The enemy ship was a hundred yards away. The Victory’s cannon fire was ripping upwards through her decks now as Hardy’s gunners elevated their barrels as high as they could. Holes were being punched high in the French two-decker’s starboard side as round shot, fired into the ship’s larboard flank, hammered clean through her. Yet the British gunners were firing blind and the boarders were gathering on the side nearest the Victory where the British guns could not reach. The French captain shouted at his men to drop the main-yard, for that would serve as their bridge to glory. His rigging was tangled with the Victory’s rigging, but his was filled with men and the Victory’s was empty. The sound of the muskets crackled like thorn burning. The Victory’s guns made deep booms. Wood splintered from the French deck and side as the shots punched out.
Fifty yards to go. The wind was foully light. The sea was covered in patches of smoke like breaking fog. The swells heaved the Pucelle eastwards. ‘Larboard a point, John,’ Chase said to the quartermaster, ‘larboard. Take me by his quarter.’ The smoke at the French ship’s stern thinned and Chase saw the name of the two-decker which threatened to board the Victory. The Redoutable. Death to the Redoutable, he thought, and just then the French seamen released the Redoutable’s mainyard halliards and the great spar dropped to crash onto the Victory’s shattered hammock netting. It lay like a canvas-wrapped log across the Redoutable’s waist, but its larboard end jutted out over the Victory’s weather deck. It was a slender bridge, but it was sufficient for the French.
‘A l’abordage!’ the French captain shouted. He was a small man with a very loud voice. He had his sword drawn. ‘A l’abordage!’
His men cheered as they swarmed up the yard. The Pucelle lifted on a wave.
‘Now!’ Chase shouted to the forecastle. ‘Now, Clouter, now!’
And Clouter hesitated.
CHAPTER 11
His lordship should know, Malachi Braithwaite had written in a careful copperplate hand, that his wife was conducting an adulterous affair with Ensign Sharpe. He had overheard the two of them in Sharpe’s quarters aboard the Calliope and, painful though it was to relate, the sounds emanating – that was the word he used, emanating – from the cabin suggested that her ladyship had quite forgotten her high station. Braithwaite had written in a cheap ink, a faded brown that had bled into the damp paper, and was hard to read in the dim lady hole. At first, the confidential secretary related, he had not believed the evidence of his own ears, and scarce even dared credit it when he had glimpsed the Lady Grace leaving the lower-deck steerage in the darkness before dawn, so he had thought it his duty to confront Sharpe with his suspicions. ‘But when I taxed Ensign Sharpe with my accusations,’ he wrote, ‘and upbraided him for taking advantage of her ladyship, he did not deny the circumstances, but instead threatened me with murder.’ Braithwaite had underlined the word ‘murder’. ‘It was that circumstance, my lord, which constrained my cowardly tongue from its bounden duty.’ It gave him no pleasure, Braithwaite concluded the letter, to inform his lordship of these shameful events, especially as his lordship had ever shown him such excessive kindnesses.
Lady Grace let the letter fall into her lap. ‘He lies,’ she said, ‘he lies.’ There were tears in her eyes.
The lady hole was suddenly filled with noise. The Pucelle’s own guns had started to fire and the shock of the cannon reverberated through the ship, shaking the twin lanterns. The noise went on and on, becoming louder as the firing drew nearer to the stern of the ship. Then there was a terrible crash as the Spanish ship’s bows collided with the Pucelle’s side, followed by a groaning screech as tons of wood ground and scraped against the hull. A man shouted, a gun fired, then three more. The sound of the reloaded guns being hauled forward was like bursts of brief thunder.
Then there an odd silence.
‘He did lie,’ Lord William said placidly in the silence, and reached over to take the letter from his wife’s lap. Grace made an effort to snatch it back, but Lord William was too quick. ‘Of course Braithwaite lied,’ his lordship went on. ‘It must have provided him with an exquisite pleasure to tell me of your disgusting behaviour. One detects his enjoyment throughout the letter, don’t you think? And I certainly did him no excessive kindnesses! The thought is as ludicrous as it is offensive.’
‘He lies!’ Lady Grace said more defiantly. A tear quivered at her eye, then rolled down her cheek.
