Читать книгу Sharpe 3-Book Collection 3: Sharpe’s Trafalgar, Sharpe’s Prey, Sharpe’s Rifles - Bernard Cornwell - Страница 17

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 practise the guns. Like many naval captains he carried extra powder and shot, bought at his own expense, so that his crew could practise. 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-grey 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 easy-going 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 rumoured 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 discoloured,’ 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 venthole 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 sideof 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 upwards 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 amongst a cloud of balls that spat towards 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 chivvying 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 eastwards 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 downwards 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 westwards. 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 towards 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 shirt-sleeves, 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 towards 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 towards 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 backwards and forwards in the lolling swell.

Lady Grace, attended by her maid and carrying a parasol against the hot sun, appeared on the quarter-deck and stared westwards. 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 towards 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!’

‘Tot 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.

The wind freshened at dusk and the Pucelle once again heeled to its pressure. Night fell and officers went round the ship to make certain that not a single lantern was alight anywhere on board except for one feeble, red-shielded binnacle lamp that gave the helmsman a glimpse of the compass. The course was changed a few points westwards in hope of closing on the far ship. The wind rose still more so that the sea could be heard coursing down the ship’s black and yellow flanks.

Sharpe slept, woke, slept again. No one disturbed his night. He was up before dawn and found that the rest of the ship’s officers, even those who should have been sleeping, were on the quarterdeck. ‘She’ll see us before we see her,’ Chase said, meaning that the rising sun would silhouette the Pucelle’s topsails against the horizon, and for a few minutes he considered rousting the off-duty watch to help the topmen bring in everything above the mains, but he reckoned the loss of speed would be a worse result and so he kept his canvas aloft. The men with the best eyesight were all high in the rigging. ‘If we’re lucky,’ Chase confided in Sharpe, ‘we may catch her by nightfall.’

‘That soon?’

‘If we’re lucky,’ the captain said again, then reached out and touched the wooden rail.

The eastern sky was grey now, streaked with cloud, but soon a leak of pink, like the dye from a redcoat’s jacket seeping in the rain onto uniform trousers, suffused the grey. The ship quivered to the seas, left a white wake, raced. The pink turned red, and deeper red, glowing like a furnace over Africa. ‘They’ll have seen us by now,’ Chase said, and took a speaking trumpet from the rail. ‘Keep your eyes sharp!’ he called to the lookouts, then flinched. ‘That was unnecessary,’ he chided himself, then corrected the damage by raising the trumpet again and promising a week’s worth of rum ration to the man who first sighted the enemy. ‘He deserves to be dead drunk,’ Chase said.

The east flared to brilliance and became too bright to look at as the sun at last inched above the horizon. Night had gone, the sea was spread naked under the burning sky and the Pucelle was alone.

For the distant sail had vanished.

Captain Llewellyn was angry. Everyone on board was irritated. The loss of the other ship had caused morale to plummet on the Pucelle so that small mistakes were constantly being made. The bosun’s mates were lashing out with their rope ends, officers were snarling, the crew was sullen, but Captain Llewellyn Llewellyn was genuinely angry and apprehensive.

Before the ship sailed from England he had taken aboard a crate of grenades. ‘They’re French ones,’ he told Sharpe, ‘so I’ve no idea what’s in them. Powder, of course, and some kind of fulminate. They’re made of glass. You light it, you throw it and you pray that it kills someone. Devilish things, they are, quite devilish.’

But the grenades were lost. They were supposed to be in the forward magazine deep on the orlop deck, but a search by Llewellyn’s lieutenant and two sergeants had failed to find the devices. To Sharpe the loss of the grenades was just another blow of ill fortune on a day that seemed ill-starred for the Pucelle, but Llewellyn reckoned it was far more serious than that. ‘Some fool might have put them in the hold,’ he said. ‘We bought them from the Viper when she was being refitted. They took them in an action off Antigua and their captain didn’t want them. Reckoned they were too dangerous. If Chase finds them in the hold he’ll crucify me, and I don’t blame him. Their proper place is in a magazine.’

A dozen marines were organized into a search party and Sharpe joined them in the deep hold where the rats ruled and the ship’s stink was foully concentrated. Sharpe had no need to be there, Llewellyn had not even asked him to help, but he preferred to be doing something useful rather than endure the bad-tempered disappointment that had soured the deck ever since daybreak.

