Sharpe's Trafalgar (34 page)

“I know nothing of him,” Grace said distantly.

“I almost feel sorry for him,” Lord William said, “for he lived in fear.”

“A sea voyage can engender nervousness,” Lady Grace said.

“So much fear,” Lord William went on, blithely ignoring his wife’s words, “that before
he died he left a sealed letter among my papers. ‘To be opened,’ the letter said, ‘in the
event of my death.’ “ He sneered. “Such a very dramatic ascription, wouldn’t you say? So
dramatic that I hesitated to obey it, for I expected it to contain nothing more than
his pathetic resentments and self-justifications. Indeed, I was so aghast at the
thought of hearing from Braithwaite beyond the grave that I very nearly threw the letter
overboard, but a Christian sense of duty made me pay him attention, and I confess he did
not write uninterestingly.” Lord William smiled at his wife, then delicately took the
folded paper from between the pages of his Odyssey. “Here, my dear, is young Braithwaite’s
legacy to our connubial happiness. Please read it, for I have been so looking forward to
your construal of its contents.” He held the letter toward her and though Lady Grace
hesitated, her heart sinking, she knew she must obey. It was either that or listen as her
husband read the letter aloud and so, without a word, she took the paper.

Her husband closed his hand about the hilt of his pistol.

The Pucelle’s bowsprit tore the jib boom from the Spanish ship. And Lady Grace read her
doom.

The stern of the French ship was so close that Sharpe felt he could have reached out and
touched it. Her name was written in golden letters placed on a black band between two sets
of the stern’s lavishly gilded windows. Neptune. The British had a Neptune in the fight,
a three-decked ship with ninety-eight guns, while this Neptune was a two-decker, though
Sharpe had the impression she was bigger than the Pucelle. Her stern was a foot or more
higher than the Pucelle’s forecastle and it was lined with French marines armed with
muskets. Their bullets banged on the deck or buried themselves in the hammock nettings.
Just beneath the enemy’s gun smoke a shield was carved into the taffrail. The shield was
surmounted by an eagle and on either side of the crest were sheaves of wooden flags, all
of them, like the shield itself, painted with the French tricolor, but the paint had
weathered and Sharpe could see faded gold traces of the old royalist fleur-de-lys
beneath the red, white and blue. He fired his musket, obliterating the view with smoke,
then Clouter, who had deliberately waited until his carronade could fire directly down
the center line of the French Neptune, pulled the lanyard.

It was the first of the Pucelle’s guns to fire, and it shrieked back on its carriage in a
cloud of black smoke. The French marines vanished, shredded to a bloody mist by the cask of
musket balls that had been loaded on top of the massive round shot that shattered the
painted shield and then struck the Neptune’s mizzenmast with a crack that was drowned by the
first guns firing from the Pucelle’s lower decks.

These guns were double-shotted and each had a bundle of grape rammed on top of the twin
cannon balls, and they were being fired straight into the Frenchman’s stern windows. The
glass panes and their frames disappeared as the heavy missiles whipped down the lengths of
the Neptune’s two gundecks. Cannon barrels were hurled from their carriages, men were
eviscerated, and still the shots came, gun after gun, as the Pucelle slowly, so slowly,
traveling at an old man’s walking pace, inched past the stern to bring the successive
larboard gunports to bear.

The guns on the starboard side were firing into the Spaniard’s bow, breaking the heavy
timber apart to send their murderous shots down her gun-decks. The Pucelle was dishing
out slaughter and the smoke billowed from her sides, starting at the bows and working down
to her stern.

The Neptune’s mizzenmast went overboard. Sharpe heard the screams of the marksmen in her
rigging, watched them fall, then rammed a new ball down his musket. The starboard
carronade, loaded like Clouter’s with musket balls and a vast round shot, had swept the
Spaniard’s forecastle clean of men. Blood dripped from the forecastle scuppers while the
figurehead of the monk with a cross had been turned into matchwood. A big crucifix was
fastened to the Spanish ship’s mizzenmast, but when Chase’s stern carronades blasted down
the smaller ship’s length the hanging Christ’s left arm was torn away and then his legs were
broken.

