A ball gouged through the wet blood on the forecastle, bounced up to tear a pan in the forecastle’s after rail and punched through the lower edge of the mainsail. Three of the studdingsails were now hanging from the yards and Chase’s seamen were trying to haul them inboard. A bar shot, two lumps of iron joined by a short iron rod, banged into the foremast close to the deck and stuck there, driven deep into the wood by the force of the impact. The Victory was close to the smoke cloud now, but she seemed to Sharpe to be sailing straight into a wall of smoke, flame and noise. The Royal Sovereign was lost in cloud, surrounded by the enemy, fighting desperately as the limp wind brought help so slowly. A portion of the forward rail of the forecastle suddenly vanished into splinters, sawdust and whirling slivers of wood. A marine fell backward, struck through the lungs by one of the splinters. “Hodgkinson! Take him below!” Armstrong shouted.
Another marine had an arm torn open by a splinter, but though his sleeve was soaked with blood and more blood dripped from his wrist, he refused to go. “Ain’t but a scratch, Sergeant.”
“Move your fingers, boy.” The man obediently wriggled his fingers. “You can pull a trigger,” Armstrong allowed. “But bind it up, bind it up! You ain’t got nothing to do for the next few minutes, so bind it up. Don’t want you dripping blood on a nice clean deck.”
A shot whipped out the timberhead which held the fore staysail sheets. Another struck the ship’s beakhead, whistling a shred of wood high into the air, then a tearing, ripping, rustling sound made Sharpe look up to see that the Pucelle’s main topgallant mast, the slenderest and highest portion of the mainmast, was falling to bring down a tangle of rigging and the main topgallant sail with it. Heavy wooden blocks thumped on the deck. Some ships had rigged a net across the quarterdeck to save heads from being stove in by such accidental missiles, but Chase did not like such “sauve-tetes,” for, he claimed, they protected the officers on the quarterdeck while leaving the men forrard unprotected. “We must all endure the same risks,” he had told Haskell when the first lieutenant had suggested the netting, though it seemed to Sharpe that the officers on the quarterdeck ran more risk than most for they were made distinctive to the enemy by their unprotected position and by the brightness of their gold-encrusted uniforms. Still, Sharpe supposed, they were paid more so they must risk more. A staysail halliard parted and the sail drifted down to drag in the sea until a rush of seamen went forrard along the bowsprit to pull it in and attach a new halliard. One, two, three more strikes on the hull, each making the Pucelle tremble, and Sharpe wondered how the enemy could even see to aim their guns for the powder smoke lay so thickly along their hulls. The seamen chanted as they raised the staysail again.
More sail-handlers were up the mainmast trying to secure the wreckage of the topgallant mast. The mainsail had at least a dozen holes in it now. The ships ahead of the Pucelle were similarly wounded. Masts were shattered, yards broken, sails hung in folds, but enough canvas remained to drive them slowly onward. Three bodies floated beside the Pucelle, heaved overboard from the Temeraire or Conqueror. Splashes whipped up from the sea all about the leading ships.
“There goes His Majesty!” Armstrong called. The sergeant was evidently confused about Nelson’s true rank and exempted the admiral from all dislike, regarding him as an honorary Northumbrian who was now taking his flagship into the enemy’s line, and Sharpe heard the sound of her broadsides and saw the flames flickering down her starboard flank as she crashed three decks of double-shotted guns into the bows of one of the French ships that had been tormenting her for so long. The Frenchman’s foremast, all of it, right down to the deck, swayed left and right, then toppled slowly. The Victory’s guns would have recoiled inboard and men would be swabbing and reloading, ramming and heaving, breathing smoke and dust, and slipping on fresh blood as they hauled the guns out.