“Plenty left to kill,” Chase said, then cupped his hands. “Back to the guns! Back to the guns!” He saw the purser peering nervously from the forward companionway. “Mister Cowper! I’ll trouble you to find rammers and swabs for this deck. Lively now! Back to the guns!”
Like two bare-knuckled boxers, deep in their thirtieth or fortieth round, both bleeding and dazed, yet neither willing to give up, the two ships pounded each other. Sharpe climbed to the quarterdeck with Chase. To the west, where the long swells came so high, the sea was all battle. Nearly a dozen ships fought there. To the south another score blazed at each other. The ocean was thick with wreckage. A mastless hulk, its guns silent, drifted away from the melee. Five or six pairs of ships, like the Pucelle and the Revenant, were clasped together, exchanging fire in private battles that took place beyond the bigger melee. The towering Santisima Trinidad had lost her foremast and most of her mizzen and still she was being hammered by smaller British ships. The powder smoke now spread across two miles of ocean, a man-made fog. The sky was darkening to the north and west. Some of the enemy ships, not daring to come close to the fighting and looking to escape, bombarded the brawling fleets from a distance, but their shots were as much a danger to their own side as to the British. The very last of the British ships, the slowest of the fleet, were only just entering the fray and opening fresh gunports to add their metal to the carnage.
Capitaine Montmorin looked across at Chase and shrugged, as if to suggest that the failure of his boarders was regrettable but not serious. The Frenchman’s guns were firing still, and Sharpe could see more boarders gathering on the Revenant’s weather deck. He could also see Captain Cromwell, peering from the shelter of the poop, and Sharpe seized a musket from a nearby marine and aimed at the Englishman who, seeing the threat, ducked back out of sight. Sharpe handed the musket back. Chase found a speaking trumpet amidst the wreckage on the deck. “Captain Montmorin? You should yield before we kill more of your men!”
Montmorin cupped his hands. “I was going to offer you the same chance, Captain Chase!”
“Look there,” Chase shouted, pointing beyond his own stern, and Montmorin climbed up his mizzen ratlines to see over the Pucelle’s poop and there, ghosting across the swells, untouched, was the Spartiate, a British seventy-four, the French-built ship that was rumored to be bewitched because she sailed faster by night than by day and now. coming late to the battle, she opened her larboard gunports.
Montmorin knew what was about to happen and he could do nothing to stop it. He was going to be raked and so he shouted at his men to lie down between the guns, though that would not save them from the Pucelle’s gunfire, then he stood in the center of his quarterdeck and waited.
The Spartiate gave Montmorin’s ship a full broadside. One after another the guns crashed back and their balls smashed the high gallery windows of the Revenant’s stern and screamed down her decks, just as the Revenant had raked the Pucelle earlier. The Spartiate was painfully slow, but that only gave her gunners more time to aim properly, and the broadside drove deep wounds into the Revenant. Her mizzen shrouds parted with a sound like Satan’s harp strings snapping, then the whole mast toppled, splintering like a monstrous tree to carry yards, sails and tricolor overboard. Sharpe heard the French musketeers screaming as they fell with the mast. Guns were thrown off carriages, men were mangled by round shot and grapeshot, and still Montmorin stood unmoving, even when the wheel was shot away behind him. Only when the last of the Spartiate’s guns had sounded did he turn and look at the ship that had raked him. He must have feared that she would put up her helm and lay alongside his starboard flank, but the Spartiate sailed grandly on, seeking a victim all her own.
“Yield, Capitainel” Chase shouted through the speaking trumpet.
Montmorin gave his answer by cupping his hands and shouting down to his weather deck. “Tirezl Tirez!” He turned and bowed to Chase.
Chase looked about the quarterdeck. “Where’s Captain Llewellyn?” he asked a marine.
“Broken leg, sir. Gone below.”
“Lieutenant Swallow?” Swallow was the young marine lieutenant.
“Think he’s dead, sir. Badly wounded, anyway.”
Chase looked at Sharpe, paused as the Revenant’s guns opened fire again. “Assemble a boarding party, Mister Sharpe,” Chase said formally.
It was always going to be a fight to the finish, right from the moment the Pucelle had first seen the Revenant off the African coast. And now Sharpe would finish it.
CHAPTER 12
Lord William listened to the guns, but it was impossible to tell how the battle went from their sound alone, though it was plain that the fighting had reached a new level of fury. “Si fractus inlabatur orbis,” he said, raising his eyes to the deck above.
Grace said nothing.
Lord William chuckled. “Oh, come, my dear, don’t tell me you have forgotten your Horace? It is one of the things that most annoys me about you; that you cannot resist translating my tags.”
“If the sky should break,” Lady Grace said dully.
“Oh come! That is hardly adequate, is it?” Lord William asked sternly. “I grant you sky for orbis, though I would prefer universe, but the verb demands falling, does it not? You were never the Latinist you thought you were.” He looked up again as a dolorous thump echoed through the ship’s timbers. “It does indeed sound as though the broken sky falls. Are you frightened? Or do you feel yourself to be entirely safe here?”
Lady Grace said nothing. She felt bereft of tears, gone to a place of abject misery that was beset by guns, horror, spite and hate.
“I am safe here,” Lord William went on, “but you, my dear, are beset by fears, so much so that in a moment you will seize my pistol and turn it on yourself. You feared, I shall say, a repetition of that amusing episode on the Calliope when your lover so bravely rescued you, and I shall claim it was impossible to prevent you from destroying yourself. I shall, of course, demonstrate an abject though dignified sadness at your demise. I shall insist that your precious body is carried home so that I may bury you in Lincolnshire. Black plumes shall crown your funerary horses, the bishop will pronounce the obsequies and my tears shall moisten your vault. All will be done properly, and your tombstone, cut from the very finest marble, will record your virtues. It will not say that you were a sordid fornicator who opened her legs to a common soldier, but rather that you combined wisdom with understanding, grace with charity and possessed a Christian forbearance that was a shining example of womanhood. Would you like the inscription in Latin?”
She gazed at him, but did not speak.
“And when you are dead, my love,” Lord William went on, “and safely buried beneath a slab recording your virtues, I shall set about destroying your lover. I shall do it quietly, Grace, subtly, so that he will never know the source of his misfortunes. Having him removed from the army will be simple, but what then? I shall think of something, indeed it will provide me with pleasure to contemplate his fate. A hanging, don’t you think? I doubt I shall be able to convict him for poor Braithwaite’s death, which he undoubtedly caused, but I shall contrive something, and when he is dangling there, twitching, and pissing in his breeches, I shall watch and I shall smile and I shall remember you.”
She still stared at him, her face expressionless.