It took three hours, but eventually a sergeant found the grenades in a box that had the word ‘biscuit’ stencilled on its lid. ‘God knows what’s in the magazines, then,’ Llewellyn said sarcastically. ‘They’re probably full of salt beef. That bloody man Cowper!’ Cowper was the ship’s purser, in charge of the Pucelle’s supplies. The purser was not quite an officer, but was generally treated as one, and he was thoroughly disliked. ‘It’s the fate of pursers,’ Llewellyn had told Sharpe, ‘to be hated. It is why God put them on earth. They are supposed to supply things, but rarely can, and if they do then the things are usually the wrong size or the wrong colour or the wrong shape.’ Pursers, like the army’s sutlers, could trade on their own account, and their venality was famous. ‘Cowper probably hid them,’ Llewellyn said, ‘thinking he could sell them to some benighted savage. Bloody man!’ Now, having cursed the purser, the Welshman took one of the grenades from the box and handed it to Sharpe. ‘Packed with scrap metal, see? That thing could go off like case shot!’

Sharpe had never handled a grenade before. The old British ones, long discarded for being ineffective, had resembled a miniature shell that had been launched from a bowl-like attachment at the front of a musket, but this French weapon was made of a dark-green glass. The light was poor in the hold, but he held the grenade close to one of the marine’s lanterns and saw that the interior of the glass globe, which was about the size of a decent suet pudding, was packed with scraps of metal. A fuse protruded from one side, sealed with a ring of melted wax. ‘You light the fuse,’ Llewellyn said, ‘throw the damn thing, and I suppose the glass container shatters when it falls. The lit fuse communicates to the powder and that’s the end of a Frenchman.’ He paused, frowning at the glass ball. ‘I hope.’ He took the grenade back and fondled it like a baby. ‘I wonder if Captain Chase would let us try one. If we had men standing by with buckets of water?’

‘Make a dirty mark on his nice clean deck?’ Sharpe asked.

‘I suppose he won’t,’ Llewellyn said sadly. ‘Still, if it comes to a battle I’ll give some to the boys up the masts and they can hurl them onto the enemy decks. They have to be good for something.’

‘Chuck ’em overboard,’ Sharpe advised.

‘Dear me, no! I don’t want to hurt the fish, Sharpe!’

Llewellyn, hugely relieved by the discovery, had the precious grenades taken to the forward magazine and Sharpe followed the marines up the ladder to the orlop deck which, being beneath the water line, was almost as dark as the hold. The marines went forrard, while Sharpe went towards the stern, intending to climb to Chase’s dining cabin for midday dinner, but he could not use the companionway up to the lower deck for a man in a faded black coat was clambering unsteadily down the ladder. Sharpe instinctively waited, then saw that it was Malachi Braithwaite who so cautiously descended the rungs. Sharpe stepped swiftly back into the surgeon’s cabin where the red-painted walls and table waited for battle’s casualties and from there he watched Braithwaite take a lantern from a hook beside the companionway. The secretary fumbled with a tinderbox, blew on the charred linen to make a flame and lit the oil lamp. He put the lamp on the deck, then grunted as he heaved up the aft hatch of the hold to release a stench of bilge water and rot. Braithwaite shuddered, nerved himself, then took the lantern and clambered down into the ship’s depths.

Sharpe followed. There were moments in life, he thought, when fate played into his hands. There had been such a moment when he met Sergeant Hakeswill and joined the army, and another on the battlefield at Assaye when a general had been unhorsed, and now Braithwaite was alone in the hold. Sharpe stood by the hatch and watched Braithwaite’s lantern bob as the secretary went slowly down the ladder, and then went aft towards the place where the officers’ dunnage was stored.

Sharpe dropped down the ladder and carefully pulled the hatch shut behind him. He went stealthily, though any noise his shoes made on the rungs was masked by the creak of the great pine masts which protruded down through all the decks to be rooted in the elmwood keel. The sound of the flexing masts was magnified in the hold, which also reverberated to the squelching clatter of the ship’s six pumps, the sound of the sea and the grating screech of the rudder turning on its pintles.

