Sharpe's Trafalgar (23 page)

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 toward 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 toward 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 tire-somely 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 caldron 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 smelled 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.

The happy days followed. The far ship was indeed the Revenant. Chase had never seen the
French warship at close quarters and, try as he might, he could not bring the Pucelle near
enough to see her name, but some of the seamen pressed from the Calliope recognized the cut
of the Frenchman’s spanker sail. Sharpe stared through his glass and could see nothing
strange about that vast sail which hung at the stern of the enemy ship, but the seamen were
certain it had been ill-repaired and, as a consequence, hung unevenly. Now the
Frenchman raced the Pucelle homeward. The ships were almost twins and neither could gain
an advantage on the other without the help of weather and the god of winds sent them an
equal share.

The Revenant was to the west and the two ships sailed northwest to clear the great bulge of
Africa and Chase reckoned that would grant the Pucelle an advantage once they were north of
the equator for then the Frenchman must come eastward to make his landfall. At night Chase
worried he would lose his prey, but morning after morning she was there, ever on the same
bearing, sometimes hull down, sometimes nearer, and none of Chase’s seamanship could
close the gap any more than Montmorin’s skills could open it. If Chase edged westward to try
and narrow the distance between them then the French ship would inch ahead and Chase would
revert to his previous course and curse the lost ground. He prayed constantly that
Montmorin would turn eastward to offer battle, but Montmorin resisted the temptation.
He would take his ship to France, or at least to a harbor belonging to France’s ally,
Spain, and the men he carried would spur the French into another attempt to make India a
British graveyard.

“He’ll still have to get through our blockade,” Chase said after supper one evening, then
shrugged and tempered his optimism. “Though that shouldn’t be difficult.”

“Why not?” Sharpe asked.

“It ain’t a close blockade off Cadiz,” Chase explained. “The big ships stay well out to
sea, beyond the horizon. There’ll only be a couple of frigates inshore and Montmorin will
brush those aside. No, we have to catch him.” The captain frowned. “You can’t move a pawn
sideways, Sharpe!”

“You can’t?” They spoke during the first watch which, perversely, ran from eight in the
evening until midnight, a time when Chase craved company, and Sharpe had become
accustomed to sharing brandy with the captain who was teaching him to play chess. Lord
William and Lady Grace were frequent guests, and Lady Grace enjoyed playing the game and
was evidently good at it, for she always made Chase frown and fidget as he stared at the
board. Lord William preferred to read after supper, though he did once deign to play against
Chase and checkmated him inside fifteen minutes. Holderby, the fifth lieutenant, was a
keen player, and when he was invited for supper he liked helping Sharpe play against
Chase. Sharpe and Lady Grace scrupulously ignored each other during those evenings.

The trade winds blew them northward, the sun shone, and Sharpe would ever remember those
weeks as bliss. With Braithwaite dead, and Lord William Hale immersed in the report he was
writing for the British government, Sharpe and Lady Grace were free. They used
circumspection, for they had no choice, yet Sharpe still suspected the ship’s crew knew of
their meetings. He dared not use her cabin, for fear that Lord William might demand
entrance, but she would go to his, gliding across the darkened quarterdeck in a black
cloak and usually waiting for the brief commotion as the watch changed until she slipped
through Sharpe’s unlocked door which lay close enough to the first lieutenant’s quarters,
where Lord William slept, for folk to assume it was there she went, but even so it was hard to
remain unseen by the helmsmen, Johnny Hopper, the bosun of Chase’s crew, grinned at
Sharpe knowingly, and Sharpe had to pretend not to notice, though he also reckoned the
secret was safe with the crew for they liked him and universally disliked the
contemptuous Lord William. Sharpe and Grace told each other that they were being
discreet, but night after night and even sometimes by day they risked discovery. It was
reckless, but neither could resist. Sharpe was delirious with love, and he loved her all
the more because she made light of the vast gulf that separated them. She lay with him one
afternoon, when a scrap of sunlight spearing through a chink in the scuttle’s deadlight
was scribing an oval shape on the opposite bulkhead, and she mentally added up the
number of rooms in her Lincolnshire house. “Thirty-six,” she decided, “though that
doesn’t include the front hall or the servants’ quarters.”

