Sharpe 3-Book Collection 3: Sharpe's Trafalgar, Sharpe's Prey, Sharpe's Rifles (43 page)

Captain Chase’s barge crew had followed him aft, fighting their own battle towards the quarterdeck steps, but Clouter had come late to the fight, for he had been the man who fired the
Pucelle
’s forward starboard carronade down into the mass of defenders just as Chase had led the charge across the mast. The big black man came across the fallen mainmast, leaped to the deck and headed aft, howling to be let through the crowded seamen. Once he was in the front rank he cleared the larboard side of the
Revenant
’s weather deck while Sharpe led the charge along the starboard side. Clouter was using an axe, swinging it one-handed, ignoring the men who tried to surrender, but just cutting them down in an orgy of killing. Men were surrendering now, throwing down axes or swords, holding up their hands or just throwing themselves to the deck where they pretended to be dead. Sharpe slashed a pike aside, cut his blade across a Frenchman’s eyes, then found no one to oppose him, but a musket ball plucked at the hem of his jacket as he turned to look for his marines. ‘Fire at those bastards!’ he shouted, pointing up at the forecastle deck where some of Montmorin’s crew still fought back. One of the marines aimed a seven-barrelled gun, but Sharpe snatched it from him. ‘Use a musket, lad.’

He sheathed the cutlass, forcing the blood-clotted blade into the scabbard’s throat, then ran through the defeated Frenchmen to where the forward companionway led down to the lower deck. The
Revenant
was the
Pucelle
’s sister ship, indeed it felt to Sharpe that he was fighting on the
Pucelle
, so alike were the two vessels. He pushed his way through the enemy, going into the shadow of the forecastle. A gunner half-heartedly rammed a cannon swab at Sharpe, who thumped the volley gun’s butt onto the man’s head, then shouted at the bastards to get out of his way. Marines were following him. Two Frenchmen cowered in their galley where the big iron stove had been torn apart by gunfire. Sharpe could hear the big guns firing below, filling the ship with their thunderous pounding, though whether it was the
Revenant
’s guns that fired or the
Pucelle
’s, he could not tell. He swung down the companionway into the lower deck’s gloom.

He slid down on his backside, landed with a thump and just pointed the volley gun down the lower deck. He pulled the trigger, adding to the smoke that writhed under the beams, then he drew the cutlass. ‘It’s over!’ he shouted. ‘Stop firing! Stop firing!’ He wished he knew French. ‘Stop firing, you bastards! Stop firing! It’s over!’ A gunner, deaf to Sharpe’s shouts, and half blinded by the smoke, pushed a powder-filled reed into a cannon’s touch-hole and Sharpe slashed him with the cutlass. ‘Stop it, I said! Stop firing!’

Two shots from the
Pucelle
hammered through the ship. Sharpe drew his pistol. The nearest French gunners just stared at him. Dozens of dead lay on the deck, some with great wooden splinters jutting from their bodies. The mainmast had a great bite gouged from one side. The deck was scorched where the cannon had exploded. ‘It’s over!’ Sharpe screamed. ‘Get away from that gun. Get away!’ The Frenchmen might not speak English, but they understood the pistol and cutlass well enough. Sharpe went to a gunport. ‘
Pucelle
!
Pucelle
!’

‘Who is it?’ a voice called back.

‘Ensign Sharpe! They’ve stopped firing! Hold your fire! Hold your fire!’

One last cannon belched smoke and flame into the
Revenant
’s belly, then there was silence at last as the big guns ceased. A gunner crawled out of one of the
Pucelle
’s lower gunports and scrambled into the
Revenant
where Sharpe was walking down the deck, stepping over corpses, climbing a fallen cannon, gesturing that the French gunners should kneel or lie down. Three marines followed him, bayonets fixed. ‘Down!’ Sharpe snarled at the wild-eyed, powder-blackened enemy. ‘Down!’ He turned to see more marines and British seamen coming down the companionway. ‘Disarm the bastards,’ he shouted, ‘and get them on deck.’ He stepped over the splintered remains of one of the ship’s pumps. A French officer faced him with a drawn sword, but he took one look at Sharpe’s face and let the blade clatter on the deck. More of the
Pucelle
’s gunners were crawling out of the British ship’s gunports and clambering into the French ports, coming to plunder what they could.