This after part of the hold was isolated from the forward part of the ship by a great heap of water butts and vinegar barrels that stretched from the planking above the bilge to the beams of the orlop deck twelve feet above. Those beams were supported by great shafts of oak that, in the dim lantern light, looked like the pillars of an old, smoke-darkened church. Braithwaite threaded his way between the oak pillars, climbing the gentle rise of the ship’s hull towards a stack of shelves at the very back of the hold that shielded a small space in the stern that was known as the lady hole because it provided the safest place on board during a battle. There was nothing valuable kept on the shelves, merely the officers’ unwanted dunnage, but Lord William had brought so much luggage to the Pucelle that some of it had to be stored here, and Sharpe, crouching in the shadow of some casks of pungent salt beef, watched the secretary climb a short ladder to find a leather case which he hauled from the top shelf and carried awkwardly back to the deck. He took a key from his pocket and unlocked the case which proved to be crammed with papers. Nothing there, Sharpe thought, for any light-fingered seamen to filch, though he did not doubt that some of them would already have picked the case’s lock in hope of better spoils. Braithwaite leafed through the papers, found what he wanted, relocked the case and carried it back up the ladder where he clumsily pushed it past the wooden bar that kept the shelf’s contents from spilling in a high sea. The secretary was muttering to himself and snatches of his words carried to Sharpe. ‘I’m an Oxford man, not a slave! It could have waited till we reached England. Get in there, damn you!’

The case was finally stowed away, Braithwaite came down the ladder, pocketed the sheet of paper, collected his lantern and started back towards the larger ladder that lay alongside the mizzenmast and led to the closed hatch. He did not see Sharpe. He thought he was alone in the hold until a hand suddenly grasped his collar. ‘Hello, Oxford man,’ Sharpe said.

‘Jesus!’ Braithwaite swore and shuddered. Sharpe took the lantern from the secretary’s nerveless hand and placed it on top of a cask, then spun Braithwaite round and pushed him hard so that he fell onto the deck.

‘I had an interesting conversation with her ladyship the other day,’ Sharpe said. ‘It seems you’re blackmailing her.’

‘You’re being ridiculous, Sharpe, ridiculous.’ Braithwaite thrust himself backwards until he could go no further, then sat with his back against the water casks where he brushed at the dirt on his trousers and coat.

‘Do they teach blackmail at Oxford?’ Sharpe asked. ‘I thought they only taught you useless things like Latin and Greek, but I’m wrong, am I? They give lectures in blackmail and housebreaking, maybe? Pocket-slitting on the side, perhaps?’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘You know what I’m talking about, Braithwaite.’ Sharpe said. He picked up the lantern and walked slowly towards the terrified secretary. ‘You’re blackmailing Lady Grace. You want her jewels, don’t you, and maybe more? You’d like her in your bed, wouldn’t you? You’d like to go where I’ve been, Braithwaite.’

Braithwaite’s eyes widened. He was scared, but he was not so witless as to miss the significance of Sharpe’s words. Sharpe had admitted the adultery, and that meant Braithwaite was about to die, for Sharpe could not afford to let him live and tell the tale. ‘I just came to fetch a memorandum, Sharpe,’ the secretary babbled in apparent panic, ‘that’s all. I came to fetch this paper. Just a memorandum, Sharpe, for Lord William’s report. Let me show you,’ and he put a hand in his pocket to fetch the paper and brought out, not a memorandum, but a small pistol. It was the kind of gun designed to be carried in a purse or pocket for use against cutthroats or highwaymen and Braithwaite, his hand shaking, dragged back the flint. ‘I’ve carried this ever since you threatened me, Sharpe.’ His voice was suddenly more confident as he levelled the pistol.

Sharpe dropped the lantern.

It hit the deck, there was a shudder of light, then the smash of glass and utter darkness. Sharpe twisted aside, half expecting to hear the pistol crack, but Braithwaite had retained enough nerve to hold his fire.

‘You’ve got one shot, Oxford man,’ Sharpe said. ‘One shot, then it’s my turn.’

Silence, except for the clatter of the pumps and the noise of the masts and the scratching of rats’ feet in the bilge.

‘I’m used to this,’ Sharpe said. ‘I’ve crawled in the darkness before, Braithwaite, and killed men. Cut their gizzards. I did it outside Gawilghur on a dark night. Cut two men’s throats, Braithwaite, slit them back to the spine.’ He was crouching behind a cask so that if Braithwaite did fire then the secretary would merely inflict a wound on a barrel of salt beef. Sharpe kept his body behind the cask and reached out with his left hand, scraping his nails on the plank deck. ‘I slit their gizzards, Oxford man.’

