Sharpe’s Trafalgar: The Battle of Trafalgar, 21 October 1805

‘There’s your target!’ Captain Cromwell called and Sharpe, standing on the gun carriage, saw an impossibly small cask bobbing on the distant waves. He had no idea what the range was, and all he could do was wait until the cask floated into line then pause until a wave rolled the ship upwards when he skipped smartly aside and jerked the lanyard. The flintlock snapped forward and a small jet of fire whipped up from the touch-hole, then the gun hammered back on its small wheels and its smoke billowed halfway up the mainsail as the powder flame licked and curled in the pungent white cloud. The big breeching rope quivered, scattering more flecks of paint, and Mister Binns called excitedly from the poop, ‘A hit, sir, a hit! A hit! Plumb, sir! A hit!’

‘We heard you the first time, Mister Binns,’ Cromwell growled.

‘But it’s a hit, sir!’ Binns protested, thinking that no one believed him.

‘Up to the main cap!’ Cromwell snapped at Binns. ‘I told you to be quiet. If you cannot learn to curb your tongue, boy, then go and shriek at the clouds. Up!’ He pointed to the very top of the mainmast. ‘And you will stay there until I can abide your malodorous presence again.’

Mathilde was applauding enthusiastically from the quarterdeck. Lady Grace was also there and Sharpe had been acutely aware of her presence as he aimed the gun. ‘That was bleeding luck,’ the old seaman said.

‘Pure luck,’ Sharpe agreed.

‘And you’ve cost the captain ten guineas,’ the old man chuckled.

‘I have?’

‘He has a wager with Mister Tufnell that no one would ever hit the target.’

‘I thought gambling was forbidden on board.’

‘There’s lots that’s forbidden, sir, but that don’t mean it don’t happen.’

Sharpe’s ears were ringing from the terrible sound of the gun as he stepped away from the smoking weapon. Tufnell, the first lieutenant, insisted on shaking his hand and refused to countenance Sharpe’s insistence that the shot had been pure luck, then Tufnell stepped aside for Captain Cromwell had come down from the quarterdeck and was advancing on Sharpe. ‘Have you fired a cannon before?’ the captain enquired fiercely.

‘No, sir.’

Cromwell peered up into the rigging, then looked for his first officer. ‘Mister Tufnell!’

‘Sir?’

‘A broken horse! There, on the main topsail!’ Cromwell pointed. Sharpe followed the captain’s finger and saw that one of the footropes that the topmen would stand on when they were furling the sail had parted. ‘I will not command a ragged ship, Mister Tufnell,’ Cromwell snarled. ‘This ain’t a Thames hay barge, Mister Tufnell, but an Indiaman! Have it spliced, man, have it spliced!’

Tufnell sent two seamen aloft to mend the broken line, while Cromwell paused to glower at the next crew firing the gun. The cannon recoiled, the smoke blossomed, and the ball skipped across the waves a good hundred yards from the bobbing cask.

‘A miss!’ Binns shouted from the top of the mainmast.

‘I have an eye for an irregularity,’ Cromwell said in his harsh, low voice, ‘as I’ve no doubt you do, Mister Sharpe. You see a hundred men on parade and doubtless your eye goes to the one sloven with a dirty musket. Am I right?’

‘I hope so, sir.’

‘A broken horse can kill a man. It can tumble him to the deck, putting misery into a mother’s heart. Her son put his foot down and there was nothing beneath him but void. Do you want your mother to have a broken heart, Mister Sharpe?’

Sharpe decided this was no time to explain that he had long been orphaned. ‘No, sir.’

Cromwell glared around the main deck which was crowded with the men who formed the gun crews. ‘What is it that you notice about these men, Mister Sharpe?’

‘Notice, sir?’

‘They are in shirtsleeves, Mister Sharpe. All except you and me are in shirtsleeves. I keep my coat on, Sharpe, because I am captain of this ship and it is meet and right that a captain should appear formally dressed before his crew. But why, I ask myself, does Mister Sharpe keep on his wool jacket on a hot day? Do you believe you are captain of this scow?’

‘I just feel the cold, sir,’ Sharpe lied.

‘Cold?’ Cromwell sneered. He put his right foot on a crack between the deck planks and, when he lifted the shoe, a string of melting tar adhered to his sole. ‘You are not cold, Mister Sharpe, you are sweating. Sweating! So come with me, Mister Sharpe.’ The captain turned and led Sharpe up to the quarterdeck. The passengers watching the gunnery made way for the two men and Sharpe was suddenly conscious of Lady Grace’s perfume, then he followed Cromwell down the companionway into the great cabin where the captain had his quarters. Cromwell unlocked his door, pushed it open and gestured that Sharpe should go inside. ‘My home,’ the captain grunted.

