Sharpe's Trafalgar (37 page)

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 center 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 dying 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 toward 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
toward 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 melee. 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 melee. 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
rumored 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 center 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 tricolor 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, Capitainel” Chase shouted through the speaking trumpet.

Montmorin gave his answer by cupping his hands and shouting down to his weather deck.
“Tirezl 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 fight to the finish, right from the moment the Pucelle had
first seen the Revenant off the African coast. And now Sharpe would finish it.

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?”

She gazed at him, but did not speak.

“And when you are dead, my love,” Lord William went on, “and safely buried beneath a slab
recording your virtues, I shall set about destroying your lover. I shall do it quietly,
Grace, subtly, so that he will never know the source of his misfortunes. Having him
removed from the army will be simple, but what then? I shall think of something, indeed it
will provide me with pleasure to contemplate his fate. A hanging, don’t you think? I doubt
I shall be able to convict him for poor Braithwaite’s death, which he undoubtedly caused,
but I shall contrive something, and when he is dangling there, twitching, and pissing in
his breeches, I shall watch and I shall smile and I shall remember you.”

She still stared at him, her face expressionless.

“I shall remember you,” he said again, unable to hide the hatred he felt for her. “I
shall remember that you were a common whore, a slave to your filthy lusts, a slut who let a
commoner roger her.” He raised the pistol.

The guns, two decks above, began to fire again, their recoil shaking the timbers clear
down to the lady hole.

But the pistol shot sounded much louder than the great guns. Its sound echoed in the
confined space, filling it with thick smoke as bright blood splashed up the lady hole’s
planking. Si fractus inlabatur orbis.

The swells were getting bigger, the sky darker. The wind had risen a little, so that the
smoke patches streamed eastward, flowing around disabled ships that trailed masts and
fallen rigging. The guns still punctured the air, but fewer now, for more enemy ships were
yielding. Gigs, barges and longboats, some grievously damaged by shot, rowed between the
combatants carrying British officers who went to accept an enemy’s surrender. Some
French and Spanish ships had struck their flags, but then, in the vagaries of battle, their
opponents had moved on and those ships rehoisted their colors, hung what sail they could
on their fractured masts and headed eastward. Far more stayed as captured prizes, their
decks a shambles, their hulls riddled and their crews stunned by the ferocity of the
British gunfire. The British fired faster. They were better trained.

The Redoutable, still lashed to the Victory, was French no longer. She was scarcely even
a ship, for all her masts were gone and her hull was mangled by cannon fire. A portion of
her quarterdeck had collapsed and a British flag now hung over her counter. The Victory’s
mizzen was gone, her fore- and mainmasts were mere stumps, but her guns were still manned and
still dangerous. The vast Santisima Trinidad was silent, her ensign struck. The fiercest
battle now was to the north of her where a few of the enemy vanguard had risked coming back
to help their comrades and now opened fire on the battle-weary British ships that loaded
and fired and rammed and fired again. To the south, where Collingwood’s Royal Sovereign had
opened the battle, a ship burned. The flames leaped twice as high as the masts and the other
ships, fearing the firebrands that must be spewed when her magazines exploded, set sail to
move away from her, though some British ships, knowing what horrors the crew of the burning
ship endured, sent small boats to pluck them to safety. The burning ship was French, the
Achille, and the sound of her explosion was a dull thump that rolled across the
wreckage-littered sea like the crack of doom. A cloud of smoke, black as night, boiled where
the burning ship had floated while scraps of fire seared to the clouds, fell to the sea,
hissed in the ocean, died.

Nelson died.

Fourteen enemy ships had struck so far. A dozen more still fought. One was burned and
sunk, the rest were fleeing.

Captain Montmorin, knowing that Chase intended to board him, had sent men with axes to
cut away the fallen mainmast. Other men chopped through the grapnel lines that tied the
Revenant to the Pucelle. Montmorin was trying to cut himself free, hoping he could limp
away to Cadiz and live to fight another day.

“I want those carronades busy!” Chase shouted, and the gunners who had helped repel the
boarders now ran to the squat weapons and levered them around to fire at the men trying to
free the Revenant, which now had more troubles, for her foresail had caught fire. The flames
spread with extraordinary swiftness, engulfing the great spread of shot-punctured
canvas, but Montmorin’s men were just as swift, cutting the halliards that held the sail’s
spar and so dropping it to the deck where they risked the fire to hurl the burning sail over
the side. “Let them be!” Chase bellowed at those of his men who were aiming muskets at the
struggling French sailors. He knew the fire could spread to the Pucelle and both ships would
then burn together and explode in horror. “Well done! Well done!” Chase applauded his
opponent’s crew as they tipped the last burning wreckage overboard. Then the carronades
recoiled on their slides and spat casks of musket balls which cut down the axemen still
trying to free the two ships from their mutual embrace. A gun exploded on the Revenant,
the sound echoing horribly as scraps of the shattered breech cut down Montmorin’s
lower-deck gunners. There were more British guns firing now, for the Revenant had lost a
dozen when she was raked, and the Pucelle was hurting the Frenchman relentlessly. A
midshipman, commanding the Pucelle’s lower-deck guns, saw that the two hulls were so
close together that the muzzle flames of his thirty-two-pounders were setting fire to
the splintered wood of the Revenant’s lower hull, so he ordered a half-dozen men to throw
buckets of water at the small fires in case the flames caught and spread to the Pucelle.

“Marines!” Sharpe was shouting. “Marines!” He had gathered thirty-two marines and
supposed the rest were dead, wounded or else guarding either the magazines or the French
prisoners on the poop. These thirty-two would have to suffice. “We’re boarding her!”
Sharpe shouted over the bellow of the guns. “You want pikes, axes, cutlasses. Make sure
your muskets are loaded! Hurry!” He turned as he heard the sound of a sword scraping from a
scabbard and saw Midshipman Collier, bright-eyed and still drenched in Lieutenant
Haskell’s blood, standing under the fallen French mainmast that would be the boarding
bridge. “What the hell are you doing here, Harry?” Sharpe asked.