‘We can come to an agreement, Sharpe,’ Braithwaite said nervously. He had not moved since the hold went dark. Sharpe knew that, for he would have heard. He reckoned Braithwaite was waiting until he went close and then he would fire. Just like ship-to-ship fighting. Let the bugger get close, then fire.

‘What kind of agreement, Oxford man?’ Sharpe asked, then scratched the deck again, making little noises that would be magnified by the secretary’s fear. He found a shard of broken lantern glass and scraped it on the wood.

‘You and I should be friends, Sharpe,’ Braithwaite said. ‘You and I? We ain’t like them. My father is a parson. He doesn’t make much. Three hundred a year? That may sound like a competence to you, but it’s nothing, Sharpe, nothing. Yet people like William Hale are born to fortunes. They abuse us, Sharpe, they grind us down. They think we’re dirt.’

Sharpe tapped the glass scrap against the lantern’s metal, then scratched it on wood to make a noise like rats’ claws. He reached as far as he could, tapping the glass closer to Braithwaite. Braithwaite would be listening, trying to make sense of the small noises, trying to contain a rising terror.

‘By what justification,’ Braithwaite asked, his voice a tone higher, ‘can mere birth bestow such good fortune on one man and deny it to another? Are we lesser men because our parents were poor? Must we forever tug the forelock because their ancestors were brutes in plate armour who stole a fortune? You and I should combine, Sharpe. I beg you, think on it.’

Sharpe was lying flat on the deck now, reaching towards Braithwaite, grinding the glass on the rough planking, taking the sound ever nearer to the secretary who tried to see something, anything, in the Stygian darkness.

‘I never wrote to Colonel Wallace as I was ordered to,’ Braithwaite said in desperation. ‘That was a favour to you, Sharpe. Can you not apprehend that we’re on the same side?’ He paused, waiting for an answer to come from the pitch darkness, but there was only the small scraping sound on the deck in front of him. ‘Speak, Sharpe!’ Braithwaite pleaded. ‘Or kill Lord William.’ Braithwaite’s voice was almost sobbing with fear now. ‘Her ladyship will thank you, Sharpe. You’d like that, wouldn’t you? Sharpe? Answer me, Sharpe, for God’s sake, answer me!’

Sharpe tapped the glass fragment on the deck. He could hear Braithwaite’s hoarse breathing. The secretary lunged out a foot, hoping to find Sharpe, but the shoe struck nothing. ‘I beg you, Sharpe, think of me as a friend! I mean you no harm. How could I? When I so admire your achievements? Her ladyship misconstrued my words, nothing else. She is finely strung, Sharpe, and I am your friend, Sharpe, your friend!’

Sharpe tossed the glass scrap so that it rattled among the casks somewhere in the hold’s starboard side. Braithwaite gave a yelp of terror, but held his fire, then sobbed as he heard more small noises. ‘Talk to me, Sharpe. We are not brutes, you and I. We have things in common, we should talk. Talk to me!’

Sharpe gathered a handful of the broken glass, paused, then threw them towards the secretary who, as the small scraps struck him, screamed and thrust the pistol blindly forward and pulled the trigger. The small gun flashed blindingly in the hold and the bullet smacked harmlessly into a timber. Sharpe stood and walked forward, waited for the echo of the shot to die away. ‘One bullet, Oxford man,’ he said, ‘then it was my turn.’

‘No!’ Braithwaite flailed wildly in the dark, but Sharpe kicked him hard, then dropped on him, pinioned his arms and turned the secretary over so that he lay on his belly.

Sharpe sat on the small of Braithwaite’s back. ‘Now tell me, Oxford man,’ he asked softly, ‘just what you wanted of Lady Grace?’

‘I’ve written it all down, Sharpe.’

‘Written what down, Oxford man?’ Sharpe had Braithwaite’s arms held tight.

‘Everything! About you and Lady Grace. I’ve left the letter among Lord William’s papers with instructions to open it if anything should happen to me.’

‘I don’t believe you, Oxford man.’

Braithwaite gave a sudden heave, trying to release his arms. ‘I’m not a fool, Sharpe. You think I wouldn’t take precautions? Of course I’ve left a letter.’ He paused. ‘Just let me go,’ he went on, ‘and we can discuss this.’

‘So if I let you go,’ Sharpe said, still holding tight to Braithwaite’s arms, ‘you’ll fetch the letter back from Lord William?’

‘Of course I will. I promise.’

‘And you’ll apologize to Lady Grace? Tell her you were wrong about your suspicions?’

