Sharpe's Trafalgar (39 page)

“You? Glad I live?” Sharpe almost spat the words into Cromwell’s face. “You, you
bastard!” He seized Cromwell’s blue coat and rammed the man against the splintered gunwale
planking beneath the poop. “Where is it?” he shouted.

“Where’s what?” Cromwell rejoined.

“Don’t bugger me, Peculiar,” Sharpe said. “You bloody well know what I want, now where
the hell is it?”

Cromwell hesitated, then seemed to crumple. “In the hold,” he muttered, “in the hold.”
He winced at the thought of this defeat. He had sold his ship because he believed the French
would rule the world, and now he was in the middle of shattered French hopes. Near a score of
French and Spanish ships had been taken and not a British ship had been lost but Peculiar
Cromwell was lost.

“Clouter!” Sharpe saw the blood-streaked man climbing to the quarterdeck. “Clouter!”

“Sir?”

“What happened to your hand?” Sharpe asked. The tall black man had a blood-soaked rag
twisted about his left hand.

“Cutlass,” Clouter said curtly. “Last man I fought. Took three fingers, sir.”

“I’m sorry.”

“He died,” Clouter said.

“You can hold this?” Sharpe asked, offering Clouter the hilt of his pistol. Clouter
nodded and took the gun. “Take this bastard down to the hold,” Sharpe said, gesturing at
Cromwell. “He’s going to give you some bags of jewels. Bring the stones to me and I’ll give
you some for saving my life. There’s also a watch that belongs to a friend of mine, and I’d
like both those, but if you find anything else, it’s yours.” He pushed Cromwell into the
black man’s embrace. “And if he gives you any trouble, Clouter, kill the bastard!”

“I want him alive, Clouter.” Captain Chase had overheard the last words. “Alive!” Chase
said again, then stood aside to let Cromwell pass. He smiled at Sharpe. “I owe you thanks
again, Richard.”

“No, sir. I have to congratulate you.” Sharpe stared at the two ships, still lashed
together, and saw wreckage and smoke and blood and bodies, and in the wider sea there were
floating hulks and tired ships, but all now were under British flags. This was the image of
victory, splintered and smoke-stained, tired and blood-streaked, but victory. The church
bells would ring in Britain’s villages for this, and then families would anxiously wait to
discover whether their menfolk would come home. “You did well, sir,” Sharpe said, “you did
well.”

“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 tricolor 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 fetid 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 around 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, no one would
believe he had been killed by the enemy and Chase would be honor bound to hold an inquiry
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 upward.

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 around 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 Gace 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.