Simmons ran, grateful for a chance to be beneath the water line even if only for an instant. Three of the Pucelle’s heavy guns fired together, their sound almost stunning Sharpe, who was going from gunport to gunport and stabbing at the French with his cutlass. A huge crash, dreadful in its loudness and so prolonged that it seemed to go on for ever, broke through Sharpe’s deafened ears and he reckoned a mast had gone overboard, though whether it was another of the Pucelle’s or one of the Revenant’s he could not tell. He saw a Frenchman ramming a cannon, half leaning out of the opposing gunport, and he skewered the man’s arm with the cutlass. The Frenchman sprang back and Sharpe skipped aside for he could see the gunner holding the linstock to the touch-hole. Sharpe registered that the French did not use flintlocks, was surprised to have noticed such a thing in battle, then the gun fired and the rammer, left in the barrel, disintegrated as it was driven across the Pucelle’s deck. A midshipman fired a pistol into an enemy gunport. A flintlock sparked and the sound of the heavy gun pounded Sharpe’s ears. Some of the men had lost the scarves they had tied about their heads and their ears dribbled blood. Others had bleeding noses caused by nothing more than the sound of the guns.
Simmons reappeared with the grenades and Sharpe took a linstock from one of the remaining water barrels, lit its fuse, then waited until the vagaries of the ocean swells brought a French gunport into view. The fuse sputtered. He could see the Revenant’s yellow planking, then the opposing ship ground against the Pucelle’s hull and a gunport came into sight and he hurled the glass ball into the Revenant. He dimly heard an explosion, saw flames illuminate the black smoke filling the enemy’s gundeck, then he left Simmons to throw the other grenades while he went back down the deck, stepping past bodies, avoiding the gunners, checking each gunport to make sure no more Frenchmen were trying to reach through with cutlass or pike. The big capstan in the middle of the deck, used to haul the ship’s anchor cables, had an enemy round shot buried in its wooden heart. Blood dripped from the deck above. A gun, crammed with grapeshot, recoiled across his path and Frenchmen screamed.
Then another scream pierced Sharpe’s ringing ears. It came from above, from the weather deck that was slick with so much blood that the sand no longer gave men a secure footing. ‘Repel boarders! Repel boarders!’
‘Marines!’ Sharpe shouted at his few men, though none heard him in the noise, but he reckoned some might follow if they saw him climb the companionway. He could hear steel striking steel. No time to think, just time to fight.
He climbed.
Lord William frowned at the sound of the carronade, then flinched as the Pucelle’s larboard broadside began to fire, the sound rolling down the ship to fill the lady hole with thunder. ‘I perceive we are still in action,’ he said, lowering the pistol. He began to laugh. ‘It was worth pointing a gun at your head, my dear, just to see your expression. But was it remorse or fear that actuated your misery?’ He paused. ‘Come! I wish an answer.’
‘Fear,’ Lady Grace gasped.
‘Yet I should like to hear you express remorse, if only as evidence that you possess some finer feelings. Do you?’ He waited. The guns fired, the sound becoming louder as the nearer cannon recoiled two decks above their refuge.
‘If you had any feelings,’ Grace said, ‘any courage, you would be on deck sharing the dangers.’
Lord William found that very amusing. ‘What a strange idea you do have of my capabilities. What can I do that would be useful to Chase? My talents, dearest, lie in the contrivance of policy and, dare I say, its administration. The report I am writing will have a profound influence on the future of India and, therefore, on the prospects of Britain. I confidently expect to join the government within a year. Within five years I might be Prime Minister. Am I to risk that future just to strut on a deck with a pack of mindless fools who believe a brawl at sea will change the world?’ He shrugged and looked up at the lady hole’s ceiling. ‘Towards the end of the fight, my dear, I shall show myself, but I have no intention of running any unnecessary or extraordinary risks. Let Nelson have his glory today, but in five years I shall dispose of him as I wish and, believe me, no adulterer will gain honour from me. You know he is an adulterer?’
‘All England knows.’