‘Of course I’ll do that. Willingly! Gladly!’

‘But you weren’t wrong, Oxford man,’ Sharpe said, stooping close to Braithwaite’s head, ‘her and me are lovers. Sweat and nakedness in the dark, Oxford man. I couldn’t have you telling lies to her, saying it never happened, could I? And now you know my secret I’m not sure I can let you go after all.’

‘But there’s a letter, Sharpe!’

‘You lie like a bloody rug, Braithwaite. There’s no letter.’

‘There is!’ Braithwaite cried in despair.

Sharpe was holding the secretary’s arms above his back, pushing them painfully forward, and now he shoved them hard to dislocate both at the shoulders. Braithwaite gave a whimper of pain, then screamed for help as Sharpe gripped one of his ears and turned his head sideways. Sharpe was trying to find a purchase with his right hand on Braithwaite’s face and Braithwaite attempted to bite him, but Sharpe smacked his face, then gripped a handful of hair and ear and twisted the head hard. ‘God knows how they did it,’ Sharpe said, ‘those bloody jettis, but I watched them, so it must be possible.’ He wrenched Braithwaite’s head again and the secretary’s frantic protest was stilled as his throat was constricted. His breath became a harsh gasping, but still he fought back, trying to heave Sharpe from his back, and Sharpe, amazed that the jettis had made this look so easy, clamped his hands on Braithwaite’s head and wrenched it with all his strength. The secretary’s breathing became a scratchy whimper, hardly audible over the cacophony of creaking and clanking in the hold, but he still twitched and so Sharpe took a deep breath, then twisted a second time and was rewarded with a small grating scrunch that he reckoned was the spine twisting out of alignment in Braithwaite’s neck.

The secretary was still now. Sharpe put a finger on Braithwaite’s neck, trying and failing to find a pulse. He waited. Still no pulse, no twitches, no breathing, and so Sharpe felt around the deck until he discovered the pistol which he put into his pocket, then he stood and heaved the dead man onto his shoulder and staggered forward, pitched left and right by the motion of the ship, until he blundered into the mizzen ladder. He dropped the body there, climbed the ladder and heaved open the hatch to the astonishment of a seaman who was passing. Sharpe nodded a greeting, closed the hatch on the corpse and on the rats that scrabbled in the dark, then climbed on into the daylight. He chucked the pistol out of his cabin’s scuttle. No one noticed.

Dinner was salt pork, peas and biscuits. Sharpe ate well.

Captain Chase assumed that the Revenant, if indeed it was the Revenant that had been glimpsed on the horizon, had seen the Pucelle’s topsails the previous day despite the cloud bank, and so had turned westwards in the night. ‘That’ll slow her down,’ he insisted, recovering some of his usual optimism. The wind was fair, for even though the Pucelle had now drawn far enough offshore to lose the advantage of the current, they were in the latitudes where the southeast trades blew. ‘The wind can only get stronger,’ Chase said, ‘and the barometer’s rising, which is good.’

Flying fish skittered away from the Pucelle’s hull. The ill feeling that had pervaded the ship all morning dissipated beneath the warm sun and under the captain’s renewed optimism. ‘We know she’s no faster than us,’ Chase said, ‘and we’re on the inside of the bend from now to Cadiz.’

‘How far is that?’ Sharpe asked. He was taking the air on the quarterdeck after sharing dinner with Chase.

‘Another month,’ Chase said, ‘but we ain’t out of trouble yet. We should do well as far as the equator, but after that we could be becalmed.’ He drummed his fingers on the rail. ‘But with God’s help we’ll catch her first.’

‘You haven’t seen my secretary, have you, Chase?’ Lord William appeared on deck to interrupt the conversation.

‘Not a sign of him,’ Chase said happily.

‘I need him,’ Lord William said petulantly. Lord William had persuaded Chase to allow him to use his dining cabin as an office. Chase had been reluctant to yield the room with its lavish table, but had decided it was better to keep Lord William happy rather than have him scowling about the ship in frustration.

Chase turned to the fifth lieutenant, Holderby. ‘Did his lordship’s secretary take dinner in the wardroom?’ he asked.

‘No, sir,’ Holderby said, ‘haven’t seen the fellow since breakfast.’

‘Have you seen him, Sharpe?’ his lordship enquired coldly. He did not like talking to Sharpe, but condescended to ask the question.

‘No, my lord.’

