Sharpe 3-Book Collection 3: Sharpe's Trafalgar, Sharpe's Prey, Sharpe's Rifles (36 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Haskell shouted down to the weather deck. ‘Stand up! Stand up! Stand to your guns!’

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

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

‘Push on through!’ Chase shouted at his ship. ‘Push on through!’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘He was an odious man,’ Lady Grace said.

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

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

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

‘I have always thought as much,’ Lady Grace said, opening her eyes.

‘The quintessence, would you not say, of fidelity?’ Lord William asked.

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

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

‘I hoped it was because I could be of use to you,’ she answered.

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

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

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

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

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