Sharpe 3-Book Collection 3: Sharpe's Trafalgar, Sharpe's Prey, Sharpe's Rifles (42 page)

She gazed at him, but did not speak.

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

She still stared at him, her face expressionless.

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

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

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

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

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

Nelson died.

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

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

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

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

‘Coming with you, sir.’

‘Like hell you are. Go and watch the bloody clock.’

‘There isn’t a clock.’

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

‘Yes, sir.’

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

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

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

‘Me first, Sharpe,’ Chase chided him.

‘Sir!’ Sharpe protested.

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

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

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

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

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

To go into that kind of fighting needed a rage, or a madness or a desperation. Some men never found those qualities and they shrank from the danger, and Sharpe could not blame them, for there was little that was admirable in rage, insanity or despair. Yet they were the qualities that drove the fight, and they were fuelled by a determination to win. Just that. To beat the bastards down, to prove that the enemy were lesser men. The good soldier was cock of a blood-soaked dunghill, and Richard Sharpe was good.

His rage went cold in a fight. The fear might harass him before the fighting began, and for two blunt pins he might have found an excuse not to cross the trembling mast bridge that would drop him into a crowd of the enemy, but once there he fought with a precision that was lethal. It seemed to him that the very passage of time slowed, so that he could see clearly what every enemy intended. A man to his right was drawing back a pike, so that threat could be ignored because it would take at least a heartbeat for the pike to come forward, and meanwhile a bearded man in front was already swinging down a cutlass and Sharpe twisted the point of his own blade into that man’s throat, then whipped the cutlass to his right, parrying the pike thrust, though Sharpe himself was looking to his left. He saw no imminent danger, looked back to the right, flicked the blade up into the pikeman’s face, looked front again, then shoulder charged the pikeman, driving him back so that he fell against a cannon and Sharpe could raise the cutlass and, with both hands, drive it down into the man’s belly. The point stuck in the gun’s timber carriage and Sharpe wasted a second wrenching it free. British seamen pounded past him, forcing the French another two or three paces back down their deck, and Sharpe climbed the cannon and jumped down its other side. A Frenchman tried to surrender to him there, but Sharpe dared not leave a man in his rear so he slashed at the Frenchman’s wrist so he could not use the axe he had dropped, then kicked him in the groin before climbing the next cannon. The spaces between the cannon served as refuges for the French and Sharpe wanted to break them out and drive them onto the pikes and blades of the boarders.