Fifty yards to go. The wind was foully light. The sea was covered in patches of smoke like breaking fog. The swells heaved the Pucelle eastward. “Larboard a point, John,” Chase said to the quartermaster, “larboard. Take me by his quarter.” The smoke at the French ship’s stern thinned and Chase saw the name of the two-decker which threatened to board the Victory. The Redouiable. Death to the Redoutable, he thought, and just then the French seamen released the Redoutable’s main-yard halliards and the great spar dropped to crash onto the Victory’s shattered hammock netting. It lay like a canvas-wrapped log across the Redoutable’s waist, but its larboard end jutted out over the Victory’s weather deck. It was a slender bridge, but it was sufficient for the French.
“A I’abordage!” the French captain shouted. He was a small man with a very loud voice. He had his sword drawn. “A I’abordage!”
His men cheered as they swarmed up the yard. The Pucelle lifted on a wave.
“Now!” Chase shouted to the forecastle. “Now, Clouter, now!”
And Clouter hesitated.
CHAPTER 11
His lordship should know, Malachi Braithwaite had written in a careful copperplate hand, that his wife was conducting an adulterous affair with Ensign Sharpe. He had overheard the two of them in Sharpe’s quarters aboard the Calliope and, painful though it was to relate, the-sounds emanating—that was the word he used, emanating—from the cabin suggested that her ladyship had quite forgotten her high station. Braithwaite had written in a cheap ink, a faded brown that had bled into the damp paper, and was hard to read in the dim lady hole. At first, the confidential secretary related, he had not believed the evidence of his own ears, and scarce even dared credit it when he had glimpsed the Lady Grace leaving the lower-deck steerage in the darkness before dawn, so he had thought it his duty to confront Sharpe with his suspicions. “But when I taxed Ensign Sharpe with my accusations,” he wrote, “and upbraided him for taking advantage of her ladyship, he did not deny the circumstances, but instead threatened me with murder.” Braithwaite had underlined the word “murder.” “It was that circumstance, my lord, which constrained my cowardly tongue from its bounden duty.” It gave him no pleasure, Braithwaite concluded the letter, to inform his lordship of these shameful events, especially as his lordship had ever shown him such excessive kindnesses.
Lady Grace let the letter fall into her lap. “He lies,” she said, “he lies.” There were tears in her eyes.
The lady hole was suddenly filled with noise. The Pucelle’s own guns had started to fire and the shock of the cannon reverberated through the ship, shaking the twin lanterns. The noise went on and on, becoming louder as the firing drew nearer to the stern of the ship. Then there was a terrible crash as the Spanish ship’s bows collided with the Pucelle’s side, followed by a groaning screech as tons of wood ground and scraped against the hull. A man shouted, a gun fired, then three more. The sound of the reloaded guns being hauled forward was like bursts of brief thunder.
Then there was an odd silence.
“He did lie,” Lord William said placidly in the silence, and reached over to take the letter from his wife’s lap. Grace made an effort to snatch it back, but Lord William was too quick. “Of course Braithwaite lied,” his lordship went on. “It must have provided him with an exquisite pleasure to tell me of your disgusting behavior. One detects his enjoyment throughout the letter, don’t you think? And I certainly did him no excessive kindnesses! The thought is as ludicrous as it is offensive.”
“He lies!” Lady Grace said more defiantly. A tear quivered at her eye, then rolled down her cheek.
“Showed him excessive kindnesses!” Lord William said scathingly. “Why would I do such a thing? I paid him a small salary commensurate with his services, and that was all.” Lord William carefully pocketed the folded letter. “One circumstance did puzzle me, though,” he went on. “Why did he confront Sharpe? Why not come straight to me? I have thought about that, and still it puzzles me. What was the point of seeing Sharpe? What did Braithwaite expect of him?”
Lady Grace said nothing. The rudder squealed in its pintles, and an enemy shot struck the Pucelle with a deep booming sound, then there was silence again.
“Then I remembered,” Lord William went on, “that Sharpe deposited some valuables with that wretched man Cromwell. I thought it an odd circumstance, for the man is palpably poor, but I suppose he could have plundered some wealth in India. Could Braithwaite have been attempting blackmail? What do you think?”
Lady Grace shook her head, not in answer to her husband’s question, but as if to shake off the whole subject.
“Or perhaps Braithwaite tried to blackmail you?” Lord William suggested, smiling at his wife. “He used to watch you with such a pathetically yearning face. It amused me, for it was plain what he was thinking.”
“I hated him!” Lady Grace blurted out.
“An extravagant waste of emotion, my dear,” Lord William said. “He was an insignificant thing, scarce worth disliking. But, and this is the point of our conversation, was he telling the truth?”
“No!” Lady Grace wailed.
Lord William lifted the pistol and examined its lock in the lantern light. “I noted,” he said, “how your spirits revived after we boarded the Calliope. I was pleased, naturally, for you have been over-nervous in these last months, but once aboard Cromwell’s ship you seemed positively happy. And indeed, in these last few days, there has been a vivacity in you that is most unnatural. Are you pregnant?”
“No,” Lady Grace lied.
“Your maid tells me you vomit most mornings?”
Grace shook her head again. Tears were running down her cheeks. Partly she cried from shame. When she was with Sharpe it seemed so natural, so comforting and exciting, but she could not plead that in her defense. He was a common soldier, an orphan from the London rookeries, and Grace knew that if society ever learned of her liaison then she would become a laughing stock. A part of her did not care if she was mocked, another part cringed under the lash of Lord William’s scorn. Grace was deep in a ship, down among the rats, lost.
Lord William watched her tears and thought of them as the first trickles of his revenge, then he looked up at the planks of the orlop deck and frowned. “It’s oddly silent,” he said, trying to keep her off balance by momentarily talking of the battle before torturing her with his sharp tongue once more. “Perhaps we have run away from the fighting?” He could hear the grumbling of some distant gunnery, but no cannons were being fired close to the Pucelle. “I remember,” he said, laying the pistol on his knees, “when we first met and my uncle suggested I should marry you. I had my doubts, of course. Your father is a wastrel and your mother a garrulous fool, but you possess, Grace, a classical beauty and I confess I was drawn to it. I was concerned that you boasted an education, though it has proved scantier than you think, and I feared you might possess opinions, which I rightly suspected would be foolish, but I was prepared to endure those afflictions. I believed, you see, that my apprehension of your beauty would overcome my distaste for your intellectual pretensions, and in return I asked very little of you, save that you gave me an heir and upheld the dignity of my name. You failed in both things.”
“I gave you an heir,” Grace protested through her tears.
“That sickly whelp?” Lord William spat, then shuddered. “It is your other failure that concerns me now, my dear. Your failure of taste, of behavior, of decency, of fidelity”—he paused, seeking the right insult—”of manners!”