Sharpe 3-Book Collection 3: Sharpe’s Trafalgar, Sharpe’s Prey, Sharpe’s Rifles

‘He also had me flogged, my lord.’

That brought silence to the table. Lady Grace alone knew Sharpe had been flogged, for she had drawn her long white fingers across the scars on his back, but the rest of the table stared at him as though he were some strange creature just dragged up on one of the seamen’s fishing lines. ‘You were flogged?’ Dalton asked in astonishment.

‘Two hundred lashes,’ Sharpe said.

‘I’m sure you deserved it,’ Lord William said, amused.

‘As it happens, my lord, I didn’t.’

‘Oh come, come.’ Lord William frowned. ‘Every man says that. Ain’t that right, Fazackerly? Have you ever known a guilty man accept responsibility for his crime?’

‘Never, my lord.’

‘It must have hurt dreadfully,’ Lieutenant Tufnell said sympathetically.

‘That,’ Lord William said, ‘is the point of it. You can’t win battles without discipline, and you can’t have discipline without the lash.’

‘The French don’t use the lash,’ Sharpe said mildly, staring up at the big mainsail and the tangle of canvas and rigging that rose higher still, ‘and you tell me, my lord, that they would destroy us in a day.’

‘That is a question of numbers, Sharpe, numbers. Officers should also know how to count.’

‘I can manage up to two hundred,’ Sharpe said, and was rewarded with another kick.

They finished the meal with dried fruit, then the men drank brandy, and Sharpe slept for much of the afternoon in a hammock slung under the spare spars that ran lengthwise above the main deck and on which the ship’s boats were stored during the voyage. He dreamed of battle. He was running away, pursued by a giant Indian with a spear. He woke drenched in sweat and immediately looked for the sun, for he knew he could not meet Grace until it was dark. Well dark. Until the ship was sleeping and only the night watch was on deck, but Braithwaite, he knew, would be watching and listening in that dark. What the hell was he to do about Braithwaite? He dared not tell Lady Grace about the man’s allegations, for they would terrify her.

He ate in steerage, then paced the main deck as darkness fell. And still he must wait until Lord William had finished playing whist or backgammon and had finally taken his drops of laudanum and gone to bed. The ship’s bell rang the night past and Sharpe waited in the black shadows between the vast mainmast and the bulkhead which supported the front end of the quarterdeck. It was where he waited for Lady Grace, for she could come there unseen by any of the crew on the quarterdeck. She used the stairs that went from the roundhouse down to the great cabin, then through a door which led to the main-deck steerage. She crept between the canvas screens and so out through another door on to the open deck. Then, taking her hand, Sharpe would lead her down into the warm stink of the lower-deck steerage and to his narrow cot where, with a greed that astonished them both, they would cling to each other as though they drowned. The very thought of her made Sharpe dizzy. He was besotted by her, drunk with her, insane for her.

He waited. The rigging creaked. The great mast shifted imperceptibly with gusts of wind. He could hear an officer pacing the quarterdeck, hear the slap of hands on the wheel spokes and the grating of the rudder ropes. The ensign flapped at the stern, the sea ran down the ship’s flanks and still Sharpe waited. He stared up at the stars visible through the sails and thought they looked like the bivouac fires of a great army encamped across the sky.

He closed his eyes, wishing she would come and wishing that the voyage could last for ever. He wished they could be lovers on a ship sailing in an endless night beneath a spread of stars, for once the Calliope reached England she would go away from him. She would go to her husband’s house in Lincolnshire and Sharpe would go to Kent to join a regiment he had never seen.

Then the door opened and she was there, crouching beside him in her vast boat cloak. ‘Come to the poop deck,’ she whispered.

He wanted to ask why, but he bit the question back for there had been an urgency in her voice and he reckoned that if it was important to her then it was important to him too, and so he let her take his hand and lead him back into the main-deck steerage. These berths cost the same as the lower deck, but they were much drier and airier. It was pitch black, for no lights were allowed after nine o’clock except in the roundhouse day cabins where deadlights could be fixed across the small portholes. Lady Grace twined her fingers in his as they groped and felt their way to the door leading to the great cabin, then up the stairs. ‘As I left my cabin,’ she whispered to him at the top of the stairs, ‘I saw Pohlmann go into the cuddy.’

She led him to the door which opened onto the back of the quarterdeck and they stepped out, risking the eyes of the helmsman and the duty officer, but if they were seen no one remarked it. They climbed to the poop deck and Lady Grace gestured at the skylight above the cuddy cabin from which, in contravention of Captain Cromwell’s orders, a faint light gleamed.

Creeping softly as children who have stayed up long after their bedtime, Sharpe and Lady Grace went close to the skylight. Four of its ten panes were propped open and Sharpe could hear the murmur of men’s voices. Lady Grace peeped over the edge, then drew back. ‘They’re there,’ she mouthed in his ear.

Sharpe looked through one of the dirty panes and saw three men’s heads bent over the long table. One was Cromwell, the second Pohlmann and Sharpe did not recognize the third. They seemed to be examining a chart, then Pohlmann straightened up and Sharpe ducked back. The smell of cigar smoke came through the open panes.

‘Morgen früh,’ said a voice, only it was not Pohlmann who spoke in German, but another man. Sharpe risked leaning forward again and saw it was Pohlmann’s servant, the man who spoke French and claimed to be Swiss.

