The Barbed Crown (29 page)
So I was too late. Before I was halfway down the carronade fired.
The effect on
Redoutable
was as dramatic as the earlier blast into the stern of the
Bucentaure
. Again, a scythe of five hundred musket balls blasted out, this time spraying our French top deck like a gust of hail. I could actually see the shadow of the radiating cloud of lead as it kicked up a blizzard of splinters.
The gore was instantaneous. Sailors and marines were hurled like paper. Small arms went flying. Almost the entire boarding party fell dead or wounded, turning an attack into slaughter. Lucas’s charge ended before it could begin.
No sooner had the carronade blasted than the French topmen got the range and peppered the British gun crew with grenades and gunfire. Several English fell and the rest ran into their forecastle for cover. Boarders and defenders were both down now, temporary stalemate ensuing. The decks of the two warships were littered with casualties.
Not wanting to join chaos below, I clambered back to the mizzen platform, noting uneasily that there was more room than when I’d left. British marines had shot several of my companions out of our perch. Our concealing canvas curtain was dotted with bullet holes.
“There! Is that Nelson?”
The marksmen peered through a momentary clearing in the smoke. A diminutive man stood on the British quarterdeck with bodies sprawled around him. He was wearing a bicorn hat of command and a coat with embroidered decorations. He almost begged to be a target.
The wearer was either insane or waiting for glory. Muskets aimed.
“Not him!” I shoved against the soldiers, making them lurch, and the muskets flashed, shots flying wide.
“You imbecile!”
“Don’t cut him down like a dog.” It was a plea, a gasp. “He’s blessed by greatness.”
“You made us miss, traitor!” A fist smashed into my face. Then a knee hit my groin. I fell onto the fighting top, and boots kicked me. I lashed back in return, tripping men, trying to save the mad admiral who strutted below.
“Take his ship and take him prisoner, dammit!” I urged. “That’s the higher deed.”
They ignored me. “Take Gage’s rifle! It’s still loaded!”
I grabbed. “No!” But they wrestled it from my grasp, my fingers slipping from its carved butt. I clawed for the sniper’s legs, but I was still being pummeled. Then I heard the gun’s distinctive crack.
I rose to my knees, surprised to be alive and dreading to look. Someone important had fallen and was being carried below, a concealing handkerchief draped over his face.
“We’ve shot the admiral!” a sergeant bellowed down to Lucas. “Their deck is clear. Now, now, board!”
Indeed,
Victory
’s top decks looked almost deserted except for a handful of marines crouching behind their gunwale. The wheel was smashed, the boats exploded, and dead and wounded lay everywhere. The carronades were abandoned. Exploded French grenades littered the planking with fragments of metal, and a steady collapse of rigging had choked the main deck with an avalanche pan of wreckage. Far below, where the hulls ground together, I could see stabs of fire as more British and French cannon went off, tearing out the guts of the ships.
It didn’t seem survival was possible for any of us.
Captain Lucas was staggering on his own quarterdeck from a wound, but now he bellowed like a bear at his men down below. “Come! They’ve fled their main deck! Leave the guns! We can seize them from above!”
For a seventy-six-gun two-decker to conquer the fabled
Victory
would be the proudest achievement of French arms in naval history. With Nelson down, suddenly it seemed possible. The sailors who were losing the gunnery contest below clambered up to attack across the rails.
Redoutable
’s guns fell silent as men bunched once again to rush the British marines.
“Lower the main yard to use as a ramp!” Lucas ordered. The spar holding the mainsail came down and was swung to lean like a log between the higher
Victory
and the lower
Redoutable
. It would serve as a bridge along which the boarders could scramble like monkeys.
“Midshipman Yon!”
“Aye, Captain!” A young French officer at the bow saluted and led four sailors in a daring leap across to the
Victory
’s anchor, and then up its stock to the British deck above. They disappeared a moment before his head popped up above the enemy gunwale.
“There’s no one left alive! They’re all hiding below!”
“Our grenades have worked!” Lucas called to his men. They cheered.
I could feel our ship quaking as the British continued to disembowel
Redoutable
with their artillery.
