Sharpe's Trafalgar (33 page)

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 around 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 shin and hold
him there while thev raked, nounded and turned his shin 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 around 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 though 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?”

“I think,” she said acidly, “that I would need to be married to Odysseus to answer such a
question.”

Lord William laughed. “Would you like that, my dear? Would you like to be married to a
warrior? Though is Odysseus such a great warrior? It always seems to me that he is a
trickster before he is a soldier.”

“He is a hero,” Grace insisted.

“As, I am sure, all husbands are to their wives,” Lord William said placidly, then looked
up at the deck beams as a double blow shook the ship. A wave heaved up the stern, making him
reach out a hand to steady himself. Feet scraped on the deck above, where the ship’s first
wounded were going under the surgeon’s knife. Then a particularly loud crash, sounding
very close by, made Lady Grace cry aloud. There was the ominous sound of gushing water that
stopped abruptly as the carpenter, finding the hole in the ship’s water line, hammered a
shaped plug into the shot hole. Lady Grace wondered how far beneath the water line they
were. Five feet? Captain Chase had been certain that no shot could penetrate the lady hole,
explaining that the sea water slowed the cannon balls instantly, but the terrible
sounds suggested that every part of the Pucelle could be wounded. The ship’s pumps
clattered, though once the Pucelle opened fire the men would be too busy at the guns to
bother with the pumps. The ship was full of noises: the creaking of the mast roots in the
hold, the gurgle of water, the sucking gulps of the pump, the groan-ings of strained
timbers, the shriek of the rudder on its metal hangings, the banging of the enemy guns
and the tearing crashes of the shots striking home. Lady Grace, assaulted by the
cacophony, had one hand at her mouth and the other clasped to her belly where she carried
Sharpe’s child.

“We are entirely safe here,” Lord William calmed his wife. “Captain Chase assures me
that no one dies beneath the water line. Though when I come to think of it, my dear, poor
Braithwaite did just that.” Lord William put his hands together in mock piety. “He was
killed beneath the water line,” he intoned.

“He fell,” Lady Grace said.

“Did he?” Lord William asked, his tone suggesting how much he was enjoying this
discussion. A thunderous blow shook the ship, then something scraped quick and hard
against the hull. Lord William settled himself more comfortably. “I must confess I have
wondered whether he did indeed fall.”

“How else could he have died?” Grace asked.

“And what a cogent question that is, my dear.” Lord William pretended to think about it
for a while. “Of course, a quite different construction could be placed on the
unfortunate man’s death if we were to discover that he was particularly disliked by
anyone aboard. Like you? You told me he was odious.”

“He was,” Lady Grace said bitterly.

“But I do not think you could have killed him,” Lord William said with a smile. “Perhaps he
had other enemies? Enemies who could make his death appear an accident? Odysseus, in the
unlikely event that he could ever have encountered young Braithwaite, would surely have
had no trouble disguising such a murder?”

“He fell,” Lady Grace insisted tiredly.

“And yet, and yet,” Lord William said, frowning in thought. “I confess I did not much like
Braithwaite. His pathetic ambition was too naked for my tastes. He lacked subtlety and
could not disguise his ridiculous envy of privilege. Once in England I should have been
forced to relinquish his services, but he must have had a higher opinion of me than I of
him, for he chose to confide in me.”

Lady Grace watched her husband. The swaying lanterns made the shadows either side of
his body shift ominously. A cannon ball thumped into the lower deck above them and the
ship’s ribs carried the harsh sound down into the lady hole, but for once Lady Grace did
not flinch at the noise. She was scratching at a shred of oakum with her right hand, trying
to imagine how it felt to a small child in a cold foundling home.

“Perhaps he did not exactly confide in me,” Lord William said pedantically, “for,
naturally, I did not encourage intimacy, yet he did have a premonition of his death.
Do you think, perhaps, he was possessed of some prophetic powers?”