‘Showed him excessive kindnesses!’ Lord William said scathingly. ‘Why would I do such a thing? I paid him a small salary commensurate with his services, and that was all.’ Lord William carefully pocketed the folded letter. ‘One circumstance did puzzle me, though,’ he went on. ‘Why did he confront Sharpe? Why not come straight to me? I have thought about that, and still it puzzles me. What was the point of seeing Sharpe? What did Braithwaite expect of him?’
Lady Grace said nothing. The rudder squealed in its pintles, and an enemy shot struck the Pucelle with a deep booming sound, then there was silence again.
‘Then I remembered,’ Lord William went on, ‘that Sharpe deposited some valuables with that wretched man Cromwell. I thought it an odd circumstance, for the man is palpably poor, but I suppose he could have plundered some wealth in India. Could Braithwaite have been attempting blackmail? What do you think?’
Lady Grace shook her head, not in answer to her husband’s question, but as if to shake off the whole subject.
‘Or perhaps Braithwaite tried to blackmail you?’ Lord William suggested, smiling at his wife. ‘He used to watch you with such a pathetically yearning face. It amused me, for it was plain what he was thinking.’
‘I hated him!’ Lady Grace blurted out.
‘An extravagant waste of emotion, my dear,’ Lord William said. ‘He was an insignificant thing, scarce worth disliking. But, and this is the point of our conversation, was he telling the truth?’
‘No!’ Lady Grace wailed.
Lord William lifted the pistol and examined its lock in the lantern light. ‘I noted,’ he said, ‘how your spirits revived after we boarded the Calliope. I was pleased, naturally, for you have been over-nervous in these last months, but once aboard Cromwell’s ship you seemed positively happy. And indeed, in these last few days, there has been a vivacity in you that is most unnatural. Are you pregnant?’
‘No,’ Lady Grace lied.
‘Your maid tells me you vomit most mornings?’
Grace shook her head again. Tears were running down her cheeks. Partly she cried from shame. When she was with Sharpe it seemed so natural, so comforting and exciting, but she could not plead that in her defence. He was a common soldier, an orphan from the London rookeries, and Grace knew that if society ever learned of her liaison then she would become a laughing stock. A part of her did not care if she was mocked, another part cringed under the lash of Lord William’s scorn. Grace was deep in a ship, down among the rats, lost.
Lord William watched her tears and thought of them as the first trickles of his revenge, then he looked up at the planks of the orlop deck and frowned. ‘It’s oddly silent,’ he said, trying to keep her off balance by momentarily talking of the battle before torturing her with his sharp tongue once more. ‘Perhaps we have run away from the fighting?’ He could hear the grumbling of some distant gunnery, but no cannons were being fired close to the Pucelle. ‘I remember,’ he said, laying the pistol on his knees, ‘when we first met and my uncle suggested I should marry you. I had my doubts, of course. Your father is a wastrel and your mother a garrulous fool, but you possess, Grace, a classical beauty and I confess I was drawn to it. I was concerned that you boasted an education, though it has proved scantier than you think, and I feared you might possess opinions, which I rightly suspected would be foolish, but I was prepared to endure those afflictions. I believed, you see, that my apprehension of your beauty would overcome my distaste for your intellectual pretensions, and in return I asked very little of you, save that you gave me an heir and upheld the dignity of my name. You failed in both things.
’
‘I gave you an heir,’ Grace protested through her tears.
‘That sickly whelp?’ Lord William spat, then shuddered. ‘It is your other failure that concerns me now, my dear. Your failure of taste, of behaviour, of decency, of fidelity’ – he paused, seeking the right insult – ‘of manners!’
‘Braithwaite lied!’ Grace screamed. ‘He lied.’
‘He did not lie,’ Lord William said angrily. ‘You, my lady, made the beast with two backs with that common soldier, that lump of ignorance, that brute.’ His voice was cold now, for he could no longer hide his long-cosseted rage. ‘You fornicated with a peasant, and you could not have sunk lower had you put yourself on the streets and lifted your skirts.’
Lady Grace rested her head on the planking. Her mouth was open, gasping for breath and the tears were dripping onto her cloak. Her eyes were red, unseeing, as she wept.
‘And now you look so ugly,’ Lord William said, ‘which will make this much easier.’ He lifted the pistol.
And the ship echoed again to the sound of a shot.