‘All Europe,’ Lord William corrected her. ‘The man is incapable of discretion and you too, my dear, have been indiscreet.’ The Pucelle’s broadside had stopped and the ship seemed silent. Lord William looked up at the deck as if he expected the noise to begin again, but the guns were quiet. Water gurgled at the stern. The ship’s pumps began again. ‘I might not have minded,’ Lord William went on, ‘had you been discreet. No man wishes to be a cuckold, but it is one thing for a wife to take a genteel lover and quite another to lie down with the servant classes. Were you mad? That would be a charitable excuse, but the world does not see you as mad, so your action reflects upon me. You chose to rut with an animal, a lump, and I suspect he has made you pregnant. You disgust me.’ He shuddered. ‘Every man on the ship must have known you were rutting. They thought I did not know, they sneered at me, and you went on like a tuppenny whore.’
Lady Grace said nothing. She stared up at one of the lanterns. Its candle was guttering, spewing a dribble of smoke that escaped through the lantern’s ventilation holes. She was red-eyed, exhausted from crying, incapable of fighting back.
‘I should have known all this when I married you,’ Lord William said. ‘One hopes, one does so hope, that a wife will prove a woman of fidelity, of prudence and quiet good sense, but why should I have expected it? Women have ever been slaves to their grosser appetites. “Frailty,” ’ he quoted, ‘ “thy name is woman!” The feeble sex, and by God how true that is! I found it hard to credit Braithwaite’s letter at first, but the more I thought about it, the more true it rang, and so I observed you and found, to my disappointment, that he did not lie. You were rutting with Sharpe, wallowing in his sweat.’
‘Be quiet!’ she pleaded with him.
‘Why should I be quiet?’ he asked in a reasonable voice. ‘I, my dear, am the offended party. You had your moment’s filthy pleasure with a mindless brute, why should I not have my moment of pleasure now? I have earned it, have I not?’ He raised the pistol again, just as the whole ship shook with a terrible blow, then another, blows so loud that Lord William instinctively ducked his head, and still the blows went on, rending the ship and crashing through the decks and making the Pucelle shudder. Lord William, his anger momentarily displaced by fear, stared up at the deck as if expecting the ship to fall apart. The lanterns quivered, noise filled the universe and the guns kept firing.
The crash Sharpe had heard when he was on the lower deck had been the Revenant’s mainmast collapsing across both ships and, when he reached the weather deck, he saw Frenchmen running across the mast that, together with the Revenant’s fallen main yard, served as a bridge between the two ships’ decks. The Pucelle’s gunners had abandoned their cannon to fight the invaders with cutlasses, handspikes, rammers and pikes. Captain Llewellyn was bringing marines from the poop, but taking them along the starboard gangway which ran above the weather deck beside the ship’s gunwale. A dozen Frenchmen were on that gangway and trying to reach the Pucelle’s stern. More Frenchmen were in the waist of the ship, screaming their war cry and hacking with cutlasses. Their attack, as sudden as it was unexpected, had succeeded in clearing the centre section of the weather deck where the invaders now stabbed at fallen gunners, as a bespectacled French officer hurled overboard the cannons’ rammers and swabs. Still more Frenchmen ran along the fallen mainmast and yard to reinforce their comrades.
The Pucelle’s crew began to counterattack. A seaman flailed with one of the handspikes used to shift the cannon, a vast club of wood that crushed a Frenchman’s skull. Others seized pikes and speared at the French. Sharpe drew the long cutlass and met the invaders under the break of the forecastle. He slashed at one, parried another, then lunged at the first to spit the man on his cutlass blade. He kicked the dy
ing Frenchman off the steel, then swung the bloody blade to drive two more boarders back. One of them was a huge man, thick-bearded, carrying an axe, and he chopped the blade at Sharpe who stepped back, surprised by the bearded man’s long reach, and his right foot slid in a pool of blood and he fell back and twisted aside as the axe split the deck next to his head. He stabbed up, trying and failing to rake the Frenchman’s arm with the cutlass point, then rolled to his left as the axe slammed down again. The Frenchman kicked Sharpe hard in the thigh, wrenched the axe free and raised it a third time, but before he could deliver the killing stroke he uttered a scream as a pike slid into his belly. There was a roar above Sharpe as Clouter, letting go of the pike, seized the axe from the Frenchman’s hand and charged on in a frenzy. Sharpe stood and followed, leaving the bearded Frenchman twisting and shaking on the deck, the pike still buried in his guts.
