LITMIR.BIZ

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Monsieur Vaillard.’

      Lady Grace pushed her chair back. Captain Chase tried to stop her retiring, saying that she was most welcome to breathe the cigar smoke that was about to fill the cabin, but she insisted on leaving and so the whole table stood.

      ‘You will not object, Captain, if I walk on your deck for a while?’ Lady Grace asked.

      ‘I should be delighted to have it so honoured, milady.’

      Brandy and cigars were produced, but the company did not stay long. Lord William suggested a hand of whist, but Chase had lost too much on his first voyage with his lordship and explained he had decided to give up playing cards altogether. Lieutenant Haskell promised a lively game in the wardroom, and Lord William and the others followed him down to the weather deck and then aft. Chase bade his visitors a good night, then invited Sharpe into the day cabin at the stern. ‘One last brandy, Sharpe.’

      ‘I don’t want to keep you up, sir.’

      ‘I’ll turf you out when I’m tired. Here.’ He gave Sharpe a glass, then led the way into the more comfortable day cabin. ‘Lord, but that William Hale is a bore,’ he said, ‘though I confess I was surprised by his wife. Never seen her so lively! Last time she was aboard I thought she was going to wilt and die.’

      ‘Maybe it was the wine tonight?’ Sharpe suggested.

      ‘Maybe, but I hear tales.’

      ‘Tales?’ Sharpe asked warily.

      ‘That you not only rescued her cousin, but that you rescued her? To the detriment of one French lieutenant who now sleeps with his ancestors?’

      Sharpe nodded, but said nothing.

      Chase smiled. ‘She seems the better for the experience. And that secretary of his is a gloomy bird, isn’t he? Scarce a damn word all night and he’s an Oxford man!’ To Sharpe’s relief Chase left the subject of Lady Grace and instead enquired whether Sharpe would consider putting himself under Captain Llewellyn’s command and so become an honorary marine. ‘If we do catch the Revenant,’ Chase said, ‘we’ll be trying to capture her. We might hammer her into submission’ – he put out a hand and surreptitiously touched the table – ‘but we still might have to board her. We’ll need fighting men if that happens, so can I count on your help? Good! I’ll tell Llewellyn that you’re now his man. He’s a thoroughly first-rate fellow, despite being a marine and a Welshman, and I doubt he’ll pester you over-much. Now, I must go on deck and make certain they’re not steering in circles. You’ll come?’

      ‘I will, sir.’

      So Sharpe was now an honorary marine.

      The Pucelle used every sail that Chase could cram onto her masts. He even rigged extra hawsers to stay the masts so that yet more canvas could be carried aloft and hung from spars that jutted out from the yards. There were studdingsails and skyscrapers, staysails, royals, spritsails and topsails, a cloud of canvas that drove the warship westwards. Chase called it hanging out his laundry, and Sharpe saw how the crew responded to their captain’s enthusiasm. They were as eager as Chase to prove the Pucelle the fastest sailor on the sea.

      And so they flew westwards until, deep in a dark night, the sea became lumpy and the ship rolled like a drunk and Sharpe was woken by the rush of feet on the deck. The cot, in which he was alone, swung wildly and he fell hard when he rolled out of it. He did not bother to dress, but just put on a boat cloak that Chase had lent him, then let himself out of the door onto the quarterdeck where he could see almost nothing, for clouds were obscuring the moon, yet he could hear orders being bellowed and hear the voices of men high in the rigging above him. Sharpe still did not understand how men could work in the dark, a hundred feet above a pitching deck, clinging to thin lines and hearing the wind’s shriek in their ears. It was a bravery, he reckoned, as great as any that was needed on a battlefield.

      ‘Is that you, Sharpe?’ Chase’s voice called.

      ‘Yes, sir.’

      ‘It’s the Agulhas Current,’ Chase said happily, ‘sweeping us round the tip of Africa! We’re shortening sail. It’ll be rough for a day or two!’

      Daylight revealed broken seas being whipped ragged white by the wind. The Pucelle pitched into the steep waves, sometimes shattering them into clouds of drenching spray that rose above the foresail and rained down in streams from the canvas, yet still Chase pushed his ship and drove her and talked to her. He still gave suppers in his quarters, for he enjoyed company in the evening, but any shift of wind would drive him from the table onto the quarterdeck. He watched each cast of the log eagerly and jotted down the ship’s speed, and rejoiced when, as the African coast curved westwards, he was able to hoist his full laundry again and feel the long hull respond to the wind’s force.

      ‘I think we’ll catch her,’ he told Sharpe one day.

      ‘She can’t be going this fast,’ Sharpe guessed.

      ‘Oh, she probably is! But my guess is that Montmorin won’t have dared go too close to land. He’ll have been forced far to the south in case he was spotted by our ships out of Cape Town. So we’re cutting the corner on him! Who knows, we may be only a score or so of miles behind him?’

      The Pucelle was seeing other ships now. Most were small native trading vessels, but they also passed two British merchantmen, an American whaler and a Royal Navy sloop with which there was a brisk exchange of signals. Connors, the third lieutenant who had the responsibility of looking after the ship’s signals, ordered a man to haul a string of brightly coloured flags up into the rigging, then put a telescope to his eye and called out the sloop’s answering message. ‘She’s the Hirondelle, sir, out of Cape Town.’

      ‘Ask if she’s seen any other ships of the line.’

      The flags were found, sorted and hoisted, and the answer came back no. Chase then sent a long message telling the Hirondelle’s captain that the Pucelle was pursuing the Revenant into the Atlantic. In time that news would reach the admiral in Bombay who must already have been wondering what had happened to his precious seventy-four.

      Land was spotted the next day, but it was distant and obscured by a squall of rain that rattled on the sails and bounced from the decks which were scrubbed clean every morning by grinding sand into the timber beneath blocks of stone the size of bibles. Holy-stoning, the men called it. Still the Pucelle drove on with every last scrap of canvas hoisted, sailing as though the devil himself was on her tail. The wind stayed strong, but for long days it brought stinging rain so that everything below deck became damp and greasy. Then, on another day of driving rain and gusting wind, they passed Cape Town, though Sharpe could see nothing of the place except a misty glimpse of a great flat-topped mountain half shrouded in cloud.

      Captain Chase ordered new charts spread on the big table in his day cabin. ‘I have a choice now,’ he told Sharpe. ‘Either I head west into the Atlantic, or ride the current up the African coast until we find the southeast trades.’

      The choice seemed obvious to Sharpe: ride the current, but he was no sailor. ‘I take a risk,’ Chase explained, ‘if I stay inshore. I get the land breezes and I have the current, but I also risk fog and I might get a westerly gale. Then we’re on a lee shore.’

      ‘And a lee shore means?’ Sharpe asked.

      ‘We’re dead,’ Chase said shortly, and let the chart roll itself up with a snap. ‘Which is why the Sailing Directions insist we go west,’ he added, ‘but if we do then we risk being becalmed.’

      ‘Where do you think the Revenant is?’

      ‘She’s out west. She’s avoiding land. At least I hope she is.’ Chase stared out of the stern window at the white-fretted wake. He looked tired now, and older, because his natural ebullience had been drained from him by days and nights of broken sleep and unbroken worry. ‘Maybe she stayed inshore?’ he mused. ‘She could have hoisted false colours. But the Hirondelle didn’t see her. Mind you, in these damned squalls

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