Sharpe had expected that the captain would have one of the stern cabins with their big wide windows, but it was more profitable to sell such accommodation to passengers and Cromwell was content with a smaller cabin on the larboard side. It was still a comfortable home. A bunk bed was built into a wall of bookshelves while a table, hinged to the bulkhead, was smothered in unrolled charts that were weighted down with three lanterns and a pair of long-barrelled pistols. The daylight streamed in through an opened porthole, above which the sea’s reflection rippled on the white painted ceiling. Cromwell unlocked a small cupboard to reveal a barometer and, beside it, what appeared to be a fat pocket watch hanging from a hook. ‘Three hundred and twenty-nine guineas,’ Cromwell told Sharpe, tapping the timepiece.

‘I’ve never owned a watch,’ Sharpe said.

‘It is not a watch, Mister Sharpe,’ Cromwell said in disgust, ‘but a chronometer. A marvel of science. Between here and Britain I doubt it will lose more than two seconds. It is that machine, Mister Sharpe, that tells us where we are.’ He blew a fleck of dust from the chronometer’s face, tapped the barometer, then carefully closed and locked the cupboard. ‘I keep my treasures safe, Mister Sharpe. You, on the other hand, flaunt yours.’

Sharpe said nothing, and the captain waved at the cabin’s only chair. ‘Sit down, Mister Sharpe. Do you wonder about my name?’

Sharpe sat uneasily. ‘Your name?’ He shrugged. ‘It’s unusual, sir.’

‘It is peculiar,’ Peculiar Cromwell said, then gave a harsh laugh that betrayed no amusement. ‘My people, Mister Sharpe, were fervent Christians and they named me from the Bible. “The Lord has chosen thee to be a peculiar people unto himself,” the book of Deuteronomy, chapter fourteen, verse two. It is not easy, Mister Sharpe, living with such a name. It invites ridicule. In its time that name has made me a laughing stock!’ He said these last words with extraordinary force, as though resenting all the folk who had ever mocked him, but Sharpe, perched on the edge of the chair, could not imagine anyone mocking the harsh-voiced, heavy-faced Peculiar Cromwell.

Cromwell sat on his bunk bed, placed his elbows on the charts and fixed his eyes on Sharpe. ‘I was put aside for God, Mister Sharpe, and it makes for a lonely life. I was denied a proper education. Other men go to Oxford or Cambridge, they are immersed in knowledge, but I was sent to sea for my parents believed I would be beyond earthly temptation if I was far from any shore. But I taught myself, Mister Sharpe. I learned from books’ – he waved at the shelves – ‘and discovered that I am well named. I am peculiar, Mister Sharpe, in my opinions, apprehensions and conclusions.’ He shook his head sadly, rippling his long hair which rested on the shoulders of his heavy blue coat. ‘All around me I espy educated men, rational men, conventional men and, above all, sociable men, but I have discovered that no such creature ever did a great thing. It is among the lonely, Mister Sharpe, that true greatness occurs.’ He scowled, as though that burden was almost too heavy to bear. ‘You too, I think, are a peculiar man,’ Cromwell went on. ‘You have been plucked by destiny from your natural place among the dregs of society and have been translated into an officer. And that’ – he leaned forward and jabbed a finger at Sharpe – ‘must make for loneliness.’

‘I have never lacked friends,’ Sharpe said, evading the embarrassing conversation.

‘You trust yourself, Mister Sharpe,’ Cromwell boomed, ignoring Sharpe’s words, ‘as I have learned to trust myself in the knowledge that no one else can be trusted. We have been set aside, you and I, as lonely men doomed to watch the traffic of those who are not peculiar. But today, Mister Sharpe, I am going to insist that you put your mistrust aside. I shall demand that you trust me.’

‘In what, sir?’

Cromwell paused as the tiller ropes creaked and groaned beneath him, then glanced up at a telltale compass fixed above the bunk. ‘A ship is a small world, Mister Sharpe,’ he said, ‘and I am appointed the ruler of that world. Upon this vessel I am lord of all, and the power of life and death is granted to me, but I do not crave such power. What I crave, Mister Sharpe, is order. Order!’ He slapped a hand on the charts. ‘And I will not abide thievery on my ship!’

Sharpe sat up in indignation. ‘Thievery! Are you …’

‘No!’ Cromwell interrupted him. ‘Of course I am not accusing you. But there will be thievery, Mister Sharpe, if you continue to flaunt your wealth.’

