Sharpe 3-Book Collection 3: Sharpe's Trafalgar, Sharpe's Prey, Sharpe's Rifles (9 page)

The passengers in the stern, the rich folk who inhabited the roundhouse and the great cabin, played whist. Another group played the game in steerage, but Sharpe had never learned to play and, besides, was not tempted to wager. He was aware that large sums were being won and lost, and though it was forbidden by the Company rules, Captain Cromwell made no objection. Indeed he sometimes played a hand himself. ‘He wins,’ Pohlmann told Sharpe, ‘he always wins.’

‘And you lose?’

‘A little.’ Pohlmann shrugged as though it did not matter.

Pohlmann was sitting on one of the lashed guns. He often came and talked with Sharpe, usually about Assaye where he had suffered such a great defeat. ‘Your William Dodd,’ he told Sharpe, ‘claimed that Sir Arthur was a cautious general. He isn’t.’ He always called Dodd ‘your William Dodd’, as though the renegade redcoat had been a colleague of Sharpe’s.

‘Wellesley’s bull-headed,’ Sharpe said admiringly. ‘He sees a chance and snatches it.’

‘And he’s gone home to England?’

‘Sailed last year,’ Sharpe said. Sir Arthur, as befitted his rank, had sailed on the
Trident
, Admiral Rainier’s flagship, and was probably in Britain by now.

‘He will be bored at home,’ Pohlmann said.

‘Bored? Why?’

‘Because our dour Captain Cromwell is right. Britain cannot fight France in Europe. She can fight her at the ends of the world, but not in Europe. The French army, my dear Sharpe, is a horde. It is not like your army. It doesn’t depend on jailbirds, failures and drunkards, but is conscripted. It is therefore huge.’

Sharpe grinned. ‘The jailbirds, failures and drunkards cooked your goose.’

‘So they did,’ Pohlmann acknowledged without taking offence, ‘but they cannot stand against the vast armies of France. No one can. Not now. And when the French decide to build a proper navy, my friend, then you will see the world dance to their tunes.’

‘And you?’ Sharpe asked. ‘Where will you be dancing?’

‘Hanover?’ Pohlmann suggested. ‘I shall buy a big house, fill it with women and watch the world from my windows. Or perhaps I shall live in France. The women are more beautiful there and I have learned one thing in my life, Sharpe, and that is that women do like money. Why do you think Lady Grace married Lord William?’ He jerked his head towards the quarterdeck where Lady Grace, accompanied by her maid, walked up and down. ‘How goes your campaign with the lady?’

‘It doesn’t,’ Sharpe grunted, ‘and there isn’t a campaign.’

Pohlmann laughed. ‘Then why do you accept my invitations to supper?’

The truth, and Sharpe knew it, was that he was obsessed with the Lady Grace. From the moment he woke in the morning until he finally slept he thought of little but her. She seemed untouchable, unemotional, unapproachable, and that only made his obsession worse. She had spoken to him once, then never again, and when Sharpe did meet her at suppertime in the captain’s cuddy and tried to engage her in conversation she turned away as though his presence offended her.

Sharpe thought of her constantly, and constantly watched for her, though he took good care not to show his obsession. But it was there, gnawing at him, filling the tedious hours as the
Calliope
thumped her way across the Indian Ocean. The winds stayed kind and each day the first officer, Lieutenant Tufnell, reported on the convoy’s progress: seventy-two miles, sixty-eight miles, seventy miles, always about the same distance.

The weather was fine and dry, yet even so the ship seemed to be rotting with damp below the decks. Even in the tropic winds that blew the convoy southwestwards some water slopped through the closed lower gunports, and the lower-deck steerage where Sharpe slept was never dry; his blankets were damp, the timbers of the ship were dank, indeed the whole
Calliope
, wherever the sun did not shine, was weeping with water, stinking and decaying, fungus-ridden and rat-infested. Seamen constantly manned the ship’s four pumps and the water slopped out of the elm tubes into gutters on the lower deck which led the stinking bilge water overboard, but however much they pumped, more always needed to be sucked out of the hull.

The goats had an infection and most died in the first fortnight so there was no fresh milk for the steerage passengers. The fresh food was soon used up, and what was left was salted, tough, rancid and monotonous. The water was foul, discoloured and stank, useful only for making strong tea, and though Sharpe’s filtering machine removed some of the impurities, it did nothing to improve the taste, and after two weeks the filter was so clogged with brown muck that he hurled the machine into the ocean. He drank arrack and sour beer or, in Captain Cromwell’s cuddy, the wine which was little better than vinegar.