Clouter did not pull the carronade’s flintlock lanyard when Chase ordered him to fire. He waited. It seemed to Sharpe, and to everyone else who watched, that Clouter was waiting too long and that the French would reach the Victory’s weather deck, but the Pucelle had heaved up on a swell and Clouter was waiting for the ship to roll to larboard on the back of the wave. She did, and on that down roll Clouter fired and the shot was perfectly timed so that its barrelful of musket balls and round shot slashed into the Frenchmen clambering up the spar that would have carried them onto the Victory’s unprotected deck. One moment there was a boarding party, the next there was a butcher’s yard. The fallen yard and sail were drenched with blood, but the Frenchmen had disappeared, snatched into oblivion by the storm of metal.
The Pucelle now glided past the Redoutable’s quarter. She was a pistol shot away and the big guns of Chase’s larboard broadside began to work on the devastated enemy. Chase had ordered the gunners to raise their barrels so that the shots cracked through the Frenchman’s side and tore their way upwards through the deck which was thronged with men. Shot after shot spat from the Pucelle in a fire that was deliberate, slow and lethal. Men were lifted from the enemy deck, snatched upward by the round shot. Some shots passed through the Redoutable to strike the Victory’s weather-deck rail. It took more than a minute for the Pucelle to pass the doomed French ship, and for all of that minute the guns ripped into her, and then it was the turn of the quarterdeck carronades that could look down on the bloody mess left on the enemy deck and the two smashers finished the work, emptying their squat barrels into the squirming mass.
The Redoutable had no cannons manned. The French captain had gambled everything on boarding the Victory, and his boarders were now dead, wounded or dazed, but the ship’s rigging was still filled with the marksmen who had emptied the upper decks of Nelson’s flagship and those men had turned their muskets onto the Pucelle. The balls rained down, smacking on the quarterdeck like metal hail. Grenades were hurled, exploding in gouts of smoke and whistling shards of glass and iron.
The Pucelle’s marines did their best, but they were outnumbered. Sharpe fired up into the dazzling light, then hurriedly reloaded. The deck about his feet was being pockmarked with bullet strikes. A ball clanged off Clouter’s empty carronade and struck a man in the thigh. A marine reeled back from the rail, his mouth opening and closing. Another, pierced through the throat, knelt by the foremast and gazed wide-eyed at Sharpe. ‘Spit, boy!’ Sharpe shouted at him. ‘Spit!’
The man looked vacantly at Sharpe, frowned, then obediently spat. There was no blood in the spittle. ‘You’ll live,’ Sharpe told him. ‘Get yourself below.’ A bullet hit a mast hoop, scraping away fresh yellow paint. Sergeant Armstrong fired his musket, swore as a bullet drilled his left foot, limped to the rail, picked up another musket and fired again. Sharpe rammed his bullet, primed the gun, lifted it to his shoulder and aimed at the knot of men on the Frenchman’s maintop. He pulled the trigger. He could see musket flashes up there. A grenade landed on the forecastle and exploded in a sheet of flame. Armstrong, wounded by shards of glass, smothered the flames with a bucket of sand, then began to reload. Blood was trickling from the scuppers of the Redoutable’s weather deck, trickling under the shattered rail and dribbling red across her closed gun-ports. The Pucelle’s foremost guns, reloaded, fired into the Frenchman’s bows and there was a crack like the gates of hell being shut as the vast anchor was struck by a round shot. More round shot from the Victory was breaking out of the enemy’s side and some struck the Pucelle. A dozen more muskets fired from the enemy’s maintop and Sergeant Armstrong was on his knees, cursing, but still reloading. More muskets flickered from the enemy’s mast and Sharpe threw down his musket and picked up Sergeant Armstrong’s volley gun. He looked up at the enemy maintop and reckoned it was too far away and that the seven bullets would spread too wide before they reached the platform that was built where the Frenchman’s lower mast was jointed to the upper.
He went to the starboard rail, slung the big gun on his shoulder and pulled himself up the foremast shrouds. He could see a marine lying on the Pucelle’s quarterdeck with a rivulet of blood seeping from his body along the planks. Another marine was being carried to the rails. He could not see Chase, but then a bullet struck the shroud above him, making the tarred rope tremble like a harp string and he climbed desperately, his ears buffeted by the sound of the big guns. Another bullet whipped close by, a second struck the mast and, bereft of force, thumped against the volley gun’s stock. He reached the futtock shrouds and, without thinking, hurled himself upwards and outwards, the quickest way to the maintop. There was no time to be frightened; instead he scrambled up the ratlines as nimbly as any sailor and then rolled onto the grating to find that he was now level with the Frenchmen in their maintop. There were a dozen men there, most reloading, but one fired and Sharpe felt the wind of the ball whipping past his cheek. He unslung the volley gun, cocked and aimed it.
