‘Could have washed the sail,’ another suggested. ‘Captain Chase ain’t a man to let dirt stay on a sail.’
‘Well, if it ain’t the Pucelle,’ the first man said, ‘it’s the Revenant, and we shouldn’t be standing on. Shouldn’t be standing on. Don’t make sense.’
Tufnell had gone to the maintop with his own telescope. ‘French warship, sir!’ he called down to the quarterdeck. ‘Black hoops on the mast!’
‘The Pucelle has black hoops,’ Cromwell shouted back. ‘Can you see her flag?’
‘No, sir.’
Cromwell stood irresolute for a moment, then gave an order to the helmsman so that the Calliope clumsily turned towards the west. Sailors ran to man the sheets, trimming the great sails to the wind’s new angle.
‘She’s turning with us, sir!’ Tufnell shouted.
The Calliope was going faster now and her bluff bows were thumping into the waves, and each thump sent a tremor through her tons of oak timbers. The passengers were silent. Sharpe stared through the telescope and saw that the far ship’s hull was above the horizon now and it was painted black and yellow like a wasp.
‘French colours, sir!’ Tufnell shouted.
‘Peculiar left it too bloody late,’ a seaman near Sharpe said. ‘Bloody man thinks he can walk on water.’
Sharpe turned and stared across the main deck at Peculiar Cromwell. Maybe, he thought, the captain had been expecting this. Morgen früh, Sharpe thought, morgen früh, only the rendezvous had come a few minutes late, but then he dismissed the idea. Surely Cromwell had not expected this? But then Sharpe saw Pohlmann gazing forrard with a glass and he remembered that Pohlmann had once commanded French officers. Had he stayed in touch with the French after Assaye? Was he allied with the French? No, Sharpe thought, no. It seemed unthinkable, but then Lady Grace came to the quarterdeck rail and she stared straight at Sharpe, looked pointedly at Cromwell, then back to Sharpe and he knew she was thinking the same unthinkable thought. ‘Are we going to fight?’ a passenger asked.
A seaman laughed. ‘Can’t fight a French seventy-four! And she’ll have big guns, not like our eighteen-pounders.’
‘Can we outrun her?’ Sharpe asked.
‘If we’re lucky.’ The man spat overboard.
Cromwell kept giving the helmsman orders, demanding a point closer to the wind or three points off the wind, and to Sharpe it seemed that the captain was trying to coax the last reserves of speed from the Calliope, but the sailors on the foredeck were disgusted. ‘Just slows us down,’ one of them explained. ‘Every time you turn the rudder it slows you. He should leave well alone.’ He looked at Sharpe. ‘I should hide that glass, sir. Some Frenchie would like that, and yon ship has the legs of us.’
Sharpe ran below. He would have to fetch his jewels from Cromwell’s cabin, but there were other things he also wanted to save and so he stuffed the precious telescope inside his shirt and tied his red officer’s sash across it, then he pulled on his red coat, buckled his sword belt and pushed the pistol into his trouser pocket. Other passengers were trying to hide their more valuable possessions, the children were crying, and then, far away, muffled by distance and the ship’s hull, Sharpe heard a gun.
He climbed back to the main deck and asked Cromwell’s permission to be on the quarterdeck. Cromwell nodded, then looked with amusement at Sharpe’s sabre. ‘Expecting a fight, Mister Sharpe?’
‘Can I retrieve my valuables from your cabin, Captain?’ Sharpe asked.
Cromwell scowled. ‘All in good time, Sharpe, all in good time. I’m busy now and will thank you to let me try and save the ship.’
Sharpe went to the rail. The French ship still looked a long way off, but now Sharpe could see the seas breaking white at the enemy’s stem and a shredding puff of smoke drifting just ahead of its bows. ‘They fired’ – Major Dalton, his heavy claymore at his waist, joined Sharpe at the rail – ‘but the ball fell a long mile short. Tufnell says they weren’t trying to hit us, they just want us to heave to.’
Ebenezer Fairley came to Sharpe’s other side. ‘We should have stayed with the convoy,’ he spat in disgust.
‘A ship like that,’ Dalton said, gazing at the French warship’s massive flank which was thick with gunports, ‘could have chewed up the whole convoy.’
‘We’d have sacrificed the Company frigate,’ Fairley said. ‘That’s what the frigate is for.’ He drummed nervous fingers on the rail. ‘She’s a fast sailor.’
‘So are we,’ Major Dalton said.
‘She’s bigger,’ Fairley said brusquely, ‘and bigger ships sail faster than small ones.’ He turned. ‘Captain!’
‘I am busy, Fairley, busy.’ Cromwell did not look at the merchant.
‘Can you outrun her?’
‘If I am left in peace to practise my trade, perhaps.’
‘What about my cash?’ Lord William demanded. He had joined his wife on deck.
‘The French,’ Cromwell decreed, ‘do not make war on private individuals. The ship and its cargo might be lost, but they will respect private property. If I have time, my lord, I will unlock my cabin. But for now, gentlemen, perhaps you will all let me sail this ship without yapping at me?’
Sharpe glanced at Lady Grace, but she ignored him and he looked back at the French warship. Fairley thumped the rail in his frustration. ‘That bloody Frenchman will make a tidy profit,’ the merchant said bitterly. ‘This hull and cargo must be worth sixty thousand pound. Sixty thousand! Maybe more.’
Twenty for the French, Sharpe thought, twenty for Pohlmann and twenty for Cromwell, a captain who fervently believed the war was lost and that the French would win. A captain who had declared that a man must make his fortune before the French took over the world. And twenty thousand pounds was a real fortune, a sum on which a man could live for ever. ‘They’ve still got to catch us,’ Sharpe tried to reassure Fairley, ‘and they’ll have to get the ship and its cargo back to France. That won’t be easy.’
Fairley shook his head. ‘Doesn’t work like that, Mister Sharpe. They’ll take us to Mauritius and sell the cargo there. There are plenty of neutrals ready to buy this cargo. And like as not they’ll sell the ship too. Next thing you know she’ll be called the George Washington and be sailing out of Boston.’ He spat across the rail. The tiller ropes creaked as Cromwell demanded yet another correction.
‘What about us?’ Sharpe asked.
‘They’ll send us home,’ Fairley said, ‘eventually. Don’t know about you or the major, seeing as you’re in uniform. They might put you in prison.’
‘They’ll parole us, Sharpe,’ Dalton reassured the younger man, ‘and we’ll live at liberty in Port Louis. I hear it’s a pleasant kind of place. And a good-looking young fellow like you will find a surfeit of bored young ladies.’
The Revenant, for it could be no other ship, fired again. Sharpe saw a monstrous billow of white smoke appear high on her bows and a few seconds later the sound of the cannon came rumbling across the water. A fountain of white spray showed a half-mile short of the Calliope.
‘Closer,’ Dalton grunted.
‘We should fire back,’ Fairley