Sharpe's Trafalgar (31 page)

“It sounds precisely like thunder,” Lady Grace said in amazement.

The Victory was still too far from the northern part of the enemy’s fleet to be worth
firing at, and so the vast majority of the French and Spanish ships stayed silent. Just the
six ships kept firing, their shots whipping the sea to foam ahead of Collingwood’s
flagship. Perhaps it was the sound of those guns that prompted the enemy to reveal their
colors at last for, one by one, their ensigns appeared so that the approaching British
could distinguish between their enemies. The French tricolor appeared brighter than the
Spanish royal flag which was dark red and white. “There, my lady,” Chase said, pointing
forward, “you can see the French admiral’s flag? At the masthead of the ship just behind
the Santisima Trinidad.”

The Royal Sovereign must have been taking shots, for she suddenly fired two of her
forward guns so that their smoke would hide her hull as it drifted with the feeble wind.
Sharpe took out his telescope, trained it on Collingwood’s flagship, and saw a sail twitch
as a round shot whipped through the canvas, and now he could see other holes in the sails and
he knew the enemy must be firing at her rigging in an attempt to stop her brave advance.
Yet she stood on, studdingsails set, widening the gap between her and the Belleisle, the
Mars and the Tonnant which were the next three ships astern. The splashes of the enemy
gunfire began to land about those ships now. None could fire back, and none could expect to
open fire for at least twenty minutes. They must simply endure and hope to repay the
bartering when they reached the line. Chase turned. “Mister Collier?”

“Sir?”

“You will escort Lord William and Lady Grace to the lady hole. Use the aft hatchway in
the gunroom. Your maid will accompany you, my lady.”

“We are not under fire, Captain,” Lady Grace objected.

“You will oblige me, my lady,” Chase insisted.

“Come, Grace,” Lord William said. He still wore his sword and pistol, but made no attempt
to stay on deck. “May I wish you well, Captain.”

“Your sentiments are much appreciated, my lord. I thank you.”

Lady Grace gave Sharpe a last look, and he dared not answer it with a smile for Lord
William would see it, but he met her gaze and held it till she turned away. Then she was gone
down the quarterdeck steps and Sharpe felt a horrid pang of loss.

The Pucelle was catching up with the Conqueror now and Chase took her toward that ship’s
starboard side. He stared at the enemy through his glass and suddenly called Sharpe. “Our
old friend, Sharpe.”

“Sir?”

“There, look.” He pointed. “You see the Santisima Trinidad? The big ship?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Six ships back. It’s the Revenant.”

Sharpe trained his telescope and counted the ships astern of the vast four-decked
Spanish battleship, and there, suddenly, was the familiar black and yellow hull and as
he gazed he saw the ports open and the guns appear. Then the Revenant vanished in smoke.

And the Victory was under fire, and the enemy could not hope to escape to Cadiz
because, despite the fickle wind, there would be a battle. Thirty-four enemy ships would
take on twenty-eight British. Two thousand five hundred and sixty-eight enemy guns,
manned by thirty thousand French and Spanish seamen would face two thousand one hundred
and forty-eight guns crewed by seventeen thousand British tars.

“To your places, gentlemen,” Chase said to the officers on his quarterdeck. “To your
places, please.” He touched the prayer book in his pocket. “And may God preserve us,
gentlemen, preserve us each and every one.”

For the fighting had begun.

Sharpe’s place was on the forecastle. Captain Llewellyn and his young lieutenant
commanded forty of the ship’s marines stationed on the poop and quarterdeck, while Sharpe
had twenty, though in truth the score of forecastle men were led by Sergeant Armstrong, a
man as squat as a hogshead and stubborn as a mule. The sergeant came from Seahouses in
Northumberland where he had been imbued with a deep distrust of the Scots. “They’re thieves
to a man, sir,” he confidently assured Sharpe, but still contrived that every Scotsman
among Llewellyn’s marines serve in his squad. “Because that’s where I can keep an eye on the
thieving bastards, sir.”