‘I asked him to fetch a memorandum about our original agreement with Holkar. Damn him, I need it!’

‘Perhaps he’s still looking for it,’ Chase suggested.

‘Or he’s seasick, my lord?’ Sharpe added. ‘The wind’s freshened.’

‘I’ve looked in his cabin,’ Lord William complained, ‘and he’s not there.’

‘Mister Collier!’ Chase summoned the midshipman who was pacing up and down the weather deck. ‘We have a missing secretary. The tall gloomy fellow who dresses in black. Look below decks for him, will you? Tell him he’s wanted in my dining cabin.’

‘Aye aye, sir,’ Collier said and dived below to start his search.

Lady Grace, attended by her maid, strolled onto the deck and stood a studious distance from Sharpe. Lord William turned on her. ‘Have you seen Braithwaite?’

‘Not since this morning,’ Lady Grace said.

‘The wretched man has disappeared.’

Lady Grace shrugged, suggesting that Braithwaite’s fate was none of her concern, then turned to watch the flying fish skim over the waves.

‘I do hope the bugger hasn’t fallen overboard,’ Chase said. ‘He’s got a long swim if he has.’

‘He had no business being on deck,’ Lord William said in annoyance.

‘I doubt he’s drowned, my lord,’ Chase said reassuringly. ‘If he had fallen then someone would have seen him.’

‘What do you do then?’ Sharpe asked.

‘Stop the ship and make a rescue,’ Chase said, ‘if we can. Did I ever tell you about Nelson in the Minerva?’

‘Even if you had,’ Sharpe said, ‘you’d tell me again.’

Chase laughed. ‘Back in ’ninety-seven, Sharpe, Nelson commands the Minerva. Fine frigate! He was being pursued by two Spanish ships of the line and a frigate when some halfwit falls overboard. Tom Hardy was aboard, wonderful man, he captains the Victory now, and Hardy took a boat to rescue the fellow. See the picture, Sharpe? Minerva fleeing for her life, close pursued by three Spaniards and Hardy and his boat crew, with the wet fellow aboard, can’t row hard enough to catch up. So what does Nelson do? He backs his topsails! Can you credit it? Backs his topsails. By God, he said, I won’t lose Hardy. Now the Dons can’t make head nor tail of this. Why’s the fellow stopping? They think he must have reinforcements coming, so the silly buggers haul their own wind. Hardy catches up, gets aboard, and the Minerva takes off like a scalded cat! What a great man Nelson is.’

Lord William scowled and stared westwards. Sharpe gazed up at the mainsail, trying to trace a rope from its beginning, through blocks and tackles, down to the belaying pins beside the gunwales. Hammocks were being aired over the netting racks in which they were stuffed during battle to stop musket bullets. A solitary sea bird, white and long-winged, curved close to the ship then soared away into the blue. Mister Cowper, the purser, was counting the boarding pikes racked around the mainmast’s trunk. He licked a pencil, made a note in a book, shot a scared look at Chase and waddled away. Holderby, who had the deck, ordered a bosun’s mate forrard to ring the ship’s bell. Chase, still thinking about Nelson, smiled.

‘Captain! Sir! Captain!’ It was Harry Collier, erupting into sight on the weather deck from beneath the quarterdeck.

‘Calm down, Mister Collier,’ Chase said. ‘The ship isn’t on fire, is it?’

‘No, sir. It’s Mister Braithwaite, sir, he’s dead, sir!’ Everyone on the quarterdeck stared down at the small boy.

‘Go on, Mister Collier,’ Chase said. ‘He can’t have just died! Men don’t just die. Well, the master did, but he was old. Braithwaite was young. Did he fall? Was he strangled? Did he kill himself? Enlighten me.’

‘He fell in the hold, sir, looks like he broke his neck. Off the ladder, sir.’

‘Careless,’ Chase said, and turned away.

Lord William frowned, did not know what to say, so turned on his heel and stalked back towards the dining cabin, then thought better of it and hurried back to the railing. ‘Midshipman?’

‘Sir?’ Collier hauled off his cocked hat. ‘My lord?’

‘Was there a piece of paper in his hand?’

‘I didn’t see, sir.’

‘Then pray look, Mister Collier, pray look,’ Lord William said, ‘and bring it to my cabin if you find such a thing.’ He walked away again. Lady Grace looked at Sharpe who met her eye, kept his expression neutral, then turned to gaze up the mainmast.

