Sharpe`s Trafalgar

CHAPTER 11

His lordship should know, Malachi Braithwaite had written in a careful copperplate hand, that his wife was conducting an adulterous affair with Ensign Sharpe. He had overheard the two of them in Sharpe’s quarters aboard the Calliope and, painful though it was to relate, the-sounds emanating—that was the word he used, emanating—from the cabin suggested that her ladyship had quite forgotten her high station. Braithwaite had written in a cheap ink, a faded brown that had bled into the damp paper, and was hard to read in the dim lady hole. At first, the confidential secretary related, he had not believed the evidence of his own ears, and scarce even dared credit it when he had glimpsed the Lady Grace leaving the lower-deck steerage in the darkness before dawn, so he had thought it his duty to confront Sharpe with his suspicions. “But when I taxed Ensign Sharpe with my accusations,” he wrote, “and upbraided him for taking advantage of her ladyship, he did not deny the circumstances, but instead threatened me with murder.” Braithwaite had underlined the word “murder.” “It was that circumstance, my lord, which constrained my cowardly tongue from its bounden duty.” It gave him no pleasure, Braithwaite concluded the letter, to inform his lordship of these shameful events, especially as his lordship had ever shown him such excessive kindnesses.

Lady Grace let the letter fall into her lap. “He lies,” she said, “he lies.” There were tears in her eyes.

The lady hole was suddenly filled with noise. The Pucelle’s own guns had started to fire and the shock of the cannon reverberated through the ship, shaking the twin lanterns. The noise went on and on, becoming louder as the firing drew nearer to the stern of the ship. Then there was a terrible crash as the Spanish ship’s bows collided with the Pucelle’s side, followed by a groaning screech as tons of wood ground and scraped against the hull. A man shouted, a gun fired, then three more. The sound of the reloaded guns being hauled forward was like bursts of brief thunder.

Then there was an odd silence.

“He did lie,” Lord William said placidly in the silence, and reached over to take the letter from his wife’s lap. Grace made an effort to snatch it back, but Lord William was too quick. “Of course Braithwaite lied,” his lordship went on. “It must have provided him with an exquisite pleasure to tell me of your disgusting behavior. One detects his enjoyment throughout the letter, don’t you think? And I certainly did him no excessive kindnesses! The thought is as ludicrous as it is offensive.”

“He lies!” Lady Grace said more defiantly. A tear quivered at her eye, then rolled down her cheek.

“Showed him excessive kindnesses!” Lord William said scathingly. “Why would I do such a thing? I paid him a small salary commensurate with his services, and that was all.” Lord William carefully pocketed the folded letter. “One circumstance did puzzle me, though,” he went on. “Why did he confront Sharpe? Why not come straight to me? I have thought about that, and still it puzzles me. What was the point of seeing Sharpe? What did Braithwaite expect of him?”

Lady Grace said nothing. The rudder squealed in its pintles, and an enemy shot struck the Pucelle with a deep booming sound, then there was silence again.

“Then I remembered,” Lord William went on, “that Sharpe deposited some valuables with that wretched man Cromwell. I thought it an odd circumstance, for the man is palpably poor, but I suppose he could have plundered some wealth in India. Could Braithwaite have been attempting blackmail? What do you think?”

Lady Grace shook her head, not in answer to her husband’s question, but as if to shake off the whole subject.

“Or perhaps Braithwaite tried to blackmail you?” Lord William suggested, smiling at his wife. “He used to watch you with such a pathetically yearning face. It amused me, for it was plain what he was thinking.”

“I hated him!” Lady Grace blurted out.

“An extravagant waste of emotion, my dear,” Lord William said. “He was an insignificant thing, scarce worth disliking. But, and this is the point of our conversation, was he telling the truth?”

“No!” Lady Grace wailed.

Lord William lifted the pistol and examined its lock in the lantern light. “I noted,” he said, “how your spirits revived after we boarded the Calliope. I was pleased, naturally, for you have been over-nervous in these last months, but once aboard Cromwell’s ship you seemed positively happy. And indeed, in these last few days, there has been a vivacity in you that is most unnatural. Are you pregnant?”

“No,” Lady Grace lied.

“Your maid tells me you vomit most mornings?”

Grace shook her head again. Tears were running down her cheeks. Partly she cried from shame. When she was with Sharpe it seemed so natural, so comforting and exciting, but she could not plead that in her defense. He was a common soldier, an orphan from the London rookeries, and Grace knew that if society ever learned of her liaison then she would become a laughing stock. A part of her did not care if she was mocked, another part cringed under the lash of Lord William’s scorn. Grace was deep in a ship, down among the rats, lost.

Lord William watched her tears and thought of them as the first trickles of his revenge, then he looked up at the planks of the orlop deck and frowned. “It’s oddly silent,” he said, trying to keep her off balance by momentarily talking of the battle before torturing her with his sharp tongue once more. “Perhaps we have run away from the fighting?” He could hear the grumbling of some distant gunnery, but no cannons were being fired close to the Pucelle. “I remember,” he said, laying the pistol on his knees, “when we first met and my uncle suggested I should marry you. I had my doubts, of course. Your father is a wastrel and your mother a garrulous fool, but you possess, Grace, a classical beauty and I confess I was drawn to it. I was concerned that you boasted an education, though it has proved scantier than you think, and I feared you might possess opinions, which I rightly suspected would be foolish, but I was prepared to endure those afflictions. I believed, you see, that my apprehension of your beauty would overcome my distaste for your intellectual pretensions, and in return I asked very little of you, save that you gave me an heir and upheld the dignity of my name. You failed in both things.”

“I gave you an heir,” Grace protested through her tears.

“That sickly whelp?” Lord William spat, then shuddered. “It is your other failure that concerns me now, my dear. Your failure of taste, of behavior, of decency, of fidelity”—he paused, seeking the right insult—”of manners!”

