LITMIR.BIZ

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receive them so that, for a few heart-stopping moments on this humid day, two old soldiers of Britain’s army would stand in the same stuffy room as Bonaparte and would hear his voice and see his eyes and go away to tell their children and their grandchildren that they had met Europe’s bogeyman face to face. They would be able to boast that they had not just fought against him for year after bitter year, but that they had stood, nervous as schoolboys, on a carpet in his prison house on an island in the middle of the South Atlantic.

      Sharpe, even as he waited, found it hard to believe that Bonaparte would receive them. He had ridden all the way from Jamestown in the belief that this expedition would be met with a scornful refusal, but had consoled himself that it would be sufficient just to see the lair of the man who had once terrified all of Europe, and who was still used by women to frighten their children into obedience. But the uniformed men who opened Longwood’s gates had welcomed them and a servant now brought them a tray of weak lemonade. The servant apologized for such pale refreshment, explaining that his Majesty would have liked to serve his distinguished visitors with wine, but that his British jailers were too mean to grant him a decent supply, and so the lemonade would have to be sufficient. The Spanish officers turned dark reproving glances on Sharpe, who shrugged. Above the hills the thunder growled. The English Major, disdaining to mingle with the Spanish visitors, slashed with his riding crop at a glossy-leaved hedge.

      After a half hour the sixteen visitors were ushered into the house itself. It smelt dank and musty. The wallpaper of the hallway and of the billiard room beyond was stained with damp. The pictures on the wall were black and white etchings, stained and fly-blown. The house reminded Sharpe of a poor country rectory that desperately pretended to a higher gentility than it could properly afford. It was certainly a pathetically far cry from the great marble floors and mirrored halls of Paris where Sharpe and Harper, after the French surrender in 1815, had joined the soldiers of all Europe to explore the palaces of a defeated and humiliated Empire. Then, in echoing halls of glory, Sharpe had climbed massive staircases where glittering throngs had once courted the ruler of France. Now Sharpe waited to see the same man in an anteroom where three buckets betrayed the fact that the house roof leaked, and where the green baize surface of a billiard table was as scuffed and faded as the Rifleman’s jacket that Sharpe had worn in special honour of this occasion.

      They waited another twenty minutes. A clock ticked loudly, then wheezed as it gathered its strength to strike the half hour. Just as the clock’s bell chimed, two officers wearing French uniforms with badly tarnished gold braid came into the billiard room. One gave swift instructions in French which the other man translated into bad Spanish.

      The visitors were welcome to meet the Emperor, but must remember to present themselves bareheaded to his Imperial Majesty.

      The visitors must stand. The Emperor would sit, but no one else was allowed to sit in his Imperial Majesty’s presence.

      No man must speak unless invited to do so by his Imperial Majesty.

      And, the visitors were told once again, if a man was invited to speak with his Imperial Majesty then he must address the Emperor as votre Majesté. Failure to do so would lead to an immediate termination of the interview. Ardiles, the dark-faced Captain of the frigate, scowled at the reiterated command, but again made no protest at it.

      Sharpe was fascinated by the tall, whip-thin Ardiles who took extraordinary precautions to avoid meeting his own passengers. Ardiles ate his meals alone, and was said to appear on deck only when the weather was appalling or during the darkest night watches when his passengers could be relied on to be either sick or asleep. Sharpe had met the Captain briefly when he had embarked on the Espiritu Santo in Cadiz, but to some of the Spanish army officers this visit to Longwood gave them their first glimpse of their frigate’s mysterious Captain.

      The French officer who had translated the etiquette instructions into clumsy Spanish now looked superciliously at Sharpe and Harper. ‘Did you understand anything at all?’ he asked in a bad English accent.

      ‘We understood perfectly, thank you, and are happy to accept your instructions,’ Sharpe answered in colloquial French. The officer seemed startled, then gave the smallest nod of acknowledgement.

