Sharpe`s Trafalgar

CHAPTER 12

Lord William listened to the guns, but it was impossible to tell how the battle went from their sound alone, though it was plain that the fighting had reached a new level of fury. “Si fractus inlabatur orbis,” he said, raising his eyes to the deck above.

Grace said nothing.

Lord William chuckled. “Oh, come, my dear, don’t tell me you have forgotten your Horace? It is one of the things that most annoys me about you; that you cannot resist translating my tags.”

“If the sky should break,” Lady Grace said dully.

“Oh come! That is hardly adequate, is it?” Lord William asked sternly. “I grant you sky for orbis, though I would prefer universe, but the verb demands falling, does it not? You were never the Latinist you thought you were.” He looked up again as a dolorous thump echoed through the ship’s timbers. “It does indeed sound as though the broken sky falls. Are you frightened? Or do you feel yourself to be entirely safe here?”

Lady Grace said nothing. She felt bereft of tears, gone to a place of abject misery that was beset by guns, horror, spite and hate.

“I am safe here,” Lord William went on, “but you, my dear, are beset by fears, so much so that in a moment you will seize my pistol and turn it on yourself. You feared, I shall say, a repetition of that amusing episode on the Calliope when your lover so bravely rescued you, and I shall claim it was impossible to prevent you from destroying yourself. I shall, of course, demonstrate an abject though dignified sadness at your demise. I shall insist that your precious body is carried home so that I may bury you in Lincolnshire. Black plumes shall crown your funerary horses, the bishop will pronounce the obsequies and my tears shall moisten your vault. All will be done properly, and your tombstone, cut from the very finest marble, will record your virtues. It will not say that you were a sordid fornicator who opened her legs to a common soldier, but rather that you combined wisdom with understanding, grace with charity and possessed a Christian forbearance that was a shining example of womanhood. Would you like the inscription in Latin?”

She gazed at him, but did not speak.

“And when you are dead, my love,” Lord William went on, “and safely buried beneath a slab recording your virtues, I shall set about destroying your lover. I shall do it quietly, Grace, subtly, so that he will never know the source of his misfortunes. Having him removed from the army will be simple, but what then? I shall think of something, indeed it will provide me with pleasure to contemplate his fate. A hanging, don’t you think? I doubt I shall be able to convict him for poor Braithwaite’s death, which he undoubtedly caused, but I shall contrive something, and when he is dangling there, twitching, and pissing in his breeches, I shall watch and I shall smile and I shall remember you.”

She still stared at him, her face expressionless.

“I shall remember you,” he said again, unable to hide the hatred he felt for her. “I shall remember that you were a common whore, a slave to your filthy lusts, a slut who let a commoner roger her.” He raised the pistol.

The guns, two decks above, began to fire again, their recoil shaking the timbers clear down to the lady hole.

But the pistol shot sounded much louder than the great guns. Its sound echoed in the confined space, filling it with thick smoke as bright blood splashed up the lady hole’s planking.Si fractus inlabatur orbis.

The swells were getting bigger, the sky darker. The wind had risen a little, so that the smoke patches streamed eastward, flowing around disabled ships that trailed masts and fallen rigging. The guns still punctured the air, but fewer now, for more enemy ships were yielding. Gigs, barges and longboats, some grievously damaged by shot, rowed between the combatants carrying British officers who went to accept an enemy’s surrender. Some French and Spanish ships had struck their flags, but then, in the vagaries of battle, their opponents had moved on and those ships rehoisted their colors, hung what sail they could on their fractured masts and headed eastward. Far more stayed as captured prizes, their decks a shambles, their hulls riddled and their crews stunned by the ferocity of the British gunfire. The British fired faster. They were better trained.

The Redoutable, still lashed to the Victory, was French no longer. She was scarcely even a ship, for all her masts were gone and her hull was mangled by cannon fire. A portion of her quarterdeck had collapsed and a British flag now hung over her counter. The Victory’s mizzen was gone, her fore- and mainmasts were mere stumps, but her guns were still manned and still dangerous. The vast Santisima Trinidad was silent, her ensign struck. The fiercest battle now was to the north of her where a few of the enemy vanguard had risked coming back to help their comrades and now opened fire on the battle-weary British ships that loaded and fired and rammed and fired again. To the south, where Collingwood’s Royal Sovereign had opened the battle, a ship burned. The flames leaped twice as high as the masts and the other ships, fearing the firebrands that must be spewed when her magazines exploded, set sail to move away from her, though some British ships, knowing what horrors the crew of the burning ship endured, sent small boats to pluck them to safety. The burning ship was French, the Achille, and the sound of her explosion was a dull thump that rolled across the wreckage-littered sea like the crack of doom. A cloud of smoke, black as night, boiled where the burning ship had floated while scraps of fire seared to the clouds, fell to the sea, hissed in the ocean, died.