“Braithwaite lied!” Grace screamed. “He lied.”

“He did not lie,” Lord William said angrily. “You, my lady, made the beast with two backs with that common soldier, that lump of ignorance, that brute.” His voice was cold now, for he could no longer hide his long-cosseted rage. “You fornicated with a peasant, and you could not have sunk lower had you put yourself on the streets and lifted your skirts.”

Lady Grace rested her head on the planking. Her mouth was open, gasping for breath and the tears were dripping onto her cloak. Her eyes were red, unseeing, as she wept.

“And now you look so ugly,” Lord William said, “which will make this much easier.” He lifted the pistol.

And the ship echoed again to the sound of a shot.

Clouter did not pull the carronade’s flintlock lanyard when Chase ordered him to fire. He waited. It seemed to Sharpe, and to everyone else who watched, that Clouter was waiting too long and that the French would reach the Victory’s weather deck, but the Pucelle had heaved up on a swell and Clouter was waiting for thd ship to roll to larboard on the back of the wave. She did, and on that down roll Clouter fired and the shot was perfectly timed so that its barrelful of musket balls and round shot slashed into the Frenchmen clambering up the spar that would have carried them onto the Victory’s unprotected deck. One moment there was a boarding party, the next there was a butcher’s yard. The fallen yard and sail were drenched with blood, but the Frenchmen had disappeared, snatched into oblivion by the storm of metal.

The Puerile now plided oast the Redoutable’s quarter. She was a pistol shot away and the big guns of Chase’s larboard broadside began to work on the devastated enemy. Chase had ordered the gunners to raise their barrels so that the shots cracked through the Frenchman’s side and tore their way upward through the deck which was thronged with men. Shot after shot spat from the Pucelle in a fire that was deliberate, slow and lethal. Men were lifted from the enemy deck, snatched upward by the round shot. Some shots passed through the Redoutable to strike the Victory’s weather-deck rail. It took more than a minute for the Pucelle to pass the doomed French ship, and for all of that minute the guns ripped into her, and then it was the turn of the quarterdeck carronades that could look down on the bloody mess left on the enemy deck and the two smashers finished the work, emptying their squat barrels into the squirming mass.

The Redoutable had no cannons manned. The French captain had I gambled everything on boarding the Victory, and his boarders were now dead, wounded or dazed, but the ship’s rigging was still filled with the marksmen who had emptied the upper decks of Nelson’s flagship and those men had turned their muskets onto the Pucelle. The balls rained down, smacking on the quarterdeck like metal hail. Grenades were hurled, exploding in gouts of smoke and whistling shards of glass and iron.

The Pucelle’s marines did their best, but they were outnumbered. Sharpe fired up into the dazzling light, then hurriedly reloaded. The deck about his feet was being pockmarked with bullet strikes. A ball clanged off Clouter’s empty carronade and struck a man in the thigh. A marine reeled back from the rail, his mouth opening and closing. Another, pierced through the throat, knelt by the foremast and gazed wide-eyed at Sharpe. “Spit, boy!” Sharpe shouted at him. “Spit!”

The man looked vacantly at Sharpe, frowned, then obediently spat. There was no blood in the spittle. “You’ll live,” Sharpe told him. “Get yourself below.” A bullet hit a mast hoop, scraping away fresh yellow paint. Sergeant Armstrong fired his musket, swore as a bullet drilled his left foot, limped to the rail, picked up another musket and fired again. Sharpe rammed his bullet, primed the gun, lifted it to his shoulder and aimed at the knot of men on the Frenchman’s maintop. He pulled the trigger. He could see musket flashes up there. A grenade landed on the forecastle and exploded in a sheet of flame. Armstrong, wounded by shards of glass, smothered the flames with a bucket of sand, then began to reload. Blood was trickling from the scuppers of the Redoutable’s weather deck, trickling under the shattered rail and dribbling red across her closed gunports. The Pucelle’s foremost guns, reloaded, fired into the Frenchman’s bows and there was a crack like the gates of hell being shut as the vast anchor was struck by a round shot. More round shot from the Victory was breaking out of the enemy’s side and some struck the Pucelle. A dozen more muskets fired from the enemy’s maintop and Sergeant Armstrong was on his knees, cursing, but still reloading. More muskets flickered from the enemy’s mast and Sharpe threw down his musket and picked up Sergeant Armstrong’s volley gun. He looked up at the enemy maintop and reckoned it was too far away and that the seven bullets would spread too wide before they reached the platform that was built where the Frenchman’s lower mast was jointed to the upper.

He went to the starboard rail, slung the big gun on his shoulder and pulled himself up the foremast shrouds. He could see a marine lying on the Pucelle’s quarterdeck with a rivulet of blood seeping from his body along the planks. Another marine was being carried to the rails. He could not see Chase, but then a bullet struck the shroud above him, making the tarred rope tremble like a harp string and he climbed desperately, his ears buffeted by the sound of the big guns. Another bullet whipped close by, a second struck the mast and, bereft of force, thumped against the volley gun’s stock. He reached the futtock shrouds and, without thinking, hurled himself upward and outward, the quickest way to the maintop. There was no time to be frightened; instead he scrambled up the ratlines as nimbly as any sailor and then rolled onto the grating to find that he was now level with the Frenchmen in their maintop. There were a dozen men there, most reloading, but one fired and Sharpe felt the wind of the ball whipping past his cheek. He unslung the volley gun, cocked and aimed it.

“Bastards,” he said, and pulled the trigger. The recoil of the gun hurled him back against the topmast shrouds. The volley gun’s smoke filled the sky, but no shots came from the Frenchman’s maintop. Sharpe slung the empty gun on his shoulder and lowered himself off the grating. His feet flailed for a heartbeat, then found the inward-sloping futtock shrouds and he went back down to the Pucelle’s deck and, when he looked back up, all he could see at the Redoutable’s maintop was a body hanging off the edge. He threw the volley gun down, picked up a musket and walked to the larboard rail.

