Sharpe`s Trafalgar

CHAPTER 10

Sharpe’s place was on the forecastle. Captain Llewellyn and his young lieutenant commanded forty of the ship’s marines stationed on the poop and quarterdeck, while Sharpe had twenty, though in truth the score of forecastle men were led by Sergeant Armstrong, a man as squat as a hogshead and stubborn as a mule. The sergeant came from Seahouses in Northumberland where he had been imbued with a deep distrust of the Scots. “They’re thieves to a man, sir,” he confidently assured Sharpe, but still contrived that every Scotsman among Llewellyn’s marines serve in his squad. “Because that’s where I can keep an eye on the thieving bastards, sir.”

The Scots were content to serve under Sergeant Armstrong, for, if he distrusted them, he hated anyone from south of the River Tyne. So far as Armstrong was concerned only men from Northumberland itself, raised to remember the cattle-raiders from north of the border, were true warriors while the rest of mankind was composed of thieving bastards, cowardly foreigners and officers. France, he seemed to believe, was a populous county somewhere so far south of London as to be execrable, while Spain was probably hell itself. The sergeant possessed one of Captain Llewellyn’s precious seven-barrel guns that he had propped against the foremast. “You can take your eyes off that, sir,” he had told Sharpe when he saw the officer’s interest in the weapon, “‘cos I’m saving it for when we board one of the bastards. There’s nothing like a volley gun for clearing an enemy deck.” Armstrong was instinctively suspicions of Sharpe for the ensign was not a marine, not from Northumberland and not born into the officer class. Armstrong was, in short, ugly, ignorant, prejudiced and as fine a soldier as Sharpe had met.

The forecastle was manned by the marines and by two of the ship’s six thirty-two-pounder carronades. The one to larboard was under the command of Clouter, the escaped slave who was in Chase’s barge crew. The huge black man, like his gunners, was naked to the waist and had a scarf tied around his ears. “Going to be lively, sir,” he greeted Sharpe, nodding toward the enemy line that was now barely a mile away. A half-dozen ships were firing at the Victory, just as another half-dozen were hammering the Royal Sovereign a little more than a mile to the south. That ship, by far the closest to the French and Spanish line, looked bedraggled, for her studdingsail yards had been shot away and the sails hung like broken wings beside her rigging. She could still not return the enemy’s fire, but in a few minutes she would be among them and her three decks of guns could begin to repay the beating she endured.

The sea ahead of the Pucelle was being pockmarked by shot, flicked by white spray or whipped by round shots skimming the waves, though so far none of those shots had come close to the Pucelle herself. The Temeraire, which had failed to overtake the Victory and was now sailing off her starboard quarter, was taking shots through her sails. Sharpe could see the holes appear like magic, making the ship’s whole spread of canvas quiver. A broken line whipped and flew wide. To Sharpe it seemed as though the Victory and Temeraire were sailing directly toward the Santisima Trinidad with its four smoke-wreathed decks of death. The sound of the enemy guns was loud now, punching over the water, sometimes in thunderous groups, more often single gun by single gun. “It’ll be ten or fifteen minutes before we’re in range, sir,” Clouter said, answering Sharpe’s unspoken question.

“Good luck, Clouter.”

The tall man grinned. “Ain’t a white man alive that can kill me, sir. No, sir, they done all they can to me, and now it’s me and my smasher’s turn.” He patted his carronade, his “smasher,” which was as ugly a weapon as any Sharpe had seen. It resembled an army mortar, though it was slightly longer in the barrel, and it squatted in its short carriage like a deformed cooking pot. The carriage had no wheels, but instead allowed the barrel to slide back, wood on greased wood. The gun’s wide muzzle gaped and its belly was crammed with one thirty-two-pound round shot and a wooden cask of musket balls. It was no pretty thing, nor was it accurate, but bring it within yards of an enemy ship and it could belch a flail of metal that could have torn the guts out of a battalion.

“A Scotsman invented it.” Sergeant Armstrong had appeared beside Sharpe. The sergeant sniffed as he looked at the vast pot on its carriage. “Heathen gun, sir. Heathen gunner, too,” he added, looking at Clouter. “If we boards an enemy, Clouter,” he said sternly, “you stay close to me.”

“Yes, Sergeant.”

“Why close to you?” Sharpe asked Armstrong as they walked away from the carronade.

“Because when that black heathen starts to fight, sir, there ain’t a man born who dares stand in his way. A fiend, he is.” Armstrong sounded disapproving, but then, Clouter was palpably not a Northumbrian. “And you, sir?” Armstrong asked suspiciously. “Will you board with us?” What the sergeant really wanted to know was whether Sharpe planned to usurp his authority.

Sharpe could have insisted on commanding the marines, but he suspected they would fight better if Armstrong gave them their orders. Which meant Sharpe had little to do on the forecastle other than set an example, which was what most junior officers were doing when they were killed in battle. Armstrong knew what had to be done, the marines had been superbly trained by Llewellyn, and Sharpe had no mind to pace the forecastle showing a gentlemanly disdain for enemy fire. He would rather fight. “I’m going below,” he told Armstrong, “to draw a musket from stores.”

The enemy shots were still falling well short of the Pucelle as Sharpe went down the companionway and forward into the covered bow portion of the weather deck where he found the galley—usually a place where men gathered—empty, cold and deserted. The fires in the vast iron oven had all been doused and two of the ship’s cats were rubbing themselves against the blackened metal as if curious as to why their source of warmth was gone. The gunners sat by their guns. Once in a while a man would lift a gunport, letting in a bright wash of light, and lean out to peer toward the enemy.