Nelson died.

Fourteen enemy ships had struck so far. A dozen more still fought. One was burned and sunk, the rest were fleeing.

Captain Montmorin, knowing that Chase intended to board him, had sent men with axes to cut away the fallen mainmast. Other men chopped through the grapnel lines that tied the Revenant to the Pucelle. Montmorin was trying to cut himself free, hoping he could limp away to Cadiz and live to fight another day.

“I want those carronades busy!” Chase shouted, and the gunners who had helped repel the boarders now ran to the squat weapons and levered them around to fire at the men trying to free the Revenant, which now had more troubles, for her foresail had caught fire. The flames spread with extraordinary swiftness, engulfing the great spread of shot-punctured canvas, but Montmorin’s men were just as swift, cutting the halliards that held the sail’s spar and so dropping it to the deck where they risked the fire to hurl the burning sail over the side. “Let them be!” Chase bellowed at those of his men who were aiming muskets at the struggling French sailors. He knew the fire could spread to the Pucelle and both ships would then burn together and explode in horror. “Well done! Well done!” Chase applauded his opponent’s crew as they tipped the last burning wreckage overboard. Then the carronades recoiled on their slides and spat casks of musket balls which cut down the axemen still trying to free the two ships from their mutual embrace. A gun exploded on the Revenant, the sound echoing horribly as scraps of the shattered breech cut down Montmorin’s lower-deck gunners. There were more British guns firing now, for the Revenant had lost a dozen when she was raked, and the Pucelle was hurting the Frenchman relentlessly. A midshipman, commanding the Pucelle’s lower-deck guns, saw that the two hulls were so close together that the muzzle flames of his thirty-two-pounders were setting fire to the splintered wood of the Revenant’s lower hull, so he ordered a half-dozen men to throw buckets of water at the small fires in case the flames caught and spread to the Pucelle.

“Marines!” Sharpe was shouting. “Marines!” He had gathered thirty-two marines and supposed the rest were dead, wounded or else guarding either the magazines or the French prisoners on the poop. These thirty-two would have to suffice. “We’re boarding her!” Sharpe shouted over the bellow of the guns. “You want pikes, axes, cutlasses. Make sure your muskets are loaded! Hurry!” He turned as he heard the sound of a sword scraping from a scabbard and saw Midshipman Collier, bright-eyed and still drenched in Lieutenant Haskell’s blood, standing under the fallen French mainmast that would be the boarding bridge. “What the hell are you doing here, Harry?” Sharpe asked.

“Coming with you, sir.”

“Like hell you are. Go and watch the bloody clock.”

“There isn’t a clock.”

“Then just go and watch something else!” Sharpe snapped. The weather-deck gunners, bare-chested, blood-streaked and powder-blackened, were assembling with pikes and cutlasses. The lower-deck guns still fired, shaking both ships with every shot. A few French guns answered, and one ball smashed through the gathering boarders, driving a path of blood across the Pucelle’s deck. “Who’s got a volley gun?” Sharpe shouted, and a marine sergeant held up one of the stubby weapons. “Is it loaded?” Sharpe asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“Then give it here.” He took the gun, exchanging it for his musket, then made sure his cutlass was not blood-crusted to its scabbard. “Follow me up to the quarterdeck!” Sharpe shouted.

The fallen mast jutted across the weather deck, but was too high to be reached unless a man stood on a hot gun barrel and hauled himself up. It would be easier, Sharpe reckoned, to go to the quarterdeck, then return along the Pucelle’s starboard gangway. From there a man could step onto the mast. He would then have to run, balancing himself on the broken pine spar, before jumping down onto the Revenant’s deck, and because the two ships were moving unequally in the long high swells, the mast would be pitching and rolling. Jesus, Sharpe thought, sweet Jesus, but this was a terrible place to be. Like going through the breach of an enemy fortress, he reckoned. He ran up the quarterdeck steps, turned down the gangway and tried not to think of what was about to happen. There were French marines on the opposing gangway, and a horde of armed defenders waiting in the Revenant’s blood-drenched waist. Montmorin knew what was coming, but just then the forward carronade sent a shattering cask of musket balls into the Revenant’s belly and belched a pall of smoke above the ship.

“Now!” Sharpe said, and clambered up onto the mast, but a hand held him back and he turned, cursing, to see that it was Chase.

“Me first, Sharpe,” Chase chided him.

“Sir!” Sharpe protested.

“Now, boys!” Chase had his sword drawn and was running across the makeshift bridge.

“Come on!” Sharpe shouted. He ran behind Chase, the heavy seven-barreled gun in his hands. It was like traversing a tightrope. He looked down to see the sea churning white between the two hulls and he felt dizzy and imagined falling to be crushed to death as the two hulls banged together, then a bullet spat past him and he saw Chase had jumped from the shattered stump of the mast and Sharpe followed, screaming as he leaped through the smoke.

