Sharpe's Trafalgar

by Bernard Cornwell

  “I hate magistrates,” Sharpe said.

  Panjit’s face betrayed a flicker of a smile. “If you were to let go of my cousin’s hair,” he suggested, “then I think we can all talk business.”

  Sharpe let go of Nana Rao, lowered the flint of the pistol and stepped back. He stood momentarily to attention. “Ensign Sharpe, sir,” he introduced himself to Chase.

  “You are no ensign, Sharpe, but a ministering angel.” Chase climbed the steps with an outstretched hand. Despite the blood on his face he was a good-looking man with a confidence and friendliness that seemed to come from a contented and good-natured character. “You are the deus ex machina, Ensign, as welcome as a whore on a gundeck or a breeze in the horse latitudes.” He spoke lightly, but there was no doubting the fervency of his thanks and, instead of shaking Sharpe’s hand, he embraced him. “Thank you,” he whispered, then stepped back. “Hopper!”

  “Sir?” The huge bosun with the tattooed arms who had been laying enemies left and right before he was overwhelmed stepped forward.

  “Clear the decks, Hopper. Our enemies wish to discuss surrender terms.”

  “Aye aye, sir.”

  “And this is Ensign Sharpe, Hopper, and he is to be treated as a most honored friend.”

  “Aye aye, sir,” Hopper said, grinning.

  “Hopper commands my barge crew,” Chase explained to Sharpe, “and those battered gentlemen are his oarsmen. This night may not go down as one of our greater victories, gentlemen”—Chase was now addressing his bruised and bleeding men—”but a victory it still is, and I thank you.”

  The yard was cleared, chairs were fetched from the house, and terms discussed.

  It had been a guinea, Sharpe thought, exceedingly well spent.

  “I rather liked the fellows,” Chase said.

  “Panjit and Nana Rao? They’re rogues,” Sharpe said. “I liked them too.”

  “Took their defeat like gentlemen!”

  “They got off light, sir,” Sharpe said. “Must have made a fortune on that fire.”

  “Oldest trick in the bag,” Captain Chase said. “There used to be a fellow on the Isle of Dogs who claimed thieves had cleaned out his chandlery on the night before some foreign ship sailed, and the victims always fell for it.” Chase chuckled and Sharpe said nothing. He had known the man Chase spoke of, and had even helped him clear the warehouse one night, but he thought it best to be silent. “But you and I are all right, Sharpe, other than a scratch and a bruise,” Chase went on, “and that’s all that matters, eh?”

  “We’re all right, sir,” Sharpe agreed. The two men, followed by Chase’s barge crew, were walking back through the pungent alleys of Bombay and both were carrying money. Chase had originally contracted with Rao to supply his ship with rum, brandy, wine and tobacco, and now, instead of the two hundred and sixteen guineas he had paid the merchant, he was carrying three hundred, while Sharpe had two hundred rupees, so all in all, Sharpe reckoned, it had been a good evening’s work, especially as Panjit had promised to supply Sharpe with the bed, blankets, bucket, lantern, chest, arrack, tobacco, soap and filter machine, all to be delivered to the Calliope at dawn and at no cost to Sharpe. The two Indians had been eager to placate the Englishmen once they realized that Chase and Sharpe had no intention of telling the rest of the fleeced victims that Nana Rao still lived, and so the merchants had fed their unwanted guests, plied them with arrack, paid the money, sworn eternal friendship and bid them good night. Now Chase and Sharpe groped their way through the dark city.

  “God, this place stinks!” Chase said.

  “You’ve not been here before?” Sharpe asked, surprised.

  “I’ve been five months in India,” Chase said, “but always at sea. Now I’m living ashore for a week, and it stinks. My God, how the place stinks!”

  “No more than London,” Sharpe said, which was true, but here the smells were different. Instead of coal fumes there was bullock-dung smoke and the rich odors of spices and sewage. It was a sweet smell, ripe even, but not unpleasant, and Sharpe was thinking back to when he had first arrived and how he had recoiled from the smell that he now thought homely and even enticing. “I’ll miss it,” he admitted. “I sometimes wish I wasn’t going back to England.”

  “Which ship are you on?”

  “The Calliope.”

  Chase evidently found that amusing. “So what do you make of Peculiar?”