Sharpe went on down to the lower deck which was as dim as a cellar though some light seeped from the wide windows of the stripped wardroom that lay at the stern. The ship’s biggest guns squatted here like tethered beasts behind their closed ports. The cannons were usually stored with their barrels fully elevated and then drawn tight to the ship’s sides, but now the barrels had been lowered to the fighting position and the carriages were standing well back from the ports. The sound of the enemy gunfire was muted so that it was little more than a dull grumble. Sharpe dropped down one more companionway to the orlop deck which was lit by shielded lanterns. He was below the water line now, and it was here that the ship’s magazines were guarded by marines armed with muskets, bayonets and orders to stop any unauthorized person from going through the double leather curtains that were dripping with sea water. Powder monkeys, some in felt slippers, but most barefooted, waited by the oviter curtain with their long tin canisters and Sharpe asked one of the boys to fetch him a pouch of musket ammunition and another of pistol shot while he went forrard to the small arms store and took a musket and pistol from the racks. The weight of the pistol made him think of Grace, safe now in the deep after hold. He tested both flints, found them secure.

He took the two pouches, thanked the boy, and climbed back to the lower deck where he paused to hang the cartridge pouches from his belt. The ship swooped up on a long swell, making him stagger slightly, then subsided into the trough, and suddenly a terrible crash echoed through the timbers, making the deck beneath Sharpe’s feet quiver, and he realized that a round shot must have hit the upperworks. “Froggies have our range,” a man said in the gloom.

“For what we are about to receive,” another man intoned, but before he could finish the prayer Lieutenant Holderby’s voice interrupted him. Holderby was at his station by the aft companionway.

“Open ports!” the fifth lieutenant shouted, and petty officers repeated the order to the forward part of the deck.

The lower deck’s thirty gunports were all raised, letting the daylight stream in to reveal the ship’s masts like three gigantic pillars about which was a seething mass of half-naked men. The long guns were all in their recoil position, hard back against their breeching ropes.

“Run them out!” Holderby ordered. “Run them out!”

Gunners heaved on the tackles and the thick deck quivered as the huge guns were hauled forward so that their barrels protruded beyond the ship’s sides. Holderby, elegant in silk stockings and gilded coat, ducked under the deck beams. “You’re to lie down between the guns. Between the guns! Lie down! Have a rest, gentlemen, before proceedings commence. Lie down!”

Chase had ordered his crew to lie down because the enemy’s shot, coming from directly forward, could scream down these decks and each one could easily knock down a score of men, but if the gun crews were in the intervals between the heavy cannons then they would be mostly protected. Up on the quarterdeck Chase shuddered and when Haskell raised an eyebrow, the captain smiled. “She’s going to be knocked to pieces, ain’t she?”

Haskell rapped a knuckle on the quarterdeck rail. “French-built, sir, well built.”

“Aye, they do make good ships.” Chase stood on tiptoes to see across the barrier of the hammock netting to where the Royal Sovereign was almost up to the enemy line. “She survived,” he said admiringly, “and she’s been under fire for twenty-three minutes! Dreadful gunnery, wouldn’t you say?”

The tip of the British right horn was about to tear into the enemy, but the Pucelle was in the left horn and that was still well short of the line, and the enemy could still fire without fear of any reply. Chase winced as a round shot smacked through his sails to open a succession of holes. The Pucelle’s ordeal had begun, and all he could do now was sail slowly on into an ever-increasing storm of gunnery. A fountain spewed up on the starboard side, spattering one of the carronade crews. “Water’s cold, eh, lads?” Chase remarked to the bare-chested gunners.

“We won’t be swimming in it, sir.”

A topsail shivered as a high shot slashed through. The ships ahead of the Pucelle were taking a more serious pounding, but the Pucelle was drawing closer and closer, heaved by the big swells and wafted by the ghosting wind, and every second took her nearer to the guns and soon, Chase knew, he would be under a much heavier cannonade, and just as he thought that so a heavy round shot struck the starboard cathead and whirled a wicked splinter of oak across the forecastle. Chase was suddenly aware that his fingers were drumming nervously against his right thigh and so he forced his hand to be still. His father, who had fought the French thirty years before, would have been appalled by these tactics. In Chase’s father’s day the ships of the line edged together, broadside to broadside, taking exquisite care never to expose their vulnerable bows and sterns to a raking, but this British fleet went bull-headed at the enemy. Chase wondered whether his father’s memorial stone had been delivered from the masons, and whether it had been placed in the church choir, and then he touched the prayer book in his pocket. “Hear us and save us,” he said under his breath, “that we perish not.”

“Amen.” Haskell had overheard him. “Amen.”

Sharpe climbed back to the forecastle where he found the marines crouching by the hammock netting and the carronade crews squatting behind their barrels. Sergeant Armstrong was standing by the foremast, scowling at the enemy line which suddenly seemed much nearer. Sharpe looked to his right and saw the Royal Sovereign had reached the enemy line. Her crew had hauled the fallen studdingsails inboard and her guns were at last firing as the vast ship pierced the enemy’s formation. A ripple of filthy smoke was traveling from her bows to her stern as she emptied her larboard broadside into the stern of a Spanish ship and her starboard guns into the bows of a Frenchman. One of the Royal Sovereign’s topmasts had fallen, but she had broken the enemy line and now she would be swallowed into their fleet. The next ship in Collingwood’s column, the two-decked Belleisle, was still a long way behind which meant the Royal Sovereign must fight the enemy single-handed until help arrived.

A slap overhead made Sharpe look up to see that a hole had been punched through the Pucelle’s foresail. The ball had then pierced all the lower sails, one after the other, before vanishing astern. Another crash, close to his feet, made him spin around. “Low on the bows, sir,” Armstrong said. “They hit the cathead earlier.” That would have been the first crash Sharpe had heard and he saw that the starboard cathead, a stout timber that jutted from the bows and from which the anchor was lowered and raised, was gouged almost halfway through.

His heart was thumping, his mouth was dry and a muscle twitched in his left cheek. He tried clamping his jaws shut to still the muscle, but it kept quivering. A shot landed close by the Pucelle’s bows and spattered water back over the beak and forecastle. The sprit-topsail yard under the reaching bowsprit twitched. one end flying into the air, then fell, broken, to hang close to the sea. This was worse than Assaye, Sharpe reckoned, for at least on land a soldier had the illusion that he could step left or right and so try to avoid the enemy’s shot, but here a man could only stand as the ship crawled toward the enemy line which was a row of massive batteries, each ship carrying more artillery than had marched with Sir Arthur Wellesley’s army. Sharpe could see the cannon balls looking like short pencil lines that flickered in the sky, and each pencil line meant a ball was coming more or less straight toward the Pucelle. A dozen enemy were firing at Nelson’s ships now. Another hole appeared in the Pucelle’s foresail, a studdingsail boom was shot away, a crash sounded close to the larboard water line and another enemy shot bounced across the swells to leave a trail of foam close on the starboard side. An odd whistling sound, almost a moan, but with a curious sharp rhythm, came from near the ship, then went silent. “Chain shot, sir,” Sergeant Armstrong said. “Sounds like the devil’s wings beating, it does.”

