“No, my lord,” Sharpe said. He had always thought that the newfangled 95th was probably made of the army’s leavings and was dressed in green because no one wanted to waste good red cloth on its soldiers.
“Because they’re intelligent,” the admiral said enthusiastically. “Intelligent! It is a quality sadly despised by the military, but intelligence does have its uses.” He looked up at Sharpe’s face, peering at the tiny blue-flecked marks on Sharpe’s scarred cheek. “Powder scars, Mister Sharpe, and I note you are still an ensign. Would I offend you by suspecting that you once served in the ranks?”
“I did, my lord.”
“Then you have my warmest admiration, indeed you do,” Nelson said energetically, and his admiration seemed entirely genuine. “You must be a remarkable man,” the admiral added.
“No, my lord,” Sharpe said, and he wanted to say that Nelson was the man to admire, but he did not know how to phrase the compliment.
“You’re modest, Mister Sharpe, and that is not good,” Nelson said sternly. To Sharpe’s surprise he found he was alone with the admiral. Chase, Blackwood and the other officers stood on the starboard side while Nelson and Sharpe paced up and down under the larboard hammock nettings. A dozen seamen, grinning at their admiral, had begun collapsing the paneled bulkheads so that no enemy shot could turn them into lethal splinters that could sweep the quarterdeck. “I am not in favor of modesty,” Nelson said, and once again the admiral was overwhelming Sharpe with a flattering intimacy, “and you doubtless find that surprising? We are told, are we not, that modesty is among the virtues, but modesty is not a warrior’s virtue. You and I, Sharpe, have been forced to rise from a lowly place and we do not achieve that by hiding our talents. I am a country clergyman’s son and now?” He waved his one hand at the far enemy fleet, then unconsciously touched the four brilliant stars, the jeweled decorations of his orders of knighthood, that glinted on the left breast of his coat. “Be proud of what you have done,” he said to Sharpe, “then go and do better.”
“As you will, my lord.”
“No,” Nelson said abruptly, and for a moment he looked desperately frail again. “No,” he repeated, “for in bringing these two fleets together, Sharpe, I will have done my life’s work.” He looked so forlorn that Sharpe had a ridiculous urge to comfort the admiral. “Kill those ships,” Nelson went on, gesturing at the enemy fleet filling the eastern horizon, “and Bonaparte and his allies can never invade England. We shall have caged the beast in Europe, and what will be left for a poor sailor to do then, eh?” He smiled. “But there will be work for soldiers, and you, I know, are a good one. Just remember, though, you must hate a Frenchman like the very devil!” The admiral said this with a venomous force, showing his steel for the first time. “Never let go of that sentiment, Mister Sharpe,” he added, “never!” He turned back to the waiting officers. “I am keeping Captain Chase from his ship. And it will be time for you to go soon, Blackwood.”
“I shall stay a while longer, if I may, my lord?” Blackwood said.
“Of course. Thank you for coming, Chase. I’m sure you had more important business to attend to, but you have been kind. Will you accept some oranges as a gift? They’re fresh out from Gibraltar.”
“I should be honored, my lord, honored.”
“You do me honor by joining us, Chase. So lay alongside and hit away. Hit away. We shall make them wish they had never seen our ships!”
Chase descended into his barge in a kind of trance. A net of oranges, enough to feed half a regiment, lay on the barge’s bottom boards. For a time, as Hopper stroked back down the line of warships, Chase just sat silent, but then he could contain himself no longer. “What a man!” he exclaimed. “What a man! My God, we’re going to do some slaughter today! We shall murder them, murder them!”
“Amen,” Hopper said.
“Praise the Lord,” Clouter volunteered.
“What did you think of him, Sharpe?” Chase asked.
Sharpe shook his head, almost lost for words. “What was it you said, sir? That you would follow him into the throat of hell? By God, sir, I’d follow that man into the belly of hell and down to its bowels too.”
“And if he led us,” Chase said reverently, “we would win there, just as we shall win this day.”
If they ever got into battle. For the wind was still light, desperately light, and the fleet sailed slow as haystacks. It seemed to Sharpe that they could never reach the enemy, and then he was sure of it, for an hour after he and Chase regained the Pucelle’s deck, the combined enemy fleet turned clumsily around to sail back northward. They were heading for Cadiz in a last attempt to escape Nelson whose ships, their white wings spread, ghosted toward hell in a wind so light that it seemed the very heavens were holding their breath.
The Pucelle’s band, more enthusiastic than it was skilled, played “Hearts of Oak,” “Nancy Dawson,” “Hail Britannia,” “Drops of Brandy” and a dozen other tunes, most of which Sharpe did not know. He did not know many of the words either, but the sailors bellowed them out, not bothering to disguise the coarsest verses even though Lady Grace was on the quarterdeck. Lord William, when one particularly obscene song echoed up from the weather deck, remonstrated with Captain Chase, but Chase pointed out that some of his men were about to be silenced forever and he was in no temper to bridle their tongues now. “Your ladyship can go to the hold now?” he suggested.
“I am not offended, Captain,” Lady Grace said. “I know when to be deaf.”
Lord William, who had chosen to wear a slim sword and had a long-barreled pistol bolstered at his waist, stalked to the starboard rail and stared at Admiral Collingwood’s column that lay a little more than a mile southward. Collingwood’s big three-decker, the Royal Sovereign, newly come from England with her freshly coppered bottom, was sailing faster than the other ships so that a gap had opened between her and the rest of Collingwood’s squadron.
The French and Spanish seemed no nearer, though when Sharpe extended his glass and looked at the enemy fleet he saw that their hulls were now above the horizon. They showed no flags yet and their gunports were still closed, for the battle, if one ever ensued, was still two or three hours away. Some of the ships were painted black and yellow like the British fleet, others were black and white, two were all black, while some were banded with red. Lieutenant Haskell had commented that they were attempting to form a line of battle, but their attempts were clumsy, for Sharpe could see great gaps in the fleet which looked like clumps of ships strung along the horizon. One ship did stand out, for, maybe a third of the way from the front of the line, there was a towering vessel with four gundecks. “The Santisima Trinidad,” Haskell told Sharpe, “with at least one hundred and thirty guns. She’s the largest ship in the world.” Even at such a distance the Spaniard’s hull looked like a cliff, but a cliff pierced with gunports. Sharpe tracked the French line, looking for the Revenant, but there were so many black-and-yellow two-decked ships that he could not distinguish her.
Some of the men were writing letters, using their guns as desks. Others wrote wills. Few could write, but those who could took the dictation of others and the letters were taken down to the safety of the orlop deck. The wind stayed feeble; indeed it seemed to Sharpe that the great swells coming from the west heaved the ships on with more effect than the wind. Those seas were monstrously long, looking like great smooth hills that ran silent and green toward the enemy. “I fear,” Chase said, coming to Sharpe’s side, “that we are in for a storm.”