Sharpe smiled. ‘I’m an ensign, sir, lowest of the low. You said yourself I’d been plucked out of my place, and you know there’s no money down there. I’m not wealthy.’

‘Then what, Mister Sharpe, is sewn into the seams of your garment?’ Cromwell asked.

Sharpe said nothing. A king’s ransom was sewn into the hems of his coat, the tops of his boots and the waistband of his trousers, and the jewels in his coat were showing because of the frailty of the red-dyed cloth.

‘Sailors are keen-eyed fellows, Mister Sharpe,’ Cromwell growled. He looked irritated when the gun fired from the main deck, as though the sound had interrupted his thinking. ‘Sailors have to be keen-eyed,’ he continued, ‘and mine are clever enough to know that a soldier hides his plunder on his person, and they’re keen-eyed enough to note that Mister Sharpe does not take off his coat, and one night, Mister Sharpe, when you go forrard to the heads, or when you take the air on the deck, a keen-eyed sailor will come at you from behind. A belaying pin? A strike at your skull? A splash in the night? Who would miss you?’ He smiled, revealing long yellow teeth, then touched the hilt of one of the pistols on the table. ‘If I were to shoot you now, strip your body and then push you through the scuttle, who would dare contradict my story that you had attacked me?’

Sharpe said nothing.

Cromwell’s hand stayed on the pistol. ‘You have a chest in your cabin?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘But you don’t trust my sailors. You know they will break through its lock in a matter of seconds.’

‘They would too,’ Sharpe said.

‘But they will not dare break into my chest!’ Cromwell declared, gesturing beneath the table where a vast iron-bound teak chest stood. ‘I want you to yield me your treasure now, Mister Sharpe, and I will sign for it and I will store it, and when we reach our destination you will be given it back. It is a normal procedure.’ He at last removed his hand from the gun and reached onto the bookshelf, taking down a small box that was filled with papers. ‘I have some money belonging to Lord William Hale in that chest, see?’ He handed one of the papers to Sharpe who saw that it acknowledged receipt of one hundred and seventy guineas in native specie. The paper had been signed by Peculiar Cromwell and, on Lord William’s behalf, by Malachi Braithwaite, MA Oxon. ‘I have possessions of Major Dalton,’ Cromwell said, producing another piece of paper, ‘and jewels belonging to the Baron von Dornberg.’ He showed Sharpe that receipt. ‘And more jewels belonging to Mister Fazackerly.’ Fazackerly was the barrister. ‘This’ – Cromwell kicked the chest – ‘is the safest place on the ship, and if one of my passengers is carrying valuables then I want those valuables out of temptation’s way. Do I make myself plain, Mister Sharpe?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘But you are thinking that you do not trust me?’

‘No, sir,’ Sharpe said, who was thinking just that.

‘I told you,’ Cromwell growled, ‘it is a normal procedure. You entrust your valuables to me and I, as a captain in the service of the East India Company, give you a receipt. If I were to lose the valuables, Mister Sharpe, then the Company would reimburse you. The only way you can lose them is if the ship sinks or if it is taken by enemy action, in which case you must have recourse to your insurers.’ Cromwell half smiled, knowing full well that Sharpe’s treasure would not be insured.

Sharpe still said nothing.

‘Thus far, Mister Sharpe,’ Cromwell said in a low voice, ‘I have requested you to comply with my wishes. If needs be, I can insist.’

‘No need to insist, sir,’ Sharpe said, for, in truth, Cromwell was right in suggesting that every sharp-eyed sailor in the ship would note the badly hidden jewels. Each and every day Sharpe was aware of the stones, and they were a burden to him and would stay a burden until he could sell them in London, and that burden would be lifted if he yielded the stones into the Company’s keeping. Besides, he had been reassured by the fact that Pohlmann had entrusted so many jewels to the captain’s keeping. If Pohlmann, who was nobody’s fool, trusted Cromwell then Sharpe surely could.

Cromwell gave him a small pair of scissors and Sharpe cut the hem of his coat. He did not reveal the stones in his waistband, nor in his boots, for they were not obvious to even a searching glance, but he did place on the table a growing heap of rubies, diamonds and emeralds that he stripped from the red coat’s seams.

Cromwell separated the stones into three piles, then weighed each pile on a small and delicate balance. He carefully noted the results, locked the jewels away, then gave Sharpe a receipt which both he and Sharpe had signed. ‘I thank you, Mister Sharpe,’ Cromwell said gravely, ‘for you have made my mind easier. The purser will find a seaman who can sew up your coat,’ he added, standing.

Sharpe also stood, ducking his head under the low beams. ‘Thank you, sir.’

