Bernard Cornwell Box Set: Sharpe's Triumph , Sharpe's Tiger , Sharpe's Fortress

by Bernard Cornwell

  A shot screamed down the weather deck, killing eight sailors and wounding a dozen more. The shot left a spattering trail of blood the whole length of the deck, and the next shot cut Haskell in half, leaving his torso on the starboard rail and his legs hanging from the quarterdeck’s forward rail. Collier, still holding the silk stock, was smothered in Haskell’s blood. The fourth shot shattered the Pucelle’s wheel and impaled the quartermaster on its splintered spokes. Chase leaned on the broken quarterdeck rail. ‘Tiller ropes!’ he shouted. ‘Mister Peel! Tiller ropes! And hard to starboard!’

  ‘Aye aye, sir! Hard to starboard!’

  More shots broke through the stern. The Pucelle was shaking from the impact. Musket bullets cracked on her poop. ‘Walk with me, Mister Collier,’ Chase said, seeing that the boy seemed close to tears, ‘just walk with me.’ He paced up and down the quarterdeck, one hand on Collier’s shoulder. ‘We are being raked, Mister Collier. It is a pity.’ He took the boy under the break of the poop, close to the mangled remains of the wheel and the quartermaster. ‘And you will stay here, Harold Collier, and note the signals. Watch the clock! And keep an eye on me. If I fall you are to find Mister Peel and tell him the ship is his. Do you understand?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Collier tried to sound confident, but his voice was shaking.

  ‘And a word of advice, Mister Collier. When you command a ship of your own, take great care never to be raked.’ Chase patted the midshipman’s shoulder, then walked back into the musket fire that pitted the quarterdeck. The enemy’s cannons still raked the Pucelle, shot after shot demolishing the high windows, throwing down cannon and spraying blood on the deck beams overhead. The remains of the mizzenmast were cut through below the decks and Chase watched appalled as the whole mast slowly toppled, tearing itself out of the poop deck as it collapsed to starboard. It went slowly, the shrouds parting with sounds like pistol shots, and the mainmast swayed as the stay connecting it to the mizzen tightened, then that cable parted and the mizzen creaked, splintered and finally fell. The enemy cheered. Chase leaned over the broken quarterdeck rail to see a dozen men hauling on one of the spare tiller lines that had been rove before the battle. ‘Pull hard, lads!’ he shouted, bellowing to be heard above the sound of the enemy’s guns that still hammered into the Pucelle. A twenty-four-pounder cannon lay on its side, trapping a screaming man. One of the starboard carronades on the quarterdeck had been punched off its carriage. The great white ensign trailed in the water. None of the Pucelle’s guns could answer, nor could they until the ship turned. ‘Pull hard!’ Chase shouted and saw Lieutenant Peel, hatless and sweating, add his weight to the tiller rope. The ship began to turn, but it was the mizzenmast, with its sail and rigging that lay in the water off the Pucelle’s starboard quarter, that did most to drag the ship around. She came slowly, still being punished by the French ship that had sailed out of the mêlée’s smoke.

  She was the Revenant. Chase recognized her, saw Montmorin standing coolly on his quarterdeck, saw the smoke of the Frenchman’s guns sweeping up into her undamaged rigging and heard the terrible sounds of his ship being battered beneath his feet, but at last the Pucelle responded to the drag of the mizzen and the tug of the tiller and Chase’s starboard broadside could begin to respond, though some of his guns had been dismounted and others had dead crews and so his first broadside was feeble. No more than seven guns fired. ‘Close the larboard ports,’ Chase called down the weather deck. ‘All crews to starboard! Lively now!’

  The Pucelle slowly came to life. She had been stunned by her raking, but Chase led a score of seamen up to the poop to cut away the mizzen’s wreckage, and below decks the surviving gunners from the larboard cannon went to make up the crews of the starboard broadside. The Revenant turned to larboard, plainly intending to run alongside the Pucelle. Her forecastle was crowded with men armed with cutlasses and boarding pikes, but the remaining starboard carronade on Chase’s quarterdeck ripped them away. John Hopper, the bosun of Chase’s barge crew, commanded that gun. Chase slashed through a last shroud with a boarding axe, left a petty officer to clear the mess on the poop deck and went back to his quarterdeck as the Revenant crept closer and closer. The Pucelle’s starboard guns were firing properly now, their crews reinforced at last, and the shots were splintering holes in the Revenant’s side, but then the first of the Frenchman’s guns were reloaded and Chase watched their blackened muzzles appear in the gunports. Smoke billowed. He saw the Revenant’s sails quiver to the shock of her guns, felt his own ship tremble as the balls struck home, saw young Collier standing at the starboard rail staring at the approaching enemy. ‘What are you doing here, Mister Collier?’ Chase asked.

