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

‘Stop the ship and make a rescue,’ Chase said, ‘if we can. Did I ever tell you about Nelson in the Minerva?’

‘Even if you had,’ Sharpe said, ‘you’d tell me again.’

Chase laughed. ‘Back in ’ninety-seven, Sharpe, Nelson commands the Minerva. Fine frigate! He was being pursued by two Spanish ships of the line and a frigate when some halfwit falls overboard. Tom Hardy was aboard, wonderful man, he captains the Victory now, and Hardy took a boat to rescue the fellow. See the picture, Sharpe? Minerva fleeing for her life, close pursued by three Spaniards and Hardy and his boat crew, with the wet fellow aboard, can’t row hard enough to catch up. So what does Nelson do? He backs his topsails! Can you credit it? Backs his topsails. By God, he said, I won’t lose Hardy. Now the Dons can’t make head nor tail of this. Why’s the fellow stopping? They think he must have reinforcements coming, so the silly buggers haul their own wind. Hardy catches up, gets aboard, and the Minerva takes off like a scalded cat! What a great man Nelson is.’

Lord William scowled and stared westwards. Sharpe gazed up at the mainsail, trying to trace a rope from its beginning, through blocks and tackles, down to the belaying pins beside the gunwales. Hammocks were being aired over the netting racks in which they were stuffed during battle to stop musket bullets. A solitary sea bird, white and long-winged, curved close to the ship then soared away into the blue. Mister Cowper, the purser, was counting the boarding pikes racked around the mainmast’s trunk. He licked a pencil, made a note in a book, shot a scared look at Chase and waddled away. Holderby, who had the deck, ordered a bosun’s mate forrard to ring the ship’s bell. Chase, still thinking about Nelson, smiled.

‘Captain! Sir! Captain!’ It was Harry Collier, erupting into sight on the weather deck from beneath the quarterdeck.

‘Calm down, Mister Collier,’ Chase said. ‘The ship isn’t on fire, is it?’

‘No, sir. It’s Mister Braithwaite, sir, he’s dead, sir!’ Everyone on the quarterdeck stared down at the small boy.

‘Go on, Mister Collier,’ Chase said. ‘He can’t have just died! Men don’t just die. Well, the master did, but he was old. Braithwaite was young. Did he fall? Was he strangled? Did he kill himself? Enlighten me.’

‘He fell in the hold, sir, looks like he broke his neck. Off the ladder, sir.’

‘Careless,’ Chase said, and turned away.

Lord William frowned, did not know what to say, so turned on his heel and stalked back towards the dining cabin, then thought better of it and hurried back to the railing. ‘Midshipman?’

‘Sir?’ Collier hauled off his cocked hat. ‘My lord?’

‘Was there a piece of paper in his hand?’

‘I didn’t see, sir.’

‘Then pray look, Mister Collier, pray look,’ Lord William said, ‘and bring it to my cabin if you find such a thing.’ He walked away again. Lady Grace looked at Sharpe who met her eye, kept his expression neutral, then turned to gaze up the mainmast.

The body was brought onto the deck. It was plain that poor Braithwaite had slipped off the ladder and fallen, breaking his neck in the process, but it was strange, the surgeon commented with a frown, that the secretary had dislocated both his arms.

‘Caught them in the ladder’s rungs?’ Sharpe suggested.

‘That could be so, that could be so,’ Pickering allowed. He did not seem convinced, but nor was he minded to probe the mystery. ‘But at least it was a quick end.’

‘One hopes so,’ Sharpe said piously.

‘Probably struck his head on a barrel.’ Pickering twisted the corpse’s head, looking for a mark, but finding none. He stood up, dusting his hands. ‘Happens once every voyage,’ he said cheerfully, ‘sometimes more. We have practical jokers, Mister Sharpe, who like to grease the rungs with soap. Usually when they believe the purser might be using a ladder. It usually ends with a broken leg and much hilarity, but our Mister Braithwaite was less fortunate.’ He wrenched the dislocated arms back into place. ‘Ugly sort of bugger, wasn’t he?’

Braithwaite’s body was stripped and then placed in his sleeping cot and the sailmaker sewed a stretch of old, frayed sailcloth as a lid for the makeshift coffin. The final stitch, as was customary, was threaded through the corpse’s nose to make certain he was truly dead. Three eighteen-pounder cannon balls had been placed in the coffin that was laid on a plank beside the starboard entry port.

Chase read the service for the dead. The Pucelle’s officers, hats off, stood respectfully about the makeshift coffin which had been covered with a British flag. Lord William and Lady Grace stood beside the entry port. ‘We therefore commit his body to the deep,’ Chase read solemnly, ‘to be turned into corruption, looking for the resurrection of the body when the sea shall give up her dead, through our Lord Jesus Christ; who at his coming shall change our vile body that it might be like his glorious body, according to the mighty working whereby he is able to subdue all things to himself.’ Chase closed the prayer book and looked at Lord William who nodded his thanks, then spoke a few well-chosen words that described Braithwaite’s excellent moral character, his assiduity as a confidential secretary and Lord William’s fervent hopes that Almighty God would receive the secretary’s soul into a life of eternal bliss. ‘His loss,’ Lord William finished, ‘is a sad, sad blow.’

‘So it is,’ Chase said, then nodded at the two seamen who crouched beside the plank and they obediently lifted it so that the coffin slid out from beneath the flag. Sharpe heard the edge of the cot strike against the sill of the entry port, then there was a splash.

Sharpe looked at Lady Grace, who looked back, expressionless.

‘Hats on,’ Chase said.

The officers went away to their duties while the seamen carried away the flag and plank. Lady Grace turned towards the quarterdeck steps and Sharpe, left alone, went to the rail and stared down into the sea.

