“The ship’s yours, Mister Peel,” Chase said to the second lieutenant, then led Lady Grace under the break of the poop to the door on the larboard side which led into the dining cabin. Lord William saw them and frowned, making Chase pause. “You wish to see the charts, my lord?” the captain asked.
“No, no,” Lord William said, and returned to the papers.
Braithwaite watched Sharpe, and Sharpe knew he must not arouse the secretary’s suspicions, but he did not believe Lady Grace truly wanted to see the charts and so, ignoring Braithwaite’s hostile gaze, he went to his sleeping cabin which lay beyond the starboard door under the poop deck. He knocked on the farther door, which led from the sleeping cabin into the day cabin, but there was no answer and so he let himself into the big stern cabin. “Sharpe!” Chase showed a small flash of irritation for, friendly as he was, his quarters were sacrosanct and he had not responded to the knock on the door.
“Captain,” Lady Grace said, laying a hand on his arm, “please.”
Chase, who had been unrolling a chart, looked from her to Sharpe and from Sharpe back to Lady Grace again. He let the chart roll up with a snap. “I clean forgot to wind the chronometers this morning,” he said. “Would you forgive me?” He went past Sharpe into the dining cabin, ostentatiously closing the door with a deliberately loud click.
“Oh God, Richard.” Lady Grace ran to him and hugged him. “Oh, God!”
“What’s the matter?”
For a few seconds she did not speak, but then realized she had little time if tongues were not to wag about herself and the captain. “It’s my husband’s secretary,” she said.
“I know all about him.”
“You do?” She stared at him wide-eyed.
“He’s blackmailing you?” Sharpe guessed.
She nodded. “And he watches me.”
Sharpe kissed her. “Leave him to me. Now go, before anyone starts a rumor.”
She kissed him fiercely, then went back onto the deck scarce two minutes after she had left it. Sharpe waited until Chase, who had wound his chronometers at dawn as he always did, came back to the day cabin. Chase rubbed his face tiredly, then looked at Sharpe. “Well, I never,” he said, then sat in his deep armchair. “It’s called playing with fire, Sharpe.”
“I know, sir.” Sharpe was blushing.
“Not that I blame you,” Chase said. “Good Lord, don’t think that! I was a dog myself until I met Florence. A dear woman! A good marriage tends a man to steadiness, Sharpe.”
“Is that advice, sir?”
“No,” Chase smiled, “it’s a boast.” He paused, thinking now of his ship rather than of Sharpe and Lady Grace. “This thing isn’t going to explode, is it?”
“No,” Sharpe said.
“It’s just that ships are oddly fragile, Sharpe. You can have the people content and working hard, but it doesn’t take much to start dissent and rancor.”
“It won’t explode, sir.”
“Of course not. You said so. Well! Dear me! You do surprise me. Or maybe you don’t. She’s a beauty, I’ll say that, and he’s a very cold fish. I think, if I wasn’t so securely married, I’d be envious of you. Positively envious.”
“We’re just acquaintances,” Sharpe said.
“Of course you are, my dear fellow, of course you are!” Chase smiled. “But her husband might be affronted by a mere”—he paused—”acquaintanceship?”
“I think that’s safe to say, sir.”
“Then make sure nothing happens to him, for he’s my responsibility.” Chase spoke those words in a harsh voice, then smiled. “Other than that, Richard, enjoy yourself. But quietly, I beg you, quietly.” Chase said the last few words in a whisper, then stood and went back to the quarterdeck.
Sharpe waited a half hour before leaving the stern quarters, doing his best to allay any suspicions that Braithwaite must inevitably have, but the secretary had left the quarterdeck by the time Sharpe reappeared, and that perhaps was a good thing for Sharpe was in a cold fury.
And Malachi Braithwaite had made himself an enemy.
CHAPTER 7
The wind was still low the next morning and the Pucelle seemed hardly to be moving in a greasy sea that slid in long low swells from the west. It was hot again, so that the seamen went bare-chested, some showing the livid cross-hatching of scars where their backs had been subjected to the lash. “Some wear it as a badge of pride,” Chase told Sharpe, “though I hope not on this ship.”
“You don’t flog?”
“I must,” Chase said, “but rarely, rarely. Maybe twice since I took command? That’s twice in three years. The first was for theft and the other was for striking a petty officer who probably deserved to be struck, but discipline is discipline. Lieutenant Haskell would like me to flog more, he thinks it would make us more efficient, but I don’t think it needful.” He stared morosely at the sails. “No damn wind, no damn wind! What the hell does God think he’s doing?”
If God would not send a wind, Chase would practice the guns. Like many naval captains he carried extra powder and shot, bought at his own expense, so that his crew could practice. All morning he had the guns going, every port open, even the ones in his great cabin, so that the ship was constantly surrounded by a pungent white-gray smoke through which it moved with a painful slowness.
“This could mean bad luck,” Peel, the second lieutenant, told Sharpe. He was a friendly man, round-faced, round-waisted and invariably cheerful. He was also untidy, a fact that irritated the first lieutenant, and the bad blood between Peel and Haskell made the wardroom a tense and unhappy place. Sharpe sensed the unhappiness, knew that it upset Chase and was aware of the ship’s preference for Peel, who was far more easygoing than the tall, unsmiling Haskell.
“Why bad luck?”
“Guns lull the wind,” Peel explained seriously. He was wearing a blue uniform coat far more threadbare than Sharpe’s red jacket, though the second lieutenant was rumored to be wealthy. “It is an unexplained phenomenon,” Peel said, “that gunfire depletes wind.” He pointed at the vast red ensign at the gaff as proof and, sure enough, it hung limp. The flag was not hoisted every day, but at times like this, when the wind was lazily tired, Chase reckoned that an ensign served to show small variations in the breeze.
“Why is it red?” Sharpe asked. “That sloop we saw had a blue one.”
“It depends which admiral you serve,” Peel explained. “We take orders from a rear admiral of the red, but if he was blue we’d fly blue and if he was white, white, and if he was yellow he wouldn’t command any ships anyway. Simple, really.” He grinned. The red flag, which had the union flag in its upper corner, stirred sluggishly as a rare gust of warm air disturbed its folds. Off to the east, where the gust came from, there were heaps of clouds which Peel said were over Africa. “And you’ll note the water’s discolored,” he added, pointing over the side to a muddy brown sea, “which means we’re off a river mouth.”
Chase timed the gun crews, promising an extra tot of rum to the fastest men. The sound of the guns was astonishing. It pounded the eardrums and shivered the ship before fading slowly into the immensity of sea and sky. The gunners tied scarves about their ears to diminish the shock of the noise, but many of them were still prematurely deaf. Sharpe, curious, went down to the lower deck where the big thirty-two-pounders lurked and he stood in wonder as the guns were fired. He had his fingers in his ears, yet, even so, the whole dark space, punctuated with bright shafts of smoky sunlight which pierced through the open gunports, reverberated with each gun’s firing. The sound seemed to punch him in the abdomen, it rang in his head, it filled the world. One after the other, the guns hammered back. Each barrel was close to ten feet long and each gun weighed nearly three tons, and each shot strained the gun’s breeching rope taut as an iron bar. The breeching rope was a great cable, fixed with eyebolts to the ship’s ribs, that looped through a ring at the gun’s breech. Half-naked gunners, sweat glistening on their skins, leaped to sponge out the vast barrels while the gun’s chief stopped the vent-hole with a leather-encased thumb. Men put in powder bags and shot, rammed them home, then hauled the weapon’s muzzle out through the gunport with the rope-and-pulley tackles fixed on either side of the carriage.