“So the clever thing to have done, Sharpe,” Chase said, “would have been to introduce yourself to Peculiar while he was living ashore and given the greedy bugger a present, because then he’d have assigned you to decent Quarters. But if vou haven’t crossed Peculiar’s palm with silver, Sharpe, he’ll like as not have you down in lower steerage with the rats. Maindeck steerage is much better and doesn’t cost a penny more, but the lower steerage is nothing but farts, vomit and misery all the way home.” The two men had left the narrow alleys and were leading the barge crew down a street that was edged with sewage-filled ditches. It was a tin-smithing quarter and the forges were already burning bright as the sound of hammers rattled the night. Pale cows watched the sailors pass and dogs barked frantically, waking the homeless poor who huddled between the ditches and the house walls. “It’s a pity you’re sailing in convoy,” Chase said.
“Why, sir?”
“Because a convoy goes at the speed of its slowest boat,” Chase explained. “Calliope could make England in three months if she was allowed to fly, but she’ll have to limp. I wish I was sailing with you. I’d offer you passage myself as thanks for your rescue tonight, but alas, I am ghost-hunting.”
“Ghost-hunting, sir?”
“You’ve heard of the Revenant?”
“No, sir.”
“The ignorance of you soldiers,” Chase said, amused. “The Revenant, my dear Sharpe, is a French seventy-four that is haunting the Indian Ocean. Hides herself in Mauritius, sallies out to snap up prizes, then scuttles back before we can catch her. I’m here to stifle her ardor, only before I can hunt her I have to scrape the bottom. My ship’s too slow after eight months at sea, so we scour off the barnacles to quicken her up.”
“I wish you good fortune, sir,” Sharpe said, then frowned. “But what’s that to do with ghosts?” He usually did not like asking such questions. Sharpe had once marched in the ranks of a redcoat battalion, but he had been made into an officer and so found himself in a world where almost every man was educated except himself. He had become accustomed to allowing small mysteries to slide past him, but Sharpe decided he did not mind revealing his ignorance to a man as good-natured as Chase.
“Revenant is the Frog word for ghost,” Chase said. “Noun, masculine. I had a tutor for these things who flogged the language into me and I’d like to flog it out of him now.” In a nearby yard a cockerel crowed and Chase glanced up at the sky. “Almost dawn,” he said. “Perhaps you’ll permit me to give you breakfast? Then my lads will take you out to the Calliope. God speed your way home, eh?”
Home. It seemed an odd word to Sharpe, for he did not have a home other than the army and he had not seen England in six years. Six years! Yet he felt no pang of delight at the prospect of sailing to England. He did not think of it as home, indeed he had no idea where home was, but wherever that elusive place lay, he was going there.
Chase was living ashore while his ship was cleaned of the weed. “We tip her over, scrape her copper-sheathed bum clean when the tide’s low, and float her off,” he explained as servants brought coffee, boiled eggs, bread rolls, ham, cold chicken and a basket of mangoes. “Bum-scrubbing is a damned nuisance. All the guns have to be shipped and half the contents of the hold dragged out, but she’ll sail like a beauty when it’s done. Have more eggs than that, Sharpe! You must be hungry. I am. Like the house? It belongs to my wife’s first cousin. He’s a trader here, though right now he’s up in the hills doing whatever traders do when they’re making themselves rich. It was his steward who alerted me to Nana Rao’s tricks. Sit down, Sharpe, sit down. Eat.”
They took their breakfast in the shade of a wide verandah that looked out on a small garden, a road and the sea. Chase was gracious, generous and apparently oblivious of the vast gulf that existed between a mere ensign, the lowest of the army’s commissioned ranks, and a post captain who was officially the equivalent of an army colonel, though on board his own ship such a man outranked the very powers of heaven. Sharpe had been conscious of that wide gulf at first, but it had gradually dawned on him that Joel Chase was genuinely good-natured and Sharpe had warmed to the naval officer whose gratitude was unstinting and heartfelt. “Do you realize that bugger Panjit really could have had me in front of the magistrates?” Chase inquired. “Dear God, Sharpe, that would have been a pickle! And Nana Rao would have vanished, and who’d have believed me if I said the dead had come back to life? Do have more ham, please. It would have meant an inquiry at the very least, and almost certainly a court martial. I’d have been damned lucky to have survived with my command intact. But how was I to know he had a private army?”
“We came out of it all right, sir.”
“Thanks to you, Sharpe, thanks to you.” Chase shuddered. “My father always said I’d be dead before I was thirty, and I’ve beaten that by five years, but one day I’ll jump into trouble and there’ll be no ensign to pull me out.” He patted the bag which held the money he had taken from Nana Rao and Panjit. “And between you and me, Sharpe, this cash is a windfall. A windfall! D’you think we could grow mangoes in England?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
“I shall try. Plant a couple in a warm spot of the garden and who knows?” Chase poured coffee and stretched out his long legs. He was curious why Sharpe, a man in his late twenties, should only be an ensign, but he made the inquiry with an exquisite tact and once he discovered that Sharpe had been promoted from the ranks he was genuine in his admiration. “I once had a captain who’d come up through the hawse-hole,” he told Sharpe, “and he was damned good! Knew his business. Understood what went on in the dark places where most captains dare not look. I reckon the army’s lucky in you, Sharpe.”
“I’m not sure they think so, sir.”
“I shall whisper in some ears, Sharpe, though if I don’t catch the Revenant there’ll be precious few who’ll listen to me.”
“You’ll catch her, sir.”
“I pray so, but she’s a fast beast. Fast and slippery. All French ships are. God knows, the buggers can’t sail them, but they do know how to build ‘em. French ships are like French women, Sharpe. Beautiful and fast, but hopelessly manned. Have some mustard.” Chase pushed the jar across the table, then petted a skinny black kitten as he stared past the palm trees toward the sea. “I do like coffee,” he said, then pointed out to sea. “There’s the Calliope.”
Sharpe looked, but all he could see was a mass of shipping far out in the harbor beyond the shallower water which was busy with scores of bumboats, launches and fishing craft.
“She’s the one drying her topsails,” Chase said, and Sharpe saw that one of the far ships had hung out her topmost sails, but at this distance she looked like the other dozen East Indiamen that would sail home together to protect themselves against the privateers who haunted the Indian Ocean. From the shore they looked like naval ships, for their hulls were banded black and white to suggest that massive broadsides were concealed behind closed gunports, but the ruse would not mislead any privateer. Those ships, their hulls stuffed with the riches of India, were the greatest prizes any corsair or French naval captain could wish to take. If a man wanted to live and die rich then all he needed to do was capture an Indiaman, which is why the great ships sailed in convoy.