The seconds crept by; perhaps the French captain was holding a council of war on his quarter-deck; perhaps he was merely hesitating, unable to reach a decision at this moment when the fate of nations hung in the balance.
‘Message from Mr Bush, sir. One gun run out ready for action, sir. The other one in five minutes.’
‘Thank you, Mr Orrock. Tell Mr Bush to station the two best gunlayers there.’
Félicité’s main-topsail was filling again.
‘Hands to the braces!’
Hotspur stood in towards her enemy. Hornblower would not yield an inch of sea room unnecessarily.
‘Helm a-weather!’
That was very long cannon shot as Hotspur wore round. Félicité’s bow was pointing straight at her; Hotspur’s stern was turned squarely to her enemy, the ships exactly in line.
‘Tell Mr Bush to open fire!’
Even before the message could have reached him Bush down below had acted. There was the bang-bang of the guns, the smoke bursting out under the counter, eddying up over the quarter-deck with the following wind. Nothing visible to Hornblower’s straining eye at the telescope; only the beautiful lines of Félicité’s bows, her sharply-steeved bowsprit, her gleaming canvas. The rumble of the gun-trucks underfoot as the guns were run out again. Bang! Hornblower saw it. Standing right above the gun, looking straight along the line of flight, he saw the projectile, a lazy pencil mark against the white and blue, up and then down, before the smoke blew forward. Surely that was a hit. The smoke prevented his seeing the second shot.
The long British nine-pounder was the best gun in the service as far as precision went. The bore was notoriously true, and the shot could be more accurately cast than the larger projectiles. And even a nine-pounder shot, flying at a thousand feet a second, could deal lusty blows. Bang! The Frenchman would be unhappy at receiving this sort of punishment without hitting back.
‘Look at that!’ said Prowse.
Félicité’s fore-staysail was out of shape, flapping in the wind; it was hard to see at first glance what had happened.
‘His fore-stay’s parted, sir,’ decided Prowse.
That Prowse was correct was shown a moment later when Félicité took in the fore-staysail. The loss of the sail itself made little difference, but the fore-stay was a most important item in the elaborate system of checks and balances (like a French constitution before Bonaparte seized power) which kept a ship’s masts in position under the pressure of the sails.
‘Mr Orrock, run below and say ‘Well done’ to Mr Bush.’
Bang! As the smoke eddied Hornblower saw Félicité round-to and as her broadside presented itself to his sight it vanished in a great bank of leaping smoke. There was the horrid howl of a passing cannon-ball somewhere near; there were two jets of water from the surface of the sea, one on each quarter, and that was all Hornblower saw or heard of the broadside. An excited crew, firing from a wheeling ship, could not be expected to do better than that, even with twenty-two guns.
A ragged cheer went up from the Hotspur’s crew, and Hornblower, turning, saw that every idle hand was craning out of the gun-ports, peering aft at the Frenchman. He could hardly object to that, but when he turned back to look at Félicité again he saw enough to set the men hurriedly at work. The Frenchman had not yawed merely to fire her broadside; she was hove-to, mizzen topsail to the mast, in order to splice the fore-stay. Lying like that, her guns would not bear. But not a second was to be lost, with Hotspur before the wind and the range increasing almost irretrievably.
‘Stand by your guns to port! Hands to the braces! Hard-a-starboard!’
Hotspur wore sweetly round on to the port-tack. She was on Félicité’s port quarter where not a French gun would bear. Bush came running from aft to keep his eye on the port-side guns; he strode along from gun to gun, making sure by eye that elevation and training were correct as Hotspur fired her broadside into her helpless enemy. Very long range, but some of those shots must have caused damage. Hornblower watched the bearing of Félicité altering as Hotspur drew astern of her.
‘Stand-by to go about after the next broadside!’
The nine guns roared out, and the smoke was still eddying in the waist as Hotspur tacked.
‘Starboard side guns!’
Excited men raced across the deck to aim and train; another broadside, but Félicité’s mizzen topsail was wheeling round.
