Sharpe's Trafalgar (36 page)

The Pucelle shuddered as the Revenant slammed into her side. The force of the
collision, broadside to broadside, two thousand tons meeting two thousand tons, drove
the two ships apart again, but Chase shouted at the few remaining men on his top decks to
throw the grapnels and make the Revenant fast. The hooks flew into the enemy’s rigging, but
the enemy had the same idea and her crew was also hurling grappling hooks, while seamen in
the Frenchman’s rigging were tying the Pucelle’s lower yards to their own. To the death,
then. Neither ship could escape now, they could only kill each other. The rails of the two
ships were thirty feet apart because their lower hulls bulged out so greatly, but Chase was
close enough to see Montmorin’s expression and the Frenchman, seeing Chase, took off his
hat and bowed. Chase did the same. Chase wanted to laugh and Montmorin was smiling, both men
struck by the oddity of such courtesies even as they did their best to kill each other.
Beneath their silver-buckled feet the great guns gouged and hammered. Chase wished he had
an orange to throw to Montmorin who, he was sure, would appreciate the gesture, but he
could not see Collier.

Chase did not know it, but his presence on the deck was directly useful, for the French
marksmen in the fighting tops were obsessed by his death and so ignored the carronade
crews which, seeing French seamen gather in the Revenant’s waist, fired down into the mass.
The Frenchmen had been snatching boarding pikes from their racks about the mainmast, while
others held axes or cutlasses, but one carronade forward and one aft provided a
tangling crossfire that destroyed the boarding party. The French had no carronades,
relying on the men in their fighting tops to clear an enemy’s deck with musket fire.

Ten marines were left on the Pucelle’s forecastle. Sergeant Armstrong, bleeding to
death, still sat by the foremast and clumsily fired his musket up into the enemy
rigging. Clouter, his black torso streaked and spattered by other men’s blood, had taken
command of the starboard carronade after half its crew was killed by a grenade thrown from
the Revenant’s foremast. Sharpe was firing up into the maintop, hoping his bullets would
gouge through its timbers to kill the French marksmen perched on the platform. The wind
seemed to have died completely so that the sails and flags hung limp. Powder smoke
thickened between the ships, rising to hide and protect the Pucelle’s bullet-lashed
deck. Sharpe was deaf now, his ears buffeted by the big guns and his world shrunken to this
small patch of bloody deck and the smoke-wreathed enemy rigging soaring above him. His
shoulder was bruised by the musket so that he flinched every time he fired. An orange
rolled across the deck at his feet, its skin dimpling the blood on the planks. He brought the
musket’s brass-bound stock hard down on the orange, squashing and bursting the fruit, then
stooped and scooped up some of the pulped flesh. He ate some, grateful for the juice in his
parched mouth, then scooped some more which he put into Armstrong’s mouth. The sergeant’s
unbloodied eye was glassy, he was scarce conscious, but he was still trying to reload his
musket. He coughed hoarsely, mingling bloody spittle with the orange juice that trickled
down his chin. “We are winning, aren’t we?” he asked Sharpe earnestly.

“We’re murdering the bastards, Sergeant.”

The dead lay where they fell now, for there were not enough men to throw them overboard, or
rather the men who remained were too busy fighting. The worst of that fight was below decks
where the two ships, matched gun to gun, mangled each other. The lower deck was dark now,
for the Revenant blotted out the daylight on the starboard side and the larboard gunports
were closed. Smoke filled the low deck, curling under beams splashed with blood from the
Revenant’s first raking broadside. Now the Frenchman’s shots broke open the hull, screamed
across the deck and crashed out to leave patches of newly created daylight where they
holed the larboard side. Thick dust and thicker smoke drifted in the shafts of light. The
Pucelle’s guns returned the fire, roaring back on their breeching ropes to fill the deck
with thunder. The ships touched here, their gunports almost coinciding so that when a
British gunner tried to swab his cannon a French cutlass half severed his arm, then the
lambs-wool swab on its staff was seized and carried aboard the French ship. The French shots
were heavier, for they carried larger guns, but larger guns took longer to reload and the
British fire was noticeably quicker. Montmorin’s crew was probably the best trained in all
the enemy’s fleet, yet still Chase’s men were faster, but now the enemy tossed grenades
through the open gunports and fired muskets to slow the British guns.

