He climbed.
Lord William frowned at the sound of the carronade, then flinched as the Pucelle’s larboard broadside began to fire, the sound rolling down the ship to fill the lady hole with thunder. “I perceive we are still in action,” he said, lowering the pistol. He began to laugh. “It was worth pointing a gun at your head, my dear, just to see your expression. But was it remorse or fear that actuated your misery?” He paused. “Come! I wish an answer.”
“Fear,” Lady Grace gasped.
“Yet I should like to hear you express remorse, if only as evidence that you possess some finer feelings. Do you?” He waited. The guns fired, the sound becoming louder as the nearer cannon recoiled two decks above their refuge.
“If you had any feelings,” Grace said, “any courage, you would be on deck sharing the dangers.”
Lord William found that very amusing. “What a strange idea you do have of my capabilities. What can I do that would be useful to Chase? My talents, dearest, lie in the contrivance of policy and, dare I say, its administration. The report I am writing will have a profound influence on the future of India and, therefore, on the prospects of Britain. I confidently expect to join the government within a year. Within five years I might be Prime Minister. Am I to risk that future just to strut on a deck with a pack of mindless fools who believe a brawl at sea will change the world?” He shrugged and looked up at the lady hole’s ceiling. “Toward the end of the fight, my dear, I shall show myself, but I have no intention of running any unnecessary or extraordinary risks. Let Nelson have his glory today, but in five years I shall dispose of him as I wish and, believe me, no adulterer will gain honor from me. You know he is an adulterer?”
“All England knows.”
“All Europe,” Lord William corrected her. “The man is incapable of discretion and you too, my dear, have been indiscreet.” The Pucelle’s broadside had stopped and the ship seemed silent. Lord William looked up at the deck as if he expected the noise to begin again, but the guns were quiet. Water gurgled at the stern. The ship’s pumps began again. “I might not have minded,” Lord William went on, “had you been discreet. No man wishes to be a cuckold, but it is one thing for a wife to take a genteel lover and quite another to lie down with the servant classes. Were you mad? That would be a charitable excuse, but the world does not see you as mad, so your action reflects upon me. You chose to rut with an animal, a lump, and I suspect he has made you pregnant. You disgust me.” He shuddered. “Every man on the ship must have known you were rutting. They thought I did not know, they sneered at me, and you went on like a tuppenny whore.”
Lady Grace said nothing. She stared up at one of the lanterns. Its candle was guttering, spewing a dribble of smoke that escaped through the lantern’s ventilation holes. She was red-eyed, exhausted from crying, incapable of fighting back.
“I should have known all this when I married you,” Lord William said. “One hopes, one does so hope, that a wife will prove a woman of fidelity, of prudence and quiet good sense, but why should I have expected it? Women have ever been slaves to their grosser appetites. “‘Frailty,’“ he quoted, “‘thy name is woman!’”
“The feeble sex, and by God how true that is! I found it hard to credit Braithwaite’s letter at first, but the more I thought about it, the more true it rang, and so I observed you and found, to my disappointment, that he did not lie. You were rutting with Sharpe, wallowing in his sweat.”
“Be quiet!” she pleaded with him.
“Why should I be quiet?” he asked in a reasonable voice. “I, my dear, am the offended party. You had your moment’s filthy pleasure with a mindless brute, why should I not have my moment of pleasure now? I have earned it, have I not?” He raised the pistol again, just as the whole ship shook with a terrible blow, then another, blows so loud that Lord William instinctively ducked his head, and still the blows went on, rending the ship and crashing through the decks and making the Pucelle shudder. Lord William, his anger momentarily displaced by fear, stared up at the deck as if expecting the ship to fall apart. The lanterns quivered, noise filled the universe and the guns kept firing.