‘Helm a-weather!’
By the time the harassed Frenchman had come before the wind again Hotspur had anticipated her; both ships were again in line and Bush was racing aft to supervise the fire of the stern chasers once more. This was revenge for the action with the Loire so long ago. In this moderate breeze and smooth sea the handy sloop held every advantage over the big frigate; what had gone on up to now was only a sample of what was to continue all through that hungry weary day of golden sun and blue sea and billowing powder smoke.
The leeward position that Hotspur held was a most decided advantage. To leeward over the horizon lay the British squadron; the Frenchman dared not chase her for long in that direction, lest he find himself trapped between the wind and overwhelming hostile strength. Moreover the Frenchman had a mission to perform; he was anxious to find and warn the Spanish Squadron, yet when he had won for himself enough sea room to weather St Vincent and to turn away his teasing little enemy hung on to him, firing into his battered stern, shooting holes in his sails, cutting away his running rigging.
During that long day Félicité fired many broadsides, all at long range, and generally badly aimed as Hotspur wheeled away out of the line of fire. And during all that long day Hornblower stood on his quarter-deck, watching the shifts of the wind, rapping out his orders, handling his little ship with unremitting care and inexhaustible ingenuity. Occasionally a shot from Félicité struck home; under Hornblower’s very eyes an eighteen-pounder ball came in through a gun-port and struck down five men into a bloody heaving mass. Yet until long after noon Hotspur evaded major damage, while the wind backed round southerly and the sun crept slowly round to the west. With the shifting of the wind his position was growing more precarious, and with the passage of time fatigue was numbing his mind.
At a long threequarters of a mile Félicité at last scored an important hit, one hit out of the broadside she fired as she yawed widely off her course. There was a crash aloft, and Hornblower looked up to see the main yard sagging in two halves, shot clean through close to the centre, each half hanging in the slings at its own drunken angle, threatening, each of them, to come falling like an arrow down through the deck. It was a novel and cogent problem to deal with, to study the dangling menaces and to give the correct helm order that set the sails a-shiver and relieve the strain.
‘Mr Wise! Take all the men you need and secure that wreckage!’
Then he could put his glass again to his aching eye to see what Félicité intended to do. She could force a close action if she took instant advantage of the opportunity. He would have to fight now to the last gasp. But the glass revealed something different, something he had to look at a second time before he could trust his swimming brain and his weary eye. Félicité had filled away. With every sail drawing she was reaching towards the sunset. She had turned tail and was flying for the horizon away from the pest which had plagued all the spirit out of her in nine continuous hours of battle.
The hands saw it, they saw her go, and someone raised a cheer which ran raggedly along the deck. There were grins and smiles which revealed teeth strangely white against the powder blackened faces. Bush came up from the waist, powder blackened like the others.
‘Sir!’ he said. ‘I don’t know how to congratulate you.’
‘Thank you, Mr Bush. You can keep your eye on Wise. There’s the two spare stuns’l booms – fish the main yard with those.’
‘Aye aye, sir.’
Despite the blackening of his features, despite the fatigue that even Bush could not conceal, there was that curious expression in Bush’s face again, i
nquiring, admiring, surprised. He was bursting with things that he wanted to say. It called for an obvious effort of will on Bush’s part to turn away without saying them; Hornblower fired a parting shot at Bush’s receding back.
‘I want the ship ready for action again before sunset, Mr Bush.’
Gurney the Gunner was reporting.
‘We’ve fired away all the top tier of powder, sir, an’ we’re well into the second tier. That’s a ton an’ a half of powder. Five tons of shot, sir. We used every cartridge; my mates are sewing new ones now.’
The carpenter next, and then Huffnell the purser and Wallis the surgeon; arrangements to feed the living, and arrangements to bury the dead.
The dead whom he had known so well; there was a bitter regret and a deep sense of personal loss as Wallis read the names. Good seamen and bad seamen, alive this morning and now gone from this world, because he had done his duty. He must not think along those lines at all. It was a hard service to which he belonged, hard and pitiless like steel, like flying cannon-shot.