  “Peculiar?” Sharpe asked.

  “Peculiar Cromwell, of course, the Captain.” Chase looked at Sharpe. “Surely you’ve met him!”

  “I haven’t. Never heard of him.”

  “But the convoy must have arrived two months ago,” Chase said.

  “It did.”

  “Then you should have made an effort to see Peculiar. That’s his real name, by the way, Peculiar Cromwell. Odd, eh? He was navy once, most of the East Indiamen captains were navy, but Peculiar resigned because he wanted to become rich. He also believed he should have been made admiral without spending tedious years as a mere captain. He’s an odd soul, but he sails a tidy ship, and a fast one. I can’t believe you didn’t make the effort to meet him.”

  “Why should I?” Sharpe asked.

  “To make sure you get some privileges aboard, of course. Can I assume you’ll be traveling in steerage?”

  “I’m traveling cheap, if that’s what you mean,” Sharpe said. He spoke bitterly, for though he had paid the lowest possible rate, his passage was still costing him one hundred and seven pounds and fifteen shillings. He had thought the army would pay for the voyage, but the army had refused, saying that Sharpe was accepting an invitation to join the 95th Rifles and if the 95th Rifles refused to pay his passage then damn them, damn their badly colored coats, and damn Sharpe. So he had cut one of the precious diamonds from the seam of his red coat and paid for the voyage himself. He still had a king’s ransom in the precious stones that he had taken from the Tippoo Sultan’s body in a dank tunnel at Seringapatam, but he resented using the loot to pay the East India Company. Britain had sent Sharpe to India, and Britain, Sharpe reckoned, should fetch him back.

  “So the clever thing to have done, Sharpe,” Chase said, “would have been to introduce yourself to Peculiar while he was living ashore and given the greedy bugger a present, because then he’d have assigned you to decent Quarters. But if vou haven’t crossed Peculiar’s palm with silver, Sharpe, he’ll like as not have you down in lower steerage with the rats. Maindeck steerage is much better and doesn’t cost a penny more, but the lower steerage is nothing but farts, vomit and misery all the way home.” The two men had left the narrow alleys and were leading the barge crew down a street that was edged with sewage-filled ditches. It was a tin-smithing quarter and the forges were already burning bright as the sound of hammers rattled the night. Pale cows watched the sailors pass and dogs barked frantically, waking the homeless poor who huddled between the ditches and the house walls. “It’s a pity you’re sailing in convoy,” Chase said.

  “Why, sir?”

  “Because a convoy goes at the speed of its slowest boat,” Chase explained. “Calliope could make England in three months if she was allowed to fly, but she’ll have to limp. I wish I was sailing with you. I’d offer you passage myself as thanks for your rescue tonight, but alas, I am ghost-hunting.”

  “Ghost-hunting, sir?”

  “You’ve heard of the Revenant?”

  “No, sir.”

  “The ignorance of you soldiers,” Chase said, amused. “The Revenant, my dear Sharpe, is a French seventy-four that is haunting the Indian Ocean. Hides herself in Mauritius, sallies out to snap up prizes, then scuttles back before we can catch her. I’m here to stifle her ardor, only before I can hunt her I have to scrape the bottom. My ship’s too slow after eight months at sea, so we scour off the barnacles to quicken her up.”

  “I wish you good fortune, sir,” Sharpe said, then frowned. “But what’s that to do with ghosts?” He usually did not like asking such questions. Sharpe had o
nce marched in the ranks of a redcoat battalion, but he had been made into an officer and so found himself in a world where almost every man was educated except himself. He had become accustomed to allowing small mysteries to slide past him, but Sharpe decided he did not mind revealing his ignorance to a man as good-natured as Chase.

  “Revenant is the Frog word for ghost,” Chase said. “Noun, masculine. I had a tutor for these things who flogged the language into me and I’d like to flog it out of him now.” In a nearby yard a cockerel crowed and Chase glanced up at the sky. “Almost dawn,” he said. “Perhaps you’ll permit me to give you breakfast? Then my lads will take you out to the Calliope. God speed your way home, eh?”

  Home. It seemed an odd word to Sharpe, for he did not have a home other than the army and he had not seen England in six years. Six years! Yet he felt no pang of delight at the prospect of sailing to England. He did not think of it as home, indeed he had no idea where home was, but wherever that elusive place lay, he was going there.

