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

The Welshman shrugged. ‘On a good, day, Sharpe? Three broadsides in five minutes. Not that we ever fire a broadside proper. Fire all the guns together, Sharpe, and the bloody ship would fall to bits! But we fire in a ripple, see? One gun after the other. Pretty to watch, it is, and after that the guns fire as they’re loaded. The faster crews will easily do three shots in five minutes, but the bigger guns are slower. But our lads are good. There aren’t many Frenchmen who can do three shots in five minutes.’

Some days Chase tried to tow the ship closer to the Revenant, but the Frenchman was also using his boats to tow and so the foes kept their stations. One day a freak breeze carried the Revenant almost beyond the horizon, leaving the Pucelle stranded, but next day it was the British ship’s turn to be wafted northwards while the Revenant lay becalmed. The Pucelle ghosted along, drawing nearer and nearer to the enemy, the ripples of her passage scarcely disturbing the glasslike sea, and foot by foot, yard by yard, cable by cable, she gained on the Revenant despite the best efforts of the French oarsmen who were out ahead in their ship’s longboats. Still the Pucelle closed the gap until at last Captain Chase had the tompion pulled from the barrel of his forward larboard twenty-four-pounder. The gun was already loaded, for all the guns were left charged, and the gunner took off the lead touch-hole cover and screwed a flintlock into place. The captain had gone to the forward end of the weather deck, where the Pucelle’s goats were penned, and crouched beside the open gunport. ‘We’ll load with chain after the first shot,’ he decided.

Chain shot looked at first glance like ordinary round shot, but the ball was split into two halves and when it left the gun the halves separated. They were joined by a short length of chain and the two hemispheres whirled through the air, the chain between them, to slice and tear at the enemy’s rigging. ‘Long range for chain shot,’ the gunner told Chase.

‘We’ll get closer,’ Chase said. He was hoping to disable the Revenant’s sails, then close and finish her with solid shot. ‘We’ll get closer,’ he said again, stooping to the gun and staring at the enemy that was now almost within range. The gilding on her stern reflected the sunlight, the tricolour hung limp from the mizzen gaff and her rail was crowded with men who must have been wondering why the wind was fickle enough to favour the British. Sharpe was staring through a telescope, hoping for a glimpse of Peculiar Cromwell’s long hair and blue coat, or of Pohlmann and his servant, but he could not make out the individuals who stood watching the Pucelle glide closer. He could see the ship’s name on her stern, see the water being pumped from her bilges and the copper, now pale green, at her water line.

Then the longboats towing the Revenant were suddenly called back. Chase grunted. ‘They probably plan to tow her head round,’ he suggested, ‘to show us her broadside. Drummer!’

A marine boy stepped forward. ‘Sir?’

‘Beat to quarters,’ Chase said, then held up a hand. ‘No, belay that! Belay!’

The wind was not so fickle after all, and the Revenant’s boats had not been recalled to turn the ship, but rather because Montmorin had seen the flickering cat’s-paws of wind ruffling the water at his stern. Now her sails lifted, stretched and tightened and the Frenchman was suddenly sliding ahead, just out of cannon range. ‘Damn,’ Chase said mildly, ‘damn and blast his French luck.’ The flintlock was dismounted, the tompion hammered into the muzzle, the gunport closed and the twenty-four-pounder secured.

Next day the Revenant pulled ahead again, the beneficiary of an unfair breeze, and by the end of the week of calms the two ships were again almost an horizon apart, though now the French ship was directly ahead of the Pucelle. ‘Far enough,’ Chase said bitterly, ‘to see her safe into harbour.’

The next few days saw contrary currents and hard winds from the northeast so that both ships beat up as close as they could. Chase called it sailing on a bowline and the Pucelle proved the better sailor and slowly, so slowly, she began to make up the lost ground. The ship smacked hard into the waves, shattering the seas across the decks and sails. Rain squalls sometimes blotted the Revenant from the Pucelle’s view, but she always reappeared and, through his telescope, Sharpe could see her pitching like the Pucelle. Once, gazing at the black and yellow warship, he saw strips of canvas flutter at her bow and she seemed to slew towards him for a few seconds, but in another few heartbeats the Frenchman had hoisted a new sail to replace the one that had blown out. ‘Worn canvas,’ the first lieutenant commented. ‘Reckon that’s why we’re faster on the wind. His foresails are threadbare.’

