“Bored? Why?”
“Because our dour Captain Cromwell is right. Britain cannot fight France in Europe. She can fight her at the ends of the world, but not in Europe. The French army, my dear Sharpe, is a horde. It is not like your army. It doesn’t depend on jailbirds, failures and drunkards, but is conscripted. It is therefore huge.”
Sharpe grinned. “The jailbirds, failures and drunkards cooked your goose.”
“So they did,” Pohlmann acknowledged without taking offense, “but they cannot stand against the vast armies of France. No one can. Not now. And when the French decide to build a proper navy, my friend, then you will see the world dance to their tunes.”
“And you?” Sharpe asked. “Where will you be dancing?”
“Hanover?” Pohlmann suggested. “I shall buy a big house, fill it with women and watch the world from my windows. Or perhaps I shall live in France. The women are more beautiful there and I have learned one thing in my life, Sharpe, and that is that women do like money. Why do you think Lady Grace married Lord William?” He jerked his head toward the quarterdeck where Lady Grace, accompanied by her maid, walked up and down. “How goes your campaign with the lady?”
“It doesn’t,” Sharpe grunted, “and there isn’t a campaign.”
Pohlmann laughed. “Then why do you accept my invitations to supper?”
The truth, and Sharpe knew it, was that he was obsessed with the Lady Grace. From the moment he woke in the morning until he finally slept he thought of little but her. She seemed untouchable, unemotional, unapproachable, and that only made his obsession worse. She had spoken to him once, then never again, and when Sharpe did meet her at sup-pertime in the captain’s cuddy and tried to engage her in conversation she turned away as though his presence offended her.
Sharpe thought of her constantly, and constantly watched for her, though he took good care not to show his obsession. But it was there, gnawing at him, filling the tedious hours as the Calliope thumped her way across the Indian Ocean. The winds stayed kind and each day the first officer, Lieutenant Tufnell, reported on the convoy’s progress: seventy-two miles, sixty-eight miles, seventy miles, always about the same distance.
The weather was fine and dry, yet even so the ship seemed to be rotting with damp below the decks. Even in the tropic winds that blew the convoy southwestward some water slopped through the closed lower gun-ports, and the lower-deck steerage where Sharpe slept was never dry; his blankets were damp, the timbers of the ship were dank, indeed the whole Calliope, wherever the sun did not shine, was weeping with water, stinking and decaying, fungus-ridden and rat-infested. Seamen constantly manned the ship’s four pumps and the water slopped out of the elm tubes ito gutters on the lower deck which led the stinking bilge water overboard, but however much they pumped, more always needed to be sucked out of the hull.
The goats had an infection and most died in the first fortnight so there was no fresh milk for the steerage passengers. The fresh food was soon used up, and what was left was salted, tough, rancid and monotonous. The water was foul, discolored and stank, useful only for making strong tea, and though Sharpe’s filtering machine removed some of the impurities, it did nothing to improve the taste, and after two weeks the filter was so clogged with brown muck that he hurled the machine into the ocean. He drank arrack and sour beer or, in Captain Cromwell’s cuddy, the wine which was little better than vinegar.
Breakfast was at eight every morning. The steerage passengers were divided into groups often and the men took it in turn to fetch each mess a cauldron of burgoo from the galley in the forecastle. The burgoo was a mixture of oatmeal and scraps of beef fat that had simmered all night on the galley stove. Dinner was at midday and was another burgoo, though this sometimes had larger scraps of meat or fibrous pieces of dried fish floating in the burned and lumpy oatmeal. On Sundays there was salt fish and ship’s biscuits that were as hard as stone, yet even so were infested with weevils that needed to be tapped out. The biscuits had to be chewed endlessly so that it was like masticating a dried brick that was occasionally enlivened by the juice of an insect that had escaped the tapping. Tea was served at four, but only to the passengers who traveled in the stern of the ship, while the steerage passengers had to wait for supper, which was more dried fish, biscuits and a hard cheese in which red worms made miniature tunnels. “Human beings should not be expected to eat such things,” Malachi Braithwaite said, shuddering after one particularly evil supper. He had joined Sharpe on the main deck to watch the sun set in red-gold splendor.
“You ate them on the way out, didn’t you?” Sharpe asked.
“I traveled out as a private secretary to a London merchant,” Braithwaite said grandly, “and he accommodated me in the great cabin and fed me at his own expense. I told his lordship as much, but he refuses the expense.” He sounded hurt. Braithwaite was a proud man, but poor, and very aware of any insults to his self-esteem. He spent his afternoons in the roundhouse where, he told Sharpe, Lord William was compiling a report for the Board of Control. The report would suggest the future governance of India and Braithwaite enjoyed the work, but late every afternoon he was dismissed back to the lower deck and his gnawing misery. He was ashamed of being made to travel steerage, he hated being one of the gun crews and he detested fetching the mess cauldrons, believing that chore put him in the place of a menial servant, no better than Lord William’s valet or Lady Grace’s maid. “I am a secretary,” he protested once to Sharpe. “I was at Oxford!”
“How did you become Lord William’s secretary?” Sharpe now asked him.
Braithwaite thought about the question as though a trap lay within it, then decided it was safe to answer. “His original secretary died in Calcutta. Of snake-bite, I believe, and his lordship was kind enough to offer me the position.”
“Now you regret taking it?”
“Indeed I do not!” Braithwaite said sharply. “His lordship is a prominent man. He is intimate with the Prime Minister.” This was confided in an admiring tone. “Indeed the report we work on will not just be for the Board of Control, but will go directly to Pitt himself! Much depends on his lordship’s conclusions. Maybe even a cabinet post? His lordship could well become Foreign Secretary within a year or two, and what would that make me?”
“An overworked secretary,” Sharpe said.
“But I will have influence,” Braithwaite insisted earnestly, “and his lordship will have one of the grandest houses in London. His wife will preside over a salon of wit and vast influence.”
“If she’ll ever talk to anyone,” Sharpe commented dryly. “She don’t say a word to me.”
“Of course she doesn’t,” Braithwaite said crossly. “She is accustomed to nothing but the highest discourse.” The secretary looked to the quarterdeck, but if he hoped to see Lady Grace he was disappointed. “She is an angel, Sharpe,” he blurted out. “One of the best women I have ever had the privilege of meeting. And with a mind to match! I have a degree from Oxford, Mister Sharpe, yet even I cannot match her ladyship’s knowledge of the Georgics.”
Whatever the hell they were, Sharpe thought. “She is a rare-looking woman,” he said mildly, wondering whether that would provoke Braithwaite into another burst of candor.
It did. “Rare-looking?” Braithwaite asked sarcastically. “She is a beauty, Mister Sharpe, the very quintessence of feminine virtue, looks and intelligence.”
Sharpe laughed. “You’re in love with her, Braithwaite.”
The secretary gave Sharpe a withering look. “If you were not a soldier with a reputation for savagery, Sharpe, I should deem that statement impertinent.”