The Pucelle had ripped away a part of the Frenchman’s ensign, while the rest was in the
water with the fallen mizzenmast. Chase wanted to turn his ship to larboard and lay her
alongside the Neptune and batter her hull into bloody ruin, but the smaller Spanish ship
rammed the Pucelle and inadvertently turned her to starboard. There was a tearing,
grating, grinding sound as the two hulls juddered together, then the Spanish captain,
fearing he would be boarded, backed his topsails and the smaller ship fell away astern. Her
starboard gunports had been closed, but now a few opened as the surviving gunners crossed
from larboard. The guns fired into the Pucelle. Captain Llewellyn’s marines were firing up
into the Spanish rigging. Smoke obscured the smaller ship. Chase thought about putting his
helm hard down and closing on her, but he was already past and so he shouted at the
quartermaster to turn the ship north toward the caldron of fire and smoke that
surrounded the Victory. The flagship’s hull could not be seen amidst that stinking fog,
but, judging from the masts, Chase reckoned there was a Frenchman on either side of her.
“Pull in the studdingsails,” he ordered. The sails, which projected either side of the
ship, were only useful in a following wind and now the Pucelle would turn to place the
small wind on her larboard flank. The sail-handlers streamed out along the yards. One,
struck by a musket ball, collapsed over the mainyard, then fell to leave a long trail of
blood down the mainsail.

The French Neptune was slowed by her trailing mizzenmast. Her crew slashed at the fallen
rigging with axes, trying to lose the broken mast overboard. The Pucelle was off her
quarter now and Chase’s larboard gunners had reloaded and poured shot after shot into the
Frenchman, firing through the lingering smoke of their first broadside. The noise of the
guns filled the sky, made the sea quiver, shook the ship. Clouter had reloaded the larboard
carronade, a slow job, but there was no target close and he would not waste the giant shot
on the Neptune which had at last released the wreckage of its mast and was drawing away. He
rammed another cask of musket balls into the short barrel, then waited for another
target to come within the short gun’s range.

But the Pucelle was suddenly in a patch of open sea with no enemy near. She had pierced
the line, but the Neptune had gone north while the Spaniard had disappeared in smoke astern
and there were no ships in front except for an enemy frigate that was a quarter-mile off
and ships of the line did not stoop to fight frigates when there were battleships to engage.
A long line of French and Spanish battleships was coming from the south, but none was in
close range and so Chase continued toward the churning smoke, lit by gunflashes, that
marked where Nelson’s beleaguered flagship lay. There was honor to be gained in
defeating a flagship and the Victory, like the Royal Sovereign, was drawing enemy ships
like flies. Four other British ships were in action close to the Victory, but the enemy
had seven or eight, and no more help would arrive for a time because the Britannia was
such a slow sailor. The French Neptune looked to be going to join that melee, and so Chase
followed. The sail-handlers, short numbered because so many were manning the guns,
sheeted home the sails as the Pucelle swung around. The sea was littered with floating
wreckage. Two bodies drifted past. A seagull perched on one, sometimes pecking at the
man’s face which had been torn open by gunfire and washed white by the sea.

The Pucelle’s wounded were carried below and the dead jettisoned. The cannon barrel
that had been thrown off its carriage was lashed tight so that it would not shift with the
ship’s rolling and crush a man. Lieutenants redistributed gunners among the crews, making
up the numbers where too many had died or been injured. Chase stared aft at the Spanish
ship. “I should have laid alongside her,” he told Haskeli ruefully.

“There’ll be others, sir.”

“By God I want a prize today!” Chase said.

“Plenty to go around, sir.”

The nearest enemy ship now was a two-decker that was laid alongside the bigger
Victory. Chase could see the smoke of the Victory’s guns spewing out from the narrow
space between the two ships and he imagined the horror in the Frenchman’s lower decks as
the three tiers of British guns mangled men and timber, but he also saw that the French
upper decks were crowded. The French captain appeared to have abandoned his gundecks
altogether and assembled his whole crew on the forecastle, open weather deck and
quarterdeck where they were armed with muskets, pikes, axes and cutlasses. “They want to
board Victory]” Chase exclaimed, pointing.