‘Or his stays aren’t tight enough,’ Chase muttered, watching as the Revenant resumed her previous course. ‘But he made that sail change quickly,’ he acknowledged ruefully.

‘He probably had the new sail bent on ready, sir,’ Haskell suggested.

‘Like as not,’ Chase agreed. ‘He’s good, our Louis, ain’t he?’

‘Probably got English blood,’ Haskell said in all seriousness.

They passed the Cape Verde Islands which were mere blurs on a rain-smudged horizon and, a week later, in another rainstorm, they glimpsed the Canaries. There was plenty of local shipping about, but the sight of two warships sent them all scurrying for shelter.

There was just one more week, maybe a day less, to Cadiz. ‘She’ll make port on my birthday,’ Chase said, staring through his glass, then he collapsed the telescope and turned away to hide his bitterness for, unless a miracle intervened, he knew he faced utter failure. He had one week to catch the Frenchman, but the wind had backed and for the next few days the Revenant kept her lead so that the sun-faded tricolour at her stern was a constant taunt to her pursuers.

‘What will Chase do if we don’t catch her?’ Grace asked Sharpe that night.

‘Sail on to England,’ he said. Plymouth, probably, and he imagined landing on a wet autumn afternoon on a stone quay where he would be forced to watch Lady Grace going away in a hired four-wheeler.

‘I shall write to you,’ she said, reading his thoughts, ‘if I know where.’

‘Shorncliffe, in Kent. The barracks.’ He could not hide his misery. The stupid dreams of a ridiculous love were fading into a grim reality, just as Chase’s hopes of catching the Revenant were fading.

Grace lay beside him, gazing up at the deck, listening to the hiss of rain falling on the deadlight of the cabin’s scuttle. She was dressed, for it was almost time for her to slip out of his door and go down to her own cabin, yet she clung to him and Sharpe saw the old sadness in her eyes. ‘There is something,’ she said softly, ‘that I was not going to tell you.’

‘Not going to tell me?’ he asked. ‘Which means you will tell me.’

‘I was not going to tell you,’ she said, ‘because there is nothing to be done about it.’

He guessed what she was going to say, but let her say it.

‘I’m pregnant,’ she said and sounded forlorn.

He squeezed her hand, said nothing. He had known what she was going to say, but was now surprised by it.

‘Are you angry?’ she asked nervously.

‘I’m happy,’ he said, and laid a hand on her flat belly. It was true. He was filled with joy, even though he knew that joy had no future.

‘The child is yours,’ she said.

‘You know that?’

‘I know that. Maybe it’s the laudanum, but …’ She stopped and shrugged. ‘It’s yours. But William will think it’s his.’

‘Not if he can’t …’

‘He will think what I tell him!’ she interrupted fiercely, then began to cry and put her head on Sharpe’s shoulder. ‘It is yours, Richard, and I would give the world for the child to know you.’

But they would be home soon, and she would go away and Sharpe would never see the child for he and Grace were illicit lovers and there was no future for them. None. They were doomed.

And next morning everything changed.

It was a chill, wet day. The wind was north of northwest, so that the Pucelle sailed hard on her bowline. Rain squalls swept across the sea, seethed on the deck and dripped from the sails. The water was green and grey, streaked by foam and whipped by the wind. The officers on the quarterdeck looked unfamiliar for they were in thick oiled coats, and Sharpe, feeling the cold for the first time since he had gone to India, shivered. The ship bucked and shuddered, fighting sea and wind, and sometimes heeled far over as a gusting squall strained the sails. Seven men manned the double wheel and it needed all their combined strength to hold the heavy ship up into the wind’s teeth. ‘A touch of autumn in the air,’ Captain Chase greeted Sharpe. Chase’s cocked hat was covered with canvas and tied beneath his chin. ‘Did you have breakfast?’

‘I did, sir.’ It was not much of a breakfast for supplies were getting low on the Pucelle and the officers, like the men, subsisted on short rations of beef, ship’s biscuit and Scotch coffee which was a vile concoction of burnt bread dissolved in hot water and sweetened with sugar.