‘I’ve no doubt I’ll see you at dinner soon. The baron seems fond of your company. You know him well?’

‘I met him once or twice in India, sir.’

‘He seems a strange man, not that I know him at all. But an aristocrat? Dirtying his hands with trade?’ Cromwell shuddered. ‘I suppose they do things differently in Hanover.’

‘I imagine they do, sir.’

‘Thank you, Mister Sharpe.’ Cromwell tucked his keys into a pocket and nodded to indicate that Sharpe could leave.

Major Dalton was on the quarterdeck, revelling in the gun practice. ‘No one’s matched your marksmanship, Sharpe,’ the Scotsman said. ‘I’m proud of you! Upholding the honour of the army.’

Lady Grace gave Sharpe one of her disinterested glances, then turned back to look at the horizon. ‘Tell me, sir,’ Sharpe said to the major, ‘would you trust an East India captain?’

‘If you can’t trust such a man, Sharpe, then the world is coming to an end.’

‘We wouldn’t want that, sir, would we?’

Sharpe gazed at Lady Grace. She stood beside her husband, lightly touching his arm to keep her balance on the swaying deck. Dog and cat, he thought.

And he felt like being scratched.

CHAPTER THREE

The boredom on the ship was palpable.

Some passengers read, but Sharpe, who still found reading difficult, obtained no relief from the few books he borrowed from Major Dalton, who spent his time making notes for a memoir he planned to write about the war against the Mahrattas. ‘I doubt anyone will read it, Sharpe,’ the major admitted modestly, ‘but it would be a pity if the army’s successes were not recorded. You would oblige me with your best recollections?’

Some of the men passed the time by practising with small arms or fighting mock duels with sword and sabres up and down the main deck until they were running with sweat. During the second week of the voyage there was a sudden enthusiasm for target practice, using the ship’s heavy sea-service muskets to fire at empty bottles hurled into the waves, but after five days Captain Cromwell declared that the fusillades were depleting the Calliope’s powder stores and the pastime ceased. Later that week a seaman claimed to have spied a mermaid at dawn and for a day or two the passengers hung on the rails vainly searching the empty sea for another glimpse. Lord William scornfully denied the existence of such creatures, but Major Dalton had seen one when he was a boy. ‘It was exhibited in Edinburgh,’ he told Sharpe, ‘after the poor creature had washed ashore on Inchkeith Rock. It was a very dark room, I remember, and she was somewhat hairy. Bedraggled, really. She was very ill-smelling, but I recall her tail and seem to remember she was very well endowed above.’ He blushed. ‘Poor lass, she was dead as a bucket.’

A strange sail was sighted one morning and there was an hour’s excitement as the gun crews mustered, the convoy clumsily closed up and the Company frigate set her studdingsails to investigate the stranger, which turned out to be an Arab dhow on course for Cochin and certainly no threat to the big Indiamen.

The passengers in the stern, the rich folk who inhabited the roundhouse and the great cabin, played whist. Another group played the game in steerage, but Sharpe had never learned to play and, besides, was not tempted to wager. He was aware that large sums were being won and lost, and though it was forbidden by the Company rules, Captain Cromwell made no objection. Indeed he sometimes played a hand himself. ‘He wins,’ Pohlmann told Sharpe, ‘he always wins.’

‘And you lose?’

‘A little.’ Pohlmann shrugged as though it did not matter.

Pohlmann was sitting on one of the lashed guns. He often came and talked with Sharpe, usually about Assaye where he had suffered such a great defeat. ‘Your William Dodd,’ he told Sharpe, ‘claimed that Sir Arthur was a cautious general. He isn’t.’ He always called Dodd ‘your William Dodd’, as though the renegade redcoat had been a colleague of Sharpe’s.

‘Wellesley’s bull-headed,’ Sharpe said admiringly. ‘He sees a chance and snatches it.’

‘And he’s gone home to England?’

‘Sailed last year,’ Sharpe said. Sir Arthur, as befitted his rank, had sailed on the Trident, Admiral Rainier’s flagship, and was probably in Britain by now.

‘He will be bored at home,’ Pohlmann said.

‘Bored? Why?’

‘Because our dour Captain Cromwell is right. Britain cannot fight France in Europe. She can fight her at the ends of the world, but not in Europe. The French army, my dear Sharpe, is a horde. It is not like your army. It doesn’t depend on jailbirds, failures and drunkards, but is conscripted. It is therefore huge.’

Sharpe grinned. ‘The jailbirds, failures and drunkards cooked your goose.’

‘So they did,’ Pohlmann acknowledged without taking offence, ‘but they cannot stand against the vast armies of France. No one can. Not now. And when the French decide to build a proper navy, my friend, then you will see the world dance to their tunes.’

