The Commodore h-10

by Cecil Scott Forester

  “Now tell me more about this Blanchefleur,” said Hornblower bending over the chart.

  “She nabbed us off Rügen, sir. Sassnitz bore so’west, eight miles. You see, sir—”

  Hornblower listened to the explanations with attention. A twenty-gun corvette under a good French captain was a serious menace loose in the Baltic With the trade beginning to move on the melting of the ice it would be his first duty to capture her or drive her into port and blockade her. A ship of that force would be able to put up a good fight even against one of his sloops. He hoped he could entrap her, for she would be far too fast for Nonsuch to overhaul her in a stern chase. She was sending her prizes into Kiel, for there they could dispose of the prisoners, pick up a French crew, and start the hazardous voyage round Denmark to the west—Bonaparte needed naval stores, with ships of war building in every port from Hamburg to Trieste.

  “Thank you, gentlemen,” he said. “I’ll not detain you longer. Captain Bush, we’ll talk to the prisoners next.”

  But there was little to learn from the seamen of the captured prize crew, even though they were brought in separately for questioning. Four of them were Frenchmen; Hornblower conducted his own examination of them, with Bush looking on admiringly. Bush had already succeeded in forgetting all the little French he had so painfully learned during his enforced sojourn in France. Two were Danes, and two were Germans; Mr. Braun was called in to interpret while they were questioned. They were all experienced seamen, and as far as Hornblower could gather they had all been driven to take service in the Blanchefleur sooner than be conscripted into Bonaparte’s navy or army. Even though they were faced with what might well be a lifetime in an English prison the Frenchmen refused any offer to serve in the British Navy, but the others accepted immediately Braun put the suggestion to them. Bush rubbed his hands at acquiring four prime seamen in this fashion to help fill his chronically undermanned ships. They had picked up a little French in the Blanchefleur, and they would soon pick up enough English in the Nonsuch or the Lotus; certainly they would under the stimulus of a rope’s end handled by an experienced petty officer.

  “Take ‘em away and read ‘em in, Mr. Hurst,” said Bush, rubbing his hands again. “Now, sir, shall we take a look at that damned renegade Englishman?”

  Clarke was lying on the main-deck of the Nonsuch, to which he had been hoisted from the boat by a tackle at the yardarm, and the surgeon was still bending over him. He had tried to blow out his brains, but he had only succeeded in shattering his lower jaw. There was blood on his blue coat and on his white trousers, and his whole head was swathed in bandages, and he lay tossing in agony on the canvas sheet in which he had been hoisted. Hornblower peered down at him. The features he could see, chalk white so that the tan looked like a coat of dirt, were pinched and refined and weak, a thin nose and hollow cheeks, brown eyes like a woman’s, with scant sandy eyebrows above them. What little hair Hornblower could see was scanty and sandy too. Hornblower wondered what combination of circumstances could have led him into betraying his country and taking service with Bonaparte. Hatred of imprisonment, perhaps—Hornblower had known what it was to be a prisoner, in Ferrol and Rosas and in France. Yet that over-refined face did not seem to indicate the sort of personality that would fret itself to pieces in confinement. It might have been a woman, perhaps, who had driven him or led him to this, or he might be a deserter from the Navy who had fled to escape punishment—it would be interesting to see if his back was scarred with the cat-o’-nine-tails. He might perhaps be an Irishman, one of those fanatic who in their desire to hurt England refused to see that the worst England had ever done to Ireland would be nothing compared with what Bonaparte would do to her if she were once in his power.

  Whatever might be the case, he was a man of ability and quick wit. As soon as he had seen that Lotus had cut him of from escape to the mainland he had resolutely taken the only course that gave him any chance of safety. He had steered the Maggie Jones as innocently as kiss-your-hand up to Nonsuch; that suggestion of smallpox had been an ingenious one, an his conversation by speaking-trumpet had been very nearly natural.

  “Is he going to live?” asked Bush of the surgeon.

  “No, sir. The mandible is extensively comminuted on both sides—I mean his jaw is shattered, sir. There is some splintering of the maxilla as well, and his tongue—the whole glosso-pharyngeal region, in fact—is in rags. The haemorrhage may prove fatal—in other words the man may bleed to death, although I do not think he will, now. But I do not think anything on earth can stop mortification—gangrene, in other words, sir—which in this area will prove immediately fatal. In any event the man will die of inanition, of hunger and thirst that is to say, even if we could keep him alive for a while by injections per rectum.”

  It was ghoulish to smile at the surgeon’s pomposity, to make the inevitable light speech.

  “It sounds as if nothing could save him, then.”

  It was a human life they were discussing.

  “We must hang him, sir, before he dies,” said Bush, turning to Hornblower. “We can convene a court martial—”

  “He cannot defend himself,” replied Hornblower.

  Bush spread his hands in a gesticulation which for him was vastly eloquent.

  “What defence has he to offer, sir? We have all the evidence we need. The prisoners have supplied it apart from the obvious facts.”

  “He might be able to rebut the evidence if he could speak,” said Hornblower. It was an absurd thing to say. There could be no possible doubt of Clarke’s guilt—his attempt at suicide proved it even if nothing else did; but Hornblower knew perfectly well that he was quite incapable of hanging a man who was physically unable to make any defence.

