“We are not under fire, Captain,” Lady Grace objected.
“You will oblige me, my lady,” Chase insisted.
“Come, Grace,” Lord William said. He still wore his sword and pistol, but made no attempt to stay on deck. “May I wish you well, Captain.”
“Your sentiments are much appreciated, my lord. I thank you.”
Lady Grace gave Sharpe a last look, and he dared not answer it with a smile for Lord William would see it, but he met her gaze and held it till she turned away. Then she was gone down the quarterdeck steps and Sharpe felt a horrid pang of loss.
The Pucelle was catching up with the Conqueror now and Chase took her toward that ship’s starboard side. He stared at the enemy through his glass and suddenly called Sharpe. “Our old friend, Sharpe.”
“Sir?”
“There, look.” He pointed. “You see the Santisima Trinidad? The big ship?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Six ships back. It’s the Revenant.”
Sharpe trained his telescope and counted the ships astern of the vast four-decked Spanish battleship, and there, suddenly, was the familiar black and yellow hull and as he gazed he saw the ports open and the guns appear. Then the Revenant vanished in smoke.
And the Victory was under fire, and the enemy could not hope to escape to Cadiz because, despite the fickle wind, there would be a battle. Thirty-four enemy ships would take on twenty-eight British. Two thousand five hundred and sixty-eight enemy guns, manned by thirty thousand French and Spanish seamen would face two thousand one hundred and forty-eight guns crewed by seventeen thousand British tars.
“To your places, gentlemen,” Chase said to the officers on his quarterdeck. “To your places, please.” He touched the prayer book in his pocket. “And may God preserve us, gentlemen, preserve us each and every one.”
For the fighting had begun.
CHAPTER 10
Sharpe’s place was on the forecastle. Captain Llewellyn and his young lieutenant commanded forty of the ship’s marines stationed on the poop and quarterdeck, while Sharpe had twenty, though in truth the score of forecastle men were led by Sergeant Armstrong, a man as squat as a hogshead and stubborn as a mule. The sergeant came from Seahouses in Northumberland where he had been imbued with a deep distrust of the Scots. “They’re thieves to a man, sir,” he confidently assured Sharpe, but still contrived that every Scotsman among Llewellyn’s marines serve in his squad. “Because that’s where I can keep an eye on the thieving bastards, sir.”
The Scots were content to serve under Sergeant Armstrong, for, if he distrusted them, he hated anyone from south of the River Tyne. So far as Armstrong was concerned only men from Northumberland itself, raised to remember the cattle-raiders from north of the border, were true warriors while the rest of mankind was composed of thieving bastards, cowardly foreigners and officers. France, he seemed to believe, was a populous county somewhere so far south of London as to be execrable, while Spain was probably hell itself. The sergeant possessed one of Captain Llewellyn’s precious seven-barrel guns that he had propped against the foremast. “You can take your eyes off that, sir,” he had told Sharpe when he saw the officer’s interest in the weapon, “‘cos I’m saving it for when we board one of the bastards. There’s nothing like a volley gun for clearing an enemy deck.” Armstrong was instinctively suspicions of Sharpe for the ensign was not a marine, not from Northumberland and not born into the officer class. Armstrong was, in short, ugly, ignorant, prejudiced and as fine a soldier as Sharpe had met.
The forecastle was manned by the marines and by two of the ship’s six thirty-two-pounder carronades. The one to larboard was under the command of Clouter, the escaped slave who was in Chase’s barge crew. The huge black man, like his gunners, was naked to the waist and had a scarf tied around his ears. “Going to be lively, sir,” he greeted Sharpe, nodding toward the enemy line that was now barely a mile away. A half-dozen ships were firing at the Victory, just as another half-dozen were hammering the Royal Sovereign a little more than a mile to the south. That ship, by far the closest to the French and Spanish line, looked bedraggled, for her studdingsail yards had been shot away and the sails hung like broken wings beside her rigging. She could still not return the enemy’s fire, but in a few minutes she would be among them and her three decks of guns could begin to repay the beating she endured.