The Royal Sovereign had vanished, her position marked only by a vast cloud of smoke out of which the rigging and sails of a half-dozen ships stood against the cloudy sky. The noise of that battle was a continuous thunder, while the sound from the ships ahead of the Pucelle was of gun after gun, close together, unending, as the French and Spanish crews took this chance of firing at an enemy who could not fire back. Two shots struck the Pucelle close to the water line, another ricocheted from her larboard flank, gouging a splinter as long as a boarding pike, a fourth struck the mainmast and broke apart one of the newly painted hoops, a fifth screamed past the forward starboard carronade, decapitated a marine, threw two others back in a spray of blood, then whipped overboard to leave a trail of red droplets glistening in the suddenly warm air.

“Throw him overboard!” Armstrong screamed at his marines who appeared paralyzed by their comrade’s sudden death. Two of them took hold of the decapitated body and carried it to the rail beside the carronade, but before they could heave it overboard Armstrong told them to take the man’s ammunition. “And see what’s in his pockets, lads! Didn’t your bloody mothers teach you to waste not and want not?” The sergeant paced across the deck, picked up the severed head by its bloody hair and dropped it over the side. “Are they kicking?” He looked at the two men who lay like rag dolls in the sheet of blood that covered a quarter of the deck.

“Markav’s dead. Sergeant.”

“Then get rid of him!”

The third marine had lost an arm and the shot had also opened his chest so that his ribs showed in a jelly-like mass of torn muscle and blood. “He won’t live,” Armstrong said, stooping over the man, who was blinking through a mask of blood and breathing in juddering gasps. A round shot scattered the hammock netting, turned the quarterdeck rail to splinters and punched out through the stern without doing any injury to the crew. Another broke a topsail yard just as two shots banged through the weather deck to leave the ship’s waist strewn with timber scraps. A round shot banged into one of the lower-deck guns, throwing the three-ton barrel clean off its carriage, crushing two gunners and filling the ship with a sound like a vast hammer striking a giant anvil.

The enemy ships ahead were shrouded in smoke, but because the small wind was blowing from the west, that smoke was shredding through their rigging and sails like a bank of fog drifting before a sea breeze, yet the fog was fed continually and Sharpe could see the pulses of fresh gray, white and black smoke, and he could also see the dark brightness of the cannon flames appear like evanescent spearheads in the fog. The flames would stab, momentarily lighting the interior of the smoke bank, then vanish and the fog flowed over the enemy decks and the shots whipped out to thump into the Victory and the Temeraire and the Neptune and the Leviathan and the Conqueror and the Pucelle, and after those ships there was a gap before the lumbering three-decked Britannia which was still not under fire.

“Heave him over!” Armstrong commanded two of his men, gesturing at the third marine who had died. The man’s arm, its torn tendons, flesh and muscle trailing like wet offal from the red sleeve, lay forgotten under the small structure that held the ship’s bell and Sharpe picked it up, carried it to the larboard rail and hurled it into the sea. He could hear men singing from a gundeck below. One of the marines was kneeling in prayer, “Mary, Mother of God,” he said over and over again, crossing himself. Clouter spat a wad of chewed tobacco over the gunwale, then cut himself another plug. The carronade’s thirty-two-pound balls, each as large as a man’s head, were stored on a grating.

Sharpe went back to stand beside the foremast and suddenly remembered he had forgotten to load either of his weapons, and was grateful for saw a body being thrown off the Conqueror’s quarterdeck. He primed the musket as a round shot went close enough to his head to punch his scalp with the wind of its passing. The shot hit nothing, threading the Pucelle’s rigging to splash far aft. Three hammering blows in quick succession shuddered the ship’s timber as balls plowed through the twin layers of oak that formed her hull. Seamen scrambled up the ratlines to reeve broken lines. The mainsail had six great holes in it now, and shook as a seventh appeared. Chase was standing at the shattered quarterdeck rail,? pearing as calm as though he were sailing the Pucelle into an empty inland sea. Sharpe rammed the musket and, between his feet, there appeared a trickle of blood, spilling from the flood released by the shot that had killed the three marines. The trickle looked very red against the white of the scrubbed timber. When the ship tilted slightly to larboard the trickle veered to the left, when the stern was raised by a following sea the trickle dashed ahead and when the bows raised to the swell it hesitated, then the red rivulet slid to the right as the ship leaned to starboard, and Sharpe scrubbed the trickle into oblivion with his foot, then pushed the ramrod back into its hoops. He loaded the pistol. A shot hit the foremast, making the rigging shake; a silver-painted splinter whirled into the sea as Joan of Arc was struck on her belly. The guns were loud enough to hurt Sharpe’s eardrums. There was blood on the weather deck where a ricocheting round shot had struck a crew and the air was filled with a shrieking, whistling, tearing noise that was chain shot and bar shot whipping through the masts to slice lines and rip sails. A rending crash sounded as a heavy shot tore up the poop deck and Sharpe could see Captain Llewellyn dragging a body toward the stern rail. Another thump from below, a second, a third, then screams made a shrill descant to the battering noise of the enemy guns. The enemy ships ahead were still in clumps, and where they were close together they looked like islands of guns. Or islands of smoke speared by gun-flames. Another gouging, tearing noise erupted from the starboard side and Sharpe leaned over to see a bright splinter of timber jutting from a band of black-painted hull. A body appeared in a gunport and was pushed overboard. A second body followed. The insides of the gunports were painted red and one of them was hanging from a single hinge until a man tore it away and let it drop.

