LITMIR.BIZ

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The Pucelle had seen the French and Spanish fleet on the previous day, but this was the first glimpse for the other crews of Nelson’s ships. They had crossed the Atlantic in search of this enemy, then sailed back from the West Indies and, in the last few days, they had tacked and worn ship, sailed east and west, north and south, and some had wondered if the enemy was at sea at all, yet now, as if summoned by a demon of the sea, thirty-four enemy ships of the line showed on the horizon.

      ‘You’ll not see its like again,’ Chase told Sharpe, nodding towards the enemy fleet. His steward had brought a tray with mugs of proper coffee onto the quarterdeck and Chase gestured that his officers should be served first, then took the last cup. He looked up at the sails which alternately stretched in the wind then slackened as the fitful gusts passed. ‘It will take hours to come up with them,’ he said moodily.

      ‘Maybe they’ll come to us,’ Sharpe said, trying to raise Chase’s spirits that seemed dampened by the dawn and the pitiful wind.

      ‘Against this sorry excuse for a breeze? I doubt it.’ Chase smiled. ‘Besides, they won’t want battle. They’ve been stuck in harbour, Sharpe. Their sail handling will be poor, their gunnery rusty, their morale down in the mud. They’d rather run away.’

      ‘Why don’t they?’

      ‘Because if they run east from here they’ll end up on the shoals of Cape Trafalgar, and if they run north or south they know we’ll intercept them and beat them to smithereens, and that means they have nowhere to go. Nowhere to go, Sharpe. We have the weather gauge, and that’s like having the higher ground. I just pray we catch them before dark. Nelson fought the Nile in the dark and that was a triumph, but I’d rather fight in daylight.’ He drained his coffee. ‘Is that really the last of the beans?’ he asked the steward.

      ‘It is, sir, except for those that got wetted in Calcutta, sir, and they’re growing fur.’

      ‘They might grind, though?’ Chase suggested.

      ‘I wouldn’t feed ’em to a pig, sir.’

      The Victory had been flying a signal which ordered the British column to form their proper order, which was little more than an encouragement for the slower ships to press on more sail and close the intervals in the line, but now that signal was hauled down and another flew in its place.

      ‘Prepare for battle, sir,’ Lieutenant Connors reported, though it was scarcely necessary, for every man aboard except the landlubbers like Sharpe had recognized the signal. And the Pucelle, like the other warships, was already preparing, indeed the men had been readying their ship all night.

      Sand was scattered on the decks to give the bare-footed gunners a better grip. The men’s hammocks, as they were every morning, were rolled tight and brought on deck where they were laid in the hammock nettings that surmounted the gunwale. The packed hammocks, secured in the net trough and lashed down under a canvas rain cover, would serve as a bulwark against enemy musket fire. Up aloft a bosun was leading a dozen men who were securing the ship’s great yards, from which the vast sails hung, with lengths of chain. Other men were reeving spare halliards and sheets so that heavy coils of rope were forever tumbling through the rigging to thump on the decks. ‘They like slashing our rigging to bits,’ Captain Llewellyn told Sharpe. ‘The Dons and the Frogs both, they like to fire at the masts, see? So the chains stop the yards falling and the spare sheets are there if the others are shot through. Mind you, Sharpe, we’ll lose a stick or two before the day’s out. It rains blocks and broken spars in battle, it does!’ Llewellyn anticipated that dangerous downpour with relish. ‘Is your cutlass sharp?’

      ‘It could do with a better edge,’ Sharpe admitted.

      ‘Forrard on the weather deck, ‘Llewellyn said, ‘by the manger, there’s a man with a treadle wheel. He’ll be glad to hone it for you.’

      Sharpe joined a queue of men. Some had cutlasses, others had boarding axes while many had fetched down the boarding pikes which stood in racks about the masts on the upper decks. The goats, sensing that their routine had changed, bleated piteously. They had been milked for the last time and now a seaman rolled up his sleeves before slaughtering them with a long knife. The manger, with its dangerously combustible straw, was being dismantled and the goats’ carcasses would be packed in salt for a future meal. The first beast struggled briefly, then the smell of fresh blood cut through the ship’s usual stench.

      Some of the men invited Sharpe to go to the head of the queue, but he waited his turn as the nearby gunners teased him. ‘Come to see a proper battle, sir?’

      ‘You’d never win a scrap without a real soldier, lads.’

      ‘These’ll win it for us, sir,’ a man said, slapping the breech of his twenty-four-pounder on which someone had chalked the message ‘a pill for Boney’. The mess tables, on which the gunners ate, were being struck down into the hold. As much wooden furniture as possible was removed from the decks above water so that they could not be reduced to splinters that whirled lethally from every strike of enemy shot. Sharpe’s cot and chest were already gone, as was all the elegant furniture from Chase’s quarters. The precious chronometers and the barometer had been packed in straw and taken down to the hold. Some ships hoisted their more valuable furniture high into the rigging in hopes that it would be safe, while others had entrusted it to the ships’ boats that were being launched and towed astern to keep them from enemy gunnery.

      A gunner’s mate sharpened the cutlass on the wheel, tested its edge against his thumb, then gave Sharpe a toothless grin. ‘That’ll give the buggers a shave they’ll never forget, sir.’

      Sharpe tipped the man sixpence, then walked back down the deck just in time to see the panelled walls of Chase’s quarters being manoeuvred down the quarterdeck stairs on their way to the hold. The simpler wooden bulkheads from the officers’ cabins and the wardroom at the stern of the weather deck had already been struck down so that now, for the first time, Sharpe could see the whole length of the ship, from its wide stern windows all the way to where men swept up the last straw of the manger in the bows of the ship. The Pucelle was being stripped of her frills and turned into a fighting machine. He climbed to the quarterdeck and saw that was similarly empty. The wide space beneath the long poop, instead of holding cabins, was now an open sweep of deck from the wheel to the windows of Chase’s day cabin. The dining cabin had vanished, Sharpe’s quarters were gone, the pictures had been taken below and the only remaining luxury was the black-and-white chequered canvas carpet on which the two eighteen-pounder guns stood.

      Connors, stationed on the poop to watch for the flagship’s signals which were being repeated by the frigate Euryalus, called down to Chase. ‘We’re to bear up in succession on the flagship’s course, sir.’ Chase just nodded and watched as the Victory, leading the line, swung to starboard so that she was now heading straight for the enemy. The wind, such as it was, came from directly behind her and Captain Hardy, doubtless on Nelson’s orders, already had men up on his yards to extend the slender poles from which he would hang his studdingsails.

      Nine ships behind the Pucelle another three-decker swung to starboard. This was the Royal Sovereign, the flagship of Admiral Collingwood, Nelson’s second-in-command. Her bright copper gleamed in the morning light as the ships behind followed her eastwards. Chase looked from the Victory to the Royal Sovereign, then back to the Victory again. ‘Two columns,’ he said aloud, ‘that’s what he’s doing. Making two columns.’

      Even Sharpe could understand that. The enemy fleet formed a ragged line that stretched for about four miles along the eastern horizon and now the British fleet was turning directly towards that line. The ships turned in succession, those at the front of the fleet curling round to make a line behind the Victory and those at the back following in the Royal Sovereign’s wake, so that the two short lines of ships were sailing straight for the enemy like a pair of horns thrusting at a shield.

      ‘We’ll set studdingsails when we’ve turned, Mister Haskell,’ Chase said.

      ‘Aye aye, sir.’

      The Conqueror,

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