Two shots from the Pucelle hammered through the ship. Sharpe drew his pistol. The nearest French gunners just stared at him. Dozens of dead lay on the deck, some with great wooden splinters jutting from their bodies. The mainmast had a great bite gouged from one side. The deck was scorched where the cannon had exploded. “It’s over!” Sharpe screamed. “Get away from that gun. Get away!” The Frenchmen might not speak English, but they understood the pistol and cutlass well enough. Sharpe went to a gunport. “Pucelle! Pucelle!”
“Who is it?” a voice called back.
“Ensign Sharpe! They’ve stopped firing! Hold your fire! Hold your fire!”
One last cannon belched smoke and flame into the Revenant’s belly, then there was silence at last as the big guns ceased. A gunner crawled out of one of the Pucelle’s lower gunports and scrambled into the Revenant where Sharpe was walking down the deck, stepping over corpses, climbing a fallen cannon, gesturing that the French gunners should kneel or lie down. Three marines followed him, bayonets fixed. “Down!” Sharpe snarled at the wild-eyed, powder-blackened enemy. “Down!” He turned to see more marines and British seamen coming down the companion-way. “Disarm the bastards,” he shouted, “and get them on deck.” He stepped over the splintered remains of one of the ship’s pumps. A French officer faced him with a drawn sword, but he took one look at Sharpe’s face and let the blade clatter on the deck. More of the Pucelle’s gunners were crawling out of the British ship’s gunports and clambering into the French ports, coming to plunder what they could.
Sharpe crossed a patch of blackened deck where one of his grenades had exploded. The French watched him warily. He pushed a man aside with his cutlass blade, then turned down the aft companionway into the ship’s cockpit which was lit with a dozen lanterns.
He almost wished he had not come down the ladder for here there were scores of men bleeding and dying. This was death’s kingdom, the red-wet belly of the ship, the place where foully wounded men came to face the surgeon and, in all likelihood, eternity. It smelled of blood and excrement and urine and terror. The surgeon, a white-haired man with a beard that was streaked with blood, looked up from the table where, with hands red to the wrists, he was delving into a man’s belly. “Get out of here,” he said in good English.
“Shut your face,” Sharpe snarled. “I haven’t killed a surgeon yet, but I don’t mind starting with you.”
The surgeon looked startled, but said nothing more as Sharpe walked into the gunroom where an officer and six men lay bandaged on the floor. He forced the cutlass into its scabbard, gently moved one wounded man aside, then seized the ring of the hatch leading into the Revenant’s lady hole. He hauled it up and pointed the pistol down into the lantern-lit space.
A man and a woman were there. The woman was Mathilde, and the man was Pohlmann’s so-called servant, the man who claimed to be Swiss, but who was in truth a subtle enemy of Britain. Above Sharpe, up in the smoky daylight, cheers sounded as the Revenant’s tricolor, which had been draped over her shattered taffrail, was bundled up and presented to Joel Chase. The ghost had been hunted and the ship was taken. “Up,” Sharpe said to Michel Vaillard. “Up!” They had pursued this man across two oceans and Sharpe felt a livid anger at the betrayal of the Calliope.
Michel Vaillard showed empty hands, then peered through the hatch. He blinked, plainly recognizing Sharpe, but unable to place him. Then he remembered exactly who Sharpe was, and in an instant understood that the Calliope must have been retaken by the British. “It’s you!” he sounded resentful.
“It’s me. Now up! Where’s Pohlmann?”
“On deck?” Vaillard suggested. He climbed the ladder, dusted his hands, then stooped to help Mathilde climb through the hatch. “What happened?” Vaillard asked Sharpe. “How did you get here?”
Sharpe ignored the questions. “You will stay here, ma’am,” Sharpe told Mathilde. “There’s a surgeon out there who needs help.” He pushed Vaillard’s arms aside and plucked back the Frenchman’s coat to see a pistol hilt. He pulled the pistol free and tossed it back into the lady hole. “You come with me.”
“I am merely a servant,” Vaillard said.
“You’re a lump of treacherous French shit,” Sharpe said. “Now go!” He pushed Vaillard in front of him, forcing him up the companionway to the lower deck where the great guns, hot as pots on a stove, now stood abandoned. The French dead and wounded were left, and a dozen British seamen were searching their bodies.
Vaillard refused to go any further, but turned instead to face Sharpe. “I am a diplomat, Mister Sharpe,” he said gravely. His face was clever and his eyes gentle. He was dressed in a gray suit and had a black cravat tied in the lacy collar of his white shirt. He looked calm, clean and confident. “You cannot kill me,” he instructed Sharpe, “and you have no right to take me prisoner. I am not a soldier, not a sailor, but an accredited diplomat. You might have won this battle, but in a day or two your admiral will send me into Cadiz because that is how diplomats must be treated.” He smiled. “That is the rule of nations, Ensign. You are a soldier, and you can die, but I am a diplomat and I must live. My life is sacrosanct.”
Sharpe prodded him with the pistol, forcing him aft toward the wardroom. Just as in the Pucelle all the bulkheads had been taken down, but the bare deck suddenly gave way to a painted canvas carpet that was smeared with blood, and the beams here were touched with gold paint.
The great gallery windows had been shattered by the Spartiate’s guns so that not a pane was left and what remained of the elegantly curved window seat was smothered in broken glass. Sharpe pulled open a door on the wardroom’s starboard side and saw that the quarter gallery, which held the officers’ latrine, had been shot clean away by the Spartiate’s broadside so that the door opened onto nothing but ocean. Far off, almost hull down, the few enemy ships that had escaped the battle sailed toward the coast of Spain. “You want to go to Cadiz?” Sharpe asked Vaillard.
“I am a diplomat!” the Frenchman protested. “You must treat me as such!”
“I’ll treat you as I bloody want,” Sharpe said. “Down here there are no bloody rules, and you’re going to Cadiz.” He seized Vaillard’s gray coat. The Frenchman struggled, pulling away from the opened door beyond which the remnants of the latrine hung above the sea. Sharpe cracked him across the skull with the pistol barrel, then swung him to the door and shoved him toward the open air. Vaillard clung to the door’s edges with both hands, his face showing as much astonishment as fear. Sharpe smashed the pistol against the Frenchman’s right hand, then kicked him in the belly and slammed the gun against the knuckles of Vaillard’s left hand. The Frenchman let go, shouting a last protest as he fell back into the sea.
A British sailor, his pigtail hanging almost to his waist, had watched the murder. “Were you supposed to do that, sir?”
“He wanted to learn to swim,” Sharpe said, bolstering the pistol.
“Frogs should be able to swim, sir,” the seaman said. “It’s their nature.” He stood beside Sharpe and stared down into the water. “But he can’t.”
“So he’s not a very good Frog,” Sharpe said.
“Only he looked rich, sir,” the sailor reproved Sharpe, “and we could have searched him before he went swimming.”
“Sorry,” Sharpe said, “I didn’t think.”
“And he’s drowning now,” the sailor said.
Vaillard splashed desperately, but his struggles only drove him under. Had he told the truth about his protected status as a diplomat? Sharpe was not sure, but if Vaillard had spoken the truth then it was better that he should drown here than be released to spread his poison in Paris. “Cadiz is that way!” Sharpe shouted down at the drowning man, pointing eastward, but Vaillard did not hear him. Vaillard was dying.