Sharpe's Devil, Page 2

  “It’s hard to believe, isn’t it?” Harper was as excited as a child taken to a country fair. “You remember when we first saw him? Jesus! It was raining that day, so it was.” That first glimpse had been at the battlefield of Quatre Bras, two days before Waterloo, when Sharpe and Harper had seen the Emperor, surrounded by lancers, in the watery distance. Two days later, before the bigger bloodletting began, they had watched Bonaparte ride a white horse along the French ranks. Now they had come to his prison and it was, as Harper had said, hard to believe that they were so close to the ogre, the tyrant, the scourge of Europe. And even stranger that Bonaparte was willing to receive them so that, for a few heart-stopping moments on this humid day, two old soldiers of Britain’s army would stand in the same stuffy room as Bonaparte and would hear his voice and see his eyes and go away to tell their children and their grandchildren that they had met Europe’s bogeyman face to face. They would be able to boast that they had not just fought against him for year after bitter year, but that they had stood, nervous as schoolboys, on a carpet in his prison house on an island in the middle of the South Atlantic.

  Sharpe, even as he waited, found it hard to believe that Bonaparte would receive them. He had ridden all the way from Jamestown in the belief that this expedition would be met with a scornful refusal, but had consoled himself that it would be sufficient just to see the lair of the man who had once terrified all of Europe, and whose name was still used by women to frighten their children into obedience. But the uniformed men who opened Longwood’s gates had welcomed them, and a servant now brought them a tray of weak lemonade. The servant apologized for such pale refreshment, explaining that His Majesty would have liked to serve his distinguished visitors wine, but that his British jailers were too mean to provide him with a sufficient supply, and so the lemonade must be enough. The Spanish officers turned dark, reproving glances on Sharpe, who shrugged. Above the hills the thunder growled. The English Major, disdaining to mingle with the Spanish visitors, slashed with his riding crop at a glossy-leaved hedge.

  After a half hour the sixteen visitors were ushered into the house itself. It smelled dank and musty. The wallpaper of the hallway and of the billiard room beyond was stained with damp. The pictures on the wall were black and white etchings, soiled and fly-blown. The house reminded Sharpe of a poor country rectory that desperately pretended to a higher gentility than it could properly afford. The house was certainly a pathetically far cry from the great marble floors and mirrored halls of Paris where Sharpe and Harper, after the French surrender in 1815, had joined the soldiers of all Europe to explore the palaces of a defeated and humiliated empire. Then, in echoing halls of glory, Sharpe had climbed massive staircases where glittering throngs had once courted the ruler of France. Now Sharpe waited to see the same man in an anteroom where three buckets betrayed that the house roof leaked, and where the green baize surface of the billiard table was as scuffed and faded as the Rifleman’s jacket that Sharpe had worn in special honor of this occasion.

  They waited another twenty minutes. A clock ticked loudly, then wheezed as it gathered its strength to strike the half hour. Just as the clock’s bell chimed, two officers wearing French uniforms with badly tarnished gold braid came into the billiard room. One gave swift instructions in French which the other man translated into bad Spanish.

  The visitors were welcome to meet the Emperor, but must remember to present themselves bareheaded to His Imperial Majesty.

  The visitors must stand. The Emperor would sit, but no one else was allowed to sit in His Imperial Majesty’s presence.

  No man must speak unless invited to do so by His Imperial Majesty.

  And, the visitors were told once again, if a man was invited to speak with His Imperial Majesty then he must address the Emperor as Votre Majesté. Failure to do so would lead to an immediate termination of the interview. Ardiles, the dark-faced Captain of the frigate, scowled at the reiterated command, but again made no protest. Sharpe was fascinated by the tall, whip-thin Ardiles, who took extraordinary precautions to avoid meeting his own passengers. Ardiles ate his meals alone, and was said to appear on deck only when the weather was appalling or during the darkest night watches when his passengers could be relied on to be either sick or asleep. Sharpe had met the Captain briefly when he had embarked on the Espiritu Santo in Cadiz, but to some of the Spanish army officers this visit to Longwood gave them their first glimpse of their frigate’s mysterious Captain.