“Boarders ready!” The men strained like hounds on the end of their leash. If the great Nelson had been wounded or killed, the top deck swept clear, and the carronades silenced, this would be the climax of the battle. Against all odds, Lucas would sweep and conquer.
“Away boarders! Charge!”
A great shout rose up, at first warbling and then strengthening in volume.
“Vive la France! Vive l’empereur!”
And then a new opponent loomed out of the miasma of smoke. The French and Spanish ships would not cooperate. The English did.
The British three-decker
Téméraire
, a towering monster of ninety-eight guns, bore down on our untouched starboard side like some ghastly apparition, huge and relatively unscathed. The men next to me shouted and pointed, urging their comrades below to return to the starboard cannon. But no one was paying attention; their eyes were on
Victory
. The French marines around me shot impotently at this new tormentor, hurling their last grenades. The bombs fell short into the sea, and they cursed in frustration.
The
Téméraire
sailed into point-blank range. Then it fired a thunderous broadside, every gun at once, into the other side of
Redoutable
.
It was if a volcano had erupted below. The entire starboard side of the ship caved in, cannons were upended like toys, and the would-be boarding party was lashed by iron and splinters. The decks below actually blistered and broke upward, planks raw, and the ladders leading from one deck to another disappeared like chaff. Even from a hundred feet above, the human havoc was horrific. Limbs spun off into the black pit that had become the core of my ship. Blood sprayed upward as if shot by a fountain. Torsos were cut in two.
Téméraire
crashed against our starboard side, rocking us, and began hammering
Redoutable
with its guns as
Victory
was doing on the port, leaving us helplessly sandwiched between two bigger ships. Our own artillery had fallen silent because there was almost nobody left to man the cannon.
We were being pulverized. Three quarters of
Redoutable
’s men were already dead or wounded.
“Victory
is getting away!”
The British had chopped away the grapnel lines, and Nelson’s battered flagship began to drift off. The widening gap of water revealed that its hull was pockmarked with shot holes and that our own hull was little more than ravaged ribbing. So much wood had been shot away that iron nails jutted like coat hooks. Dead and wounded tumbled into the growing crevasse between the two ships, vanishing in the ocean. As
Victory
got some sea room the rhythm of its guns actually increased, hammering with vicious determination. Shrouds, stays, and halyards snapped; lines scythed; and yardarms crashed down. The protective netting had long since collapsed, and the spars bounced as they hit the main deck with great crashes. The broken French deck was a tangle of sails, rope, and bodies.
We’d lost. My surviving topmen turned on me. “The damned American has been a coward the entire battle!”
“Not a coward, but an ambassador,” I gasped. “I tried to stop this.”
“Hang him!”
“From what, François? Our rigging is tumbling. I’m going to shoot him before we go over ourselves.”
“Lucas wants me alive,” I tried. “He’ll need a negotiator.”
There was no reasoning. They were in a rage of despair, deafened from the fighting, their friends dead. I represented bad luck. Two held my arms while a third pressed a musket muzzle against my head.
I closed my eyes.
Then
Téméraire
broadsided again, and the mizzen shook as if every cannonball was aimed at its base. Everyone on our platform jerked and fell, the musket’s blast going off by my cheek and giving me a painful powder burn. The world pitched and rolled. The mizzen cracked somewhere below, cut like a great tree, and we all yelled and screamed as it leaned, men plunging. With majestic momentum, it fell toward
Victory
.
I instinctively clung to a ratline as the French mast pivoted, watching time again slow to molasses. A few surviving British marines and sailors shouted soundlessly, looking upward at this tower falling toward them. The shattered English rigging loomed like a tangled forest canopy. The gun smoke thickened as we descended into it, as if I was falling into an alien atmosphere of poisonous clouds. A wrack of canvas and broken tackle rushed up.
Harry!
came into my mind. Not just my wife, but my poor dear son.
And that was the end.
I
awoke in hell.
The underworld was murkily lit by an amber lantern, and my body was held down on a satanic altar. My tormentors were a coven of demons, their hands and forearms red with blood. I could hear screams and groans of the damned. Some kind of primary devil leaned over me with a shiny saw, ready to begin an eternity of torment.
I should have paid more attention to the maxims of Franklin.
Then the devil frowned.
