Then the longboats towing the Revenant were suddenly called back. Chase grunted. “They probably plan to tow her head around,” he suggested, “to show us her broadside. Drummer!”
A marine boy stepped forward. “Sir?”
“Beat to quarters,” Chase said, then held up a hand. “No, belay that! Belay!”
The wind was not so fickle after all, and the Revenant’s boats had not been recalled to turn the ship, but rather because Montmorin had seen the flickering cat’s-paws of wind ruffling the water at his stern. Now her sails lifted, stretched and tightened and the Frenchman was suddenly sliding ahead, just out of cannon range. “Damn,” Chase said mildly, “damn and blast his French luck.” The flintlock was dismounted, the tompion hammered into the muzzle, the gunport closed and the twenty-four-pounder secured.
Next day the Revenant pulled ahead again, the beneficiary of an unfair breeze, and by the end of the week of calms the two ships were again almost an horizon apart, though now the French ship was directly ahead of the Pucelle. “Far enough,” Chase said bitterly, “to see her safe into harbor.”
The next few days saw contrary currents and hard winds from the northeast so that both ships beat up as close as they could. Chase called it sailing on a bowline and the Pucelle proved the better sailor and slowly, so slowly, she began to make up the lost ground. The ship smacked hard into the waves, shattering the seas across the decks and sails. Rain squalls sometimes blotted the Revenant from the Pucelle’s view, but she always reappeared and, through his telescope, Sharpe could see her pitching like the Pucelle. Once, gazing at the black and yellow warship, he saw strips of canvas flutter at her bow and she seemed to slew toward him for a few seconds, but in another few heartbeats the Frenchman had hoisted a new sail to replace the one that had blown out. “Worn canvas,” the first lieutenant commented. “Reckon that’s why we’re faster on the wind. His foresails are threadbare.”
“Or his stays aren’t tight enough,” Chase muttered, watching as the Revenant resumed her previous course. “But he made that sail change quickly,” he acknowledged ruefully.
“He probably had the new sail bent on ready, sir,” Haskell suggested.
“Like as not,” Chase agreed. “He’s good, our Louis, ain’t he?”
“Probably got English blood,” Haskell said in all seriousness.
They passed the Cape Verde Islands which were mere blurs on a rain-smudged horizon and, a week later, in another rainstorm, they glimpsed the Canaries. There was plenty of local shipping about, but the sight of two warships sent them all scurrying for shelter.
There was just one more week, maybe a day less, to Cadiz. “She’ll make port on my birthday,” Chase said, staring through his glass, then he collapsed the telescope and turned away to hide his bitterness for, unless a miracle intervened, he knew he faced utter failure. He had one week to catch the Frenchman, but the wind had backed and for the next few days the Revenant kept her lead so that the sun-faded tricolor at her stern was a constant taunt to her pursuers.
“What will Chase do if we don’t catch her?” Grace asked Sharpe that night.
“Sail on to England,” he said. Plymouth, probably, and he imagined landing on a wet autvimn afternoon on a stone quay where he would be forced to watch Lady Grace going away in a hired four-wheeler.
“I shall write to you,” she said, reading his thoughts, “if I know where.”
“Shorncliffe, in Kent. The barracks.” He could not hide his misery. The stupid dreams of a ridiculous love were fading into a grim reality, just as Chase’s hopes of catching the Revenant were fading.
Grace lay beside him, gazing up at the deck, listening to the hiss of rain falling on the deadlight of the cabin’s scuttle. She was dressed, for it was almost time for her to slip out of his door and go down to her own cabin, yet she clung to him and Sharpe saw the old sadness in her eyes. “There is something,” she said softly, “that I was not going to tell you.”
“Not going to tell me?” he asked. “Which means you will tell me.”
“I was not going to tell you,” she said, “because there is nothing to be done about it.”
He guessed what she was going to say, but let her say it.
“I’m pregnant,” she said and sounded forlorn.
He squeezed her hand, said nothing. He had known what she was going to say, but was now surprised by it.
“Are you angry?” she asked nervously.
“I’m happy,” he said, and laid a hand on her flat belly. It was true. He was filled with joy, even though he knew that joy had no future.
“The child is yours,” she said.
“You know that?”
“I know that. Maybe it’s the laudanum, but… “ She stopped and shrugged. “It’s yours. But William will think it’s his.”
“Not if he can’t… “
“He will think what I tell him!” she interrupted fiercely, then began to cry and put her head on Sharpe’s shoulder. “It is yours, Richard, and I would give the world for the child to know you.”
But they would be home soon, and she would go away and Sharpe would never see the child for he and Grace were illicit lovers and there was no future for them. None. They were doomed.
And next morning everything changed.
It was a chill, wet day. The wind was north of northwest, so that the Pucelle sailed hard on her bowline. Rain squalls swept across the sea, seethed on the deck and dripped from the sails. The water was green and gray, streaked by foam and whipped by the wind. The officers on the quarterdeck looked unfamiliar for they were in thick oiled coats, and Sharpe, feeling the cold for the first time since he had gone to India, shivered. The ship bucked and shuddered, fighting sea and wind, and sometimes heeled far over as a gusting squall strained the sails. Seven men manned the double wheel and it needed all their combined strength to hold the heavy ship up into the wind’s teeth. “A touch of autumn in the air,” Captain Chase greeted Sharpe. Chase’s cocked hat was covered with canvas and tied beneath his chin. “Did you have breakfast?”
“I did, sir.” It was not much of a breakfast for supplies were getting low on the Pucelle and the officers, like the men, subsisted on short rations of beef, ship’s biscuit and Scotch coffee which was a vile concoction of burned bread dissolved in hot water and sweetened with sugar.
“We’re gaining on him,” Chase said, nodding toward the distant Revenant which was evidently having as hard a time as the Pucelle, for she was shattering the seas with her bluff bow and smothering her hull in spray as she pushed as near northward as her helmsman could manage. The Pucelle closed the gap relentlessly, as she always did when the ships were hard on the wind, but just after the second bell of the forenoon watch the breeze went into the south-southwest and the Revenant was no longer struggling into the wind, but could sail with her canvas spread to the treacherous wind’s kindness and so keep her lead. Then, just a half hour later, she unexpectedly turned to the east which meant she was heading toward the Straits of Gibraltar instead of Cadiz.
“Starboard, starboard!” Chase called to the helmsman.
Haskell ran up to the quarterdeck as the seven men spun the Pucelle’s wheel. Sail handlers ran about the deck, loosing sheets. The sails flapped, spattering rainwater across the deck. “Has she blown out her foresails again?” Haskell shouted over the noise of the beating canvas.