“Yield, Capitainel” Chase shouted through the speaking trumpet.
Montmorin gave his answer by cupping his hands and shouting down to his weather deck. “Tirezl Tirez!” He turned and bowed to Chase.
Chase looked about the quarterdeck. “Where’s Captain Llewellyn?” he asked a marine.
“Broken leg, sir. Gone below.”
“Lieutenant Swallow?” Swallow was the young marine lieutenant.
“Think he’s dead, sir. Badly wounded, anyway.”
Chase looked at Sharpe, paused as the Revenant’s guns opened fire again. “Assemble a boarding party, Mister Sharpe,” Chase said formally.
It was always going to be a fight to the finish, right from the moment the Pucelle had first seen the Revenant off the African coast. And now Sharpe would finish it.
CHAPTER 12
Lord William listened to the guns, but it was impossible to tell how the battle went from their sound alone, though it was plain that the fighting had reached a new level of fury. “Si fractus inlabatur orbis,” he said, raising his eyes to the deck above.
Grace said nothing.
Lord William chuckled. “Oh, come, my dear, don’t tell me you have forgotten your Horace? It is one of the things that most annoys me about you; that you cannot resist translating my tags.”
“If the sky should break,” Lady Grace said dully.
“Oh come! That is hardly adequate, is it?” Lord William asked sternly. “I grant you sky for orbis, though I would prefer universe, but the verb demands falling, does it not? You were never the Latinist you thought you were.” He looked up again as a dolorous thump echoed through the ship’s timbers. “It does indeed sound as though the broken sky falls. Are you frightened? Or do you feel yourself to be entirely safe here?”
Lady Grace said nothing. She felt bereft of tears, gone to a place of abject misery that was beset by guns, horror, spite and hate.
“I am safe here,” Lord William went on, “but you, my dear, are beset by fears, so much so that in a moment you will seize my pistol and turn it on yourself. You feared, I shall say, a repetition of that amusing episode on the Calliope when your lover so bravely rescued you, and I shall claim it was impossible to prevent you from destroying yourself. I shall, of course, demonstrate an abject though dignified sadness at your demise. I shall insist that your precious body is carried home so that I may bury you in Lincolnshire. Black plumes shall crown your funerary horses, the bishop will pronounce the obsequies and my tears shall moisten your vault. All will be done properly, and your tombstone, cut from the very finest marble, will record your virtues. It will not say that you were a sordid fornicator who opened her legs to a common soldier, but rather that you combined wisdom with understanding, grace with charity and possessed a Christian forbearance that was a shining example of womanhood. Would you like the inscription in Latin?”
She gazed at him, but did not speak.
“And when you are dead, my love,” Lord William went on, “and safely buried beneath a slab recording your virtues, I shall set about destroying your lover. I shall do it quietly, Grace, subtly, so that he will never know the source of his misfortunes. Having him removed from the army will be simple, but what then? I shall think of something, indeed it will provide me with pleasure to contemplate his fate. A hanging, don’t you think? I doubt I shall be able to convict him for poor Braithwaite’s death, which he undoubtedly caused, but I shall contrive something, and when he is dangling there, twitching, and pissing in his breeches, I shall watch and I shall smile and I shall remember you.”
She still stared at him, her face expressionless.
“I shall remember you,” he said again, unable to hide the hatred he felt for her. “I shall remember that you were a common whore, a slave to your filthy lusts, a slut who let a commoner roger her.” He raised the pistol.
The guns, two decks above, began to fire again, their recoil shaking the timbers clear down to the lady hole.
But the pistol shot sounded much louder than the great guns. Its sound echoed in the confined space, filling it with thick smoke as bright blood splashed up the lady hole’s planking. Si fractus inlabatur orbis.