  ‘My duty, sir.’

  ‘I told you to watch the clock in the poop, didn’t I?’

  ‘There ain’t no clock, sir. It went.’ The boy, in mute proof, held up the twisted enamel of the clock’s face.

  ‘Then go down to the orlop deck, Mister Collier, and don’t disturb the surgeon, but in his dispensary there is a net of oranges, a gift from Admiral Nelson. Bring them up for the gun crews.’

  ‘Aye aye, sir.’

  Chase looked back and saw the Victory. A signal flew from her rigging and Chase did not need a signal lieutenant to translate the flags. ‘Engage the enemy more closely.’ Well, he was about to do that, and he was engaging a virtually undamaged enemy ship while his own had been grievously hurt, but by God, Chase thought, he would make Nelson proud. Chase did not blame himself for being raked. In this kind of battle, a wild mêlée with ships milling about in smoke, it would be a miracle if any captain was not raked, and he was proud that his men had turned the ship before the Revenant could empty her whole broadside into the Pucelle’s stern. She could still fight. Beyond the Victory, beyond the smoke that lay about her, beyond the embattled ships, some dismasted, he could see the undamaged rigging of the British vessels that formed the rearmost part of each squadron and those ships, not yet committed, were only just entering the battle. The Santisima Trinidad, towering over both fleets like a behemoth, was being raked and pounded by smaller ships that looked like terriers yapping at a bull. The French Neptune had vanished, and the Pucelle was threatened by the Revenant alone, but the Revenant had somehow escaped the worst of the fighting and Montmorin, as fine a captain as any in the French navy, was determined to pluck some honour from the day.

  Two seamen dragged the Pucelle’s soaking white ensign onto the quarterdeck, smearing Haskell’s blood with the sopping folds of the heavy flag. ‘Run it up to the main topsail yard, larboard side,’ Chase ordered. It would look odd there, but by God he would fly it to show that the Pucelle was undefeated.

  Musket balls began striking the deck. Montmorin had fifty or sixty men in his upperworks and they would now try to do what the Redoutable had done to the Victory. He would clear the Pucelle’s decks and Chase desperately wanted to retreat into the shelter of the damaged poop, but his place was here, in full view, and so he put his hands behind his back and tried to look calm as he paced up and down the deck. He resisted the temptation to extend each length of the deck until he was under the poop, but forced himself to turn a few paces short, though he did stop once to stare in fascination at the mangled remains of the binnacle and its compass. A musket ball thumped the deck by his feet and he turned and paced back. He should have summoned a lieutenant from below decks to replace Haskell, but he decided against it. If he fell then his men knew what to do. Just fight. That was all there was to do now. Just fight, and Chase’s life or death would make small difference to the outcome, whereas the lieutenants, commanding the guns, were doing something useful.

  The crews of the two larboard carronades, which had no targets, were levering the fallen starboard carronade out of the way so that they could drag one of their two guns to replace it. Chase skipped out of their way, then saw Midshipman Collier on the weather deck where he was handing out oranges from his huge net. ‘Throw one here, lad!’ he called to the boy.

  Collier looked alarmed a
t the order, as though he feared to throw something at his captain, but he tossed the orange underhand as if he was bowling a cricket ball and Chase had to lunge to one side to catch it single-handed. Some gunners cheered the catch and Chase held the orange aloft like a trophy, then tossed it to Hopper.

  Captain Llewellyn’s marines were firing at the French in their fighting tops, but the French were more numerous and their lashing fire was thinning Llewellyn’s ranks. ‘Shelter your men as best you can, Llewellyn,’ Chase ordered.

  ‘If I can take some to the maintop, sir?’ the Welshman suggested.

  ‘No, no, I gave my word to Nelson. Shelter them. Your time will come soon enough. Under the break of the poop, Llewellyn. You can fire from there.’