A ball gouged through the wet blood on the forecastle, bounced up to tear a pan in the forecastle’s after rail and punched through the lower edge of the mainsail. Three of the studdingsails were now hanging from the yards and Chase’s seamen were trying to haul them inboard. A bar shot, two lumps of iron joined by a short iron rod, banged into the foremast close to the deck and stuck there, driven deep into the wood by the force of the impact. The Victory was close to the smoke cloud now, but she seemed to Sharpe to be sailing straight into a wall of smoke, flame and noise. The Royal Sovereign was lost in cloud, surrounded by the enemy, fighting desperately as the limp wind brought help so slowly. A portion of the forward rail of the forecastle suddenly vanished into splinters, sawdust and whirling slivers of wood. A marine fell backward, struck through the lungs by one of the splinters. “Hodgkinson! Take him below!” Armstrong shouted.

Another marine had an arm torn open by a splinter, but though his sleeve was soaked with blood and more blood dripped from his wrist, he refused to go. “Ain’t but a scratch, Sergeant.”

“Move your fingers, boy.” The man obediently wriggled his fingers. “You can pull a trigger,” Armstrong allowed. “But bind it up, bind it up! You ain’t got nothing to do for the next few minutes, so bind it up. Don’t want you dripping blood on a nice clean deck.”

A shot whipped out the timberhead which held the fore staysail sheets. Another struck the ship’s beakhead, whistling a shred of wood high into the air, then a tearing, ripping, rustling sound made Sharpe look up to see that the Pucelle’s main topgallant mast, the slenderest and highest portion of the mainmast, was falling to bring down a tangle of rigging and the main topgallant sail with it. Heavy wooden blocks thumped on the deck. Some ships had rigged a net across the quarterdeck to save heads from being stove in by such accidental missiles, but Chase did not like such “sauve-tetes,” for, he claimed, they protected the officers on the quarterdeck while leaving the men forrard unprotected. “We must all endure the same risks,” he had told Haskell when the first lieutenant had suggested the netting, though it seemed to Sharpe that the officers on the quarterdeck ran more risk than most for they were made distinctive to the enemy by their unprotected position and by the brightness of their gold-encrusted uniforms. Still, Sharpe supposed, they were paid more so they must risk more. A staysail halliard parted and the sail drifted down to drag in the sea until a rush of seamen went forrard along the bowsprit to pull it in and attach a new halliard. One, two, three more strikes on the hull, each making the Pucelle tremble, and Sharpe wondered how the enemy could even see to aim their guns for the powder smoke lay so thickly along their hulls. The seamen chanted as they raised the staysail again.

More sail-handlers were up the mainmast trying to secure the wreckage of the topgallant mast. The mainsail had at least a dozen holes in it now. The ships ahead of the Pucelle were similarly wounded. Masts were shattered, yards broken, sails hung in folds, but enough canvas remained to drive them slowly onward. Three bodies floated beside the Pucelle, heaved overboard from the Temeraire or Conqueror. Splashes whipped up from the sea all about the leading ships.

“There goes His Majesty!” Armstrong called. The sergeant was evidently confused about Nelson’s true rank and exempted the admiral from all dislike, regarding him as an honorary Northumbrian who was now taking his flagship into the enemy’s line, and Sharpe heard the sound of her broadsides and saw the flames flickering down her starboard flank as she crashed three decks of double-shotted guns into the bows of one of the French ships that had been tormenting her for so long. The Frenchman’s foremast, all of it, right down to the deck, swayed left and right, then toppled slowly. The Victory’s guns would have recoiled inboard and men would be swabbing and reloading, ramming and heaving, breathing smoke and dust, and slipping on fresh blood as they hauled the guns out.

The Pucelle’s fore topgallant sail collapsed, the chains holding the yard shot through. The Conqueror was suffering as well. Her studdingsails trailed in the water, though Pellew’s men were working to drag them inboard. Her fore topmast was bent at an unnatural angle and there were scars on her painted flank. The British ships, now that their gunports were opened, were studded with red squares that broke the black and yellow stripes. The air quivered with the sound of guns, whistled with the passage of shots, and the long Atlantic swell lifted and drove the slow ships straight into the enemy fire.

Sharpe watched one ship dead ahead. She was a Spaniard and her red and white ensign was so huge that it almost trailed in the water. A gust of wind freed her of smoke and when she rolled to a long sea Sharpe could see daylight clean through her gunports, but then she rolled back and a half-dozen of those gunports stabbed flame. The shots screamed through the Pucelle’s rigging, shivering the sails and severing lines. The Spaniard’s red and black hull was hidden by smoke that thickened as more guns fired. A shot plowed into the forecastle, another struck high on the foremast and a third smacked into the water line on the larboard side. Sharpe was counting, watching the stern of the Spaniard where the first guns had fired. One minute passed and the smoke there was thinning. Two minutes, and still the guns had not fired again. Slow, he thought, slow, but a slow gunner could still kill. Sharpe could see men with muskets in the enemy rigging. A shot howled overhead and vanished astern. The Britannia’s bluff bows, bright with the figurehead of Britannia holding her shield and trident, were suddenly pushing through a curtain of spray where an enemy round shot had fallen short. The marine still prayed, calling on Christ’s mother to protect him, making the sign of the cross again and again.

The Victory had almost disappeared in smoke. She was through the enemy line now and the gun smoke seemed to boil around her, though Sharpe could just see the flagship’s high gilded stern reflecting a weak daylight through the man-made fog. It seemed to him that the enemy ships were gathering around Nelson and the sound of their guns was quivering the sea, rattling Sharpe’s teeth, deafening him. The Temeraire, second in Nelson’s column, forced her ponderous way through a gap in the enemy line and opened fire, pouring her broadside into the stern of a Frenchman. Sharpe looked right and saw that the first ships behind Collingwood’s Royal Sovereign had at last reached the enemy. The sea there seemed to seethe with steam. A mast toppled into smoke. A huge gap was opening in the enemy’s line north of where Collingwood had attacked, which showed that the British ships were snaring and pounding the enemy south of the Royal Sovereign, but the French and Spanish ships to the north of Collingwood’s flagship just sailed on toward the place where Nelson’s Victory was setting up a second snare.

