Sharpe 21 - Sharpe's Devil by Bernard Cornwell Read Free Book Online

do?” Louisa challenged. “I've used every influence I can, till the authorities are sick of me. I don't need influence, I need the truth.” Louisa paused, then took the plunge. “I want you to go to Chile and find me that truth.”
    Lucille's gray eyes widened in surprise, while Sharpe, equally astonished at the effrontery of Louisa's request, said nothing. Beyond the moat, in the elms that grew beside the orchard, rooks cawed loud and a house-martin sliced on saber wings between the dairy and the horse-chestnut tree. “There must be men in South America who are in a better position to search for your husband?” Lucille remarked very mildly.
    “How do I trust them? Those officers who were friends of my husband have either been sent home or posted to remote garrisons. I sent money to other officers who claimed to be friends of Don Bias, but all I received in return are the same lies. They merely wish me to send more money, and thus they encourage me with hope but not with facts. Besides, such men cannot speak to the rebels.”
    “And I can?” Sharpe asked.
    “You can find out whether they ambushed Don Bias, or whether someone else set the trap.”
    Sharpe, from all he had heard, doubted whether any rebels had been involved. “By someone else,” he said diplomatically, “I assume you mean the man Don Bias was riding to confront? The Governor of, where was it?”
    “Puerto Crucero, and the governor's name was Miguel Bautista,” Louisa spoke the name with utter loathing, “and Miguel Bautista is Chile's new Captain-General. That snake has replaced Don Bias! He writes me flowery letters of condolence, but the truth is that he hated Don Bias and has done nothing to help me.”
    “Why did he hate Don Bias?” Sharpe asked.
    “Because Don Bias is honest, and Bautista is corrupt. Why else?”
    “Corrupt enough to murder Don Bias?” Sharpe asked.
    “My husband is not dead!” Louisa insisted in a voice full of pain, so much pain that Sharpe, who till now had been trying to pierce her armor of certainty, suddenly realized just what anguish lay behind that self-delusion. “He is hiding,” Louisa insisted, “or perhaps he is wounded. Perhaps he is with the savages. Who knows? I only know, in my heart, that he is not dead. You will understand!” This passionate appeal was directed at Lucille, who smiled with sympathy, but said nothing. “Women know when their men die,” Louisa went on, “they feel it. I know a woman who woke in her sleep, crying, and later we discovered that her husband's ship had sunk that very same night! I tell you, Don Bias is alive!” The cry was pathetic, yet full of vigor, tragic.
    Sharpe turned to watch his son who, with little Dominique, was searching inside the open barn door for newly laid eggs. He did not want to go to Chile. These days he even resented having to travel much beyond Caen. Sharpe was a happy man, his only worries the usual concerns of a farmer—money and weather— and he wished Louisa had not cpme to the valley with her talk of cavalry and ambush and savages and corruption. Sharpe's more immediate concerns were the pike that decimated the millstream trout and the crumbling sill of the weir that threatened to collapse and inundate Lucille's water meadows, and he did not want to think of far-off countries and corrupt governments and missing soldiers.
    Dona Louisa, seeing Sharpe stare at his children, must have understood what he was thinking. “I have asked for help everywhere,” she made the appeal to Lucille as much as to Sharpe. “The Spanish authorities won't help me, which is why I went to London.” Louisa, who perhaps had more faith in her English roots than she would have liked to admit, explained that she had sought the help of the British government because British interests were important in Chile. Merchants from London and Liverpool, in anticipation of new trading opportunities, were suspected of funding the rebel government, while the Royal Navy kept a