It was Braun that Hornblower was worried about; yet what with the violence of his reaction after his speech-making, and the chatter and glitter around him, and the sultry glances of the Countess, it was hard to think. Hornblower had to drive himself to keep his mind on his subject. The pistol in Braun’s waistband – the fierce intensity of Braun’s expression – that gallery up there. He could fit the piece of the puzzle together if only he were left undistracted for a moment.
‘The Prince of Sweden will make his entry with His Imperial Majesty,’ the Countess was saying.
The Prince of Sweden! Bernadotte, the initiator of a new dynasty, the supplanter of Gustavus, for whom Braun had risked life and fortune. Alexander had conquered Finland; Bernadotte had abandoned it to him. The two men whom Braun had most reason to hate in the whole world were probably Alexander and Bernadotte. And Braun was armed with a double-barrelled pistol, a rifled pistol with percussion caps that never missed fire and which carried true for fifty yards. Hornblower swept the gallery with his eyes. There he was, at the far end, standing unobtrusively between two pillars. Something must be done at once. The Grand Marshal was chattering affably with a couple of courtiers, and Hornblower turned to him, abandoning the Countess and breaking rudely into the conversation with the only excuse that he could think of.
‘Impossible!’ said the Grand Marshal, glancing at the clock. ‘His Imperial Majesty and His Royal Highness enter in three and a half minutes.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Hornblower. ‘I regret it deeply, but I must—it is absolutely necessary – it is urgent—’
Hornblower fairly danced with anxiety, and the gesture reinforced the argument he had already advanced. The Grand Marshal stood weighing the relative undesirability of interrupting a Court ceremony and offending someone who, as the recent interview showed, might have the ear of the Czar.
‘Go out through that door, then, sir,’ he said reluctantly at length, pointing, ‘and please, sir, come back without calling attention to yourself.’
Hornblower fled, sidling rapidly but as unobtrusively as possible through the groups of people to the door; he slipped through it and glanced round desperately. The broad staircase to the left must lead up to the gallery. He grasped the scabbard of his sword to keep it from tripping him up and ran up the stairs two at a time; the one or two footmen whom he passed hardly spared him a glance. The gallery was crowded, although the dresses were not as beautiful nor the uniforms as brilliant. Hornblower hurried along towards the end where he had seen Braun; he took long strides while doing his best to look like a nonchalant stroller. Mound caught his eye – Hornblower could not spare the time to say anything, dared not risk saying a word, but he put all the meaning into his glance that he could, hoping that Mound would follow him. Down below he heard the sound of doors being thrown open, and the babble of conversation stopped abruptly. A loud harsh voice announced ‘L’Empéreur! L’Impératrice! Le Prince Royal de Suède!’
Braun stood there between the two pillars, glancing down. His hand was at his waist; he was drawing the pistol. There was only one silent way to stop him. Hornblower whipped out his sword – the hundred-guinea gold-hilted sword, the gift of the Patriotic Fund, with an edge like a razor – and he slashed at the wrist of the hand that held the pistol. With the tendons severed the fingers opened nervelessly and the pistol fell heavily on the carpeted floor while Braun turned in gaping surprise, looking first at the blood spouting from his wrist and then at Hornblower’s face. Hornblower put the point of the blade at his breast; he could lunge and kill him on the instant, and every line in his expression must have attested the genuineness of his determination to do so if necessary, for Braun uttered no sound, made no movement. Somebody loomed up at Hornblower’s shoulder; it was Mound, thank God.
‘Look after him,’ whispered Hornblower. ‘Tie that wrist up! Get him out of here somehow.’