  Chase was living ashore while his ship was cleaned of the weed. “We tip her over, scrape her copper-sheathed bum clean when the tide’s low, and float her off,” he explained as servants brought coffee, boiled eggs, bread rolls, ham, cold chicken and a basket of mangoes. “Bum-scrubbing is a damned nuisance. All the guns have to be shipped and half the contents of the hold dragged out, but she’ll sail like a beauty when it’s done. Have more eggs than that, Sharpe! You must be hungry. I am. Like the house? It belongs to my wife’s first cousin. He’s a trader here, though right now he’s up in the hills doing whatever traders do when they’re making themselves rich. It was his steward who alerted me to Nana Rao’s tricks. Sit down, Sharpe, sit down. Eat.”

  They took their breakfast in the shade of a wide verandah that looked out on a small garden, a road and the sea. Chase was gracious, generous and apparently oblivious of the vast gulf that existed between a mere ensign, the lowest of the army’s commissioned ranks, and a post captain who was officially the equivalent of an army colonel, though on board his own ship such a man outranked the very powers of heaven. Sharpe had been conscious of that wide gulf at first, but it had gradually dawned on him that Joel Chase was genuinely good-natured and Sharpe had warmed to the naval officer whose gratitude was unstinting and heartfelt. “Do you realize that bugger Panjit really could have had me in front of the magistrates?” Chase inquired. “Dear God, Sharpe, that would have been a pickle! And Nana Rao would have vanished, and who’d have believed me if I said the dead had come back to life? Do have more ham, please. It would have meant an inquiry at the very least, and almost certainly a court martial. I’d have been damned lucky to have survived with my command intact. But how was I to know he had a private army?”

  “We came out of it all right, sir.”

  “Thanks to you, Sharpe, thanks to you.” Chase shuddered. “My father always said I’d be dead before I was thirty, and I’ve beaten that by five years, but one day I’ll jump into trouble and there’ll be no ensign to pull me out.” He patted the bag which held the money he had taken from Nana Rao and Panjit. “And between you and me, Sharpe, this cash is a windfall. A windfall! D’you think we could grow mangoes in England?”

  “I don’t know, sir.”

  “I shall try. Plant a couple in a warm spot of the garden and who knows?” Chase poured coffee and stretched out his long legs. He was curious why Sharpe, a man in his late twenties, should only be an ensign, but he made the inquiry with an exquisite tact and once he discovered that Sharpe had been promoted from the ranks he was genuine in his admiration. “I once had a captain who’d come up through the hawse-hole,” he told Sharpe, “and he was damned good! Knew his business. Understood what went on in the dark places where most captains dare not look. I reckon the army’s lucky in you, Sharpe.”

  “I’m not sure they think so, sir.”

  “I shall whisper in some ears, Sharpe, though if I don’t catch the Revenant there’ll be precious few who’ll listen to me.”

  “You’ll catch her, sir.”

  “I pray so, but she’s a fast beast. Fast and slippery. All French ships are. God knows, the buggers can’t sail them, but they do know how to build ‘em. French ships are like French women, Sharpe. Beautiful and fast, but hopelessly manned. Have some mustard.” Chase pushed the jar across the table, then petted a skinny black kitten as he stared past the palm trees toward the sea. “I do like coffee,” he said, then pointed out to sea. “There’s the Calliope.”

  Sharpe looked, but all he could see was a mass of shipping far out in the harbor beyond the shallower water which was busy with scores of bumboats, launches and fishing craft.

  “She’s the one drying her topsails,” Chase said, and Sharpe saw that one of the far ships had hung out her topmost sails, but at this distance she looked like the other dozen East Indiamen that would sail home together to protect themselves against the privateers who haunted the Indian Ocean. From the shore they looked like naval ships, for their hulls were banded black and white to suggest that massive broadsides were concealed behind closed gunports, but the ruse would not mislead any privateer. Those ships, their hulls stuffed with the riches of India, were the greatest prizes any corsair or French naval captain could wish to take. If a man wanted to live and die rich then all he needed to do was capture an Indiaman, which is why the great ships sailed in convoy.

  “Where’s your ship, sir?” Sharpe asked.

