A buzz whipped past Sharpe’s ear and he thought it was an insect, then he saw a small splinter fly out of the deck and knew that it was musket fire coming from the rigging of the ships ahead. He willed himself to stand still. The Spanish ship that had been straight ahead had gone into smoke and there was a Frenchman there instead, and close behind her was another ship, though whether she was French or Spanish Sharpe could not tell, for her ensign was hidden by the mass of her undamaged sails. The sails looked dirty. She was a two-decker, smaller than the Pucelle, and her figurehead showed a monk with an uplifted hand holding a cross. A Spaniard, then. Sharpe looked for the Revenant, but could not see her. Chase seemed to be aiming across the smaller Spaniard’s bows, taking the Pucelle through the shrinking gap between her and the Frenchman ahead, while the Spaniard was trying to cut the Pucelle off, trying to lay his smaller ship right across her bows and he was so close to the Frenchman that his jib boom, the outer part of his bowsprit, almost touched the French mizzen. French guns poured round shot into the Pucelle’s hull. Musket balls pattered on the sails. The French rigging was spotted with powder smoke, her hull was sheathed in it.
Chase gauged the gap. He could haul the ship around and take on the French ship broadside to broadside, but his orders were to pass through the line, though the gap was narrowing dangerously. If he misjudged, and if the Spaniard succeeded in laying his hull athwart the Pucelle’s bows then the Dons would seize his bowsprit, lash it to their own shin and hold him there while thev raked, nounded and turned his shin into bloody splinters. Haskell recognized the danger and turned on Chase with a raised eyebrow. A musket ball struck the deck between them, then a round shot splintered the edge of the poop deck just above Chase before scattering the flag lockers built against the taffrail so that the Pucelle suddenly trailed a bright stream of gaudy flags. A musket bullet buried itself in the wheel, another broke the binnacle lantern. Chase stared at the shrinking gap and felt the temptation to head across the Spaniard’s stern, but he would be damned if he let the Spanish captain dictate his battle. “Stand on!” he said to the quartermaster. “Stand on!” He would tear the bowsprit clean out of the Spaniard’s hull before he gave way. “The gun crews will stand up, Mister Haskell!” Chase said.
Haskell shouted down to the weather deck. “Stand up! Stand up! Stand to your guns!”
Midshipmen and lieutenants repeated the order to the lower deck. “Stand up! Stand up!” Men gathered around their guns, peered through the open ports, eyed the ragged holes that had already been punched in the hull’s double-planked oak timbers. The cannons’ flintlocks were cocked and the gunners crouched to the side, lanyards held ready.
A marine cursed and staggered on the forecastle as a musket bullet drove down through his shoulder into his belly. “Make your own way to the surgeon,” Armstrong told him, “and don’t make a fuss.” He stared up at the Frenchman’s mizzenmast where a knot of men were firing muskets down onto the Pucelle. “Time to teach those bastards some manners,” he growled. The Pucelle’s bowsprit, ragged with its broken yard, pushed into the gap between the two ships. The gunners below decks could not yet see the enemy, but they knew they were close for the smoke of the enemy guns lay across the sea like mist, then thickened as the enemy fired again, though now the Pucelle was so close that they were firing at the ships behind her.
“Push on through!” Chase shouted at his ship. “Push on through!”
For now was the glorious moment of revenge. Now was the moment when, if the Pucelle could force her passage, she would carry her broadsides within feet of an unprotected enemy stern and an unprotected enemy bow. Then, having taken the punishment for so long, she could rake two ships at once, ripping blood and bone and timber with her own fire-driven metal. “Make the shots tell!” Chase called. “Make them tell!”
Make the bastards bleed, he though vengefully. Make the bastards sorry they had ever been born and damn them to a fiery hell for the damage they had already done to his ship. There was a ripping, splintering sound as the Pucelle’s bowsprit tangled with the Spanish bowsprit, but then the Spaniard’s jib boom broke off altogether and the Pucelle’s shot-battered bows were in the gap, her broken sprit topsail yard was ripping the French ensign, and the first of her guns could bear. “Now kill them!” Chase shouted, relief flooding through him because at last he could fight back. “Now kill them!”
Lord William Hale had refused to allow his wife’s maid to take refuge in the lady hole, peremptorily telling the girl to find a place further forward in the Pucelle’s hold. “It is bad enough,” he told his wife, “that we are forced to this place, let alone that we should share it with servants.”
The lady hole was the aftermost corner of the Pucelle’s hold, a triangular space made where the hull supported the rudder. Its forward bulkhead was formed by the shelves where the officers’ empty dunnage was stored and where Malachi Braithwaite had sought the memorandum on the day of his death, and the floor of the hole was made by the steeply sloping sides of the ship, and though Captain Chase had ordered that a patch of old sailcloth be placed in the hole to provide a rudimentary comfort, Lord William and Lady Grace were still forced to perch uncomfortably against the plank slopes beneath the small hatch that led to the gunroom on the orlop deck above. It was in the gunroom that the cannons’ flintlocks were usually stored and where the ship’s small weapons could be repaired. It was empty now, though the surgeon might use it as a place to put the dying.
Lord William had insisted on having two lanterns which he hung from rusting hooks in the lady hole’s ceiling. He drew his pistol and lay it on his lap, using it as a prop for the spine of a book he drew from his coat pocket. “I am reading the Odyssey,” he told his wife. “I thought I should have the leisure for much reading on this voyage, but time has flown. Have you found the same?”
“I have,” she said dully. The sound of the enemy guns was very muted down below the water line.
“But I was pleased to discover,” Lord William went on, “in the few moments I have been able to devote to Homer, that my Greek is as fresh as ever. There were a few words that escaped me, but young Braithwaite recalled them. He was not much use, Braithwaite, but his Greek was excellent.”
“He was an odious man,” Lady Grace said.
“I did not realize you had remarked him,” Lord William said, then shifted the book so that the lantern light fell on the page. He traced the lines with his finger, mouthing the words silently.
Lady Grace listened to the guns, then started when the first shot struck the Pucelle and made all the ship’s timbers quiver. Lord William merely raised an eyebrow, then went on with his reading. More shots struck home, their sound dulled by the decks above. Opposite Lady Grace, where the hull’s inner planking was joined to a rib, water wept through a seam and every time a swell passed under the hull the water would bulge in the seam, then run down to vanish into the hold beyond the dunnage shelves. She restrained an urge to press a finger against the seam which was stuffed with a narrow strip of frayed oakum, and she remembered Sharpe telling her how, as a small child in the foundling home, he had been forced to pick apart great mats of tarred rope that had been used as fenders on London’s docks. His job had been to extract the hemp strands which were then sold to the shipyards to be used as caulking for planks. His fingernails were still ragged and black, though that, he said, was the result of firing a flintlock musket. She thought of his hands, closed her eyes and wondered at the madness that had swamped her. She was still in its thrall. The ship shook again, and she had a sudden terror of being trapped in this cramped space as the Pucelle sank.