  “He’ll slip through our fingers if we wait, sir.”

  “Then let him.”

  “But the example to the men, sir—”

  “No, no, no,” flared Hornblower. “What sort of example would it be to the men to hang a dying man—a man who would not know what was being done to him, for that matter?”

  It was horrible to see the faint play of expression in Bush’s face. Bush was a kindly man, a good brother to his sisters and a good son to his mother, and yet there was that hint of the lust of cruelty, the desire for a hanging. No, that was not quite fair. What Bush lusted for was revenge—revenge on a traitor who had borne arms against their common country.

  “It would teach the men not to desert, sir,” said Bush, still feebly raising arguments. Hornblower knew—he had twenty years of experience—how every British captain was plagued by desertion, and spent half his waking hours wondering first how to find men and second how to retain them.

  “It might,” said Hornblower, “but I doubt it very much.”

  He could not imagine any good being done, and he certainly could picture the harm, if the men were forced to witness a helpless man, one who could not even stand on his feet, being noosed about the neck and swung up to the yard-arm.

  Bush still hankered for blood. Even though he had no more to say, there was still a look in his face, there were still protests trembling on his lips.

  “Thank you, Captain Bush,” said Hornblower. “My mind is made up.”

  Bush did not know, and might never learn, that mere revenge, objectless, retaliatory, was always stale and unprofitable.

  Chapter Eight

  The Blanchefleur would most likely still be hovering round the island of Rügen. Cape Arcona would be a profitable haunt—shipping coming down the Baltic from Russian and Finnish ports would make a landfall there, to be easily snapped up, hemmed in between the land and the two-fathom shoal of the Adlergrund. She would not know of the arrival of a British squadron, nor guess that the immediate recapture of the Maggie Jones had so quickly revealed her presence here.

  “I think that is all perfectly plain, gentlemen?” said Hornblower, looking round his cabin at his assembled captains.

  There was a murmur of assent. Vickery of the Lotus and Cole of the Raven
were looking grimly expectant. Each of them was hoping that it would be his ship that would encounter the Blanchefleur–a successful single-ship action against a vessel of so nearly equal force would be the quickest way to be promoted captain from commander. Vickery was young and ardent—it was he who had commanded the boats at the cutting-out of the Sèvres–and Cole was grey-headed and bent. Mound, captain of the Harvey, and Duncan, captain of the Moth were both of them young lieutenants; Freeman, of the cutter Clam, swarthy and with long black hair like a gipsy, was of a different type; it would be less surprising to hear he was captain of a smuggling craft than captain of a King’s ship. It was Duncan who asked the next question.

  “If you please, sir, is Swedish Pomerania neutral?”

  “Whitehall would be glad to know the answer to that question, Mr. Duncan,” said Hornblower, with a grin. He wanted to appear stern and aloof, but it was not easy with these pleasant boys.

  They grinned back at him; it was with a curious pang that Hornblower realized that his subordinates were already fond of him. He thought, guiltily, that if only they knew all the truth about him they might not like him so much.

  “Any other questions, gentlemen? No? Then you can return to your ships and take your stations for the night.”

  At dawn when Hornblower came on deck there was a thin fog over the surface of the sea; with the dropping of the westerly wind the cold water flowing out from the melting ice-packs of the Gulf of Finland had an opportunity of cooling the warm damp air and condensing its moisture into a cloud.

  “It could be thicker, sir, but not much,” grumbled Bush. The foremast was visible from the quarter-deck, but not the bowsprit. There was only a faint breeze from the north, and the Nonsuch, creeping along before it, was very silent, pitching hardly at all on the smooth sea, with a rattle of blocks and cordage.

  “I took a cast with the deep-sea lead at six bells, sir,” reported Montgomery. “Ninety-one fathoms. Grey mud. That’ll be the Arcona deep, sir.”

  “Very good, Mr. Montgomery,” said Bush. Hornblower was nearly sure that Bush’s curt manner to his lieutenants was modelled on the manner Hornblower used to employ towards him when he was first lieutenant.

  “Nosing our way about with the lead,” said Bush, disgustedly. “We might as well be a Dogger Bank trawler. And you remember what the prisoners said about the Blanchefleur, sir? They have pilots on board who know these waters like the palms of their hands.”

  Groping about in a fog in shoal waters was not the sort of exercise for which a big two-decker was designed, but the Nonsuch had a special value in this campaign. There were few ships this side of the Sound which could match her in force; under her protection the flotilla could cruise wherever necessary. Danes and Swedes and Russians and French had plenty of small craft, but when Nonsuch made her appearance they were powerless to hinder.

  “If you please, sir,” said Montgomery, touching his hat. “Isn’t that gunfire which I can hear?”

  Everybody listened, enwrapped in the clammy fog. The only noises to be heard were those of the ship, and the condensed fog dripping from the rigging to the deck. Then a flat-sounding thud came faintly to their ears.

  “That’s a gun, sir, or my name’s not Sylvanus Montgomery!”

  “From astern,” said Hornblower.