Chase had gone left, jumping into a space cleared by the carronade, though it was still cluttered with twitching bodies and the deck was slick with new blood. He stumbled on the corpses and the Frenchmen saw him, his gold braid bright in the smoke, and they shouted as they charged, but then Sharpe fired the volley gun from the spar and the bullets twitched the French back in a cloud of smoke. Sharpe jumped down, threw the volley gun aside and drew his cutlass. He had leaped into the smoking madness of battle, not the deliberate calm of disciplined fighting when battalions fired volleys or when stately ships exchanged cannon fire, but the visceral horror of the gutter fight. Chase had fallen between two of the Frenchman’s starboard guns, and they protected him, but Sharpe was exposed and he screamed at the enemy, flicked a pike aside with the cutlass, lunged at a man’s eyes, missed, then a marine jumped onto the Frenchman’s back, throwing him forward, and Sharpe stamped on the man’s head as the marine was piked in the back. He swung the cutlass to the right, inadvertently foiling another pike thrust, then reached and seized the French seaman’s shirt and pulled him forward, straight onto the cutlass blade. Sharpe twisted the steel in the man’s belly, wrenched it free. He was shrieking like a fiend. He used both hands to swing the cutlass back to his left, driving away a French officer who stumbled over the dying British marine and fell back out of range. The dead were making a barricade to protect Sharpe and Chase, but a French marine was climbing over one of the guns. Chase scrambled to his feet, lunged his slender sword at his attacker, then fired a pistol across the other cannon. Sharpe swung the cutlass again, then cheered as a rush of British marines and seamen dropped to the deck.

“This way!” Sharpe leaped the dead, carrying the fight toward the Revenant’s bows. The French defenders were numerous, but the way aft was blocked by just as many men. Muskets cracked from the quarterdeck and more fired from the forecastle and at least one defender was killed by his own side in that wild fire. The Revenant’s men far outnumbered the boarders, but the British numbers increased every second and the Pucelle’s crewmen wanted revenge for the raking the Revenant had given them. They slashed and lunged and screamed and hit and battered men down. A gunner was swinging a handspike, swatted aside a sword, crushed a Frenchman’s skull, then he was pushed on by the men behind. Chase was shouting at men to follow him aft toward the quarterdeck while Sharpe was leading a swarm of crazed men forward. “Kill them!” he shrieked. “Kill them!”

Afterward he would remember little of that fight, but he rarely remembered such brawls. They were too confused, too loud, too full of horror, so full of horror, indeed, that he was ashamed when he remembered the joy of it, but there was a joy there. It was the happiness of being released to the slaughter, of having every bond of civilization removed. It was also what Richard Sharpe was good at. It was why he wore an officer’s sash instead of a private’s belt, because in almost every battle the moment came when the disciplined ranks dissolved and a man simply had to claw and scratch and kill like a beast. You did not kill men at long range in this kind of fighting, but came as close as a lover before you slaughtered them.

To go into that kind of fighting needed a rage, or a madness or a desperation. Some men never found those qualities and they shrank from the danger, and Sharpe could not blame them, for there was little that was admirable in rage, insanity or despair. Yet they were the qualities that drove the fight, and they were fueled by a determination to win. Just that. To beat the bastards down, to prove that the enemy were lesser men. The good soldier was cock of a blood-soaked dunghill, and Richard Sharpe was good.

His rage went cold in a fight. The fear might harass him before the fighting began, and for two blunt pins he might have found an excuse not to cross the trembling mast bridge that would drop him into a crowd of the enemy, but once there he fought with a precision that was lethal. It seemed to him that the very passage of time slowed, so that he could see clearly what every enemy intended. A man to his right was drawing back a pike, so that threat could be ignored because it would take at least a heartbeat for the pike to come forward, and meanwhile a bearded man in front was already swinging down a cutlass and Sharpe twisted the point of his own blade into that man’s throat, then whipped the cutlass to his right, parrying the pike thrust, though Sharpe himself was looking to his left. He saw no imminent danger, looked back to the right, flicked the blade up into the pikeman’s face, looked front again, then shoulder charged the pikeman, driving him back so that he fell against a cannon and Sharpe could raise the cutlass and, with both hands, drive it down into the man’s belly. The point stuck in the gun’s timber carriage and Sharpe wasted a second wrenching it free. British seamen pounded past him, forcing the French another two or three paces back down their deck, and Sharpe climbed the cannon and jumped down its other side. A Frenchman tried to surrender to him there, but Sharpe dared not leave a man in his rear so he slashed at the Frenchman’s wrist so he could not use the axe he had dropped, then kicked him in the groin before climbing the next cannon. The spaces between the cannon served as refuges for the French and Sharpe wanted to break them out and drive them onto the pikes and blades of the boarders.