“Fetch marines!” Lieutenant Holderby shouted at a midshipman, then had to go right up
to the boy and cup his hands over the midshipman’s ear. “Fetch marines!” A round shot killed
the lieutenant, spewing his intestines across the gratings where the thirty-two-pound
round shots were stored. The midshipman stayed still for a second, disoriented. Flames
were rising to his left, then a gunner threw sand across the remnants of the grenade and
another tossed a cask of water to douse the fire. Another gunner was crawling on the
deck, vomiting blood. A woman was hauling on a gun tackle, spitting curses at the French
gunners who were only a cutlass length away. A gun recoiled, filling the deck with noise
and breaking its breeching rope so that it slewed around and crushed two men whose shrieks
were lost in the din. Men heaved and rammed, their naked torsos gleaming with sweat that
trickled through the powder residue. They all looked black now, except where they were
spotted or streaked or sheeted with blood. The Revenant’s powder smoke belched into the
Pucelle, choking men who struggled to return the favor.

The midshipman scrambled up the companionway to the weather deck that shook from the
recoil of its twenty-four-pounder guns. Wreckage of the rigging lay across the central
part of the deck which was so thick with smoke that the midshipman climbed to the
forecastle instead of to the quarterdeck. His ears were ringing with the sound of the
guns and his throat was as dry as ash. He saw an officer in a red coat. “You’re wanted
below, sir.”

“What?” Sharpe shouted.

“Marines, sir, needed below.” The boy’s voice was hoarse. “They’re coming through the
gunports, sir. Lower deck.” A bullet smacked into the deck beside his feet, another
ricocheted off the ship’s bell.

“Marines!” Sharpe bellowed. “Pikes! Muskets!”

He led his ten men down the companionway, stepped over the body of a powder monkey who
lay dead though there was not a mark on his young body that Sharpe could see, then down to the
hellish dark and thick gloom of the lower deck. Only half of the starboard cannons were
firing now, and they were being impeded by the French who slashed through the gunports
with cutlasses and pikes. Sharpe fired his musket through a gunport, glimpsed a
Frenchman’s face dissolve into blood, ran to the next and used the butt of the empty
musket to hammer an enemy’s arm. “Simmons!” he shouted at a marine. “Simmons!”

Simmons stared at him, wide-eyed. “Go to the forward magazine,” Sharpe shouted. “Fetch
the grenades!”

Simmons ran, grateful for a chance to be beneath the water line even if only for an
instant. Three of the Pucelle’s heavy guns fired together, their sound almost stunning
Sharpe, who was going from gunport to gun-port and stabbing at the French with his
cutlass. A huge crash, dreadful in its loudness and so prolonged that it seemed to go on
forever, broke through Sharpe’s deafened ears and he reckoned a mast had gone overboard,
though whether it was another of the Pucelle’s or one of the Revenant’s he could not tell.
He saw a Frenchman ramming a cannon, half leaning out of the opposing gunport, and he
skewered the man’s arm with the cutlass. The Frenchman sprang back and Sharpe skipped aside
for he could see the gunner holding the linstock to the touch-hole. Sharpe registered
that the French did not use flintlocks, was surprised to have noticed such a thing in
battle, then the gun fired and the rammer, left in the barrel, disintegrated as it was
driven across the Pucelle’s deck. A midshipman fired a pistol into an enemy gunport. A
flintlock sparked and the sound of the heavy gun pounded Sharpe’s ears. Some of the men had
lost the scarves they had tied about their heads and their ears dribbled blood. Others had
bleeding noses caused by nothing more than the sound of the guns.

Simmons reappeared with the grenades and Sharpe took a linstock from one of the
remaining water barrels, lit its fuse, then waited until the vagaries of the ocean
swells brought a French gunport into view. The fuse sputtered. He could see the Revenant’s
yellow planking, then the opposing ship ground against the Pucelle’s hull and a gunport
came into sight and he hurled the glass ball into the Revenant. He dimly heard an
explosion, saw flames illuminate the black smoke filling the enemy’s gundeck, then he
left Simmons to throw the other grenades while he went back down the deck, stepping past
bodies, avoiding the gunners, checking each gunport to make sure no more Frenchmen were
trying to reach through with cutlass or pike. The big capstan in the middle of the deck,
used to haul the ship’s anchor cables, had an enemy round shot buried in its wooden heart.
Blood dripped from the deck above. A gun, crammed with grapeshot, recoiled across his path and
Frenchmen screamed.

