Sharpe had cursed under his breath. He cursed because someone else now knew that Lord William had been shot in the lady hole, and when he had clambered up into the dimly lit gunroom he found it was Clouter who, one-handed, was proving as able as most men with two hands. “I saw you come down here, sir,” Clouter said, “and was going to give you these.” He had held out Sharpe’s jewels, all of them, and Major Dalton’s watch, and Sharpe had taken them and then tried to return some of the emeralds and diamonds to Clouter.
“I did nothing,” the big man protested.
“You saved my life, Clouter,” Sharpe said and folded the big black fingers around the stones, “and now you’re going to save it again. Can you get that bastard up on deck?”
Clouter grinned. “Up where he died, sir?” he asked and Sharpe scarce dared believe that Clouter had so quickly understood the problem and its solution. He just stared at the tall black man who grinned again. “You should have shot the bastard weeks ago, sir, but the Frogs did it for you and there ain’t a man aboard who won’t say the same.” He stooped and hauled the corpse onto his shoulder as Sharpe helped Lady Grace up through the hatch. He told her to wait while he went with Clouter to the quarterdeck and there, in the gathering dusk and rising wind, Lord William had been heaved overboard.
No one had taken any notice of the body being carried through the ship, for what was one more corpse being brought up from the surgeon’s knife? “He was braver than I thought,” Chase had said.
Sharpe went back to the cockpit where Lady Grace stared white-faced and wide-eyed as Pickering tied off blood vessels, then sewed the flap of skin over the newly made stump. Sharpe took her arm and led her into one of the midshipmen’s tiny cabins at the rear of the cockpit. He closed the door, though that hardly gave them privacy for the doors were made of wooden slats through which anyone could have seen them, but no one had eyes for the cabin.
“I want you to know what happened,” Lady Gace said when she was alone with Sharpe in the midshipman’s cabin, but then she could say no more.
“I know what happened,” Sharpe said.
“He was going to kill me,” she said.
“Then you did the right thing,” Sharpe said, “but the rest of the world thinks he died a brave man’s death. They think he went on deck to fight, and he was shot. That’s what Chase thinks, it’s what everybody thinks. Do you understand?”
She nodded. She was shivering, but not with cold. Her husband’s blood flecked her hair.
“And you waited for him,” Sharpe said, “and he did not come back.”
She turned to look at the gunroom door that hid the lady-hole hatch. “But the blood,” she wailed, “the blood!”
“The ship is full of blood,” Sharpe said, “too much blood. Your husband died on deck. He died a hero.”
“Yes,” she said, “he did.” She gazed at him, her eyes huge in the dark, then held him fiercely. He could feel her body shaking. “I thought you must be dead,” she said.
“Not even a scratch,” Sharpe replied, stroking her hair.
She shuddered, then pulled her head back to look at him. “We’re free, Richard,” she said with a note of surprise. “Do you realize that? We’re free!”
“Yes, my lady, we’re free.”
“What are we going to do?”
“Whatever we want,” Sharpe said, “whatever we can.”
She held him and he held her and the ship leaned to the weather and the wounded moaned and the last scraps of smoke vanished in the night as the storm wind rose from the darkening west to batter ships already pounded past endurance. But Sharpe had his woman, he was free, and he was at last going home.
Historical note
Sharpe really had no business being at Trafalgar, but he had to travel home from India and Cape Trafalgar lies not far from the route he would have taken and he might well have passed it on or about October 21, 1805. But if Sharpe had no business being there, then Admiral Villeneuve, commander of the combined French and Spanish fleets, had even less.