Sharpe 3-Book Collection 3: Sharpe's Trafalgar, Sharpe's Prey, Sharpe's Rifles (44 page)

‘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 tricolour 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 foetid 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 round 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 then no one would believe he had been killed by the enemy and Chase would be honour bound to hold an enquiry 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 upwards.

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 round 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 Grace 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.

Sharpe really had no business being at Trafalgar, but he had to travel home from India and Cape Trafalgar lies not far from the route he would have taken and he might well have passed it on or about 21 October 1805. But if Sharpe had no business being there, then Admiral Villeneuve, commander of the combined French and Spanish fleets, had even less.

The great fleet had been gathered to cover the invasion of Britain, for which Napoleon had assembled his Grand Army near Boulogne. The British blockade and the weather combined to keep the enemy in port, except for a foray across the Atlantic by which Villeneuve hoped to draw Nelson away from the English coast. The foray failed, Villeneuve had put into Cadiz, and there he was trapped. Napoleon abandoned his invasion plans and marched his army east towards its great victory at Austerlitz. The French and Spanish fleet was now an irrelevance, but Napoleon, furious with Villeneuve, sent a replacement admiral and it seems likely that Villeneuve, knowing that he faced disgrace and eager to justify his existence before his replacement reached Cadiz, put to sea. Ostensibly he was taking the fleet to the Mediterranean, but he must have hoped he could fight the British ships blockading Cadiz, win a victory and so restore his reputation. After just a day at sea he discovered that the blockading fleet was much larger than he had thought and so turned his ships back northwards in hope of escaping battle. It was already too late; Nelson was in sight and the combined fleet was doomed.

There was no
Pucelle
, nor a
Revenant
. Nelson fought Trafalgar with twenty-seven ships of the line, while the combined French and Spanish fleet had thirty-three. By day’s end seventeen of those enemy ships had struck their colours and one had been destroyed by fire, making Trafalgar the most decisive naval battle until Midway. The British lost no ships but paid, of course, the price of Nelson’s life. He was the matchless hero of the Napoleonic wars, as beloved by his men as he was feared by the enemy. He was also, of course, a famous adulterer, and his last request of his country was that Britain should look after Lady Hamilton. The granting of that request lay in the power of politicians, and politicians do not change, so Lady Hamilton died in miserable penury.

On the night after the battle a huge storm blew up and all but four of the seventeen prizes were lost. Many were being towed, but the storm was too fierce and the tows were cast off. Three of the prizes sank, two were deliberately set afire and five were wrecked. Another three captured ships, manned by prize crews too small to cope with the storm, were handed back to their original crews and sailed to safety, but they were so damaged by battle and storm that none was fit to sail again. Of the fifteen enemy ships that escaped capture in battle, four were taken by the Royal Navy and one was wrecked in the next two weeks. Many of the British ships were as badly damaged as the French or Spanish, but superb seamanship brought them all safe into port.