Sharpe 3-Book Collection 3: Sharpe's Trafalgar, Sharpe's Prey, Sharpe's Rifles (30 page)

‘Well done, quartermaster,’ Chase said, pretending he had felt no qualms during the manoeuvre. ‘Well done, Pucelles! Mister Holderby! Muster a work party and break out some yellow paint!’

‘Why yellow?’ Sharpe asked.

‘Every other ship has yellow hoops,’ Chase said, gesturing back down the long line, ‘while ours are like the French hoops, black.’ Only the upper masts were made from single pine trunks while the lower were formed from clusters of long timbers that were bound and seized by the iron hoops. ‘In battle,’ Chase said, ‘maybe that’s all anyone will note of us. And they’ll see black hoops and think we’re a Frog ship and pour two or three decks of good British gunnery into our vitals. Can’t have that, Sharpe! Not for a few slaps of paint!’ He turned like a dancer, unable to contain his elation, for his ship was in the line of battle, the enemy was at sea and Horatio Nelson was his leader.

The British fleet tacked after dark, the signal passed on from ship to ship by lanterns hung in the rigging. Now, instead of sailing northwards, the fleet headed south, staying parallel to the enemy ships, but out of their sight. The wind had dropped, but a long swell ran from the western darkness to lift and drop the ponderous hulls. It was a long night. Sharpe went on deck once and saw the stern lanterns of the
Conqueror
reflecting from the seas ahead, then he gazed eastwards as a brilliant flame showed briefly on the horizon. Lieutenant Peel, bundled against the cold, reckoned it was one of the frigates setting off a firework to confuse the enemy. ‘Keeping them awake, Sharpe, keeping them worried.’ Peel slapped his gloved hands together and stamped his feet on the deck.

‘Why are they sailing south?’ Sharpe asked. He was shaking. He had forgotten just how the cold could bite.

‘The good Lord alone knows,’ Peel said cheerfully, ‘and He ain’t telling me. They aren’t going to cover an invasion force in the Channel, that’s for certain. They’re probably heading for the Mediterranean which means they’ll keep on south until they’re clear of the shallows off Cape Trafalgar, then they can run east towards the Straits. Does your chess improve?’

‘No,’ Sharpe said, ‘too many rules.’ He wondered whether Lady Grace would risk coming to his cabin, but he doubted it, for the night-shrouded ship was unnaturally busy as men readied themselves for the morning. A seaman brought him a cup of Scotch coffee and he drank the bitter liquid, then chewed on the sweetened bread crumbs that gave the coffee its flavour.

‘This will be my first battle,’ Peel admitted suddenly.

‘My first at sea,’ Sharpe said.

‘It makes you think,’ Peel said wistfully.

‘It’s better once it starts,’ Sharpe suggested. ‘It’s the waiting that’s hard.’

Peel laughed softly. ‘Some clever bugger once remarked that nothing concentrates the mind so much as the prospect of being hanged in the morning.’

‘I doubt he knew,’ Sharpe said. ‘And besides, we’re the hangmen tomorrow.’

‘So we are, so we are,’ Peel said, though he could not hide the fears that gnawed at him. ‘Of course nothing might happen,’ he said. ‘The buggers might give us the slip.’ He went to look at the compass, leaving Sharpe to stare into the darkness. Sharpe stayed on deck until he could abide the cold no longer, then went and shivered in his confining cot that felt so horribly like a coffin.

He woke just before dawn. The sails were flapping and he put his head out of his cabin door and asked Chase’s steward what was happening. ‘We’re wearing ship, sir. Going north again, sir. There’s coffee coming, sir. Proper coffee. I saved a handful of beans because the captain does like his coffee. I’ll bring you shaving water, sir.’

Once he had shaved, Sharpe pulled on his clothes, draped his borrowed cloak about his shoulders and went on deck to find that the fleet had indeed turned back to the north. Lieutenant Haskell now had the watch and he reckoned that Nelson had been running southwards to keep out of the enemy’s sight so that they would not use the excuse of his presence to return to Cadiz, but as the first grey light seeped along the eastern horizon the admiral had turned his fleet in an attempt to get between the enemy and the Spanish port.

The wind was still light so that the line of great ships lumbered northwards at less than a man’s walking pace. The sky brightened, burnishing the long swells with shifting bands of silver and scarlet.
Euryalus
, the frigate which had dogged the enemy fleet ever since it had left harbour, was now back with the fleet, while to the east, almost in line with the burning sky where the sun rose, was a streak of dirty cloud showing against the horizon. That streak was the topsails of the enemy, blurred by distance.