The Scots were content to serve under Sergeant Armstrong, for, if he distrusted them,
he hated anyone from south of the River Tyne. So far as Armstrong was concerned only men
from Northumberland itself, raised to remember the cattle-raiders from north of the
border, were true warriors while the rest of mankind was composed of thieving bastards,
cowardly foreigners and officers. France, he seemed to believe, was a populous county
somewhere so far south of London as to be execrable, while Spain was probably hell itself.
The sergeant possessed one of Captain Llewellyn’s precious seven-barrel guns that he had
propped against the foremast. “You can take your eyes off that, sir,” he had told Sharpe when
he saw the officer’s interest in the weapon, “‘cos I’m saving it for when we board one of
the bastards. There’s nothing like a volley gun for clearing an enemy deck.” Armstrong
was instinctively suspicions of Sharpe for the ensign was not a marine, not from
Northumberland and not born into the officer class. Armstrong was, in short, ugly,
ignorant, prejudiced and as fine a soldier as Sharpe had met.

The forecastle was manned by the marines and by two of the ship’s six
thirty-two-pounder carronades. The one to larboard was under the command of Clouter, the
escaped slave who was in Chase’s barge crew. The huge black man, like his gunners, was naked
to the waist and had a scarf tied around his ears. “Going to be lively, sir,” he greeted
Sharpe, nodding toward the enemy line that was now barely a mile away. A half-dozen ships
were firing at the Victory, just as another half-dozen were hammering the Royal
Sovereign a little more than a mile to the south. That ship, by far the closest to the French
and Spanish line, looked bedraggled, for her studdingsail yards had been shot away and the
sails hung like broken wings beside her rigging. She could still not return the enemy’s
fire, but in a few minutes she would be among them and her three decks of guns could begin to
repay the beating she endured.

The sea ahead of the Pucelle was being pockmarked by shot, flicked by white spray or
whipped by round shots skimming the waves, though so far none of those shots had come close to
the Pucelle herself. The Temeraire, which had failed to overtake the Victory and was now
sailing off her starboard quarter, was taking shots through her sails. Sharpe could see the
holes appear like magic, making the ship’s whole spread of canvas quiver. A broken line
whipped and flew wide. To Sharpe it seemed as though the Victory and Temeraire were sailing
directly toward the Santisima Trinidad with its four smoke-wreathed decks of death. The
sound of the enemy guns was loud now, punching over the water, sometimes in thunderous
groups, more often single gun by single gun. “It’ll be ten or fifteen minutes before
we’re in range, sir,” Clouter said, answering Sharpe’s unspoken question.

“Good luck, Clouter.”

The tall man grinned. “Ain’t a white man alive that can kill me, sir. No, sir, they done all
they can to me, and now it’s me and my smasher’s turn.” He patted his carronade, his
“smasher,” which was as ugly a weapon as any Sharpe had seen. It resembled an army mortar,
though it was slightly longer in the barrel, and it squatted in its short carriage like a
deformed cooking pot. The carriage had no wheels, but instead allowed the barrel to slide
back, wood on greased wood. The gun’s wide muzzle gaped and its belly was crammed with one
thirty-two-pound round shot and a wooden cask of musket balls. It was no pretty thing,
nor was it accurate, but bring it within yards of an enemy ship and it could belch a flail
of metal that could have torn the guts out of a battalion.

“A Scotsman invented it.” Sergeant Armstrong had appeared beside Sharpe. The sergeant
sniffed as he looked at the vast pot on its carriage. “Heathen gun, sir. Heathen gunner,
too,” he added, looking at Clouter. “If we boards an enemy, Clouter,” he said sternly, “you
stay close to me.”

“Yes, Sergeant.”

“Why close to you?” Sharpe asked Armstrong as they walked away from the carronade.

“Because when that black heathen starts to fight, sir, there ain’t a man born who dares
stand in his way. A fiend, he is.” Armstrong sounded disapproving, but then, Clouter was
palpably not a Northumbrian. “And you, sir?” Armstrong asked suspiciously. “Will you
board with us?” What the sergeant really wanted to know was whether Sharpe planned to usurp
his authority.