A dozen marines were left. The others were dead or wounded. Sergeant Armstrong, his face bleeding from three cuts and his trousers a deep red from a bullet wound, was sitting with his back against the foremast. He had a musket at his shoulder and, though his right eye was closed by blood, he did his best to aim the musket, then fired. “You should go below, Sergeant!” Sharpe shouted.

Armstrong gave a monosyllabic opinion of that advice and pulled a cartridge from his pouch. A bullet had grazed Clouter’s back leaving a bloody welt like the stroke of a lash, but the big man was paying it no heed. He was stuffing another cask of musket balls into the carronade, though by now the Pucelle had gone beyond the Redoutable and the Frenchman was out of Clouter’s range.

Captain Chase still lived. Connors, the signal lieutenant, had lost his right forearm to a cannon ball and was down in the cockpit, while Pearson, a midshipman who had twice failed his lieutenant’s examination, had been killed by the musketry. The marine lieutenant was wounded in the belly and had been taken below to die. A dozen gunners were dead and two marines had been thrown overboard, but Chase reckoned the Pucelle had still been lucky. She had destroyed the Redoutable just as that ship had been on the point of boarding the Victory, and Chase felt an exultation as he looked back to see the terrible damage his guns had done. They had filleted her, by God! Chase had half considered laying alongside the Redoutable and boarding her, but she was already lashed to the Victory and doubtless the flagship’s crew would take her surrender, then he saw the French Neptune ahead and he shouted at the helmsman to steer for her. “She’s ours!” he told Haskell.

The first lieutenant was bleeding from a bullet wound in his left arm, though he refused to have it treated. The arm hung useless, but Haskell claimed it did not hurt and, besides, he said, he was right-handed. Blood dripped from his fingers. “At least get the arm bandaged,” Chase suggested, staring at the Neptune, which was making surprising speed despite the loss of her mizzenmast. She must have sailed clean around the western edge of the melee while the Pucelle passed to its east, and now the Frenchman was heading landward as though trying to escape the battle.

“I’m sure Pickering is quite busy enough without having to be detained bv scratched lieutenants,” Haskell answered testily.

Chase took off his white silk stock and beckoned to Midshipman Collier. “Tie that around Lieutenant Haskell’s arm,” he ordered the midshipman, then turned to the quartermaster. “Starboard, John,” he said, gesturing, “starboard.” The Neptune was threatening to cross the Pucelle’s bows and Chase needed to avoid that, but he reckoned he had speed enough to catch the Frenchman, lay her alongside and fight her muzzle to muzzle, and, because she carried eighty-four guns and he only had seventy-four, his victory would be all the more remarkable.

Then disaster struck.

The Pucelle had sailed past the Victory and the Redoutable, leaving a thick cloud of smoke that drifted after her, and out of that cloud there appeared the bows of an undamaged ship. Her figurehead showed a ghostly skeleton, scythe in one hand and a French tricolor in the other, and she was crossing behind the Pucelle, not a pistol’s length away, and the whole of her larboard broadside was facing the Pucelle’s decorated stern.

“Hard to starboard!” Chase shouted at the quartermaster who had already begun the turn which would bring the Pucelle’s larboard broadside to face the Neptune, but then the new enemy fired and the very first shot ripped away the tiller ropes so that the wheel spun uselessly in the quartermaster’s hands. The rudder, no longer tensioned by the ropes, centered itself and the Pucelle swung back to larboard, leaving her stern naked to the enemy guns. She would be raked.

A shot screamed down the weather deck, killing eight sailors and wounding a dozen more. The shot left a spattering trail of blood the whole length of the deck, and the next shot cut Haskell in half, leaving his torso on the starboard rail and his legs hanging from the quarterdeck’s forward rail. Collier, still holding the silk stock, was smothered in Haskell’s blood. The fourth shot shattered the Pucelle’s wheel and impaled the quartermaster on its splintered spokes. Chase leaned on the broken quarterdeck rail. “Tiller ropes!” he shouted. “Mister Peel! Tiller ropes! And hard to starboard!”

“Aye aye, sir! Hard to starboard!”

More shots broke through the stern. The Pucelle was shaking from the impact. Musket bullets cracked on her poop. “Walk with me, Mister Collier,” Chase said, seeing that the boy seemed close to tears, “just walk with me.” He paced up and down the quarterdeck, one hand on Collier’s shoulder. “We are being raked, Mister Collier. It is a pity.” He took the boy under the break of the poop, close to the mangled remains of the wheel and the quartermaster. “And you will stay here, Harold Collier, and note the signals. Watch the clock! And keep an eye on me. If I fall you are to find Mister Peel and tell him the ship is his. Do you understand?”

“Yes, sir.” Collier tried to sound confident, but his voice was shaking.

“And a word of advice, Mister Collier. When you command a ship of your own, take great care never to be raked.” Chase patted the midshipman’s shoulder, then walked back into the musket fire that pitted the quarterdeck. The enemy’s cannons still raked the Pucelle, shot after shot demolishing the high windows, throwing down cannon and spraying blood on the deck beams overhead. The remains of the mizzenmast were cut through below the decks and Chase watched appalled as the whole mast slowly toppled, tearing itself out of the poop deck as it collapsed to starboard. It went slowly, the shrouds parting with sounds like pistol shots, and the mainmast swayed as the stay connecting it to the mizzen tightened, then that cable parted and the mizzen creaked, splintered and finally fell. The enemy cheered. Chase leaned over the broken quarterdeck rail to see a dozen men hauling on one of the spare tiller lines that had been rove before the battle. “Pull hard, lads!” he shouted, bellowing to be heard above the sound of the enemy’s guns that still hammered into the Pucelle. A twenty-four-pounder cannon lay on its side, trapping a screaming man. One of the starboard carronades on the quarterdeck had been punched off its carriage. The great white ensign trailed in the water. None of the Pucelle’s guns could answer, nor could they until the ship turned. “Pull hard!” Chase shouted and saw Lieutenant Peel, hatless and sweating, add his weight to the tiller rope. The ship began to turn, but it was the mizzenmast, with its sail and rigging that lay in the water off the Pucelle’s starboard quarter, that did most to drag the ship around. She came slowly, still being punished by the FYench ship that had sailed out of the melee’s smoke.

