SHARPE’S TRAFALGAR. Bernard Cornwell. Sharpe’s Trafalgar: Richard Sharpe and the Battle of Trafalgar, October 21, 1805

“Of course, my lord.”

Lord William walked away. Sharpe watched him, wondering if there was some game being played that he was unaware of. He remembered Braithwaite’s claim to have left a letter among Lord William’s papers, then dismissed that idea as a lie. Sharpe reckoned he was seeing dangers where there were none and so he shrugged the conversation away and climbed, first to the quarterdeck and then to the poop where he stood at the taffrail and watched the wake dissipate in the sea.

He heard the footsteps behind him and knew who they belonged to before she came to the rail where, like him, she stared at the sea. “I’ve missed you,” she said softly.

“And I you,” Sharpe said. He gazed at the ship’s wake which rippled the place where a shrouded body sank under a stream of bubbles toward an unending darkness.

“He fell?” Lady Grace asked.

“So it seems,” Sharpe said, “but it must have been a very quick death, which is a blessing.”

“Indeed it is,” she said, then turned to Sharpe. “I find the sun tire-somely hot.”

“Maybe you should go below. My cabin is cooler, I think.”

She nodded, looked into his eyes for a few seconds, then abruptly turned and went.

Sharpe waited five minutes, then followed.

The Pucelle, if anyone could have seen her from out where the flying fish splashed down into the waves, looked beautiful that afternoon. Warships were not elegant. Their hulls were massive, making their masts seem disproportionately short, but Captain Chase had hung every sail high in the wind and those royals, studdingsails and skyscrapers added enough bulk aloft to balance the big yellow and black hull. The gilding on her stern and the silver paint on her figurehead reflected the sun, the yellow on her flanks was bright, her deck was scrubbed pale and clean, while the water broke white at her stem and foamed briefly behind. Her seventy-four massive guns were hidden.

The rot and damp and rust and stench could not be detected from the outside, but inside the ship the stink was no longer noticed. In the forecastle the ship’s last three goats were milked for the captain’s supper. In the bilge the water slopped. Rats were born, fought and died in the hold’s deep darkness. In the magazine a gunner sewed powder bags for the guns, oblivious of a whore who plied her trade between the two leather screens that protected the magazine’s door from an errant spark. In the galley the cook, one-eyed and syphilitic, shuddered at the smell of some badly salted beef, but put it in the caldron anyway, while in his cabin at the stern of the weather deck Captain Llewellyn dreamed of leading his marines in a glorious charge that would capture the Revenant. Four bells of the afternoon watch sounded. On the quarterdeck a seaman cast the log, a lump of wood, and let the line trail fast from its reel. He counted the knots in the line as they vanished over the rail, chanting the numbers aloud while an officer peered at a pocket watch. Captain Chase went to his day cabin and tapped the barometer. Still rising. The off-duty watch slept in their hammocks, swaying together like so many cocoons. The carpenter scarfed a piece of oak into a gun carriage while in Chase’s sleeping cabin an ensign and a lady lay in each other’s arms.

“Did you kill him?” Lady Grace asked Sharpe in a whisper.

“Would it matter if I did?”

She traced a finger down the scar on his face. “I hated him,” she whispered. “From the day he came into William’s employment he just watched me. He would drool.” She shuddered suddenly. “He told me if I went to his cabin he would keep silent. I wanted to slap him. I almost did, but I thought he’d tell William everything if I struck him, so I just walked away. I hated him.”

“And I killed him,” Sharpe said softly.

She said nothing for a while, then she kissed the tip of his nose. “I knew you did. The very moment William asked me where he was I knew you had killed him. Was it really quick?”