Breakfast was at eight every morning. The steerage passengers were divided into groups of ten and the men took it in turn to fetch each mess a cauldron of burgoo from the galley in the forecastle. The burgoo was a mixture of oatmeal and scraps of beef fat that had simmered all night on the galley stove. Dinner was at midday and was another burgoo, though this sometimes had larger scraps of meat or fibrous pieces of dried fish floating in the burned and lumpy oatmeal. On Sundays there was salt fish and ship’s biscuits that were as hard as stone, yet even so were infested with weevils that needed to be tapped out. The biscuits had to be chewed endlessly so that it was like masticating a dried brick that was occasionally enlivened by the juice of an insect that had escaped the tapping. Tea was served at four, but only to the passengers who travelled in the stern of the ship, while the steerage passengers had to wait for supper, which was more dried fish, biscuits and a hard cheese in which red worms made miniature tunnels. ‘Human beings should not be expected to eat such things,’ Malachi Braithwaite said, shuddering after one particularly evil supper. He had joined Sharpe on the main deck to watch the sun set in red-gold splendour.

‘You ate them on the way out, didn’t you?’ Sharpe asked.

‘I travelled out as a private secretary to a London merchant,’ Braithwaite said grandly, ‘and he accommodated me in the great cabin and fed me at his own expense. I told his lordship as much, but he refuses the expense.’ He sounded hurt. Braithwaite was a proud man, but poor, and very aware of any insults to his self-esteem. He spent his afternoons in the roundhouse where, he told Sharpe, Lord William was compiling a report for the Board of Control. The report would suggest the future governance of India and Braithwaite enjoyed the work, but late every afternoon he was dismissed back to the lower deck and his gnawing misery. He was ashamed of being made to travel steerage, he hated being one of the gun crews and he detested fetching the mess cauldrons, believing that chore put him in the place of a menial servant, no better than Lord William’s valet or Lady Grace’s maid. ‘I am a secretary,’ he protested once to Sharpe. ‘I was at Oxford!’

‘How did you become Lord William’s secretary?’ Sharpe now asked him.

Braithwaite thought about the question as though a trap lay within it, then decided it was safe to answer. ‘His original secretary died in Calcutta. Of snake-bite, I believe, and his lordship was kind enough to offer me the position.’

‘Now you regret taking it?’

‘Indeed I do not!’ Braithwaite said sharply. ‘His lordship is a prominent man. He is intimate with the Prime Minister.’ This was confided in an admiring tone. ‘Indeed the report we work on will not just be for the Board of Control, but will go directly to Pitt himself! Much depends on his lordship’s conclusions. Maybe even a cabinet post? His lordship could well become Foreign Secretary within a year or two, and what would that make me?’

‘An overworked secretary,’ Sharpe said.

‘But I will have influence,’ Braithwaite insisted earnestly, ‘and his lordship will have one of the grandest houses in London. His wife will preside over a salon of wit and vast influence.’

‘If she’ll ever talk to anyone,’ Sharpe commented drily. ‘She don’t say a word to me.’

‘Of course she doesn’t,’ Braithwaite said crossly. ‘She is accustomed to nothing but the highest discourse.’ The secretary looked to the quarterdeck, but if he hoped to see Lady Grace he was disappointed. ‘She is an angel, Sharpe,’ he blurted out. ‘One of the best women I have ever had the privilege of meeting. And with a mind to match! I have a degree from Oxford, Mister Sharpe, yet even I cannot match her ladyship’s knowledge of the Georgics.’

Whatever the hell they were, Sharpe thought. ‘She is a rare-looking woman,’ he said mildly, wondering whether that would provoke Braithwaite into another burst of candour.

It did. ‘Rare-looking?’ Braithwaite asked sarcastically. ‘She is a beauty, Mister Sharpe, the very quintessence of feminine virtue, looks and intelligence.’

Sharpe laughed. ‘You’re in love with her, Braithwaite.’

The secretary gave Sharpe a withering look. ‘If you were not a soldier with a reputation for savagery, Sharpe, I should deem that statement impertinent.’

‘I might be the savage,’ Sharpe said, rubbing salt into the secretary’s wounded pride, ‘but I’m the one who had supper with her tonight.’

Though Lady Grace had neither spoken with him that night, nor even appeared to notice his presence in the cuddy where the food was scarcely better than the slop provided in steerage. The richer passengers were served the dead goats that were stewed and served in a vinegar sauce and Captain Cromwell was particularly fond of peas and pork, though the peas were dried to the consistency of bullets and the meat was salted to the texture of ancient leather. There was a suet pudding most nights, then port or brandy, coffee, cigars and whist. Eggs and coffee were served for breakfast, luxuries that never appeared in steerage, but Sharpe was not invited to share breakfast with the privileged folk.

