“Good-bye, Sharpe! Write to me!” Dalton called.
“Good luck, lad!” Fairley boomed.
Chase descended the ladder last and took his place in the sternsheets. “All together now!” Hopper shouted and the oarsmen dug in their red and white blades and the barge slid away from the Calliope.
The stench of the Pucelle reached across the water. It was the smell of a huge crew crammed into a wooden ship, the stink of unwashed bodies, of body waste, of tobacco, tar, salt and rot, but the ship herself loomed high and mighty, a great sheer wall of gunports, crammed with men, powder and shot.
“Good-bye!” Dalton called a last time.
And Sharpe joined the hunter, seeking revenge, going home.
“I hate having women on board,” Chase said savagely. “It’s bad luck, you know that? Women and rabbits, both bring bad luck.” He touched the polished table in his day cabin to avert the ill fortune. “Not that there aren’t women on board already,” he admitted. “There’s at least six Portsmouth whores down below who I’m not supposed to know about, and I suspect one of the gunners has his wife hidden away, but that ain’t the same as having her ladyship and her maid out on the open deck feeding the crew’s filthy fantasies.”
Sharpe said nothing. The elegant cabin stretched the whole width of the ship and was lit by a wide stern window through which he could see the far-off Calliope already hull down on the horizon. The windows were curtained in flowered chintz which matched the cushions spread along the window seat, and the deck was carpeted with canvas painted in a black and white checkerboard pattern. There were two tables, a sideboard, a deep leather armchair, a couch and a revolving bookcase, though the air of genteel domesticity was somewhat spoiled by the presence of two eighteen-pounder cannons that pointed toward red-painted gunports. Forward of the day cabin, and on the ship’s starboard side, were Chase’s sleeping quarters, while forward on the larboard side was a dining cabin that could seat a dozen in comfort. “And I’ll be damned if I’ll move out for Lord goddamn bloody Hale,” Chase grumbled, “though he plainly expects me to. He can go back to the first lieutenant’s quarters and his damned wife can go into the second lieutenant’s cabin, which is how they sailed from Calcutta. Lord knows why they sleep apart, but they do. I shouldn’t have told you that.”
“I didn’t hear it,” Sharpe said.
“The bloody secretary can go in Horrocks’s cabin,” Chase decided. Horrocks was the lieutenant who had been made prize master of the Calliope. “And the first lieutenant can have the master’s cabin. He died three days ago. No one knows why. He tired of life, or life tired of him. God alone knows where the second will go. He’ll turf out the third, I suppose, who’ll kick out someone else, and so on down to the ship’s cat that will get chucked overboard, poor thing. God, I hate having passengers, especially women! You’ll have my quarters.”
“Your quarters?” Sharpe asked in astonishment.
“Sleeping cabin,” Chase said, “through that door there. Good Lord above, Sharpe, I’ve got this damn great room!” He gestured about the lavish day cabin with its elegant furniture, framed portraits and curtained windows. “My steward can hang my cot in here, and yours can go in the small cabin.”
“I can’t take your cabin!” Sharpe protested.
“Of course you can! It’s a damned poky little hole, anyway, just right for an insignificant ensign. Besides, Sharpe, I’m a fellow who likes some company and as captain I can’t go to the wardroom without an invitation and the officers don’t invite me much. Can’t blame them. They want to relax, so I end up in lonely state. So you can entertain me instead. D’you play chess? No? I shall teach you. And you’ll take supper with me tonight? Of course you will.” Chase, who had taken off his uniform coat, stretched out in a chair. “Do you really think the baron might have been Pohlmann?”
“He was,” Sharpe said flatly.
Chase raised an eyebrow. “So sure?”
“I recognized him, sir,” Sharpe admitted, “but I didn’t tell any of the Calliope’s officers. I didn’t think it was important.”
Chase shook his head, more in amusement than disapproval. “It wouldn’t have done any good if you had told them. And Peculiar would probably have killed you if you had, and as for the others, how were they to know what was happening? I only hope to God I do!” He straightened to find a piece of paper on the larger table. “We, that is His Britannic Majesty’s navy, are looking for a gentleman named Vaillard. Michel Vaillard. He’s a bad lad, our Vaillard, and it seems he is trying to return to Europe. And how better to travel than disguised as a servant? No one looks at servants, do they?”
“Why are you searching for him, sir?”
“It seems, Sharpe, that he has been negotiating with the last of the Mahrattas who are terrified that the British will take over what’s left of their territory, so Vaillard has concluded a treaty with one of their leaders, Holkar?” He looked at the paper. “Yes, Holkar, and Vaillard is taking the treaty back to Paris. Holkar agrees to talk peace with the British, and in the meantime Monsieur Vaillard, presumably with the help of your friend Pohlmann, arranges to supply Holkar with French advisers, French cannon and French muskets. This is a copy of the treaty.” He flicked the paper over to Sharpe who saw that it was in French, though someone had helpfully written a translation between the lines. Holkar, the ablest of the Mahratta war leaders and a man who had evaded the army of Sir Arthur Wellesley, but who was now being pressed by other British forces, had undertaken to open peace negotiations and, under their cover, raise an enormous army which would be equipped by his allies, the French. The treaty even listed those princes in British territory who could be relied on to rebel if such an army attacked out of the north.
“They’ve been clever, Vaillard and Pohlmann,” Chase said. “Used British ships to go home! Quickest way, you see. They suborned your fellow, Cromwell, and must have sent a message to Mauritius arranging a rendezvous.”
“How did we get a copy of their treaty?” Sharpe asked.
“Spies?” Chase guessed. “Everything became vigorous after you left Bombay. The admiral sent a sloop to the Red Sea in case Vaillard decided to go overland and he sent the Porcupine to overhaul the convoy and told me to keep my eyes skinned as well, because stopping that damned Vaillard is our most important job. Now we know where the bloody man is, or we think we do, so I’ll have to pursue him. They’re going back to Europe and we are too. It’s back home for us, Sharpe, and you’re going to see just how fast a French-built warship can sail. The trouble is that the Revenant’s just as quick and she’s the best part of a week in front of us.”
“And if you catch her?”
“We beat her to smithereens, of course,” Chase said happily, “and make certain Monsieur Vaillard and Herr Pohlmann go to the fishes.”
“And Captain Cromwell with them,” Sharpe said vengefully.
“I think I’d rather take him alive,” Chase said, “and hang him from the yardarm. Nothing cheers up a jack tar’s spirit so much as seeing a captain swinging on a generous length of Bridport hemp.”
Sharpe looked through the stern window to see the Calliope was just a smudge of sails on the horizon. He felt like a cask thrown into a fast river, being swept away to some unknown destination on a journey over which he had no control, but he was glad it was happening, for he was still with Lady Grace. The very thought of her sparked a warm feeling in his breast, though he knew it was a madness, an utter madness, but he could not escape it. He did not even want to escape it.
“Here’s Mister Harold Collier,” Chase said, responding to a knock on the door that brought into the cabin the diminutive midshipman who had commanded the boat that had carried Sharpe out to the Calliope so long ago in Bombay Harbor. Now Mister Collier was ordered to show Sharpe the Pucelle.