  “Can’t see her from here,” Chase said. “She’s careened on a mud-bank on the far side of Elephanta Island.”

  “Careened?”

  “Tipped on her side so we can polish her bum.”

  “What’s she called?”

  Chase looked abashed. “Pucelle,” he said.

  “Pucelle? Sounds French.”

  “It is French, Sharpe. It means a virgin.” Chase pretended to be offended as Sharpe laughed. “You’ve heard of la Pucelle d’Orleans?” he asked.

  “No, sir.”

  “The maid of Orleans, Sharpe, was Joan of Arc, and the ship was named for her and I just trust she doesn’t end up like Joan, burned to a crisp.”

  “But why would you name a boat for a Frenchwoman, sir?” Sharpe asked.

  “We didn’t. The Frogs did. She was a French boat till Nelson took her at the Nile. If you capture a ship, Sharpe, you keep the old name unless it’s really obnoxious. Nelson took the Franklin at the Nile, an eighty-gun thing of great beauty, but the navy will be damned if it has a ship named after a traitorous bloody Yankee so we call her the Canopus now. But my ship kept her name, and she’s a lovely beast. Lovely and fast. Oh my God, no.” He sat up straight, staring toward the road. “Oh, God, no!” These last words were prompted by the sight of an open carriage that had slowed and now stopped just beyond the garden gate. Chase, who had been genial until this moment, suddenly looked bitter.

  A man and a woman were seated in the carriage which was driven by an Indian dressed in yellow and black livery. Two native footmen, arrayed in the same livery, now hurried to open the carriage door and unfold the steps, allowing the man, who was dressed in a white linen jacket, to step down to the pavement. A beggar immediately swung on short crutches and calloused stumps toward the carriage, but one of the footmen fended the man off with a sharp kick and the coachman completed the rout with his whip. The white-jacketed man was middle-aged and had a face that reminded Sharpe of Sir Arthur Wellesley. Maybe it was the prominent nose, or perhaps it was the cold and haughty look the man wore. Or perhaps it was just that everything about him, from his carriage to the liveried servants, spoke of privilege.

  “Lord William Hale,” Chase said, investing every syllable with dislike.

  “Never heard of him.”

  “He’s on the Board of Control,” Chase explained, then saw Sharpe’s raised eyebrow. “Six men, Sharpe, who are appointed by the government to make certain that the East India Company doesn’t do anything foolish. Or rather that, if it does, no blame attaches itself to the government.” He lo
oked sourly at Lord William who had paused to speak with the woman in the carriage. “That’s his wife and I’ve just brought the two of them from Calcutta so they could go home on the same convoy as yourself. You should pray they aren’t on the Calliope.”

  Lord William was gray-haired and Sharpe assumed his wife would also be middle-aged, but when she lowered her white parasol Sharpe had a clear view of her ladyship and the breath was checked in his throat. She was much younger than Lord William, and her pale, slender face had a haunting beauty, almost a sadness, that struck Sharpe with the force of a bullet. He stared at her, entranced by her.

  Chase smiled at Sharpe’s smitten expression. “She was born Grace de Laverre Gould, third daughter of the Earl of Selby. She’s twenty years younger than her husband, but just as cold.”

  Sharpe could not take his eyes from her ladyship, for she was truly beautiful; breathtakingly, achingly, untouchably beautiful. Her face was pale as ivory, sharp-shadowed as she leaned toward her husband, and framed by heavy loops of black hair that were pinned to appear artless, but which even Sharpe could tell must have taken her maid an age to arrange. She did not smile, but just gazed solemnly into her husband’s face. “She looks sad rather than cold,” Sharpe said.

  Chase mocked the wistfulness in Sharpe’s voice. “What does she have to be sad about? Her beauty is her fortune, Sharpe, and her husband is as rich as he is ambitious as he is clever. She’s on her way to being wife of the Prime Minister so long as Lord William doesn’t put a foot wrong and, believe me, he steps as lightly as a cat.”

  Lord William concluded the conversation with his wife, then gestured for a footman to open Chase’s gate. “You might have taken a house with a carriage drive,” he admonished the naval captain as he strode up the short path. “It’s devilish annoying being pestered by beggars every time one makes a call.”

  “Alas, my lord, we sailors are so inept on land. I cannot entice your wife to take some coffee?”