Sharpes Devil   ::   Корнуэлл Бернард

So maybe using the dog was his idea of a joke? Besides, he didn't think anyone would open the coffin, and why should they? Because by the time he needed to produce a body Don Bias had been dead three months, so all Bautista needed do was produce a coffin that stank and sent off his trusted Marquinez to concoct the wretched thing. And it worked, at least till we turned up." Sharpe said the words bitterly, a despairing cry to the cold wind that whipped up from the mysterious Chilean southlands. He and Harper were walking around the citadel's ramparts over which, just moments before, the decomposed remains of the yellow dog had been tossed away.

"So maybe the bastard faked that message in Boney's picture just to have a reason to throw us out!" Harper said, "but Dona Louisa would have sent another request for the body! The thing wouldn't have ended with us."

"And Bautista would have provided her with a body, or rather a skeleton so rotted down that no one could ever tell who it had been, but he would have needed time to prepare it. He'd probably have had a lavish coffin made, with a silver plate on it, and he'd have found an unrecognizably decayed body to put inside, dressed in a gilded uniform, and he couldn't arrange all that with us sniffing around Puerto Crucero."

Harper stopped at an embrasure and stared at the far mountains. "So where's Bias Vivar?"

"Still out there," Sharpe nodded at the broken countryside to the north, at the retreating ridges and dark valleys where, he knew, he must now search for a friend's body. He did not want to make the search. He had been so sure that he would find the body under the garrison church's flagstones, and now he faced yet more time in this country that was so bitterly far from everything he loved. "We'll need two horses. Unless, of course, you've had enough?"

"Are you sure we need to stay?" Harper asked unhappily.

Sharpe's face was equally miserable. "We haven't found Vivar, so I don't think I can go home yet."

Harper shook his head. "And we'll not find him! You heard what Major Suarez said. He's looked twice and found nothing. Christ! Bautista probably had a thousand men looking!"

"I know. But I can't go back to Louisa and tell her I couldn't be bothered to search the place where Don Bias died. We have to take a look, Patrick," Sharpe said, then added hurriedly, "I do, anyway."

"I'll stay," Harper said robustly. "Jesus, if I get home I'll only have the bloody children screaming and the wife telling me I should drink less."

Sharpe smiled. "So she does think you're too fat?"

"She's a woman, what the hell does she know?" Harper tried to pull in his gut, and failed.