‘Morgen früh,’ Pohlmann repeated.

‘These things ain’t certain, Baron,’ Cromwell said.

‘You have done well this far, my friend, so I am sure all will go well tomorrow,’ Pohlmann answered and Sharpe heard the clink of glasses, then he and Grace shrank back because a hand came into sight to close the open panes. The dim light was extinguished and a moment later Sharpe heard Cromwell’s growling voice talking to the helmsman on the quarterdeck.

‘We can’t go down now,’ Grace whispered in his ear.

They went to the dark corner between the signal cannon and the taffrail and there, crouched in the shadows, they kissed, and only then did Sharpe ask if she had heard the German words.

‘They mean “tomorrow morning”,’ Grace said.

‘And the man who said them first,’ Sharpe said, ‘is supposed to be Pohlmann’s servant. What’s a servant doing drinking with his master? I’ve heard him speak French, too, but he claims to be Swiss.’

‘The Swiss, dearest,’ Lady Grace said, ‘speak German and French.’

‘They do?’ Sharpe asked. ‘I thought they talked Swiss.’ She laughed. Sharpe was sitting with his back against the gunwale and she was straddling his lap, her knees either side of his chest. ‘I don’t know,’ he went on, ‘maybe they were just saying that we turn west tomorrow? We’ve been sailing south for days, we have to go west soon.’

‘Not too soon,’ she said. ‘I would like this voyage to last for ever.’ She leaned forward and kissed his nose. ‘I thought you were going to be appallingly rude to William at dinner.’

‘I held my tongue, didn’t I?’ he asked. ‘But only because my shin’s black and blue.’ He touched a finger to her face, marvelling at the delicacy of her looks. ‘I know he’s your husband, my love, but he’s stuffed to his muzzle with rubbish. Wanting officers to speak Latin! What use is Latin?’

Lady Grace shrugged. ‘If the enemy is coming to kill you, Richard, who do you want defending you? A properly educated gentleman who can construe Ovid, or some barbarian cutthroat with a back like a washboard?’

Sharpe pretended to think. ‘If you put it like that, of course, then I’ll take the Ovid fellow.’ She laughed, and it seemed to Sharpe that this was a woman born to happiness, not misery. ‘I missed you,’ he said.

‘I missed you,’ she answered.

He put his hands under the big black cloak to find that she was naked under her nightgown and then they forgot the next morning, forgot Cromwell, forgot Pohlmann and forgot the mysterious servant, for the Calliope was shrouded in the night, sailing beneath a slivered moon as it carried its star-crossed lovers to nowhere.

Captain Peculiar Cromwell was on the quarterdeck all next morning, pacing from larboard to starboard, glowering at the binnacle, pacing again, and his restlessness infected the ship so that the passengers became nervous and constantly glanced at the captain as if expecting him to lose his temper. Speculation flew round the main deck until it was finally agreed that Cromwell was expecting a storm, but the captain made no preparations. No sail was shortened or lashings inspected.

Ebenezer Fairley, the nabob who had responded so angrily to Lord William’s assertions about Latin, came down to the main deck in search of Sharpe. ‘I was hoping, Mister Sharpe, that you were not upset by those fools at dinner yesterday,’ he boomed.

‘By Lord William? No.’

‘Man’s a halfwit,’ Fairley said savagely, ‘saying we should speak Latin! What’s the use of Latin? Or of Greek? He makes me ashamed to be an Englishman.’

‘I took no offence, Mister Fairley.’

‘And his wife’s no better! Treats you like dirt, don’t she? And she won’t even speak to my wife.’

‘She’s a beauty, though,’ Sharpe said wistfully.

‘A beauty?’ Fairley sounded disgusted. ‘Well, aye, I suppose if you like getting splinters every time you touch her.’ He sniffed. ‘But what have either of them ever done except learn Latin? Have they ever planted a field of wheat? Set up a factory? Dug a canal? They were born, Sharpe, that’s all that ever happened to them, they were born.’ He shuddered. ‘I tell you, Sharpe, I’m not a radical man, not me! But there are times when I wouldn’t mind seeing a guillotine outside Parliament. I could find business for it, I tell you.’ Fairley, a tall and heavy-faced man, glanced up at Cromwell. ‘Peculiar’s in an itchy mood.’

‘Folk say there’s a storm coming.’

‘God save the ship, then,’ Fairley said, ‘because I’m carrying three thousand pounds of cargo in this bottom, but we should be safe. I chose the Calliope, Mister Sharpe, because she has a reputation. A good one. Fast and seaworthy, she is, and Peculiar’s a good seaman for all his scowls. This hold, Mister Sharpe, is fair stuffed with valuables because the ship’s got a good name. You can’t beat a good name in business. Did they really flog you?’

‘They did, sir.’

‘And you became an officer?’ Fairley shook his head in rueful admiration. ‘I’ve made a fortune in my time, Sharpe, a rare fortune, and you don’t make a fortune without knowing men. If you want to work for me just say the word. I might be going home to rest my backside, but I’ve still got a business to run and I need good men I can trust. I do business in India, in China and wherever in Europe the damned French let me, and I need capable men. I can only promise you two things, Sharpe, that I’ll work you like a dog and pay you like a prince.’

‘Work for you, sir?’ Sharpe was astonished.