"Grazed, indeed! I was hit, so I was!"
"Barely broke the skin."
"Lucky to be alive, I am. Sweet mother of God, but I could have been dead by now."
"Luckily you've got a skull like a bloody ox." Sharpe rapped Harper's temple. "It would take a twelve pounder to dent that skull."
"Would you listen to him! As near to death as a goose at Christmas, so I am, and all he can do is tap my skull!"
Sharpe went to the big water vat by the back door, soaked a piece of cloth, and tossed it to Harper. "Hold that against your head. It'll bring you back to life. I'm going to see what the bastards took."
Apart from their weapons and the chest with Louisa's gold, all of which had been locked in Blair's strong room, the thieves appeared to have taken everything. Sharpe, disconsolate, went downstairs to where Harper was dabbing his bloody head with the wet rag. "The lot," Sharpe said bitterly. "Your bag, my bags, our clothes, boots, razors. The lot."
"The Emperor's thimble?" Harper asked in disbelief.
"Everything," Sharpe said. "Bonaparte's portrait, and some stuff of Blair's as well. I can't tell what, but the candlesticks are gone and those small pictures that were on the shelf. Bastards!"
"What about your locket?"
"Around my neck."
"The guns?"
Sharpe shook his head. "The strong-room padlock wasn't touched." He picked up the thief s weapon. "The bastard tried to shoot me twice. It wouldn't fire."
"He forgot to prime it?"
Sharpe opened the pan and saw a sludge of wet powder there, then saw that the trigger was loose. He scraped the priming out of the pan and tapped the gun's butt on the floor. His guess was that the carbine's mainspring had jammed because the wood of the stock had swollen in the damp weather. It was a common enough problem with cheap guns. He tapped harder and this time the trapped spring jarred itself free and the flint snapped down on the emptied pan.
"Swollen wood?" Harper asked.
"Saved my life, too. Bugger had me lined up at five paces." He peered at the lockplate and saw the mark of the Cadiz Armory, which made this a Spanish army gun. There was nothing sinister in that. The world was awash with old army weapons; even Sharpe and Harper carried rifles with the British Government's Tower Armory mark on their plates.
Sharpe turned to the whimpering cook and accused her of letting the two thieves into the house, but the woman protested her innocence, claiming that the two men must have climbed across the church roof and jumped from there onto the half-roof at the side of Blair's house. "It has happened before, senar" she said resignedly, "which is why the master has his strong room."
"What do we do now?" Harper still held the rag against his head.
"I'll make a formal complaint," Sharpe said. "It won't help, but I'll make it anyway." He went back to the Citadel where, in the guardroom, a surly clerk took down a list of the stolen property. Sharpe, as he dictated the missing items, knew that he wasted his time.
"You wasted your time," Blair said when he came home. "Place is full of bloody thieves. That clerk will already have thrown your list away. You'll have to buy more clothes tomorrow."
"Or look for the bloody thieves," Harper, his head sore and bandaged, growled threateningly.
"You'll never find them," Blair said. "They brand some of them on the forehead with a big L, but it doesn't do any good." Sharpe guessed the L stood for ladron, thief. "That's why I have a strong room," Blair went on, "it would take more than a couple of cutthroats to break in there." He had fetched a bottle of gin back from the H.M.S. Charybdis and in consequence was a happy man. By nightfall he was also a drunken man who once again offered Sharpe and Harper the run of his servants. "None of them are poxed. They'd better not be, God help them, or I'll have the skin off their backs."
"I'll manage without," Sharpe said.
"Your loss, Sharpe, your loss."
That night the clouds rolled back from the coastal plain so that the dawn brought a wondrous clean sky and a sharp, bright sun that rose to silhouette the jagged peaks of the Andes. There was something almost springlike in the air—something so cleansing and cheerful that Sharpe, waking, felt almost glad to be in Chile, then he suddenly remembered the events of the previous day, and knew that he must spoil this bright clean day by buying a new greatcoat, new breeches, a coat, shirts, small clothes and a razor. At least, he thought grimly, he had been wearing his good kerseymere coat for his abortive visit to Bautista, which had served to save the coat from the thieves and to save Sharpe from Lucille's wrath. She was forever telling him he should dress more stylishly, and the dark green kerseymere coat had been the first success in her long and difficult campaign. The coat had become somewhat soiled with horse manure when Sharpe rolled in the stableyard, but he supposed that would brush out.
He pulled on shirt, breeches and boots, then carried the coat downstairs so that one of Blair's servants could attack it with a brush. Blair was already up, drinking bitter coffee in the parlor and with him, to Sharpe's utter surprise, was Captain Marquinez. The Captain had a gold-edged shako tucked under one arm. The shako had a tall white plume that shivered as Marquinez offered Sharpe a low bow. "Good morning, Colonel!"
"Got our travel permits, have you?" was Sharpe's surly greeting.
"What a lovely morning!" Marquinez smiled wiui delight. "Mister Blair has offered me coffee, but I cannot accept, for we are summoned to the Captain-General's audience."
"Summoned?" Sharpe asked. Blair clearly thought Sharpe's hostility was inappropriate, for he was making urgent signals that Sharpe should behave more gently.
Marquinez smiled. "Summoned indeed, Colonel."
Sharpe poured himself coffee. "I'm an Englishman, Captain. You don't summon me."
"What Colonel Sharpe means—" Blair began.
"Colonel Sharpe reproves me, and quite rightly." The plume nodded as Marquinez bowed again. "It would give Captain-General Bautista the most exquisite delight, Colonel, if you and Mister Harper would favor him with your attendance at this morning's audience."
"Bloody hell," Sharpe said. And wondered just what sort of man he would find when he at last met Vivar's enemy.
Bautista's audience hall was a palatial room dominated by a carved and painted royal coat of arms that hung above the fireplace. Incongruously, for it was not cold, a small fire burned in a grate that was dwarfed by the huge stone hearth. The windows at either end of the hall were open; those at the east, where the early sun now dazzled, looked onto the Angel Tower and its execution yard, while the western windows offered a view across the defenses to the swirling waters of the Valdivia River. The whole room, with its blackened beams, lime-washed walls, bright escutcheon and stone pillars, was intended as a projection of Spanish royal power, a grandiose echo of the Escorial.
The room's real power, though, lay not in the monarch's coat of arms, nor in the royal portraits that hung on the high walls, but in the energetic figure that paced up and down, up and down, behind a long table that was set before the fireplace and at which four aides-de-camp sat and took dictation. Watching the pacing man, and listening to his every word, was an audience of seventy or eighty officers. This was evidently how Captain-General Bautista chose to do his business: openly, efficiently, crisply.
Miguel Bautista was a tall, thin man with black hair which was oiled and brushed back so that it clung like a sleek cap to his narrow skull. His face was thin and pale, dominated by a long nose and the dark eyes of a predator. There was, Sharpe thought, a glint of quick intelligence in those eyes, but there was something else too, a carelessness, as though this young man had seen much of the world's wickedness and was amused by it. He wore a uniform that was new to Sharpe. It was an elegantly cut cavalry tunic of plain black cloth, but with no symbols of rank except for two modest epaulettes of silver chain. His breeches were black, as were his cavalry boots and even the cloth covering of his scabbard. It was a simple uniform, but one which stood in stark contrast to the colorful uniforms of the other officers in the room.