Captain Chase’s barge crew had followed him aft, fighting their own battle toward the quarterdeck steps, but Clouter had come late to the fight, for he had been the man who fired the Pucelle’s forward starboard carronade down into the mass of defenders just as Chase had led the charge across the mast. The big black man came across the fallen mainmast, leaped to the deck and headed aft, howling to be let through the crowded seamen. Once he was in the front rank he cleared the larboard side of the Revenant’s weather deck while Sharpe led the charge along the starboard side. Clouter was using an axe, swinging it one-handed, ignoring the men who tried to surrender, but just cutting them down in an orgy of killing. Men were surrendering now, throwing down axes or swords, holding up their hands or just throwing themselves to the deck where they pretended to be dead. Sharpe slashed a pike aside, cut his blade across a Frenchman’s eyes, then found no one to oppose him, but a musket ball plucked at the hem of his jacket as he turned to look for his marines. “Fire at those bastards!” he shouted, pointing up at the forecastle deck where some of Montmorin’s crew still fought back. One of the marines aimed a seven-barreled gun, but Sharpe snatched it from him. “Use a musket, lad.”

He sheathed the cutlass, forcing the blood-clotted blade into the scabbard’s throat, then ran through the defeated Frenchmen to where the forward companionway led down to the lower deck. The Revenant was the Pucelle’s sister ship, indeed it felt to Sharpe that he was fighting on the Pucelle, so alike were the two vessels. He pushed his way through the enemy, going into the shadow of the forecastle. A gunner halfheartedly rammed a cannon swab at Sharpe, who thumped the volley gun’s butt onto the man’s head, then shouted at the bastards to get out of his way. Marines were following him. Two Frenchmen cowered in their galley where the big iron stove had been torn apart by gunfire. Sharpe could hear the big guns firing below, filling the ship with their thunderous pounding, though whether it was the Revenant’s guns that fired or the Pucelle’s, he could not tell. He swung down the companionway into the lower deck’s gloom.

He slid down on his backside, landed with a thump and just pointed the volley gun down the lower deck. He pulled the trigger, adding to the smoke that writhed under the beams, then he drew the cutlass. “It’s over!” he shouted. “Stop firing! Stop firing!” He wished he knew French. “Stop firing, you bastards! Stop firing! It’s over!” A gunner, deaf to Sharpe’s shouts, and half blinded by the smoke, pushed a powder-filled reed into a cannon’s touch-hole and Sharpe slashed him with the cutlass. “Stop it, I said! Stop firing!”

Two shots from the Pucelle hammered through the ship. Sharpe drew his pistol. The nearest French gunners just stared at him. Dozens of dead lay on the deck, some with great wooden splinters jutting from their bodies. The mainmast had a great bite gouged from one side. The deck was scorched where the cannon had exploded. “It’s over!” Sharpe screamed. “Get away from that gun. Get away!” The Frenchmen might not speak English, but they understood the pistol and cutlass well enough. Sharpe went to a gunport. “Pucelle! Pucelle!”

“Who is it?” a voice called back.

“Ensign Sharpe! They’ve stopped firing! Hold your fire! Hold your fire!”

One last cannon belched smoke and flame into the Revenant’s belly, then there was silence at last as the big guns ceased. A gunner crawled out of one of the Pucelle’s lower gunports and scrambled into the Revenant where Sharpe was walking down the deck, stepping over corpses, climbing a fallen cannon, gesturing that the French gunners should kneel or lie down. Three marines followed him, bayonets fixed. “Down!” Sharpe snarled at the wild-eyed, powder-blackened enemy. “Down!” He turned to see more marines and British seamen coming down the companion-way. “Disarm the bastards,” he shouted, “and get them on deck.” He stepped over the splintered remains of one of the ship’s pumps. A French officer faced him with a drawn sword, but he took one look at Sharpe’s face and let the blade clatter on the deck. More of the Pucelle’s gunners were crawling out of the British ship’s gunports and clambering into the French ports, coming to plunder what they could.

Sharpe crossed a patch of blackened deck where one of his grenades had exploded. The French watched him warily. He pushed a man aside with his cutlass blade, then turned down the aft companionway into the ship’s cockpit which was lit with a dozen lanterns.

He almost wished he had not come down the ladder for here there were scores of men bleeding and dying. This was death’s kingdom, the red-wet belly of the ship, the place where foully wounded men came to face the surgeon and, in all likelihood, eternity. It smelled of blood and excrement and urine and terror. The surgeon, a white-haired man with a beard that was streaked with blood, looked up from the table where, with hands red to the wrists, he was delving into a man’s belly. “Get out of here,” he said in good English.