She was the Revenant. Chase recognized her, saw Montmorin standing coolly on his quarterdeck, saw the smoke of the Frenchman’s guns sweeping up into her undamaged rigging and heard the terrible sounds of his ship being battered beneath his feet, but at last the Pucelle responded to the drag of the mizzen and the tug of the tiller and Chase’s starboard broadside could begin to respond, though some of his guns had been dismounted and others had dead crews and so his first broadside was feeble. No more than seven guns fired. “Close the larboard ports,” Chase called down the weather deck. “All crews to starboard! Lively now!”

The Pucelle slowly came to life. She had been stunned by her raking, but Chase led a score of seamen up to the poop to cut away the mizzen’s wreckage, and below decks the surviving gunners from the larboard cannon went to make up the crews of the starboard broadside. The Revenant turned to larboard, plainly intending to run alongside the Pucelle. Her forecastle was crowded with men armed with cutlasses and boarding pikes, but the remaining starboard carronade on Chase’s quarterdeck ripped them away. John Hopper, the bosun of Chase’s barge crew, commanded that gun. Chase slashed through a last shroud with a boarding axe, left a petty officer to clear the mess on the poop deck and went back to his quarterdeck as the Revenant crept closer and closer. The Pucelle’s starboard guns were firing properly now, their crews reinforced at last, and the shots were splintering holes in the Revenant’s side, but then the first of the Frenchman’s guns were reloaded and Chase watched their blackened muzzles appear in the gunports. Smoke billowed. He saw the Revenant’s sails quiver to the shock of her guns, felt his own ship tremble as the balls struck home, saw young Collier standing at the starboard rail staring at the approaching enemy. “What are you doing here, Mister Collier?” Chase asked.

“My duty, sir.”

“I told you to watch the clock in the poop, didn’t I?”

“There ain’t no clock, sir. It went.” The boy, in mute proof, held up the twisted enamel of the clock’s face.

“Then go down to the orlop deck, Mister Collier, and don’t disturb the surgeon, but in his dispensary there is a net of oranges, a gift from Admiral Nelson. Bring them up for the gun crews.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

Chase looked back and saw the Victory. A signal flew from her rigging and Chase did not need a signal lieutenant to translate the flags. “Engage the enemy more closely.” Well, he was about to do that, and he was engaging a virtually undamaged enemy ship while his own had been grievously hurt, but by God, Chase thought, he would make Nelson proud. Chase did not blame himself for being raked. In this kind of battle, a wild melee with ships milling about in smoke, it would be a miracle if any captain was not raked, and he was proud that his men had turned the ship before the Revenant could empty her whole broadside into the Pucelle’s stern. She could still fight. Beyond the Victory, beyond the smoke that lay about her, beyond the embattled ships, some dismasted, he could see the undamaged rigging of the British vessels that formed the rearmost part of each squadron and those ships, not yet committed, were only just entering the battle. The Santisima Trinidad, towering over both fleets like a behemoth, was being raked and pounded by smaller ships that looked like terriers yapping at a bull. The French Neptune had vanished, and the Pucelle was threatened by the Revenant alone, but the Revenant had somehow escaped the worst of the fighting and Mont-morin, as fine a captain as any in the French navy, was determined to pluck some honor from the day.

Two seamen dragged the Pucelle’s soaking white ensign onto the quarterdeck, smearing Haskell’s blood with the sopping folds of the heavy flag. “Run it up to the main topsail yard, larboard side,” Chase ordered. It would look odd there, but by God he would fly it to show that the Pucelle was undefeated.

Musket balls began striking the deck. Montmorin had fifty or sixty men in his upperworks and they would now try to do what the Redoutable had done to the Victory. He would clear the Pucelle’s decks and Chase desperately wanted to retreat into the shelter of the damaged poop, but his place was here, in full view, and so he put his hands behind his back and tried to look calm as he paced up and down the deck. He resisted the temptation to extend each length of the deck until he was under the poop, but forced himself to turn a few paces short, though he did stop once to stare in fascination at the mangled remains of the binnacle and its compass. A musket ball thumped the deck by his feet and he turned and paced back. He should have summoned a lieutenant from below decks to replace Haskell, but he decided against it. If he fell then his men knew what to do. Just fight. That was all there was to do now. Just fight, and Chase’s life or death would make small difference to the outcome, whereas the lieutenants, commanding the guns, were doing something useful.

The crews of the two larboard carronades, which had no targets, were levering the fallen starboard carronade out of the way so that they could drag one of their two guns to replace it. Chase skipped out of their way, then saw Midshipman Collier on the weather deck where he was handing out oranges from his huge net. “Throw one here, lad!” he called to the boy.

Collier looked alarmed at the order, as though he feared to throw something at his captain, but he tossed the orange underhand as if he was bowling a cricket ball and Chase had to lunge to one side to catch it single-handed. Some gunners cheered the catch and Chase held the orange aloft like a trophy, then tossed it to Hopper.

Captain Llewellyn’s marines were firing at the French in their fighting tops, but the French were more numerous and their lashing fire was thinning Llewellyn’s ranks. “Shelter your men as best you can, Llewellyn,” Chase ordered.

“If I can take some to the maintop, sir?” the Welshman suggested.

“No, no, I gave my word to Nelson. Shelter them. Your time will come soon enough. Under the break of the poop, Llewellyn. You can fire from there.”