He glanced over the railing. A little crowd of royalty was advancing through the huge doors opposite and below him – Alexander in his light-blue uniform; a tall swarthy man with a huge nose who must be Bernadotte; a number of women, two with crowns who must be the Empress and Empress-Mother, and the rest in plumes. Braun would have had the easiest shot heart could desire. All round the vast room the Court was making obeisance, the men bowing low and the women curtseying; as Hornblower looked they rose all together, plumes and uniforms like a breaking wave of flowers. Hornblower tore his eyes from the spectacle, sheathed his sword, and picked up the pistol from the floor, stuffing it down into his waistband. Mound, his eternal nonchalance replaced by swift catlike movements, had his long arms round Braun, who was leaning against him. Hornblower snatched out his handkerchief and put it in Mound’s hand, but there was not time to do more. He turned away and hastened back along the gallery. The lesser courtiers up here had straightened up from their bows and their curtseys and were beginning to look around them again and resume their conversation. It was lucky that at the moment of crisis they had had no eyes or ears for anything save the royal party. Hurst and Somers were about to start talking to the women again when Hornblower caught their eyes.
‘Go back there to Mound,’ he said. ‘He needs your help.’
Then he walked quickly down the stairs again, found the door into the audience hall, and pushed past the footman on guard there. A glance showed him the position of the group he had left, and he sidled round to it and took up his position at the Countess’s side. The royal party was making the circle of the room, making the usual conventional remarks to distinguished individuals, and it was only a matter of a few minutes before they reached Hornblower. The Grand Marshal presented him, and, Hornblower, his head swimming with his recent excitement so that he felt as if he was in a nightmare, bowed to each crowned head in turn and to Bernadotte.
‘It is a pleasure to meet Commodore Hornblower,’ said Alexander pleasantly. ‘We have all of us heard of his exploits.’
‘Your Majesty is too kind,’ gulped Hornblower.
Then the royal group passed on, and Hornblower turned to meet the Countess’s glance again. The fact that the Czar had addressed a few words to him personally evidently confirmed her suspicions that he was a man of potential influence, and there was a considering look in her eyes.
‘Will you be making a long stay in Russia?’ she asked.
It was very hard, during this period of intense reaction, to keep his mind on anything. All he wanted to do was to sit down and rest quietly. He flogged his mind into making a polite rejoinder, and when the men of the party began to ply him with questions about the British Navy and about maritime affairs in general he tried to answer sensibly, but it was a forlorn hope.
Footmen were rolling in long buffet tables, glittering with gold and silver; Hornblower forced himself to watch keenly, so as to commit no breach of etiquette. To one side the royal party had taken their seats, Empresses and Czar in armchairs and the princes and princesses in upright chairs, and everyone had to be careful always to face in that direction so as not to commit the heinous crime of letting royalty see a human back. People were beginning to take food from the buffets, and, try as he would, Hornblower could see no sign at all of any attention to precedence. But there was the Persian Ambassador munching something from a gold plate, so that he was justified in making a move in the same direction. Yet all the same this was the most curious dinner he had ever attended, with everyone standing up except royalty; and royalty, he could see, were eating nothing at all.
‘May I offer you my arm, Countess?’ he said, as the group began to drift towards a buffet.
The courtiers by dint of long practice had seemingly mastered the art of eating while standing up and while holding their hats under their arms, but it was not easy. His dangling sword was liable to trip him, too, and that infernal pistol in his waistband was digging uncomfortably into his side. The footmen serving at the buffets understood no French, and the Countess came to Hornblower’s rescue with an order.
‘That is caviare,’ she ex
plained to him, ‘and this is vodka, the drink of the people, but I think you will find that the two are admirably suited to each other.’