“Shut your face,” Sharpe snarled. “I haven’t killed a surgeon yet, but I don’t mind starting with you.”

The surgeon looked startled, but said nothing more as Sharpe walked into the gunroom where an officer and six men lay bandaged on the floor. He forced the cutlass into its scabbard, gently moved one wounded man aside, then seized the ring of the hatch leading into the Revenant’s lady hole. He hauled it up and pointed the pistol down into the lantern-lit space.

A man and a woman were there. The woman was Mathilde, and the man was Pohlmann’s so-called servant, the man who claimed to be Swiss, but who was in truth a subtle enemy of Britain. Above Sharpe, up in the smoky daylight, cheers sounded as the Revenant’s tricolor, which had been draped over her shattered taffrail, was bundled up and presented to Joel Chase. The ghost had been hunted and the ship was taken. “Up,” Sharpe said to Michel Vaillard. “Up!” They had pursued this man across two oceans and Sharpe felt a livid anger at the betrayal of the Calliope.

Michel Vaillard showed empty hands, then peered through the hatch. He blinked, plainly recognizing Sharpe, but unable to place him. Then he remembered exactly who Sharpe was, and in an instant understood that the Calliope must have been retaken by the British. “It’s you!” he sounded resentful.

“It’s me. Now up! Where’s Pohlmann?”

“On deck?” Vaillard suggested. He climbed the ladder, dusted his hands, then stooped to help Mathilde climb through the hatch. “What happened?” Vaillard asked Sharpe. “How did you get here?”

Sharpe ignored the questions. “You will stay here, ma’am,” Sharpe told Mathilde. “There’s a surgeon out there who needs help.” He pushed Vaillard’s arms aside and plucked back the Frenchman’s coat to see a pistol hilt. He pulled the pistol free and tossed it back into the lady hole. “You come with me.”

“I am merely a servant,” Vaillard said.

“You’re a lump of treacherous French shit,” Sharpe said. “Now go!” He pushed Vaillard in front of him, forcing him up the companionway to the lower deck where the great guns, hot as pots on a stove, now stood abandoned. The French dead and wounded were left, and a dozen British seamen were searching their bodies.

Vaillard refused to go any further, but turned instead to face Sharpe. “I am a diplomat, Mister Sharpe,” he said gravely. His face was clever and his eyes gentle. He was dressed in a gray suit and had a black cravat tied in the lacy collar of his white shirt. He looked calm, clean and confident. “You cannot kill me,” he instructed Sharpe, “and you have no right to take me prisoner. I am not a soldier, not a sailor, but an accredited diplomat. You might have won this battle, but in a day or two your admiral will send me into Cadiz because that is how diplomats must be treated.” He smiled. “That is the rule of nations, Ensign. You are a soldier, and you can die, but I am a diplomat and I must live. My life is sacrosanct.”

Sharpe prodded him with the pistol, forcing him aft toward the wardroom. Just as in the Pucelle all the bulkheads had been taken down, but the bare deck suddenly gave way to a painted canvas carpet that was smeared with blood, and the beams here were touched with gold paint.

The great gallery windows had been shattered by the Spartiate’s guns so that not a pane was left and what remained of the elegantly curved window seat was smothered in broken glass. Sharpe pulled open a door on the wardroom’s starboard side and saw that the quarter gallery, which held the officers’ latrine, had been shot clean away by the Spartiate’s broadside so that the door opened onto nothing but ocean. Far off, almost hull down, the few enemy ships that had escaped the battle sailed toward the coast of Spain. “You want to go to Cadiz?” Sharpe asked Vaillard.

“I am a diplomat!” the Frenchman protested. “You must treat me as such!”

“I’ll treat you as I bloody want,” Sharpe said. “Down here there are no bloody rules, and you’re going to Cadiz.” He seized Vaillard’s gray coat. The Frenchman struggled, pulling away from the opened door beyond which the remnants of the latrine hung above the sea. Sharpe cracked him across the skull with the pistol barrel, then swung him to the door and shoved him toward the open air. Vaillard clung to the door’s edges with both hands, his face showing as much astonishment as fear. Sharpe smashed the pistol against the Frenchman’s right hand, then kicked him in the belly and slammed the gun against the knuckles of Vaillard’s left hand. The Frenchman let go, shouting a last protest as he fell back into the sea.

A British sailor, his pigtail hanging almost to his waist, had watched the murder. “Were you supposed to do that, sir?”

“He wanted to learn to swim,” Sharpe said, bolstering the pistol.

“Frogs should be able to swim, sir,” the seaman said. “It’s their nature.” He stood beside Sharpe and stared down into the water. “But he can’t.”

“So he’s not a very good Frog,” Sharpe said.

