Sharpe 3-Book Collection 3: Sharpe's Trafalgar, Sharpe's Prey, Sharpe's Rifles (35 page)

‘We won’t be swimming in it, sir.’

A topsail shivered as a high shot slashed through. The ships ahead of the
Pucelle
were taking a more serious pounding, but the
Pucelle
was drawing closer and closer, heaved by the big swells and wafted by the ghosting wind, and every second took her nearer to the guns and soon, Chase knew, he would be under a much heavier cannonade, and just as he thought that so a heavy round shot struck the starboard cathead and whirled a wicked splinter of oak across the forecastle. Chase was suddenly aware that his fingers were drumming nervously against his right thigh and so he forced his hand to be still. His father, who had fought the French thirty years before, would have been appalled by these tactics. In Chase’s father’s day the ships of the line edged together, broadside to broadside, taking exquisite care never to expose their vulnerable bows and sterns to a raking, but this British fleet went bullheaded at the enemy. Chase wondered whether his father’s memorial stone had been delivered from the masons, and whether it had been placed in the church choir, and then he touched the prayer book in his pocket. ‘Hear us and save us,’ he said under his breath, ‘that we perish not.’

‘Amen.’ Haskell had overheard him. ‘Amen.’

Sharpe climbed back to the forecastle where he found the marines crouching by the hammock netting and the carronade crews squatting behind their barrels. Sergeant Armstrong was standing by the foremast, scowling at the enemy line which suddenly seemed much nearer. Sharpe looked to his right and saw the
Royal Sovereign
had reached the enemy line. Her crew had hauled the fallen studdingsails inboard and her guns were at last firing as the vast ship pierced the enemy’s formation. A ripple of filthy smoke was travelling from her bows to her stern as she emptied her larboard broadside into the stern of a Spanish ship and her starboard guns into the bows of a Frenchman. One of the
Royal Sovereign
’s topmasts had fallen, but she had broken the enemy line and now she would be swallowed into their fleet. The next ship in Collingwood’s column, the two-decked
Belleisle
, was still a long way behind which meant the
Royal Sovereign
must fight the enemy single-handed until help arrived.

A slap overhead made Sharpe look up to see that a hole had been punched through the
Pucelle
’s foresail. The ball had then pierced all the lower sails, one after the other, before vanishing astern. Another crash, close to his feet, made him spin round. ‘Low on the bows, sir,’ Armstrong said. ‘They hit the cathead earlier.’ That would have been the first crash Sharpe had heard and he saw that the starboard cathead, a stout timber that jutted from the bows and from which the anchor was lowered and raised, was gouged almost halfway through.

His heart was thumping, his mouth was dry and a muscle twitched in his left cheek. He tried clamping his jaws shut to still the muscle, but it kept quivering. A shot landed close by the
Pucelle
’s bows and spattered water back over the beak and forecastle. The sprit-topsail yard under the reaching bowsprit twitched, one end flying into the air, then fell, broken, to hang close to the sea. This was worse than Assaye, Sharpe reckoned, for at least on land a soldier had the illusion that he could step left or right and so try to avoid the enemy’s shot, but here a man could only stand as the ship crawled towards the enemy line which was a row of massive batteries, each ship carrying more artillery than had marched with Sir Arthur Wellesley’s army. Sharpe could see the cannon balls looking like short pencil lines that flickered in the sky, and each pencil line meant a ball was coming more or less straight towards the
Pucelle
. A dozen enemy were firing at Nelson’s ships now. Another hole appeared in the
Pucelle
’s foresail, a studdingsail boom was shot away, a crash sounded close to the larboard water line and another enemy shot bounced across the swells to leave a trail of foam close on the starboard side. An odd whistling sound, almost a moan, but with a curious sharp rhythm, came from near the ship, then went silent. ‘Chain shot, sir,’ Sergeant Armstrong said. ‘Sounds like the devil’s wings beating, it does.’

The
Royal Sovereign
had vanished, her position marked only by a vast cloud of smoke out of which the rigging and sails of a half-dozen ships stood against the cloudy sky. The noise of that battle was a continuous thunder, while the sound from the ships ahead of the
Pucelle
was of gun after gun, close together, unending, as the French and Spanish crews took this chance of firing at an enemy who could not fire back. Two shots struck the
Pucelle
close to the water line, another ricocheted from her larboard flank, gouging a splinter as long as a boarding pike, a fourth struck the mainmast and broke apart one of the newly painted hoops, a fifth screamed past the forward starboard carronade, decapitated a marine, threw two others back in a spray of blood, then whipped overboard to leave a trail of red droplets glistening in the suddenly warm air.