The body was brought onto the deck. It was plain that poor Braithwaite had slipped off the ladder and fallen, breaking his neck in the process, but it was strange, the surgeon commented with a frown, that the secretary had dislocated both his arms.

‘Caught them in the ladder’s rungs?’ Sharpe suggested.

‘That could be so, that could be so,’ Pickering allowed. He did not seem convinced, but nor was he minded to probe the mystery. ‘But at least it was a quick end.’

‘One hopes so,’ Sharpe said piously.

‘Probably struck his head on a barrel.’ Pickering twisted the corpse’s head, looking for a mark, but finding none. He stood up, dusting his hands. ‘Happens once every voyage,’ he said cheerfully, ‘sometimes more. We have practical jokers, Mister Sharpe, who like to grease the rungs with soap. Usually when they believe the purser might be using a ladder. It usually ends with a broken leg and much hilarity, but our Mister Braithwaite was less fortunate.’ He wrenched the dislocated arms back into place. ‘Ugly sort of bugger, wasn’t he?’

Braithwaite’s body was stripped and then placed in his sleeping cot and the sailmaker sewed a stretch of old, frayed sailcloth as a lid for the makeshift coffin. The final stitch, as was customary, was threaded through the corpse’s nose to make certain he was truly dead. Three eighteen-pounder cannon balls had been placed in the coffin that was laid on a plank beside the starboard entry port.

Chase read the service for the dead. The Pucelle’s officers, hats off, stood respectfully about the makeshift coffin which had been covered with a British flag. Lord William and Lady Grace stood beside the entry port. ‘We therefore commit his body to the deep,’ Chase read solemnly, ‘to be turned into corruption, looking for the resurrection of the body when the sea shall give up her dead, through our Lord Jesus Christ; who at his coming shall change our vile body that it might be like his glorious body, according to the mighty working whereby he is able to subdue all things to himself.’ Chase closed the prayer book and looked at Lord William who nodded his thanks, then spoke a few well-chosen words that described Braithwaite’s excellent moral character, his assiduity as a confidential secretary and Lord William’s fervent hopes that Almighty God would receive the secretary’s soul into a life of eternal bliss. ‘His loss,’ Lord William finished, ‘is a sad, sad blow.’

‘So it is,’ Chase said, then nodded at the two seamen who crouched beside the plank and they obediently lifted it so that the coffin slid out from beneath the flag. Sharpe heard the edge of the cot strike against the sill of the entry port, then there was a splash.

Sharpe looked at Lady Grace, who looked back, expressionless.

‘Hats on,’ Chase said.

The officers went away to their duties while the seamen carried away the flag and plank. Lady Grace turned towards the quarterdeck steps and Sharpe, left alone, went to the rail and stared down into the sea.

‘The Lord giveth’ – Lord William Hale was suddenly beside Sharpe – ‘and the Lord taketh away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.’

Sharpe, astonished that his lordship should deign to speak to him, was silent for a few seconds. ‘I’m sorry about your secretary, my lord.’

Lord William looked at Sharpe who was again struck by his lordship’s resemblance to Sir Arthur Wellesley. The same cold eyes, the same hooked nose that looked like a hawk’s beak, but something in Lord William’s face now suggested amusement, as though his lordship was privy to information that Sharpe did not possess. ‘Are you really sorry, Sharpe?’ Lord William asked. ‘That’s good of you. I spoke well of him just now, but what else could I say? In truth he was a narrow man, envious, inefficient and inadequate to his duties and I doubt the world will much regret his passing.’ Lord William pulled his hat on as if to walk away, then turned back to Sharpe. ‘It occurs to me, Sharpe, that I never thanked you for the service you did for my wife on the Calliope. That was remiss of me, and I apologize. I also thank you for that service, and will thank you further if we do not speak of it again.’

‘Of course, my lord.’

Lord William walked away. Sharpe watched him, wondering if there was some game being played that he was unaware of. He remembered Braithwaite’s claim to have left a letter among Lord William’s papers, then dismissed that idea as a lie. Sharpe reckoned he was seeing dangers where there were none and so he shrugged the conversation away and climbed, first to the quarterdeck and then to the poop where he stood at the taffrail and watched the wake dissipate in the sea.

He heard the footsteps behind him and knew who they belonged to before she came to the rail where, like him, she stared at the sea. ‘I’ve missed you,’ she said softly.