“Only he looked rich, sir,” the sailor reproved Sharpe, “and we could have searched him before he went swimming.”

“Sorry,” Sharpe said, “I didn’t think.”

“And he’s drowning now,” the sailor said.

Vaillard splashed desperately, but his struggles only drove him under. Had he told the truth about his protected status as a diplomat? Sharpe was not sure, but if Vaillard had spoken the truth then it was better that he should drown here than be released to spread his poison in Paris. “Cadiz is that way!” Sharpe shouted down at the drowning man, pointing eastward, but Vaillard did not hear him. Vaillard was dying.

Pohlmann was already dead. Sharpe found the Hanoverian on the quarterdeck where he had shared the danger with Montmorin and had been killed early in the battle by a cannon ball that tore his chest apart. The German’s face, curiously untouched by blood, seemed to be smiling. A swell lifted the Revenant, rocking Pohlmann’s body. “He was a brave man,” a voice said, and Sharpe looked up to see it was Capitaine Louis Montmorin. Montmorin had yielded the ship to Chase, offering his sword with tears in his eyes, but Chase had refused to take the sword. He had shaken Montmorin’s hand instead, commiserated with the Frenchman and congratulated him on the fighting qualities of his ship and crew.

“He was a good soldier,” Sharpe said, looking down into Pohlmann’s face. “He just had a bad habit of choosing the wrong side.”

As had Peculiar Cromwell. The Calliope’s captain still lived. He looked scared, as well he might, for he faced trial and punishment, but he straightened when he saw Sharpe. He did not look surprised, perhaps because he had already heard of the Calliope’s fate. “I told Montmorin not to fight,” he said as Sharpe walked toward him. Cromwell had cut his long hair short, perhaps in an attempt to change his appearance, but there was no mistaking the heavy brows and long jaw. “I told him this fight was not our business. Our business was to reach Cadiz, nothing else, but he insisted on fighting.” He held out a tar-stained hand. “I am glad you live, Ensign.”

“You? Glad I live?” Sharpe almost spat the words into Cromwell’s face. “You, you bastard!” He seized Cromwell’s blue coat and rammed the man against the splintered gunwale planking beneath the poop. “Where is it?” he shouted.

“Where’s what?” Cromwell rejoined.

“Don’t bugger me, Peculiar,” Sharpe said. “You bloody well know what I want, now where the hell is it?”

Cromwell hesitated, then seemed to crumple. “In the hold,” he muttered, “in the hold.” He winced at the thought of this defeat. He had sold his ship because he believed the French would rule the world, and now he was in the middle of shattered French hopes. Near a score of French and Spanish ships had been taken and not a British ship had been lost but Peculiar Cromwell was lost.

“Clouter!” Sharpe saw the blood-streaked man climbing to the quarterdeck. “Clouter!”

“Sir?”

“What happened to your hand?” Sharpe asked. The tall black man had a blood-soaked rag twisted about his left hand.

“Cutlass,” Clouter said curtly. “Last man I fought. Took three fingers, sir.”

“I’m sorry.”

“He died,” Clouter said.

“You can hold this?” Sharpe asked, offering Clouter the hilt of his pistol. Clouter nodded and took the gun. “Take this bastard down to the hold,” Sharpe said, gesturing at Cromwell. “He’s going to give you some bags of jewels. Bring the stones to me and I’ll give you some for saving my life. There’s also a watch that belongs to a friend of mine, and I’d like both those, but if you find anything else, it’s yours.” He pushed Cromwell into the black man’s embrace. “And if he gives you any trouble, Clouter, kill the bastard!”

“I want him alive, Clouter.” Captain Chase had overheard the last words. “Alive!” Chase said again, then stood aside to let Cromwell pass. He smiled at Sharpe. “I owe you thanks again, Richard.”

“No, sir. I have to congratulate you.” Sharpe stared at the two ships, still lashed together, and saw wreckage and smoke and blood and bodies, and in the wider sea there were floating hulks and tired ships, but all now were under British flags. This was the image of victory, splintered and smoke-stained, tired and blood-streaked, but victory. The church bells would ring in Britain’s villages for this, and then families would anxiously wait to discover whether their menfolk would come home. “You did well, sir,” Sharpe said, “you did well.”

“We all did well,” Chase said. “Haskell died, did you know? Poor Haskell. He so wanted to be a captain. He was married last year. Only last year, just before we left for India.” Chase looked as weary as Montmorin, but when he looked up he saw his old red ensign hoisted above the French tricolor on the Revenant’s foremast, the only mast left to the French ship. The white ensign flew from the Pucelle’s mainmast and its white cloth was smeared with Haskell’s blood. “We didn’t let him down, did we?” Chase said, tears in his eyes. “Nelson, I mean. I could not have lived with myself had I let him down.”