On the nights when he ate in steerage Sharpe would go on deck afterwards and watch the sailors dancing to a four-man orchestra of two violins, a flute and a drummer who beat his hands on the end of a half-barrel. One night there was a sudden and violent downpour of rain that drummed on the sails. Sharpe stood bare-chested, head back and mouth agape to drink the clean water, but most of the rain which fell on the ship seemed to find its way between decks that became ever more rank. Everything seemed to rot, rust or grow fungus. On Sundays the purser held divine service and the four-man orchestra played while the passengers, the richer standing on the quarterdeck and the less privileged beneath them on the main deck, sang ‘Awake, my soul, and with the sun thy daily stage of duty run’. Major Dalton sang gustily, beating time with his hand. Pohlmann seemed amused by the services, while Lord William and his wife, contravening the captain’s orders, did not bother to attend. When the hymn was done the purser read a toneless prayer that Sharpe and those other passengers who were paying attention found alarming. ‘O most glorious and gracious Lord God, who dwellest in heaven, but beholdest all things below; Look down, we beseech thee, and hear us, calling out of the depths of misery and out of the jaws of this death which is ready now to swallow us up. Save, Lord, or else we perish.’

Yet they did not perish and the sea and the miles slipped endlessly by, untouched by any speck of land or hostile sail. At noon the officers solemnly sighted the sun with their sextants, then hurried to Captain Cromwell’s cabin to work out the mathematics, though, in the middle of the third week, a day at last came when the sky was so thick with cloud that no sight could be taken. Captain Cromwell was overheard to remark that the
Calliope
was in for a blow, and all day he strode about the quarterdeck with a look of grim pleasure. The wind rose slowly but surely, making the passengers stagger on the canted deck and hold onto their hats. Many of those who had overcome their early seasickness now succumbed again, and the spray breaking on the ship’s bluff bows rattled on the sails as it flew down the deck. Late in the afternoon it began to rain so heavily that grey veils hid all but the closest vessels of the convoy.

Sharpe was again invited to be Pohlmann’s guest for supper and, when he went below to change into his least dirty shirt and to pull on his coat that had been neatly mended by a foretop man, he found the steerage slopping with water and vomit. Children cried, a tethered dog yelped. Braithwaite was draped over a gun, heaving dry. Every time the ship dipped to the wind water forced its way through the locked gunports and rippled across the deck, and when she buried her bows into the sea a veritable flood came through the hawse-holes and rolled down the sopping planks.

Water cascaded down the companionway as Sharpe climbed back to the remains of the daylight. He staggered across the quarterdeck where six men hung onto the wheel and banged through the poop door where he was thrown across the small hallway before cannoning back into the cuddy where only the captain, Major Dalton, Pohlmann, Mathilde and Lord William and Lady Grace waited. The other three passengers were all either seasick or were eating in their own cabins.

‘You’re the baron’s guest again?’ Cromwell asked pointedly.

‘You surely do not mind Mister Sharpe being my guest?’ Pohlmann enquired hotly.

‘He eats from your purse, Baron, not mine,’ Cromwell growled, then waved Sharpe into his usual chair. ‘For God’s sake, sit, Mister Sharpe.’ He held up a massive hand, then paused as the ship rolled. The bulkheads shifted alarmingly and the cutlery slid across the table. ‘May the good Lord bless these victuals,’ Cromwell said, ‘and make us grateful for their sustenance, in the name of the Lord, amen.’

‘Amen,’ Lady Grace said distantly. Her husband looked pale and gripped the table’s edge as if it might alleviate the boat’s quick motion. Lady Grace, on the other hand, was quite unaffected by the weather. She wore a red dress, cut low, and had a string of pearls around her slim neck. Her dark hair was piled at her crown and held in place with pearl-encrusted pins.

Fiddles had been placed about the table so that the knives, forks, spoons, glasses, plates and cruets would not slide off, but the lurching of the ship made the meal a perilous experience. Cromwell’s steward served a thick soup first. ‘Fresh fish!’ Cromwell boasted. ‘All caught this morning. I have no idea what kind of fish they were, but no one has yet died of an unknown fish on my ship. They’ve died of other things, of course.’ The captain eagerly spooned the bony gruel into his mouth, expertly holding the plate so that the contents did not spill as the ship tilted. ‘Men fall from the upper works, folk die of fever and I’ve even had a passenger kill herself for unrequited love, but I’ve never had one die of fish poison.’