He went to the starboard rail, slung the big gun on his shoulder and pulled himself up the foremast shrouds. He could see a marine lying on the Pucelle’s quarterdeck with a rivulet of blood seeping from his body along the planks. Another marine was being carried to the rails. He could not see Chase, but then a bullet struck the shroud above him, making the tarred rope tremble like a harp string and he climbed desperately, his ears buffeted by the sound of the big guns. Another bullet whipped close by, a second struck the mast and, bereft of force, thumped against the volley gun’s stock. He reached the futtock shrouds and, without thinking, hurled himself upward and outward, the quickest way to the maintop. There was no time to be frightened; instead he scrambled up the ratlines as nimbly as any sailor and then rolled onto the grating to find that he was now level with the Frenchmen in their maintop. There were a dozen men there, most reloading, but one fired and Sharpe felt the wind of the ball whipping past his cheek. He unslung the volley gun, cocked and aimed it.
“Bastards,” he said, and pulled the trigger. The recoil of the gun hurled him back against the topmast shrouds. The volley gun’s smoke filled the sky, but no shots came from the Frenchman’s maintop. Sharpe slung the empty gun on his shoulder and lowered himself off the grating. His feet flailed for a heartbeat, then found the inward-sloping futtock shrouds and he went back down to the Pucelle’s deck and, when he looked back up, all he could see at the Redoutable’s maintop was a body hanging off the edge. He threw the volley gun down, picked up a musket and walked to the larboard rail.
A dozen marines were left. The others were dead or wounded. Sergeant Armstrong, his face bleeding from three cuts and his trousers a deep red from a bullet wound, was sitting with his back against the foremast. He had a musket at his shoulder and, though his right eye was closed by blood, he did his best to aim the musket, then fired. “You should go below, Sergeant!” Sharpe shouted.
Armstrong gave a monosyllabic opinion of that advice and pulled a cartridge from his pouch. A bullet had grazed Clouter’s back leaving a bloody welt like the stroke of a lash, but the big man was paying it no heed. He was stuffing another cask of musket balls into the carronade, though by now the Pucelle had gone beyond the Redoutable and the Frenchman was out of Clouter’s range.
Captain Chase still lived. Connors, the signal lieutenant, had lost his right forearm to a cannon ball and was down in the cockpit, while Pearson, a midshipman who had twice failed his lieutenant’s examination, had been killed by the musketry. The marine lieutenant was wounded in the belly and had been taken below to die. A dozen gunners were dead and two marines had been thrown overboard, but Chase reckoned the Pucelle had still been lucky. She had destroyed the Redoutable just as that ship had been on the point of boarding the Victory, and Chase felt an exultation as he looked back to see the terrible damage his guns had done. They had filleted her, by God! Chase had half considered laying alongside the Redoutable and boarding her, but she was already lashed to the Victory and doubtless the flagship’s crew would take her surrender, then he saw the French Neptune ahead and he shouted at the helmsman to steer for her. “She’s ours!” he told Haskell.
The first lieutenant was bleeding from a bullet wound in his left arm, though he refused to have it treated. The arm hung useless, but Haskell claimed it did not hurt and, besides, he said, he was right-handed. Blood dripped from his fingers. “At least get the arm bandaged,” Chase suggested, staring at the Neptune, which was making surprising speed despite the loss of her mizzenmast. She must have sailed clean around the western edge of the melee while the Pucelle passed to its east, and now the Frenchman was heading landward as though trying to escape the battle.
“I’m sure Pickering is quite busy enough without having to be detained bv scratched lieutenants,” Haskell answered testily.
Chase took off his white silk stock and beckoned to Midshipman Collier. “Tie that around Lieutenant Haskell’s arm,” he ordered the midshipman, then turned to the quartermaster. “Starboard, John,” he said, gesturing, “starboard.” The Neptune was threatening to cross the Pucelle’s bows and Chase needed to avoid that, but he reckoned he had speed enough to catch the Frenchman, lay her alongside and fight her muzzle to muzzle, and, because she carried eighty-four guns and he only had seventy-four, his victory would be all the more remarkable.
