burn. The world pitched and rolled. The mizzen cracked somewhere below, cut like a great tree, and we all yelled and screamed as it leaned, men plunging. With majestic momentum, it fell toward Victory.
I instinctively clung to a ratline as the French mast pivoted, watching time again slow to molasses. A few surviving British marines and sailors shouted soundlessly, looking upward at this tower falling toward them. The shattered English rigging loomed like a tangled forest canopy. The gun smoke thickened as we descended into it, as if I was falling into an alien atmosphere of poisonous clouds. A wrack of canvas and broken tackle rushed up.
Harry! came into my mind. Not just my wife, but my poor dear son.
And that was the end.
CHAPTER 31
I awoke in hell.
The underworld was murkily lit by an amber lantern, and my body was held down on a satanic altar. My tormentors were a coven of demons, their hands and forearms red with blood. I could hear screams and groans of the damned. Some kind of primary devil leaned over me with a shiny saw, ready to begin an eternity of torment.
I should have paid more attention to the maxims of Franklin.
Then the devil frowned.
“What’s wrong with this one?” Satan demanded at his minions.
“Brought down insensible and gory. Dead, for all we know.”
“Look at him blink. Which limb needs to come off?”
“Blood everywhere, Dr. Beatty. We ain’t quite sure.”
Grateful heavens, I wasn’t damned, but simply in the cockpit in the bowels of the Victory: stunned, carried, and now about to be amputated if I didn’t testify to my own health. I opened my mouth and a bubble of blood and saliva formed. I gaped like a fish, trying to summon speech.
Surgeon Beatty yanked impatiently at my arms and legs. “Good God, the admiral’s dying, and you bother me with an intact lump like this? Get the useless bugger off the table so we can do some real work.”
And the demons, or rather seamen, threw me against a bulkhead. Salvation!
I slowly comprehended that I was still alive, and in the British flagship where I’d fallen. It was hellish in Victory’s cockpit, a grim preview of the afterlife. There were at least forty wounded crammed into a space little larger than a kitchen, some bleeding their life away, others sobbing from the agony of quick amputation, and still others lying stunned like poleaxed cattle. Everything was sticky with blood. Lanterns danced eerily, offal slid on the floor, and even here below the cannon, acrid gunsmoke made a thin fog in the air. The beams quaked from the continued roar of massive thirty-six-pounders overhead, the guns leaping and then slamming down with each discharge. The battle was still going on.
My fall had carried me onto the British flagship. By peculiar damnation, I managed to change sides even when unconscious.
I blearily peered about. There was a cluster of men opposite me, attending anxiously to someone important who was propped up against a timber on the larboard side of the flagship. The victim’s face was pale and sweating, his features twisted with great pain.
It was Nelson.
So the man I’d seen shot down by the French from the mizzen platform had truly been the commander of the British fleet. Could the Combined Fleet actually win the battle over the English because of this calamity?
But Redoutable was being torn apart, wasn’t it?
Cheers rumbled from the Victory’s crew above.
“What’s that? What’s that?” I heard Nelson’s distinctive nasal voice. He coughed, the sound wet and dire.
“Another one of the enemy must have struck its flag, your lordship,” a wounded lieutenant replied.
The admiral lay back. “Good. Good.”
Did these officers know I’d just been on the fighting platforms that had mortally wounded their commander? What had become of my Bonaparte rifle? Would I be remembered as a confidant of Nelson at Merton, or his would-be assassin from the Redoutable? I fumbled to check for belongings or wounds. None of the latter, but I was still wearing my Napoleonic pendant. I needed to put distance between this bunch and me until battle emotions cooled.
I shifted slightly, shying toward the cockpit entry, trying hard not to be noticed. A midshipman was screaming and kicking on the surgery table as Beatty sawed, the boy’s teeth clamped on a soggy hank of rope. His leg fell away like a hank of beef. The boy gasped, giving great shuddering sobs as his stump was doused with vinegar, bound, and he was shifted to lie like cordwood with the others. There