“There’s your target!” Captain Cromwell called and Sharpe, standing on the gun carriage, saw an impossibly small cask bobbing on the distant waves. He had no idea what the range was, and all he could do was wait until the cask floated into line then pause until a wave rolled the ship upward when he skipped smartly aside and jerked the lanyard. The flintlock snapped forward and a small jet of fire whipped up from the touch-hole, then the gun hammered back on its small wheels and its smoke billowed halfway up the mainsail as the powder flame licked and curled in the pungent white cloud. The big breeching rope quivered, scattering more flecks of paint, and Mister Binns called excitedly from the poop, “A hit, sir, a hit! A hit! Plumb, sir! A hit!”
“We heard you the first time, Mister Binns,” Cromwell growled.
“But it’s a hit, sir!” Binns protested, thinking that no one believed him.
“Up to the main cap!” Cromwell snapped at Binns. “I told you to be quiet. If you cannot learn to curb your tongue, boy, then go and shriek at the clouds. Up!” He pointed to the very top of the mainmast. “And you will stay there until I can abide your malodorous presence again.”
Mathilde was applauding enthusiastically from the quarterdeck. Lady Grace was also there and Sharpe had been acutely aware of her presence as he aimed the gun. “That was bleeding luck,” the old seaman said.
“Pure luck,” Sharpe agreed.
“And you’ve cost the captain ten guineas,” the old man chuckled.
“I have?”
“He has a wager with Mister Tufnell that no one would ever hit the target.”
“I thought gambling was forbidden on board.”
“There’s lots that’s forbidden, sir, but that don’t mean it don’t happen.”
Sharpe’s ears were ringing from the terrible sound of the gun as he stepped away from the smoking weapon. Tufnell, the first lieutenant, insisted on shaking his hand and refused to countenance Sharpe’s insistence that the shot had been pure luck, then Tufnell stepped aside for Captain Cromwell had come down from the quarterdeck and was advancing on Sharpe. “Have you fired a cannon before?” the captain inquired fiercely.
“No, sir.”
Cromwell peered up into the rigging, then looked for his first officer. “Mister Tufnell!”
“Sir?”
“A broken horse! There, on the main topsail!” Cromwell pointed. Sharpe followed the captain’s finger and saw that one of the footropes that the topmen would stand on when they were furling the sail had parted. “I will not command a ragged ship, Mister Tufnell,” Cromwell snarled. “This ain’t a Thames hay barge, Mister Tufnell, but an Indiaman! Have it spliced, man, have it spliced!”
Tufnell sent two seamen aloft to mend the broken line, while Cromwell paused to glower at the next crew firing the gun. The cannon recoiled, the smoke blossomed, and the ball skipped across the waves a good hundred yards from the bobbing cask.
“A miss!” Binns shouted from the top of the mainmast.
“I have an eye for an irregularity,” Cromwell said in his harsh, low voice, “as I’ve no doubt you do, Mister Sharpe. You see a hundred men on parade and doubtless your eye goes to the one sloven with a dirty musket. Am I right?”
“I hope so, sir.”
“A broken horse can kill a man. It can tumble him to the deck, putting misery into a mother’s heart. Her son put his foot down and there was nothing beneath him but void. Do you want your mother to have a broken heart, Mister Sharpe?”
Sharpe decided this was no time to explain that he had long been orphaned. “No, sir.”
Cromwell glared around the main deck which was crowded with the men who formed the gun crews. “What is it that you notice about these men, Mister Sharpe?”
“Notice, sir?”
“They are in shirtsleeves, Mister Sharpe. All except you and me are in shirtsleeves. I keep my coat on, Sharpe, because I am captain of this ship and it is meet and right that a captain should appear formally dressed before his crew. But why, I ask myself, does Mister Sharpe keep on his wool jacket on a hot day? Do you believe you are captain of this scow?”