‘The Lord giveth’ – Lord William Hale was suddenly beside Sharpe – ‘and the Lord taketh away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.’

Sharpe, astonished that his lordship should deign to speak to him, was silent for a few seconds. ‘I’m sorry about your secretary, my lord.’

Lord William looked at Sharpe who was again struck by his lordship’s resemblance to Sir Arthur Wellesley. The same cold eyes, the same hooked nose that looked like a hawk’s beak, but something in Lord William’s face now suggested amusement, as though his lordship was privy to information that Sharpe did not possess. ‘Are you really sorry, Sharpe?’ Lord William asked. ‘That’s good of you. I spoke well of him just now, but what else could I say? In truth he was a narrow man, envious, inefficient and inadequate to his duties and I doubt the world will much regret his passing.’ Lord William pulled his hat on as if to walk away, then turned back to Sharpe. ‘It occurs to me, Sharpe, that I never thanked you for the service you did for my wife on the Calliope. That was remiss of me, and I apologize. I also thank you for that service, and will thank you further if we do not speak of it again.’

‘Of course, my lord.’

Lord William walked away. Sharpe watched him, wondering if there was some game being played that he was unaware of. He remembered Braithwaite’s claim to have left a letter among Lord William’s papers, then dismissed that idea as a lie. Sharpe reckoned he was seeing dangers where there were none and so he shrugged the conversation away and climbed, first to the quarterdeck and then to the poop where he stood at the taffrail and watched the wake dissipate in the sea.

He heard the footsteps behind him and knew who they belonged to before she came to the rail where, like him, she stared at the sea. ‘I’ve missed you,’ she said softly.

‘And I you,’ Sharpe said. He gazed at the ship’s wake which rippled the place where a shrouded body sank under a stream of bubbles towards an unending darkness.

‘He fell?’ Lady Grace asked.

‘So it seems,’ Sharpe said, ‘but it must have been a very quick death, which is a blessing.’

‘Indeed it is,’ she said, then turned to Sharpe. ‘I find the sun tiresomely hot.’

‘Maybe you should go below. My cabin is cooler, I think.’

She nodded, looked into his eyes for a few seconds, then abruptly turned and went.

Sharpe waited five minutes, then followed.

The Pucelle, if anyone could have seen her from out where the flying fish splashed down into the waves, looked beautiful that afternoon. Warships were not elegant. Their hulls were massive, making their masts seem disproportionately short, but Captain Chase had hung every sail high in the wind and those royals, studdingsails and skyscrapers added enough bulk aloft to balance the big yellow and black hull. The gilding on her stern and the silver paint on her figurehead reflected the sun, the yellow on her flanks was bright, her deck was scrubbed pale and clean, while the water broke white at her stem and foamed briefly behind. Her seventy-four massive guns were hidden.

The rot and damp and rust and stench could not be detected from the outside, but inside the ship the stink was no longer noticed. In the forecastle the ship’s last three goats were milked for the captain’s supper. In the bilge the water slopped. Rats were born, fought and died in the hold’s deep darkness. In the magazine a gunner sewed powder bags for the guns, oblivious of a whore who plied her trade between the two leather screens that protected the magazine’s door from an errant spark. In the galley the cook, one-eyed and syphilitic, shuddered at the smell of some badly salted beef, but put it in the cauldron anyway, while in his cabin at the stern of the weather deck Captain Llewellyn dreamed of leading his marines in a glorious charge that would capture the Revenant. Four bells of the afternoon watch sounded. On the quarterdeck a seaman cast the log, a lump of wood, and let the line trail fast from its reel. He counted the knots in the line as they vanished over the rail, chanting the numbers aloud while an officer peered at a pocket watch. Captain Chase went to his day cabin and tapped the barometer. Still rising. The off-duty watch slept in their hammocks, swaying together like so many cocoons. The carpenter scarfed a piece of oak into a gun carriage while in Chase’s sleeping cabin an ensign and a lady lay in each other’s arms.

‘Did you kill him?’ Lady Grace asked Sharpe in a whisper.

‘Would it matter if I did?’

She traced a finger down the scar on his face. ‘I hated him,’ she whispered. ‘From the day he came into William’s employment he just watched me. He would drool.’ She shuddered suddenly. ‘He told me if I went to his cabin he would keep silent. I wanted to slap him. I almost did, but I thought he’d tell William everything if I struck him, so I just walked away. I hated him.’

‘And I killed him,’ Sharpe said softly.

She said nothing for a while, then she kissed the tip of his nose. ‘I knew you did. The very moment William asked me where he was I knew you had killed him. Was it really quick?’

‘Not very,’ Sharpe admitted. ‘I wanted him to know why he was dying.’

She thought about that for a while, then decided she did not mind if Braithwaite’s end had been slow and painful. ‘No one’s killed for me before,’ she said.

‘I’d carve my way through a bloody army for you, lady,’ Sharpe said, then again remembered Braithwaite’s claim that he had left a letter for Lord William and again dismissed his fears, reckoning that the claim had been nothing more than a desperate effort by a doomed man to cling onto life. He would not mention it to Lady Grace.

The sun westered, casting the intricate shadow of shrouds and halliards and sails and masts on the green sea. The ship’s bell counted the half-hours. Three seamen were brought before Captain Chase, accused of various sins, and all three had their rum rations suspended for a week. A marine drummer boy cut his hand playing with a cutlass and the surgeon bandaged it, then clipped him about the ear for being a bloody little fool. The ship’s cats slept by the galley stove. The purser smelt a cask of water, recoiled from its stench, but chalked a sign on the barrel decreeing that it was drinkable.