“You did him proud, sir.”

“We had some help from the Spartiate. What a good fellow Francis Lavory is! I do hope he’s taken a prize for himself.” A wind lifted the ensigns and dragged the thinning smoke fast across the sea. The long swells were rippling with wind while white foam splashed about the floating wreckage that littered the sea. There were only a dozen ships in sight which still retained their masts and rigging intact, but Nelson had started the day with twenty-eight ships and now there were forty-six in his fleet, and the rest of the enemy had fled. “We must look for Vaillard,” Chase said, suddenly remembering the Frenchman.

“He’s dead, sir.”

“Dead?” Chase shrugged. “Best thing, I suppose.” The wind filled the ragged sails of the two ships. “My God,” Chase said, “there’s wind at last, and not just a little, I fear. We must be about our work.” He gazed at the Pucelle. “Doesn’t she look battered? Poor dear thing. Mister Collier! You survive!”

“I’m alive, sir,” Harold Collier said with a grin. He had his sword still drawn, its blade smeared with blood.

“You can probably sheathe the sword, Harry,” Chase said gently.

“Scabbard was hit, sir,” Collier said, and lifted the scabbard to show where a musket ball had bent it.

“You did well, Mister Collier,” Chase said, “and now you’ll muster men to separate the ships.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

Montmorin was taken aboard the Pucelle, but the rest of his crew were imprisoned below the Revenant’s decks. The wind was moaning in the torn rigging now, and the sea was breaking into whitecaps. A midshipman and twenty men were put aboard the captured Revenant as a prize crew, then the two ships were cut apart. A tow line had been rigged from the Pucelle’s stern so that her prize could be towed to port. Lieutenant Peel had a score of men laying new cables to the Pucelle’s remaining masts, trying to brace them against the promised storm. The gunports were closed, the flintlocks dismounted from the cannons’ breeches, and the guns lashed up. The galley fires were relit and their first job was to heat great vats of vinegar with which the bloody decks would be scoured, for it was believed that only hot vinegar could draw blood from timber. Sharpe, back on board the Pucelle, found some oranges in the scupper and ate one, filling his pockets with the others.

The dead were jettisoned. Splash after splash. Men moved slowly, bone weary from an afternoon of blood and thirst and fighting, but the fall of night and the rising wind brought the worst news of the day. A boat from the Conqueror pulled past and an officer shouted the news up to Chase’s shattered quarterdeck. Nelson had died, the officer said, struck down by a musket ball on the Victory’s deck. The Pucelle’s seamen scarcely dared believe the news, and Sharpe first heard of it when he saw Chase weeping. “Are you hurt, sir?” he asked.

Chase looked utterly bereft, like a man defeated instead of a captain with a rich prize. “The admiral’s dead, Sharpe,” Chase said. “He’s dead.”

“Nelson?” Sharpe asked. “Nelson?”

“Dead!” Chase said. “Oh, good God, why?”

Sharpe just felt an emptiness inside. The whole crew looked stricken, as if a friend, not a commander, had died. Nelson was dead. Some did not believe it, but the commander-in-chief’s flag flying above the Royal Sovereign confirmed that Collingwood now commanded the victorious fleet. And if Collingwood commanded then Nelson was dead. Chase wept for him, cuffing away his tears only when the last body was thrown overboard.

There was no ceremony for that final corpse, but then no one who had died that day had received any ceremony. The corpse was brought to the quarterdeck and, in the deepening dusk, thrown into the sea. It seemed cold suddenly. The wind had a cutting edge and Sharpe shivered. Chase watched the body float away on the waves, then shook his head in puzzlement. “He must have decided to join the fight,” Chase said. “Can you credit it?”

“Every man was expected to do his duty, sir,” Sharpe said stolidly.

“So they were, and so they did, but no one expected him to fight or to fetch a bullet in the head. Poor fellow. He was braver than I ever thought. Does his wife know?”

“I shall tell her, sir.”

“Would you?” Chase asked. “Yes, of course you will. No one better, but I’m grateful to you, Richard, grateful.” He turned to watch the fleet, its stern lanterns already lit, struggling under half sail in the rising wind. Only the Victory was dark, with not a single light showing. “Oh, poor Nelson,” Chase lamented, “poor England.”

Sharpe, as soon as he was back aboard the Pucelle, had gone down to the cockpit which was as fetid and bloody as the one on the Revenant. Pickering had been sawing at a man’s thigh bone, sweat dripping from his face into the mangled flesh. The patient, a leather pad between his teeth, was twitching as the blunt saw grated on bone. Two seamen held him down, and neither they nor the surgeon had noticed Sharpe go through to the gunroom where he lifted the lady-hole hatch to see blood spattered on its underside. Lord William lay sprawled in the narrow space, his skull gaping bloodily where the pistol bullet had exited. Grace had been huddled with her arms about her knees, shaking, and she half screamed as the hatch was opened, then she shuddered with relief when she saw it was Sharpe. “Richard? It is you?” She was crying again. “They’re going to hang me, Richard. They’re going to hang me, but I had to shoot him. He was going to kill me. I had to shoot him.”