“We never counted them at home either,” Sharpe said, and grunted when she dug his ribs
with an elbow. They lay on blankets spread on the floor, for the hanging cot was too
narrow. “So how many servants have you got?” he asked.

“In the country? Twenty-three, I think, but that’s just in the house. And in London?
Fourteen, and then there are the coachmen and stable boys. I’ve no idea how many of those
there are. Six or seven perhaps?”

“I lose count of mine, too,” Sharpe said, then flinched. “That hurt!”

“Shh!” she whispered. “Chase will hear. Did you ever have a servant?”

“A little Arab boy,” Sharpe said, “who wanted to come to England with me. But he died.”
He lay silent, marveling at the touch of her skin on his. “What does your maid think you’re
doing?”

“Lying down in the dark with orders not to be disturbed. I say the sun gives me a
headache.”

He smiled. “So what will you do when it rains?”

“I’ll say the rain gives me a headache, of course. Not that Mary cares. She’s in love with
Chase’s steward, so she’s glad I don’t need her. She haunts his pantry.” Grace ran a finger
down Sharpe’s belly. “Maybe they’ll run away to sea together?”

Sometimes it seemed to Sharpe that he and Grace had run away to sea, and they played a game
where they pretended the Pucelle was their private ship and its crew their servants and
that they would forever be sailing forgiving seas under sunny skies. They never spoke
of what waited at journey’s end, for then Grace must go back to her lavish world and Sharpe
to his place, and he did not know whether he would ever see her again. “We are like children,
you and I,” Grace said more than once, a note of wonder in her voice, “irresponsible,
careless children.”

In the mornings Sharpe exercised with the marines, in the afternoons he slept, and in
the evening he ate his supper with Chase, then waited impatiently until Lord William was
in his laudanum-induced sleep and Grace could come to his door. They would talk, sleep, make
love, talk again. “I haven’t had a bath since Bombay,” she said one night with a shudder.

“Nor have I.”

“But I’m used to having baths!’ she said.

“You smell good to me.”

“I stink,” she said. “I stink, and the whole ship stinks. And I miss walking. I love to
walk in the country. If I had my way I would never see London again.”

“You’d like the army,” Sharpe said. “We’re always going for long walks.”

She lay silent for a while, then stroked his hair. “I dream sometimes of William’s death,”
she said softly. “Not when I’m asleep, but when I’m awake. That’s dreadful.”

“It’s human,” Sharpe said. “I think of it too.”

“I wish he’d fall overboard,” she said. “Or slip down a ladder. He won’t though.” Not
without help, Sharpe thought, and he pushed that idea away. Killing Braithwaite was one
thing—the private secretary had been a blackmailer—but Lord William had done nothing
except be haughty and married to a woman Sharpe loved. Yet Sharpe did think of killing him,
though how it could be done he did not know. Lord William was hardly likely to descend into
the hold and he was never on deck in the dark of the night when a man might be pushed over the
side. “If he died,” Grace said quietly, “I’d be wealthy. I would sell the London house and
live in the country. I’d make a great library with a fireplace, walk the dogs, and you could
live with me. I’d be Mrs. Richard Sharpe.”

For a moment Sharpe thought he had misheard her, then he smiled. “You’d miss society,”
he said.

“I hate society,” she said vehemently. “Vapid conversation, stupid people,
endless rivalry. I shall be a recluse, Richard, with books from the floor to the
ceiling.”

“And what will I do?”

“Make love to me,” she said, “and glower at the neighbors.”

“I reckon I could manage that,” Sharpe said, knowing it was a dream, except that all it
would take was one man’s death to make the dream come true. “Is there a gunport in your
husband’s cabin?” he asked, knowing he should not ask the question.

“Yes, why?”

“Nothing,” he said, but he had been wondering whether he could go into the cabin at
night and overpower Lord William and heave him through the gunport, but then he dismissed
the idea. Lord William’s cabin, like Sharpe’s, was under the poop and close to the ship’s
wheel, and Sharpe doubted he could commit murder and dispose of the body without alerting
the officer on watch. Even the creak of the opening gun-port would be too loud.

“He’s never ill,” Grace said on another afternoon when she had risked coming to
Sharpe’s cabin. “He’s never ill.”

