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 grey, white and black smoke, and he could also see the dark brightness of the cannon flames appear like evanescent spear-heads 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 the lapse, for it gave him something to do. He bit open the cartridge and 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 ploughed 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, appearing 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 towards 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 gap 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 backwards, 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-têtes’, 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 onwards. 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 wer
e 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 ploughed 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 round 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 towards 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 beauty of tensioned masts and spread sails above painted hulls. They crept towards 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 mizzenmast, 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.’
A buzz whipped past Sharpe’s ear and he thought it was an insect, then he saw a small splinter fly out of the deck and knew that it was musket fire coming from the rigging of the ships ahead. He willed himself to stand still. The Spanish ship that had been straight ahead had gone into smoke and there was a Frenchman there instead, and close behind her was another ship, though whether she was French or Spanish Sharpe could not tell, for her ensign was hidden by the mass of her undamaged sails. The sails looked dirty. She was a two-decker, smaller than the Pucelle, and her figurehead showed a monk with an uplifted hand holding a cross. A Spaniard, then. Sharpe looked for the Revenant, but could not see her. Chase seemed to be aiming across the smaller Spaniard’s bows, taking the Pucelle through the shrinking gap between her and the Frenchman ahead, while the Spaniard was trying to cut the Pucelle off, trying to lay his smaller ship right across her bows and he was so close to the Frenchman that his jib boom, the outer part of his bowsprit, almost touched the French mizzen. French guns poured round shot into the Pucelle’s hull. Musket balls pattered on the sails. The French rigging was spotted with powder smoke, her hull was sheathed in it.
Chase gauged the gap. He could haul the ship round and take on the French ship broadside to broadside, but his orders were to pass through the line, though the gap was narrowing dangerously. If he misjudged, and if the Spaniard succeeded in laying his hull athwart the Pucelle’s bows then the Dons would seize his bowsprit, lash it to their own ship and hold him there while they raked, pounded and turned his ship into bloody splinters. Haskell recognized the danger and turned on Chase with a raised eyebrow. A musket ball struck the deck between them, then a round shot splintered the edge of the poop deck just above Chase before scattering the flag lockers built against the taffrail so that the Pucelle suddenly trailed a bright stream of gaudy flags. A musket bullet buried itself in the wheel, another broke the binnacle lantern. Chase stared at the shrinking gap and felt the temptation to head across the Spaniard’s stern, but he would be damned if he let the Spanish captain dictate his battle. ‘Stand on!’ he said to the quartermaster. ‘Stand on!’ He would tear the bowsprit clean out of the Spaniard’s hull before he gave way. ‘The gun crews will stand up, Mister Haskell!’ Chase said.
Haskell shouted down to the weather deck. ‘Stand up! Stand up! Stand to your guns!’
Midshipmen and lieutenants repeated the order to the lower deck. ‘Stand up! Stand up!’ Men gathered round their guns, peered through the open ports, eyed the ragged holes that had already been punched in the hull’s double-planked oak timbers. The cannons’ flintlocks were cocked and the gunners crouched to the side, lanyards held ready.
A marine cursed and staggered on the forecastle as a musket bullet drove down through his shoulder into his belly. ‘Make your own way to the surgeon,’ Armstrong told him, ‘and don’t make a fuss.’ He stared up at the Frenchman’s mizzenmast where a knot of men were firing muskets down onto the Pucelle. ‘Time to teach those bastards some manners,’ he growled. The Pucelle’s bowsprit, ragged with its broken yard, pushed into the gap between the two ships. The gunners below decks could not yet see the enemy, but they knew they were close for the smoke of the enemy guns lay across the sea like mist, then thickened as the enemy fired again, though now the Pucelle was so close that they were firing at the ships behind her.
‘Push on through!’ Chase shouted at his ship. ‘Push on through!’
For now was the glorious moment of revenge. Now was the moment when, if the Pucelle could force her passage, she would carry her broadsides within feet of an unprotected enemy stern and an unprotected enemy bow. Then, having taken the punishment for so long, she could rake two ships at once, ripping blood and bone and timber with her own fire-driven metal. ‘Make the shots tell!’ Chase called. ‘Make them tell!’
Make the bastards bleed, he thought vengefully. Make the bastards sorry they had ever been born and damn them to a fiery hell for the damage they had already done to his ship. There was a ripping, splintering sound as the Pucelle’s bowsprit tangled with the Spanish bowsprit, but then the Spaniard’s jib boom broke off altogether and the Pucelle’s shot-battered bows were in the gap, her broken sprit topsail yard was ripping the French ensign, and the first of her guns could bear. ‘Now kill them!’ Chase shouted, relief flooding through him because at la
st he could fight back. ‘Now kill them!’
Lord William Hale had refused to allow his wife’s maid to take refuge in the lady hole, peremptorily telling the girl to find a place further forward in the Pucelle’s hold. ‘It is bad enough,’ he told his wife, ‘that we are forced to this place, let alone that we should share it with servants.’
The lady hole was the aftermost corner of the Pucelle’s hold, a triangular space made where the hull supported the rudder. Its forward bulkhead was formed by the shelves where the officers’ empty dunnage was stored and where Malachi Braithwaite had sought the memorandum on the day of his death, and the floor of the hole was made by the steeply sloping sides of the ship, and though Captain Chase had ordered that a patch of old sailcloth be placed in the hole to provide a rudimentary comfort, Lord William and Lady Grace were still forced to perch uncomfortably against the plank slopes beneath the small hatch that led to the gunroom on the orlop deck above. It was in the gunroom that the cannons’ flintlocks were usually stored and where the ship’s small weapons could be repaired. It was empty now, though the surgeon might use it as a place to put the dying.
Lord William had insisted on having two lanterns which he hung from rusting hooks in the lady hole’s ceiling. He drew his pistol and lay it on his lap, using it as a prop for the spine of a book he drew from his coat pocket. ‘I am reading the Odyssey,’ he told his wife. ‘I thought I should have the leisure for much reading on this voyage, but time has flown. Have you found the same?’
‘I have,’ she said dully. The sound of the enemy guns was very muted down below the water line.
Bernard Cornwell Box Set: Sharpe's Triumph , Sharpe's Tiger , Sharpe's Fortress Page 28