At nine o’clock at night Hornblower sat down to the first food he head eaten since the night before, and as he submitted to Bailey’s clumsy ministrations, he thought once more about Doughty, and from Doughty he went on – the step was perfectly natural – to think about eight million Spanish dollars in prize money. His weary mind was purged of the thought of sin. He did not have to class himself with the cheating captains he had heard about, with the peculating officers he had known. He could grant himself absolution; grudging absolution.
XXIII
With her battered sides and her fished main yard, Hotspur beat her way back towards the rendezvous appointed in case of separation. Even in this pleasant latitude of Southern Europe winter was asserting itself. The nights were cold and the wind blew chill, and Hotspur had to ride out a gale for twenty-four hours as she tossed about; St Vincent, bearing north fifteen leagues, was the place of rendezvous, but there was no sign of the frigate squadron. Hornblower paced the deck as he tried to reach a decision, as he calculated how far off to leeward the recent gale might have blown Indefatigable and her colleagues, and as he debated what his duty demanded he should do next. Push eyed him from a distance as he paced; even though he was in the secret regarding the flota he knew better than to intrude. Then at last came the hail from the mast-head.
‘Sail ho! Sail to windward! Deck, there! There’s another. Looks like a fleet, sir.’
Now Bush could join Hornblower.
‘I expect that’s the frigates, sir.’
‘Maybe.’ Hornblower hailed the main-topmast-head. ‘How many sail now?’
‘Eight, sir. Sir, they look like ships of the line, some of them, sir. Yes, sir, a three-decker an’ some two-deckers.’
A squadron of ships of the line, heading for Cadiz. They might possibly be French – fragments of Bonaparte’s navy sometimes evaded blockade. In that case it was his duty to identify them, risking capture. Most likely they were British, and Hornblower had a momentary misgiving as to what their presence would imply in that case.
‘We’ll stand towards them, Mr Bush. Mr Foreman! Hoist the private signal.’
There were the topsails showing now, six ships of the line ploughing along in line ahead, a frigate out on either flank.
‘Leading ship answers 264, sir. That’s the private signal for this week.’
‘Very well. Make our number.’
Today’s grey sea and grey sky seemed to reflect the depression that was settling over Hornblower’s spirits.
‘Dreadnought, sir. Admiral Parker. His flag’s flying.’
So Parker had been detached from the fleet off Ushant; Hornblower’s unpleasant conviction was growing.
‘Flag to Hotspur, sir. “Captain come on board.” ’
‘Thank you, Mr Foreman. Mr Bush, call away the quarter boat.’
Parker gave an impression of greyness like the weather when Hornblower was led aft to Dreadnought’s quarter-deck. His eyes and his hair and even his face (in contrast with the swarthy faces round him) were of a neutral grey. But he was smartly dressed, so that Hornblower felt something of a ragamuffin in his presence, wishing, too, that his morning’s shave had been more effective.
‘What are you doing here, Captain Hornblower?’
‘I am on the rendezvous appointed for Captain Moore’s squadron, sir.’
‘Captain Moore’s in England by this time.’
The news left Hornblower unmoved, for it was what he was expecting to hear, but he had to make an answer.
‘Indeed, sir?’
‘You haven’t heard the news?’
‘I’ve heard nothing for a week, sir.’
‘Moore captured the Spanish treasure fleet. Where were you?’
‘I had an encounter with a French frigate, sir.’
A glance at Hotspur lying hove-to on the Dreadnought’s beam could take in the fished main-yard and the raw patches on her sides.
‘You missed a fortune in prize money.’
‘So I should think, sir.’
‘Six million dollars. The Dons fought, and one of their frigates blew up with all hands before others surrendered.’
In a ship in action drill and discipline had to be perfect; a moment’s carelessness on the part of a powder boy or a gun loader could lead to disaster. Hornblower’s thoughts on this subject prevented him this time from making even a conversational reply, and Parker went on without waiting for one.