‘We’re gaining on him,’ Chase said, nodding towards the distant Revenant which was evidently having as hard a time as the Pucelle, for she was shattering the seas with her bluff bow and smothering her hull in spray as she pushed as near northwards as her helmsman could manage. The Pucelle closed the gap relentlessly, as she always did when the ships were hard on the wind, but just after the second bell of the forenoon watch the breeze went into the south-south-west and the Revenant was no longer struggling into the wind, but could sail with her canvas spread to the treacherous wind’s kindness and so keep her lead. Then, just a half-hour later, she unexpectedly turned to the east which meant she was heading towards the Straits of Gibraltar instead of Cadiz.

‘Starboard, starboard!’ Chase called to the helmsman.

Haskell ran up to the quarterdeck as the seven men spun the Pucelle’s wheel. Sail handlers ran about the deck, loosing sheets. The sails flapped, spattering rainwater across the deck. ‘Has she blown out her foresails again?’ Haskell shouted over the noise of the beating canvas.

‘No,’ Chase said. The Frenchman was travelling faster and easier now, sliding across the waves to leave a track of ragged white water at her stern. ‘He’s making for Toulon!’ Chase decided, but no sooner had he spoken than the Revenant turned back onto her old course and the Pucelle’s watch, who had just loosened her sheets, had to haul them tight again.

‘Follow him!’ Chase called to the quartermaster and pulled out his glass again, unhooded the lens and stared at the Frenchman. ‘What the devil is he doing? Is he taunting us? Knows he’s safe and wants to mock us? Blast him!’

The answer came ten minutes later when a lookout called that a sail was in sight. Twenty minutes more and there were two sails out on the northern horizon and the closer of the two had been identified as a British frigate. ‘Can’t be the blockading squadron,’ Chase said, puzzled, ‘because we’re too far south.’ A moment later the second ship came into clearer view and she too was a Royal Navy frigate.

The Revenant had plainly changed course to avoid the two ships, fearing from her first glimpse of their topsails that they might be British ships of the line, but then, realizing that she was faced by two mere frigates, she had decided to fight her way through to Cadiz. ‘She’ll have no trouble brushing them aside,’ Chase said gloomily. ‘Their only hope of stopping her is by laying themselves right across her course.’

Signals were suddenly flying in the breeze. Sharpe could not even see the distant frigates, but Hopper, the bosun of Chase’s crew, could not only see them, but could identify the nearer ship. ‘She’s the Euryalus, sir!’

‘Henry Blackwood, by God,’ Chase said. ‘He’s a good man.’

Tom Connors, the signal lieutenant, was halfway up the mizzen ratlines where he gazed through a glass at the Euryalus which was flying a string of bright flags from her mizzen yard. ‘The fleet’s out, sir!’ Connors called excitedly, then amended his report. ‘Euryalus wants us to identify ourselves, sir. But she also says the French and Spanish fleets are out.’

‘My God! Bless me!’ Chase, his face suddenly stripped of all its tiredness and disappointment, turned to Sharpe. ‘The fleet’s out!’ He sounded disbelieving and exultant at the same time. ‘You’re certain, Tom?’ he asked Connors, who was now running up to the flag lockers on the poop. ‘Of course you’re sure. They’re out!’ Chase could not resist dancing two or three celebratory steps that were made clumsy by his heavy tarpaulin coat. ‘The Frogs and Dons, they’re out! By God, they’re out!’

Haskell, normally so stern, looked delighted. The news was racing round the ship, bringing off-duty men up to the deck. Even Cowper, the purser, who normally stayed mole-like in the lower depths of the ship, came to the quarterdeck, hurriedly saluted Chase, then gazed northwards as though expecting to see the enemy fleet on the horizon. Pickering, the surgeon, who normally did not stir from his cot till past midday, lumbered on deck, glanced at the far frigates, then muttered that he was going out of range and went back below. Sharpe did not quite understand the excitement and surprise that had quickened the crew, indeed it seemed to him that the news was grim. Lieutenant Peel slapped Sharpe’s back in his joy, then saw the confusion on the soldier’s face. ‘You don’t share our delight, Sharpe?’

‘Isn’t it bad news, sir, if the fleet’s out?’