      ‘His Majesty will be ready soon,’ the first French officer said, and then the whole group waited in an awkward silence. The Spanish army officers, gorgeous in their uniforms, had taken off their bicorne hats in readiness for the imperial audience. Their boots creaked as they shifted their weight from foot to foot. A sword scabbard rapped against the bulbous leg of the billiard table. The sour Captain Ardiles, looking as malignant as a bishop caught unawares in a whorehouse, stared sourly out of the window at the black mountains, about which cannoned an ominous rumble of thunder. Harper rolled a billiard ball slowly down the table’s length. It bounced off the far cushion and slowed to a stop.

      Then the double doors at the far end of the room were snatched open and a servant dressed in green and gold livery stood in the entrance. ‘The Emperor will receive you now,’ he said, then stood aside.

      And Sharpe, his heart beating as fearfully as if he again walked into battle, went to meet an old enemy.

      It was all so utterly different from everything Sharpe had anticipated. Later, trying to reconcile reality with expectation, Sharpe wondered just what he had thought to find inside the yellow-walled house. An ogre? A small toad-like man with smoke coming from his nostrils? A horned devil with bloody claws? But instead, standing on a hearth rug in front of an empty fireplace, Sharpe saw a short, stout man wearing a plain green riding coat with a velvet collar, black knee breeches and coarse white stockings. In the velvet lapel of the coat was a miniature medallion of the Légion d’Honneur.

      All those details Sharpe noticed later, as the interview progressed, but his very first impression as he went through the door and shuffled awkwardly into line, was the shock of familiarity. This was the most famous face in the world, a face repeated on a million pictures, a million etchings, a million plates, a million coins. This was a face so familiar to Sharpe that it was truly astonishing to see it in reality. He involuntarily checked and gasped, causing Harper to push him onwards. The Emperor, recognizing Sharpe’s reaction, seemed to smile.

      Sharpe’s second impression was of the Emperor’s eyes. They seemed full of amusement as though Bonaparte, alone of all the men in the room, understood that a jest was being played. The eyes belied the rest of Bonaparte’s face which was plump and oddly petulant. That petulance surprised Sharpe, as did the Emperor’s hair which alone was unlike his portraits. The hair was as fine and wispy as a child’s hair. There was something feminine and unsettling about that silky hair and Sharpe perversely wished that Bonaparte would cover it with the cocked hat he carried under his arm.

      ‘You are welcome, gentlemen,’ the Emperor greeted the Spanish officers, a pleasantry which was translated into Spanish by a bored-looking aide. The greeting prompted, from all but the disdainful Ardiles, a chorus of polite responses.

      When all sixteen visitors had found somewhere to stand the Emperor sat in a delicate gilt chair. The room was evidently a drawing room, and was full of pretty furniture, but it was also as damp as the hallway and billiard room outside. The skirting boards, beneath the waterstained wallpaper, were disfigured by tin plates that had been nailed over rat holes and, in the silence that followed the Emperor’s greeting, Sharpe could hear the dry scratching of rats’ feet in the cavities behind the patched wall. The house was evidently infested as badly as any ship.

      ‘Tell me your business,’ the Emperor invited the senior Spanish officer present. That worthy, an artillery Colonel named Ruiz, explained in hushed tones how their vessel, the Spanish frigate Espiritu Santo, was on passage from Cadiz, carrying passengers to the Spanish garrison at the Chilean port of Valdivia. Ruiz then presented the Espiritu Santo’s Captain, Ardiles, who, with scarcely concealed hostility, offered the Emperor a stiffly reluctant bow. The Emperor’s aides, sensitive to the smallest sign of disrespect, shifted uneasily, but Bonaparte seemed not to notice or, if he did, not to care. Ardiles, asked by the Emperor how long he had been a seaman, answered as curtly as possible. Clearly the lure of seeing the exiled tyrant had overcome Ardiles’s distaste for the company of his passengers, but he was at pains not to show any sense

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