Then the calms came. For a week the two ships made scarce forty miles, but just lay on a glassy sea in which their reflections were almost mirror perfect. The sails hung and the powder smoke belched by gun practice made a cloud about each ship that did not shift so that, from a distance, the Revenant looked like a patch of fog rigged with masts and sails. Lieutenant Haskell tried to time the Frenchman’s volleys by watching the cloud twitch in his telescope. “Only one shot every three minutes and twenty seconds,” he finally concluded.

“They’re not trying their hardest,” Chase said. “Montmorin’s not going to let me know how well his men are trained. You may be assured they’re a good deal faster than that.”

“How fast are we?” Sharpe asked Llewellyn.

The Welshman shrugged. “On a good, day, Sharpe? Three broadsides in five minutes. Not that we ever fire a broadside proper. Fire all the guns together, Sharpe, and the bloody ship would fall to bits! But we fire in a ripple, see? One gun after the other. Pretty to watch, it is, and after that the guns fire as they’re loaded. The faster crews will easily do three shots in five minutes, but the bigger guns are slower. But our lads are good. There aren’t many Frenchmen who can do three shots in five minutes.”

Some days Chase tried to tow the ship closer to the Revenant, but the Frenchman was also using his boats to tow and so the foes kept their stations. One day a freak breeze carried the Revenant almost beyond the horizon, leaving the Pucelle stranded, but next day it was the British ship’s turn to be wafted northward while the Revenant lay becalmed. The Pucelle ghosted along, drawing nearer and nearer to the enemy, the ripples of her passage scarcely disturbing the glasslike sea, and foot by foot, yard by yard, cable by cable, she gained on the Revenant despite the best efforts of the French oarsmen who were out ahead in their ship’s longboats. Still the Pucelle closed the gap until at last Captain Chase had the tompion pulled from the barrel of his forward larboard twenty-four-pounder. The gun was already loaded, for all the guns were left charged, and the gunner took off the lead touch-hole cover and screwed a flintlock into place. The captain had gone to the forward end of the weather deck, where the Pucelle’s goats were penned, and crouched beside the open gunport. “We’ll load with chain after the first shot,” he decided.

Chain shot looked at first glance like ordinary round shot, but the ball was split into two halves and when it left the gun the halves separated. They were joined by a short length of chain and the two hemispheres whirled through the air, the chain between them, to slice and tear at the enemy’s rigging. “Long range for chain shot,” the gunner told Chase.

“We’ll get closer,” Chase said. He was hoping to disable the Revenant’s sails, then close and finish her with solid shot. “We’ll get closer,” he said again, stooping to the gun and staring at the enemy that was now almost within range. The gilding on her stern reflected the sunlight, the tricolor hung limp from the mizzen gaff and her rail was crowded with men who must have been wondering why the wind was fickle enough to favor the British. Sharpe was staring through a telescope, hoping for a glimpse of Peculiar Cromwell’s long hair and blue coat, or of Pohlmann and his servant, but he could not make out the individuals who stood watching the Pucelle glide closer. He could see the ship’s name on her stern, see the water being pumped from her bilges and the copper, now pale green, at her water line.

Then the longboats towing the Revenant were suddenly called back. Chase grunted. “They probably plan to tow her head around,” he suggested, “to show us her broadside. Drummer!”

A marine boy stepped forward. “Sir?”

“Beat to quarters,” Chase said, then held up a hand. “No, belay that! Belay!”

The wind was not so fickle after all, and the Revenant’s boats had not been recalled to turn the ship, but rather because Montmorin had seen the flickering cat’s-paws of wind ruffling the water at his stern. Now her sails lifted, stretched and tightened and the Frenchman was suddenly sliding ahead, just out of cannon range. “Damn,” Chase said mildly, “damn and blast his French luck.” The flintlock was dismounted, the tompion hammered into the muzzle, the gunport closed and the twenty-four-pounder secured.

Next day the Revenant pulled ahead again, the beneficiary of an unfair breeze, and by the end of the week of calms the two ships were again almost an horizon apart, though now the French ship was directly ahead of the Pucelle. “Far enough,” Chase said bitterly, “to see her safe into harbor.”

The next few days saw contrary currents and hard winds from the northeast so that both ships beat up as close as they could. Chase called it sailing on a bowline and the Pucelle proved the better sailor and slowly, so slowly, she began to make up the lost ground. The ship smacked hard into the waves, shattering the seas across the decks and sails. Rain squalls sometimes blotted the Revenant from the Pucelle’s view, but she always reappeared and, through his telescope, Sharpe could see her pitching like the Pucelle. Once, gazing at the black and yellow warship, he saw strips of canvas flutter at her bow and she seemed to slew toward him for a few seconds, but in another few heartbeats the Frenchman had hoisted a new sail to replace the one that had blown out. “Worn canvas,” the first lieutenant commented. “Reckon that’s why we’re faster on the wind. His foresails are threadbare.”

“Or his stays aren’t tight enough,” Chase muttered, watching as the Revenant resumed her previous course. “But he made that sail change quickly,” he acknowledged ruefully.

“He probably had the new sail bent on ready, sir,” Haskell suggested.

“Like as not,” Chase agreed. “He’s good, our Louis, ain’t he?”

“Probably got English blood,” Haskell said in all seriousness.

They passed the Cape Verde Islands which were mere blurs on a rain-smudged horizon and, a week later, in another rainstorm, they glimpsed the Canaries. There was plenty of local shipping about, but the sight of two warships sent them all scurrying for shelter.

There was just one more week, maybe a day less, to Cadiz. “She’ll make port on my birthday,” Chase said, staring through his glass, then he collapsed the telescope and turned away to hide his bitterness for, unless a miracle intervened, he knew he faced utter failure. He had one week to catch the Frenchman, but the wind had backed and for the next few days the Revenant kept her lead so that the sun-faded tricolor at her stern was a constant taunt to her pursuers.

“What will Chase do if we don’t catch her?” Grace asked Sharpe that night.

“Sail on to England,” he said. Plymouth, probably, and he imagined landing on a wet autvimn afternoon on a stone quay where he would be forced to watch Lady Grace going away in a hired four-wheeler.

“I shall write to you,” she said, reading his thoughts, “if I know where.”

“Shorncliffe, in Kent. The barracks.” He could not hide his misery. The stupid dreams of a ridiculous love were fading into a grim reality, just as Chase’s hopes of catching the Revenant were fading.

Grace lay beside him, gazing up at the deck, listening to the hiss of rain falling on the deadlight of the cabin’s scuttle. She was dressed, for it was almost time for her to slip out of his door and go down to her own cabin, yet she clung to him and Sharpe saw the old sadness in her eyes. “There is something,” she said softly, “that I was not going to tell you.”

“Not going to tell me?” he asked. “Which means you will tell me.”

“I was not going to tell you,” she said, “because there is nothing to be done about it.”