“I shall remember you,” he said again, unable to hide the hatred he felt for her. “I shall remember that you were a common whore, a slave to your filthy lusts, a slut who let a commoner roger her.” He raised the pistol.
The guns, two decks above, began to fire again, their recoil shaking the timbers clear down to the lady hole.
But the pistol shot sounded much louder than the great guns. Its sound echoed in the confined space, filling it with thick smoke as bright blood splashed up the lady hole’s planking.Si fractus inlabatur orbis.
The swells were getting bigger, the sky darker. The wind had risen a little, so that the smoke patches streamed eastward, flowing around disabled ships that trailed masts and fallen rigging. The guns still punctured the air, but fewer now, for more enemy ships were yielding. Gigs, barges and longboats, some grievously damaged by shot, rowed between the combatants carrying British officers who went to accept an enemy’s surrender. Some French and Spanish ships had struck their flags, but then, in the vagaries of battle, their opponents had moved on and those ships rehoisted their colors, hung what sail they could on their fractured masts and headed eastward. Far more stayed as captured prizes, their decks a shambles, their hulls riddled and their crews stunned by the ferocity of the British gunfire. The British fired faster. They were better trained.
The Redoutable, still lashed to the Victory, was French no longer. She was scarcely even a ship, for all her masts were gone and her hull was mangled by cannon fire. A portion of her quarterdeck had collapsed and a British flag now hung over her counter. The Victory’s mizzen was gone, her fore- and mainmasts were mere stumps, but her guns were still manned and still dangerous. The vast Santisima Trinidad was silent, her ensign struck. The fiercest battle now was to the north of her where a few of the enemy vanguard had risked coming back to help their comrades and now opened fire on the battle-weary British ships that loaded and fired and rammed and fired again. To the south, where Collingwood’s Royal Sovereign had opened the battle, a ship burned. The flames leaped twice as high as the masts and the other ships, fearing the firebrands that must be spewed when her magazines exploded, set sail to move away from her, though some British ships, knowing what horrors the crew of the burning ship endured, sent small boats to pluck them to safety. The burning ship was French, the Achille, and the sound of her explosion was a dull thump that rolled across the wreckage-littered sea like the crack of doom. A cloud of smoke, black as night, boiled where the burning ship had floated while scraps of fire seared to the clouds, fell to the sea, hissed in the ocean, died.
Nelson died.
Fourteen enemy ships had struck so far. A dozen more still fought. One was burned and sunk, the rest were fleeing.
Captain Montmorin, knowing that Chase intended to board him, had sent men with axes to cut away the fallen mainmast. Other men chopped through the grapnel lines that tied the Revenant to the Pucelle. Montmorin was trying to cut himself free, hoping he could limp away to Cadiz and live to fight another day.
“I want those carronades busy!” Chase shouted, and the gunners who had helped repel the boarders now ran to the squat weapons and levered them around to fire at the men trying to free the Revenant, which now had more troubles, for her foresail had caught fire. The flames spread with extraordinary swiftness, engulfing the great spread of shot-punctured canvas, but Montmorin’s men were just as swift, cutting the halliards that held the sail’s spar and so dropping it to the deck where they risked the fire to hurl the burning sail over the side. “Let them be!” Chase bellowed at those of his men who were aiming muskets at the struggling French sailors. He knew the fire could spread to the Pucelle and both ships would then burn together and explode in horror. “Well done! Well done!” Chase applauded his opponent’s crew as they tipped the last burning wreckage overboard. Then the carronades recoiled on their slides and spat casks of musket balls which cut down the axemen still trying to free the two ships from their mutual embrace. A gun exploded on the Revenant, the sound echoing horribly as scraps of the shattered breech cut down Montmorin’s lower-deck gunners. There were more British guns firing now, for the Revenant had lost a dozen when she was raked, and the Pucelle was hurting the Frenchman relentlessly. A midshipman, commanding the Pucelle’s lower-deck guns, saw that the two hulls were so close together that the muzzle flames of his thirty-two-pounders were setting fire to the splintered wood of the Revenant’s lower hull, so he ordered a half-dozen men to throw buckets of water at the small fires in case the flames caught and spread to the Pucelle.
“Marines!” Sharpe was shouting. “Marines!” He had gathered thirty-two marines and supposed the rest were dead, wounded or else guarding either the magazines or the French prisoners on the poop. These thirty-two would have to suffice. “We’re boarding her!” Sharpe shouted over the bellow of the guns. “You want pikes, axes, cutlasses. Make sure your muskets are loaded! Hurry!” He turned as he heard the sound of a sword scraping from a scabbard and saw Midshipman Collier, bright-eyed and still drenched in Lieutenant Haskell’s blood, standing under the fallen French mainmast that would be the boarding bridge. “What the hell are you doing here, Harry?” Sharpe asked.
“Coming with you, sir.”
“Like hell you are. Go and watch the bloody clock.”
“There isn’t a clock.”
“Then just go and watch something else!” Sharpe snapped. The weather-deck gunners, bare-chested, blood-streaked and powder-blackened, were assembling with pikes and cutlasses. The lower-deck guns still fired, shaking both ships with every shot. A few French guns answered, and one ball smashed through the gathering boarders, driving a path of blood across the Pucelle’s deck. “Who’s got a volley gun?” Sharpe shouted, and a marine sergeant held up one of the stubby weapons. “Is it loaded?” Sharpe asked.
“Yes, sir.”
“Then give it here.” He took the gun, exchanging it for his musket, then made sure his cutlass was not blood-crusted to its scabbard. “Follow me up to the quarterdeck!” Sharpe shouted.
The fallen mast jutted across the weather deck, but was too high to be reached unless a man stood on a hot gun barrel and hauled himself up. It would be easier, Sharpe reckoned, to go to the quarterdeck, then return along the Pucelle’s starboard gangway. From there a man could step onto the mast. He would then have to run, balancing himself on the broken pine spar, before jumping down onto the Revenant’s deck, and because the two ships were moving unequally in the long high swells, the mast would be pitching and rolling. Jesus, Sharpe thought, sweet Jesus, but this was a terrible place to be. Like going through the breach of an enemy fortress, he reckoned. He ran up the quarterdeck steps, turned down the gangway and tried not to think of what was about to happen. There were French marines on the opposing gangway, and a horde of armed defenders waiting in the Revenant’s blood-drenched waist. Montmorin knew what was coming, but just then the forward carronade sent a shattering cask of musket balls into the Revenant’s belly and belched a pall of smoke above the ship.
“Now!” Sharpe said, and clambered up onto the mast, but a hand held him back and he turned, cursing, to see that it was Chase.
“Me first, Sharpe,” Chase chided him.
“Sir!” Sharpe protested.
“Now, boys!” Chase had his sword drawn and was running across the makeshift bridge.
“Come on!” Sharpe shouted. He ran behind Chase, the heavy seven-barreled gun in his hands. It was like traversing a tightrope. He looked down to see the sea churning white between the two hulls and he felt dizzy and imagined falling to be crushed to death as the two hulls banged together, then a bullet spat past him and he saw Chase had jumped from the shattered stump of the mast and Sharpe followed, screaming as he leaped through the smoke.