"Cape Horn!" Ardiles shouted, pointing off to starboard.

Sharpe stared. For a long time he could see nothing, then an explosion of shredded water betrayed where a black scrap of rock resisted the pounding waves.

"That's the last scrap of good earth that many a sailorman saw before he drowned!" Ardiles spoke with a gloomy relish, then clutched at the tarred rigging as the Espiritu Santo fell sideways into the green heart of a wave's trough. He waited till the frigate had recovered and was laboring up a great slope of savaged white sea. "So what did you think of Napoleon?" Ardiles asked Sharpe.

Sharpe hesitated, wanting his answer to be precise. "He put me in mind of a man who has played a hugely successful joke on people he despises."

Ardiles, who had flat, watchful eyes in a hungry, cadaverous face, thought about Sharpe's answer, then shrugged. "Maybe. But I think he should have been executed for his joke."

Sharpe said nothing. He could see the waves breaking on Cape Horn more clearly now, and could just make out the loom of a black cliff beyond the battered water. God, he thought, but this is a fearful place.

"They made me sick!" Ardiles said suddenly.

"Sick?" Sharpe had only half heard Ardiles's scathing words and had assumed that the frigate's Captain was talking about the seasickness that afflicted most of the army officers.

"Ruiz and the others! Fawning over that man! Jesus! But Bonaparte was our enemy. He did enough damage to Spain! If it were not for Bonaparte you think there'd be any rebellion in South America? He encouraged it! And how many more Spaniards will die for that man's evil? Yet these bastards bowed and scraped to him. Given half a chance they'd have licked his bum cleaner than a nun's finger!"

Sharpe staggered as the ship rolled. A rattle of sleet and foam shot down the deck and slammed into the poop. "I can't say I wasn't impressed by meeting Bonaparte!" he shouted in defense of the Spanish army officers. "He's been my enemy long enough, but I felt privileged to be there. I even liked him!"

"That's because you're English! Your women weren't raped by those French bastards, and your children weren't killed by them!" Ardiles stared balefully into the trough of a scummy wave that roared under the Espiritu Santos counter. "So what did you talk about when you were alone with him?”

"Waterloo."

"Just Waterloo?" Ardiles seemed remarkably suspicious.

"Just that," Sharpe said, with an air of irritation, for it was none of Ardiles's business what he and a stricken Emperor had discussed.

Ardiles, sensing he had offended Sharpe, changed the subject by waving a hand toward the cabins where Ruiz's artillery officers sheltered from the storm in their vomit-rinsed misery. "What do you think of officers who don't share their men's discomforts?"

Sharpe believed that officers who abandoned their men were officers on their way to defeat, but tact kept him from saying as much to the sardonic Ardiles, so instead he made some harmless comment about being no expert on Spanish shipping arrangements.

"I think such officers are bastards!" Ardiles had to shout to be heard over the numbing sound of the huge seas. "The only reason they sailed on this ship is because the voyage will be six or eight weeks shorter! Which means they can reach the whorehouses of Valdivia ahead of their Sergeants," Ardiles spat into the scuppers. "They're good whorehouses, too. Too good for these bastards."

"You know Chile well?" Sharpe asked.

"Well enough! I've visited twice a year for three years. They use my ship as a passenger barge! Instead of letting me look for Cochrane and beating the shit out of him, they insist that I sail back and forth between Spain and Valdivia! Back and forth! Back and forth! It's a waste of a good ship! This is the largest and best frigate in the Spanish Navy and they waste it on ferrying shit like Ruiz!" Ardiles scowled down into the frigate's waist where the green water surged and broke ragged about the lashed guns, then he turned his saturnine gaze back to Sharpe. "You're looking for Captain-General Vivar, yes?"

"I am, yes." Sharpe was not surprised that Ardiles knew his business, for he had made no secret of his quest, yet he was taken aback by the abrupt and jeering manner of the Captain's asking and Sharpe's reply had consequently been guarded, almost hostile.

Ardiles leaned closer to Sharpe. "I knew Vivar! I even liked him! But he was not a tactful man. Most of the army officers in Chile thought he was too clever. They had their own ideas on how the war should be lost, but Vivar was proving them wrong, and they didn't like him for that."

"Are you saying that his own side killed him?"

Ardiles shook his head. "I think he was killed by the rebels. He was probably wounded in the ambush, his horse galloped into deep timber, and he fell off. His body's probably still out there, ripped apart by animals and chewed by birds. The oddest part of the whole thing, to my mind, is why he was out there with such a small escort. There were only fifteen men with him!"

"He was always a brave man," said Sharpe, who had not heard just how small the escort had been and now hid his surprise. Why would a Captain-General travel with such a tiny detachment? Even in country he thought safe?

"Maybe more foolish than brave?" Ardiles suggested. "My own belief is that he had an arrangement to meet the rebels, and that they double-crossed him."

Sharpe, who had convinced himself that Don Bias had been murdered by his own people, found this new idea grotesque. "Are you saying he was a traitor?"

"He was a patriot, but he was playing with fire." Ardiles paused, as though debating whether to say more, then he must have decided that his revelation could do no harm. "I tell you a strange thing, Englishman. Two months after Vivar arrived in Chile he ordered me to take him to Talcahuana. That means nothing to you, so I shall explain.

"It is a peninsula, close to Concepcion, and inside rebel territory. His Excellency's staff told Don Bias it was not safe to go there, but he scoffed at such timidity. I thought it was my chance to fight against Cochrane, so I went gladly. But two days north of Valdivia we struck bad weather. It was awful! We could not go anywhere near land; instead we rode out the storm at sea for four days. After that Don Bias still insisted on going to Talcahuana. We anchored off Punta Tombes and Don Bias went ashore on his own. On his own! He refused an escort. He just took a fowling-piece! He said he wanted to prove that a nobleman of Spain could hunt freely wherever His Spanish Majesty ruled in this world. Six hours later he came back with two brace of duck, and ordered me back to Valdivia. So what? You are asking. I will tell you what! I myself thought it was merely bravado. After all, he had made me sail for a week through waters patroled by the rebel navy, but later I heard rumors that Don Bias had gone ashore to meet those rebels. To talk with them. I don't know if that is true, but on my voyage home with the news of Don Bias's disappearance, we captured a rebel pinnace with a dozen men aboard and two of them told me that the devil Cochrane himself had been waiting to meet Don Bias, but that after two days they decided he was not coming, and so Cochrane went away."

"You believed them?"

Ardiles shrugged. "Do dying men tell lies or truth? My belief, Englishman, is that they were telling the truth, and I think Don Bias died when he tried to resurrect the meeting with the rebels. But you believe Don Bias to be alive, yes?"

Sharpe hesitated, but Ardiles had favored him with a revelation, and Sharpe's truth was nowhere near so dangerous, so he told it. "No."

"So why are you here?"

"Because I've been paid to look for him. Maybe I shall find his dead body?" Because even that, Sharpe had decided, would give Louisa some small comfort. It would, at the very least, offer her certainty and if Sharpe could arrange to have the body carried home to Spain then Louisa could bury Don Bias in his family's vault in the great cathedral in Santiago de Compostela.