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

Lady Grace, attended by her maid and carrying a parasol against the hot sun, appeared on the quarter-deck and stared westwards. Captain Chase claimed the strange sail was now visible from the deck, but she could not see it, even with a telescope. ‘They probably haven’t seen us,’ Chase suggested.

‘Why not?’ she asked.

‘Our sails have clouds behind them’ – he gestured to the great cloud range that piled above Africa – ‘and with any luck our canvas just blends into the sky.’

‘You think it’s the Revenant?’

‘I don’t know, milady. She could be a neutral merchantman.’ Chase tried to sound neutral himself, but his suppressed excitement made it plain he believed the far ship was indeed the Revenant.

Braithwaite was standing under the break of the poop, watching to see if Sharpe joined her ladyship, but Sharpe did not move. He looked east and saw cat’s-paws of ripples on the water, the first signs of a freshening wind. The ripples chased and skittered across the long swells, obstinately refusing to come near the Pucelle, but then they seemed to gather together and slide over the sea and suddenly the sails filled, the rigging creaked and the towing lines dipped towards the water.

‘The land wind,’ Chase said, ‘and about time!’ He went to the quartermaster at the wheel who at last had some purchase on the rudder. ‘Can you feel it?’

‘Aye aye, sir.’ The helmsman paused to spit a stream of tobacco juice into a big brass spittoon. ‘Ain’t much though,’ he added, ‘no more than if a little old lady was breathing on the sails, sir.’

The wind faltered, shivering the sails, then lazily caught again and Chase turned to watch the sea. ‘Get the boats in, Mister Haskell!’

‘Aye aye, sir!’

‘Tot of rum for the oarsmen!’

‘Aye aye, sir.’ Haskell, who believed Chase spoiled his men, sounded disapproving.

‘Double tot of rum for the oarsmen,’ Chase said to annoy Haskell, ‘and wind for us and death to the French!’ His spirits had risen in the belief that he had found his quarry. Now he must stalk her. ‘We’ll close the angle on her during the night,’ he told Haskell. ‘Every inch of canvas! And no lights on board. And we’ll wet the sails.’ A canvas hose was rigged to a pump and used to douse the sails with sea water. Chase explained to Sharpe that wet sails caught more of a light wind than dry, and it did seem as if the soaked canvas worked better. The ship moved perceptibly, though below decks, where the gunsmoke lingered, no wind cleared the air.

The wind freshened at dusk and the Pucelle once again heeled to its pressure. Night fell and officers went round the ship to make certain that not a single lantern was alight anywhere on board except for one feeble, red-shielded binnacle lamp that gave the helmsman a glimpse of the compass. The course was changed a few points westwards in hope of closing on the far ship. The wind rose still more so that the sea could be heard coursing down the ship’s black and yellow flanks.

Sharpe slept, woke, slept again. No one disturbed his night. He was up before dawn and found that the rest of the ship’s officers, even those who should have been sleeping, were on the quarterdeck. ‘She’ll see us before we see her,’ Chase said, meaning that the rising sun would silhouette the Pucelle’s topsails against the horizon, and for a few minutes he considered rousting the off-duty watch to help the topmen bring in everything above the mains, but he reckoned the loss of speed would be a worse result and so he kept his canvas aloft. The men with the best eyesight were all high in the rigging. ‘If we’re lucky,’ Chase confided in Sharpe, ‘we may catch her by nightfall.’

‘That soon?’

‘If we’re lucky,’ the captain said again, then reached out and touched the wooden rail.

The eastern sky was grey now, streaked with cloud, but soon a leak of pink, like the dye from a redcoat’s jacket seeping in the rain onto uniform trousers, suffused the grey. The ship quivered to the seas, left a white wake, raced. The pink turned red, and deeper red, glowing like a furnace over Africa. ‘They’ll have seen us by now,’ Chase said, and took a speaking trumpet from the rail. ‘Keep your eyes sharp!’ he called to the lookouts, then flinched. ‘That was unnecessary,’ he chided himself, then corrected the damage by raising the trumpet again and promising a week’s worth of rum ration to the man who first sighted the enemy. ‘He deserves to be dead drunk,’ Chase said.

The east flared to brilliance and became too bright to look at as the sun at last inched above the horizon. Night had gone, the sea was spread naked under the burning sky and the Pucelle was alone.

For the distant sail had vanished.

Captain Llewellyn was angry. Everyone on board was irritated. The loss of the other ship had caused morale to plummet on the Pucelle so that small mistakes were constantly being made. The bosun’s mates were lashing out with their rope ends, officers were snarling, the crew was sullen, but Captain Llewellyn Llewellyn was genuinely angry and apprehensive.

Before the ship sailed from England he had taken aboard a crate of grenades. ‘They’re French ones,’ he told Sharpe, ‘so I’ve no idea what’s in them. Powder, of course, and some kind of fulminate. They’re made of glass. You light it, you throw it and you pray that it kills someone. Devilish things, they are, quite devilish.’