‘So it’s war with Spain. The Dons will declare war as soon as they hear the news – they probably have done so already. This squadron is detached from the Channel Fleet to begin the blockade of Cadiz.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘You had better return north after Moore. Report to the Channel Fleet off Ushant for further orders.’
‘Aye aye, sir.’
The cold grey eyes betrayed not the least flicker of humanity. A farmer would look at a cow with far more interest than this Admiral looked at a Commander.
‘A good journey to you, Captain.’
‘Thank you, sir.’
The wind was well to the north of west; Hotspur would have to stand far out to weather St Vincent, and farther out still to make sure of weathering Cape Roca. Parker and his ships had a fair wind for Cadiz and although Hornblower gave his orders the moment he reached the deck they were over the horizon almost as soon as Hotspur had hoisted in her boat and had settled down on the starboard tack, close-hauled, to begin the voyage back to Ushant. And as she plunged to the seas that met her starboard bow there was something additional to be heard and felt about her motion. As each wave crest reached her, and she began to put her bows down, there was a sudden dull noise and momentary little shock through the fabric of the ship, to be repeated when she had completed her descent and began to rise again. Twice for every wave this happened, so that ear and mind came to expect it at each rise and fall. It was the fished main-yard, splinted between the two spare studding sail booms. However tightly the frapping was strained that held the joint together, a little play remained, and the ponderous yardarms settled backward and forward with a thump, twice with every wave, until mind and ear grew weary of its ceaseless monotony.
It was on the second day that Bailey provided a moment’s distraction for Hornblower while Hotspur still reached out into the Atlantic to gain her offing.
‘This was in the pocket of your nightshirt, sir. I found it when I was going to wash it.’
It was a folded piece of paper with a note written on it, and that note must have been written the evening that Hotspur lay in Cadiz Bay – Bailey clearly did not believe in too frequent washing of nightshirts.
‘Sir—
The Cabin Stores are short of Capers and Cayenne.
Thank you, Sir. Thank you, Sir.
Your Humble obedient Servant
J. Doughty.’
Hornblower crumpled the paper in his hand. It was painful to be reminded of the Doughty incident. This must be the very last of it.
‘Did you read this, Bailey?’
‘No, sir. I’m no scholard, sir.’
That was the standard reply of an illiterate in the Royal Navy, but Hornblower was not satisfied until he had taken a glance at the ship’s muster rolls and seen the ‘X’ against Bailey’s name. Most Scotsmen could read and write – it was fortunate that Bailey was an exception.
So Hotspur continued close-hauled, first on the starboard tack and then on the port, carrying sail very tenderly on her wounded mainyard, while she made her way northward over the grey Atlantic until at last she weathered Finisterre and could run two points free straight for Ushant along the hypotenuse of the Bay of Biscay. It snowed on New Year’s Eve just as it had snowed last New Year’s Eve when Hotspur had baulked Bonaparte’s attempted invasion of Ireland. It was raining and bleak, and thick weather closely limited the horizon when Hotspur attained the latitude of Ushant and groped her way slowly forward in search of the Channel Fleet. The Thunderer loomed up in the mist and passed her on to the Majestic, and the Majestic passed her on until the welcome word ‘Hibernia’ came back in reply to Bush’s hail. There was only a small delay while the news of Hotspur’s arrival was conveyed below to the Admiral before the next hail came; Collins’s voice, clearly recognisable despite the speaking-trumpet.
‘Captain Hornblower?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Would you kindly come aboard?’
Hornblower was ready this time, so closely shaved that his cheeks were raw, his best coat on, two copies of his report in his pocket.
Cornwallis was shivering, huddled in a chair in his cabin, a thick shawl over his shoulders and another over his knees, and presumably with a hot bottle under his feet. With his shawls and his wig he looked like some old woman until he looked up with his china blue eyes.
The Young Hornblower Omnibus Page 85
