Sharpe's Trafalgar (32 page)

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 paralyzed 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.

“Markav’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 gray, white and black smoke, and he could also see the dark brightness of
the cannon flames appear like evanescent spearheads 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 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 plowed 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, ? pearing 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 toward 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 pan 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 backward, 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-tetes,” 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 onward. 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.

The Pucelle’s fore topgallant sail collapsed, the chains holding the yard shot through.
The Conqueror was suffering as well. Her studdingsails trailed in the water, though
Pellew’s men were working to drag them inboard. Her fore topmast was bent at an unnatural
angle and there were scars on her painted flank. The British ships, now that their gunports
were opened, were studded with red squares that broke the black and yellow stripes. The air
quivered with the sound of guns, whistled with the passage of shots, and the long Atlantic
swell lifted and drove the slow ships straight into the enemy fire.

Sharpe watched one ship dead ahead. She was a Spaniard and her red and white ensign was so
huge that it almost trailed in the water. A gust of wind freed her of smoke and when she
rolled to a long sea Sharpe could see daylight clean through her gunports, but then she
rolled back and a half-dozen of those gunports stabbed flame. The shots screamed through the
Pucelle’s rigging, shivering the sails and severing lines. The Spaniard’s red and black
hull was hidden by smoke that thickened as more guns fired. A shot plowed into the
forecastle, another struck high on the foremast and a third smacked into the water line
on the larboard side. Sharpe was counting, watching the stern of the Spaniard where the
first guns had fired. One minute passed and the smoke there was thinning. Two minutes, and
still the guns had not fired again. Slow, he thought, slow, but a slow gunner could still
kill. Sharpe could see men with muskets in the enemy rigging. A shot howled overhead and
vanished astern. The Britannia’s bluff bows, bright with the figurehead of Britannia
holding her shield and trident, were suddenly pushing through a curtain of spray where an
enemy round shot had fallen short. The marine still prayed, calling on Christ’s mother to
protect him, making the sign of the cross again and again.

The Victory had almost disappeared in smoke. She was through the enemy line now and
the gun smoke seemed to boil around her, though Sharpe could just see the flagship’s high
gilded stern reflecting a weak daylight through the man-made fog. It seemed to him that
the enemy ships were gathering around Nelson and the sound of their guns was quivering
the sea, rattling Sharpe’s teeth, deafening him. The Temeraire, second in Nelson’s
column, forced her ponderous way through a gap in the enemy line and opened fire, pouring
her broadside into the stern of a Frenchman. Sharpe looked right and saw that the first
ships behind Collingwood’s Royal Sovereign had at last reached the enemy. The sea there
seemed to seethe with steam. A mast toppled into smoke. A huge gap was opening in the
enemy’s line north of where Collingwood had attacked, which showed that the British ships
were snaring and pounding the enemy south of the Royal Sovereign, but the French and
Spanish ships to the north of Collingwood’s flagship just sailed on toward the place where
Nelson’s Victory was setting up a second snare.

Everything happened so slowly. Sharpe found that hard to bear. It was not like a land
battle where the cavalry could pound across the field to leave a plume of dust and horse
artillery slewed about in a spray of earth. This battle was taking place at a lethargic
speed and there was a strange contrast between the stately slow beauty of the full-rigged
ships and the noise of their guns. They went to their deaths so gracefully, in the full
heautv nf tensioned masts and soread sails above oainted hulls. They crept toward death.
The Leviathan and Neptune were in the battle now, piercing the enemy line a little to the
south of the Victory. A shot gouged a furrow through the Pucelle’s forecastle deck,
another struck the mizzen-mast, shaking it, a third hammered the length of the weather
deck, piercing bows and stern and miraculously touching nothing in the flight between.
The men were still crouched between the guns. Chase was standing by the mizzenmast, hands
clasped behind his back. The Pucelle was three ship lengths away from the enemy line and
Chase was choosing the place where he would sail her through. “Starboard a point,” he called,
and the wheel creaked as the quartermaster hauled the spokes. Screams sounded from the
lower deck as an enemy shot punched through the oak and ricocheted from the mainmast to
strike a crouching gun crew. “Steady,” Chase said, “steady.”