Two seamen dragged the Pucelle’s soaking white ensign onto the quarterdeck, smearing Haskell’s blood with the sopping folds of the heavy flag. “Run it up to the main topsail yard, larboard side,” Chase ordered. It would look odd there, but by God he would fly it to show that the Pucelle was undefeated.
Musket balls began striking the deck. Montmorin had fifty or sixty men in his upperworks and they would now try to do what the Redoutable had done to the Victory. He would clear the Pucelle’s decks and Chase desperately wanted to retreat into the shelter of the damaged poop, but his place was here, in full view, and so he put his hands behind his back and tried to look calm as he paced up and down the deck. He resisted the temptation to extend each length of the deck until he was under the poop, but forced himself to turn a few paces short, though he did stop once to stare in fascination at the mangled remains of the binnacle and its compass. A musket ball thumped the deck by his feet and he turned and paced back. He should have summoned a lieutenant from below decks to replace Haskell, but he decided against it. If he fell then his men knew what to do. Just fight. That was all there was to do now. Just fight, and Chase’s life or death would make small difference to the outcome, whereas the lieutenants, commanding the guns, were doing something useful.
The crews of the two larboard carronades, which had no targets, were levering the fallen starboard carronade out of the way so that they could drag one of their two guns to replace it. Chase skipped out of their way, then saw Midshipman Collier on the weather deck where he was handing out oranges from his huge net. “Throw one here, lad!” he called to the boy.
Collier looked alarmed at the order, as though he feared to throw something at his captain, but he tossed the orange underhand as if he was bowling a cricket ball and Chase had to lunge to one side to catch it single-handed. Some gunners cheered the catch and Chase held the orange aloft like a trophy, then tossed it to Hopper.
Captain Llewellyn’s marines were firing at the French in their fighting tops, but the French were more numerous and their lashing fire was thinning Llewellyn’s ranks. “Shelter your men as best you can, Llewellyn,” Chase ordered.
“If I can take some to the maintop, sir?” the Welshman suggested.
“No, no, I gave my word to Nelson. Shelter them. Your time will come soon enough. Under the break of the poop, Llewellyn. You can fire from there.”
“You should come with us, sir.”
“I feel like taking the air, Llewellyn,” Chase said with a smile. In truth he was terrified. He kept thinking of his wife, his house, the children. In her last letter Florence had said that one of the ponies had a sickness, but which one? The cob? Was it better? He tried to think of such domestic things, wondering if the apple harvest was good and whether the stable yard had been repaved and why the parlor chimney smoked so bad when the wind was in the east, but in truth he just wanted to dash into the poop’s shadow and so be protected from the musketry by the deck planks above. He wanted to cower, but his job was to stay on his quarterdeck. That was why he was paid four hundred and eighteen pounds and twelve shillings a year, and so he paced up and down, up and down, made conspicuous by his cocked hat and gilded epaulettes, and he tried to divide four hundred and eighteen pounds and twelve shillings by three hundred and sixty-five days and the Frenchmen aimed their muskets at him so that Chase walked a strip of deck that became ever more lumpy and ragged from bullet strikes. He saw the ship’s barber, a one-eyed Irishman, hauling on a weather-deck gun. At this moment, Chase reckoned, that man was more valuable to the ship than its captain. He paced on, knowing he would be hit soon, hoping it would not hurt too badly, regretting his death so keenly and wishing he could see his children one more time. He was frightened, but it was unthinkable to do anything else but show a cool disdain for danger.
He turned and stared westward. The melee about the Victory had grown, but he could distinctly see a British ensign flying above a French tricolor, showing that at least one enemy ship had struck. Farther south there was a second melee where Collingwood’s squadron had cut off the rear of the French and Spanish fleet. Away to the east, beyond the Revenant, a handful of enemy ships shamefully sailed away, while to the north the enemy vanguard had at last turned and was lumbering southward to help their beleaguered comrades. The battle, Chase reckoned, could only get worse, for a dozen ships on either side had yet to engage, but his fight was with Montmorin now.
The Pucelle shuddered as the Revenant slammed into her side. The force of the collision, broadside to broadside, two thousand tons meeting two thousand tons, drove the two ships apart again, but Chase shouted at the few remaining men on his top decks to throw the grapnels and make the Revenant fast. The hooks flew into the enemy’s rigging, but the enemy had the same idea and her crew was also hurling grappling hooks, while seamen in the Frenchman’s rigging were tying the Pucelle’s lower yards to their own. To the death, then. Neither ship could escape now, they could only kill each other. The rails of the two ships were thirty feet apart because their lower hulls bulged out so greatly, but Chase was close enough to see Montmorin’s expression and the Frenchman, seeing Chase, took off his hat and bowed. Chase did the same. Chase wanted to laugh and Montmorin was smiling, both men struck by the oddity of such courtesies even as they did their best to kill each other. Beneath their silver-buckled feet the great guns gouged and hammered. Chase wished he had an orange to throw to Montmorin who, he was sure, would appreciate the gesture, but he could not see Collier.
Chase did not know it, but his presence on the deck was directly useful, for the French marksmen in the fighting tops were obsessed by his death and so ignored the carronade crews which, seeing French seamen gather in the Revenant’s waist, fired down into the mass. The Frenchmen had been snatching boarding pikes from their racks about the mainmast, while others held axes or cutlasses, but one carronade forward and one aft provided a tangling crossfire that destroyed the boarding party. The French had no carronades, relying on the men in their fighting tops to clear an enemy’s deck with musket fire.
Ten marines were left on the Pucelle’s forecastle. Sergeant Armstrong, bleeding to death, still sat by the foremast and clumsily fired his musket up into the enemy rigging. Clouter, his black torso streaked and spattered by other men’s blood, had taken command of the starboard carronade after half its crew was killed by a grenade thrown from the Revenant’s foremast. Sharpe was firing up into the maintop, hoping his bullets would gouge through its timbers to kill the French marksmen perched on the platform. The wind seemed to have died completely so that the sails and flags hung limp. Powder smoke thickened between the ships, rising to hide and protect the Pucelle’s bullet-lashed deck. Sharpe was deaf now, his ears buffeted by the big guns and his world shrunken to this small patch of bloody deck and the smoke-wreathed enemy rigging soaring above him. His shoulder was bruised by the musket so that he flinched every time he fired. An orange rolled across the deck at his feet, its skin dimpling the blood on the planks. He brought the musket’s brass-bound stock hard down on the orange, squashing and bursting the fruit, then stooped and scooped up some of the pulped flesh. He ate some, grateful for the juice in his parched mouth, then scooped some more which he put into Armstrong’s mouth. The sergeant’s unbloodied eye was glassy, he was scarce conscious, but he was still trying to reload his musket. He coughed hoarsely, mingling bloody spittle with the orange juice that trickled down his chin. “We are winning, aren’t we?” he asked Sharpe earnestly.