“You should come with us, sir.”

“I feel like taking the air, Llewellyn,” Chase said with a smile. In truth he was terrified. He kept thinking of his wife, his house, the children. In her last letter Florence had said that one of the ponies had a sickness, but which one? The cob? Was it better? He tried to think of such domestic things, wondering if the apple harvest was good and whether the stable yard had been repaved and why the parlor chimney smoked so bad when the wind was in the east, but in truth he just wanted to dash into the poop’s shadow and so be protected from the musketry by the deck planks above. He wanted to cower, but his job was to stay on his quarterdeck. That was why he was paid four hundred and eighteen pounds and twelve shillings a year, and so he paced up and down, up and down, made conspicuous by his cocked hat and gilded epaulettes, and he tried to divide four hundred and eighteen pounds and twelve shillings by three hundred and sixty-five days and the Frenchmen aimed their muskets at him so that Chase walked a strip of deck that became ever more lumpy and ragged from bullet strikes. He saw the ship’s barber, a one-eyed Irishman, hauling on a weather-deck gun. At this moment, Chase reckoned, that man was more valuable to the ship than its captain. He paced on, knowing he would be hit soon, hoping it would not hurt too badly, regretting his death so keenly and wishing he could see his children one more time. He was frightened, but it was unthinkable to do anything else but show a cool disdain for danger.

He turned and stared westward. The melee about the Victory had grown, but he could distinctly see a British ensign flying above a French tricolor, showing that at least one enemy ship had struck. Farther south there was a second melee where Collingwood’s squadron had cut off the rear of the French and Spanish fleet. Away to the east, beyond the Revenant, a handful of enemy ships shamefully sailed away, while to the north the enemy vanguard had at last turned and was lumbering southward to help their beleaguered comrades. The battle, Chase reckoned, could only get worse, for a dozen ships on either side had yet to engage, but his fight was with Montmorin now.

The Pucelle shuddered as the Revenant slammed into her side. The force of the collision, broadside to broadside, two thousand tons meeting two thousand tons, drove the two ships apart again, but Chase shouted at the few remaining men on his top decks to throw the grapnels and make the Revenant fast. The hooks flew into the enemy’s rigging, but the enemy had the same idea and her crew was also hurling grappling hooks, while seamen in the Frenchman’s rigging were tying the Pucelle’s lower yards to their own. To the death, then. Neither ship could escape now, they could only kill each other. The rails of the two ships were thirty feet apart because their lower hulls bulged out so greatly, but Chase was close enough to see Montmorin’s expression and the Frenchman, seeing Chase, took off his hat and bowed. Chase did the same. Chase wanted to laugh and Montmorin was smiling, both men struck by the oddity of such courtesies even as they did their best to kill each other. Beneath their silver-buckled feet the great guns gouged and hammered. Chase wished he had an orange to throw to Montmorin who, he was sure, would appreciate the gesture, but he could not see Collier.

Chase did not know it, but his presence on the deck was directly useful, for the French marksmen in the fighting tops were obsessed by his death and so ignored the carronade crews which, seeing French seamen gather in the Revenant’s waist, fired down into the mass. The Frenchmen had been snatching boarding pikes from their racks about the mainmast, while others held axes or cutlasses, but one carronade forward and one aft provided a tangling crossfire that destroyed the boarding party. The French had no carronades, relying on the men in their fighting tops to clear an enemy’s deck with musket fire.

Ten marines were left on the Pucelle’s forecastle. Sergeant Armstrong, bleeding to death, still sat by the foremast and clumsily fired his musket up into the enemy rigging. Clouter, his black torso streaked and spattered by other men’s blood, had taken command of the starboard carronade after half its crew was killed by a grenade thrown from the Revenant’s foremast. Sharpe was firing up into the maintop, hoping his bullets would gouge through its timbers to kill the French marksmen perched on the platform. The wind seemed to have died completely so that the sails and flags hung limp. Powder smoke thickened between the ships, rising to hide and protect the Pucelle’s bullet-lashed deck. Sharpe was deaf now, his ears buffeted by the big guns and his world shrunken to this small patch of bloody deck and the smoke-wreathed enemy rigging soaring above him. His shoulder was bruised by the musket so that he flinched every time he fired. An orange rolled across the deck at his feet, its skin dimpling the blood on the planks. He brought the musket’s brass-bound stock hard down on the orange, squashing and bursting the fruit, then stooped and scooped up some of the pulped flesh. He ate some, grateful for the juice in his parched mouth, then scooped some more which he put into Armstrong’s mouth. The sergeant’s unbloodied eye was glassy, he was scarce conscious, but he was still trying to reload his musket. He coughed hoarsely, mingling bloody spittle with the orange juice that trickled down his chin. “We are winning, aren’t we?” he asked Sharpe earnestly.

“We’re murdering the bastards, Sergeant.”

The dead lay where they fell now, for there were not enough men to throw them overboard, or rather the men who remained were too busy fighting. The worst of that fight was below decks where the two ships, matched gun to gun, mangled each other. The lower deck was dark now, for the Revenant blotted out the daylight on the starboard side and the larboard gunports were closed. Smoke filled the low deck, curling under beams splashed with blood from the Revenant’s first raking broadside. Now the Frenchman’s shots broke open the hull, screamed across the deck and crashed out to leave patches of newly created daylight where they holed the larboard side. Thick dust and thicker smoke drifted in the shafts of light. The Pucelle’s guns returned the fire, roaring back on their breeching ropes to fill the deck with thunder. The ships touched here, their gunports almost coinciding so that when a British gunner tried to swab his cannon a French cutlass half severed his arm, then the lambs-wool swab on its staff was seized and carried aboard the French ship. The French shots were heavier, for they carried larger guns, but larger guns took longer to reload and the British fire was noticeably quicker. Montmorin’s crew was probably the best trained in all the enemy’s fleet, yet still Chase’s men were faster, but now the enemy tossed grenades through the open gunports and fired muskets to slow the British guns.

