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 harbor.”
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 toward 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 tricolor 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 autvimn 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.”