Sharpe's Trafalgar

by Bernard Cornwell

  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.”

  “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.”

  “We all did well,” Chase said. “Haskell died, did you know? Poor Haskell. He so wanted to be a captain. He was married last year. Only last year, just before we left for India.” Chase looked as weary as Montmorin, but when he looked up he saw his old red ensign hoisted above the French tricolor on the Revenant’s foremast, the only mast left to the French ship. The white ensign flew from the Pucelle’s mainmast and its white cloth was smeared with Haskell’s blood. “We didn’t let him down, did we?” Chase said, tears in his eyes. “Nelson, I mean. I could not have lived with myself had I let him down.”

  “You did him proud, sir.”

  “We had some help from the Spartiate. What a good fellow Francis Lavory is! I do hope he’s taken a prize for himself.” A wind lifted the ensigns and dragged the thinning smoke fast across the sea. The long swells were rippling with wind while white foam splashed about the floating wreckage that littered the sea. There were only a dozen ships in sight which still retained their masts and rigging intact, but Nelson had started the day with twenty-eight ships and now there were forty-six in his fleet, and the rest of the enemy had fled. “We must look for Vaillard,” Chase said, suddenly remembering the Frenchman.

  “He’s dead, sir.”

  “Dead?” Chase shrugged. “Best thing, I suppose.” The wind filled the ragged sails of the two ships. “My God,” Chase said, “there’s wind at last, and not just a little, I fear. We must be about our work.” He gazed at the Pucelle. “Doesn’t she look battered? Poor dear thing. Mister Collier! You survive!”

  “I’m alive, sir,” Harold Collier said with a grin. He had his sword still drawn, its blade smeared with blood.

  “You can probably sheathe the sword, Harry,” Chase said gently.

  “Scabbard was hit, sir,” Collier said, and lifted the scabbard to show where a musket ball had bent it.

  “You did well, Mister Collier,” Chase said, “and now you’ll muster men to separate the ships.”

  “Aye aye, sir.”

  Montmorin was taken aboard the Pucelle, but the rest of his crew were imprisoned below the Revenant’s decks. The wind was moaning in the torn rigging now, and the sea was breaking into whitecaps. A midshipman and twenty men were put aboard the captured Revenant as a prize crew, then the two ships were cut apart. A tow line had been rigged from the Pucelle’s stern so that her prize could be towed to port. Lieutenant Peel had a score of men laying new cables to the Pucelle’s remaining masts, trying to brace them against the promised storm. The gunports were closed, the flintlocks dismounted from the cannons’ breeches, and the guns lashed up. The galley fires were relit and their first job was to heat great vats of vinegar with which the bloody decks would be scoured, for it was believed that only hot vinegar could draw blood from timber. Sharpe, back on board the Pucelle, found some oranges in the scupper and ate one, filling his pockets with the others.

  The dead were jettisoned. Splash after splash. Men moved slowly, bone weary from an afternoon of blood and thirst and fighting, but the fall of night and the rising wind brought the worst news of the day. A boat from the Conqueror pulled past and an officer shouted the news up to Chase’s shattered quarterdeck. Nelson had died, the officer said, struck down by a musket ball on the Victory’s deck. The Pucelle’s seamen scarcely dared believe the news, and Sharpe first heard of it when he saw Chase weeping. “Are you hurt, sir?” he asked.

  Chase looked utterly bereft, like a man defeated instead of a captain with a rich prize. “The admiral’s dead, Sharpe,” Chase said. “He’s dead.”

  “Nelson?” Sharpe asked. “Nelson?”

  “Dead!” Chase said. “Oh, good God, why?”

  Sharpe just felt an emptiness inside. The whole crew looked stricken, as if a friend, not a commander, had died. Nelson was dead. Some did not believe it, but the commander-in-chief’s flag flying above the Royal Sovereign confirmed that Collingwood now commanded the victorious fleet. And if Collingwood commanded then Nelson was dead. Chase wept for him, cuffing away his tears only when the last body was thrown overboard.

  There was no ceremony for that final corpse, but then no one who had died that day had received any ceremony. The corpse was brought to the quarterdeck and, in the deepening dusk, thrown into the sea. It seemed cold suddenly. The wind had a cutting edge and Sharpe shivered. Chase watched the body float away on the waves, then shook his head in puzzlement. “He must have decided to join the fight,” Chase said. “Can you credit it?”

  “Every man was expected to do his duty, sir,” Sharpe said stolidly.

  “So they were, and so they did, but no one expected him to fight or to fetch a bullet in the head. Poor fellow. He was braver than I ever thought. Does his wife know?”