“Fetch marines!” Lieutenant Holderby shouted at a midshipman, then had to go right up to the boy and cup his hands over the midshipman’s ear. “Fetch marines!” A round shot killed the lieutenant, spewing his intestines across the gratings where the thirty-two-pound round shots were stored. The midshipman stayed still for a second, disoriented. Flames were rising to his left, then a gunner threw sand across the remnants of the grenade and another tossed a cask of water to douse the fire. Another gunner was crawling on the deck, vomiting blood. A woman was hauling on a gun tackle, spitting curses at the French gunners who were only a cutlass length away. A gun recoiled, filling the deck with noise and breaking its breeching rope so that it slewed around and crushed two men whose shrieks were lost in the din. Men heaved and rammed, their naked torsos gleaming with sweat that trickled through the powder residue. They all looked black now, except where they were spotted or streaked or sheeted with blood. The Revenant’s powder smoke belched into the Pucelle, choking men who struggled to return the favor.

The midshipman scrambled up the companionway to the weather deck that shook from the recoil of its twenty-four-pounder guns. Wreckage of the rigging lay across the central part of the deck which was so thick with smoke that the midshipman climbed to the forecastle instead of to the quarterdeck. His ears were ringing with the sound of the guns and his throat was as dry as ash. He saw an officer in a red coat. “You’re wanted below, sir.”

“What?” Sharpe shouted.

“Marines, sir, needed below.” The boy’s voice was hoarse. “They’re coming through the gunports, sir. Lower deck.” A bullet smacked into the deck beside his feet, another ricocheted off the ship’s bell.

“Marines!” Sharpe bellowed. “Pikes! Muskets!”

He led his ten men down the companionway, stepped over the body of a powder monkey who lay dead though there was not a mark on his young body that Sharpe could see, then down to the hellish dark and thick gloom of the lower deck. Only half of the starboard cannons were firing now, and they were being impeded by the French who slashed through the gunports with cutlasses and pikes. Sharpe fired his musket through a gunport, glimpsed a Frenchman’s face dissolve into blood, ran to the next and used the butt of the empty musket to hammer an enemy’s arm. “Simmons!” he shouted at a marine. “Simmons!”

Simmons stared at him, wide-eyed. “Go to the forward magazine,” Sharpe shouted. “Fetch the grenades!”

Simmons ran, grateful for a chance to be beneath the water line even if only for an instant. Three of the Pucelle’s heavy guns fired together, their sound almost stunning Sharpe, who was going from gunport to gun-port and stabbing at the French with his cutlass. A huge crash, dreadful in its loudness and so prolonged that it seemed to go on forever, broke through Sharpe’s deafened ears and he reckoned a mast had gone overboard, though whether it was another of the Pucelle’s or one of the Revenant’s he could not tell. He saw a Frenchman ramming a cannon, half leaning out of the opposing gunport, and he skewered the man’s arm with the cutlass. The Frenchman sprang back and Sharpe skipped aside for he could see the gunner holding the linstock to the touch-hole. Sharpe registered that the French did not use flintlocks, was surprised to have noticed such a thing in battle, then the gun fired and the rammer, left in the barrel, disintegrated as it was driven across the Pucelle’s deck. A midshipman fired a pistol into an enemy gunport. A flintlock sparked and the sound of the heavy gun pounded Sharpe’s ears. Some of the men had lost the scarves they had tied about their heads and their ears dribbled blood. Others had bleeding noses caused by nothing more than the sound of the guns.

Simmons reappeared with the grenades and Sharpe took a linstock from one of the remaining water barrels, lit its fuse, then waited until the vagaries of the ocean swells brought a French gunport into view. The fuse sputtered. He could see the Revenant’s yellow planking, then the opposing ship ground against the Pucelle’s hull and a gunport came into sight and he hurled the glass ball into the Revenant. He dimly heard an explosion, saw flames illuminate the black smoke filling the enemy’s gundeck, then he left Simmons to throw the other grenades while he went back down the deck, stepping past bodies, avoiding the gunners, checking each gunport to make sure no more Frenchmen were trying to reach through with cutlass or pike. The big capstan in the middle of the deck, used to haul the ship’s anchor cables, had an enemy round shot buried in its wooden heart. Blood dripped from the deck above. A gun, crammed with grapeshot, recoiled across his path and Frenchmen screamed.

Then another scream pierced Sharpe’s ringing ears. It came from above, from the weather deck that was slick with so much blood that the sand no longer gave men a secure footing. “Repel boarders! Repel boarders!”

“Marines!” Sharpe shouted at his few men, though none heard him in the noise, but he reckoned some might follow if they saw him climb the companionway. He could hear steel striking steel. No time to think, just time to fight.

He climbed.

Lord William frowned at the sound of the carronade, then flinched as the Pucelle’s larboard broadside began to fire, the sound rolling down the ship to fill the lady hole with thunder. “I perceive we are still in action,” he said, lowering the pistol. He began to laugh. “It was worth pointing a gun at your head, my dear, just to see your expression. But was it remorse or fear that actuated your misery?” He paused. “Come! I wish an answer.”

“Fear,” Lady Grace gasped.

“Yet I should like to hear you express remorse, if only as evidence that you possess some finer feelings. Do you?” He waited. The guns fired, the sound becoming louder as the nearer cannon recoiled two decks above their refuge.

“If you had any feelings,” Grace said, “any courage, you would be on deck sharing the dangers.”

