Sharpe's Trafalgar (20 page)

Land was spotted the next day, but it was distant and obscured by a squall of rain that
rattled on the sails and bounced from the decks which were scrubbed clean every morning by
grinding sand into the timber beneath blocks of stone the size of bibles. Holy-stoning,
the men called it. Still the Pucelle drove on with every last scrap of canvas hoisted,
sailing as though the devil himself was on her tail. The wind stayed strong, but for long
days it brought stinging rain so that everything below deck became damp and greasy. Then,
on another day of driving rain and gusting wind, they passed Cape Town, though Sharpe could
see nothing of the place except a misty glimpse of a great flat-topped mountain half
shrouded in cloud.

Captain Chase ordered new charts spread on the big table in his day cabin. “I have a
choice now,” he told Sharpe. “Either I head west into the Atlantic, or ride the current up
the African coast until we find the southeast trades.”

The choice seemed obvious to Sharpe: ride the current, but he was no sailor. “I take a
risk,” Chase explained, “if I stay inshore. I get the land breezes and I have the current,
but I also risk fog and I might get a westerly gale. Then we’re on a lee shore.”

“And a lee shore means?” Sharpe asked.

“We’re dead,” Chase said shortly, and let the chart roll itself up with a snap. “Which is
why the Sailing Directions insist we go west,” he added, “but if we do then we risk being
becalmed.”

“Where do you think the Revenant is?”

“She’s out west. She’s avoiding land. At least I hope she is.” Chase stared out of the
stern window at the white-fretted wake. He looked tired now, and older, because his
natural ebullience had been drained from him by days and nights of broken sleep and
unbroken worry. “Maybe she stayed inshore?” he mused. “She could have hoisted false
colors. But the Hirondelle didn’t see her. Mind you, in these damned squalls a fleet could
go within a couple of miles of us and we wouldn’t see a thing.” He pulled on his tarpaulin
coat, ready to go back on deck. “Up the coast, I think.” He spoke to himself. “Up the coast
and God help us if there’s a blow out of the west.” He picked up his hat. “God help us anyway
if we don’t find the Revenant. Their lordships of the Admiralty don’t look mercifully on
captains who abandon their station to chase wild geese halfway around the world. And God
help us if we do find it and that fellow really is a Swiss servant and not Vaillard after
all! And the first lieutenant’s right. He won’t be sailing to France, but making for Cadiz.
It’s closer. Much closer.” He shrugged. “I’m sorry, Sharpe, I’m not very good company for
you.”

“I’m having a better time than I ever dared expect when I embarked on the
Calliope.”

“Good,” Chase said, going to the door, “good. And time to turn north.”

Sharpe was busy enough. In the morning he paraded with the marines, and then there was
practice, endless practice, for Captain Llewellyn feared his men would become stale if
they were not busy. They fired their muskets in all weathers, learning how to shield their
locks from the rain. They fired from the decks and from the upperworks, and Sharpe fired with
them, using one of the Sea Service muskets which was similar to the weapon he had fired
when he was a private, but with a slightly shorter barrel and an old-fashioned flat lock
which looked crude, but, as Llewellyn explained, was easier to repair at sea. The weapons
were susceptible to salt air and the marines spent hours cleaning and oiling the guns, and
more hours practicing with bayonets and cutlasses. Llewellyn also insisted that Sharpe
try his new toys, the seven-barrel guns, and so Sharpe fired one into the sea from the
forecastle and thought his shoulder must be broken, so violent was the kick of the seven
half-inch barrels. It took over two minutes to reload, but the marine captain would not
see that as a disadvantage. “Fire one of those down onto a Frog deck, Sharpe, and we’re
making some proper misery!” Most of all, Llewellyn wanted to board the Revenant and could
not wait to launch his red-coated men onto the enemy’s deck. “Which is why the men have to
stay spry, Sharpe,” he would say, then he would order groups to race from the forecastle to
the quarterdeck, back to the forecastle, then up the forward mast by the larboard
ratlines and down by the starboard ones. “If the Frogs board us,” he said, “we have to be
able to get around the ship quickly. Don’t dawdle, Hawkins! Hurry, man, hurry! You’re a
marine, not a slug!”