‘Throw him overboard!’ Armstrong screamed at his marines who appeared paralysed by their comrade’s sudden death. Two of them took hold of the decapitated body and carried it to the rail beside the carronade, but before they could heave it overboard Armstrong told them to take the man’s ammunition. ‘And see what’s in his pockets, lads! Didn’t your bloody mothers teach you to waste not and want not?’ The sergeant paced across the deck, picked up the severed head by its bloody hair and dropped it over the side. ‘Are they kicking?’ He looked at the two men who lay like rag dolls in the sheet of blood that covered a quarter of the deck.

‘Mackay’s dead, Sergeant.’

‘Then get rid of him!’

The third marine had lost an arm and the shot had also opened his chest so that his ribs showed in a jelly-like mass of torn muscle and blood. ‘He won’t live,’ Armstrong said, stooping over the man, who was blinking through a mask of blood and breathing in juddering gasps. A round shot scattered the hammock netting, turned the quarterdeck rail to splinters and punched out through the stern without doing any injury to the crew. Another broke a topsail yard just as two shots banged through the weather deck to leave the ship’s waist strewn with timber scraps. A round shot banged into one of the lower-deck guns, throwing the three-ton barrel clean off its carriage, crushing two gunners and filling the ship with a sound like a vast hammer striking a giant anvil.

The enemy ships ahead were shrouded in smoke, but because the small wind was blowing from the west, that smoke was shredding through their rigging and sails like a bank of fog drifting before a sea breeze, yet the fog was fed continually and Sharpe could see the pulses of fresh grey, white and black smoke, and he could also see the dark brightness of the cannon flames appear like evanescent spear-heads in the fog. The flames would stab, momentarily lighting the interior of the smoke bank, then vanish and the fog flowed over the enemy decks and the shots whipped out to thump into the
Victory
and the
Temeraire
and the
Neptune
and the
Leviathan
and the
Conqueror
and the
Pucelle
, and after those ships there was a gap before the lumbering three-decked
Britannia
which was still not under fire.

‘Heave him over!’ Armstrong commanded two of his men, gesturing at the third marine who had died. The man’s arm, its torn tendons, flesh and muscle trailing like wet offal from the red sleeve, lay forgotten under the small structure that held the ship’s bell and Sharpe picked it up, carried it to the larboard rail and hurled it into the sea. He could hear men singing from a gundeck below. One of the marines was kneeling in prayer, ‘Mary, Mother of God,’ he said over and over again, crossing himself. Clouter spat a wad of chewed tobacco over the gunwale, then cut himself another plug. The carronade’s thirty-two-pound balls, each as large as a man’s head, were stored on a grating.

Sharpe went back to stand beside the foremast and suddenly remembered he had forgotten to load either of his weapons, and was grateful for the lapse, for it gave him something to do. He bit open the cartridge and saw a body being thrown off the
Conqueror
’s quarterdeck. He primed the musket as a round shot went close enough to his head to punch his scalp with the wind of its passing. The shot hit nothing, threading the
Pucelle
’s rigging to splash far aft. Three hammering blows in quick succession shuddered the ship’s timber as balls ploughed through the twin layers of oak that formed her hull. Seamen scrambled up the ratlines to reeve broken lines. The mainsail had six great holes in it now, and shook as a seventh appeared. Chase was standing at the shattered quarterdeck rail, appearing as calm as though he were sailing the
Pucelle
into an empty inland sea. Sharpe rammed the musket and, between his feet, there appeared a trickle of blood, spilling from the flood released by the shot that had killed the three marines. The trickle looked very red against the white of the scrubbed timber. When the ship tilted slightly to larboard the trickle veered to the left, when the stern was raised by a following sea the trickle dashed ahead and when the bows raised to the swell it hesitated, then the red rivulet slid to the right as the ship leaned to starboard, and Sharpe scrubbed the trickle into oblivion with his foot, then pushed the ramrod back into its hoops. He loaded the pistol. A shot hit the foremast, making the rigging shake; a silver-painted splinter whirled into the sea as Joan of Arc was struck on her belly. The guns were loud enough to hurt Sharpe’s eardrums. There was blood on the weather deck where a ricocheting round shot had struck a crew and the air was filled with a shrieking, whistling, tearing noise that was chain shot and bar shot whipping through the masts to slice lines and rip sails. A rending crash sounded as a heavy shot tore up the poop deck and Sharpe could see Captain Llewellyn dragging a body towards the stern rail. Another thump from below, a second, a third, then screams made a shrill descant to the battering noise of the enemy guns. The enemy ships ahead were still in clumps, and where they were close together they looked like islands of guns. Or islands of smoke speared by gun-flames. Another gouging, tearing noise erupted from the starboard side and Sharpe leaned over to see a bright splinter of timber jutting from a band of black-painted hull. A body appeared in a gunport and was pushed overboard. A second body followed. The insides of the gunports were painted red and one of them was hanging from a single hinge until a man tore it away and let it drop.