“By God, sir, so they do.”

Chase could not see the French ship’s name, for the powder smoke curled around her stern,
but her captain was plainly a bold man, for he was willing to lose his own ship if,
thereby, he could capture Nelson’s flagship. His seamen had grappled the bigger
Victory and dragged her close, his gunners had closed their ports and seized their
cutlasses and now the French sought a way across to Nelson’s deck. The Victory was higher
than the Frenchman, and the two ships’ tumblehomes meant that even when their hulls were
touching, the rails were still thirty or more feet apart. The Victory’s guns were pounding
the Frenchman’s hull, while the French ship had scores of men in the rigging, and those men
were pouring a lethal musket fire down onto the flagship’s exposed decks. They had almost
cleared those decks, so that now the British fought from their lower decks while the French
sought a way to cross to the flagship’s virtually unguarded upper decks. The French
captain planned to pour hundreds of men onto the Victory. He would make his name, be an
admiral by nightfall and carry Nelson as a prisoner back to Cadiz.

Chase had climbed a few feet up the mizzen shrouds to see what was happening, and what he
saw appalled him. He could not see the admiral, or Captain Hardy. A few red-coated
marines crouched under the cover of the carronades and put up a feeble fire to counter the
lashing musketry that still ripped down from the French masts, while on the Victory’s
farther side another enemy ship fired into her hull.

Chase dropped down the rigging. “Starboard a point,” he said to the helmsman, then took a
speaking trumpet from the shattered rail. “Clouter! Have you got musket balls loaded?”

“Full of them, sir!”

The enemy ship was a hundred yards away. The Victory’s cannon fire was ripping upward
through her decks now as Hardy’s gunners elevated their barrels as high as they could.
Holes were being punched high in the French two-decker’s starboard side as round shot,
fired into the ship’s larboard flank, hammered clean through her. Yet the British gunners
were firing blind and the boarders were gathering on the side nearest the Victory where
the British guns could not reach. The French captain shouted at his men to drop the
mainyard, for that would serve as their bridge to glory. His rigging was tangled with the
Victory’s rigging, but his was filled with men and the Victory’s was empty. The sound of
the muskets crackled like thorn burning. The Victory’s guns made deep booms. Wood
splintered from the French deck and side as the shots punched out.

Fifty yards to go. The wind was foully light. The sea was covered in patches of smoke
like breaking fog. The swells heaved the Pucelle eastward. “Larboard a point, John,” Chase
said to the quartermaster, “larboard. Take me by his quarter.” The smoke at the French
ship’s stern thinned and Chase saw the name of the two-decker which threatened to board the
Victory. The Redouiable. Death to the Redoutable, he thought, and just then the French
seamen released the Redoutable’s main-yard halliards and the great spar dropped to crash
onto the Victory’s shattered hammock netting. It lay like a canvas-wrapped log across
the Redoutable’s waist, but its larboard end jutted out over the Victory’s weather deck.
It was a slender bridge, but it was sufficient for the French.

“A I’abordage!” the French captain shouted. He was a small man with a very loud voice. He
had his sword drawn. “A I’abordage!”

His men cheered as they swarmed up the yard. The Pucelle lifted on a wave.

“Now!” Chase shouted to the forecastle. “Now, Clouter, now!”

And Clouter hesitated.

His lordship should know, Malachi Braithwaite had written in a careful copperplate
hand, that his wife was conducting an adulterous affair with Ensign Sharpe. He had
overheard the two of them in Sharpe’s quarters aboard the Calliope and, painful though it
was to relate, the-sounds emanating—that was the word he used, emanating—from the cabin
suggested that her ladyship had quite forgotten her high station. Braithwaite had
written in a cheap ink, a faded brown that had bled into the damp paper, and was hard to
read in the dim lady hole. At first, the confidential secretary related, he had not
believed the evidence of his own ears, and scarce even dared credit it when he had glimpsed
the Lady Grace leaving the lower-deck steerage in the darkness before dawn, so he had
thought it his duty to confront Sharpe with his suspicions. “But when I taxed Ensign
Sharpe with my accusations,” he wrote, “and upbraided him for taking advantage of her
ladyship, he did not deny the circumstances, but instead threatened me with murder.”
Braithwaite had underlined the word “murder.” “It was that circumstance, my lord, which
constrained my cowardly tongue from its bounden duty.” It gave him no pleasure,
Braithwaite concluded the letter, to inform his lordship of these shameful events,
especially as his lordship had ever shown him such excessive kindnesses.