Sharpe equipped himself with a cutlass that suited him far better than the cavalry
saber he had worn ever since the battle of Assaye. The cutlass was straight-bladed, heavy
and crude, but it felt like a weapon that could do serious damage. “You don’t fence with
them,” Llewellyn advised him, “because it ain’t a weapon for the wrist. It’s a full arm
blade. Hack the buggers down! Keep your arms strong, Sharpe, eh? Climb the masts every day,
do the cutlass drill, keep strong!”

Sharpe did climb the masts. He found it terrifying, for every small motion on deck was
magnified as he went higher. At first he did not try to reach the topmost parts of the
rigging, but he became adept at clambering up to the maintop, which was a wide platform
built where the lower mast was joined to the upper. The sailors reached the maintop by
using the futtock shrouds which led to the platform’s outer edge, but Sharpe always
wriggled through the small hatchway beside the mast rather than risk the frightening climb
up the futtock shrouds where a man must hang upside down from the tarred ropes. Then, a week
after they had turned north, on a day when the sea was frustratingly calm and the wind
fitful, Sharpe decided to attempt the futtock shrouds and so show that a soldier could do
what any midshipman made look simple. He climbed the lower ratlines which were easy for
they leaned like a ladder against the mast, but then he came to the place where the futtock
shrouds went out and backward above his head. He would have to climb upside down, but he was
determined to do it and so he reached back with his hands and hauled himself upward. Then,
halfway to the maintop’s platform, his feet slipped off the ratlines and he hung there,
suspended fifty feet above the deck, and he felt his fingers, hooked like claws, slipping
on the wet ropes and he dared not swing his legs for fear of falling and so he stayed,
paralyzed by fear, until a topman, swinging down through the web of rigging with the
agility of a monkey, grabbed his waistband and hauled him into the maintop. “Lord, sir,
you don’t want to be going that a way. That be for matelots, not lobsters. Use the lubber’s
hole, sir, that’s what it be for, lubbers.”

Sharpe was still too scared to speak. All he could think of was the sensation of his
fingers slipping over the rough tarred rope, but at last he managed to gasp a thank you and
promised to reward the man with a pound of tobacco from his stores.

“Almost lost you there, Sharpe!” Chase said cheerfully when Sharpe regained the
quarterdeck.

“Terrifying,” Sharpe said, and looked at his hands that were scored deep with tar.

Lady Grace had also seen his near fall. She had not been near Sharpe now for the best part
of a week, and her distance worried him. She had exchanged glances with him once or twice,
and those swift looks had seemed to be filled with a mute appeal, but there had been no chance
to talk with her and she had not risked coming to his cabin in the heart of the night. Now
she was standing on the lee side of the quarterdeck, close to her husband who was speaking
with Malachi Braithwaite, and she seemed to hesitate before approaching Sharpe, but then,
with a visible effort, she made herself cross the deck. Malachi Braithwaite watched her,
while her husband frowned at a sheaf of papers.

“We make slow progress today, Captain Chase,” she said stiffly.

“We have a current, milady, which invisibly helps us, but I do wish the wind would pipe
up.” Chase frowned at the sails. “Some folk believe whistling encourages the wind, but it
never seems to work.” He whistled two bars of “Nancy Dawson,” but the wind stayed light.
“See?”

Lady Grace stared at Chase, apparently at a loss for words, and the captain suddenly
sensed that she was in some distress. “Milady?” he inquired with a concerned frown.

“You could perhaps show me on a chart where we are, Captain?” she blurted out.

Chase hesitated, confused by the sudden request. “It will be a pleasure, milady,” he
said. “The charts are in my day cabin. Will his lordship ... “

“I shall be quite safe in your cabin, Captain,” Lady Grace said.

“The ship’s yours, Mister Peel,” Chase said to the second lieutenant, then led Lady
Grace under the break of the poop to the door on the larboard side which led into the
dining cabin. Lord William saw them and frowned, making Chase pause. “You wish to see the
charts, my lord?” the captain asked.

“No, no,” Lord William said, and returned to the papers.