Everything happened so slowly. Sharpe found that hard to bear. It was not like a land battle where the cavalry could pound across the field to leave a plume of dust and horse artillery slewed about in a spray of earth. This battle was taking place at a lethargic speed and there was a strange contrast between the stately slow beauty of the full-rigged ships and the noise of their guns. They went to their deaths so gracefully, in the full heautv nf tensioned masts and soread sails above oainted hulls. They crept toward death. The Leviathan and Neptune were in the battle now, piercing the enemy line a little to the south of the Victory. A shot gouged a furrow through the Pucelle’s forecastle deck, another struck the mizzen-mast, shaking it, a third hammered the length of the weather deck, piercing bows and stern and miraculously touching nothing in the flight between. The men were still crouched between the guns. Chase was standing by the mizzenmast, hands clasped behind his back. The Pucelle was three ship lengths away from the enemy line and Chase was choosing the place where he would sail her through. “Starboard a point,” he called, and the wheel creaked as the quartermaster hauled the spokes. Screams sounded from the lower deck as an enemy shot punched through the oak and ricocheted from the mainmast to strike a crouching gun crew. “Steady,” Chase said, “steady.”

A buzz whipped past Sharpe’s ear and he thought it was an insect, then he saw a small splinter fly out of the deck and knew that it was musket fire coming from the rigging of the ships ahead. He willed himself to stand still. The Spanish ship that had been straight ahead had gone into smoke and there was a Frenchman there instead, and close behind her was another ship, though whether she was French or Spanish Sharpe could not tell, for her ensign was hidden by the mass of her undamaged sails. The sails looked dirty. She was a two-decker, smaller than the Pucelle, and her figurehead showed a monk with an uplifted hand holding a cross. A Spaniard, then. Sharpe looked for the Revenant, but could not see her. Chase seemed to be aiming across the smaller Spaniard’s bows, taking the Pucelle through the shrinking gap between her and the Frenchman ahead, while the Spaniard was trying to cut the Pucelle off, trying to lay his smaller ship right across her bows and he was so close to the Frenchman that his jib boom, the outer part of his bowsprit, almost touched the French mizzen. French guns poured round shot into the Pucelle’s hull. Musket balls pattered on the sails. The French rigging was spotted with powder smoke, her hull was sheathed in it.

Chase gauged the gap. He could haul the ship around and take on the French ship broadside to broadside, but his orders were to pass through the line, though the gap was narrowing dangerously. If he misjudged, and if the Spaniard succeeded in laying his hull athwart the Pucelle’s bows then the Dons would seize his bowsprit, lash it to their own shin and hold him there while thev raked, nounded and turned his shin into bloody splinters. Haskell recognized the danger and turned on Chase with a raised eyebrow. A musket ball struck the deck between them, then a round shot splintered the edge of the poop deck just above Chase before scattering the flag lockers built against the taffrail so that the Pucelle suddenly trailed a bright stream of gaudy flags. A musket bullet buried itself in the wheel, another broke the binnacle lantern. Chase stared at the shrinking gap and felt the temptation to head across the Spaniard’s stern, but he would be damned if he let the Spanish captain dictate his battle. “Stand on!” he said to the quartermaster. “Stand on!” He would tear the bowsprit clean out of the Spaniard’s hull before he gave way. “The gun crews will stand up, Mister Haskell!” Chase said.

Haskell shouted down to the weather deck. “Stand up! Stand up! Stand to your guns!”

Midshipmen and lieutenants repeated the order to the lower deck. “Stand up! Stand up!” Men gathered around their guns, peered through the open ports, eyed the ragged holes that had already been punched in the hull’s double-planked oak timbers. The cannons’ flintlocks were cocked and the gunners crouched to the side, lanyards held ready.

A marine cursed and staggered on the forecastle as a musket bullet drove down through his shoulder into his belly. “Make your own way to the surgeon,” Armstrong told him, “and don’t make a fuss.” He stared up at the Frenchman’s mizzenmast where a knot of men were firing muskets down onto the Pucelle. “Time to teach those bastards some manners,” he growled. The Pucelle’s bowsprit, ragged with its broken yard, pushed into the gap between the two ships. The gunners below decks could not yet see the enemy, but they knew they were close for the smoke of the enemy guns lay across the sea like mist, then thickened as the enemy fired again, though now the Pucelle was so close that they were firing at the ships behind her.

“Push on through!” Chase shouted at his ship. “Push on through!”

For now was the glorious moment of revenge. Now was the moment when, if the Pucelle could force her passage, she would carry her broadsides within feet of an unprotected enemy stern and an unprotected enemy bow. Then, having taken the punishment for so long, she could rake two ships at once, ripping blood and bone and timber with her own fire-driven metal. “Make the shots tell!” Chase called. “Make them tell!”

Make the bastards bleed, he though vengefully. Make the bastards sorry they had ever been born and damn them to a fiery hell for the damage they had already done to his ship. There was a ripping, splintering sound as the Pucelle’s bowsprit tangled with the Spanish bowsprit, but then the Spaniard’s jib boom broke off altogether and the Pucelle’s shot-battered bows were in the gap, her broken sprit topsail yard was ripping the French ensign, and the first of her guns could bear. “Now kill them!” Chase shouted, relief flooding through him because at last he could fight back. “Now kill them!”

Lord William Hale had refused to allow his wife’s maid to take refuge in the lady hole, peremptorily telling the girl to find a place further forward in the Pucelle’s hold. “It is bad enough,” he told his wife, “that we are forced to this place, let alone that we should share it with servants.”

The lady hole was the aftermost corner of the Pucelle’s hold, a triangular space made where the hull supported the rudder. Its forward bulkhead was formed by the shelves where the officers’ empty dunnage was stored and where Malachi Braithwaite had sought the memorandum on the day of his death, and the floor of the hole was made by the steeply sloping sides of the ship, and though Captain Chase had ordered that a patch of old sailcloth be placed in the hole to provide a rudimentary comfort, Lord William and Lady Grace were still forced to perch uncomfortably against the plank slopes beneath the small hatch that led to the gunroom on the orlop deck above. It was in the gunroom that the cannons’ flintlocks were usually stored and where the ship’s small weapons could be repaired. It was empty now, though the surgeon might use it as a place to put the dying.

