“Not if he can’t … “
“He will think what I tell him!” she interrupted fiercely, then began to cry and put her head on Sharpe’s shoulder. “It is yours, Richard, and I would give the world for the child to know you.”
But they would be home soon, and she would go away and Sharpe would never see the child for he and Grace were illicit lovers and there was no future for them. None. They were doomed.
And next morning everything changed.
It was a chill, wet day. The wind was north of northwest, so that the Pucelle sailed hard on her bowline. Rain squalls swept across the sea, seethed on the deck and dripped from the sails. The water was green and gray, streaked by foam and whipped by the wind. The officers on the quarterdeck looked unfamiliar for they were in thick oiled coats, and Sharpe, feeling the cold for the first time since he had gone to India, shivered. The ship bucked and shuddered, fighting sea and wind, and sometimes heeled far over as a gusting squall strained the sails. Seven men manned the double wheel and it needed all their combined strength to hold the heavy ship up into the wind’s teeth. “A touch of autumn in the air,” Captain Chase greeted Sharpe. Chase’s cocked hat was covered with canvas and tied beneath his chin. “Did you have breakfast?”
“I did, sir.” It was not much of a breakfast for supplies were getting low on the Pucelle and the officers, like the men, subsisted on short rations of beef, ship’s biscuit and Scotch coffee which was a vile concoction of burned bread dissolved in hot water and sweetened with sugar.
“We’re gaining on him,” Chase said, nodding toward the distant Revenant which was evidently having as hard a time as the Pucelle, for she was shattering the seas with her bluff bow and smothering her hull in spray as she pushed as near northward as her helmsman could manage. The Pucelle closed the gap relentlessly, as she always did when the ships were hard on the wind, but just after the second bell of the forenoon watch the breeze went into the south-southwest and the Revenant was no longer struggling into the wind, but could sail with her canvas spread to the treacherous wind’s kindness and so keep her lead. Then, just a half hour later, she unexpectedly turned to the east which meant she was heading toward the Straits of Gibraltar instead of Cadiz.
“Starboard, starboard!” Chase called to the helmsman.
Haskell ran up to the quarterdeck as the seven men spun the Pucelle’s wheel. Sail handlers ran about the deck, loosing sheets. The sails flapped, spattering rainwater across the deck. “Has she blown out her foresails again?” Haskell shouted over the noise of the beating canvas.
“No,” Chase said. The Frenchman was traveling faster and easier now, sliding across the waves to leave a track of ragged white water at her stern. “He’s making for Toulon!” Chase decided, but no sooner had he spoken than the Revenant turned back onto her old course and the Pucelle’s watch, who had just loosened her sheets, had to haul them tight again.
“Follow him!” Chase called to the quartermaster and pulled out his glass again, unhooded the lens and stared at the Frenchman. “What the devil is he doing? Is he taunting us? Knows he’s safe and wants to mock us? Blast him!”
The answer came ten minutes later when a lookout called that a sail was in sight. Twenty minutes more and there were two sails out on the northern horizon and the closer of the two had been identified as a British frigate. “Can’t be the blockading squadron,” Chase said, puzzled, “because we’re too far south.” A moment later the second ship came into clearer view and she too was a Royal Navy frigate.
The Revenant had plainly changed course to avoid the two ships, fearing from her first glimpse of their topsails that they might be British ships of the line, but then, realizing that she was faced by two mere frigates, she had decided to fight her way through to Cadiz. “She’ll have no trouble brushing them aside,” Chase said gloomily. “Their only hope of stopping her is by laying themselves right across her course.”