“Ghost-hunting, sir?”

“You’ve heard of the Revenant?”

“No, sir.”

“The ignorance of you soldiers,” Chase said, amused. “The Revenant, my dear Sharpe, is a French seventy-four that is haunting the Indian Ocean. Hides herself in Mauritius, sallies out to snap up prizes, then scuttles back before we can catch her. I’m here to stifle her ardor, only before I can hunt her I have to scrape the bottom. My ship’s too slow after eight months at sea, so we scour off the barnacles to quicken her up.”

“I wish you good fortune, sir,” Sharpe said, then frowned. “But what’s that to do with ghosts?” He usually did not like asking such questions. Sharpe had once marched in the ranks of a redcoat battalion, but he had been made into an officer and so found himself in a world where almost every man was educated except himself. He had become accustomed to allowing small mysteries to slide past him, but Sharpe decided he did not mind revealing his ignorance to a man as good-natured as Chase.

“Revenant is the Frog word for ghost,” Chase said. “Noun, masculine. I had a tutor for these things who flogged the language into me and I’d like to flog it out of him now.” In a nearby yard a cockerel crowed and Chase glanced up at the sky. “Almost dawn,” he said. “Perhaps you’ll permit me to give you breakfast? Then my lads will take you out to the Calliope. God speed your way home, eh?”

Home. It seemed an odd word to Sharpe, for he did not have a home other than the army and he had not seen England in six years. Six years! Yet he felt no pang of delight at the prospect of sailing to England. He did not think of it as home, indeed he had no idea where home was, but wherever that elusive place lay, he was going there.