“All England knows.”
“All Europe,” Lord William corrected her. “The man is incapable of discretion and you too, my dear, have been indiscreet.” The Pucelle’s broadside had stopped and the ship seemed silent. Lord William looked up at the deck as if he expected the noise to begin again, but the guns were quiet. Water gurgled at the stern. The ship’s pumps began again. “I might not have minded,” Lord William went on, “had you been discreet. No man wishes to be a cuckold, but it is one thing for a wife to take a genteel lover and quite another to lie down with the servant classes. Were you mad? That would be a charitable excuse, but the world does not see you as mad, so your action reflects upon me. You chose to rut with an animal, a lump, and I suspect he has made you pregnant. You disgust me.” He shuddered. “Every man on the ship must have known you were rutting. They thought I did not know, they sneered at me, and you went on like a tuppenny whore.”
Lady Grace said nothing. She stared up at one of the lanterns. Its candle was guttering, spewing a dribble of smoke that escaped through the lantern’s ventilation holes. She was red-eyed, exhausted from crying, incapable of fighting back.
“I should have known all this when I married you,” Lord William said. “One hopes, one does so hope, that a wife will prove a woman of fidelity, of prudence and quiet good sense, but why should I have expected it? Women have ever been slaves to their grosser appetites. “‘Frailty,’“ he quoted, “‘thy name is woman!’”
“The feeble sex, and by God how true that is! I found it hard to credit Braithwaite’s letter at first, but the more I thought about it, the more true it rang, and so I observed you and found, to my disappointment, that he did not lie. You were rutting with Sharpe, wallowing in his sweat.”
“Be quiet!” she pleaded with him.
“Why should I be quiet?” he asked in a reasonable voice. “I, my dear, am the offended party. You had your moment’s filthy pleasure with a mindless brute, why should I not have my moment of pleasure now? I have earned it, have I not?” He raised the pistol again, just as the whole ship shook with a terrible blow, then another, blows so loud that Lord William instinctively ducked his head, and still the blows went on, rending the ship and crashing through the decks and making the Pucelle shudder. Lord William, his anger momentarily displaced by fear, stared up at the deck as if expecting the ship to fall apart. The lanterns quivered, noise filled the universe and the guns kept firing.
The crash Sharpe had heard when he was on the lower deck had been the Revenant’s mainmast collapsing across both ships and, when he reached the weather deck, he saw Frenchmen running across the mast that, together with the Revenant’s fallen main yard, served as a bridge between the two ships’ decks. The Pucelle’s gunners had abandoned their cannon to fight the invaders with cutlasses, handspikes, rammers and pikes. Captain Llewellyn was bringing marines from the poop, but taking them along the starboard gangway which ran above the weather deck beside the ship’s gunwale. A dozen Frenchmen were on that gangway and trying to reach the Pucelle’s stern. More Frenchmen were in the waist of the ship, screaming their war cry and hacking with cutlasses. Their attack, as sudden as it was unexpected, had succeeded in clearing the center section of the weather deck where the invaders now stabbed at fallen gunners, as a bespectacled French officer hurled overboard the cannons’ rammers and swabs. Still more Frenchmen ran along the fallen mainmast and yard to reinforce their comrades.
The Pucelle’s crew began to counterattack. A seaman flailed with one of the handspikes used to shift the cannon, a vast club of wood that crushed a Frenchman’s skull. Others seized pikes and speared at the French. Sharpe drew the long cutlass and met the invaders under the break of the forecastle. He slashed at one, parried another, then lunged at the first to spit the man on his cutlass blade. He kicked the dying Frenchman off the steel, then swung the bloody blade to drive two more boarders back. One of them was a huge man, thick-bearded, carrying an axe, and he chopped the blade at Sharpe who stepped back, surprised by the bearded man’s long reach, and his right foot slid in a pool of blood and he fell back and twisted aside as the axe split the deck next to his head. He stabbed up, trying and failing to rake the Frenchman’s arm with the cutlass point, then rolled to his left as the axe slammed down again. The Frenchman kicked Sharpe hard in the thigh, wrenched the axe free and raised it a third time, but before he could deliver the killing stroke he uttered a scream as a pike slid into his belly. There was a roar above Sharpe as Clouter, letting go of the pike, seized the axe from the Frenchman’s hand and charged on in a frenzy. Sharpe stood and followed, leaving the bearded Frenchman twisting and shaking on the deck, the pike still buried in his guts.
Thirty or forty Frenchmen were in the ship’s waist now, and more were streaming along the mast, but just then a carronade blasted from the quarterdeck and emptied the makeshift bridge. One man, left untouched on the mast, jumped down to the Pucelle’s deck and Clouter, almost underneath him, brought the axe up between the man’s legs. The scream seemed to be the loudest noise Sharpe had heard in all that furious day. A tall French officer, hatless and with a powder-stained face, led a charge toward the Pucelle’s. bows. Clouter knocked the man’s sword aside then punched him in the face so hard that the officer recoiled into his own men, then a swarm of British gunners, screaming and stabbing, swept past the black man to hack at the invaders.
The guns pounded below, grinding and mangling the two ships. Captain Chase was fighting on the weather deck, leading a group of men who assailed the French from the stern. Captain Llewellyn’s marines had recaptured the gangway and now guarded the fallen mast, shooting down any Frenchman who tried to cross, while the remaining invaders were caught between the attack from the stern and the assault from the bows. Clouter was back in the front rank, chopping the axe in short hard strokes that felled a man each time. Sharpe trapped a Frenchman against the ship’s side, beneath the gangway. The man lunged his cutlass at Sharpe, had it effortlessly parried, saw death in the redcoat’s face and so, in desperation, squirmed through a gunport and threw himself down between the ships. He screamed as the seas drove the two hulls together. Sharpe leaped the gun, looking for an enemy. The Pucelle’s waist was filled with hacking, stabbing, shouting seamen who ignored the desperate shouts for quarter from the French whose impetuous attempt to capture the Pucelle had been foiled by the carronade. The bespectacled enemy officer still tried to render the Pucelle’s guns useless by jettisoning their rammers, but Clouter threw the axe and its blade thumped into the man’s skull like a tomahawk and his death seemed to still the frenzy, or perhaps it was Captain Chase’s insistent voice shouting that the Pucelles should stop fighting because the remaining Frenchmen were trying to surrender. “Take their weapons!” Chase bellowed. “Take their weapons!”
Only a score of Frenchmen were still standing and, disarmed, they were shepherded toward the stern. “I don’t want them below,” Chase said, “they could make mischief. Buggers can stand on the poop instead and be shot at.” He grinned at Sharpe. “Glad you sailed with me?”
“Hot work, sir.” Sharpe looked for Clouter and hailed him. “You saved my life,” he told the tall man. “Thank you.”
Clouter looked astonished. “I didn’t even see you, sir.”
“You saved my life,” Sharpe insisted.
Clouter gave a strange, high-pitched laugh. “But we killed some, didn’t we? Didn’t we just kill some?”