Then another scream pierced Sharpe’s ringing ears. It came from above, from the weather
deck that was slick with so much blood that the sand no longer gave men a secure footing.
“Repel boarders! Repel boarders!”

“Marines!” Sharpe shouted at his few men, though none heard him in the noise, but he
reckoned some might follow if they saw him climb the companionway. He could hear steel
striking steel. No time to think, just time to fight.

He climbed.

Lord William frowned at the sound of the carronade, then flinched as the Pucelle’s
larboard broadside began to fire, the sound rolling down the ship to fill the lady hole
with thunder. “I perceive we are still in action,” he said, lowering the pistol. He
began to laugh. “It was worth pointing a gun at your head, my dear, just to see your
expression. But was it remorse or fear that actuated your misery?” He paused. “Come! I
wish an answer.”

“Fear,” Lady Grace gasped.

“Yet I should like to hear you express remorse, if only as evidence that you possess
some finer feelings. Do you?” He waited. The guns fired, the sound becoming louder as the
nearer cannon recoiled two decks above their refuge.

“If you had any feelings,” Grace said, “any courage, you would be on deck sharing the
dangers.”

Lord William found that very amusing. “What a strange idea you do have of my
capabilities. What can I do that would be useful to Chase? My talents, dearest, lie in
the contrivance of policy and, dare I say, its administration. The report I am writing
will have a profound influence on the future of India and, therefore, on the prospects of
Britain. I confidently expect to join the government within a year. Within five years I
might be Prime Minister. Am I to risk that future just to strut on a deck with a pack of
mindless fools who believe a brawl at sea will change the world?” He shrugged and looked up
at the lady hole’s ceiling. “Toward the end of the fight, my dear, I shall show myself, but
I have no intention of running any unnecessary or extraordinary risks. Let Nelson
have his glory today, but in five years I shall dispose of him as I wish and, believe me,
no adulterer will gain honor from me. You know he is an adulterer?”

“All England knows.”

“All Europe,” Lord William corrected her. “The man is incapable of discretion and you
too, my dear, have been indiscreet.” The Pucelle’s broadside had stopped and the ship
seemed silent. Lord William looked up at the deck as if he expected the noise to begin
again, but the guns were quiet. Water gurgled at the stern. The ship’s pumps began again.
“I might not have minded,” Lord William went on, “had you been discreet. No man wishes to be
a cuckold, but it is one thing for a wife to take a genteel lover and quite another to lie
down with the servant classes. Were you mad? That would be a charitable excuse, but the
world does not see you as mad, so your action reflects upon me. You chose to rut with an
animal, a lump, and I suspect he has made you pregnant. You disgust me.” He shuddered.
“Every man on the ship must have known you were rutting. They thought I did not know, they
sneered at me, and you went on like a tuppenny whore.”

Lady Grace said nothing. She stared up at one of the lanterns. Its candle was
guttering, spewing a dribble of smoke that escaped through the lantern’s ventilation
holes. She was red-eyed, exhausted from crying, incapable of fighting back.

“I should have known all this when I married you,” Lord William said. “One hopes, one does
so hope, that a wife will prove a woman of fidelity, of prudence and quiet good sense, but
why should I have expected it? Women have ever been slaves to their grosser appetites.
“‘Frailty,’“ he quoted, “‘thy name is woman!’”

“The feeble sex, and by God how true that is! I found it hard to credit Braithwaite’s
letter at first, but the more I thought about it, the more true it rang, and so I observed
you and found, to my disappointment, that he did not lie. You were rutting with Sharpe,
wallowing in his sweat.”

“Be quiet!” she pleaded with him.

“Why should I be quiet?” he asked in a reasonable voice. “I, my dear, am the offended
party. You had your moment’s filthy pleasure with a mindless brute, why should I not have
my moment of pleasure now? I have earned it, have I not?” He raised the pistol again, just
as the whole ship shook with a terrible blow, then another, blows so loud that Lord William
instinctively ducked his head, and still the blows went on, rending the ship and crashing
through the decks and making the Pucelle shudder. Lord William, his anger momentarily
displaced by fear, stared up at the deck as if expecting the ship to fall apart. The
lanterns quivered, noise filled the universe and the guns kept firing.