“How long a voyage is it?” Sharpe asked Lavisser.
“A week? Ten days? Sometimes much longer. It all depends on Aeolus, our god of the winds. May he blow us swiftly and safely.”
Sharpe grunted an acknowledgment, then just stared ashore where the herring smokers made a haze over the land. He leaned on the stern rail, suddenly wishing he was anywhere but at sea.
Lavisser leaned on the rail beside him. “You ain’t happy, Sharpe,” the guardsman said. Sharpe frowned at the words, which struck him as intrusive. He said nothing, but was acutely aware of Lavisser so close beside him. “Let me guess.” The Guards Captain raised his eyes to the wheeling gulls and pretended to think for a while, then looked at Sharpe again. “My guess, Sharpe, is that you met Lady Grace Hale on shipboard and that you’ve not been afloat since.” He held up a cautionary hand when he saw the anger in Sharpe’s eyes. “My dear Sharpe, please don’t mistake me. I feel for you, indeed I do. I met the Lady Grace once. Let me see? It must be a dozen years or more ago and I was only a sprat of fifteen, but I could spot a beauty even then. She was lovely.”
Sharpe said nothing, just watched Lavisser.
“She was lovely and she was clever,” the Guards Captain went on softly, “and then she was married off to a tedious old bore. And you, Sharpe, forgive my being forward, gave her a time of happiness. Isn’t that something to remember with satisfaction?” Lavisser waited for Sharpe to respond, but the rifleman said nothing. “Am I right?” Lavisser asked gently.
“She left me in bloody misery,” Sharpe admitted. “I can’t seem to shake it. And, yes, being on a ship brings it back.”
“Why should you shake it?” Lavisser asked. “My dear Sharpe, may I call you Richard? That’s kind of you. My dear Richard, you should be in mourning. She deserves it. The greater the affection, the greater the mourning. And it’s been cruel for you. All the gossip! It’s no one’s business what you and Lady Grace did.”
“It was everyone’s business,” Sharpe said bitterly.
“And it will pass,” Lavisser said gently. “Gossip is ephemeral, Richard, it vanishes like dew or smoke. Your grief remains, the rest of the world will forget. They’ve mostly forgotten already.”
“You haven’t.”
Lavisser smiled. “I’ve been racking my brains all day trying to place you. It only came to me as we climbed aboard.” A rush of feet interrupted them as seamen came aft to secure the mizzen sheets. The great sail banged above their heads, then was brought under control and the frigate picked up speed. Her ensign, blue because the fleet’s commander was an Admiral of the Blue, flapped crisply in the evening wind. “The grief will pass, Richard,” Lavisser went on in a low voice, “it will pass. I had a sister who died, a dear thing, and I grieved for her. It’s not the same, I know, but we should not be ashamed of demonstrating our feelings. Not when it is grief for a lovely woman.”
“It won’t stop me doing my job,” Sharpe said stoically, fighting off the tears that threatened.
“Of course it won’t,” Lavisser said fervently, “nor, I trust, will it stop you from enjoying the fleshpots of Copenhagen. They are meager and few, I can assure you, but such as they are we shall enjoy.”
“I can’t afford fleshpots,” Sharpe said.
“Don’t be so dull, Richard! We’re sailing with forty-three thousand of the government’s guineas and I intend to steal as many of them as I decently can without getting caught.” He smiled so broadly and with such infectious enjoyment that Sharpe had to laugh. “There!” Lavisser said. “You see I shall be good for you!”
“I hope so,” Sharpe replied. He was watching the Cleopatra’s rippling wake. The tide was ebbing and the wind was out of the west so that the anchored ships presented their sterns to the frigate’s quarterdeck. The ugly bomb ships sat low in the water. One was called Thunder, another Vesuvius, then there was Aetna with Zebra close by. The frigate sailed so close to Zebra that Sharpe could look down into her welldeck which was stuffed with what looked like coils of rope, put there to cushion the shock of the two great mortars that squatted in the ship’s belly. The mortars were capped with tompions, but Sharpe guessed they threw a shell about a foot across and, because the flash of their firing would blast up into the air to lob the bombs in a high arc, the forward stays of the Zebra were not made of hemp, but of thick chain. Another eight guns, carronades by the look of them, were mounted aft of the mainmast. An ugly vessel, Sharpe thought, but a brute with massive teeth, and there were sixteen of the bomb ships moored or anchored in the river, along with a host of gun brigs that were shallow-draft vessels armed with heavy cannon. These were not ships designed to fight other ships, but to hammer targets ashore.
The Cleopatra was picking up speed now as the crew trimmed the big sails. She leaned to larboard and the water began to gurgle and seethe at her stern. The dusk was drawing in, shadowing the big seventy-fours that were the workhorses of the British fleet. Sharpe recognized some of the ships’ names from Trafalgar: the Mars, the Minotaur, the Orion and the Agamemnon, but most he had never seen before. The Goliath, belying her name, was dwarfed by the Prince of Wales, a 98-gun monster which flew the Admiral’s pennant. A gunport opened at the Prince of Wales’s bow to return the salute that the Cleopatra was firing as she passed. The sound of the guns was huge, the smoke thick and the tremor of the cannon, even though they were unshotted, shook the deck beneath Sharpe’s feet.
Only one ship, another seventy-four, lay beyond the Prince of Wales. She was a good-looking ship and Sharpe had learned enough in his voyage home from India to recognize that she was French-built, one of the many ships that had been captured from the enemy. Water gushed from her pumps as the Cleopatra sailed by and Sharpe looked up to see men pausing in their work to watch the sleek frigate pass. Then the Cleopatra left the seventy-four behind and Sharpe could read the gold-painted name scrolled across her stern. Pucelle. His heart leaped. The Pucelle! His own ship, the ship he had been aboard at Trafalgar and which was captained by his friend, Joel Chase, though whether Chase was still a captain, or aboard the Pucelle or even alive, Sharpe did not know. He just knew that he and Grace had known happiness on board the ship that had been named by her French builders for Joan of Arc, La Pucelle or the virgin. He wanted to wave at the ship, but it was too far for him to recognize anyone aboard.
“You’re welcome, gentlemen.” Captain Samuels, dark-faced, gray-haired and scowling, had come to greet his guests. “Lieutenant Dunbar will show you your quarters.” He frowned at Sharpe, who had turned to stare at the Pucelle again. “You find my remarks tedious, Lieutenant?”
“I’m sorry, sir. I was aboard that ship once.”
“The Pucelle?”
“Didn’t she take the Revenant at Trafalgar, sir?”
“What if she did? There were easy pickings at that battle, Lieutenant.” The envy of a man who had not sailed with Nelson was naked in Samuels’s voice.
“You were there, sir?” Sharpe asked, knowing it would needle the Captain.
“I was not, but nor were you, Lieutenant, and now you will show me the courtesy of remarking my words.” He went on to tell them the rules of the ship, that they were not to smoke aboard, not to climb the rigging and that they must salute the quarterdeck. “You will take your meals in the officers’ mess and I’ll thank you not to get in the crew’s way. I’ll do my duty, God knows, but that doesn’t mean I must like it. I’m to put you and your damned cargo ashore by stealth and that I’ll do, but I’ll be glad to see the back of you both and get back to some proper sailoring.” He left them as abruptly as he had come.
“I do love feeling welcome,” Lavisser murmured.
Sharpe stared aft again, but the Pucelle was lost in the dark loom of the land. She was gone and he was sailing away again. Sailing to a war, or to stop a war, or to be tangled in treachery, but whatever it was, he was still a soldier.