Braithwaite watched Sharpe, and Sharpe knew he must not arouse the secretary’s
suspicions, but he did not believe Lady Grace truly wanted to see the charts and so,
ignoring Braithwaite’s hostile gaze, he went to his sleeping cabin which lay beyond the
starboard door under the poop deck. He knocked on the farther door, which led from the
sleeping cabin into the day cabin, but there was no answer and so he let himself into
the big stern cabin. “Sharpe!” Chase showed a small flash of irritation for, friendly as
he was, his quarters were sacrosanct and he had not responded to the knock on the door.

“Captain,” Lady Grace said, laying a hand on his arm, “please.”

Chase, who had been unrolling a chart, looked from her to Sharpe and from Sharpe back to
Lady Grace again. He let the chart roll up with a snap. “I clean forgot to wind the
chronometers this morning,” he said. “Would you forgive me?” He went past Sharpe into the
dining cabin, ostentatiously closing the door with a deliberately loud click.

“Oh God, Richard.” Lady Grace ran to him and hugged him. “Oh, God!”

“What’s the matter?”

For a few seconds she did not speak, but then realized she had little time if tongues
were not to wag about herself and the captain. “It’s my husband’s secretary,” she
said.

“I know all about him.”

“You do?” She stared at him wide-eyed.

“He’s blackmailing you?” Sharpe guessed.

She nodded. “And he watches me.”

Sharpe kissed her. “Leave him to me. Now go, before anyone starts a rumor.”

She kissed him fiercely, then went back onto the deck scarce two minutes after she had
left it. Sharpe waited until Chase, who had wound his chronometers at dawn as he always
did, came back to the day cabin. Chase rubbed his face tiredly, then looked at Sharpe. “Well,
I never,” he said, then sat in his deep armchair. “It’s called playing with fire,
Sharpe.”

“I know, sir.” Sharpe was blushing.

“Not that I blame you,” Chase said. “Good Lord, don’t think that! I was a dog myself until
I met Florence. A dear woman! A good marriage tends a man to steadiness, Sharpe.”

“Is that advice, sir?”

“No,” Chase smiled, “it’s a boast.” He paused, thinking now of his ship rather than of
Sharpe and Lady Grace. “This thing isn’t going to explode, is it?”

“No,” Sharpe said.

“It’s just that ships are oddly fragile, Sharpe. You can have the people content and
working hard, but it doesn’t take much to start dissent and rancor.”

“It won’t explode, sir.”

“Of course not. You said so. Well! Dear me! You do surprise me. Or maybe you don’t. She’s a
beauty, I’ll say that, and he’s a very cold fish. I think, if I wasn’t so securely married,
I’d be envious of you. Positively envious.”

“We’re just acquaintances,” Sharpe said.

“Of course you are, my dear fellow, of course you are!” Chase smiled. “But her husband
might be affronted by a mere”—he paused—”acquaintanceship?”

“I think that’s safe to say, sir.”

“Then make sure nothing happens to him, for he’s my responsibility.” Chase spoke those
words in a harsh voice, then smiled. “Other than that, Richard, enjoy yourself. But
quietly, I beg you, quietly.” Chase said the last few words in a whisper, then stood and
went back to the quarterdeck.

Sharpe waited a half hour before leaving the stern quarters, doing his best to allay
any suspicions that Braithwaite must inevitably have, but the secretary had left the
quarterdeck by the time Sharpe reappeared, and that perhaps was a good thing for Sharpe was
in a cold fury.

And Malachi Braithwaite had made himself an enemy.

The wind was still low the next morning and the Pucelle seemed hardly to be moving in a
greasy sea that slid in long low swells from the west. It was hot again, so that the seamen
went bare-chested, some showing the livid cross-hatching of scars where their backs had
been subjected to the lash. “Some wear it as a badge of pride,” Chase told Sharpe, “though I
hope not on this ship.”

“You don’t flog?”

“I must,” Chase said, “but rarely, rarely. Maybe twice since I took command? That’s twice
in three years. The first was for theft and the other was for striking a petty officer who
probably deserved to be struck, but discipline is discipline. Lieutenant Haskell would
like me to flog more, he thinks it would make us more efficient, but I don’t think it
needful.” He stared morosely at the sails. “No damn wind, no damn wind! What the hell does
God think he’s doing?”

