Haskell shouted down to the weather deck. “Stand up! Stand up! Stand to your guns!”

Midshipmen and lieutenants repeated the order to the lower deck. “Stand up! Stand up!” Men gathered around their guns, peered through the open ports, eyed the ragged holes that had already been punched in the hull’s double-planked oak timbers. The cannons’ flintlocks were cocked and the gunners crouched to the side, lanyards held ready.

A marine cursed and staggered on the forecastle as a musket bullet drove down through his shoulder into his belly. “Make your own way to the surgeon,” Armstrong told him, “and don’t make a fuss.” He stared up at the Frenchman’s mizzenmast where a knot of men were firing muskets down onto the Pucelle. “Time to teach those bastards some manners,” he growled. The Pucelle’s bowsprit, ragged with its broken yard, pushed into the gap between the two ships. The gunners below decks could not yet see the enemy, but they knew they were close for the smoke of the enemy guns lay across the sea like mist, then thickened as the enemy fired again, though now the Pucelle was so close that they were firing at the ships behind her.

“Push on through!” Chase shouted at his ship. “Push on through!”

For now was the glorious moment of revenge. Now was the moment when, if the Pucelle could force her passage, she would carry her broadsides within feet of an unprotected enemy stern and an unprotected enemy bow. Then, having taken the punishment for so long, she could rake two ships at once, ripping blood and bone and timber with her own fire-driven metal. “Make the shots tell!” Chase called. “Make them tell!”

Make the bastards bleed, he though vengefully. Make the bastards sorry they had ever been born and damn them to a fiery hell for the damage they had already done to his ship. There was a ripping, splintering sound as the Pucelle’s bowsprit tangled with the Spanish bowsprit, but then the Spaniard’s jib boom broke off altogether and the Pucelle’s shot-battered bows were in the gap, her broken sprit topsail yard was ripping the French ensign, and the first of her guns could bear. “Now kill them!” Chase shouted, relief flooding through him because at last he could fight back. “Now kill them!”

Lord William Hale had refused to allow his wife’s maid to take refuge in the lady hole, peremptorily telling the girl to find a place further forward in the Pucelle’s hold. “It is bad enough,” he told his wife, “that we are forced to this place, let alone that we should share it with servants.”

The lady hole was the aftermost corner of the Pucelle’s hold, a triangular space made where the hull supported the rudder. Its forward bulkhead was formed by the shelves where the officers’ empty dunnage was stored and where Malachi Braithwaite had sought the memorandum on the day of his death, and the floor of the hole was made by the steeply sloping sides of the ship, and though Captain Chase had ordered that a patch of old sailcloth be placed in the hole to provide a rudimentary comfort, Lord William and Lady Grace were still forced to perch uncomfortably against the plank slopes beneath the small hatch that led to the gunroom on the orlop deck above. It was in the gunroom that the cannons’ flintlocks were usually stored and where the ship’s small weapons could be repaired. It was empty now, though the surgeon might use it as a place to put the dying.

Lord William had insisted on having two lanterns which he hung from rusting hooks in the lady hole’s ceiling. He drew his pistol and lay it on his lap, using it as a prop for the spine of a book he drew from his coat pocket. “I am reading the Odyssey,” he told his wife. “I thought I should have the leisure for much reading on this voyage, but time has flown. Have you found the same?”

“I have,” she said dully. The sound of the enemy guns was very muted down below the water line.

“But I was pleased to discover,” Lord William went on, “in the few moments I have been able to devote to Homer, that my Greek is as fresh as ever. There were a few words that escaped me, but young Braithwaite recalled them. He was not much use, Braithwaite, but his Greek was excellent.”

“He was an odious man,” Lady Grace said.

“I did not realize you had remarked him,” Lord William said, then shifted the book so that the lantern light fell on the page. He traced the lines with his finger, mouthing the words silently.

Lady Grace listened to the guns, then started when the first shot struck the Pucelle and made all the ship’s timbers quiver. Lord William merely raised an eyebrow, then went on with his reading. More shots struck home, their sound dulled by the decks above. Opposite Lady Grace, where the hull’s inner planking was joined to a rib, water wept through a seam and every time a swell passed under the hull the water would bulge in the seam, then run down to vanish into the hold beyond the dunnage shelves. She restrained an urge to press a finger against the seam which was stuffed with a narrow strip of frayed oakum, and she remembered Sharpe telling her how, as a small child in the foundling home, he had been forced to pick apart great mats of tarred rope that had been used as fenders on London’s docks. His job had been to extract the hemp strands which were then sold to the shipyards to be used as caulking for planks. His fingernails were still ragged and black, though that, he said, was the result of firing a flintlock musket. She thought of his hands, closed her eyes and wondered at the madness that had swamped her. She was still in its thrall. The ship shook again, and she had a sudden terror of being trapped in this cramped space as the Pucelle sank.

“I am reading about Penelope,” Lord William said, ignoring the frequent crashes as the enemy shot hacked into the Pucelle. “She is a remarkable woman, is she not?”

“I have always thought as much,” Lady Grace said, opening her eyes.

“The quintessence, would you not say, of fidelity?” Lord William asked.

Grace looked into her husband’s face. He was sitting to her left, perched on the opposite side of the narrow space. He seemed amused. “Her fidelity is always praised,” she said.

“Have you ever wondered, my dear, why I took you to India?” Lord William asked, closing the book after carefully marking his place with what appeared to be a folded letter.

“I hoped it was because I could be of use to you,” she answered.

“And so you were,” Lord William said. “Our necessary visitors were entertained most properly and I have not one single complaint about the manner in which you organized our household.”

Grace said nothing. The rudder, so close behind them, creaked in its pintles. The enemy gunfire was a constant succession of dull thumps, sometimes rising to a thunderous crescendo, then lulling again into the steadier banging.

“But of course,” Lord William went on, “a good servant can run a household quite as well as a wife, if not better. No, my dear, I confess it was not for that reason that I wished you to accompany me, but rather, forgive me, because I feared you would find it hard to imitate Penelope if I were to leave you at home for such a long period.”

Grace, who had been watching the water well and spill from the seam, looked at her husband. “You are offensive,” she said coldly.

Lord William ignored her words. “Penelope, after all,” he went on, “stayed faithful to her husband through all the long years of his exile, but would a modern woman show the same forbearance?” Lord William pretended to mull over this question. “What do you think, my dear?”

“I think,” she said acidly, “that I would need to be married to Odysseus to answer such a question.”

Lord William laughed. “Would you like that, my dear? Would you like to be married to a warrior? Though is Odysseus such a great warrior? It always seems to me that he is a trickster before he is a soldier.”