  “Beg your pardon, sir, but I thought it was on the port bow.”

  “Damn this fog,” said Bush.

  If the Blanchefleur once had warning of the presence of a British squadron in pursuit of her, and then got away, she would vanish like a needle in a haystack. Hornblower held up a wetted finger and glanced into the binnacle.

  “Wind’s north,” he said. “Maybe nor’nor’east.”

  That was comforting. To leeward, the likely avenue of escape, lay Rügen and the coast of Swedish Pomerania, twenty miles away. If Blanchefleur did not slip through the net he had spread she would be hemmed in.

  “Set the lead going, Mr. Montgomery,” said Bush.

  “Aye aye, sir.”

  “There’s another gun!” said Hornblower. “On the port bow, sure enough.”

  A wild yell from the masthead.

  “Sail ho! Sail right ahead!”

  The mist was thinner in that direction. Perhaps as much as a quarter of a mile away could be seen the thinnest palest ghost of a ship creeping through the fog across the bows.

  “Ship-rigged, flush-decked,” said Bush. “That’s the Blanchefleur sure as a gun!”

  She vanished as quickly as she had appeared, into a thicker bank of fog.

  “Hard-a-starboard!” roared Bush. “Hands to the braces!”

  Hornblower was at the binnacle, taking a hurried bearing.

  “Steady as you go!” he ordered the helmsman. “Keep her at that!”

  In this gentle breeze the heavily sparred privateer would be able to make better speed than a clumsy two-decker. All that could be hoped for would be to keep Nonsuch up to windward of her to head her off if she tried to break through the cordon.

  “Call all hands,” said Bush. “Beat to quarters.”

  The drums roared through the ship, and the hands came pouring up to their stations.

  “Run out the guns,” continued Bush. “One broadside into her, and she’s ours.”

  The trucks roared as three hundred tons of metal were run out. At the breech of every gun there clustered an eager group. The linstocks smouldered sullenly.

  “Masthead, there! Stay awake!” pealed Bush, and then more quietly to Hornblower, “He may double back and throw us off the scent.”

  There was always the possibility of the masthead being above this thin fog—the lookout in Nonsuch might catch a glimpse of the Blanchefleur’s topmasts when nothing could be seen from the deck.

  For several minutes there was no more sound save for the cry of the leadsman; Nonsuch rolled gently in the trough of the waves, but it was hard to realize in the mist that she was making headway.

  “By the mark twenty,” called the leadsman.

  Before he had uttered the last word Hornblower and Bush had turned to glance at each other; up to that moment their subconscious minds had been listening to the cries without their consciousness paying any attention. But ‘by the mark’ meant that now there was at most twenty fathoms under them.

  “Shoaling, sir,” commented Bush.

  Then the masthead lookout yelled again.

  “Sail on the lee quarter, sir!”

  Bush and Hornblower sprang to the rail, but in the clinging fog there was nothing to be seen.

  “Masthead, there! What d’you see?”

  “Nothin’ now, sir. Just caught a glimpse of a ship’s royals, sir. There they are again, sir. Two points—three points abaft the port beam.”

  “What’s her course?”

  “Same as ours, sir. She’s gone again now.”

  “Shall we bear down on her, sir?” asked Bush.

  “Not yet,” said Hornblower.

  “Stand to your guns on the port side!” ordered Bush.

  Even a distant broadside might knock away a spar or two and leave the chase helpless.

  “Tell the men not to fire without orders,” said Hornblower. “That may be Lotus.”

  “So it may, by God,” said Bush.

  Lotus had been on Nonsuch’s port beam in the cordon sweeping down towards Rügen. Someone had undoubtedly been firing—that must have been Lotus, and she would have turned in pursuit of the Blanchefleur, which could bring her into just the position where those royals had been seen; and the royals of two ship-rigged sloops, seen through mist, would resemble each other closely enough to deceive the eye even of an experienced seaman.

  “Wind’s freshening, sir,” commented Hurst.

  “That’s so,” said Bush. “Please God it clears this fog away.”

  Nonsuch was perceptibly leaning over to the freshening breeze. From forward came the cheerful music of the sea under the bows.

  “By the deep eighteen!” called the leadsman.

 
Then twenty voices yelled together.

  “There she is! Sail on the port beam! That’s Lotus!”

  The fog had cleared in this quarter, and there was Lotus under all sail, three cables’ lengths away.

  “Ask her where’s the chase,” snapped Bush.

  “Sail—last—seen—ahead,” read of the signal midshipman, glass to eye.

  “Much use that is to us,” Bush grumbled. There were enough streaks of fog still remaining to obscure the whole circle of the horizon, even though there was a thin watery sunshine in the air, and a pale sun—silver instead of gold—visible to the eastward.

  “There she is!” suddenly yelled someone at the masthead. “Hull down on the port quarter!”

  “Stole away, by God!” said Hurst. “She must have put up her helm the moment she saw us.”

  The Blanchefleur was a good six miles away, with only her royals visible from the deck of the Nonsuch, heading downwind under all sail. A string of signal flags ran up Lotus’s mast, and a gun from her called attention to the urgency of her signal.