  The French officer who had translated the etiquette instructions into clumsy Spanish now looked superciliously at Sharpe and Harper. “Did you understand anything at all?” he asked in badly accented English.

  “We understood perfectly, thank you, and are happy to accept your instructions,” Sharpe answered in colloquial French. The officer seemed startled, then gave the smallest nod of acknowledgment.

  “His Majesty will be ready soon,” the first French officer said, and then the whole group waited in an awkward silence. The Spanish army officers, gorgeous in their uniforms, had taken off their bicorne hats in readiness for the imperial audience. Their boots creaked as they shifted their weight from foot to foot. A sword scabbard rapped against the bulbous leg of the billiard table. The sour Captain Ardiles, looking as malignant as a bishop caught in a whorehouse, stared sourly out of the window to where a rumble of ominous thunder cannoned about the black mountains. Harper rolled a billiard ball slowly down the table’s length. It bounced off the far cushion and slowed to a stop.

  Then the double doors at the far end of the room were snatched open and a servant dressed in green and gold livery stood in the entrance. “The Emperor will receive you now,” he said, then stood aside.

  And Sharpe, his heart beating as fearfully as if he again walked into battle, went to meet an old enemy.

  It was all so utterly different from everything Sharpe had anticipated. Later, trying to reconcile reality with expectation, Sharpe wondered just what he had thought to find inside the yellow-walled house. The ogre of legend? A small toadlike man with smoke coming from his nostrils? A horned devil with bloody claws? But instead, standing on a hearth rug in front of an empty fireplace, Sharpe saw a short, stout man wearing a plain green riding coat with a velvet collar, black knee breeches and coarse white stockings. In the velvet lapel of the coat was a miniature medallion of the Légion d’honneur.

  All those details Sharpe noticed later, as the interview progressed, but his very first impression as he went through the door and shuffled awkwardly into line was the shock of familiarity. This was the most famous face in the world, a face repeated on a million pictures, a million etchings, a million plates, a million coins. This was a face so familiar to Sharpe that it was truly astonishing to see it in reality. He involuntarily gasped, causing Harper to push him onward. The Emperor, recognizing Sharpe’s reaction, seemed to smile.

  Sharpe’s second impression was of the Emperor’s eyes. They seemed full of amusement as though Bonaparte, alone of all the men in the room, understood that a jest was being played. The eyes belied the rest of Bonaparte’s face, which was plump and oddly petulant. That petulance surprised Sharpe, as did the Emperor’s hair which alone was unlike his portraits. It was as fine and wispy as a child’s. There was something feminine and unsettling about that silky hair and Sharpe perversely wished that Bonaparte would cover it with the cocked hat he carried under his arm.

  “You are welcome, gentlemen,” the Emperor greeted the Spanish officers, which pleasantry was translated into Spanish by a bored-looking aide. The greeting prompted a chorus of polite responses from all but the disdainful Ardiles.

  The Emperor, when all sixteen visitors had found somewhere to stand, sat in a delicate gilt chair. The room was evidently a drawing room, and was full of pretty furniture, but it was also as damp as the hallway and billiard room outside. The skirting boards, beneath the water-stained wallpaper, were disfigured by tin plates that had been nailed over rat holes and, in the silence that followed the Emperor’s greetin
g, Sharpe could hear the dry scratching of rats’ feet in the cavities behind the tin patched wall. The house was evidently infested as badly as any ship.

  “Tell me your business,” the Emperor invited the senior Spanish officer present. That worthy, an artillery Colonel named Ruiz, explained in hushed tones how their vessel, the Spanish frigate Espiritu Santo, was on passage from Cadiz, carrying passengers to the Spanish garrison at the Chilean port of Valdivia. Ruiz then presented the Espiritu Santo’s Captain, Ardiles, who, with scarcely concealed hostility, offered the Emperor a stiffly reluctant bow. The Emperor’s aides, sensitive to the smallest sign of disrespect, shifted uneasily, but Bonaparte seemed not to notice or, if he did, not to care. Ardiles, asked by the Emperor how long he had been a seaman, answered as curtly as possible. Clearly the lure of seeing the exiled tyrant had overcome Ardiles’s distaste for the company of his passengers, but he was at pains not to show any sense of being honored by the reception.