A ball gouged through the wet blood on the forecastle, bounced up to tear a gap in the forecastle’s after rail and punched through the lower edge of the mainsail. Three of the studdingsails were now hanging from the yards and Chase’s seamen were trying to haul them inboard. A bar shot, two lumps of iron joined by a short iron rod, banged into the foremast close to the deck and stuck there, driven deep into the wood by the force of the impact. The
Victory
was close to the smoke cloud now, but she seemed to Sharpe to be sailing straight into a wall of smoke, flame and noise. The
Royal Sovereign
was lost in cloud, surrounded by the enemy, fighting desperately as the limp wind brought help so slowly. A portion of the forward rail of the forecastle suddenly vanished into splinters, sawdust and whirling slivers of wood. A marine fell backwards, struck through the lungs by one of the splinters. ‘Hodgkinson! Take him below!’ Armstrong shouted.

Another marine had an arm torn open by a splinter, but though his sleeve was soaked with blood and more blood dripped from his wrist, he refused to go. ‘Ain’t but a scratch, Sergeant.’

‘Move your fingers, boy.’ The man obediently wriggled his fingers. ‘You can pull a trigger,’ Armstrong allowed. ‘But bind it up, bind it up! You ain’t got nothing to do for the next few minutes, so bind it up. Don’t want you dripping blood on a nice clean deck.’

A shot whipped out the timberhead which held the fore staysail sheets. Another struck the ship’s beakhead, whistling a shred of wood high into the air, then a tearing, ripping, rustling sound made Sharpe look up to see that the
Pucelle
’s main topgallant mast, the slenderest and highest portion of the mainmast, was falling to bring down a tangle of rigging and the main topgallant sail with it. Heavy wooden blocks thumped on the deck. Some ships had rigged a net across the quarterdeck to save heads from being stove in by such accidental missiles, but Chase did not like such ‘
sauve-têtes
’, for, he claimed, they protected the officers on the quarterdeck while leaving the men forrard unprotected. ‘We must all endure the same risks,’ he had told Haskell when the first lieutenant had suggested the netting, though it seemed to Sharpe that the officers on the quarterdeck ran more risk than most for they were made distinctive to the enemy by their unprotected position and by the brightness of their gold-encrusted uniforms. Still, Sharpe supposed, they were paid more so they must risk more. A staysail halliard parted and the sail drifted down to drag in the sea until a rush of seamen went forrard along the bowsprit to pull it in and attach a new halliard. One, two, three more strikes on the hull, each making the
Pucelle
tremble, and Sharpe wondered how the enemy could even see to aim their guns for the powder smoke lay so thickly along their hulls. The seamen chanted as they raised the staysail again.

More sail-handlers were up the mainmast trying to secure the wreckage of the topgallant mast. The mainsail had at least a dozen holes in it now. The ships ahead of the
Pucelle
were similarly wounded. Masts were shattered, yards broken, sails hung in folds, but enough canvas remained to drive them slowly onwards. Three bodies floated beside the
Pucelle
, heaved overboard from the
Temeraire
or
Conqueror
. Splashes whipped up from the sea all about the leading ships.

‘There goes His Majesty!’ Armstrong called. The sergeant was evidently confused about Nelson’s true rank and exempted the admiral from all dislike, regarding him as an honorary Northumbrian who was now taking his flagship into the enemy’s line, and Sharpe heard the sound of her broadsides and saw the flames flickering down her starboard flank as she crashed three decks of double-shotted guns into the bows of one of the French ships that had been tormenting her for so long. The Frenchman’s foremast, all of it, right down to the deck, swayed left and right, then toppled slowly. The
Victory
’s guns would have recoiled inboard and men would be swabbing and reloading, ramming and heaving, breathing smoke and dust, and slipping on fresh blood as they hauled the guns out.