‘Good God.’ Captain Chase had emerged on deck and spotted the far sails. He looked tired, as though he had slept badly, but he was dressed for battle, doing honour to the enemy by wearing his finest uniform which was normally stored deep in a sea chest. The gold on the twin epaulettes gleamed. His tasselled hat had been brushed till it shone. His white stockings were of silk, his coat was neither faded by the sun nor whitened by salt, while his sword scabbard had been polished, as had the silver buckles on his clean shoes. ‘Good God,’ he said again, ‘those poor men.’

The decks of the British ships were thick with men, all staring eastwards. The
Pucelle
had seen the French and Spanish fleet on the previous day, but this was the first glimpse for the other crews of Nelson’s ships. They had crossed the Atlantic in search of this enemy, then sailed back from the West Indies and, in the last few days, they had tacked and worn ship, sailed east and west, north and south, and some had wondered if the enemy was at sea at all, yet now, as if summoned by a demon of the sea, thirty-four enemy ships of the line showed on the horizon.

‘You’ll not see its like again,’ Chase told Sharpe, nodding towards the enemy fleet. His steward had brought a tray with mugs of proper coffee onto the quarterdeck and Chase gestured that his officers should be served first, then took the last cup. He looked up at the sails which alternately stretched in the wind then slackened as the fitful gusts passed. ‘It will take hours to come up with them,’ he said moodily.

‘Maybe they’ll come to us,’ Sharpe said, trying to raise Chase’s spirits that seemed dampened by the dawn and the pitiful wind.

‘Against this sorry excuse for a breeze? I doubt it.’ Chase smiled. ‘Besides, they won’t want battle. They’ve been stuck in harbour, Sharpe. Their sail handling will be poor, their gunnery rusty, their morale down in the mud. They’d rather run away.’

‘Why don’t they?’

‘Because if they run east from here they’ll end up on the shoals of Cape Trafalgar, and if they run north or south they know we’ll intercept them and beat them to smithereens, and that means they have nowhere to go. Nowhere to go, Sharpe. We have the weather gauge, and that’s like having the higher ground. I just pray we catch them before dark. Nelson fought the Nile in the dark and that was a triumph, but I’d rather fight in daylight.’ He drained his coffee. ‘Is that really the last of the beans?’ he asked the steward.

‘It is, sir, except for those that got wetted in Calcutta, sir, and they’re growing fur.’

‘They might grind, though?’ Chase suggested.

‘I wouldn’t feed ’em to a pig, sir.’

The
Victory
had been flying a signal which ordered the British column to form their proper order, which was little more than an encouragement for the slower ships to press on more sail and close the intervals in the line, but now that signal was hauled down and another flew in its place.

‘Prepare for battle, sir,’ Lieutenant Connors reported, though it was scarcely necessary, for every man aboard except the landlubbers like Sharpe had recognized the signal. And the
Pucelle
, like the other warships, was already preparing, indeed the men had been readying their ship all night.

Sand was scattered on the decks to give the barefooted gunners a better grip. The men’s hammocks, as they were every morning, were rolled tight and brought on deck where they were laid in the hammock nettings that surmounted the gunwale. The packed hammocks, secured in the net trough and lashed down under a canvas rain cover, would serve as a bulwark against enemy musket fire. Up aloft a bosun was leading a dozen men who were securing the ship’s great yards, from which the vast sails hung, with lengths of chain. Other men were reeving spare halliards and sheets so that heavy coils of rope were forever tumbling through the rigging to thump on the decks. ‘They like slashing our rigging to bits,’ Captain Llewellyn told Sharpe. ‘The Dons and the Frogs both, they like to fire at the masts, see? So the chains stop the yards falling and the spare sheets are there if the others are shot through. Mind you, Sharpe, we’ll lose a stick or two before the day’s out. It rains blocks and broken spars in battle, it does!’ Llewellyn anticipated that dangerous downpour with relish. ‘Is your cutlass sharp?’

‘It could do with a better edge,’ Sharpe admitted.

‘Forrard on the weather deck, ‘ Llewellyn said, ‘by the manger, there’s a man with a treadle wheel. He’ll be glad to hone it for you.’

