“I think we’ll catch her,” he told Sharpe one day.
“She can’t be going this fast,” Sharpe guessed.
“Oh, she probably is! But my guess is that Montmorin won’t have dared go too close to land. He’ll have been forced far to the south in case he was spotted by our ships out of Cape Town. So we’re cutting the corner on him! Who knows, we may be only a score or so of miles behind him?”
The Pucelle was seeing other ships now. Most were small native trading vessels, but they also passed two British merchantmen, an American whaler and a Royal Navy sloop with which there was a brisk exchange of signals. Connors, the third lieutenant who had the responsibility of looking after the ship’s signals, ordered a man to haul a string of brightly colored flags up into the rigging, then put a telescope to his eye and called out the sloop’s answering message. “She’s the Hirondelle, sir, out of Cape Town.”
“Ask if she’s seen any other ships of the line.”
The flags were found, sorted and hoisted, and the answer came back no. Chase then sent a long message telling the Hirondelle’s captain that the Pucelle was pursuing the Revenant into the Atlantic. In time that news would reach the admiral in Bombay who must already have been wondering what had happened to his precious seventy-four.
Land was spotted the next day, but it was distant and obscured by a squall of rain that rattled on the sails and bounced from the decks which were scrubbed clean every morning by grinding sand into the timber beneath blocks of stone the size of bibles. Holy-stoning, the men called it. Still the Pucelle drove on with every last scrap of canvas hoisted, sailing as though the devil himself was on her tail. The wind stayed strong, but for long days it brought stinging rain so that everything below deck became damp and greasy. Then, on another day of driving rain and gusting wind, they passed Cape Town, though Sharpe could see nothing of the place except a misty glimpse of a great flat-topped mountain half shrouded in cloud.
Captain Chase ordered new charts spread on the big table in his day cabin. “I have a choice now,” he told Sharpe. “Either I head west into the Atlantic, or ride the current up the African coast until we find the southeast trades.”
The choice seemed obvious to Sharpe: ride the current, but he was no sailor. “I take a risk,” Chase explained, “if I stay inshore. I get the land breezes and I have the current, but I also risk fog and I might get a westerly gale. Then we’re on a lee shore.”
“And a lee shore means?” Sharpe asked.
“We’re dead,” Chase said shortly, and let the chart roll itself up with a snap. “Which is why the Sailing Directions insist we go west,” he added, “but if we do then we risk being becalmed.”
“Where do you think the Revenant is?”
“She’s out west. She’s avoiding land. At least I hope she is.” Chase stared out of the stern window at the white-fretted wake. He looked tired now, and older, because his natural ebullience had been drained from him by days and nights of broken sleep and unbroken worry. “Maybe she stayed inshore?” he mused. “She could have hoisted false colors. But the Hirondelle didn’t see her. Mind you, in these damned squalls a fleet could go within a couple of miles of us and we wouldn’t see a thing.” He pulled on his tarpaulin coat, ready to go back on deck. “Up the coast, I think.” He spoke to himself. “Up the coast and God help us if there’s a blow out of the west.” He picked up his hat. “God help us anyway if we don’t find the Revenant. Their lordships of the Admiralty don’t look mercifully on captains who abandon their station to chase wild geese halfway around the world. And God help us if we do find it and that fellow really is a Swiss servant and not Vaillard after all! And the first lieutenant’s right. He won’t be sailing to France, but making for Cadiz. It’s closer. Much closer.” He shrugged. “I’m sorry, Sharpe, I’m not very good company for you.”