  Bonaparte, never much interested in sailors, turned his attention back to Colonel Ruiz, who formally presented the officers of his regiment of artillery who, in turn, bowed elegantly to the small man in the gilded chair. Bonaparte had a kindly word for each man, then turned his attention back to Ruiz. He wanted to know what impulse had brought Ruiz to Saint Helena. The Colonel explained that the Espiritu Santo, thanks to the superior skills of the Spanish Navy, had made excellent time on its southward journey and, being within a few days sailing of Saint Helena, the officers on board the Espiritu Santo had thought it only proper to pay their respects to His Majesty the Emperor.

  In other words, they could not resist making a detour to stare at the defanged beast chained to its rock, but Bonaparte took Ruiz’s flowery compliment at its face value. “Then I trust you will also pay your respects to Sir Hudson Lowe,” he said drily. “Sir Hudson is my jailer. He, with five thousand men, seven ships, eight batteries of artillery and the ocean which you gentlemen have crossed to do me this great honor.”

  While the Spanish-speaking Frenchman translated the Emperor’s mixture of scorn for his jailers and insincere flattery for his visitors, Bonaparte’s eyes turned toward Sharpe and Harper who, alone in the room, had not been introduced. For a second, Rifleman and Emperor stared into each other’s eyes, then Bonaparte looked back to Colonel Ruiz. “So you are reinforcements for the Spanish army in Chile?”

  “Indeed, Your Majesty,” the Colonel replied.

  “So your ship is also carrying your guns? And your gunners?” Bonaparte asked.

  “Just the regiment’s officers,” Ruiz replied. “Captain Ardiles’s vessel has been specially adapted to carry passengers, but alas she cannot accommodate a whole regiment. Especially of artillery.”

  “So the rest of your men are where?” The Emperor asked blithely.

  “They’re following on two transport ships,” Ruiz said airily, “with their guns.”

  “Ah!” The Emperor’s response was apparently a polite acknowledgment of the trivial answer, yet the silence that followed, and the fixity of his smile, were a sudden reproof to these Spaniards who had chosen the comfort of Ardiles’s fast frigate while leaving their men to the stinking hulks that would take at least a month longer than the Espiritu Santo to make the long, savage voyage around South America to where Spanish troops were trying to reconquer Chile from the rebel government. “Let us hope the rest of your regiment doesn’t decide to pay me their respects,” Bonaparte broke the slightly uncomfortable mood that his unspoken criticism had caused, “or else Sir Hudson will fear they have come to rescue me!”

  Ruiz laughed, the other army officers smiled, and Ardiles, perhaps hearing in the Emperor’s voice an edge of longing that the other Spaniards had missed, scowled.

  “So tell me,” Bonaparte still spoke to Ruiz, “what are your expectations in Chile?”

  Colonel Ruiz bristled with confidence as he expressed his eager conviction that the rebel Chilean forces and government would soon collapse, as would all the other insurgents in the Spanish colonies of South America, and that the rightful government of His Majesty King Ferdinand VII would thus be restored throughout Spain’s American dominions. The coming of his own regiment, the Colonel asserted, could only hasten that royal victory.

  “Indeed,” the Emperor agreed politely, then moved the conversation to the subject of Europe, and specifically to the troubles of Spain. Bonaparte politely affected to believe the Colonel’s assurance that the liberals would not dare to revolt openly against the King, and his denial that the army, sickened by the waste of blood in South America, was close to mutiny. Indeed, Colonel Ruiz expressed himself full of hope for Spain’s future, relishing a monarchy growing ever more powerful, and fed ever more riches by its colonial possessions. The other artillery officers, keen to please their bombastic Colonel, nodded sycophantic agreement, though Captain Ardiles looked disgusted at Ruiz’s bland optimism and showed his skepticism by pointedly staring out of the window as he fanned himself with a mildewed cocked hat.