If God would not send a wind, Chase would practice the guns. Like many naval captains he
carried extra powder and shot, bought at his own expense, so that his crew could practice.
All morning he had the guns going, every port open, even the ones in his great cabin, so
that the ship was constantly surrounded by a pungent white-gray smoke through which it
moved with a painful slowness.

“This could mean bad luck,” Peel, the second lieutenant, told Sharpe. He was a friendly
man, round-faced, round-waisted and invariably cheerful. He was also untidy, a fact
that irritated the first lieutenant, and the bad blood between Peel and Haskell made the
wardroom a tense and unhappy place. Sharpe sensed the unhappiness, knew that it upset
Chase and was aware of the ship’s preference for Peel, who was far more easygoing than the
tall, unsmiling Haskell.

“Why bad luck?”

“Guns lull the wind,” Peel explained seriously. He was wearing a blue uniform coat far
more threadbare than Sharpe’s red jacket, though the second lieutenant was rumored to be
wealthy. “It is an unexplained phenomenon,” Peel said, “that gunfire depletes wind.” He
pointed at the vast red ensign at the gaff as proof and, sure enough, it hung limp. The flag
was not hoisted every day, but at times like this, when the wind was lazily tired, Chase
reckoned that an ensign served to show small variations in the breeze.

“Why is it red?” Sharpe asked. “That sloop we saw had a blue one.”

“It depends which admiral you serve,” Peel explained. “We take orders from a rear
admiral of the red, but if he was blue we’d fly blue and if he was white, white, and if he
was yellow he wouldn’t command any ships anyway. Simple, really.” He grinned. The red
flag, which had the union flag in its upper corner, stirred sluggishly as a rare gust of
warm air disturbed its folds. Off to the east, where the gust came from, there were heaps of
clouds which Peel said were over Africa. “And you’ll note the water’s discolored,” he added,
pointing over the side to a muddy brown sea, “which means we’re off a river mouth.”

Chase timed the gun crews, promising an extra tot of rum to the fastest men. The sound of
the guns was astonishing. It pounded the eardrums and shivered the ship before fading
slowly into the immensity of sea and sky. The gunners tied scarves about their ears to
diminish the shock of the noise, but many of them were still prematurely deaf. Sharpe,
curious, went down to the lower deck where the big thirty-two-pounders lurked and he
stood in wonder as the guns were fired. He had his fingers in his ears, yet, even so, the
whole dark space, punctuated with bright shafts of smoky sunlight which pierced through the
open gunports, reverberated with each gun’s firing. The sound seemed to punch him in the
abdomen, it rang in his head, it filled the world. One after the other, the guns hammered
back. Each barrel was close to ten feet long and each gun weighed nearly three tons, and each
shot strained the gun’s breeching rope taut as an iron bar. The breeching rope was a great
cable, fixed with eyebolts to the ship’s ribs, that looped through a ring at the gun’s
breech. Half-naked gunners, sweat glistening on their skins, leaped to sponge out the vast
barrels while the gun’s chief stopped the vent-hole with a leather-encased thumb. Men put
in powder bags and shot, rammed them home, then hauled the weapon’s muzzle out through the
gunport with the rope-and-pulley tackles fixed on either side of the carriage.

“You’re not aiming at anything!” Sharpe had to shout to the fifth lieutenant who
commanded one group of guns.

“We ain’t marksmen,” the lieutenant, who was called Holderby, shouted back. “If it comes
to battle we’ll be so close to the bastards that we can’t miss! Twenty paces at most, and
usually less.” Holderby paced down the gundeck, ducking under beams, touching men’s
shoulders at random. “You’re dead!” he shouted. “You’re dead!” The chosen men grinned and
sat gratefully on the shot gratings. Holderby was thinning the crews, as they would be
thinned by battle, and watching how well the “survivors” manned their big guns.