Lady Grace let the letter fall into her lap. “He lies,” she said, “he lies.” There were
tears in her eyes.

The lady hole was suddenly filled with noise. The Pucelle’s own guns had started to
fire and the shock of the cannon reverberated through the ship, shaking the twin
lanterns. The noise went on and on, becoming louder as the firing drew nearer to the stern
of the ship. Then there was a terrible crash as the Spanish ship’s bows collided with the
Pucelle’s side, followed by a groaning screech as tons of wood ground and scraped against
the hull. A man shouted, a gun fired, then three more. The sound of the reloaded guns being
hauled forward was like bursts of brief thunder.

Then there was an odd silence.

“He did lie,” Lord William said placidly in the silence, and reached over to take the
letter from his wife’s lap. Grace made an effort to snatch it back, but Lord William was too
quick. “Of course Braithwaite lied,” his lordship went on. “It must have provided him with
an exquisite pleasure to tell me of your disgusting behavior. One detects his enjoyment
throughout the letter, don’t you think? And I certainly did him no excessive
kindnesses! The thought is as ludicrous as it is offensive.”

“He lies!” Lady Grace said more defiantly. A tear quivered at her eye, then rolled down
her cheek.

“Showed him excessive kindnesses!” Lord William said scathingly. “Why would I do such a
thing? I paid him a small salary commensurate with his services, and that was all.” Lord
William carefully pocketed the folded letter. “One circumstance did puzzle me,
though,” he went on. “Why did he confront Sharpe? Why not come straight to me? I have thought
about that, and still it puzzles me. What was the point of seeing Sharpe? What did
Braithwaite expect of him?”

Lady Grace said nothing. The rudder squealed in its pintles, and an enemy shot struck
the Pucelle with a deep booming sound, then there was silence again.

“Then I remembered,” Lord William went on, “that Sharpe deposited some valuables with
that wretched man Cromwell. I thought it an odd circumstance, for the man is palpably poor,
but I suppose he could have plundered some wealth in India. Could Braithwaite have been
attempting blackmail? What do you think?”

Lady Grace shook her head, not in answer to her husband’s question, but as if to shake
off the whole subject.

“Or perhaps Braithwaite tried to blackmail you?” Lord William suggested, smiling at
his wife. “He used to watch you with such a pathetically yearning face. It amused me, for
it was plain what he was thinking.”

“I hated him!” Lady Grace blurted out.

“An extravagant waste of emotion, my dear,” Lord William said. “He was an insignificant
thing, scarce worth disliking. But, and this is the point of our conversation, was he
telling the truth?”

“No!” Lady Grace wailed.

Lord William lifted the pistol and examined its lock in the lantern light. “I noted,”
he said, “how your spirits revived after we boarded the Calliope. I was pleased,
naturally, for you have been over-nervous in these last months, but once aboard Cromwell’s
ship you seemed positively happy. And indeed, in these last few days, there has been a
vivacity in you that is most unnatural. Are you pregnant?”

“No,” Lady Grace lied.

“Your maid tells me you vomit most mornings?”

Grace shook her head again. Tears were running down her cheeks. Partly she cried from
shame. When she was with Sharpe it seemed so natural, so comforting and exciting, but she
could not plead that in her defense. He was a common soldier, an orphan from the London
rookeries, and Grace knew that if society ever learned of her liaison then she would
become a laughing stock. A part of her did not care if she was mocked, another part cringed
under the lash of Lord William’s scorn. Grace was deep in a ship, down among the rats,
lost.