  Sharpe, like all the other visitors, was sweating foully. The room was steamy and close, and none of its windows was open. The rain had at last begun to fall and a zinc bucket, placed close to the Emperor’s chair, suddenly rang as a drip fell from the leaking ceiling. The Emperor frowned at the noise, then returned his polite attention to Colonel Ruiz who had reverted to his favorite subject of how the rebels in Chile, Peru and Venezuela had overextended themselves and must inevitably collapse.

  Sharpe, who had spent too many shipboard hours listening to the Colonel’s boasting, studied the Emperor instead of paying any attention to Ruiz’s long-winded bragging. By now Sharpe had recovered his presence of mind, no longer feeling dizzy just to be in the same small room as Bonaparte, and so he made himself examine the seated figure as though he could commit the man to memory forever. Bonaparte was far fatter than Sharpe had expected. He was not as fat as Harper, who was fat like a bull or a prize boar is fat, but instead the Emperor was unhealthily bloated like a dead beast swollen with noxious vapors. His monstrous potbelly, waistcoated in white, rested on his spread thighs. His face was sallow and his fine hair was lank. Sweat pricked at his forehead. His nose was thin and straight, his chin dimpled, his mouth firm and his eyes extraordinary. Sharpe knew Bonaparte was fifty years old, yet the Emperor’s face looked much younger than fifty. His body, though, was that of an old, sick man. It had to be the climate, Sharpe supposed, for surely no white man could keep healthy in such a steamy and oppressive heat. The rain was falling harder now, pattering on the yellow stucco wall and on the window, and dripping annoyingly into the zinc bucket. It would be a wet ride back to the harbor where the longboats waited to row the sixteen men back to Ardiles’s ship.

  Sharpe gazed attentively about the room, knowing that when he was back home Lucille would demand to hear a thousand details. He noted how low the ceiling was, and how the plaster of the ceiling was yellowed and sagging, as if, at any moment, the roof might fall in. He heard the scrabble of rats again, and marked other signs of decay like the mildew on the green velvet curtains, the tarnish in the silvering of a looking-glass, and the flaking of the gilt on the glass’s frame. Under the mirror a pack of worn playing cards lay carelessly strewn on a small round table beside a silver-framed portrait of a child dressed in an elaborate uniform. A torn cloak, lined with a check pattern, hung from a hook on the door. “And you, monsieur, you are no Spaniard. What is your business here?”

  The Emperor’s question, in French, had been addressed to Sharpe who, taken aback and not concentrating, said nothing. The interpreter, assuming that Sharpe had misunderstood the Emperor’s accent, began to translate, but then Sharpe, suddenly dry-mouthed and horribly nervous, found his tongue. “I am a passenger on the Espiritu Santo, Your Majesty. Traveling to Chile with my friend from Ireland, Mister Patrick Harper.”

  The Emperor smiled. “Your very substantial friend?”

  “When he was my Regimental Sergeant Major he was somewhat less substantial, but just as impressive
.” Sharpe could feel his right leg twitching with fear. Why, for God’s sake? Bonaparte was just another man, and a defeated one at that. Moreover, the Emperor was a man, Sharpe tried to convince himself, of no account anymore. The prefect of a small French departement had more power than Bonaparte now, yet still Sharpe felt dreadfully nervous.

  “You are passengers?” the Emperor asked in wonderment. “Going to Chile?”

  “We are traveling to Chile in the interests of an old friend. We go to search for her husband, who is missing in battle. It is a debt of honor, Your Majesty.”

  “And you, monsieur?” The question, in French, was addressed to Harper, “you travel for the same reason?”

  Sharpe translated both the question and Harper’s answer. “He says that he found life after the war tedious, Your Majesty, and thus welcomed this chance to accompany me.”

  “Ah! How well I understand tedium. Nothing to do but put on weight, eh?” The Emperor lightly patted his belly, then looked back to Sharpe. “You speak French well, for an Englishman.”

  “I have the honor to live in France, Your Majesty.”

  “You do?” The Emperor sounded hurt and, for the first time since the visitors had come into the room, an expression of genuine feeling crossed Bonaparte’s face. Then he managed to cover his envy by a friendly smile. “You are accorded a privilege denied to me. Where in France?”