“What?” Sharpe shouted.
“Marines, sir, needed below.” The boy’s voice was hoarse. “They’re coming through the gunports, sir. Lower deck.” A bullet smacked into the deck beside his feet, another ricocheted off the ship’s bell.
“Marines!” Sharpe bellowed. “Pikes! Muskets!”
He led his ten men down the companionway, stepped over the body of a powder monkey who lay dead though there was not a mark on his young body that Sharpe could see, then down to the hellish dark and thick gloom of the lower deck. Only half of the starboard cannons were firing now, and they were being impeded by the French who slashed through the gunports with cutlasses and pikes. Sharpe fired his musket through a gunport, glimpsed a Frenchman’s face dissolve into blood, ran to the next and used the butt of the empty musket to hammer an enemy’s arm. “Simmons!” he shouted at a marine. “Simmons!”
Simmons stared at him, wide-eyed. “Go to the forward magazine,” Sharpe shouted. “Fetch the grenades!”
Simmons ran, grateful for a chance to be beneath the water line even if only for an instant. Three of the Pucelle’s heavy guns fired together, their sound almost stunning Sharpe, who was going from gunport to gun-port and stabbing at the French with his cutlass. A huge crash, dreadful in its loudness and so prolonged that it seemed to go on forever, broke through Sharpe’s deafened ears and he reckoned a mast had gone overboard, though whether it was another of the Pucelle’s or one of the Revenant’s he could not tell. He saw a Frenchman ramming a cannon, half leaning out of the opposing gunport, and he skewered the man’s arm with the cutlass. The Frenchman sprang back and Sharpe skipped aside for he could see the gunner holding the linstock to the touch-hole. Sharpe registered that the French did not use flintlocks, was surprised to have noticed such a thing in battle, then the gun fired and the rammer, left in the barrel, disintegrated as it was driven across the Pucelle’s deck. A midshipman fired a pistol into an enemy gunport. A flintlock sparked and the sound of the heavy gun pounded Sharpe’s ears. Some of the men had lost the scarves they had tied about their heads and their ears dribbled blood. Others had bleeding noses caused by nothing more than the sound of the guns.
Simmons reappeared with the grenades and Sharpe took a linstock from one of the remaining water barrels, lit its fuse, then waited until the vagaries of the ocean swells brought a French gunport into view. The fuse sputtered. He could see the Revenant’s yellow planking, then the opposing ship ground against the Pucelle’s hull and a gunport came into sight and he hurled the glass ball into the Revenant. He dimly heard an explosion, saw flames illuminate the black smoke filling the enemy’s gundeck, then he left Simmons to throw the other grenades while he went back down the deck, stepping past bodies, avoiding the gunners, checking each gunport to make sure no more Frenchmen were trying to reach through with cutlass or pike. The big capstan in the middle of the deck, used to haul the ship’s anchor cables, had an enemy round shot buried in its wooden heart. Blood dripped from the deck above. A gun, crammed with grapeshot, recoiled across his path and Frenchmen screamed.
Then another scream pierced Sharpe’s ringing ears. It came from above, from the weather deck that was slick with so much blood that the sand no longer gave men a secure footing. “Repel boarders! Repel boarders!”
“Marines!” Sharpe shouted at his few men, though none heard him in the noise, but he reckoned some might follow if they saw him climb the companionway. He could hear steel striking steel. No time to think, just time to fight.
He climbed.
Lord William frowned at the sound of the carronade, then flinched as the Pucelle’s larboard broadside began to fire, the sound rolling down the ship to fill the lady hole with thunder. “I perceive we are still in action,” he said, lowering the pistol. He began to laugh. “It was worth pointing a gun at your head, my dear, just to see your expression. But was it remorse or fear that actuated your misery?” He paused. “Come! I wish an answer.”
“Fear,” Lady Grace gasped.
“Yet I should like to hear you express remorse, if only as evidence that you possess some finer feelings. Do you?” He waited. The guns fired, the sound becoming louder as the nearer cannon recoiled two decks above their refuge.
“If you had any feelings,” Grace said, “any courage, you would be on deck sharing the dangers.”
Lord William found that very amusing. “What a strange idea you do have of my capabilities. What can I do that would be useful to Chase? My talents, dearest, lie in the contrivance of policy and, dare I say, its administration. The report I am writing will have a profound influence on the future of India and, therefore, on the prospects of Britain. I confidently expect to join the government within a year. Within five years I might be Prime Minister. Am I to risk that future just to strut on a deck with a pack of mindless fools who believe a brawl at sea will change the world?” He shrugged and looked up at the lady hole’s ceiling. “Toward the end of the fight, my dear, I shall show myself, but I have no intention of running any unnecessary or extraordinary risks. Let Nelson have his glory today, but in five years I shall dispose of him as I wish and, believe me, no adulterer will gain honor from me. You know he is an adulterer?”
“All England knows.”
“All Europe,” Lord William corrected her. “The man is incapable of discretion and you too, my dear, have been indiscreet.” The Pucelle’s broadside had stopped and the ship seemed silent. Lord William looked up at the deck as if he expected the noise to begin again, but the guns were quiet. Water gurgled at the stern. The ship’s pumps began again. “I might not have minded,” Lord William went on, “had you been discreet. No man wishes to be a cuckold, but it is one thing for a wife to take a genteel lover and quite another to lie down with the servant classes. Were you mad? That would be a charitable excuse, but the world does not see you as mad, so your action reflects upon me. You chose to rut with an animal, a lump, and I suspect he has made you pregnant. You disgust me.” He shuddered. “Every man on the ship must have known you were rutting. They thought I did not know, they sneered at me, and you went on like a tuppenny whore.”
Lady Grace said nothing. She stared up at one of the lanterns. Its candle was guttering, spewing a dribble of smoke that escaped through the lantern’s ventilation holes. She was red-eyed, exhausted from crying, incapable of fighting back.
“I should have known all this when I married you,” Lord William said. “One hopes, one does so hope, that a wife will prove a woman of fidelity, of prudence and quiet good sense, but why should I have expected it? Women have ever been slaves to their grosser appetites. “‘Frailty,’“ he quoted, “‘thy name is woman!’”
“The feeble sex, and by God how true that is! I found it hard to credit Braithwaite’s letter at first, but the more I thought about it, the more true it rang, and so I observed you and found, to my disappointment, that he did not lie. You were rutting with Sharpe, wallowing in his sweat.”
“Be quiet!” she pleaded with him.
“Why should I be quiet?” he asked in a reasonable voice. “I, my dear, am the offended party. You had your moment’s filthy pleasure with a mindless brute, why should I not have my moment of pleasure now? I have earned it, have I not?” He raised the pistol again, just as the whole ship shook with a terrible blow, then another, blows so loud that Lord William instinctively ducked his head, and still the blows went on, rending the ship and crashing through the decks and making the Pucelle shudder. Lord William, his anger momentarily displaced by fear, stared up at the deck as if expecting the ship to fall apart. The lanterns quivered, noise filled the universe and the guns kept firing.