‘Bastards,’ he said, and pulled the trigger. The recoil of the gun hurled him back against the topmast shrouds. The volley gun’s smoke filled the sky, but no shots came from the Frenchman’s maintop. Sharpe slung the empty gun on his shoulder and lowered himself off the grating. His feet flailed for a heartbeat, then found the inward-sloping futtock shrouds and he went back down to the Pucelle’s deck and, when he looked back up, all he could see at the Redoutable’s maintop was a body hanging off the edge. He threw the volley gun down, picked up a musket and walked to the larboard rail.
A dozen marines were left. The others were dead or wounded. Sergeant Armstrong, his face bleeding from three cuts and his trousers a deep red from a bullet wound, was sitting with his back against the foremast. He had a musket at his shoulder and, though his right eye was closed by blood, he did his best to aim the musket, then fired. ‘You should go below, Sergeant!’ Sharpe shouted.
Armstrong gave a monosyllabic opinion of that advice and pulled a cartridge from his pouch. A bullet had grazed Clouter’s back leaving a bloody welt like the stroke of a lash, but the big man was paying it no heed. He was stuffing another cask of musket balls into the carronade, though by now the Pucelle had gone beyond the Redoutable and the Frenchman was out of Clouter’s range.
Captain Chase still lived. Connors, the signal lieutenant, had lost his right forearm to a cannon ball and was down in the cockpit, while Pearson, a midshipman who had twice failed his lieutenant’s examination, had been killed by the musketry. The marine lieutenant was wounded in the belly and had been taken below to die. A dozen gunners were dead and two marines had been thrown overboard, but Chase reckoned the Pucelle had still been lucky. She had destroyed the Redoutable just as that ship had been on the point of boarding the Victory, and Chase felt an exultation as he looked back to see the terrible damage his guns had done. They had filleted her, by God! Chase had half considered laying alongside the Redoutable and boarding her, but she was a
lready lashed to the Victory and doubtless the flagship’s crew would take her surrender, then he saw the French Neptune ahead and he shouted at the helmsman to steer for her. ‘She’s ours!’ he told Haskell.
The first lieutenant was bleeding from a bullet wound in his left arm, though he refused to have it treated. The arm hung useless, but Haskell claimed it did not hurt and, besides, he said, he was right-handed. Blood dripped from his fingers. ‘At least get the arm bandaged,’ Chase suggested, staring at the Neptune, which was making surprising speed despite the loss of her mizzenmast. She must have sailed clean round the western edge of the mêlée while the Pucelle passed to its east, and now the Frenchman was heading landwards as though trying to escape the battle.
‘I’m sure Pickering is quite busy enough without having to be detained by scratched lieutenants,’ Haskell answered testily.
Chase took off his white silk stock and beckoned to Midshipman Collier. ‘Tie that round Lieutenant Haskell’s arm,’ he ordered the midshipman, then turned to the quartermaster. ‘Starboard, John,’ he said, gesturing, ‘starboard.’ The Neptune was threatening to cross the Pucelle’s bows and Chase needed to avoid that, but he reckoned he had speed enough to catch the Frenchman, lay her alongside and fight her muzzle to muzzle, and, because she carried eighty-four guns and he only had seventy-four, his victory would be all the more remarkable.
Then disaster struck.
The Pucelle had sailed past the Victory and the Redoutable, leaving a thick cloud of smoke that drifted after her, and out of that cloud there appeared the bows of an undamaged ship. Her figurehead showed a ghostly skeleton, scythe in one hand and a French tricolour in the other, and she was crossing behind the Pucelle, not a pistol’s length away, and the whole of her larboard broadside was facing the Pucelle’s decorated stern.
‘Hard to starboard!’ Chase shouted at the quartermaster who had already begun the turn which would bring the Pucelle’s larboard broadside to face the Neptune, but then the new enemy fired and the very first shot ripped away the tiller ropes so that the wheel spun uselessly in the quartermaster’s hands. The rudder, no longer tensioned by the ropes, centred itself and the Pucelle swung back to larboard, leaving her stern naked to the enemy guns. She would be raked.