He turned and stared westward. The melee about the Victory had grown, but he could distinctly see a British ensign flying above a French tricolor, showing that at least one enemy ship had struck. Farther south there was a second melee where Collingwood’s squadron had cut off the rear of the French and Spanish fleet. Away to the east, beyond the Revenant, a handful of enemy ships shamefully sailed away, while to the north the enemy vanguard had at last turned and was lumbering southward to help their beleaguered comrades. The battle, Chase reckoned, could only get worse, for a dozen ships on either side had yet to engage, but his fight was with Montmorin now.
The Pucelle shuddered as the Revenant slammed into her side. The force of the collision, broadside to broadside, two thousand tons meeting two thousand tons, drove the two ships apart again, but Chase shouted at the few remaining men on his top decks to throw the grapnels and make the Revenant fast. The hooks flew into the enemy’s rigging, but the enemy had the same idea and her crew was also hurling grappling hooks, while seamen in the Frenchman’s rigging were tying the Pucelle’s lower yards to their own. To the death, then. Neither ship could escape now, they could only kill each other. The rails of the two ships were thirty feet apart because their lower hulls bulged out so greatly, but Chase was close enough to see Montmorin’s expression and the Frenchman, seeing Chase, took off his hat and bowed. Chase did the same. Chase wanted to laugh and Montmorin was smiling, both men struck by the oddity of such courtesies even as they did their best to kill each other. Beneath their silver-buckled feet the great guns gouged and hammered. Chase wished he had an orange to throw to Montmorin who, he was sure, would appreciate the gesture, but he could not see Collier.
Chase did not know it, but his presence on the deck was directly useful, for the French marksmen in the fighting tops were obsessed by his death and so ignored the carronade crews which, seeing French seamen gather in the Revenant’s waist, fired down into the mass. The Frenchmen had been snatching boarding pikes from their racks about the mainmast, while others held axes or cutlasses, but one carronade forward and one aft provided a tangling crossfire that destroyed the boarding party. The French had no carronades, relying on the men in their fighting tops to clear an enemy’s deck with musket fire.
Ten marines were left on the Pucelle’s forecastle. Sergeant Armstrong, bleeding to death, still sat by the foremast and clumsily fired his musket up into the enemy rigging. Clouter, his black torso streaked and spattered by other men’s blood, had taken command of the starboard carronade after half its crew was killed by a grenade thrown from the Revenant’s foremast. Sharpe was firing up into the maintop, hoping his bullets would gouge through its timbers to kill the French marksmen perched on the platform. The wind seemed to have died completely so that the sails and flags hung limp. Powder smoke thickened between the ships, rising to hide and protect the Pucelle’s bullet-lashed deck. Sharpe was deaf now, his ears buffeted by the big guns and his world shrunken to this small patch of bloody deck and the smoke-wreathed enemy rigging soaring above him. His shoulder was bruised by the musket so that he flinched every time he fired. An orange rolled across the deck at his feet, its skin dimpling the blood on the planks. He brought the musket’s brass-bound stock hard down on the orange, squashing and bursting the fruit, then stooped and scooped up some of the pulped flesh. He ate some, grateful for the juice in his parched mouth, then scooped some more which he put into Armstrong’s mouth. The sergeant’s unbloodied eye was glassy, he was scarce conscious, but he was still trying to reload his musket. He coughed hoarsely, mingling bloody spittle with the orange juice that trickled down his chin. “We are winning, aren’t we?” he asked Sharpe earnestly.
“We’re murdering the bastards, Sergeant.”
The dead lay where they fell now, for there were not enough men to throw them overboard, or rather the men who remained were too busy fighting. The worst of that fight was below decks where the two ships, matched gun to gun, mangled each other. The lower deck was dark now, for the Revenant blotted out the daylight on the starboard side and the larboard gunports were closed. Smoke filled the low deck, curling under beams splashed with blood from the Revenant’s first raking broadside. Now the Frenchman’s shots broke open the hull, screamed across the deck and crashed out to leave patches of newly created daylight where they holed the larboard side. Thick dust and thicker smoke drifted in the shafts of light. The Pucelle’s guns returned the fire, roaring back on their breeching ropes to fill the deck with thunder. The ships touched here, their gunports almost coinciding so that when a British gunner tried to swab his cannon a French cutlass half severed his arm, then the lambs-wool swab on its staff was seized and carried aboard the French ship. The French shots were heavier, for they carried larger guns, but larger guns took longer to reload and the British fire was noticeably quicker. Montmorin’s crew was probably the best trained in all the enemy’s fleet, yet still Chase’s men were faster, but now the enemy tossed grenades through the open gunports and fired muskets to slow the British guns.
“Fetch marines!” Lieutenant Holderby shouted at a midshipman, then had to go right up to the boy and cup his hands over the midshipman’s ear. “Fetch marines!” A round shot killed the lieutenant, spewing his intestines across the gratings where the thirty-two-pound round shots were stored. The midshipman stayed still for a second, disoriented. Flames were rising to his left, then a gunner threw sand across the remnants of the grenade and another tossed a cask of water to douse the fire. Another gunner was crawling on the deck, vomiting blood. A woman was hauling on a gun tackle, spitting curses at the French gunners who were only a cutlass length away. A gun recoiled, filling the deck with noise and breaking its breeching rope so that it slewed around and crushed two men whose shrieks were lost in the din. Men heaved and rammed, their naked torsos gleaming with sweat that trickled through the powder residue. They all looked black now, except where they were spotted or streaked or sheeted with blood. The Revenant’s powder smoke belched into the Pucelle, choking men who struggled to return the favor.
The midshipman scrambled up the companionway to the weather deck that shook from the recoil of its twenty-four-pounder guns. Wreckage of the rigging lay across the central part of the deck which was so thick with smoke that the midshipman climbed to the forecastle instead of to the quarterdeck. His ears were ringing with the sound of the guns and his throat was as dry as ash. He saw an officer in a red coat. “You’re wanted below, sir.”