Lord William watched her tears and thought of them as the first trickles of his revenge,
then he looked up at the planks of the orlop deck and frowned. “It’s oddly silent,” he said,
trying to keep her off balance by momentarily talking of the battle before torturing
her with his sharp tongue once more. “Perhaps we have run away from the fighting?” He could
hear the grumbling of some distant gunnery, but no cannons were being fired close to the
Pucelle. “I remember,” he said, laying the pistol on his knees, “when we first met and my
uncle suggested I should marry you. I had my doubts, of course. Your father is a wastrel
and your mother a garrulous fool, but you possess, Grace, a classical beauty and I
confess I was drawn to it. I was concerned that you boasted an education, though it has
proved scantier than you think, and I feared you might possess opinions, which I rightly
suspected would be foolish, but I was prepared to endure those afflictions. I believed,
you see, that my apprehension of your beauty would overcome my distaste for your
intellectual pretensions, and in return I asked very little of you, save that you gave
me an heir and upheld the dignity of my name. You failed in both things.”

“I gave you an heir,” Grace protested through her tears.

“That sickly whelp?” Lord William spat, then shuddered. “It is your other failure that
concerns me now, my dear. Your failure of taste, of behavior, of decency, of
fidelity”—he paused, seeking the right insult—”of manners!”

“Braithwaite lied!” Grace screamed. “He lied.”

“He did not lie,” Lord William said angrily. “You, my lady, made the beast with two backs
with that common soldier, that lump of ignorance, that brute.” His voice was cold now, for
he could no longer hide his long-cosseted rage. “You fornicated with a peasant, and you
could not have sunk lower had you put yourself on the streets and lifted your skirts.”

Lady Grace rested her head on the planking. Her mouth was open, gasping for breath and
the tears were dripping onto her cloak. Her eyes were red, unseeing, as she wept.

“And now you look so ugly,” Lord William said, “which will make this much easier.” He
lifted the pistol.

And the ship echoed again to the sound of a shot.

Clouter did not pull the carronade’s flintlock lanyard when Chase ordered him to fire.
He waited. It seemed to Sharpe, and to everyone else who watched, that Clouter was waiting
too long and that the French would reach the Victory’s weather deck, but the Pucelle had
heaved up on a swell and Clouter was waiting for thd ship to roll to larboard on the back of
the wave. She did, and on that down roll Clouter fired and the shot was perfectly timed so
that its barrelful of musket balls and round shot slashed into the Frenchmen clambering
up the spar that would have carried them onto the Victory’s unprotected deck. One
moment there was a boarding party, the next there was a butcher’s yard. The fallen yard
and sail were drenched with blood, but the Frenchmen had disappeared, snatched into
oblivion by the storm of metal.

The Puerile now plided oast the Redoutable’s quarter. She was a pistol shot away and the
big guns of Chase’s larboard broadside began to work on the devastated enemy. Chase had
ordered the gunners to raise their barrels so that the shots cracked through the
Frenchman’s side and tore their way upward through the deck which was thronged with men. Shot
after shot spat from the Pucelle in a fire that was deliberate, slow and lethal. Men were
lifted from the enemy deck, snatched upward by the round shot. Some shots passed through the
Redoutable to strike the Victory’s weather-deck rail. It took more than a minute for the
Pucelle to pass the doomed French ship, and for all of that minute the guns ripped into her,
and then it was the turn of the quarterdeck carronades that could look down on the bloody
mess left on the enemy deck and the two smashers finished the work, emptying their squat
barrels into the squirming mass.

The Redoutable had no cannons manned. The French captain had I gambled everything on
boarding the Victory, and his boarders were now dead, wounded or dazed, but the ship’s
rigging was still filled with the marksmen who had emptied the upper decks of Nelson’s
flagship and those men had turned their muskets onto the Pucelle. The balls rained down,
smacking on the quarterdeck like metal hail. Grenades were hurled, exploding in gouts of
smoke and whistling shards of glass and iron.