Lord William had insisted on having two lanterns which he hung from rusting hooks in the lady hole’s ceiling. He drew his pistol and lay it on his lap, using it as a prop for the spine of a book he drew from his coat pocket. “I am reading the Odyssey,” he told his wife. “I thought I should have the leisure for much reading on this voyage, but time has flown. Have you found the same?”

“I have,” she said dully. The sound of the enemy guns was very muted down below the water line.

“But I was pleased to discover,” Lord William went on, “in the few moments I have been able to devote to Homer, that my Greek is as fresh as ever. There were a few words that escaped me, but young Braithwaite recalled them. He was not much use, Braithwaite, but his Greek was excellent.”

“He was an odious man,” Lady Grace said.

“I did not realize you had remarked him,” Lord William said, then shifted the book so that the lantern light fell on the page. He traced the lines with his finger, mouthing the words silently.

Lady Grace listened to the guns, then started when the first shot struck the Pucelle and made all the ship’s timbers quiver. Lord William merely raised an eyebrow, then went on with his reading. More shots struck home, their sound dulled by the decks above. Opposite Lady Grace, where the hull’s inner planking was joined to a rib, water wept through a seam and every time a swell passed under the hull the water would bulge in the seam, then run down to vanish into the hold beyond the dunnage shelves. She restrained an urge to press a finger against the seam which was stuffed with a narrow strip of frayed oakum, and she remembered Sharpe telling her how, as a small child in the foundling home, he had been forced to pick apart great mats of tarred rope that had been used as fenders on London’s docks. His job had been to extract the hemp strands which were then sold to the shipyards to be used as caulking for planks. His fingernails were still ragged and black, though that, he said, was the result of firing a flintlock musket. She thought of his hands, closed her eyes and wondered at the madness that had swamped her. She was still in its thrall. The ship shook again, and she had a sudden terror of being trapped in this cramped space as the Pucelle sank.

“I am reading about Penelope,” Lord William said, ignoring the frequent crashes as the enemy shot hacked into the Pucelle. “She is a remarkable woman, is she not?”

“I have always thought as much,” Lady Grace said, opening her eyes.

“The quintessence, would you not say, of fidelity?” Lord William asked.

Grace looked into her husband’s face. He was sitting to her left, perched on the opposite side of the narrow space. He seemed amused. “Her fidelity is always praised,” she said.

“Have you ever wondered, my dear, why I took you to India?” Lord William asked, closing the book after carefully marking his place with what appeared to be a folded letter.

“I hoped it was because I could be of use to you,” she answered.

“And so you were,” Lord William said. “Our necessary visitors were entertained most properly and I have not one single complaint about the manner in which you organized our household.”

Grace said nothing. The rudder, so close behind them, creaked in its pintles. The enemy gunfire was a constant succession of dull thumps, sometimes rising to a thunderous crescendo, then lulling again into the steadier banging.

“But of course,” Lord William went on, “a good servant can run a household quite as well as a wife, if not better. No, my dear, I confess it was not for that reason that I wished you to accompany me, but rather, forgive me, because I feared you would find it hard to imitate Penelope if I were to leave you at home for such a long period.”

Grace, who had been watching the water well and spill from the seam, looked at her husband. “You are offensive,” she said coldly.

Lord William ignored her words. “Penelope, after all,” he went on, “stayed faithful to her husband through all the long years of his exile, but would a modern woman show the same forbearance?” Lord William pretended to mull over this question. “What do you think, my dear?”

“I think,” she said acidly, “that I would need to be married to Odysseus to answer such a question.”

Lord William laughed. “Would you like that, my dear? Would you like to be married to a warrior? Though is Odysseus such a great warrior? It always seems to me that he is a trickster before he is a soldier.”

“He is a hero,” Grace insisted.

“As, I am sure, all husbands are to their wives,” Lord William said placidly, then looked up at the deck beams as a double blow shook the ship. A wave heaved up the stern, making him reach out a hand to steady himself. Feet scraped on the deck above, where the ship’s first wounded were going under the surgeon’s knife. Then a particularly loud crash, sounding very close by, made Lady Grace cry aloud. There was the ominous sound of gushing water that stopped abruptly as the carpenter, finding the hole in the ship’s water line, hammered a shaped plug into the shot hole. Lady Grace wondered how far beneath the water line they were. Five feet? Captain Chase had been certain that no shot could penetrate the lady hole, explaining that the sea water slowed the cannon balls instantly, but the terrible sounds suggested that every part of the Pucelle could be wounded. The ship’s pumps clattered, though once the Pucelle opened fire the men would be too busy at the guns to bother with the pumps. The ship was full of noises: the creaking of the mast roots in the hold, the gurgle of water, the sucking gulps of the pump, the groan-ings of strained timbers, the shriek of the rudder on its metal hangings, the banging of the enemy guns and the tearing crashes of the shots striking home. Lady Grace, assaulted by the cacophony, had one hand at her mouth and the other clasped to her belly where she carried Sharpe’s child.

“We are entirely safe here,” Lord William calmed his wife. “Captain Chase assures me that no one dies beneath the water line. Though when I come to think of it, my dear, poor Braithwaite did just that.” Lord William put his hands together in mock piety. “He was killed beneath the water line,” he intoned.

“He fell,” Lady Grace said.

“Did he?” Lord William asked, his tone suggesting how much he was enjoying this discussion. A thunderous blow shook the ship, then something scraped quick and hard against the hull. Lord William settled himself more comfortably. “I must confess I have wondered whether he did indeed fall.”

“How else could he have died?” Grace asked.

“And what a cogent question that is, my dear.” Lord William pretended to think about it for a while. “Of course, a quite different construction could be placed on the unfortunate man’s death if we were to discover that he was particularly disliked by anyone aboard. Like you? You told me he was odious.”

“He was,” Lady Grace said bitterly.