‘And I you,’ Sharpe said. He gazed at the ship’s wake which rippled the place where a shrouded body sank under a stream of bubbles towards an unending darkness.

‘He fell?’ Lady Grace asked.

‘So it seems,’ Sharpe said, ‘but it must have been a very quick death, which is a blessing.’

‘Indeed it is,’ she said, then turned to Sharpe. ‘I find the sun tiresomely hot.’

‘Maybe you should go below. My cabin is cooler, I think.’

She nodded, looked into his eyes for a few seconds, then abruptly turned and went.

Sharpe waited five minutes, then followed.

The Pucelle, if anyone could have seen her from out where the flying fish splashed down into the waves, looked beautiful that afternoon. Warships were not elegant. Their hulls were massive, making their masts seem disproportionately short, but Captain Chase had hung every sail high in the wind and those royals, studdingsails and skyscrapers added enough bulk aloft to balance the big yellow and black hull. The gilding on her stern and the silver paint on her figurehead reflected the sun, the yellow on her flanks was bright, her deck was scrubbed pale and clean, while the water broke white at her stem and foamed briefly behind. Her seventy-four massive guns were hidden.

The rot and damp and rust and stench could not be detected from the outside, but inside the ship the stink was no longer noticed. In the forecastle the ship’s last three goats were milked for the captain’s supper. In the bilge the water slopped. Rats were born, fought and died in the hold’s deep darkness. In the magazine a gunner sewed powder bags for the guns, oblivious of a whore who plied her trade between the two leather screens that protected the magazine’s door from an errant spark. In the galley the cook, one-eyed and syphilitic, shuddered at the smell of some badly salted beef, but put it in the cauldron anyway, while in his cabin at the stern of the weather deck Captain Llewellyn dreamed of leading his marines in a glorious charge that would capture the Revenant. Four bells of the afternoon watch sounded. On the quarterdeck a seaman cast the log, a lump of wood, and let the line trail fast from its reel. He counted the knots in the line as they vanished over the rail, chanting the numbers aloud while an officer peered at a pocket watch. Captain Chase went to his day cabin and tapped the barometer. Still rising. The off-duty watch slept in their hammocks, swaying together like so many cocoons. The carpenter scarfed a piece of oak into a gun carriage while in Chase’s sleeping cabin an ensign and a lady lay in each other’s arms.

‘Did you kill him?’ Lady Grace asked Sharpe in a whisper.

‘Would it matter if I did?’

She traced a finger down the scar on his face. ‘I hated him,’ she whispered. ‘From the day he came into William’s employment he just watched me. He would drool.’ She shuddered suddenly. ‘He told me if I went to his cabin he would keep silent. I wanted to slap him. I almost did, but I thought he’d tell William everything if I struck him, so I just walked away. I hated him.’

‘And I killed him,’ Sharpe said softly.

She said nothing for a while, then she kissed the tip of his nose. ‘I knew you did. The very moment William asked me where he was I knew you had killed him. Was it really quick?’

‘Not very,’ Sharpe admitted. ‘I wanted him to know why he was dying.’

She thought about that for a while, then decided she did not mind if Braithwaite’s end had been slow and painful. ‘No one’s killed for me before,’ she said.

‘I’d carve my way through a bloody army for you, lady,’ Sharpe said, then again remembered Braithwaite’s claim that he had left a letter for Lord William and again dismissed his fears, reckoning that the claim had been nothing more than a desperate effort by a doomed man to cling onto life. He would not mention it to Lady Grace.

The sun westered, casting the intricate shadow of shrouds and halliards and sails and masts on the green sea. The ship’s bell counted the half-hours. Three seamen were brought before Captain Chase, accused of various sins, and all three had their rum rations suspended for a week. A marine drummer boy cut his hand playing with a cutlass and the surgeon bandaged it, then clipped him about the ear for being a bloody little fool. The ship’s cats slept by the galley stove. The purser smelt a cask of water, recoiled from its stench, but chalked a sign on the barrel decreeing that it was drinkable.

And just after the sun set, when the west was a furnace blaze, a last bright ray was reflected off a distant sail.

‘Sail on the larboard quarter!’ the lookout shouted. ‘Sail on the larboard quarter.’

Sharpe did not hear the cry. At that moment he would not have heard the last trump, but the rest of the ship heard the news and seemed to quiver with excitement. For the hunt was not lost, it still ran, and the quarry was again in sight.