  ‘You should come with us, sir.’

  ‘I feel like taking the air, Llewellyn,’ Chase said with a smile. In truth he was terrified. He kept thinking of his wife, his house, the children. In her last letter Florence had said that one of the ponies had a sickness, but which one? The cob? Was it better? He tried to think of such domestic things, wondering if the apple harvest was good and whether the stable yard had been repaved and why the parlour chimney smoked so bad when the wind was in the east, but in truth he just wanted to dash into the poop’s shadow and so be protected from the musketry by the deck planks above. He wanted to cower, but his job was to stay on his quarterdeck. That was why he was paid four hundred and eighteen pounds and twelve shillings a year, and so he paced up and down, up and down, made conspicuous by his cocked hat and gilded epaulettes, and he tried to divide four hundred and eighteen pounds and twelve shillings by three hundred and sixty-five days and the Frenchmen aimed their muskets at him so that Chase walked a strip of deck that became ever more lumpy and ragged from bullet strikes. He saw the ship’s barber, a one-eyed Irishman, hauling on a weather-deck gun. At this moment, Chase reckoned, that man was more valuable to the ship than its captain. He paced on, knowing he would be hit soon, hoping it would not hurt too badly, regretting his death so keenly and wishing he could see his children one more time. He was frightened, but it was unthinkable to do anything else but show a cool disdain for danger.

  He turned and stared westwards. The mêlée about the Victory had grown, but he could distinctly see a British ensign flying above a French tricolour, showing that at least one enemy ship had struck. Farther south there was a second mêlée where Collingwood’s squadron had cut off the rear of the French and Spanish fleet. Away to the east, beyond the Revenant, a handful of enemy ships shamefully sailed away, while to the north the enemy vanguard had at last turned and was lumbering southwards to help their beleaguered comrades. The battle, Chase reckoned, could only get worse, for a dozen ships on either side had yet to engage, but his fight was with Montmorin now.

  The Pucelle shuddered as the Revenant slammed into her side. The force of the collision, broadside to broadside, two thousand tons meeting two thousand tons, drove the two ships apart again, but Chase shouted at the few remaining men on his top decks to throw the grapnels and make the Revenant fast. The hooks flew into the enemy’s rigging, but the enemy had the same idea and her crew was also hurling grappling hooks, while seamen in the Frenchman’s rigging were tying the Pucelle’s lower yards to their own. To the death, then. Neither ship could escape now, they could only kill each other. The rails of the two ships were thirty feet apart because their lower hulls bulged out so greatly, but Chase was close enough to see Montmorin’s expression and the Frenchman, seeing Chase, took off his hat and bowed. Chase did the same. Chase wanted to laugh and Montmorin was smiling, both men struck by the oddity of such courtesies even as they did their best to kill each other. Beneath their silver-buckled feet the great guns gouged and hammered. Chase wished he had an orange to throw to Montmorin who, he was sure, would appreciate the gesture, but he could not see Collier.

  Chase did not know it, but his presence on the deck was directly useful, for the French marksmen in the fighting tops were obsessed by his death and so ignored the carronade crews which, seeing French seamen gather in the Revenant’s waist, fired down into the mass. The Frenchmen had been snatching boarding pikes from their racks about the mainmast, while others held axes or cutlasses, but one carronade forward and one aft provided a tangling crossfire that destroyed the boarding party. The French had no carronades, relying on the men in their fighting tops to clear an enemy’s deck with musket fire.

  Ten marines were left on the Pucelle’s forecastle. Sergeant Armstrong, bleeding to death, still sat by the foremast and clumsily fired his musket up into the enemy rigging. Clouter, his black torso streaked and spattered by other men’s blood, had taken command of the starboard carronade after half its crew was killed by a grenade thrown from the Revenant’s foremast. Sharpe was firing up into the maintop, hoping his bullets would gouge through its timbers to kill the French marksmen perched on the platform. The wind seemed to have died completely so that the sails and flags hung limp. Powder smoke thickened between the ships, rising to hide and protect the Pucelle’s bullet-lashed deck. Sharpe was deaf now, his ears buffeted by the big guns and his world shrunken to this small patch of bloody deck and the smoke-wreathed enemy rigging soaring above him. His shoulder was bruised by the musket so that he flinched every time he fired. An orange rolled across the deck at his feet, its skin dimpling the blood on the planks. He brought the musket’s brass-bound stock hard down on the orange, squashing and bursting the fruit, then stooped and scooped up some of the pulped flesh. He ate some, grateful for the juice in his parched mouth, then scooped some more which he put into Armstrong’s mouth. The sergeant’s unbloodied eye was glassy, he was scarce conscious, but he was still trying to reload his musket. He coughed hoarsely, mingling bloody spittle with the orange juice that trickled down his chin. ‘We are winning, aren’t we?’ he asked Sharpe earnestly.