Sharpe could have insisted on commanding the marines, but he suspected they would
fight better if Armstrong gave them their orders. Which meant Sharpe had little to do on
the forecastle other than set an example, which was what most junior officers were
doing when they were killed in battle. Armstrong knew what had to be done, the marines had
been superbly trained by Llewellyn, and Sharpe had no mind to pace the forecastle showing a
gentlemanly disdain for enemy fire. He would rather fight. “I’m going below,” he told
Armstrong, “to draw a musket from stores.”

The enemy shots were still falling well short of the Pucelle as Sharpe went down the
companionway and forward into the covered bow portion of the weather deck where he
found the galley—usually a place where men gathered—empty, cold and deserted. The fires
in the vast iron oven had all been doused and two of the ship’s cats were rubbing themselves
against the blackened metal as if curious as to why their source of warmth was gone. The
gunners sat by their guns. Once in a while a man would lift a gunport, letting in a bright
wash of light, and lean out to peer toward the enemy.

Sharpe went on down to the lower deck which was as dim as a cellar though some light
seeped from the wide windows of the stripped wardroom that lay at the stern. The ship’s
biggest guns squatted here like tethered beasts behind their closed ports. The cannons were
usually stored with their barrels fully elevated and then drawn tight to the ship’s
sides, but now the barrels had been lowered to the fighting position and the carriages
were standing well back from the ports. The sound of the enemy gunfire was muted so that it
was little more than a dull grumble. Sharpe dropped down one more companionway to the
orlop deck which was lit by shielded lanterns. He was below the water line now, and it was
here that the ship’s magazines were guarded by marines armed with muskets, bayonets and
orders to stop any unauthorized person from going through the double leather curtains
that were dripping with sea water. Powder monkeys, some in felt slippers, but most
barefooted, waited by the oviter curtain with their long tin canisters and Sharpe asked
one of the boys to fetch him a pouch of musket ammunition and another of pistol shot
while he went forrard to the small arms store and took a musket and pistol from the racks.
The weight of the pistol made him think of Grace, safe now in the deep after hold. He tested
both flints, found them secure.

He took the two pouches, thanked the boy, and climbed back to the lower deck where he
paused to hang the cartridge pouches from his belt. The ship swooped up on a long swell,
making him stagger slightly, then subsided into the trough, and suddenly a terrible
crash echoed through the timbers, making the deck beneath Sharpe’s feet quiver, and he
realized that a round shot must have hit the upperworks. “Froggies have our range,” a man
said in the gloom.

“For what we are about to receive,” another man intoned, but before he could finish
the prayer Lieutenant Holderby’s voice interrupted him. Holderby was at his station by
the aft companionway.

“Open ports!” the fifth lieutenant shouted, and petty officers repeated the order to
the forward part of the deck.

The lower deck’s thirty gunports were all raised, letting the daylight stream in to
reveal the ship’s masts like three gigantic pillars about which was a seething mass of
half-naked men. The long guns were all in their recoil position, hard back against their
breeching ropes.

“Run them out!” Holderby ordered. “Run them out!”

Gunners heaved on the tackles and the thick deck quivered as the huge guns were hauled
forward so that their barrels protruded beyond the ship’s sides. Holderby, elegant in
silk stockings and gilded coat, ducked under the deck beams. “You’re to lie down between
the guns. Between the guns! Lie down! Have a rest, gentlemen, before proceedings
commence. Lie down!”

Chase had ordered his crew to lie down because the enemy’s shot, coming from directly
forward, could scream down these decks and each one could easily knock down a score of men,
but if the gun crews were in the intervals between the heavy cannons then they would be
mostly protected. Up on the quarterdeck Chase shuddered and when Haskell raised an
eyebrow, the captain smiled. “She’s going to be knocked to pieces, ain’t she?”

Haskell rapped a knuckle on the quarterdeck rail. “French-built, sir, well built.”

“Aye, they do make good ships.” Chase stood on tiptoes to see across the barrier of the
hammock netting to where the Royal Sovereign was almost up to the enemy line. “She
survived,” he said admiringly, “and she’s been under fire for twenty-three minutes!
Dreadful gunnery, wouldn’t you say?”

