He took the two pouches, thanked the boy, and climbed back to the lower deck where he paused to hang the cartridge pouches from his belt. The ship swooped up on a long swell, making him stagger slightly, then subsided into the trough, and suddenly a terrible crash echoed through the timbers, making the deck beneath Sharpe’s feet quiver, and he realized that a round shot must have hit the upperworks. “Froggies have our range,” a man said in the gloom.
“For what we are about to receive,” another man intoned, but before he could finish the prayer Lieutenant Holderby’s voice interrupted him. Holderby was at his station by the aft companionway.
“Open ports!” the fifth lieutenant shouted, and petty officers repeated the order to the forward part of the deck.
The lower deck’s thirty gunports were all raised, letting the daylight stream in to reveal the ship’s masts like three gigantic pillars about which was a seething mass of half-naked men. The long guns were all in their recoil position, hard back against their breeching ropes.
“Run them out!” Holderby ordered. “Run them out!”
Gunners heaved on the tackles and the thick deck quivered as the huge guns were hauled forward so that their barrels protruded beyond the ship’s sides. Holderby, elegant in silk stockings and gilded coat, ducked under the deck beams. “You’re to lie down between the guns. Between the guns! Lie down! Have a rest, gentlemen, before proceedings commence. Lie down!”
Chase had ordered his crew to lie down because the enemy’s shot, coming from directly forward, could scream down these decks and each one could easily knock down a score of men, but if the gun crews were in the intervals between the heavy cannons then they would be mostly protected. Up on the quarterdeck Chase shuddered and when Haskell raised an eyebrow, the captain smiled. “She’s going to be knocked to pieces, ain’t she?”
Haskell rapped a knuckle on the quarterdeck rail. “French-built, sir, well built.”
“Aye, they do make good ships.” Chase stood on tiptoes to see across the barrier of the hammock netting to where the Royal Sovereign was almost up to the enemy line. “She survived,” he said admiringly, “and she’s been under fire for twenty-three minutes! Dreadful gunnery, wouldn’t you say?”
The tip of the British right horn was about to tear into the enemy, but the Pucelle was in the left horn and that was still well short of the line, and the enemy could still fire without fear of any reply. Chase winced as a round shot smacked through his sails to open a succession of holes. The Pucelle’s ordeal had begun, and all he could do now was sail slowly on into an ever-increasing storm of gunnery. A fountain spewed up on the starboard side, spattering one of the carronade crews. “Water’s cold, eh, lads?” Chase remarked to the bare-chested gunners.
“We won’t be swimming in it, sir.”
A topsail shivered as a high shot slashed through. The ships ahead of the Pucelle were taking a more serious pounding, but the Pucelle was drawing closer and closer, heaved by the big swells and wafted by the ghosting wind, and every second took her nearer to the guns and soon, Chase knew, he would be under a much heavier cannonade, and just as he thought that so a heavy round shot struck the starboard cathead and whirled a wicked splinter of oak across the forecastle. Chase was suddenly aware that his fingers were drumming nervously against his right thigh and so he forced his hand to be still. His father, who had fought the French thirty years before, would have been appalled by these tactics. In Chase’s father’s day the ships of the line edged together, broadside to broadside, taking exquisite care never to expose their vulnerable bows and sterns to a raking, but this British fleet went bull-headed at the enemy. Chase wondered whether his father’s memorial stone had been delivered from the masons, and whether it had been placed in the church choir, and then he touched the prayer book in his pocket. “Hear us and save us,” he said under his breath, “that we perish not.”