Sharpe had dropped down into the lady hole. “They ain’t going to hang you, my lady,” he said. “He died on deck. That’s what everyone will think. He died on deck.”
“I had to do it!” she wailed.
“The Frogs did it.” Sharpe took the pistol from her and shoved it into a pocket, then he put his hands under Lord William’s armpits and heaved him up, trying to push the corpse through the hatch, but the body was awkward in the narrow space.
“They’ll hang me,” Grace cried.
Sharpe let the corpse drop, then turned and crouched beside her. “No one will hang you. No one will know. If they find him down here, I’ll say I shot him, but with a little luck I can get him up on deck and everyone will think the Frogs did it.”
She put her arms around his neck. “You’re safe. Oh, God, you’re safe. What happened?”
“We won,” Sharpe said. “We won.” He kissed her, then held her tight for an instant before he went back to struggle with the corpse. If Lord William was found here, no one would believe he had been killed by the enemy and Chase would be honor bound to hold an inquiry into the death, so the body had to be taken up above the orlop deck, but the hatch was narrow and Sharpe could not get the corpse through, but then a hand reached down and took hold of Lord William’s bloody collar and heaved him effortlessly upward.
Sharpe had cursed under his breath. He cursed because someone else now knew that Lord William had been shot in the lady hole, and when he had clambered up into the dimly lit gunroom he found it was Clouter who, one-handed, was proving as able as most men with two hands. “I saw you come down here, sir,” Clouter said, “and was going to give you these.” He had held out Sharpe’s jewels, all of them, and Major Dalton’s watch, and Sharpe had taken them and then tried to return some of the emeralds and diamonds to Clouter.
“I did nothing,” the big man protested.
“You saved my life, Clouter,” Sharpe said and folded the big black fingers around the stones, “and now you’re going to save it again. Can you get that bastard up on deck?”
Clouter grinned. “Up where he died, sir?” he asked and Sharpe scarce dared believe that Clouter had so quickly understood the problem and its solution. He just stared at the tall black man who grinned again. “You should have shot the bastard weeks ago, sir, but the Frogs did it for you and there ain’t a man aboard who won’t say the same.” He stooped and hauled the corpse onto his shoulder as Sharpe helped Lady Grace up through the hatch. He told her to wait while he went with Clouter to the quarterdeck and there, in the gathering dusk and rising wind, Lord William had been heaved overboard.
No one had taken any notice of the body being carried through the ship, for what was one more corpse being brought up from the surgeon’s knife? “He was braver than I thought,” Chase had said.
Sharpe went back to the cockpit where Lady Grace stared white-faced and wide-eyed as Pickering tied off blood vessels, then sewed the flap of skin over the newly made stump. Sharpe took her arm and led her into one of the midshipmen’s tiny cabins at the rear of the cockpit. He closed the door, though that hardly gave them privacy for the doors were made of wooden slats through which anyone could have seen them, but no one had eyes for the cabin.
“I want you to know what happened,” Lady Gace said when she was alone with Sharpe in the midshipman’s cabin, but then she could say no more.
“I know what happened,” Sharpe said.
“He was going to kill me,” she said.
“Then you did the right thing,” Sharpe said, “but the rest of the world thinks he died a brave man’s death. They think he went on deck to fight, and he was shot. That’s what Chase thinks, it’s what everybody thinks. Do you understand?”
She nodded. She was shivering, but not with cold. Her husband’s blood flecked her hair.
“And you waited for him,” Sharpe said, “and he did not come back.”
She turned to look at the gunroom door that hid the lady-hole hatch. “But the blood,” she wailed, “the blood!”
“The ship is full of blood,” Sharpe said, “too much blood. Your husband died on deck. He died a hero.”
“Yes,” she said, “he did.” She gazed at him, her eyes huge in the dark, then held him fiercely. He could feel her body shaking. “I thought you must be dead,” she said.
“Not even a scratch,” Sharpe replied, stroking her hair.
She shuddered, then pulled her head back to look at him. “We’re free, Richard,” she said with a note of surprise. “Do you realize that? We’re free!”
“Yes, my lady, we’re free.”
“What are we going to do?”
“Whatever we want,” Sharpe said, “whatever we can.”
She held him and he held her and the ship leaned to the weather and the wounded moaned and the last scraps of smoke vanished in the night as the storm wind rose from the darkening west to batter ships already pounded past endurance. But Sharpe had his woman, he was free, and he was at last going home.
Historical note
Sharpe really had no business being at Trafalgar, but he had to travel home from India and Cape Trafalgar lies not far from the route he would have taken and he might well have passed it on or about October 21, 1805. But if Sharpe had no business being there, then Admiral Villeneuve, commander of the combined French and Spanish fleets, had even less.
The great fleet had been gathered to cover the invasion of Britain, for which Napoleon had assembled his Grand Army near Boulogne. The British blockade and the weather combined to keep the enemy in port, except for a foray across the Atlantic by which Villeneuve hoped to draw Nelson away from the English coast. The foray failed, Villeneuve had put into Cadiz, and there he was trapped. Napoleon abandoned his invasion plans and marched his army east toward its great victory at Austerlitz. The French and Spanish fleet was now an irrelevance, but Napoleon, furious with Villeneuve, sent a replacement admiral and it seems likely that Villeneuve, knowing that he faced disgrace and eager to justify his existence before his replacement reached Cadiz, put to sea. Ostensibly he was taking the fleet to the Mediterranean, but he must have hoped he could fight the British ships blockading Cadiz, win a victory and so restore his reputation. After just a day at sea he discovered that the blockading fleet was much larger than he had thought and so turned his ships back northward in hope of escaping battle. It was already too late; Nelson was in sight and the combined fleet was doomed.
There was no Pucelle, nor a Revenant. Nelson fought Trafalgar with twenty-seven ships of the line, while the combined French and Spanish fleet had thirty-three. By day’s end seventeen of those enemy ships had struck their colors and one had been destroyed by fire, making Trafalgar the most decisive naval battle until Midway. The British lost no ships but paid, of course, the price of Nelson’s life. He was the matchless hero of the Napoleonic wars, as beloved by his men as he was feared by the enemy. He was also, of course, a famous adulterer, and his last request of his country was that Britain should look after Lady Hamilton. The granting of that request lay in the power of politicians, and politicians do not change, so Lady Hamilton died in miserable penury.
On the night after the battle a huge storm blew up and all but four of the seventeen prizes were lost. Many were being towed, but the storm was too fierce and the tows were cast off. Three of the prizes sank, two were deliberately set afire and five were wrecked. Another three captured ships, manned by prize crews too small to cope with the storm, were handed back to their original crews and sailed to safety, but they were so damaged by battle and storm that none was fit to sail again. Of the fifteen enemy ships that escaped capture in battle, four were taken by the Royal Navy and one was wrecked in the next two weeks. Many of the British ships were as badly damaged as the French or Spanish, but superb seamanship brought them all safe into port.