Sharpes Devil   ::   Корнуэлл Бернард

They were taken to a room high in the fortress, a room that looked across the harbor entrance to where the vast Pacific rollerspounded at the outer rocks to explode in great gouts of white water. Sharpe leaned through the bars of the high window and stared straight down to see that their prison room lay directly above a flight of rock-cut steps which led to the citadel's wharf. To the north of the wharf was a shingle beach where a handful of small fishing boats lay canted on their sides.

The window bars were each an inch thick and deeply rusted, but, when Harper tried to loosen them, they proved stubbornly solid. "Even if you managed to escape," Sharpe asked in a voice made acid by frustration, "and survived the eighty-foot drop to the quay, just where the hell do you think you'd go?"

"Somewhere they serve decent ale, of course," Harper gave the bars a last massive but impotent tug, "or maybe to that Jonathan out there." He pointed to a brigantine which had just anchored in the outer harbor. The boat was flying an outsize American flag, a splash of bright color in the twilight gloom. Sharpe assumed the flag was intentionally massive so that, should the dreaded Lord Cochrane make a raid on Puerto Crucero, he could not mistake the American ship for a Spanish merchantman.

Sharpe wished Cochrane would make a raid, for he could see no other route out of their predicament. He had tried hammering on their prison door, demanding to be given paper and ink so that he could send a message to George Blair, the Consul in Valdivia, but his shouting was ignored. "Damn them," Sharpe growled, "damn them and damn them!"

"They won't dare punish us," Harper tried either to console Sharpe or to convince himself. "They're scared wicked of our navy, aren't they? Besides, if they meant us harm they wouldn't have put us in here. This isn't such a bad wee place," Harper looked around their prison. "I've been in worse."

The room was not, indeed, a bad wee place. The wall beside the window had been grievously cracked at some point, Sharpe assumed by one of the famous earthquakes that racked this coast, but otherwise the room was in fine repair and furnished comfortably enough. There were two straw-filled mattresses on the floor, a stool, a table and a lidded bucket. Such comforts suggested that Major Suarez, or his superiors, would deal very gingerly with two British citizens.

It was also plain to Sharpe that the Puerto Crucero authorities were waiting for instructions from Valdivia, for, once incarcerated, they were left alone for six days. No one interrogated them, no one brought them news, no one informed them of any charges. The only visitors to the high prison room were the orderlies who brought food and emptied the bucket.