Thirty or forty Frenchmen were in the ship’s waist now, and more were streaming along the mast, but just then a carronade blasted from the quarterdeck and emptied the makeshift bridge. One man, left untouched on the mast, jumped down to the Pucelle’s deck and Clouter, almost underneath him, brought the axe up between the man’s legs. The scream seemed to be the loudest noise Sharpe had heard in all that furious day. A tall French officer, hatless and with a powder-stained face, led a charge towards the Pucelle’s bows. Clouter knocked the man’s sword aside then punched him in the face so hard that the officer recoiled into his own men, then a swarm of British gunners, screaming and stabbing, swept past the black man to hack at the invaders.
The guns pounded below, grinding and mangling the two ships. Captain Chase was fighting on the weather deck, leading a group of men who assailed the French from the stern. Captain Llewellyn’s marines had recaptured the gangway and now guarded the fallen mast, shooting down any Frenchman who tried to cross, while the remaining invaders were caught between the attack from the stern and the assault from the bows. Clouter was back in the front rank, chopping the axe in short hard strokes that felled a man each time. Sharpe trapped a Frenchman against the ship’s side, beneath the gangway. The man lunged his cutlass at Sharpe, had it effortlessly parried, saw death in the redcoat’s face and so, in desperation, squirmed through a gunport and threw himself down between the ships. He screamed as the seas drove the two hulls together. Sharpe leaped the gun, looking for an enemy. The Pucelle’s waist was filled with hacking, stabbing, shouting seamen who ignored the desperate shouts for quarter from the French whose impetuous attempt to capture the Pucelle had been foiled by the carronade. The bespectacled enemy officer still tried to render the Pucelle’s guns useless by jettisoning their rammers, but Clouter threw the axe and its blade thumped into the man’s skull like a tomahawk and his death seemed to still the frenzy, or perhaps it was Captain Chase’s insistent voice shouting that the Pucelles should stop fighting because the remaining Frenchmen were trying to surrender. ‘Take their weapons!’ Chase bellowed. ‘Take their weapons!’
Only a score of Frenchmen were still standing and, disarmed, they were shepherded towards the stern. ‘I don’t want them below,’ Chase said, ‘they could make mischief. Buggers can stand on the poop instead and be shot at.’ He grinned at Sharpe. ‘Glad you sailed with me?’
‘Hot work, sir.’ Sharpe looked for Clouter and hailed him. ‘You saved my life,’ he told the tall man. ‘Thank you.’
Clouter looked astonished. ‘I didn’t even see you, sir.’
‘You saved my life,’ Sharpe insisted.
Clouter gave a strange, high-pitched laugh. ‘But we killed some, didn’t we? Didn’t we just kill some?’
‘Plenty left to kill,’ Chase said, then cupped his hands. ‘Back to the guns! Back to the guns!’ He saw the purser peering nervously from the forward companionway. ‘Mister Cowper! I’ll trouble you to find rammers and swabs for this deck. Lively now! Back to the guns!’
Like two bare-knuckled boxers, deep in their thirtieth or fortieth round, both bleeding and dazed, yet neither willing to give up, the two ships pounded each other. Sharpe climbed to the quarterdeck with Chase. To the west, where the long swells came so high, the sea was all battle. Nearly a dozen ships fought there. To the south another score blazed at each other. The ocean was thick with wreckage. A mastless hulk, its guns silent, drifted away from the mêlée. Five or six pairs of ships, like the Pucelle and the Revenant, were clasped together, exchanging fire in private battles that took place beyond the bigger mêlée. The towering Santisima Trinidad had lost her foremast and most of her mizzen and still she was being hammered by smaller British ships. The powder smoke now spread across two miles of ocean, a man-made fog. The sky was darkening to the north and west. Some of the enemy ships, not daring to come close to the fighting and looking to escape, bombarded the brawling fleets from a distance, but their shots were as much a danger to their own side as to the British. The very last of the British ships, the slowest of the fleet, were only just entering the fray and opening fresh gunports to add their metal to the carnage.
Capitaine Montmorin looked across at Chase and shrugged, as if to suggest that the failure of his boarders was regrettable but not serious. The Frenchman’s guns were firing still, and Sharpe could see more boarders gathering on the Revenant’s weather deck. He could also see Captain Cromwell, peering from the shelter of the poop, and Sharpe seized a musket from a nearby marine and aimed at the Englishman who, seeing the threat, ducked back out of sight. Sharpe handed the musket back. Chase found a speaking trumpet amidst the wreckage on the deck. ‘Captain Montmorin? You should yield before we kill more of your men!’
Montmorin cupped his hands. ‘I was going to offer you the same chance, Captain Chase!’
