Only a score of Frenchmen were still standing and, disarmed, they were shepherded toward the stern. “I don’t want them below,” Chase said, “they could make mischief. Buggers can stand on the poop instead and be shot at.” He grinned at Sharpe. “Glad you sailed with me?”
“Hot work, sir.” Sharpe looked for Clouter and hailed him. “You saved my life,” he told the tall man. “Thank you.”
Clouter looked astonished. “I didn’t even see you, sir.”
“You saved my life,” Sharpe insisted.
Clouter gave a strange, high-pitched laugh. “But we killed some, didn’t we? Didn’t we just kill some?”
“Plenty left to kill,” Chase said, then cupped his hands. “Back to the guns! Back to the guns!” He saw the purser peering nervously from the forward companionway. “Mister Cowper! I’ll trouble you to find rammers and swabs for this deck. Lively now! Back to the guns!”
Like two bare-knuckled boxers, deep in their thirtieth or fortieth round, both bleeding and dazed, yet neither willing to give up, the two ships pounded each other. Sharpe climbed to the quarterdeck with Chase. To the west, where the long swells came so high, the sea was all battle. Nearly a dozen ships fought there. To the south another score blazed at each other. The ocean was thick with wreckage. A mastless hulk, its guns silent, drifted away from the melee. Five or six pairs of ships, like the Pucelle and the Revenant, were clasped together, exchanging fire in private battles that took place beyond the bigger melee. The towering Santisima Trinidad had lost her foremast and most of her mizzen and still she was being hammered by smaller British ships. The powder smoke now spread across two miles of ocean, a man-made fog. The sky was darkening to the north and west. Some of the enemy ships, not daring to come close to the fighting and looking to escape, bombarded the brawling fleets from a distance, but their shots were as much a danger to their own side as to the British. The very last of the British ships, the slowest of the fleet, were only just entering the fray and opening fresh gunports to add their metal to the carnage.
Capitaine Montmorin looked across at Chase and shrugged, as if to suggest that the failure of his boarders was regrettable but not serious. The Frenchman’s guns were firing still, and Sharpe could see more boarders gathering on the Revenant’s weather deck. He could also see Captain Cromwell, peering from the shelter of the poop, and Sharpe seized a musket from a nearby marine and aimed at the Englishman who, seeing the threat, ducked back out of sight. Sharpe handed the musket back. Chase found a speaking trumpet amidst the wreckage on the deck. “Captain Montmorin? You should yield before we kill more of your men!”
Montmorin cupped his hands. “I was going to offer you the same chance, Captain Chase!”
“Look there,” Chase shouted, pointing beyond his own stern, and Montmorin climbed up his mizzen ratlines to see over the Pucelle’s poop and there, ghosting across the swells, untouched, was the Spartiate, a British seventy-four, the French-built ship that was rumored to be bewitched because she sailed faster by night than by day and now. coming late to the battle, she opened her larboard gunports.
Montmorin knew what was about to happen and he could do nothing to stop it. He was going to be raked and so he shouted at his men to lie down between the guns, though that would not save them from the Pucelle’s gunfire, then he stood in the center of his quarterdeck and waited.
The Spartiate gave Montmorin’s ship a full broadside. One after another the guns crashed back and their balls smashed the high gallery windows of the Revenant’s stern and screamed down her decks, just as the Revenant had raked the Pucelle earlier. The Spartiate was painfully slow, but that only gave her gunners more time to aim properly, and the broadside drove deep wounds into the Revenant. Her mizzen shrouds parted with a sound like Satan’s harp strings snapping, then the whole mast toppled, splintering like a monstrous tree to carry yards, sails and tricolor overboard. Sharpe heard the French musketeers screaming as they fell with the mast. Guns were thrown off carriages, men were mangled by round shot and grapeshot, and still Montmorin stood unmoving, even when the wheel was shot away behind him. Only when the last of the Spartiate’s guns had sounded did he turn and look at the ship that had raked him. He must have feared that she would put up her helm and lay alongside his starboard flank, but the Spartiate sailed grandly on, seeking a victim all her own.