But the grenades were lost. They were supposed to be in the forward magazine deep on the orlop deck, but a search by Llewellyn’s lieutenant and two sergeants had failed to find the devices. To Sharpe the loss of the grenades was just another blow of ill fortune on a day that seemed ill-starred for the Pucelle, but Llewellyn reckoned it was far more serious than that. ‘Some fool might have put them in the hold,’ he said. ‘We bought them from the Viper when she was being refitted. They took them in an action off Antigua and their captain didn’t want them. Reckoned they were too dangerous. If Chase finds them in the hold he’ll crucify me, and I don’t blame him. Their proper place is in a magazine.’

A dozen marines were organized into a search party and Sharpe joined them in the deep hold where the rats ruled and the ship’s stink was foully concentrated. Sharpe had no need to be there, Llewellyn had not even asked him to help, but he preferred to be doing something useful rather than endure the bad-tempered disappointment that had soured the deck ever since daybreak.

It took three hours, but eventually a sergeant found the grenades in a box that had the word ‘biscuit’ stencilled on its lid. ‘God knows what’s in the magazines, then,’ Llewellyn said sarcastically. ‘They’re probably full of salt beef. That bloody man Cowper!’ Cowper was the ship’s purser, in charge of the Pucelle’s supplies. The purser was not quite an officer, but was generally treated as one, and he was thoroughly disliked. ‘It’s the fate of pursers,’ Llewellyn had told Sharpe, ‘to be hated. It is why God put them on earth. They are supposed to supply things, but rarely can, and if they do then the things are usually the wrong size or the wrong colour or the wrong shape.’ Pursers, like the army’s sutlers, could trade on their own account, and their venality was famous. ‘Cowper probably hid them,’ Llewellyn said, ‘thinking he could sell them to some benighted savage. Bloody man!’ Now, having cursed the purser, the Welshman took one of the grenades from the box and handed it to Sharpe. ‘Packed with scrap metal, see? That thing could go off like case shot!’

Sharpe had never handled a grenade before. The old British ones, long discarded for being ineffective, had resembled a miniature shell that had been launched from a bowl-like attachment at the front of a musket, but this French weapon was made of a dark-green glass. The light was poor in the hold, but he held the grenade close to one of the marine’s lanterns and saw that the interior of the glass globe, which was about the size of a decent suet pudding, was packed with scraps of metal. A fuse protruded from one side, sealed with a ring of melted wax. ‘You light the fuse,’ Llewellyn said, ‘throw the damn thing, and I suppose the glass container shatters when it falls. The lit fuse communicates to the powder and that’s the end of a Frenchman.’ He paused, frowning at the glass ball. ‘I hope.’ He took the grenade back and fondled it like a baby. ‘I wonder if Captain Chase would let us try one. If we had men standing by with buckets of water?’

‘Make a dirty mark on his nice clean deck?’ Sharpe asked.

‘I suppose he won’t,’ Llewellyn said sadly. ‘Still, if it comes to a battle I’ll give some to the boys up the masts and they can hurl them onto the enemy decks. They have to be good for something.’

‘Chuck ’em overboard,’ Sharpe advised.

‘Dear me, no! I don’t want to hurt the fish, Sharpe!’

Llewellyn, hugely relieved by the discovery, had the precious grenades taken to the forward magazine and Sharpe followed the marines up the ladder to the orlop deck which, being beneath the water line, was almost as dark as the hold. The marines went forrard, while Sharpe went towards the stern, intending to climb to Chase’s dining cabin for midday dinner, but he could not use the companionway up to the lower deck for a man in a faded black coat was clambering unsteadily down the ladder. Sharpe instinctively waited, then saw that it was Malachi Braithwaite who so cautiously descended the rungs. Sharpe stepped swiftly back into the surgeon’s cabin where the red-painted walls and table waited for battle’s casualties and from there he watched Braithwaite take a lantern from a hook beside the companionway. The secretary fumbled with a tinderbox, blew on the charred linen to make a flame and lit the oil lamp. He put the lamp on the deck, then grunted as he heaved up the aft hatch of the hold to release a stench of bilge water and rot. Braithwaite shuddered, nerved himself, then took the lantern and clambered down into the ship’s depths.

Sharpe followed. There were moments in life, he thought, when fate played into his hands. There had been such a moment when he met Sergeant Hakeswill and joined the army, and another on the battlefield at Assaye when a general had been unhorsed, and now Braithwaite was alone in the hold. Sharpe stood by the hatch and watched Braithwaite’s lantern bob as the secretary went slowly down the ladder, and then went aft towards the place where the officers’ dunnage was stored.

Sharpe dropped down the ladder and carefully pulled the hatch shut behind him. He went stealthily, though any noise his shoes made on the rungs was masked by the creak of the great pine masts which protruded down through all the decks to be rooted in the elmwood keel. The sound of the flexing masts was magnified in the hold, which also reverberated to the squelching clatter of the ship’s six pumps, the sound of the sea and the grating screech of the rudder turning on its pintles.