Sharpe knew what she was thinking and he was thinking it himself, but he doubted Lord
William would have the decency to die of some convenient disease. “Perhaps he’ll be
killed in the fight with the Revenant,” Sharpe said.

Grace smiled. “He’ll be down below, my love, safe beneath the water line.”

“He’s a man!” Sharpe said, surprised. “He’ll have to fight.”

“He’s a politician, my dear, and he assassinates, he does not fight. He will tell me his
life is too precious to be risked, and he will really believe it! Though when we reach
England he will modestly claim to have played a part in the Revenanfs defeat and I, like
a loyal wife, will sit there and smile while the company admires him. He is a
politician.”

Footsteps sounded outside the cabin, in the space behind the wheel and under the
overhang of the poop. Sharpe listened apprehensively, expecting the steps to go away as
they usually did, but this time they came right to his door. Grace clutched his hand, then
shuddered as a knock sounded. Sharpe did not respond, then the bolted door shook as
someone tried to force it open. “Who is it?” Sharpe called, pretending to have been
asleep.

“Midshipman Collier, sir.”

“What do you want?”

“You’re wanted in the captain’s quarters, sir.”

“Tell him I’ll be there in a minute, Harry,” Sharpe said. His heart was racing.

“You should go,” Grace whispered.

Sharpe dressed, buckled his sword belt, leaned over to kiss her, then slipped out of the
door. Chase was standing by the larboard shrouds, gazing at the dot on the horizon that was
the Revenant. “You wanted me, sir?” Sharpe asked.

“Not me, Sharpe, not me,” Chase said. “It’s Lord William who wants you.

“Lord William?” Sharpe could not keep the surprise from his voice.

Chase raised an eyebrow as if to suggest that Sharpe had brought this trouble on
himself, then jerked his head toward his dining cabin. Sharpe felt a rising panic,
subdued it by telling himself Braithwaite had not left a damning letter, straightened his
red coat, then went to the dining cabin’s door beneath the poop.

Lord William’s voice invited him to come in, Sharpe obeyed and was negligently waved
toward a chair. Lord William was alone in the room, sitting at the long table which was
covered with books and papers. He was writing, and the scratch of his pen seemed ominous.
He wrote for a long time, ignoring Sharpe. The skylight above the table was open and the
wind rustled the papers on the table. Sharpe stared at his lordship’s gray hair, not one
out of place.

“I am writing a report,” Lord William broke the silence, making Sharpe jump with guilty
surprise, “about the political situation in India.” He dipped the nib in an inkwell,
drained it carefully, then wrote another sentence before placing the pen on a small
silver stand. His cold eyes were pouchy and glassy, probably from the laudanum that he took
each night, but they were still filled with their usual distaste for Sharpe. “I would not
normally turn to a junior officer for assistance, but I have small choice under the
present circumstances. I would like your opinion, Sharpe, on the fighting abilities of the
Mahrattas.”

Sharpe felt a pang of relief. The Mahrattas! Ever since entering the cabin he had been
thinking of Braithwaite and his claim to have written a damned letter, but all Lord William
wanted was an opinion on the Mahrattas! “Brave men, my lord,” Sharpe said.

Lord William shuddered. “I suppose I deserve a vulgar opinion, since I requested it
of you,” he said tartly, then steepled his fingers and looked at Sharpe over his
well-manicured nails. “It is evident to me, Sharpe, that we must eventually take over the
administration of the whole Indian continent. In time that will also become evident
to the government. The major obstacles to that ambition are the remaining Mahratta
states, particularly those governed by Holkar. Let me be specific. Can those states
prevent us from annexing their territory?”

“No, my lord.”

“Be explicit, please.” Lord William had drawn a clean sheet of paper toward him and had
the pen poised.

Sharpe took a deep breath. “They are brave men, my lord,” he said, risking an irritated
glance, “but that ain’t enough. They don’t understand how to fight in our way. They think the
secret is artillery, so what they do, sir, is line up all their guns in a great row and put
the infantry behind them.”

“We don’t do that?” Lord William asked, sounding surprised.

“We put the guns at the sides of the infantry, sir. That way, if the other infantry
attacks, we can rake them with crossfire. Kill more men that way, my lord.”

“And you,” Lord William said acidly as his pen raced over the paper, “are an expert on
killing. Go on, Sharpe.”