Bernard Cornwell - Sharpe’s Devil - Napoleon and South America, 1820–1821

Who, Doña Louisa now informed Sharpe, had disappeared. Blas Vivar had vanished.

Sharpe, overwhelmed by the suddenness of the information and by Louisa’s arrival, gaped like a village idiot. Lucille insisted that Doña Louisa must stay for supper, which meant staying for the night, and Sharpe was peremptorily sent about making preparations. There was no spare stabling for Doña Louisa’s valuable carriage horses, so Sharpe ordered a boy to unstall the plough horses and take them to a meadow while Lucille organized beds for Doña Louisa and her maids, and rugs for Doña Louisa’s coachmen. Luggage had to be unstrapped from the varnished carriage and carried upstairs where the château’s two maids laid new sheets on the beds. Wine was brought up from the damp cellar, and a fine cheese, which Lucille would otherwise have sent to the market in Caen, was taken from its nettle-leaf wrapping and pronounced fit for the visitor’s supper. That supper would not be much different from any of the other peasant meals being eaten in the village for the château was pretentious only in its name. The building had once been a nobleman’s fortified manor, but was now little more than an overgrown and moated farmhouse.

Doña Louisa, her mind too full of her troubles to notice the fuss her arrival had prompted, explained to Sharpe the immediate cause of her unexpected visit. ‘I have been in England and I insisted the Horse Guards told me where I might find you. I am sorry not to have sent you warning of my coming here, but I need help.’ She spoke peremptorily, her voice that of a woman who was not used to deferring the gratification of her wishes.

She was nevertheless forced to wait while Sharpe’s two children were introduced to her. Patrick, aged five, offered her ladyship a sturdy bow while Dominique, aged three, was more interested in the ducklings which splashed at the moat’s edge. ‘Dominique looks like your wife,’ Louisa said.

Sharpe merely grunted a noncommittal reply, for he had no wish to explain that he and Lucille were not married, nor that he already had a bitch of a wife in London whom he could not afford to divorce and who would not decently crawl away and die. Nor did Lucille, coming to join Sharpe and their guest at the table in the courtyard, bother to correct Louisa’s misapprehension, for Lucille claimed to take more pleasure in being mistaken for Madame Richard Sharpe than in using her ancient title. However Sharpe, much to Lucille’s amusement, now insisted on introducing her to Louisa as the Vicomtesse de Seleglise; an honour which duly impressed the Countess of Mouromorto. Lucille, as ever, tried to disown the title by saying that such nonsenses had been abolished in the revolution and, besides, anyone connected to an ancient French family could drag out a title from somewhere. ‘Half the ploughmen in France are viscounts,’ the Viscountess Seleglise said with inaccurate self-deprecation, then politely asked whether the Countess of Mouromorto had any children.

‘Three,’ Louisa had replied, and had then gone on to explain how a further two children had died in infancy. Sharpe, supposing that the two women would get down to the interminable and tedious feminine business of making mutual compliments about their respective children, had let the conversation become a meaningless drone, but Louisa had suprisingly brushed the subject of children aside, only wanting to talk of her missing husband. ‘He’s somewhere in Chile,’ she said.

Sharpe had to think for a few seconds before he could place Chile, then he remembered a few scraps of information from the newspapers that he read in the inn beside Caen Abbey where he went for dinner on market days. ‘There’s a war of independence going on in Chile, isn’t there?’

‘A rebellion!’ Louisa had corrected him sharply. Indeed, she went on, her husband had been sent to suppress the rebellion, though when Don Blas had reached Chile he had discovered a demoralized Spanish army, a defeated squadron of naval ships, and a treasury bled white by corruption. Yet within six months he had been full of hope and had even been promising Louisa that she and the children would soon join him in Valdivia’s citadel which served as Chile’s official residence for its Captain-General.

‘I thought Santiago was the capital of Chile?’ Lucille, who had brought some sewing from the house, enquired gently.

‘It was,’ Louisa admitted reluctantly, then added indignantly, ‘till the rebels captured it. They now call it the capital of the Chilean Republic. As if there could be such a thing!’ And, Louisa claimed, if Don Blas had been given a chance, there would be no Chilean Republic, for her husband had begun to turn the tide of Royalist defeat. He had won a series of small victories over the rebels; such victories were nothing much to boast of, he had written to his wife, but they were the first in many years and they had been sufficient to persuade his soldiers that the rebels were not invincible fiends. Then, suddenly, there were no more letters from Don Blas, only an official despatch which said that His Excellency Don Blas, Count of Mouromorto and Captain-General of the Spanish Forces in His Majesty’s dominion of Chile, had disappeared.

Don Blas, Louisa said, had ridden to inspect the fortifications at the harbour town of Puerto Crucero, the southernmost garrison in Spanish Chile. He had ridden with a cavalry escort, and had been ambushed somewhere north of Puerto Crucero, in a region of steep hills and deep woods. At the time of the ambush Don Blas had been riding ahead of his escort, and he was last seen spurring forward to escape the closing jaws of the rebel trap. The escort, driven away by the fierceness of the ambushers, had not been able to search the valley where the trap had been sprung for another six hours, by which time Don Blas and his ambushers had long disappeared.

‘He must have been captured by the rebels,’ Sharpe had suggested mildly.

‘If you were a rebel commander,’ Louisa observed icily, ‘and succeeded in capturing or killing the Spanish Captain-General, would you keep silent about your victory?’

‘No,’ Sharpe admitted, for such a feat would encourage every rebel in South America and concomitantly depress all their Royalist opponents. He frowned. ‘Surely Don Blas had aides with him?’

‘Three.’

‘Yet he was riding alone? In rebel country?’ Sharpe’s soldiering instincts, rusty as they were, recoiled at such a thought.

Louisa, who had rehearsed these questions and answers for weeks, shrugged. ‘They tell me that no rebels had been seen in those parts for many months. That Don Blas often rode ahead. He was impatient, you surely remember that?’

‘But he wasn’t foolhardy.’ A wasp crawled on the table and Sharpe slapped down hard. ‘The rebels have made no proclamations about Don Blas?’

‘None!’ There was despair in Louisa’s voice. ‘And when I ask for information from our own army, I am told there is no information to be had. It seems that a Captain-General can disappear in Chile without trace! I do not even know if I am a widow.’ She looked at Lucille. ‘I wanted to travel to Chile, but it would have meant leaving my children. Besides, what can a woman do against the intransigence of soldiers?’

Lucille shot an amused glance at Sharpe, then looked down again at her sewing.

‘The army has told you nothing?’ Sharpe asked in astonishment.

‘They tell me Don Blas is dead. They cannot prove it, for they have never found his body, but they assure me he must be dead.’ Louisa said that the King had even paid for a Requiem Mass to be sung in Santiago de Compostela’s great cathedral, though Louisa had shocked the royal authorities by refusing to attend such a Mass, claiming it to be indecently premature. Don Blas, Louisa insisted, was alive. Her instinct told her so. ‘He might be a prisoner. I am told there are tribes of heathen savages who are reputed to keep white men as slaves in the forest. And Chile is a terrible country,’ she explained to Lucille. ‘There are pygmies and giants in the mountains, while the rebel ranks are filled by rogues from Europe. Who knows what might have happened?’