The Countess was right. The grey, unappetising-looking stuff was perfectly delicious. Hornblower sipped cautiously at the vodka, and in his present highly strung condition hardly noticed the fierce bite of the liquor; but there was no doubt that vodka and caviare blended together exquisitely. He felt the warm glow of the alcohol inside him, and realised that he was desperately hungry. The buffet was covered with foods of all kinds, some being kept warm in chafing dishes, some cold; under the tutelage of the Countess, Hornblower went a fair way towards tackling them all. There was a dish apparently of stewed mushrooms that was excellent, slices of smoked fish, an unidentifiable salad, some varieties of cheese, eggs both hot and cold, a sort of ragoût of pork. There were other liquors as well, and Hornblower ate and drank with his spirits rising momentarily, playing his part in the conversation and feeling more and more warmly grateful to the Countess. It might be a queer way to have dinner, but Hornblower thought he had never tasted such delicious food. His head began to whirl with the liquor; he knew that danger signal of old, although this time he did not resent it quite so bitterly as usual, and he checked himself in the midst of a laugh in time not to be too unrestrained. Laughter, chatter, and bright lights; this was one of the jolliest parties he had ever attended – he felt as if it had been someone else who had slashed Braun’s wrist open with a sword an hour ago. Hornblower replaced his lovely porcelain plate on the buffet, among the gold dishes, and wiped his mouth with one of the silken napkins that lay there. He was comfortably replete, with the gratifying sensation of having eaten just too much and having drunk just enough; he supposed coffee would be served soon, and a cup of coffee was all he needed to complete his internal gratification.
‘I have dined extremely well,’ he said to the Countess.
The most remarkable expression passed over the Countess’s face. Her eyebrows rose, and she opened her mouth to say something and then shut it again. She was smiling and puzzled and distressed all at the same time. She again started to speak, but her words were cut short by the ceremonial opening of yet another pair of doors from which twenty or thirty footmen emerged to form an avenue leading into the next room. Hornblower became conscious that the royal party had risen from their chairs and were falling into formation, and the complete cessation of conversation told Hornblower that some specially solemn moment had arrived. Couples were moving about the room like ships jockeying for position. The Countess laid her hand on his arm with a gentle pressure as if to lead him. By George, a procession was forming behind the royal party! There went the Persian Ambassador, a smiling girl on his arm. Hornblower just had time to lead his own partner forward to join the procession next, and after two or three more couples had joined behind him the procession began to move forward, its tail being steadily lengthened as it went. Hornblower kept his eyes on the Persian Ambassador before him; they passed down the avenue of footmen, and entered the next room.
The procession was breaking off to left and to right in alternate couples as though in a country dance; the Persian Ambassador went to the left, and Hornblower was ready to go to the right without the prompting of the gesture of the Grand Marshal, who was standing there ready to direct anyone in doubt. It was another enormous room, lit by what seemed to be hundreds of cut-glass chandeliers dangling from the roof, and all down the length of it ran a vast table – miles long, it seemed, to Hornblower’s disordered imagination – covered with gold plate and crystal and embanked with flowers. The table was shaped like a T with a very small crosspiece, and the royal party had already taken their seats at the head; behind every chair all the way down stood a white-wigged footman. It dawned upon Hornblower that dinner was about to begin; the food and drink which had been served in the domed hall had been something extra and introductory. Hornblower was ready to laugh at himself for his idiotic lack of comprehension at the same time as he was ready to groan with despair at the thought of having to eat his way through an Imperial dinner in his present distended condition.
Save for royalty, the men were standing at their chairs while the ladies sat; across the table the Persian Ambassador was bending affably over the young woman he had brought in, and the aigrette in his turban nodded and his diamonds flashed. The last woman took her seat, and then the men sat down together – not quite as simultaneously as marines presenting arms, but almost so. A babble of conversation began immediately, and almost immediately a golden soup-plate was put under Hornblower’s nose and a golden soup tureen full of pink soup was offered to him for him to help himself from. He could not help glancing down the table; everyone had been given soup at the same moment – there must be two hundred footmen at least waiting at table.
‘That is M. de Narbonne, the French Ambassador,’ said the Countess, indicating with a glance a handsome young man across the table two places higher than the Persian Ambassador. ‘Of course the Grand Marshal did not present you to him. And that is the Austrian Ambassador, and the Saxon Minister, and the Danish Minister, all your enemies officially. The Spanish Ambassador comes from Joseph Bonaparte, not from the Spanish partisan government which you recognise, so you could hardly be presented to him either. I don’t believe there’s a soul here except us Russians to whom it would be proper to present you.’
There was a cool, pleasant yellow wine in a tall glass before Hornblower, and he sipped it.