“What’s wrong with this one?” Satan demanded at his minions.
“Brought down insensible and gory. Dead, for all we know.”
“Look at him blink. Which limb needs to come off?”
“Blood everywhere, Dr. Beatty. We ain’t quite sure.”
Grateful heavens, I wasn’t damned, but simply in the cockpit in the bowels of the
Victory:
stunned, carried, and now about to be amputated if I didn’t testify to my own health. I opened my mouth and a bubble of blood and saliva formed. I gaped like a fish, trying to summon speech.
Surgeon Beatty yanked impatiently at my arms and legs. “Good God, the admiral’s dying, and you bother me with an intact lump like this? Get the useless bugger off the table so we can do some real work.”
And the demons, or rather seamen, threw me against a bulkhead. Salvation!
I slowly comprehended that I was still alive, and in the British flagship where I’d fallen. It
was
hellish in
Victory
’s cockpit, a grim preview of the afterlife. There were at least forty wounded crammed into a space little larger than a kitchen, some bleeding their life away, others sobbing from the agony of quick amputation, and still others lying stunned like poleaxed cattle. Everything was sticky with blood. Lanterns danced eerily, offal slid on the floor, and even here below the cannon, acrid gunsmoke made a thin fog in the air. The beams quaked from the continued roar of massive thirty-six-pounders overhead, the guns leaping and then slamming down with each discharge. The battle was still going on.
My fall had carried me onto the British flagship. By peculiar damnation, I managed to change sides even when unconscious.
I blearily peered about. There was a cluster of men opposite me, attending anxiously to someone important who was propped up against a timber on the larboard side of the flagship. The victim’s face was pale and sweating, his features twisted with great pain.
It was Nelson.
So the man I’d seen shot down by the French from the mizzen platform had truly been the commander of the British fleet. Could the Combined Fleet actually win the battle over the English because of this calamity?
But
Redoutable
was being torn apart, wasn’t it?
Cheers rumbled from the
Victory
’s crew above.
“What’s that? What’s that?” I heard Nelson’s distinctive nasal voice. He coughed, the sound wet and dire.
“Another one of the enemy must have struck its flag, your lordship,” a wounded lieutenant replied.
The admiral lay back. “Good. Good.”
Did these officers know I’d just been on the fighting platforms that had mortally wounded their commander? What had become of my Bonaparte rifle? Would I be remembered as a confidant of Nelson at Merton, or his would-be assassin from the
Redoutable
? I fumbled to check for belongings or wounds. None of the latter, but I was still wearing my Napoleonic pendant. I needed to put distance between this bunch and me until battle emotions cooled.
I shifted slightly, shying toward the cockpit entry, trying hard not to be noticed. A midshipman was screaming and kicking on the surgery table as Beatty sawed, the boy’s teeth clamped on a soggy hank of rope. His leg fell away like a hank of beef. The boy gasped, giving great shuddering sobs as his stump was doused with vinegar, bound, and he was shifted to lie like cordwood with the others. There he could contemplate his future as a cripple.
“This next one’s already dead,” a seaman reported.
“We’ve no room,” Beatty snapped. “Throw him overboard.”
I inched farther away. As my vision cleared I saw more than I wanted to. Cracked bone jutting from broken flesh. Skin roasted from flash or fire. Discarded legs and arms piled like pallid sausage. An eye gone, a foot crushed, and a man sucking breath with a three-foot wood splinter impaled between his ribs like a spear. A mouth opened to groan that had no teeth. A boy no more than twelve sobbed, looking at a wrist that no longer was attached to a hand.
All this glory I had failed to prevent.
There was a bustle of men stiffening to brief attention and a new officer came bent into the cockpit to confer with Nelson. This was Thomas Hardy, I recognized, having seen him after the Battle of the Nile. His uniform was tattered, slivers of wood hanging in fabric that was spattered with blood, but he otherwise seemed to be unhurt. He knelt next to the admiral. Nelson’s eyes focused for a moment in recognition, and he reached with his one remaining arm to clasp Hardy’s, left to left. You could see his body shaking as he gathered strength to talk. Thank God Emma couldn’t watch.
“Well, Hardy, how goes the battle?” It was a croak. “How goes the day with us?”