The Pucelle’s marines did their best, but they were outnumbered. Sharpe fired up into
the dazzling light, then hurriedly reloaded. The deck about his feet was being pockmarked
with bullet strikes. A ball clanged off Clouter’s empty carronade and struck a man in the
thigh. A marine reeled back from the rail, his mouth opening and closing. Another, pierced
through the throat, knelt by the foremast and gazed wide-eyed at Sharpe. “Spit, boy!” Sharpe
shouted at him. “Spit!”

The man looked vacantly at Sharpe, frowned, then obediently spat. There was no blood in
the spittle. “You’ll live,” Sharpe told him. “Get yourself below.” A bullet hit a mast
hoop, scraping away fresh yellow paint. Sergeant Armstrong fired his musket, swore as a
bullet drilled his left foot, limped to the rail, picked up another musket and fired again.
Sharpe rammed his bullet, primed the gun, lifted it to his shoulder and aimed at the knot of
men on the Frenchman’s maintop. He pulled the trigger. He could see musket flashes up
there. A grenade landed on the forecastle and exploded in a sheet of flame. Armstrong,
wounded by shards of glass, smothered the flames with a bucket of sand, then began to
reload. Blood was trickling from the scuppers of the Redoutable’s weather deck, trickling
under the shattered rail and dribbling red across her closed gunports. The Pucelle’s
foremost guns, reloaded, fired into the Frenchman’s bows and there was a crack like the
gates of hell being shut as the vast anchor was struck by a round shot. More round shot from
the Victory was breaking out of the enemy’s side and some struck the Pucelle. A dozen more
muskets fired from the enemy’s maintop and Sergeant Armstrong was on his knees, cursing,
but still reloading. More muskets flickered from the enemy’s mast and Sharpe threw down his
musket and picked up Sergeant Armstrong’s volley gun. He looked up at the enemy maintop
and reckoned it was too far away and that the seven bullets would spread too wide before
they reached the platform that was built where the Frenchman’s lower mast was jointed to
the upper.

He went to the starboard rail, slung the big gun on his shoulder and pulled himself up
the foremast shrouds. He could see a marine lying on the Pucelle’s quarterdeck with a
rivulet of blood seeping from his body along the planks. Another marine was being carried
to the rails. He could not see Chase, but then a bullet struck the shroud above him, making
the tarred rope tremble like a harp string and he climbed desperately, his ears buffeted
by the sound of the big guns. Another bullet whipped close by, a second struck the mast
and, bereft of force, thumped against the volley gun’s stock. He reached the futtock shrouds
and, without thinking, hurled himself upward and outward, the quickest way to the
maintop. There was no time to be frightened; instead he scrambled up the ratlines as
nimbly as any sailor and then rolled onto the grating to find that he was now level with
the Frenchmen in their maintop. There were a dozen men there, most reloading, but one fired
and Sharpe felt the wind of the ball whipping past his cheek. He unslung the volley gun,
cocked and aimed it.

“Bastards,” he said, and pulled the trigger. The recoil of the gun hurled him back
against the topmast shrouds. The volley gun’s smoke filled the sky, but no shots came from
the Frenchman’s maintop. Sharpe slung the empty gun on his shoulder and lowered himself
off the grating. His feet flailed for a heartbeat, then found the inward-sloping futtock
shrouds and he went back down to the Pucelle’s deck and, when he looked back up, all he could
see at the Redoutable’s maintop was a body hanging off the edge. He threw the volley gun
down, picked up a musket and walked to the larboard rail.

A dozen marines were left. The others were dead or wounded. Sergeant Armstrong, his face
bleeding from three cuts and his trousers a deep red from a bullet wound, was sitting with
his back against the foremast. He had a musket at his shoulder and, though his right eye was
closed by blood, he did his best to aim the musket, then fired. “You should go below,
Sergeant!” Sharpe shouted.

Armstrong gave a monosyllabic opinion of that advice and pulled a cartridge from his
pouch. A bullet had grazed Clouter’s back leaving a bloody welt like the stroke of a lash,
but the big man was paying it no heed. He was stuffing another cask of musket balls into
the carronade, though by now the Pucelle had gone beyond the Redoutable and the Frenchman
was out of Clouter’s range.