“Braithwaite lied!” Grace screamed. “He lied.”
“He did not lie,” Lord William said angrily. “You, my lady, made the beast with two backs with that common soldier, that lump of ignorance, that brute.” His voice was cold now, for he could no longer hide his long-cosseted rage. “You fornicated with a peasant, and you could not have sunk lower had you put yourself on the streets and lifted your skirts.”
Lady Grace rested her head on the planking. Her mouth was open, gasping for breath and the tears were dripping onto her cloak. Her eyes were red, unseeing, as she wept.
“And now you look so ugly,” Lord William said, “which will make this much easier.” He lifted the pistol.
And the ship echoed again to the sound of a shot.
Clouter did not pull the carronade’s flintlock lanyard when Chase ordered him to fire. He waited. It seemed to Sharpe, and to everyone else who watched, that Clouter was waiting too long and that the French would reach the Victory’s weather deck, but the Pucelle had heaved up on a swell and Clouter was waiting for thd ship to roll to larboard on the back of the wave. She did, and on that down roll Clouter fired and the shot was perfectly timed so that its barrelful of musket balls and round shot slashed into the Frenchmen clambering up the spar that would have carried them onto the Victory’s unprotected deck. One moment there was a boarding party, the next there was a butcher’s yard. The fallen yard and sail were drenched with blood, but the Frenchmen had disappeared, snatched into oblivion by the storm of metal.
The Puerile now plided oast the Redoutable’s quarter. She was a pistol shot away and the big guns of Chase’s larboard broadside began to work on the devastated enemy. Chase had ordered the gunners to raise their barrels so that the shots cracked through the Frenchman’s side and tore their way upward through the deck which was thronged with men. Shot after shot spat from the Pucelle in a fire that was deliberate, slow and lethal. Men were lifted from the enemy deck, snatched upward by the round shot. Some shots passed through the Redoutable to strike the Victory’s weather-deck rail. It took more than a minute for the Pucelle to pass the doomed French ship, and for all of that minute the guns ripped into her, and then it was the turn of the quarterdeck carronades that could look down on the bloody mess left on the enemy deck and the two smashers finished the work, emptying their squat barrels into the squirming mass.
The Redoutable had no cannons manned. The French captain had I gambled everything on boarding the Victory, and his boarders were now dead, wounded or dazed, but the ship’s rigging was still filled with the marksmen who had emptied the upper decks of Nelson’s flagship and those men had turned their muskets onto the Pucelle. The balls rained down, smacking on the quarterdeck like metal hail. Grenades were hurled, exploding in gouts of smoke and whistling shards of glass and iron.
The Pucelle’s marines did their best, but they were outnumbered. Sharpe fired up into the dazzling light, then hurriedly reloaded. The deck about his feet was being pockmarked with bullet strikes. A ball clanged off Clouter’s empty carronade and struck a man in the thigh. A marine reeled back from the rail, his mouth opening and closing. Another, pierced through the throat, knelt by the foremast and gazed wide-eyed at Sharpe. “Spit, boy!” Sharpe shouted at him. “Spit!”
The man looked vacantly at Sharpe, frowned, then obediently spat. There was no blood in the spittle. “You’ll live,” Sharpe told him. “Get yourself below.” A bullet hit a mast hoop, scraping away fresh yellow paint. Sergeant Armstrong fired his musket, swore as a bullet drilled his left foot, limped to the rail, picked up another musket and fired again. Sharpe rammed his bullet, primed the gun, lifted it to his shoulder and aimed at the knot of men on the Frenchman’s maintop. He pulled the trigger. He could see musket flashes up there. A grenade landed on the forecastle and exploded in a sheet of flame. Armstrong, wounded by shards of glass, smothered the flames with a bucket of sand, then began to reload. Blood was trickling from the scuppers of the Redoutable’s weather deck, trickling under the shattered rail and dribbling red across her closed gunports. The Pucelle’s foremost guns, reloaded, fired into the Frenchman’s bows and there was a crack like the gates of hell being shut as the vast anchor was struck by a round shot. More round shot from the Victory was breaking out of the enemy’s side and some struck the Pucelle. A dozen more muskets fired from the enemy’s maintop and Sergeant Armstrong was on his knees, cursing, but still reloading. More muskets flickered from the enemy’s mast and Sharpe threw down his musket and picked up Sergeant Armstrong’s volley gun. He looked up at the enemy maintop and reckoned it was too far away and that the seven bullets would spread too wide before they reached the platform that was built where the Frenchman’s lower mast was jointed to the upper.
He went to the starboard rail, slung the big gun on his shoulder and pulled himself up the foremast shrouds. He could see a marine lying on the Pucelle’s quarterdeck with a rivulet of blood seeping from his body along the planks. Another marine was being carried to the rails. He could not see Chase, but then a bullet struck the shroud above him, making the tarred rope tremble like a harp string and he climbed desperately, his ears buffeted by the sound of the big guns. Another bullet whipped close by, a second struck the mast and, bereft of force, thumped against the volley gun’s stock. He reached the futtock shrouds and, without thinking, hurled himself upward and outward, the quickest way to the maintop. There was no time to be frightened; instead he scrambled up the ratlines as nimbly as any sailor and then rolled onto the grating to find that he was now level with the Frenchmen in their maintop. There were a dozen men there, most reloading, but one fired and Sharpe felt the wind of the ball whipping past his cheek. He unslung the volley gun, cocked and aimed it.
“Bastards,” he said, and pulled the trigger. The recoil of the gun hurled him back against the topmast shrouds. The volley gun’s smoke filled the sky, but no shots came from the Frenchman’s maintop. Sharpe slung the empty gun on his shoulder and lowered himself off the grating. His feet flailed for a heartbeat, then found the inward-sloping futtock shrouds and he went back down to the Pucelle’s deck and, when he looked back up, all he could see at the Redoutable’s maintop was a body hanging off the edge. He threw the volley gun down, picked up a musket and walked to the larboard rail.
A dozen marines were left. The others were dead or wounded. Sergeant Armstrong, his face bleeding from three cuts and his trousers a deep red from a bullet wound, was sitting with his back against the foremast. He had a musket at his shoulder and, though his right eye was closed by blood, he did his best to aim the musket, then fired. “You should go below, Sergeant!” Sharpe shouted.
Armstrong gave a monosyllabic opinion of that advice and pulled a cartridge from his pouch. A bullet had grazed Clouter’s back leaving a bloody welt like the stroke of a lash, but the big man was paying it no heed. He was stuffing another cask of musket balls into the carronade, though by now the Pucelle had gone beyond the Redoutable and the Frenchman was out of Clouter’s range.
Captain Chase still lived. Connors, the signal lieutenant, had lost his right forearm to a cannon ball and was down in the cockpit, while Pearson, a midshipman who had twice failed his lieutenant’s examination, had been killed by the musketry. The marine lieutenant was wounded in the belly and had been taken below to die. A dozen gunners were dead and two marines had been thrown overboard, but Chase reckoned the Pucelle had still been lucky. She had destroyed the Redoutable just as that ship had been on the point of boarding the Victory, and Chase felt an exultation as he looked back to see the terrible damage his guns had done. They had filleted her, by God! Chase had half considered laying alongside the Redoutable and boarding her, but she was already lashed to the Victory and doubtless the flagship’s crew would take her surrender, then he saw the French Neptune ahead and he shouted at the helmsman to steer for her. “She’s ours!” he told Haskell.