“But I do not think you could have killed him,” Lord William said with a smile. “Perhaps he had other enemies? Enemies who could make his death appear an accident? Odysseus, in the unlikely event that he could ever have encountered young Braithwaite, would surely have had no trouble disguising such a murder?”

“He fell,” Lady Grace insisted tiredly.

“And yet, and yet,” Lord William said, frowning in thought. “I confess I did not much like Braithwaite. His pathetic ambition was too naked for my tastes. He lacked subtlety and could not disguise his ridiculous envy of privilege. Once in England I should have been forced to relinquish his services, but he must have had a higher opinion of me than I of him, for he chose to confide in me.”

Lady Grace watched her husband. The swaying lanterns made the shadows either side of his body shift ominously. A cannon ball thumped into the lower deck above them and the ship’s ribs carried the harsh sound down into the lady hole, but for once Lady Grace did not flinch at the noise. She was scratching at a shred of oakum with her right hand, trying to imagine how it felt to a small child in a cold foundling home.

“Perhaps he did not exactly confide in me,” Lord William said pedantically, “for, naturally, I did not encourage intimacy, yet he did have a premonition of his death. Do you think, perhaps, he was possessed of some prophetic powers?”

“I know nothing of him,” Grace said distantly.

“I almost feel sorry for him,” Lord William said, “for he lived in fear.”

“A sea voyage can engender nervousness,” Lady Grace said.

“So much fear,” Lord William went on, blithely ignoring his wife’s words, “that before he died he left a sealed letter among my papers. ‘To be opened,’ the letter said, ‘in the event of my death.’ “ He sneered. “Such a very dramatic ascription, wouldn’t you say? So dramatic that I hesitated to obey it, for I expected it to contain nothing more than his pathetic resentments and self-justifications. Indeed, I was so aghast at the thought of hearing from Braithwaite beyond the grave that I very nearly threw the letter overboard, but a Christian sense of duty made me pay him attention, and I confess he did not write uninterestingly.” Lord William smiled at his wife, then delicately took the folded paper from between the pages of his Odyssey. “Here, my dear, is young Braithwaite’s legacy to our connubial happiness. Please read it, for I have been so looking forward to your construal of its contents.” He held the letter toward her and though Lady Grace hesitated, her heart sinking, she knew she must obey. It was either that or listen as her husband read the letter aloud and so, without a word, she took the paper.

Her husband closed his hand about the hilt of his pistol.

The Pucelle’s bowsprit tore the jib boom from the Spanish ship. And Lady Grace read her doom.

The stern of the French ship was so close that Sharpe felt he could have reached out and touched it. Her name was written in golden letters placed on a black band between two sets of the stern’s lavishly gilded windows. Neptune. The British had a Neptune in the fight, a three-decked ship with ninety-eight guns, while this Neptune was a two-decker, though Sharpe had the impression she was bigger than the Pucelle. Her stern was a foot or more higher than the Pucelle’s forecastle and it was lined with French marines armed with muskets. Their bullets banged on the deck or buried themselves in the hammock nettings. Just beneath the enemy’s gun smoke a shield was carved into the taffrail. The shield was surmounted by an eagle and on either side of the crest were sheaves of wooden flags, all of them, like the shield itself, painted with the French tricolor, but the paint had weathered and Sharpe could see faded gold traces of the old royalist fleur-de-lys beneath the red, white and blue. He fired his musket, obliterating the view with smoke, then Clouter, who had deliberately waited until his carronade could fire directly down the center line of the French Neptune, pulled the lanyard.

It was the first of the Pucelle’s guns to fire, and it shrieked back on its carriage in a cloud of black smoke. The French marines vanished, shredded to a bloody mist by the cask of musket balls that had been loaded on top of the massive round shot that shattered the painted shield and then struck the Neptune’s mizzenmast with a crack that was drowned by the first guns firing from the Pucelle’s lower decks.

These guns were double-shotted and each had a bundle of grape rammed on top of the twin cannon balls, and they were being fired straight into the Frenchman’s stern windows. The glass panes and their frames disappeared as the heavy missiles whipped down the lengths of the Neptune’s two gundecks. Cannon barrels were hurled from their carriages, men were eviscerated, and still the shots came, gun after gun, as the Pucelle slowly, so slowly, traveling at an old man’s walking pace, inched past the stern to bring the successive larboard gunports to bear.

The guns on the starboard side were firing into the Spaniard’s bow, breaking the heavy timber apart to send their murderous shots down her gun-decks. The Pucelle was dishing out slaughter and the smoke billowed from her sides, starting at the bows and working down to her stern.

The Neptune’s mizzenmast went overboard. Sharpe heard the screams of the marksmen in her rigging, watched them fall, then rammed a new ball down his musket. The starboard carronade, loaded like Clouter’s with musket balls and a vast round shot, had swept the Spaniard’s forecastle clean of men. Blood dripped from the forecastle scuppers while the figurehead of the monk with a cross had been turned into matchwood. A big crucifix was fastened to the Spanish ship’s mizzenmast, but when Chase’s stern carronades blasted down the smaller ship’s length the hanging Christ’s left arm was torn away and then his legs were broken.

The Pucelle had ripped away a part of the Frenchman’s ensign, while the rest was in the water with the fallen mizzenmast. Chase wanted to turn his ship to larboard and lay her alongside the Neptune and batter her hull into bloody ruin, but the smaller Spanish ship rammed the Pucelle and inadvertently turned her to starboard. There was a tearing, grating, grinding sound as the two hulls juddered together, then the Spanish captain, fearing he would be boarded, backed his topsails and the smaller ship fell away astern. Her starboard gunports had been closed, but now a few opened as the surviving gunners crossed from larboard. The guns fired into the Pucelle. Captain Llewellyn’s marines were firing up into the Spanish rigging. Smoke obscured the smaller ship. Chase thought about putting his helm hard down and closing on her, but he was already past and so he shouted at the quartermaster to turn the ship north toward the caldron of fire and smoke that surrounded the Victory. The flagship’s hull could not be seen amidst that stinking fog, but, judging from the masts, Chase reckoned there was a Frenchman on either side of her. “Pull in the studdingsails,” he ordered. The sails, which projected either side of the ship, were only useful in a following wind and now the Pucelle would turn to place the small wind on her larboard flank. The sail-handlers streamed out along the yards. One, struck by a musket ball, collapsed over the mainyard, then fell to leave a long trail of blood down the mainsail.