“Coming with you, sir.”

“Like hell you are. Go and watch the bloody clock.”

“There isn’t a clock.”

“Then just go and watch something else!” Sharpe snapped. The weather-deck gunners,
bare-chested, blood-streaked and powder-blackened, were assembling with pikes and
cutlasses. The lower-deck guns still fired, shaking both ships with every shot. A few
French guns answered, and one ball smashed through the gathering boarders, driving a path
of blood across the Pucelle’s deck. “Who’s got a volley gun?” Sharpe shouted, and a marine
sergeant held up one of the stubby weapons. “Is it loaded?” Sharpe asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“Then give it here.” He took the gun, exchanging it for his musket, then made sure his
cutlass was not blood-crusted to its scabbard. “Follow me up to the quarterdeck!” Sharpe
shouted.

The fallen mast jutted across the weather deck, but was too high to be reached unless a
man stood on a hot gun barrel and hauled himself up. It would be easier, Sharpe reckoned,
to go to the quarterdeck, then return along the Pucelle’s starboard gangway. From there a
man could step onto the mast. He would then have to run, balancing himself on the broken
pine spar, before jumping down onto the Revenant’s deck, and because the two ships were
moving unequally in the long high swells, the mast would be pitching and rolling. Jesus,
Sharpe thought, sweet Jesus, but this was a terrible place to be. Like going through the
breach of an enemy fortress, he reckoned. He ran up the quarterdeck steps, turned down the
gangway and tried not to think of what was about to happen. There were French marines on the
opposing gangway, and a horde of armed defenders waiting in the Revenant’s
blood-drenched waist. Montmorin knew what was coming, but just then the forward carronade
sent a shattering cask of musket balls into the Revenant’s belly and belched a pall of
smoke above the ship.

“Now!” Sharpe said, and clambered up onto the mast, but a hand held him back and he
turned, cursing, to see that it was Chase.

“Me first, Sharpe,” Chase chided him.

“Sir!” Sharpe protested.

“Now, boys!” Chase had his sword drawn and was running across the makeshift bridge.

“Come on!” Sharpe shouted. He ran behind Chase, the heavy seven-barreled gun in his
hands. It was like traversing a tightrope. He looked down to see the sea churning white
between the two hulls and he felt dizzy and imagined falling to be crushed to death as the
two hulls banged together, then a bullet spat past him and he saw Chase had jumped from the
shattered stump of the mast and Sharpe followed, screaming as he leaped through the
smoke.

Chase had gone left, jumping into a space cleared by the carronade, though it was still
cluttered with twitching bodies and the deck was slick with new blood. He stumbled on the
corpses and the Frenchmen saw him, his gold braid bright in the smoke, and they shouted as
they charged, but then Sharpe fired the volley gun from the spar and the bullets twitched the
French back in a cloud of smoke. Sharpe jumped down, threw the volley gun aside and drew his
cutlass. He had leaped into the smoking madness of battle, not the deliberate calm of
disciplined fighting when battalions fired volleys or when stately ships exchanged
cannon fire, but the visceral horror of the gutter fight. Chase had fallen between two
of the Frenchman’s starboard guns, and they protected him, but Sharpe was exposed and he
screamed at the enemy, flicked a pike aside with the cutlass, lunged at a man’s eyes, missed,
then a marine jumped onto the Frenchman’s back, throwing him forward, and Sharpe stamped
on the man’s head as the marine was piked in the back. He swung the cutlass to the right,
inadvertently foiling another pike thrust, then reached and seized the French seaman’s
shirt and pulled him forward, straight onto the cutlass blade. Sharpe twisted the steel in
the man’s belly, wrenched it free. He was shrieking like a fiend. He used both hands to swing
the cutlass back to his left, driving away a French officer who stumbled over the dying
British marine and fell back out of range. The dead were making a barricade to protect
Sharpe and Chase, but a French marine was climbing over one of the guns. Chase scrambled to
his feet, lunged his slender sword at his attacker, then fired a pistol across the other
cannon. Sharpe swung the cutlass again, then cheered as a rush of British marines and seamen
dropped to the deck.

“This way!” Sharpe leaped the dead, carrying the fight toward the Revenant’s bows. The
French defenders were numerous, but the way aft was blocked by just as many men. Muskets
cracked from the quarterdeck and more fired from the forecastle and at least one defender
was killed by his own side in that wild fire. The Revenant’s men far outnumbered the
boarders, but the British numbers increased every second and the Pucelle’s crewmen
wanted revenge for the raking the Revenant had given them. They slashed and lunged and
screamed and hit and battered men down. A gunner was swinging a handspike, swatted aside a
sword, crushed a Frenchman’s skull, then he was pushed on by the men behind. Chase was
shouting at men to follow him aft toward the quarterdeck while Sharpe was leading a swarm
of crazed men forward. “Kill them!” he shrieked. “Kill them!”

Afterward he would remember little of that fight, but he rarely remembered such
brawls. They were too confused, too loud, too full of horror, so full of horror, indeed,
that he was ashamed when he remembered the joy of it, but there was a joy there. It was the
happiness of being released to the slaughter, of having every bond of civilization
removed. It was also what Richard Sharpe was good at. It was why he wore an officer’s sash
instead of a private’s belt, because in almost every battle the moment came when the
disciplined ranks dissolved and a man simply had to claw and scratch and kill like a beast.
You did not kill men at long range in this kind of fighting, but came as close as a lover
before you slaughtered them.