Sharpe had dropped down into the lady hole. “They ain’t going to hang you, my lady,” he said. “He died on deck. That’s what everyone will think. He died on deck.”

“I had to do it!” she wailed.

“The Frogs did it.” Sharpe took the pistol from her and shoved it into a pocket, then he put his hands under Lord William’s armpits and heaved him up, trying to push the corpse through the hatch, but the body was awkward in the narrow space.

“They’ll hang me,” Grace cried.

Sharpe let the corpse drop, then turned and crouched beside her. “No one will hang you. No one will know. If they find him down here, I’ll say I shot him, but with a little luck I can get him up on deck and everyone will think the Frogs did it.”

She put her arms around his neck. “You’re safe. Oh, God, you’re safe. What happened?”

“We won,” Sharpe said. “We won.” He kissed her, then held her tight for an instant before he went back to struggle with the corpse. If Lord William was found here, no one would believe he had been killed by the enemy and Chase would be honor bound to hold an inquiry into the death, so the body had to be taken up above the orlop deck, but the hatch was narrow and Sharpe could not get the corpse through, but then a hand reached down and took hold of Lord William’s bloody collar and heaved him effortlessly upward.

Sharpe had cursed under his breath. He cursed because someone else now knew that Lord William had been shot in the lady hole, and when he had clambered up into the dimly lit gunroom he found it was Clouter who, one-handed, was proving as able as most men with two hands. “I saw you come down here, sir,” Clouter said, “and was going to give you these.” He had held out Sharpe’s jewels, all of them, and Major Dalton’s watch, and Sharpe had taken them and then tried to return some of the emeralds and diamonds to Clouter.

“I did nothing,” the big man protested.

“You saved my life, Clouter,” Sharpe said and folded the big black fingers around the stones, “and now you’re going to save it again. Can you get that bastard up on deck?”

Clouter grinned. “Up where he died, sir?” he asked and Sharpe scarce dared believe that Clouter had so quickly understood the problem and its solution. He just stared at the tall black man who grinned again. “You should have shot the bastard weeks ago, sir, but the Frogs did it for you and there ain’t a man aboard who won’t say the same.” He stooped and hauled the corpse onto his shoulder as Sharpe helped Lady Grace up through the hatch. He told her to wait while he went with Clouter to the quarterdeck and there, in the gathering dusk and rising wind, Lord William had been heaved overboard.

No one had taken any notice of the body being carried through the ship, for what was one more corpse being brought up from the surgeon’s knife? “He was braver than I thought,” Chase had said.

Sharpe went back to the cockpit where Lady Grace stared white-faced and wide-eyed as Pickering tied off blood vessels, then sewed the flap of skin over the newly made stump. Sharpe took her arm and led her into one of the midshipmen’s tiny cabins at the rear of the cockpit. He closed the door, though that hardly gave them privacy for the doors were made of wooden slats through which anyone could have seen them, but no one had eyes for the cabin.

“I want you to know what happened,” Lady Gace said when she was alone with Sharpe in the midshipman’s cabin, but then she could say no more.

“I know what happened,” Sharpe said.

“He was going to kill me,” she said.

“Then you did the right thing,” Sharpe said, “but the rest of the world thinks he died a brave man’s death. They think he went on deck to fight, and he was shot. That’s what Chase thinks, it’s what everybody thinks. Do you understand?”

She nodded. She was shivering, but not with cold. Her husband’s blood flecked her hair.

“And you waited for him,” Sharpe said, “and he did not come back.”

She turned to look at the gunroom door that hid the lady-hole hatch. “But the blood,” she wailed, “the blood!”

“The ship is full of blood,” Sharpe said, “too much blood. Your husband died on deck. He died a hero.”

“Yes,” she said, “he did.” She gazed at him, her eyes huge in the dark, then held him fiercely. He could feel her body shaking. “I thought you must be dead,” she said.

“Not even a scratch,” Sharpe replied, stroking her hair.

She shuddered, then pulled her head back to look at him. “We’re free, Richard,” she said with a note of surprise. “Do you realize that? We’re free!”

“Yes, my lady, we’re free.”

“What are we going to do?”

“Whatever we want,” Sharpe said, “whatever we can.”

She held him and he held her and the ship leaned to the weather and the wounded moaned and the last scraps of smoke vanished in the night as the storm wind rose from the darkening west to batter ships already pounded past endurance. But Sharpe had his woman, he was free, and he was at last going home.