The guns, like those on the Calliope, were all fired by flintlocks. The army’s field
artillery, none of it so big as these guns, was fired with a linstock, a slow match that
glowed red as it burned, but no naval captain would dare have a glowing red-hot linstock
lying loose on a gundeck where so much powder lay waiting to explode. Instead the guns
had flintlocks, though, if the flintlock failed, a linstock was suspended in a nearby tub
half-filled with water. The flintlock’s trigger was a lanyard which the gunner would
twitch, the flint would fall, the spark flash and then the powder-packed reed in the touch
hole hissed and a four- or five-inch flame leaped upward before the world was consumed by
noise as another flame, twice as long as the gun’s barrel, seared into the instant cloud
of smoke as the gun crashed back.

Sharpe climbed to the deck, and from the deck to the maintop, for only from there could he
see beyond the massive bank of smoke to where the shots fell. They fell ragged, some
seemingly going as much as a mile before they splashed into the sullen sea, others
ripping the surface into spray only a hundred yards from the ship. Chase, as the
lieutenant had said, was not training his men to be marksmen, but to be fast. There were
gunners aboard who boasted they could lay a ball onto a floating target tub at half a
mile, but the secret of battle, Chase insisted, was getting close and releasing a storm
of shot. “It doesn’t have to be aimed,” he had told Sharpe. “I use the ship to aim the guns. I
lay the guns alongside the enemy and let them massacre the bastard. Speed, speed, speed,
Sharpe. Speed wins battles.”

It was just like musketry, Sharpe realized. On land the armies came together and, as
often as not, it was the side that could fire its muskets fastest that would win. Men did not
aim muskets, because they were so inaccurate. They pointed their muskets, then fired so
that their bullet was just one among a cloud of balls that spat toward the enemy. Send
enough balls and the enemy would weaken. Lay two ships close together and the one that
fired fastest should win in the same way, and so Chase harried his gunners, praising the
swift ones and chivying the laggards, and all morning the sea about the ship quivered to
the vibration of the guns. A long track of wavering and thinning powder smoke lay behind
the ship, proof that she made some progress, though it was frustratingly slow. Sharpe had
brought his telescope up the mast and now trained it eastward in hope of seeing land, but
all he could see was a dark shadow beneath the cloud. He shortened the barrel and trained
the glass downward to see Malachi Braithwaite pacing up and down the quarterdeck,
flinching every time a gun cracked.

What to do about Braithwaite? In truth Sharpe knew exactly what to do, but how to do it
on a ship crammed with over seven hundred men was the problem. He collapsed the telescope
and put it into a pocket, then, for the first time, climbed from the maintop up above the
main topsail to the crosstrees, a much smaller platform than the maintop, where he perched
beneath the main topgallant sail. Yet another sail rose above that, the royal, up
somewhere in the sky, though not so high that men did not climb to it, for there was a
lookout poised above the royal’s yard, contentedly chewing tobacco as he stared
westward. The deck looked small from here, small and narrow, but the air was fresh for the
ever-present stink of the ship and the rotten-egg stench of the powder smoke did not reach
this high.

The tall mast trembled as two guns fired together. A freak breath of wind blew the smoke
away and Sharpe saw the sea rippling in a frantic fan pattern away from the guns’ blasts.
Grass did that in front of a field gun, except that the grass became scorched and sometimes
caught fire. The sea settled and the smoke thickened.

“Sail!” the man above Sharpe bellowed to the deck, the hail so loud and sudden that Sharpe
jumped in fright. “Sail on the larboard beam!”

Sharpe had to think which side of the ship was larboard and which starboard, but managed
to remember and trained his telescope out toward the west, but he could see nothing
except a hazy line where the sea met the sky.

“What do you see?” Haskell, the first lieutenant, called up through a speaking
trumpet.

“Royals and tops,” the man shouted, “same course as us, sir!”

The gunfire ceased, for Chase now had something else to worry about. The gunports were
closed and the big guns lashed tight as a half-dozen men scurried up the rigging to add
their eyes to the lookout’s gaze. Sharpe could still see nothing on the western horizon,
even with the help of the telescope. He was proud of his eyesight, but being at sea
demanded a different kind of vision to looking for enemies on land. He swept the glass
left and right, still unable to find the strange ship, then a sudden tiny blur of dirty white
broke the horizon; he lost it, edged the glass back, and there she was. Just a blur, nothing
but a blur, but the man above him, without any glass, had seen it and could distinguish one
sail from another.