The French Neptune was slowed by her trailing mizzenmast. Her crew slashed at the fallen rigging with axes, trying to lose the broken mast overboard. The Pucelle was off her quarter now and Chase’s larboard gunners had reloaded and poured shot after shot into the Frenchman, firing through the lingering smoke of their first broadside. The noise of the guns filled the sky, made the sea quiver, shook the ship. Clouter had reloaded the larboard carronade, a slow job, but there was no target close and he would not waste the giant shot on the Neptune which had at last released the wreckage of its mast and was drawing away. He rammed another cask of musket balls into the short barrel, then waited for another target to come within the short gun’s range.

But the Pucelle was suddenly in a patch of open sea with no enemy near. She had pierced the line, but the Neptune had gone north while the Spaniard had disappeared in smoke astern and there were no ships in front except for an enemy frigate that was a quarter-mile off and ships of the line did not stoop to fight frigates when there were battleships to engage. A long line of French and Spanish battleships was coming from the south, but none was in close range and so Chase continued toward the churning smoke, lit by gunflashes, that marked where Nelson’s beleaguered flagship lay. There was honor to be gained in defeating a flagship and the Victory, like the Royal Sovereign, was drawing enemy ships like flies. Four other British ships were in action close to the Victory, but the enemy had seven or eight, and no more help would arrive for a time because the Britannia was such a slow sailor. The French Neptune looked to be going to join that melee, and so Chase followed. The sail-handlers, short numbered because so many were manning the guns, sheeted home the sails as the Pucelle swung around. The sea was littered with floating wreckage. Two bodies drifted past. A seagull perched on one, sometimes pecking at the man’s face which had been torn open by gunfire and washed white by the sea.

The Pucelle’s wounded were carried below and the dead jettisoned. The cannon barrel that had been thrown off its carriage was lashed tight so that it would not shift with the ship’s rolling and crush a man. Lieutenants redistributed gunners among the crews, making up the numbers where too many had died or been injured. Chase stared aft at the Spanish ship. “I should have laid alongside her,” he told Haskeli ruefully.

“There’ll be others, sir.”

“By God I want a prize today!” Chase said.

“Plenty to go around, sir.”

The nearest enemy ship now was a two-decker that was laid alongside the bigger Victory. Chase could see the smoke of the Victory’s guns spewing out from the narrow space between the two ships and he imagined the horror in the Frenchman’s lower decks as the three tiers of British guns mangled men and timber, but he also saw that the French upper decks were crowded. The French captain appeared to have abandoned his gundecks altogether and assembled his whole crew on the forecastle, open weather deck and quarterdeck where they were armed with muskets, pikes, axes and cutlasses. “They want to board Victory]” Chase exclaimed, pointing.

“By God, sir, so they do.”

Chase could not see the French ship’s name, for the powder smoke curled around her stern, but her captain was plainly a bold man, for he was willing to lose his own ship if, thereby, he could capture Nelson’s flagship. His seamen had grappled the bigger Victory and dragged her close, his gunners had closed their ports and seized their cutlasses and now the French sought a way across to Nelson’s deck. The Victory was higher than the Frenchman, and the two ships’ tumblehomes meant that even when their hulls were touching, the rails were still thirty or more feet apart. The Victory’s guns were pounding the Frenchman’s hull, while the French ship had scores of men in the rigging, and those men were pouring a lethal musket fire down onto the flagship’s exposed decks. They had almost cleared those decks, so that now the British fought from their lower decks while the French sought a way to cross to the flagship’s virtually unguarded upper decks. The French captain planned to pour hundreds of men onto the Victory. He would make his name, be an admiral by nightfall and carry Nelson as a prisoner back to Cadiz.

Chase had climbed a few feet up the mizzen shrouds to see what was happening, and what he saw appalled him. He could not see the admiral, or Captain Hardy. A few red-coated marines crouched under the cover of the carronades and put up a feeble fire to counter the lashing musketry that still ripped down from the French masts, while on the Victory’s farther side another enemy ship fired into her hull.

Chase dropped down the rigging. “Starboard a point,” he said to the helmsman, then took a speaking trumpet from the shattered rail. “Clouter! Have you got musket balls loaded?”

“Full of them, sir!”

The enemy ship was a hundred yards away. The Victory’s cannon fire was ripping upward through her decks now as Hardy’s gunners elevated their barrels as high as they could. Holes were being punched high in the French two-decker’s starboard side as round shot, fired into the ship’s larboard flank, hammered clean through her. Yet the British gunners were firing blind and the boarders were gathering on the side nearest the Victory where the British guns could not reach. The French captain shouted at his men to drop the mainyard, for that would serve as their bridge to glory. His rigging was tangled with the Victory’s rigging, but his was filled with men and the Victory’s was empty. The sound of the muskets crackled like thorn burning. The Victory’s guns made deep booms. Wood splintered from the French deck and side as the shots punched out.

Fifty yards to go. The wind was foully light. The sea was covered in patches of smoke like breaking fog. The swells heaved the Pucelle eastward. “Larboard a point, John,” Chase said to the quartermaster, “larboard. Take me by his quarter.” The smoke at the French ship’s stern thinned and Chase saw the name of the two-decker which threatened to board the Victory. The Redouiable. Death to the Redoutable, he thought, and just then the French seamen released the Redoutable’s main-yard halliards and the great spar dropped to crash onto the Victory’s shattered hammock netting. It lay like a canvas-wrapped log across the Redoutable’s waist, but its larboard end jutted out over the Victory’s weather deck. It was a slender bridge, but it was sufficient for the French.

“A I’abordage!” the French captain shouted. He was a small man with a very loud voice. He had his sword drawn. “A I’abordage!”

His men cheered as they swarmed up the yard. The Pucelle lifted on a wave.

“Now!” Chase shouted to the forecastle. “Now, Clouter, now!”

And Clouter hesitated.