Sharpe joined a queue of men. Some had cutlasses, others had boarding axes while many had fetched down the boarding pikes which stood in racks about the masts on the upper decks. The goats, sensing that their routine had changed, bleated piteously. They had been milked for the last time and now a seaman rolled up his sleeves before slaughtering them with a long knife. The manger, with its dangerously combustible straw, was being dismantled and the goats’ carcasses would be packed in salt for a future meal. The first beast struggled briefly, then the smell of fresh blood cut through the ship’s usual stench.

Some of the men invited Sharpe to go to the head of the queue, but he waited his turn as the nearby gunners teased him. ‘Come to see a proper battle, sir?’

‘You’d never win a scrap without a real soldier, lads.’

‘These’ll win it for us, sir,’ a man said, slapping the breech of his twenty-four-pounder on which someone had chalked the message ‘a pill for Boney’. The mess tables, on which the gunners ate, were being struck down into the hold. As much wooden furniture as possible was removed from the decks above water so that they could not be reduced to splinters that whirled lethally from every strike of enemy shot. Sharpe’s cot and chest were already gone, as was all the elegant furniture from Chase’s quarters. The precious chronometers and the barometer had been packed in straw and taken down to the hold. Some ships hoisted their more valuable furniture high into the rigging in hopes that it would be safe, while others had entrusted it to the ships’ boats that were being launched and towed astern to keep them from enemy gunnery.

A gunner’s mate sharpened the cutlass on the wheel, tested its edge against his thumb, then gave Sharpe a toothless grin. ‘That’ll give the buggers a shave they’ll never forget, sir.’

Sharpe tipped the man sixpence, then walked back down the deck just in time to see the panelled walls of Chase’s quarters being manoeuvred down the quarterdeck stairs on their way to the hold. The simpler wooden bulkheads from the officers’ cabins and the wardroom at the stern of the weather deck had already been struck down so that now, for the first time, Sharpe could see the whole length of the ship, from its wide stern windows all the way to where men swept up the last straw of the manger in the bows of the ship. The
Pucelle
was being stripped of her frills and turned into a fighting machine. He climbed to the quarterdeck and saw that was similarly empty. The wide space beneath the long poop, instead of holding cabins, was now an open sweep of deck from the wheel to the windows of Chase’s day cabin. The dining cabin had vanished, Sharpe’s quarters were gone, the pictures had been taken below and the only remaining luxury was the black-and-white chequered canvas carpet on which the two eighteen-pounder guns stood.

Connors, stationed on the poop to watch for the flagship’s signals which were being repeated by the frigate
Euryalus
, called down to Chase. ‘We’re to bear up in succession on the flagship’s course, sir.’ Chase just nodded and watched as the
Victory
, leading the line, swung to starboard so that she was now heading straight for the enemy. The wind, such as it was, came from directly behind her and Captain Hardy, doubtless on Nelson’s orders, already had men up on his yards to extend the slender poles from which he would hang his studdingsails.

Nine ships behind the
Pucelle
another three-decker swung to starboard. This was the
Royal Sovereign
, the flagship of Admiral Collingwood, Nelson’s second-in-command. Her bright copper gleamed in the morning light as the ships behind followed her eastwards. Chase looked from the
Victory
to the
Royal Sovereign
, then back to the
Victory
again. ‘Two columns,’ he said aloud, ‘that’s what he’s doing. Making two columns.’

Even Sharpe could understand that. The enemy fleet formed a ragged line that stretched for about four miles along the eastern horizon and now the British fleet was turning directly towards that line. The ships turned in succession, those at the front of the fleet curling round to make a line behind the
Victory
and those at the back following in the
Royal Sovereign
’s wake, so that the two short lines of ships were sailing straight for the enemy like a pair of horns thrusting at a shield.

‘We’ll set studdingsails when we’ve turned, Mister Haskell,’ Chase said.

‘Aye aye, sir.’

The
Conqueror
, the fifth ship in Nelson’s column and the one immediately ahead of the
Pucelle
, turned towards the enemy, showing Sharpe her long flank which was painted in stripes of black and yellow. The
Conqueror
’s gunports, all on the yellow bands, were painted black to give her a half-chequered appearance.

‘Follow her, quartermaster,’ Chase said, then walked to the table behind the wheel where the ship’s log lay open. He dipped the pen in ink and made a new entry. ‘6.49
AM
. Turned east towards the enemy.’ Chase put the pen down, then took a small notebook and a stub of pencil from his pocket. ‘Mister Collier!’