‘My experience today,’ he said, ‘is that Russians are the most delightful people in the world, and Russian women the most charming and most beautiful.’
The Countess flashed a glance at him from her sultry eyes, and, it seemed to Hornblower, set his brains creeping about inside his skull. The golden soup-plate was whisked away and replaced by a golden dinner-plate. Another wine was poured into another glass before him – champagne. It effervesced just as his thoughts appeared to him to be doing. His footman spoke to him in Russian, apparently offering him a choice, and the Countess settled the problem without referring to him.
‘As this is your first visit to Russia,’ she explained, ‘I could be sure that you have not yet tasted our Volga River trout.’
She was helping herself to one as she spoke, from a golden dish; Hornblower’s footman was presenting another golden dish.
‘A gold service looks very well,’ said the Countess sadly, ‘but it allows the food to grow unfortunately cold. I never use mine in my house save when I entertain His Imperial Majesty. As that is the case in most houses I doubt if His Imperial Majesty ever has a hot meal.’
The gold knife and fork with which Hornblower dissected his fish were heavy in his hands, and scraped oddly against the gold plate.
‘You have a kind heart, madame,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ said the Countess, with deep significance.
Hornblower’s head whirled again; the champagne, so cold, so delicate, seemed perfectly adapted to put this right, and he drank of it thirstily.
A couple of fat little birds on toast followed the trout; they melted delicately in the mouth; some other wine followed the champagne. And there was a venison stew, and a cut of some roast which might be mutton but which was borne on Pegasus-wings of garlic beyond mundane speculation. Somewhere in the procession of food appeared a pink water ice, only the third or fourth which Hornblower had ever tasted.
‘Foreign kickshaws,’ said Hornblower to himself, but he enjoyed the food and had no prejudice against foreign cookery. Perhaps he said ‘foreign kickshaws’ to himself because that was what Bush would have said had he been eating the dinner. Or perhaps it was because he was a little drunk – Hornblower’s persistent self-examination brought him to this startling conclusion with a shock, comparable with that received by a man walking into a stanchion in the dark. He must certainly not get drunk while he was representing his country, and he would be a fool to get drunk while in the imminent personal danger which surrounded him. He personally had brought an assassin to th
e palace, and if the fact ever leaked out it would go hard with him, especially if the Czar should become aware that the assassin was armed with a rifled pistol which was Hornblower’s private property. Hornblower sobered still further when it came to him that he had forgotten all about his junior officers – he had left them trying to dispose of the wounded assassin, and what they would do with him was more than he could guess.
The Countess beside him was pressing his foot under the table; and a little electric thrill ran through him and his steadiness vanished once more. He smiled at her beatifically. She gave him a long look with lowered lids and then turned away to address a remark to her neighbour on her other side, a tactful hint for Hornblower to pay a little attention to the Baroness to whom he had hardly spoken a word. Hornblower plunged feverishly into conversation, and the general in the outlandish dragoon uniform on the far side of the Baroness joined in with a question about Admiral Keats, whose acquaintance he had made in 1807. The footman was offering a new dish; his hairy wrist was exposed between his cuff and his white glove, and that wrist was spotted with flea-bites. Hornblower remembered having read in one of the books he had been studying about the northern powers that the farther east one travelled the worse the vermin became – the Polish flea was bad, but the Russian flea was unbearable. If it was any worse than the Spanish flea, with which Hornblower had an intimate acquaintance, it must be a remarkably well-developed flea.
There must be hundreds – there must actually be thousands – of servants in this palace, and Hornblower could guess how closely they must be herded together. Having waged a ceaseless war against body-vermin for twenty years in crowded ships Hornblower was well aware of the difficulty of extermination. But while one part of his mind was discussing with the dragoon general the principles of seniority and selection in the British Navy another part was telling himself that he would greatly prefer not to be served by a flea-bitten footman. The conversation languished, and Hornblower turned back to the Countess.
Admiral Hornblower Page 36
