“I want him alive, Clouter.” Captain Chase had overheard the last words. “Alive!” Chase said again, then stood aside to let Cromwell pass. He smiled at Sharpe. “I owe you thanks again, Richard.”
“No, sir. I have to congratulate you.” Sharpe stared at the two ships, still lashed together, and saw wreckage and smoke and blood and bodies, and in the wider sea there were floating hulks and tired ships, but all now were under British flags. This was the image of victory, splintered and smoke-stained, tired and blood-streaked, but victory. The church bells would ring in Britain’s villages for this, and then families would anxiously wait to discover whether their menfolk would come home. “You did well, sir,” Sharpe said, “you did well.”
“We all did well,” Chase said. “Haskell died, did you know? Poor Haskell. He so wanted to be a captain. He was married last year. Only last year, just before we left for India.” Chase looked as weary as Montmorin, but when he looked up he saw his old red ensign hoisted above the French tricolor on the Revenant’s foremast, the only mast left to the French ship. The white ensign flew from the Pucelle’s mainmast and its white cloth was smeared with Haskell’s blood. “We didn’t let him down, did we?” Chase said, tears in his eyes. “Nelson, I mean. I could not have lived with myself had I let him down.”
“You did him proud, sir.”
“We had some help from the Spartiate. What a good fellow Francis Lavory is! I do hope he’s taken a prize for himself.” A wind lifted the ensigns and dragged the thinning smoke fast across the sea. The long swells were rippling with wind while white foam splashed about the floating wreckage that littered the sea. There were only a dozen ships in sight which still retained their masts and rigging intact, but Nelson had started the day with twenty-eight ships and now there were forty-six in his fleet, and the rest of the enemy had fled. “We must look for Vaillard,” Chase said, suddenly remembering the Frenchman.
“He’s dead, sir.”
“Dead?” Chase shrugged. “Best thing, I suppose.” The wind filled the ragged sails of the two ships. “My God,” Chase said, “there’s wind at last, and not just a little, I fear. We must be about our work.” He gazed at the Pucelle. “Doesn’t she look battered? Poor dear thing. Mister Collier! You survive!”
“I’m alive, sir,” Harold Collier said with a grin. He had his sword still drawn, its blade smeared with blood.
“You can probably sheathe the sword, Harry,” Chase said gently.
“Scabbard was hit, sir,” Collier said, and lifted the scabbard to show where a musket ball had bent it.
“You did well, Mister Collier,” Chase said, “and now you’ll muster men to separate the ships.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
Montmorin was taken aboard the Pucelle, but the rest of his crew were imprisoned below the Revenant’s decks. The wind was moaning in the torn rigging now, and the sea was breaking into whitecaps. A midshipman and twenty men were put aboard the captured Revenant as a prize crew, then the two ships were cut apart. A tow line had been rigged from the Pucelle’s stern so that her prize could be towed to port. Lieutenant Peel had a score of men laying new cables to the Pucelle’s remaining masts, trying to brace them against the promised storm. The gunports were closed, the flintlocks dismounted from the cannons’ breeches, and the guns lashed up. The galley fires were relit and their first job was to heat great vats of vinegar with which the bloody decks would be scoured, for it was believed that only hot vinegar could draw blood from timber. Sharpe, back on board the Pucelle, found some oranges in the scupper and ate one, filling his pockets with the others.
The dead were jettisoned. Splash after splash. Men moved slowly, bone weary from an afternoon of blood and thirst and fighting, but the fall of night and the rising wind brought the worst news of the day. A boat from the Conqueror pulled past and an officer shouted the news up to Chase’s shattered quarterdeck. Nelson had died, the officer said, struck down by a musket ball on the Victory’s deck. The Pucelle’s seamen scarcely dared believe the news, and Sharpe first heard of it when he saw Chase weeping. “Are you hurt, sir?” he asked.