A man settled beside Sharpe on the crosstrees. “It’s a Frenchie,” he said.

Sharpe recognized him as John Hopper, the big bosun of the captain’s gig. “You can’t
tell at this distance, surely?” Sharpe asked.

“Cut of the sails, sir,” Hopper said confidently. “Can’t mistake it.”

“What is it, Hopper?” Chase, bareheaded and in shirtsleeves, hauled himself onto the
platform.

“It could be her, sir, it really could,” Hopper said. “She’s a Frenchie, right
enough.”

“Damn wind,” Chase said. “May I, Sharpe?” He held out his hand for the telescope, then
trained it west. “Damn it, Hopper, you’re right. Who spotted her?”

“Pearson, sir.”

“Triple his rum ration,” Chase said, then closed the glass, returned it to Sharpe, and
slithered back to the deck in a manner that scared Sharpe witless. “Boats!” Chase shouted,
running toward the quarterdeck. “Boats!”

Hopper followed his captain and Sharpe watched as the ship’s boats were lowered over the
side and filled with oarsmen. They were going to tow the ship, not west toward the strange
sail, but north in an attempt to get ahead of her.

The men rowed all through the afternoon. They sweated and tugged until their arms were
agony. Very slight ripples at the Pucelle’s flank showed that they were making some
progress, but not enough, it seemed to Sharpe, to gain any headway on the far sail. The small
breaths of wind that had relieved the heat earlier in the day seemed to have died away
completely so that the sails hung lifeless and the ship was enveloped in an odd silence.
The loudest noises were the footfalls of the officers on the quarterdeck, the shouts of
the men urging on the tired oarsmen and the creak of the wheel as it spun backward and
forward in the lolling swell.

Lady Grace, attended by her maid and carrying a parasol against the hot sun, appeared
on the quarterdeck and stared westward. Captain Chase claimed the strange sail was now
visible from the deck, but she could not see it, even with a telescope. “They probably
haven’t seen us,” Chase suggested.

“Why not?” she asked.

“Our sails have clouds behind them”—he gestured to the great cloud range that piled above
Africa—”and with any luck our canvas just blends into the sky.”

“You think it’s the Revenant?”

“I don’t know, milady. She could be a neutral merchantman.” Chase tried to sound
neutral himself, but his suppressed excitement made it plain he believed the far ship was
indeed the Revenant.

Braithwaite was standing under the break of the poop, watching to see if Sharpe joined
her ladyship, but Sharpe did not move. He looked east and saw cat’s-paws of ripples on the
water, the first signs of a freshening wind. The ripples chased and skittered across the
long swells, obstinately refusing to come near the Pucelle, but then they seemed to
gather together and slide over the sea and suddenly the sails filled, the rigging creaked
and the towing lines dipped toward the water.

“The land wind,” Chase said, “and about time!” He went to the quartermaster at the wheel
who at last had some purchase on the rudder. “Can you feel it?”

“Aye aye, sir.” The helmsman paused to spit a stream of tobacco juice into a big brass
spittoon. “Ain’t much though,” he added, “no more than if a little old lady was breathing
on the sails, sir.”

The wind faltered, shivering the sails, then lazily caught again and Chase turned to
watch the sea. “Get the boats in, Mister Haskell!”

“Aye aye, sir!”

“Yot of rum for the oarsmen!”

“Aye aye, sir.” Haskell, who believed Chase spoiled his men, sounded disapproving.

“Double tot of rum for the oarsmen,” Chase said to annoy Haskell, “and wind for us and
death to the French!” His spirits had risen in the belief that he had found his quarry. Now
he must stalk her. “We’ll close the angle on her during the night,” he told Haskell. “Every
inch of canvas! And no lights on board. And we’ll wet the sails.” A canvas hose was rigged to
a pump and used to douse the sails with sea water. Chase explained to Sharpe that wet sails
caught more of a light wind than dry, and it did seem as if the soaked canvas worked better.
The ship moved perceptibly, though below decks, where the gunsmoke lingered, no wind
cleared the air.