  ‘We’re murdering the bastards, Sergeant.’

  The dead lay where they fell now, for there were not enough men to throw them overboard, or rather the men who remained were too busy fighting. The worst of that fight was below decks where the two ships, matched gun to gun, mangled each other. The lower deck was dark now, for the Revenant blotted out the daylight on the starboard side and the larboard gun-ports were closed. Smoke filled the low deck, curling under beams splashed with blood from the Revenant’s first raking broadside. Now the Frenchman’s shots broke open the hull, screamed across the deck and crashed out to leave patches of newly created daylight where they holed the larboard side. Thick dust and thicker smoke drifted in the shafts of light. The Pucelle’s guns returned the fire, roaring back on their breeching ropes to fill the deck with thunder. The ships touched here, their gunports almost coinciding so that when a British gunner tried to swab his cannon a French cutlass half severed his arm, then the lambswool swab on its staff was seized and carried aboard the French ship. The French shots were heavier, for they carried larger guns, but larger guns took longer to reload and the British fire was noticeably quicker. Montmorin’s crew was probably the best trained in all the enemy’s fleet, yet still Chase’s men were faster, but now the enemy tossed grenades through the open gunports and fired muskets to slow the British guns.

  ‘Fetch marines!’ Lieutenant Holderby shouted at a midshipman, then had to go right up to the boy and cup his hands over the midshipman’s ear. ‘Fetch marines!’ A round shot killed the lieutenant, spewing his intestines across the gratings where the thirty-two-pound round shots were stored. The midshipman stayed still for a second, disoriented. Flames were rising to his left, then a gunner threw sand across the remnants of the grenade and another tossed a cask of water to douse the fire. Another gunner was crawling on the deck, vomiting blood. A woman was hauling on a gun tackle, spitting curses at the French gunners who were only a cutlass length away. A gun recoiled, filling the deck with noise and breaking its breeching rope so that it slewed round and crushed two men whose shrieks were lost in the din. Men heaved and rammed, their naked torsos gleaming with sweat that trickled th
rough the powder residue. They all looked black now, except where they were spotted or streaked or sheeted with blood. The Revenant’s powder smoke belched into the Pucelle, choking men who struggled to return the favour.

  The midshipman scrambled up the companionway to the weather deck that shook from the recoil of its twenty-four-pounder guns. Wreckage of the rigging lay across the central part of the deck which was so thick with smoke that the midshipman climbed to the forecastle instead of to the quarterdeck. His ears were ringing with the sound of the guns and his throat was as dry as ash. He saw an officer in a red coat. ‘You’re wanted below, sir.’

  ‘What?’ Sharpe shouted.

  ‘Marines, sir, needed below.’ The boy’s voice was hoarse. ‘They’re coming through the gunports, sir. Lower deck.’ A bullet smacked into the deck beside his feet, another ricocheted off the ship’s bell.

  ‘Marines!’ Sharpe bellowed. ‘Pikes! Muskets!’

  He led his ten men down the companionway, stepped over the body of a powder monkey who lay dead though there was not a mark on his young body that Sharpe could see, then down to the hellish dark and thick gloom of the lower deck. Only half of the starboard cannons were firing now, and they were being impeded by the French who slashed through the gunports with cutlasses and pikes. Sharpe fired his musket through a gunport, glimpsed a Frenchman’s face dissolve into blood, ran to the next and used the butt of the empty musket to hammer an enemy’s arm. ‘Simmons!’ he shouted at a marine. ‘Simmons!’

  Simmons stared at him, wide-eyed. ‘Go to the after magazine,’ Sharpe shouted. ‘Fetch the grenades!’