Sharpe slept, woke, slept again. No one disturbed his night. He was up before dawn and found that the rest of the ship’s officers, even those who should have been sleeping, were on the quarterdeck. “She’ll see us before we see her,” Chase said, meaning that the rising sun would silhouette the Pucelle’s topsails against the horizon, and for a few minutes he considered rousting the off-duty watch to help the topmen bring in everything above the mains, but he reckoned the loss of speed would be a worse result and so he kept his canvas aloft. The men with the best eyesight were all high in the rigging. “If we’re lucky,” Chase confided in Sharpe, “we may catch her by nightfall.”
“That soon?”
“If we’re lucky,” the captain said again, then reached out and touched the wooden rail.
The eastern sky was gray now, streaked with cloud, but soon a leak of pink, like the dye from a redcoat’s jacket seeping in the rain onto uniform trousers, suffused the gray. The ship quivered to the seas, left a white wake, raced. The pink turned red, and deeper red, glowing like a furnace over Africa. “They’ll have seen us by now,” Chase said, and took a speaking trumpet from the rail. “Keep your eyes sharp!” he called to the lookouts, then flinched. “That was unnecessary,” he chided himself, then corrected the damage by raising the trumpet again and promising a week’s worth of rum ration to the man who first sighted the enemy. “He deserves to be dead drunk,” Chase said.
The east flared to brilliance and became too bright to look at as the sun at last inched above the horizon. Night had gone, the sea was spread naked under the burning sky and the Pucelle was alone.
For the distant sail had vanished.
Captain Llewellyn was angry. Everyone on board was irritated. The loss of the other ship had caused morale to plummet on the Pucelle so that small mistakes were constantly being made. The bosun’s mates were lashing out with their rope ends, officers were snarling, the crew was sullen, but Captain Llewellyn Llewellyn was genuinely angry and apprehensive.
Before the ship sailed from England he had taken aboard a crate of grenades. “They’re French ones,” he told Sharpe, “so I’ve no idea what’s in them. Powder, of course, and some kind of fulminate. They’re made of glass. You light it, you throw it and you pray that it kills someone. Devilish things, they are, quite devilish.”
But the grenades were lost. They were supposed to be in the forward magazine deep on the orlop deck, but a search by Llewellyn’s lieutenant and two sergeants had failed to find the devices. To Sharpe the loss of the grenades was just another blow of ill fortune on a day that seemed ill-starred for the Pucelle, but Llewellyn reckoned it was far more serious than that. “Some fool might have put them in the hold,” he said. “We bought them from the Viper when she was being refitted. They took them in an action off Antigua and their captain didn’t want them. Reckoned they were too dangerous. If Chase finds them in the hold he’ll crucify me, and I don’t blame him. Their proper place is in a magazine.”
A dozen marines were organized into a search party and Sharpe joined them in the deep hold where the rats ruled and the ship’s stink was foully concentrated. Sharpe had no need to be there, Llewellyn had not even asked him to help, but he preferred to be doing something useful rather than endure the bad-tempered disappointment that had soured the deck ever since daybreak.
It took three hours, but eventually a sergeant found the grenades in a box that had the word “biscuit” stenciled on its lid. “God knows what’s in the magazines, then,” Llewellyn said sarcastically. “They’re probably full of salt beef. That bloody man Cowper!” Cowper was the ship’s purser, in charge of the Pucelle’s supplies. The purser was not quite an officer, but was generally treated as one, and he was thoroughly disliked. “It’s the fate of pursers,” Llewellyn had told Sharpe, “to be hated. It is why God put them on earth. They are supposed to supply things, but rarely can, and if they do then the things are usually the wrong size or the wrong color or the wrong shape.” Pursers, like the army’s sutlers, could trade on their own account, and their venality was famous. “Cowper probably hid them,” Llewellyn said, “thinking he could sell them to some benighted savage. Bloody man!” Now, having cursed the purser, the Welshman took one of the grenades from the box and handed it to Sharpe. “Packed with scrap metal, see? That thing could go off like case shot!”