The tip of the British right horn was about to tear into the enemy, but the Pucelle was
in the left horn and that was still well short of the line, and the enemy could still fire
without fear of any reply. Chase winced as a round shot smacked through his sails to open a
succession of holes. The Pucelle’s ordeal had begun, and all he could do now was sail
slowly on into an ever-increasing storm of gunnery. A fountain spewed up on the
starboard side, spattering one of the carronade crews. “Water’s cold, eh, lads?” Chase
remarked to the bare-chested gunners.

“We won’t be swimming in it, sir.”

A topsail shivered as a high shot slashed through. The ships ahead of the Pucelle were
taking a more serious pounding, but the Pucelle was drawing closer and closer, heaved
by the big swells and wafted by the ghosting wind, and every second took her nearer to the
guns and soon, Chase knew, he would be under a much heavier cannonade, and just as he
thought that so a heavy round shot struck the starboard cathead and whirled a wicked
splinter of oak across the forecastle. Chase was suddenly aware that his fingers were
drumming nervously against his right thigh and so he forced his hand to be still. His
father, who had fought the French thirty years before, would have been appalled by these
tactics. In Chase’s father’s day the ships of the line edged together, broadside to
broadside, taking exquisite care never to expose their vulnerable bows and sterns to a
raking, but this British fleet went bull-headed at the enemy. Chase wondered whether his
father’s memorial stone had been delivered from the masons, and whether it had been
placed in the church choir, and then he touched the prayer book in his pocket. “Hear us and
save us,” he said under his breath, “that we perish not.”

“Amen.” Haskell had overheard him. “Amen.”

Sharpe climbed back to the forecastle where he found the marines crouching by the
hammock netting and the carronade crews squatting behind their barrels. Sergeant
Armstrong was standing by the foremast, scowling at the enemy line which suddenly seemed
much nearer. Sharpe looked to his right and saw the Royal Sovereign had reached the enemy
line. Her crew had hauled the fallen studdingsails inboard and her guns were at last
firing as the vast ship pierced the enemy’s formation. A ripple of filthy smoke was
traveling from her bows to her stern as she emptied her larboard broadside into the stern
of a Spanish ship and her starboard guns into the bows of a Frenchman. One of the Royal
Sovereign’s topmasts had fallen, but she had broken the enemy line and now she would be
swallowed into their fleet. The next ship in Collingwood’s column, the two-decked
Belleisle, was still a long way behind which meant the Royal Sovereign must fight the enemy
single-handed until help arrived.

A slap overhead made Sharpe look up to see that a hole had been punched through the
Pucelle’s foresail. The ball had then pierced all the lower sails, one after the other,
before vanishing astern. Another crash, close to his feet, made him spin around. “Low on
the bows, sir,” Armstrong said. “They hit the cathead earlier.” That would have been the
first crash Sharpe had heard and he saw that the starboard cathead, a stout timber that
jutted from the bows and from which the anchor was lowered and raised, was gouged almost
halfway through.

His heart was thumping, his mouth was dry and a muscle twitched in his left cheek. He
tried clamping his jaws shut to still the muscle, but it kept quivering. A shot landed
close by the Pucelle’s bows and spattered water back over the beak and forecastle. The
sprit-topsail yard under the reaching bowsprit twitched. one end flying into the air,
then fell, broken, to hang close to the sea. This was worse than Assaye, Sharpe reckoned,
for at least on land a soldier had the illusion that he could step left or right and so try
to avoid the enemy’s shot, but here a man could only stand as the ship crawled toward the
enemy line which was a row of massive batteries, each ship carrying more artillery than
had marched with Sir Arthur Wellesley’s army. Sharpe could see the cannon balls looking like
short pencil lines that flickered in the sky, and each pencil line meant a ball was coming
more or less straight toward the Pucelle. A dozen enemy were firing at Nelson’s ships now.
Another hole appeared in the Pucelle’s foresail, a studdingsail boom was shot away, a
crash sounded close to the larboard water line and another enemy shot bounced across the
swells to leave a trail of foam close on the starboard side. An odd whistling sound, almost a
moan, but with a curious sharp rhythm, came from near the ship, then went silent. “Chain
shot, sir,” Sergeant Armstrong said. “Sounds like the devil’s wings beating, it does.”