Sharpe's Trafalgar (38 page)

To go into that kind of fighting needed a rage, or a madness or a desperation. Some
men never found those qualities and they shrank from the danger, and Sharpe could not blame
them, for there was little that was admirable in rage, insanity or despair. Yet they were
the qualities that drove the fight, and they were fueled by a determination to win. Just
that. To beat the bastards down, to prove that the enemy were lesser men. The good soldier
was cock of a blood-soaked dunghill, and Richard Sharpe was good.

His rage went cold in a fight. The fear might harass him before the fighting began, and
for two blunt pins he might have found an excuse not to cross the trembling mast bridge that
would drop him into a crowd of the enemy, but once there he fought with a precision that
was lethal. It seemed to him that the very passage of time slowed, so that he could see
clearly what every enemy intended. A man to his right was drawing back a pike, so that
threat could be ignored because it would take at least a heartbeat for the pike to come
forward, and meanwhile a bearded man in front was already swinging down a cutlass and
Sharpe twisted the point of his own blade into that man’s throat, then whipped the cutlass
to his right, parrying the pike thrust, though Sharpe himself was looking to his left. He
saw no imminent danger, looked back to the right, flicked the blade up into the pikeman’s
face, looked front again, then shoulder charged the pikeman, driving him back so that he
fell against a cannon and Sharpe could raise the cutlass and, with both hands, drive it down
into the man’s belly. The point stuck in the gun’s timber carriage and Sharpe wasted a
second wrenching it free. British seamen pounded past him, forcing the French another
two or three paces back down their deck, and Sharpe climbed the cannon and jumped down its
other side. A Frenchman tried to surrender to him there, but Sharpe dared not leave a man
in his rear so he slashed at the Frenchman’s wrist so he could not use the axe he had dropped,
then kicked him in the groin before climbing the next cannon. The spaces between the
cannon served as refuges for the French and Sharpe wanted to break them out and drive them
onto the pikes and blades of the boarders.

Captain Chase’s barge crew had followed him aft, fighting their own battle toward 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-barreled 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 halfheartedly 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 companion-way. “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
smelled 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 tricolor,
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 gray 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 toward 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 toward 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 gray 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 toward 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, bolstering 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
eastward, 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 toward 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.”