The stern of the French ship was so close that Sharpe felt he could have reached out and touched it. Her name was written in golden letters placed on a black band between two sets of the stern’s lavishly gilded windows. Neptune. The British had a Neptune in the fight, a three-decked ship with ninety-eight guns, while this Neptune was a two-decker, though Sharpe had the impression she was bigger than the Pucelle. Her stern was a foot or more higher than the Pucelle’s forecastle and it was lined with French marines armed with muskets. Their bullets banged on the deck or buried themselves in the hammock nettings. Just beneath the enemy’s gun smoke a shield was carved into the taffrail. The shield was surmounted by an eagle and on either side of the crest were sheaves of wooden flags, all of them, like the shield itself, painted with the French tricolor, but the paint had weathered and Sharpe could see faded gold traces of the old royalist fleur-de-lys beneath the red, white and blue. He fired his musket, obliterating the view with smoke, then Clouter, who had deliberately waited until his carronade could fire directly down the center line of the French Neptune, pulled the lanyard.
It was the first of the Pucelle’s guns to fire, and it shrieked back on its carriage in a cloud of black smoke. The French marines vanished, shredded to a bloody mist by the cask of musket balls that had been loaded on top of the massive round shot that shattered the painted shield and then struck the Neptune’s mizzenmast with a crack that was drowned by the first guns firing from the Pucelle’s lower decks.
These guns were double-shotted and each had a bundle of grape rammed on top of the twin cannon balls, and they were being fired straight into the Frenchman’s stern windows. The glass panes and their frames disappeared as the heavy missiles whipped down the lengths of the Neptune’s two gundecks. Cannon barrels were hurled from their carriages, men were eviscerated, and still the shots came, gun after gun, as the Pucelle slowly, so slowly, traveling at an old man’s walking pace, inched past the stern to bring the successive larboard gunports to bear.
The guns on the starboard side were firing into the Spaniard’s bow, breaking the heavy timber apart to send their murderous shots down her gun-decks. The Pucelle was dishing out slaughter and the smoke billowed from her sides, starting at the bows and working down to her stern.
The Neptune’s mizzenmast went overboard. Sharpe heard the screams of the marksmen in her rigging, watched them fall, then rammed a new ball down his musket. The starboard carronade, loaded like Clouter’s with musket balls and a vast round shot, had swept the Spaniard’s forecastle clean of men. Blood dripped from the forecastle scuppers while the figurehead of the monk with a cross had been turned into matchwood. A big crucifix was fastened to the Spanish ship’s mizzenmast, but when Chase’s stern carronades blasted down the smaller ship’s length the hanging Christ’s left arm was torn away and then his legs were broken.
The Pucelle had ripped away a part of the Frenchman’s ensign, while the rest was in the water with the fallen mizzenmast. Chase wanted to turn his ship to larboard and lay her alongside the Neptune and batter her hull into bloody ruin, but the smaller Spanish ship rammed the Pucelle and inadvertently turned her to starboard. There was a tearing, grating, grinding sound as the two hulls juddered together, then the Spanish captain, fearing he would be boarded, backed his topsails and the smaller ship fell away astern. Her starboard gunports had been closed, but now a few opened as the surviving gunners crossed from larboard. The guns fired into the Pucelle. Captain Llewellyn’s marines were firing up into the Spanish rigging. Smoke obscured the smaller ship. Chase thought about putting his helm hard down and closing on her, but he was already past and so he shouted at the quartermaster to turn the ship north toward the caldron of fire and smoke that surrounded the Victory. The flagship’s hull could not be seen amidst that stinking fog, but, judging from the masts, Chase reckoned there was a Frenchman on either side of her. “Pull in the studdingsails,” he ordered. The sails, which projected either side of the ship, were only useful in a following wind and now the Pucelle would turn to place the small wind on her larboard flank. The sail-handlers streamed out along the yards. One, struck by a musket ball, collapsed over the mainyard, then fell to leave a long trail of blood down the mainsail.
The French Neptune was slowed by her trailing mizzenmast. Her crew slashed at the fallen rigging with axes, trying to lose the broken mast overboard. The Pucelle was off her quarter now and Chase’s larboard gunners had reloaded and poured shot after shot into the Frenchman, firing through the lingering smoke of their first broadside. The noise of the guns filled the sky, made the sea quiver, shook the ship. Clouter had reloaded the larboard carronade, a slow job, but there was no target close and he would not waste the giant shot on the Neptune which had at last released the wreckage of its mast and was drawing away. He rammed another cask of musket balls into the short barrel, then waited for another target to come within the short gun’s range.
But the Pucelle was suddenly in a patch of open sea with no enemy near. She had pierced the line, but the Neptune had gone north while the Spaniard had disappeared in smoke astern and there were no ships in front except for an enemy frigate that was a quarter-mile off and ships of the line did not stoop to fight frigates when there were battleships to engage. A long line of French and Spanish battleships was coming from the south, but none was in close range and so Chase continued toward the churning smoke, lit by gunflashes, that marked where Nelson’s beleaguered flagship lay. There was honor to be gained in defeating a flagship and the Victory, like the Royal Sovereign, was drawing enemy ships like flies. Four other British ships were in action close to the Victory, but the enemy had seven or eight, and no more help would arrive for a time because the Britannia was such a slow sailor. The French Neptune looked to be going to join that melee, and so Chase followed. The sail-handlers, short numbered because so many were manning the guns, sheeted home the sails as the Pucelle swung around. The sea was littered with floating wreckage. Two bodies drifted past. A seagull perched on one, sometimes pecking at the man’s face which had been torn open by gunfire and washed white by the sea.
The Pucelle’s wounded were carried below and the dead jettisoned. The cannon barrel that had been thrown off its carriage was lashed tight so that it would not shift with the ship’s rolling and crush a man. Lieutenants redistributed gunners among the crews, making up the numbers where too many had died or been injured. Chase stared aft at the Spanish ship. “I should have laid alongside her,” he told Haskeli ruefully.
“There’ll be others, sir.”
“By God I want a prize today!” Chase said.
“Plenty to go around, sir.”
The nearest enemy ship now was a two-decker that was laid alongside the bigger Victory. Chase could see the smoke of the Victory’s guns spewing out from the narrow space between the two ships and he imagined the horror in the Frenchman’s lower decks as the three tiers of British guns mangled men and timber, but he also saw that the French upper decks were crowded. The French captain appeared to have abandoned his gundecks altogether and assembled his whole crew on the forecastle, open weather deck and quarterdeck where they were armed with muskets, pikes, axes and cutlasses. “They want to board Victory]” Chase exclaimed, pointing.