“Very well, my lord. We’ve twelve or fourteen of the enemy’s ships in our possession, but five of their van have tacked and show an intention of bearing down upon the
Victory
. I’ve therefore called two or three of our fresh ships round us, and have no doubt of giving them a drubbing.”
Nelson managed a weak smile. “I hope none of our ships have struck, Hardy.”
“No, my lord, no fear of that.”
His head rolled back. “I’m a dead man. I’m going fast; it will all be over with me soon. Come nearer to me.”
The captain leaned in.
“Pray let my dear Lady Hamilton have my hair, and all other things belonging to me.”
“I hope that Dr. Beatty can hold out some prospect of life.” The captain’s voice shook with emotion. He glanced at the surgeon.
“Oh, no, it’s impossible! My back is shot through. Beatty will tell you so.”
The hero was drowning in his own blood. You could hear his struggle for breath. In a melee slaughtering thousands, here was the pathos summed up in one man, one life, and one death. We were all weeping, and I realized I was witnessing something as historic as Napoleon’s coronation. We’d never see Nelson’s like again.
Beatty came over to probe the admiral’s legs. The admiral reported no feeling. “My lord, unhappily for our country, nothing can be done for you.”
“I know it. God be praised, I’ve done my duty.”
Duty! It was what General Duhésme called me to as well in the Boulogne camp. But duty to which side? Duty to slaughter, endlessly repeated through history? I shifted and dragged myself a good foot toward the exit.
“Fourteen or fifteen enemy ships surrendered,” Nelson muttered. “I’d bargained for twenty.”
I didn’t see the admiral die. Witnessing history is all very fine, but not if it risks your own survival. I kept creeping. Another bustle and a bosun burst in, one ear trickling blood from the concussions, face black from powder, eyes wide and straining. He looked anxiously about and then pointed at me. “There’s the one! That’s the frog bastard!”
A dozen heads swiveled. I gasped my protest. “I’m no Frenchman,” I said in quite fluent English. I dragged myself by my arms half outside the chamber. My hospital stay was over.
The bosun followed me out. “He came over with the
Redoutable
’s mainmast, carrying a pretty gun from Boney hisself! Could’a been ’im who fired the fatal shot!”
“I’m sure you’re confused . . .”
“Let’s hang him!”
“Come, Jack,” a saner seaman said, “the poor sod’s just another prisoner.”
“We’ve no masts or yards left to hang anybody from anyway.”
“Bloody hell, then I’ll rig one meself!”
“Aye. I won’t have a damned jack traitor lying near our saintly admiral!”
“I’m trying to leave . . .” I wheezed.
“Maybe we should just shoot him with his own damned rifle.”
I was the only man in a dozen miles to try to keep out of this battle and now was being proposed for execution by both sides. By the devil’s horns, why are my accusers so unjust, and so enthusiastic? I’d promoted myself from spy to diplomat, but I was the only person who recognized my high station.
I’d also been stunned, as if taking a blow from a hammer, and I struggled to think fast. These sailors still had their blood up from the battle, and I couldn’t wait for sense to return. I had to use trickery.
“Just don’t drown me!” I suddenly cried.
They paused. “As if you have a choice, assassin.”
“I’m fearful of water, lads. Hang or shoot this misunderstood American if you must, but don’t put me overboard and watch the sharks. Oh, I hate the cold sea! Anything but that!”
“Hate the sea? Can’t swim, I suppose.”
“Not a stroke. Lord, I’ll sink into the black depths and be eaten by fishes. That’s a preview of hell, that is. Nelson dreads it, too. Yes, hemp around my neck would be a mercy. There’s a good fellow, give me a proper hanging. With ceremony and a Bible, if you don’t mind.”
The sailors looked at each other and grunted. “That’s it then, lads. Sometimes simplest is best.” One bent. “Say hello to Davy Jones, assassin.”
“But I can’t swim, I told you! Surely you won’t let me drown!”
They laughed, grabbed, lurched me upright, and glared like a mob rousting a heretic. Hands tore at my wretched clothing, and one came away with the pendant.
“Look here then, a medal from Napoleon!”
“And a savage tomahawk!”
“Bloody hell, he’s a filthy spy. Or worse.”