Then disaster struck.
The Pucelle had sailed past the Victory and the Redoutable, leaving a thick cloud of smoke that drifted after her, and out of that cloud there appeared the bows of an undamaged ship. Her figurehead showed a ghostly skeleton, scythe in one hand and a French tricolor in the other, and she was crossing behind the Pucelle, not a pistol’s length away, and the whole of her larboard broadside was facing the Pucelle’s decorated stern.
“Hard to starboard!” Chase shouted at the quartermaster who had already begun the turn which would bring the Pucelle’s larboard broadside to face the Neptune, but then the new enemy fired and the very first shot ripped away the tiller ropes so that the wheel spun uselessly in the quartermaster’s hands. The rudder, no longer tensioned by the ropes, centered itself and the Pucelle swung back to larboard, leaving her stern naked to the enemy guns. She would be raked.
A shot screamed down the weather deck, killing eight sailors and wounding a dozen more. The shot left a spattering trail of blood the whole length of the deck, and the next shot cut Haskell in half, leaving his torso on the starboard rail and his legs hanging from the quarterdeck’s forward rail. Collier, still holding the silk stock, was smothered in Haskell’s blood. The fourth shot shattered the Pucelle’s wheel and impaled the quartermaster on its splintered spokes. Chase leaned on the broken quarterdeck rail. “Tiller ropes!” he shouted. “Mister Peel! Tiller ropes! And hard to starboard!”
“Aye aye, sir! Hard to starboard!”
More shots broke through the stern. The Pucelle was shaking from the impact. Musket bullets cracked on her poop. “Walk with me, Mister Collier,” Chase said, seeing that the boy seemed close to tears, “just walk with me.” He paced up and down the quarterdeck, one hand on Collier’s shoulder. “We are being raked, Mister Collier. It is a pity.” He took the boy under the break of the poop, close to the mangled remains of the wheel and the quartermaster. “And you will stay here, Harold Collier, and note the signals. Watch the clock! And keep an eye on me. If I fall you are to find Mister Peel and tell him the ship is his. Do you understand?”
“Yes, sir.” Collier tried to sound confident, but his voice was shaking.
“And a word of advice, Mister Collier. When you command a ship of your own, take great care never to be raked.” Chase patted the midshipman’s shoulder, then walked back into the musket fire that pitted the quarterdeck. The enemy’s cannons still raked the Pucelle, shot after shot demolishing the high windows, throwing down cannon and spraying blood on the deck beams overhead. The remains of the mizzenmast were cut through below the decks and Chase watched appalled as the whole mast slowly toppled, tearing itself out of the poop deck as it collapsed to starboard. It went slowly, the shrouds parting with sounds like pistol shots, and the mainmast swayed as the stay connecting it to the mizzen tightened, then that cable parted and the mizzen creaked, splintered and finally fell. The enemy cheered. Chase leaned over the broken quarterdeck rail to see a dozen men hauling on one of the spare tiller lines that had been rove before the battle. “Pull hard, lads!” he shouted, bellowing to be heard above the sound of the enemy’s guns that still hammered into the Pucelle. A twenty-four-pounder cannon lay on its side, trapping a screaming man. One of the starboard carronades on the quarterdeck had been punched off its carriage. The great white ensign trailed in the water. None of the Pucelle’s guns could answer, nor could they until the ship turned. “Pull hard!” Chase shouted and saw Lieutenant Peel, hatless and sweating, add his weight to the tiller rope. The ship began to turn, but it was the mizzenmast, with its sail and rigging that lay in the water off the Pucelle’s starboard quarter, that did most to drag the ship around. She came slowly, still being punished by the FYench ship that had sailed out of the melee’s smoke.