“You will go to the hold, Grace,” Lord William said, “as the captain orders you.”
“As must you, my lord,” Chase said.
Lord William shrugged. “I can fire a musket, Chase.”
“Doubtless you can, my lord, but we must gauge whether you are more valuable to Britain alive than dead.”
Lord William nodded. “If you say so, Chase, if you say so.” Was he relieved? Sharpe could not tell, but certainly Lord William was making no great effort to persuade Chase to let him stay on deck. “How long till you close on them?” Lord William asked.
“Five hours at least,” Chase said, “probably six.” A seaman was casting the log that brought ill news with every throw. Two knots slipped through his fingers, sometimes three, but it was slow going even though Chase was cramming every sail onto the masts. Sharpe stood ten paces from Lady Grace, not daring to look at her, but acutely aware of her. Pregnant! He felt his heart leap with a strange happiness, then he flinched as he realized that they must soon be parted and what would happen to his child then? He stared fixedly down into the weather deck where two gunners were attaching the flintlocks to the guns. Another gunner received permission to come to the quarterdeck to arm the twelve eighteen-pounder cannons and the four thirty-two-pounder carronades. Two more of the brutal carronades squatted on the forecastle. They were short-barreled and wide-mouthed, capable of belching a terrible onslaught of musket and cannon balls at an enemy’s deck.
A dozen gunners were now in Chase’s quarters, marveling at the gilded beams and delicately carved windows. Small tubs of water for swabbing the guns or slaking the men’s thirst were placed beside every cannon, while other men threw water on the decks and the ship’s sides so that the dampened timber would be slow to catch fire. Match tubs were readied, half filled with water and capped with a pierced lid through which a slow match hung in case a flintlock should break. Down in the orlop deck men coiled an anchor cable to make a gigantic bed on which the wounded could be laid as they waited to see Pickering, the surgeon, who was singing as he laid out his knives, saws, probes and pincers. The carpenter was putting shot plugs all about the orlop deck. The plugs were great cones of wood, thickly smeared with tallow, that could be rammed into any hole punched close to the water line. Relieving ropes were laid for the rudder so that if the wheel was shot away, or the tiller rope severed by a round shot, the ship could be steered from the weather deck. Leather fire buckets, most filled with sand, stood in clusters. The powder monkeys, small boys of ten or eleven, brought up the first charges from the magazines. Chase had ordered blue bags, which were the middle size of charge. The biggest powder charges, in black bags, were used when firing at long range, the blue were more than adequate for a close-range fight, while even the red bags, which had the smallest charge and were usually used for signaling, could smash a shot through an enemy ship’s side at point-blank range. “By day’s end,” Chase said wistfully, “we’ll probably be double-loading reds.” He suddenly brightened. “My God, it’s my birthday! Mister Haskell! You owe me ten guineas! You recall our wager? I said, did I not, that we should come up with the Revenant on my birthday?”
“I shall pay gladly, sir.”
“You’ll pay nothing, Mister Haskell, nothing. If Nelson hadn’t been here then the Revenant would have escaped us. It ain’t fair for a captain to win a bet with an admiral’s help. This coffee tastes good! The fur adds piquancy, don’t you think?”
The galley cooked a last burgoo, a generous one, with great chunks of pork and beef floating in the greasy oats. It would be the last hot meal the men would enjoy before battle, for the galley fires would have to be doused in case an enemy shot struck the oven and scattered fire across a gundeck where the powder bags waited to be loaded. The men ate the meal sitting on the deck, while the bosun’s mates took around a double ration of rum. A band began playing on the Conqueror. “Where’s our band?” Chase demanded. “Have them play! Have them play! I’d like some music.”