“What’s worse than that?”
“I’m just an American tourist,” I protested feebly. The broken sword I’d strapped to my inner thigh, and they didn’t snatch that.
“Yes, the sea for him.”
Sometimes I make my own luck.
They hustled me up to the lowest gun deck and gave an angry shove toward a shot-smashed gunport. It reminded me somewhat of being pitched from a gambling salon or brothel, but I was usually fortified with alcohol when that occurred.
The last glimpse I had of the lower gun deck of
Victory
was as ghastly as the medical cockpit below. Several cannon had been dismounted by French shot, their barrels tilted like sprawled logs. Bodies were being picked over to find the rare wounded, with one corpse shoved out a gunport even as I watched. Smoke smeared the horror with greasy gauze, and new beams of light poked from shot holes to highlight cones of carnage. Splinters had turned the deck into a bed of wooden spikes, wet with puddles of blood. Blobs of flesh were lodged against framing like hurled pudding. Disconnected fingers lay like worms.
The entire cavity had been newly painted with blood, so heavy that it literally dripped from overhead beams in places. Some French cannonballs were embedded to jut like iron breasts. Loose balls rolled to the pitch of waves. I could hear the desultory clanging of a pump below, and the slosh of seawater as the ship groaned.
“Here’s what your frog friends did, bloody spy.”
“I’ve been trying to halt this slaughter.”
“Rob us of victory, you mean.”
“You probably shot poor Nelson with that fancy gun of yours.”
“No, I tried to save him. I’m his friend.” I waved feebly. “If you’ll just ask . . .”
“Pitch him, Jack. The French are bearing down again.”
“Bloody right. No more time for this nonsense.”
“Don’t drown me! I’m a British agent for Sir Sidney Smith!”
“You’re a spy, a turncoat, and a Yankee dog. I can see it in your eyes.”
I shut them. “I’ve got intelligence of the French fleet . . .”
They stuffed me through the ragged gunport as if they were grinding sausage. “There you go!” I dropped into the sea.
My rifle, and tomahawk, they kept.
The lower gun deck isn’t far above the water. I rolled off the curved hull, cutting myself on the ragged edges of fresh shot holes and barnacles, and hit the cold Atlantic with a splash.
The water was a shock, but the plunge flushed my thinking. My head stung, and I surmised I’d cut it on the long fall on the mizzen. I’d no idea how I’d survived at all, but as I kicked away from the
Victory
I saw the flagship had lost all its masts and the deck was a tangle of fallen timber. Sails dragged in the ocean.
I must have fallen into a web of wreckage when the
Redoutable
’s mizzen came down, the tangle breaking the fall just enough to save my life.
Now I backstroked away. The sailors stared at me with consternation.
“Look at that. I thought the bugger couldn’t swim!”
“He’s paddling like a damn duck. Say, Jack, I believe he lied to us.”
“That ain’t fair. Come back and be hanged, you!”
I waved.
“Bloody damnation, let’s just shoot him. You there, marine! Your musket loaded?”
So I rolled and struck out for all I was worth, and when a bullet plunked nearby I dove and swam underwater for a spell. Thank the Lord for idiots.
When I surfaced, I looked back. One man shook his fist, but the wind was blowing
Victory
away. The others had lost interest or been ordered to other tasks. A swell lifted me and set me down again. The wind was picking up as the battle went from a boil to a simmer, and the black sky to the west foretold coming fury.
I set off swimming toward
Redoutable
.
It was drifting down on me even as
Victory
drifted away. For a mile in each direction battered battleships wandered, rigging trashed, guns thumping, men staggering. Everyone was exhausted. Firing cannon is bloody hard work.
One ship, presumably French, was burning like a bonfire. Many of the French and Spanish vessels had already surrendered, including the gigantic
Santisima Trinidad
.
Redoutable
had struck to the
Téméraire
. The two ships, still locked together, floated about a hundred yards from where I’d been flung. I swam to the vessel I’d started on fairly easily, initially hoping for more of a hero’s welcome from the French. But wait, those soldiers had wanted to shoot me, too, hadn’t they? And the British prize crew that had clambered aboard might be even less friendly if they got word of my exit from the
Victory
.