The Pucelle’s fore topgallant sail collapsed, the chains holding the yard shot through. The Conqueror was suffering as well. Her studdingsails trailed in the water, though Pellew’s men were working to drag them inboard. Her fore topmast was bent at an unnatural angle and there were scars on her painted flank. The British ships, now that their gunports were opened, were studded with red squares that broke the black and yellow stripes. The air quivered with the sound of guns, whistled with the passage of shots, and the long Atlantic swell lifted and drove the slow ships straight into the enemy fire.
Sharpe watched one ship dead ahead. She was a Spaniard and her red and white ensign was so huge that it almost trailed in the water. A gust of wind freed her of smoke and when she rolled to a long sea Sharpe could see daylight clean through her gunports, but then she rolled back and a half-dozen of those gunports stabbed flame. The shots screamed through the Pucelle’s rigging, shivering the sails and severing lines. The Spaniard’s red and black hull was hidden by smoke that thickened as more guns fired. A shot plowed into the forecastle, another struck high on the foremast and a third smacked into the water line on the larboard side. Sharpe was counting, watching the stern of the Spaniard where the first guns had fired. One minute passed and the smoke there was thinning. Two minutes, and still the guns had not fired again. Slow, he thought, slow, but a slow gunner could still kill. Sharpe could see men with muskets in the enemy rigging. A shot howled overhead and vanished astern. The Britannia’s bluff bows, bright with the figurehead of Britannia holding her shield and trident, were suddenly pushing through a curtain of spray where an enemy round shot had fallen short. The marine still prayed, calling on Christ’s mother to protect him, making the sign of the cross again and again.
The Victory had almost disappeared in smoke. She was through the enemy line now and the gun smoke seemed to boil around her, though Sharpe could just see the flagship’s high gilded stern reflecting a weak daylight through the man-made fog. It seemed to him that the enemy ships were gathering around Nelson and the sound of their guns was quivering the sea, rattling Sharpe’s teeth, deafening him. The Temeraire, second in Nelson’s column, forced her ponderous way through a gap in the enemy line and opened fire, pouring her broadside into the stern of a Frenchman. Sharpe looked right and saw that the first ships behind Collingwood’s Royal Sovereign had at last reached the enemy. The sea there seemed to seethe with steam. A mast toppled into smoke. A huge gap was opening in the enemy’s line north of where Collingwood had attacked, which showed that the British ships were snaring and pounding the enemy south of the Royal Sovereign, but the French and Spanish ships to the north of Collingwood’s flagship just sailed on toward the place where Nelson’s Victory was setting up a second snare.
Everything happened so slowly. Sharpe found that hard to bear. It was not like a land battle where the cavalry could pound across the field to leave a plume of dust and horse artillery slewed about in a spray of earth. This battle was taking place at a lethargic speed and there was a strange contrast between the stately slow beauty of the full-rigged ships and the noise of their guns. They went to their deaths so gracefully, in the full heautv nf tensioned masts and soread sails above oainted hulls. They crept toward death. The Leviathan and Neptune were in the battle now, piercing the enemy line a little to the south of the Victory. A shot gouged a furrow through the Pucelle’s forecastle deck, another struck the mizzen-mast, shaking it, a third hammered the length of the weather deck, piercing bows and stern and miraculously touching nothing in the flight between. The men were still crouched between the guns. Chase was standing by the mizzenmast, hands clasped behind his back. The Pucelle was three ship lengths away from the enemy line and Chase was choosing the place where he would sail her through. “Starboard a point,” he called, and the wheel creaked as the quartermaster hauled the spokes. Screams sounded from the lower deck as an enemy shot punched through the oak and ricocheted from the mainmast to strike a crouching gun crew. “Steady,” Chase said, “steady.”