‘And you?’ Sharpe asked. ‘Where will you be dancing?’

‘Hanover?’ Pohlmann suggested. ‘I shall buy a big house, fill it with women and watch the world from my windows. Or perhaps I shall live in France. The women are more beautiful there and I have learned one thing in my life, Sharpe, and that is that women do like money. Why do you think Lady Grace married Lord William?’ He jerked his head towards the quarterdeck where Lady Grace, accompanied by her maid, walked up and down. ‘How goes your campaign with the lady?’

‘It doesn’t,’ Sharpe grunted, ‘and there isn’t a campaign.’

Pohlmann laughed. ‘Then why do you accept my invitations to supper?’

The truth, and Sharpe knew it, was that he was obsessed with the Lady Grace. From the moment he woke in the morning until he finally slept he thought of little but her. She seemed untouchable, unemotional, unapproachable, and that only made his obsession worse. She had spoken to him once, then never again, and when Sharpe did meet her at suppertime in the captain’s cuddy and tried to engage her in conversation she turned away as though his presence offended her.

Sharpe thought of her constantly, and constantly watched for her, though he took good care not to show his obsession. But it was there, gnawing at him, filling the tedious hours as the Calliope thumped her way across the Indian Ocean. The winds stayed kind and each day the first officer, Lieutenant Tufnell, reported on the convoy’s progress: seventy-two miles, sixty-eight miles, seventy miles, always about the same distance.

The weather was fine and dry, yet even so the ship seemed to be rotting with damp below the decks. Even in the tropic winds that blew the convoy southwestwards some water slopped through the closed lower gunports, and the lower-deck steerage where Sharpe slept was never dry; his blankets were damp, the timbers of the ship were dank, indeed the whole Calliope, wherever the sun did not shine, was weeping with water, stinking and decaying, fungus-ridden and rat-infested. Seamen constantly manned the ship’s four pumps and the water slopped out of the elm tubes into gutters on the lower deck which led the stinking bilge water overboard, but however much they pumped, more always needed to be sucked out of the hull.

The goats had an infection and most died in the first fortnight so there was no fresh milk for the steerage passengers. The fresh food was soon used up, and what was left was salted, tough, rancid and monotonous. The water was foul, discoloured and stank, useful only for making strong tea, and though Sharpe’s filtering machine removed some of the impurities, it did nothing to improve the taste, and after two weeks the filter was so clogged with brown muck that he hurled the machine into the ocean. He drank arrack and sour beer or, in Captain Cromwell’s cuddy, the wine which was little better than vinegar.

Breakfast was at eight every morning. The steerage passengers were divided into groups of ten and the men took it in turn to fetch each mess a cauldron of burgoo from the galley in the forecastle. The burgoo was a mixture of oatmeal and scraps of beef fat that had simmered all night on the galley stove. Dinner was at mid-day and was another burgoo, though this sometimes had larger scraps of meat or fibrous pieces of dried fish floating in the burned and lumpy oatmeal. On Sundays there was salt fish and ship’s biscuits that were as hard as stone, yet even so were infested with weevils that needed to be tapped out. The biscuits had to be chewed endlessly so that it was like masticating a dried brick that was occasionally enlivened by the juice of an insect that had escaped the tapping. Tea was served at four, but only to the passengers who travelled in the stern of the ship, while the steerage passengers had to wait for supper, which was more dried fish, biscuits and a hard cheese in which red worms made miniature tunnels. ‘Human beings should not be expected to eat such things,’ Malachi Braithwaite said, shuddering after one particularly evil supper. He had joined Sharpe on the main deck to watch the sun set in red-gold splendour.

‘You ate them on the way out, didn’t you?’ Sharpe asked.

‘I travelled out as a private secretary to a London merchant,’ Braithwaite said grandly, ‘and he accommodated me in the great cabin and fed me at his own expense. I told his lordship as much, but he refuses the expense.’ He sounded hurt. Braithwaite was a proud man, but poor, and very aware of any insults to his self-esteem. He spent his afternoons in the roundhouse where, he told Sharpe, Lord William was compiling a report for the Board of Control. The report would suggest the future governance of India and Braithwaite enjoyed the work, but late every afternoon he was dismissed back to the lower deck and his gnawing misery. He was ashamed of being made to travel steerage, he hated being one of the gun crews and he detested fetching the mess cauldrons, believing that chore put him in the place of a menial servant, no better than Lord William’s valet or Lady Grace’s maid. ‘I am a secretary,’ he protested once to Sharpe. ‘I was at Oxford!’