Lord William found that very amusing. “What a strange idea you do have of my capabilities. What can I do that would be useful to Chase? My talents, dearest, lie in the contrivance of policy and, dare I say, its administration. The report I am writing will have a profound influence on the future of India and, therefore, on the prospects of Britain. I confidently expect to join the government within a year. Within five years I might be Prime Minister. Am I to risk that future just to strut on a deck with a pack of mindless fools who believe a brawl at sea will change the world?” He shrugged and looked up at the lady hole’s ceiling. “Toward the end of the fight, my dear, I shall show myself, but I have no intention of running any unnecessary or extraordinary risks. Let Nelson have his glory today, but in five years I shall dispose of him as I wish and, believe me, no adulterer will gain honor from me. You know he is an adulterer?”

“All England knows.”

“All Europe,” Lord William corrected her. “The man is incapable of discretion and you too, my dear, have been indiscreet.” The Pucelle’s broadside had stopped and the ship seemed silent. Lord William looked up at the deck as if he expected the noise to begin again, but the guns were quiet. Water gurgled at the stern. The ship’s pumps began again. “I might not have minded,” Lord William went on, “had you been discreet. No man wishes to be a cuckold, but it is one thing for a wife to take a genteel lover and quite another to lie down with the servant classes. Were you mad? That would be a charitable excuse, but the world does not see you as mad, so your action reflects upon me. You chose to rut with an animal, a lump, and I suspect he has made you pregnant. You disgust me.” He shuddered. “Every man on the ship must have known you were rutting. They thought I did not know, they sneered at me, and you went on like a tuppenny whore.”

Lady Grace said nothing. She stared up at one of the lanterns. Its candle was guttering, spewing a dribble of smoke that escaped through the lantern’s ventilation holes. She was red-eyed, exhausted from crying, incapable of fighting back.

“I should have known all this when I married you,” Lord William said. “One hopes, one does so hope, that a wife will prove a woman of fidelity, of prudence and quiet good sense, but why should I have expected it? Women have ever been slaves to their grosser appetites. “‘Frailty,’“ he quoted, “‘thy name is woman!’”

“The feeble sex, and by God how true that is! I found it hard to credit Braithwaite’s letter at first, but the more I thought about it, the more true it rang, and so I observed you and found, to my disappointment, that he did not lie. You were rutting with Sharpe, wallowing in his sweat.”

“Be quiet!” she pleaded with him.

“Why should I be quiet?” he asked in a reasonable voice. “I, my dear, am the offended party. You had your moment’s filthy pleasure with a mindless brute, why should I not have my moment of pleasure now? I have earned it, have I not?” He raised the pistol again, just as the whole ship shook with a terrible blow, then another, blows so loud that Lord William instinctively ducked his head, and still the blows went on, rending the ship and crashing through the decks and making the Pucelle shudder. Lord William, his anger momentarily displaced by fear, stared up at the deck as if expecting the ship to fall apart. The lanterns quivered, noise filled the universe and the guns kept firing.

The crash Sharpe had heard when he was on the lower deck had been the Revenant’s mainmast collapsing across both ships and, when he reached the weather deck, he saw Frenchmen running across the mast that, together with the Revenant’s fallen main yard, served as a bridge between the two ships’ decks. The Pucelle’s gunners had abandoned their cannon to fight the invaders with cutlasses, handspikes, rammers and pikes. Captain Llewellyn was bringing marines from the poop, but taking them along the starboard gangway which ran above the weather deck beside the ship’s gunwale. A dozen Frenchmen were on that gangway and trying to reach the Pucelle’s stern. More Frenchmen were in the waist of the ship, screaming their war cry and hacking with cutlasses. Their attack, as sudden as it was unexpected, had succeeded in clearing the center section of the weather deck where the invaders now stabbed at fallen gunners, as a bespectacled French officer hurled overboard the cannons’ rammers and swabs. Still more Frenchmen ran along the fallen mainmast and yard to reinforce their comrades.

The Pucelle’s crew began to counterattack. A seaman flailed with one of the handspikes used to shift the cannon, a vast club of wood that crushed a Frenchman’s skull. Others seized pikes and speared at the French. Sharpe drew the long cutlass and met the invaders under the break of the forecastle. He slashed at one, parried another, then lunged at the first to spit the man on his cutlass blade. He kicked the dying Frenchman off the steel, then swung the bloody blade to drive two more boarders back. One of them was a huge man, thick-bearded, carrying an axe, and he chopped the blade at Sharpe who stepped back, surprised by the bearded man’s long reach, and his right foot slid in a pool of blood and he fell back and twisted aside as the axe split the deck next to his head. He stabbed up, trying and failing to rake the Frenchman’s arm with the cutlass point, then rolled to his left as the axe slammed down again. The Frenchman kicked Sharpe hard in the thigh, wrenched the axe free and raised it a third time, but before he could deliver the killing stroke he uttered a scream as a pike slid into his belly. There was a roar above Sharpe as Clouter, letting go of the pike, seized the axe from the Frenchman’s hand and charged on in a frenzy. Sharpe stood and followed, leaving the bearded Frenchman twisting and shaking on the deck, the pike still buried in his guts.

Thirty or forty Frenchmen were in the ship’s waist now, and more were streaming along the mast, but just then a carronade blasted from the quarterdeck and emptied the makeshift bridge. One man, left untouched on the mast, jumped down to the Pucelle’s deck and Clouter, almost underneath him, brought the axe up between the man’s legs. The scream seemed to be the loudest noise Sharpe had heard in all that furious day. A tall French officer, hatless and with a powder-stained face, led a charge toward the Pucelle’s. bows. Clouter knocked the man’s sword aside then punched him in the face so hard that the officer recoiled into his own men, then a swarm of British gunners, screaming and stabbing, swept past the black man to hack at the invaders.

