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‘That soon?’
‘If we’re lucky,’ the captain said again, then reached out and touched the wooden rail.
The eastern sky was grey now, streaked with cloud, but soon a leak of pink, like the dye from a redcoat’s jacket seeping in the rain onto uniform trousers, suffused the grey. The ship quivered to the seas, left a white wake, raced. The pink turned red, and deeper red, glowing like a furnace over Africa. ‘They’ll have seen us by now,’ Chase said, and took a speaking trumpet from the rail. ‘Keep your eyes sharp!’ he called to the lookouts, then flinched. ‘That was unnecessary,’ he chided himself, then corrected the damage by raising the trumpet again and promising a week’s worth of rum ration to the man who first sighted the enemy. ‘He deserves to be dead drunk,’ Chase said.
The east flared to brilliance and became too bright to look at as the sun at last inched above the horizon. Night had gone, the sea was spread naked under the burning sky and the Pucelle was alone.
For the distant sail had vanished.
Captain Llewellyn was angry. Everyone on board was irritated. The loss of the other ship had caused morale to plummet on the Pucelle so that small mistakes were constantly being made. The bosun’s mates were lashing out with their rope ends, officers were snarling, the crew was sullen, but Captain Llewellyn Llewellyn was genuinely angry and apprehensive.
Before the ship sailed from England he had taken aboard a crate of grenades. ‘They’re French ones,’ he told Sharpe, ‘so I’ve no idea what’s in them. Powder, of course, and some kind of fulminate. They’re made of glass. You light it, you throw it and you pray that it kills someone. Devilish things, they are, quite devilish.’
But the grenades were lost. They were supposed to be in the forward magazine deep on the orlop deck, but a search by Llewellyn’s lieutenant and two sergeants had failed to find the devices. To Sharpe the loss of the grenades was just another blow of ill fortune on a day that seemed ill-starred for the Pucelle, but Llewellyn reckoned it was far more serious than that. ‘Some fool might have put them in the hold,’ he said. ‘We bought them from the Viper when she was being refitted. They took them in an action off Antigua and their captain didn’t want them. Reckoned they were too dangerous. If Chase finds them in the hold he’ll crucify me, and I don’t blame him. Their proper place is in a magazine.’
A dozen marines were organized into a search party and Sharpe joined them in the deep hold where the rats ruled and the ship’s stink was foully concentrated. Sharpe had no need to be there, Llewellyn had not even asked him to help, but he preferred to be doing something useful rather than endure the bad-tempered disappointment that had soured the deck ever since daybreak.
It took three hours, but eventually a sergeant found the grenades in a box that had the word ‘biscuit’ stencilled on its lid. ‘God knows what’s in the magazines, then,’ Llewellyn said sarcastically. ‘They’re probably full of salt beef. That bloody man Cowper!’ Cowper was the ship’s purser, in charge of the Pucelle’s supplies. The purser was not quite an officer, but was generally treated as one, and he was thoroughly disliked. ‘It’s the fate of pursers,’ Llewellyn had told Sharpe, ‘to be hated. It is why God put them on earth. They are supposed to supply things, but rarely can, and if they do then the things are usually the wrong size or the wrong colour or the wrong shape.’ Pursers, like the army’s sutlers, could trade on their own account, and their venality was famous. ‘Cowper probably hid them,’ Llewellyn said, ‘thinking he could sell them to some benighted savage. Bloody man!’ Now, having cursed the purser, the Welshman took one of the grenades from the box and handed it to Sharpe. ‘Packed with scrap metal, see? That thing could go off like case shot!’
Sharpe had never handled a grenade before. The old British ones, long discarded for being ineffective, had resembled a miniature shell that had been launched from a bowl-like attachment at the front of a musket, but this French weapon was made of a dark-green glass. The light was poor in the hold, but he held the grenade close to one of the marine’s lanterns and saw that the interior of the glass globe, which was about the size of a decent suet pudding, was packed with scraps of metal. A fuse protruded from one side, sealed with a ring of melted wax. ‘You light the fuse,’ Llewellyn said, ‘throw the damn thing, and I suppose the glass container shatters when it falls. The lit fuse communicates to the powder and that’s the end of a Frenchman.’ He paused, frowning at the glass ball. ‘I hope.’ He took the grenade back and fondled it like a baby. ‘I wonder if Captain Chase would let us try one. If we had men standing by with buckets of water?’
‘Make a dirty mark on his nice clean deck?’ Sharpe asked.
‘I suppose he won’t,’ Llewellyn said sadly. ‘Still, if it comes to a battle I’ll give some to the boys up the masts and they can hurl them onto the enemy decks. They have to be good for something.’
‘Chuck ’em overboard,’ Sharpe advised.
‘Dear me, no! I don’t want to hurt the fish, Sharpe!’
Llewellyn, hugely relieved by the discovery, had the precious grenades taken to the forward magazine and Sharpe followed the marines up the ladder to the orlop deck which, being beneath the water line, was almost as dark as the hold. The marines went forrard, while Sharpe went towards the stern, intending to climb to Chase’s dining cabin for midday dinner, but he could not use the companionway up to the lower deck for a man in a faded black coat was clambering unsteadily down the ladder. Sharpe instinctively waited, then saw that it was Malachi Braithwaite who so cautiously descended the rungs. Sharpe stepped swiftly back into the surgeon’s cabin where the red-painted walls and table waited for battle’s casualties and from there he watched Braithwaite take a lantern from a hook beside the companionway. The secretary fumbled with a tinderbox, blew on the charred linen to make a flame and lit the oil lamp. He put the lamp on the deck, then grunted as he heaved up the aft hatch of the hold to release a stench of bilge water and rot. Braithwaite shuddered, nerved himself, then took the lantern and clambered down into the ship’s depths.
Sharpe followed. There were moments in life, he thought, when fate played into his hands. There had been such a moment when he met Sergeant Hakeswill and joined the army, and another on the battlefield at Assaye when a general had been unhorsed, and now Braithwaite was alone in the hold. Sharpe stood by the hatch and watched Braithwaite’s lantern bob as the secretary went slowly down the ladder, and then went aft towards the place where the officers’ dunnage was stored.
Sharpe dropped down the ladder and carefully pulled the hatch shut behind him. He went stealthily, though any noise his shoes made on the rungs was masked by the creak of the great pine masts which protruded down through all the decks to be rooted in the elmwood keel. The sound of the flexing masts was magnified in the hold, which also reverberated to the squelching clatter of the ship’s six pumps, the sound of the sea and the grating screech of the rudder turning on its pintles.
This after part of the hold was isolated from the forward part of the ship by a great heap of water butts and vinegar barrels that stretched from the planking above the bilge to the beams of the orlop deck twelve feet above. Those beams were supported by great shafts of oak that, in the dim lantern light, looked like the pillars of an old, smoke-darkened church. Braithwaite threaded his way between the oak pillars, climbing the gentle rise of the ship’s hull towards a stack of shelves at the very back of the hold that shielded a small space in the stern that was known as the lady hole because it provided the safest place on board during a battle. There was nothing valuable kept on the shelves, merely the