  “I shall tell her, sir.”

  “Would you?” Chase asked. “Yes, of course you will. No one better, but I’m grateful to you, Richard, grateful.” He turned to watch the fleet, its stern lanterns already lit, struggling under half sail in the rising wind. Only the Victory was dark, with not a single light showing. “Oh, poor Nelson,” Chase lamented, “poor England.”

  Sharpe, as soon as he was back aboard the Pucelle, had gone down to the cockpit which was as fetid and bloody as the one on the Revenant. Pickering had been sawing at a man’s thigh bone, sweat dripping from his face into the mangled flesh. The patient, a leather pad between his teeth, was twitching as the blunt saw grated on bone. Two seamen held him down, and neither they nor the surgeon had noticed Sharpe go through to the gunroom where he lifted the lady-hole hatch to see blood spattered on its underside. Lord William lay sprawled in the narrow space, his skull gaping bloodily where the pistol bullet had exited. Grace had been huddled with her arms about her knees, shaking, and she half screamed as the hatch was opened, then she shuddered with relief when she saw it was Sharpe. “Richard? It is you?” She was crying again. “They’re going to hang me, Richard. They’re going to hang me, but I had to shoot him. He was going to kill me. I had to shoot him.”

  Sharpe had dropped down into the lady hole. “They ain’t going to hang you, my lady,” he said. “He died on deck. That’s what everyone will think. He died on deck.”

  “I had to do it!” she wailed.

  “The Frogs did it.” Sharpe took the pistol from her and shoved it into a pocket, then he put his hands under Lord William’s armpits and heaved him up, trying to push the corpse through the hatch, but the body was awkward in the narrow space.

  “They’ll hang me,” Grace cried.

  Sharpe let the corpse drop, then turned and crouched beside her. “No one will hang you. No one will know. If they find him down here, I’ll say I shot him, but with a little luck I can get him up on deck and everyone will think the Frogs did it.”

  She put her arms around his neck. “You’re safe. Oh, God, you’re safe. What happened?”

  “We won,” Sharpe said. “We won.” He kissed her, then held her tight for an instant before he went back to struggle with the corpse. If Lord William was found here, no one would believe he had been killed by the enemy and Chase would be honor bound to hold an inquiry into the death, so the body had to be taken up above the orlop deck, but the hatch was narrow and Sharpe could not get the corpse through, but then a hand reached down and took hold of Lord William’s bloody collar and heaved him effortlessly upward.

  Sharpe had cursed under his breath. He cursed because someone else now knew that Lord William had been shot in the lady hole, and when he had clambered up into the dimly lit gunroom he found it was Clouter who, one-handed, was proving as able as most men with two hands. “I saw you come down here, sir,” Clouter said, “and was going to give you these.” He had held out Sharpe’s jewels,
all of them, and Major Dalton’s watch, and Sharpe had taken them and then tried to return some of the emeralds and diamonds to Clouter.

  “I did nothing,” the big man protested.

  “You saved my life, Clouter,” Sharpe said and folded the big black fingers around the stones, “and now you’re going to save it again. Can you get that bastard up on deck?”

  Clouter grinned. “Up where he died, sir?” he asked and Sharpe scarce dared believe that Clouter had so quickly understood the problem and its solution. He just stared at the tall black man who grinned again. “You should have shot the bastard weeks ago, sir, but the Frogs did it for you and there ain’t a man aboard who won’t say the same.” He stooped and hauled the corpse onto his shoulder as Sharpe helped Lady Grace up through the hatch. He told her to wait while he went with Clouter to the quarterdeck and there, in the gathering dusk and rising wind, Lord William had been heaved overboard.

  No one had taken any notice of the body being carried through the ship, for what was one more corpse being brought up from the surgeon’s knife? “He was braver than I thought,” Chase had said.

  Sharpe went back to the cockpit where Lady Grace stared white-faced and wide-eyed as Pickering tied off blood vessels, then sewed the flap of skin over the newly made stump. Sharpe took her arm and led her into one of the midshipmen’s tiny cabins at the rear of the cockpit. He closed the door, though that hardly gave them privacy for the doors were made of wooden slats through which anyone could have seen them, but no one had eyes for the cabin.

  “I want you to know what happened,” Lady Gace said when she was alone with Sharpe in the midshipman’s cabin, but then she could say no more.

  “I know what happened,” Sharpe said.

  “He was going to kill me,” she said.

  “Then you did the right thing,” Sharpe said, “but the rest of the world thinks he died a brave man’s death. They think he went on deck to fight, and he was shot. That’s what Chase thinks, it’s what everybody thinks. Do you understand?”