The guns pounded below, grinding and mangling the two ships. Captain Chase was fighting on the weather deck, leading a group of men who assailed the French from the stern. Captain Llewellyn’s marines had recaptured the gangway and now guarded the fallen mast, shooting down any Frenchman who tried to cross, while the remaining invaders were caught between the attack from the stern and the assault from the bows. Clouter was back in the front rank, chopping the axe in short hard strokes that felled a man each time. Sharpe trapped a Frenchman against the ship’s side, beneath the gangway. The man lunged his cutlass at Sharpe, had it effortlessly parried, saw death in the redcoat’s face and so, in desperation, squirmed through a gunport and threw himself down between the ships. He screamed as the seas drove the two hulls together. Sharpe leaped the gun, looking for an enemy. The Pucelle’s waist was filled with hacking, stabbing, shouting seamen who ignored the desperate shouts for quarter from the French whose impetuous attempt to capture the Pucelle had been foiled by the carronade. The bespectacled enemy officer still tried to render the Pucelle’s guns useless by jettisoning their rammers, but Clouter threw the axe and its blade thumped into the man’s skull like a tomahawk and his death seemed to still the frenzy, or perhaps it was Captain Chase’s insistent voice shouting that the Pucelles should stop fighting because the remaining Frenchmen were trying to surrender. “Take their weapons!” Chase bellowed. “Take their weapons!”

Only a score of Frenchmen were still standing and, disarmed, they were shepherded toward the stern. “I don’t want them below,” Chase said, “they could make mischief. Buggers can stand on the poop instead and be shot at.” He grinned at Sharpe. “Glad you sailed with me?”

“Hot work, sir.” Sharpe looked for Clouter and hailed him. “You saved my life,” he told the tall man. “Thank you.”

Clouter looked astonished. “I didn’t even see you, sir.”

“You saved my life,” Sharpe insisted.

Clouter gave a strange, high-pitched laugh. “But we killed some, didn’t we? Didn’t we just kill some?”

“Plenty left to kill,” Chase said, then cupped his hands. “Back to the guns! Back to the guns!” He saw the purser peering nervously from the forward companionway. “Mister Cowper! I’ll trouble you to find rammers and swabs for this deck. Lively now! Back to the guns!”

Like two bare-knuckled boxers, deep in their thirtieth or fortieth round, both bleeding and dazed, yet neither willing to give up, the two ships pounded each other. Sharpe climbed to the quarterdeck with Chase. To the west, where the long swells came so high, the sea was all battle. Nearly a dozen ships fought there. To the south another score blazed at each other. The ocean was thick with wreckage. A mastless hulk, its guns silent, drifted away from the melee. Five or six pairs of ships, like the Pucelle and the Revenant, were clasped together, exchanging fire in private battles that took place beyond the bigger melee. The towering Santisima Trinidad had lost her foremast and most of her mizzen and still she was being hammered by smaller British ships. The powder smoke now spread across two miles of ocean, a man-made fog. The sky was darkening to the north and west. Some of the enemy ships, not daring to come close to the fighting and looking to escape, bombarded the brawling fleets from a distance, but their shots were as much a danger to their own side as to the British. The very last of the British ships, the slowest of the fleet, were only just entering the fray and opening fresh gunports to add their metal to the carnage.

Capitaine Montmorin looked across at Chase and shrugged, as if to suggest that the failure of his boarders was regrettable but not serious. The Frenchman’s guns were firing still, and Sharpe could see more boarders gathering on the Revenant’s weather deck. He could also see Captain Cromwell, peering from the shelter of the poop, and Sharpe seized a musket from a nearby marine and aimed at the Englishman who, seeing the threat, ducked back out of sight. Sharpe handed the musket back. Chase found a speaking trumpet amidst the wreckage on the deck. “Captain Montmorin? You should yield before we kill more of your men!”

Montmorin cupped his hands. “I was going to offer you the same chance, Captain Chase!”

“Look there,” Chase shouted, pointing beyond his own stern, and Montmorin climbed up his mizzen ratlines to see over the Pucelle’s poop and there, ghosting across the swells, untouched, was the Spartiate, a British seventy-four, the French-built ship that was rumored to be bewitched because she sailed faster by night than by day and now. coming late to the battle, she opened her larboard gunports.

Montmorin knew what was about to happen and he could do nothing to stop it. He was going to be raked and so he shouted at his men to lie down between the guns, though that would not save them from the Pucelle’s gunfire, then he stood in the center of his quarterdeck and waited.

The Spartiate gave Montmorin’s ship a full broadside. One after another the guns crashed back and their balls smashed the high gallery windows of the Revenant’s stern and screamed down her decks, just as the Revenant had raked the Pucelle earlier. The Spartiate was painfully slow, but that only gave her gunners more time to aim properly, and the broadside drove deep wounds into the Revenant. Her mizzen shrouds parted with a sound like Satan’s harp strings snapping, then the whole mast toppled, splintering like a monstrous tree to carry yards, sails and tricolor overboard. Sharpe heard the French musketeers screaming as they fell with the mast. Guns were thrown off carriages, men were mangled by round shot and grapeshot, and still Montmorin stood unmoving, even when the wheel was shot away behind him. Only when the last of the Spartiate’s guns had sounded did he turn and look at the ship that had raked him. He must have feared that she would put up her helm and lay alongside his starboard flank, but the Spartiate sailed grandly on, seeking a victim all her own.

“Yield, Capitainel” Chase shouted through the speaking trumpet.

Montmorin gave his answer by cupping his hands and shouting down to his weather deck. “Tirezl Tirez!” He turned and bowed to Chase.

Chase looked about the quarterdeck. “Where’s Captain Llewellyn?” he asked a marine.

“Broken leg, sir. Gone below.”

“Lieutenant Swallow?” Swallow was the young marine lieutenant.

“Think he’s dead, sir. Badly wounded, anyway.”

Chase looked at Sharpe, paused as the Revenant’s guns opened fire again. “Assemble a boarding party, Mister Sharpe,” Chase said formally.

It was always going to be a fight to the finish, right from the moment the Pucelle had first seen the Revenant off the African coast. And now Sharpe would finish it.