This after part of the hold was isolated from the forward part of the ship by a great heap of water butts and vinegar barrels that stretched from the planking above the bilge to the beams of the orlop deck twelve feet above. Those beams were supported by great shafts of oak that, in the dim lantern light, looked like the pillars of an old, smoke-darkened church. Braithwaite threaded his way between the oak pillars, climbing the gentle rise of the ship’s hull towards a stack of shelves at the very back of the hold that shielded a small space in the stern that was known as the lady hole because it provided the safest place on board during a battle. There was nothing valuable kept on the shelves, merely the officers’ unwanted dunnage, but Lord William had brought so much luggage to the Pucelle that some of it had to be stored here, and Sharpe, crouching in the shadow of some casks of pungent salt beef, watched the secretary climb a short ladder to find a leather case which he hauled from the top shelf and carried awkwardly back to the deck. He took a key from his pocket and unlocked the case which proved to be crammed with papers. Nothing there, Sharpe thought, for any light-fingered seamen to filch, though he did not doubt that some of them would already have picked the case’s lock in hope of better spoils. Braithwaite leafed through the papers, found what he wanted, relocked the case and carried it back up the ladder where he clumsily pushed it past the wooden bar that kept the shelf’s contents from spilling in a high sea. The secretary was muttering to himself and snatches of his words carried to Sharpe. ‘I’m an Oxford man, not a slave! It could have waited till we reached England. Get in there, damn you!’

The case was finally stowed away, Braithwaite came down the ladder, pocketed the sheet of paper, collected his lantern and started back towards the larger ladder that lay alongside the mizzenmast and led to the closed hatch. He did not see Sharpe. He thought he was alone in the hold until a hand suddenly grasped his collar. ‘Hello, Oxford man,’ Sharpe said.

‘Jesus!’ Braithwaite swore and shuddered. Sharpe took the lantern from the secretary’s nerveless hand and placed it on top of a cask, then spun Braithwaite round and pushed him hard so that he fell onto the deck.

‘I had an interesting conversation with her ladyship the other day,’ Sharpe said. ‘It seems you’re blackmailing her.’

‘You’re being ridiculous, Sharpe, ridiculous.’ Braithwaite thrust himself backwards until he could go no further, then sat with his back against the water casks where he brushed at the dirt on his trousers and coat.

‘Do they teach blackmail at Oxford?’ Sharpe asked. ‘I thought they only taught you useless things like Latin and Greek, but I’m wrong, am I? They give lectures in blackmail and housebreaking, maybe? Pocket-slitting on the side, perhaps?’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘You know what I’m talking about, Braithwaite.’ Sharpe said. He picked up the lantern and walked slowly towards the terrified secretary. ‘You’re blackmailing Lady Grace. You want her jewels, don’t you, and maybe more? You’d like her in your bed, wouldn’t you? You’d like to go where I’ve been, Braithwaite.’

Braithwaite’s eyes widened. He was scared, but he was not so witless as to miss the significance of Sharpe’s words. Sharpe had admitted the adultery, and that meant Braithwaite was about to die, for Sharpe could not afford to let him live and tell the tale. ‘I just came to fetch a memorandum, Sharpe,’ the secretary babbled in apparent panic, ‘that’s all. I came to fetch this paper. Just a memorandum, Sharpe, for Lord William’s report. Let me show you,’ and he put a hand in his pocket to fetch the paper and brought out, not a memorandum, but a small pistol. It was the kind of gun designed to be carried in a purse or pocket for use against cutthroats or highwaymen and Braithwaite, his hand shaking, dragged back the flint. ‘I’ve carried this ever since you threatened me, Sharpe.’ His voice was suddenly more confident as he levelled the pistol.

Sharpe dropped the lantern.

It hit the deck, there was a shudder of light, then the smash of glass and utter darkness. Sharpe twisted aside, half expecting to hear the pistol crack, but Braithwaite had retained enough nerve to hold his fire.

‘You’ve got one shot, Oxford man,’ Sharpe said. ‘One shot, then it’s my turn.’

Silence, except for the clatter of the pumps and the noise of the masts and the scratching of rats’ feet in the bilge.

‘I’m used to this,’ Sharpe said. ‘I’ve crawled in the darkness before, Braithwaite, and killed men. Cut their gizzards. I did it outside Gawilghur on a dark night. Cut two men’s throats, Braithwaite, slit them back to the spine.’ He was crouching behind a cask so that if Braithwaite did fire then the secretary would merely inflict a wound on a barrel of salt beef. Sharpe kept his body behind the cask and reached out with his left hand, scraping his nails on the plank deck. ‘I slit their gizzards, Oxford man.’

‘We can come to an agreement, Sharpe,’ Braithwaite said nervously. He had not moved since the hold went dark. Sharpe knew that, for he would have heard. He reckoned Braithwaite was waiting until he went close and then he would fire. Just like ship-to-ship fighting. Let the bugger get close, then fire.

‘What kind of agreement, Oxford man?’ Sharpe asked, then scratched the deck again, making little noises that would be magnified by the secretary’s fear. He found a shard of broken lantern glass and scraped it on the wood.

‘You and I should be friends, Sharpe,’ Braithwaite said. ‘You and I? We ain’t like them. My father is a parson. He doesn’t make much. Three hundred a year? That may sound like a competence to you, but it’s nothing, Sharpe, nothing. Yet people like William Hale are born to fortunes. They abuse us, Sharpe, they grind us down. They think we’re dirt.’