Sharpe crossed a patch of blackened deck where one of his grenades had exploded. The French watched him warily. He pushed a man aside with his cutlass blade, then turned down the aft companionway into the ship’s cockpit which was lit with a dozen lanterns.

He almost wished he had not come down the ladder for here there were scores of men bleeding and dying. This was death’s kingdom, the red-wet belly of the ship, the place where foully wounded men came to face the surgeon and, in all likelihood, eternity. It smelt of blood and excrement and urine and terror. The surgeon, a white-haired man with a beard that was streaked with blood, looked up from the table where, with hands red to the wrists, he was delving into a man’s belly. ‘Get out of here,’ he said in good English.

‘Shut your face,’ Sharpe snarled. ‘I haven’t killed a surgeon yet, but I don’t mind starting with you.’

The surgeon looked startled, but said nothing more as Sharpe walked into the gunroom where an officer and six men lay bandaged on the floor. He forced the cutlass into its scabbard, gently moved one wounded man aside, then seized the ring of the hatch leading into the
Revenant
’s lady hole. He hauled it up and pointed the pistol down into the lantern-lit space.

A man and a woman were there. The woman was Mathilde, and the man was Pohlmann’s so-called servant, the man who claimed to be Swiss, but who was in truth a subtle enemy of Britain. Above Sharpe, up in the smoky daylight, cheers sounded as the
Revenant
’s tricolour, which had been draped over her shattered taffrail, was bundled up and presented to Joel Chase. The ghost had been hunted and the ship was taken. ‘Up,’ Sharpe said to Michel Vaillard. ‘Up!’ They had pursued this man across two oceans and Sharpe felt a livid anger at the betrayal of the
Calliope
.

Michel Vaillard showed empty hands, then peered through the hatch. He blinked, plainly recognizing Sharpe, but unable to place him. Then he remembered exactly who Sharpe was, and in an instant understood that the
Calliope
must have been retaken by the British. ‘It’s you!’ he sounded resentful.

‘It’s me. Now up! Where’s Pohlmann?’

‘On deck?’ Vaillard suggested. He climbed the ladder, dusted his hands, then stooped to help Mathilde climb through the hatch. ‘What happened?’ Vaillard asked Sharpe. ‘How did you get here?’

Sharpe ignored the questions. ‘You will stay here, ma’am,’ Sharpe told Mathilde. ‘There’s a surgeon out there who needs help.’ He pushed Vaillard’s arms aside and plucked back the Frenchman’s coat to see a pistol hilt. He pulled the pistol free and tossed it back into the lady hole. ‘You come with me.’

‘I am merely a servant,’ Vaillard said.

‘You’re a lump of treacherous French shit,’ Sharpe said. ‘Now go!’ He pushed Vaillard in front of him, forcing him up the companionway to the lower deck where the great guns, hot as pots on a stove, now stood abandoned. The French dead and wounded were left, and a dozen British seamen were searching their bodies.

Vaillard refused to go any further, but turned instead to face Sharpe. ‘I am a diplomat, Mister Sharpe,’ he said gravely. His face was clever and his eyes gentle. He was dressed in a grey suit and had a black cravat tied in the lacy collar of his white shirt. He looked calm, clean and confident. ‘You cannot kill me,’ he instructed Sharpe, ‘and you have no right to take me prisoner. I am not a soldier, not a sailor, but an accredited diplomat. You might have won this battle, but in a day or two your admiral will send me into Cadiz because that is how diplomats must be treated.’ He smiled. ‘That is the rule of nations, Ensign. You are a soldier, and you can die, but I am a diplomat and I must live. My life is sacrosanct.’

