But before the band could gather, the Victory signaled to Pucelle, a signal that was repeated by the Euryalus. “Our number, sir!” Lieutenant Connors shouted, then watched the frigate that sailed wide out on the larboard side of Nelson’s column. “You’re invited to take breakfast with the admiral, sir.”
“I am?” Chase sounded delighted. “Inform his lordship I’m on my way.”
The barge crew was summoned while the barge itself, which was already on tow behind the ship, was hauled up to the starboard side. Lord William stepped forward, plainly expecting to accompany Chase to the Victory, but the captain turned to Sharpe instead. “You’ll come, Sharpe? Of course you will!”
“Me?” Sharpe blinked in astonishment. “I’m not dressed to meet an admiral, sir!”
“You look fine, Sharpe. Ragged, perhaps, but fine.” Chase, blithely ignoring Lord William’s ill-concealed indignation, dropped his voice. “Besides, he’ll expect me to bring a lieutenant, but if I take Haskell, Peel will never forgive me and if I take Peel, Haskell will feel slighted, so you’ll have to do.” Chase grinned, pleased with the idea of introducing Sharpe to his beloved Nelson. “And you’ll divert him, Sharpe. He’s a perverse man, he likes soldiers.” Chase drew Sharpe forward as the barge crew, led by the huge Hopper, scrambled down the steps built into the Pucelle’s side. “You go first, Sharpe,” Chase said. “The boys will make sure you don’t get a bath.”
The side of a warship leaned steeply inward, for the ships were built to bulge out close to the water line, and that generous slope made the first few steps easy enough, but the nearer Sharpe came to the water line the steeper the narrow steps became and, though there was scarcely any wind, the Pucelle was rising and falling in the big swells, while the barge was falling and rising, and Sharpe could feel his boots sliding on the lower wooden ledges that were slimy with growth. “Hold it there, sir,” Hopper growled at him, then shouted, “Now!” and two pairs of hands unceremoniously grasped Sharpe by his breeches and jacket and hauled him safe into the barge. Clouter, the escaped slave, was one of his helpers and he grinned as Sharpe found his feet.
Chase came nimbly down the steps, glanced once at the pitching barge, then stepped gracefully onto the rear thwart. “It’ll be a stiff pull, Hopper.”
“It’ll be easy enough, sir, easy enough.”
Chase took the tiller himself while Hopper sat at an oar. It was indeed a hard pull and a long one, but the barge crept past the intervening ships and Sharpe could stare up at their massive striped sides. From the white and red barge, low down among the swells, the ships looked vast, cumbersome and indestructible.
“I also brought you,” Chase grinned at Sharpe, “because your inclusion will annoy Lord William. He doubtless thinks he should have been invited, but bless me, how he would bore Nelson!” Chase waved to an officer high on the stern of a seventy-four. “That’s the Leviathan,” he told Sharpe, “under Harry Bayntun. He’s a prime fellow, prime! I served with him in the old Bellona. I was only a youngster, but they were happy days, happy days.” The swell lifted the Leviathan’s stern, revealing an expanse of green copper and trailing weed. “Besides,” Chase went on, “Nelson can be useful to you.”
“Useful?”
“Lord William don’t like you,” Chase said, not bothering that he was being overheard by Hopper and Clouter who had the two stroke oars nearest the stern, “which means he’ll try and obstruct your career. But I know Nelson’s a friend of Colonel Stewart, and Stewart’s one of your strange riflemen, so perhaps his lordship will put in a word for you? Of course he will, he’s the very soul of generosity.”
It took a half-hour to reach the flagship, but at last Chase steered the barge into the Victory’s starboard flank and one of his men hooked onto its chains so that the small boat was held just beneath another ladder as steep and perilous as the one Sharpe had descended on the Pucelle. A gilded entryway was halfway up the ladder, but its door was closed, meaning Sharpe must climb all the way to the top. “You first, Sharpe,” Chase said. “Jump and cling on!”