‘Look there,’ Chase shouted, pointing beyond his own stern, and Montmorin climbed up his mizzen ratlines to see over the Pucelle’s poop and there, ghosting across the swells, untouched, was the Spartiate, a British seventy-four, the French-built ship that was rumoured to be bewitched because she sailed faster by night than by day and now, coming late to the battle, she opened her larboard gunports.
Montmorin knew what was about to happen and he could do nothing to stop it. He was going to be raked and so he shouted at his men to lie down between the guns, though that would not save them from the Pucelle’s gunfire, then he stood in the centre of his quarterdeck and waited.
The Spartiate gave Montmorin’s ship a full broadside. One after another the guns crashed back and their balls smashed the high gallery windows of the Revenant’s stern and screamed down her decks, just as the Revenant had raked the Pucelle earlier. The Spartiate was painfully slow, but that only gave her gunners more time to aim properly, and the broadside drove deep wounds into the Revenant. Her mizzen shrouds parted with a sound like Satan’s harp strings snapping, then the whole mast toppled, splintering like a monstrous tree to carry yards, sails and tricolour overboard. Sharpe heard the French musketeers screaming as they fell with the mast. Guns were thrown off carriages, men were mangled by round shot and grapeshot, and still Montmorin stood unmoving, even when the wheel was shot away behind him. Only when the last of the Spartiate’s guns had sounded did he turn and look at the ship that had raked him. He must have feared that she would put up her helm and lay alongside his starboard flank, but the Spartiate sailed grandly on, seeking a victim all her own.
‘Yield, Capitaine!’ Chase shouted through the speaking trumpet.
Montmorin gave his answer by cupping his hands and shouting down to his weather deck. ‘Tirez! Tirez!’ He turned and bowed to Chase.
Chase looked about the quarterdeck. ‘Where’s Captain Llewellyn?’ he asked a marine.
‘Broken leg, sir. Gone below.’
‘Lieutenant Swallow?’ Swallow was the young marine lieutenant.
‘Think he’s dead, sir. Badly wounded, anyway.’
Chase looked at Sharpe, paused as the Revenant’s guns opened fire again. ‘Assemble a boarding party, Mister Sharpe,’ Chase said formally.
It was always going to be a fi
ght to the finish, right from the moment the Pucelle had first seen the Revenant off the African coast. And now Sharpe would finish it.
CHAPTER 12
Lord William listened to the guns, but it was impossible to tell how the battle went from their sound alone, though it was plain that the fighting had reached a new level of fury. ‘Si fractus inlabatur orbis,’ he said, raising his eyes to the deck above.
Grace said nothing.
Lord William chuckled. ‘Oh, come, my dear, don’t tell me you have forgotten your Horace? It is one of the things that most annoys me about you; that you cannot resist translating my tags.’
‘If the sky should break,’ Lady Grace said dully.
‘Oh come! That is hardly adequate, is it?’ Lord William asked sternly. ‘I grant you sky for orbis, though I would prefer universe, but the verb demands falling, does it not? You were never the Latinist you thought you were.’ He looked up again as a dolorous thump echoed through the ship’s timbers. ‘It does indeed sound as though the broken sky falls. Are you frightened? Or do you feel yourself to be entirely safe here?’
Lady Grace said nothing. She felt bereft of tears, gone to a place of abject misery that was beset by guns, horror, spite and hate.
‘I am safe here,’ Lord William went on, ‘but you, my dear, are beset by fears, so much so that in a moment you will seize my pistol and turn it on yourself. You feared, I shall say, a repetition of that amusing episode on the Calliope when your lover so bravely rescued you, and I shall claim it was impossible to prevent you from destroying yourself. I shall, of course, demonstrate an abject though dignified sadness at your demise. I shall insist that your precious body is carried home so that I may bury you in Lincolnshire. Black plumes shall crown your funerary horses, the bishop will pronounce the obsequies and my tears shall moisten your vault. All will be done properly, and your tombstone, cut from the very finest marble, will record your virtues. It will not say that you were a sordid fornicator who opened her legs to a common soldier, but rather that you combined wisdom with understanding, grace with charity and possessed a Christian forbearance that was a shining example of womanhood. Would you like the inscription in Latin?’
Bernard Cornwell Box Set: Sharpe's Triumph , Sharpe's Tiger , Sharpe's Fortress Page 32