Sharpe prodded him with the pistol, forcing him aft towards the wardroom. Just as in the
Pucelle
all the bulkheads had been taken down, but the bare deck suddenly gave way to a painted canvas carpet that was smeared with blood, and the beams here were touched with gold paint. The great gallery windows had been shattered by the
Spartiate
’s guns so that not a pane was left and what remained of the elegantly curved window seat was smothered in broken glass. Sharpe pulled open a door on the wardroom’s starboard side and saw that the quarter gallery, which held the officers’ latrine, had been shot clean away by the
Spartiate
’s broadside so that the door opened onto nothing but ocean. Far off, almost hull down, the few enemy ships that had escaped the battle sailed towards the coast of Spain. ‘You want to go to Cadiz?’ Sharpe asked Vaillard.

‘I am a diplomat!’ the Frenchman protested. ‘You must treat me as such!’

‘I’ll treat you as I bloody want,’ Sharpe said. ‘Down here there are no bloody rules, and you’re going to Cadiz.’ He seized Vaillard’s grey coat. The Frenchman struggled, pulling away from the opened door beyond which the remnants of the latrine hung above the sea. Sharpe cracked him across the skull with the pistol barrel, then swung him to the door and shoved him towards the open air. Vaillard clung to the door’s edges with both hands, his face showing as much astonishment as fear. Sharpe smashed the pistol against the Frenchman’s right hand, then kicked him in the belly and slammed the gun against the knuckles of Vaillard’s left hand. The Frenchman let go, shouting a last protest as he fell back into the sea.

A British sailor, his pigtail hanging almost to his waist, had watched the murder. ‘Were you supposed to do that, sir?’

‘He wanted to learn to swim,’ Sharpe said, holstering the pistol.

‘Frogs should be able to swim, sir,’ the seaman said. ‘It’s their nature.’ He stood beside Sharpe and stared down into the water. ‘But he can’t.’

‘So he’s not a very good Frog,’ Sharpe said.

‘Only he looked rich, sir,’ the sailor reproved Sharpe, ‘and we could have searched him before he went swimming.’

‘Sorry,’ Sharpe said, ‘I didn’t think.’

‘And he’s drowning now,’ the sailor said.

Vaillard splashed desperately, but his struggles only drove him under. Had he told the truth about his protected status as a diplomat? Sharpe was not sure, but if Vaillard had spoken the truth then it was better that he should drown here than be released to spread his poison in Paris. ‘Cadiz is that way!’ Sharpe shouted down at the drowning man, pointing eastwards, but Vaillard did not hear him. Vaillard was dying.

Pohlmann was already dead. Sharpe found the Hanoverian on the quarterdeck where he had shared the danger with Montmorin and had been killed early in the battle by a cannon ball that tore his chest apart. The German’s face, curiously untouched by blood, seemed to be smiling. A swell lifted the
Revenant
, rocking Pohlmann’s body. ‘He was a brave man,’ a voice said, and Sharpe looked up to see it was Capitaine Louis Montmorin. Montmorin had yielded the ship to Chase, offering his sword with tears in his eyes, but Chase had refused to take the sword. He had shaken Montmorin’s hand instead, commiserated with the Frenchman and congratulated him on the fighting qualities of his ship and crew.

‘He was a good soldier,’ Sharpe said, looking down into Pohlmann’s face. ‘He just had a bad habit of choosing the wrong side.’

As had Peculiar Cromwell. The
Calliope
’s captain still lived. He looked scared, as well he might, for he faced trial and punishment, but he straightened when he saw Sharpe. He did not look surprised, perhaps because he had already heard of the
Calliope
’s fate. ‘I told Montmorin not to fight,’ he said as Sharpe walked towards him. Cromwell had cut his long hair short, perhaps in an attempt to change his appearance, but there was no mistaking the heavy brows and long jaw. ‘I told him this fight was not our business. Our business was to reach Cadiz, nothing else, but he insisted on fighting.’ He held out a tar-stained hand. ‘I am glad you live, Ensign.’

‘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.’