Chase dropped down the rigging. “Starboard a point,” he said to the helmsman, then took a speaking trumpet from the shattered rail. “Clouter! Have you got musket balls loaded?”
“Full of them, sir!”
The enemy ship was a hundred yards away. The Victory’s cannon fire was ripping upward through her decks now as Hardy’s gunners elevated their barrels as high as they could. Holes were being punched high in the French two-decker’s starboard side as round shot, fired into the ship’s larboard flank, hammered clean through her. Yet the British gunners were firing blind and the boarders were gathering on the side nearest the Victory where the British guns could not reach. The French captain shouted at his men to drop the mainyard, for that would serve as their bridge to glory. His rigging was tangled with the Victory’s rigging, but his was filled with men and the Victory’s was empty. The sound of the muskets crackled like thorn burning. The Victory’s guns made deep booms. Wood splintered from the French deck and side as the shots punched out.
Fifty yards to go. The wind was foully light. The sea was covered in patches of smoke like breaking fog. The swells heaved the Pucelle eastward. “Larboard a point, John,” Chase said to the quartermaster, “larboard. Take me by his quarter.” The smoke at the French ship’s stern thinned and Chase saw the name of the two-decker which threatened to board the Victory. The Redouiable. Death to the Redoutable, he thought, and just then the French seamen released the Redoutable’s main-yard halliards and the great spar dropped to crash onto the Victory’s shattered hammock netting. It lay like a canvas-wrapped log across the Redoutable’s waist, but its larboard end jutted out over the Victory’s weather deck. It was a slender bridge, but it was sufficient for the French.
“A I’abordage!” the French captain shouted. He was a small man with a very loud voice. He had his sword drawn. “A I’abordage!”
His men cheered as they swarmed up the yard. The Pucelle lifted on a wave.
“Now!” Chase shouted to the forecastle. “Now, Clouter, now!”
And Clouter hesitated.
CHAPTER 11
His lordship should know, Malachi Braithwaite had written in a careful copperplate hand, that his wife was conducting an adulterous affair with Ensign Sharpe. He had overheard the two of them in Sharpe’s quarters aboard the Calliope and, painful though it was to relate, the-sounds emanating—that was the word he used, emanating—from the cabin suggested that her ladyship had quite forgotten her high station. Braithwaite had written in a cheap ink, a faded brown that had bled into the damp paper, and was hard to read in the dim lady hole. At first, the confidential secretary related, he had not believed the evidence of his own ears, and scarce even dared credit it when he had glimpsed the Lady Grace leaving the lower-deck steerage in the darkness before dawn, so he had thought it his duty to confront Sharpe with his suspicions. “But when I taxed Ensign Sharpe with my accusations,” he wrote, “and upbraided him for taking advantage of her ladyship, he did not deny the circumstances, but instead threatened me with murder.” Braithwaite had underlined the word “murder.” “It was that circumstance, my lord, which constrained my cowardly tongue from its bounden duty.” It gave him no pleasure, Braithwaite concluded the letter, to inform his lordship of these shameful events, especially as his lordship had ever shown him such excessive kindnesses.
Lady Grace let the letter fall into her lap. “He lies,” she said, “he lies.” There were tears in her eyes.
The lady hole was suddenly filled with noise. The Pucelle’s own guns had started to fire and the shock of the cannon reverberated through the ship, shaking the twin lanterns. The noise went on and on, becoming louder as the firing drew nearer to the stern of the ship. Then there was a terrible crash as the Spanish ship’s bows collided with the Pucelle’s side, followed by a groaning screech as tons of wood ground and scraped against the hull. A man shouted, a gun fired, then three more. The sound of the reloaded guns being hauled forward was like bursts of brief thunder.