He spent until eleven o’clock on these unsatisfactory literary exercises, and it was with guilty relief that he returned to the quarter-deck to take Hotspur up with the last of the tide with the well-remembered coasts closing in upon her on both sides. The weather was reasonably clear; not a sparkling Christmas Day, but with little enough haze at noon, when Hornblower gave the orders that hove Hotspur to, as close to Pollux Reef as he dared. The dull thud of a gun from Petit Minou coincided with his orders. The rebuilt battery there was firing its usual range-testing shot in the hope that this time he had come in too far. Did they recognise the ship that had done them so much damage? Presumably.
‘Their morning salute, sir,’ said Bush.
‘Yes.’
Hornblower took the telescope into his gloved, yet frozen, hands and trained it up the Goulet as he always did. Often there was something new to observe. Today there was much.
‘Four new ships at anchor, sir,’ said Bush.
‘I make it five. Isn’t that a new one – the frigate in line with the church steeple?’
‘Don’t think so, sir. She’s shifted anchorage. Only four new ones by my count.’
‘You’re right, Mr Bush.’
‘Yards crossed, sir. And – sir, would you look at those tops’l yards?’
Hornblower was already looking.
‘I can’t be sure.’
‘I think those are tops’ls furled over-all, sir.’
‘It’s possible.’
A sail furled over-all was much thinner and less noticeable, with the loose part gathered into the bunt about the mast, than one furled in the usual fashion.
‘I’ll go up to the masthead myself, sir. And young Foreman has good eyes. I’ll take him with me.’
‘Very well. No, wait a moment, Mr Bush. I’ll go myself. Take charge of the ship, if you please. But you can send Foreman up.’
Hornblower’s decision to go aloft was proof of the importance he attached to observation of the new ships. He was uncomfortably aware of his slowness and awkwardness, and it was only reluctantly that he exhibited them to his lightfooted and lighthearted subordinates. But there was something about those ships …
He was breathing heavily by the time he reached the fore-topmast-head, and it took several seconds to steady himself sufficiently to fix the ships in the field of the telescope, but he was much warmer. Foreman was there already, and the regular look-out shrank away out of the notice of his betters. Neither Foreman nor the look-out could be sure about those furled topsails.
They thought it likely, yet they would not commit themselves.
‘D’you make out anything else about those ships, Mr Foreman?’
‘Well, no, sir. I can’t say that I do.’
‘D’you think they’re riding high?’
‘Maybe, yes, sir.’
Two of the new arrivals were small two-deckers – sixty-fours, probably – and the lower tier of gun-ports in each case might be farther above the water line than one might expect. It was not a matter of measurement, all the same; it was more a matter of intuition, of good taste. Those hulls were just not quite right, although, Foreman, willing enough to oblige, clearly did not share his feelings.
Hornblower’s glass swept the shores round the anchorage, questing for any further data. There were the rows of hutments that housed the troops. French soldiers were notoriously well able to look after themselves, to build themselves adequate shelter; the smoke of their cooking fires was clearly visible – today, of course they would be cooking their Christmas dinners. It was from here that had come the battalion that had chased him back to the boats the day he blew up the battery. Hornblower’s glass checked itself, moved along and returned again. With the breeze that was blowing he could not be certain, but it seemed to him that from two rows of huts there was no smoke to be seen. It was all a little vague; he could not even estimate the number of troops those huts would house; two thousand men, five thousand men; and he was still doubtful about the absence of cooking smoke.
‘Captain, sir!’ Bush was hailing from the deck. ‘The tide’s turned.’
‘Very well. I’ll come down.’
He was abstracted and thoughtful when he reached the deck.
‘Mr Bush, I’ll be wanting fish for my dinner soon. Keep a special look-out for the Duke’s Freers.’
He had to pronounce it that way to make sure Bush understood him. Two days later he found himself in his cabin drinking rum – pretending to drink rum – with the captain of the Deux Frères. He had bought himself half a dozen unidentifiable fish, which the captain strongly recommended as good eating. ‘Carrelets,’ the captain called them – Hornblower had a vague idea that they might be flounders. At any rate, he paid for them with a gold piece which the captain slipped without comment into the pockets of his scale-covered serge trousers.
Inevitably the conversation shifted to the sights to be seen up the Goulet, and from the general to the particular, centring on the new arrivals in the anchorage. The captain dismissed them with a gesture as unimportant.
‘Armé’s en flûte,’ he said, casually.
En flûte! That told the story. That locked into place the pieces of the puzzle. Hornblower took an unguarded gulp at his glass of rum and water and fought down the consequent cough so as to display no special interest. A ship of war with her guns taken out was like a flute when her ports were opened – she had a row of empty holes down her side.
‘Not to fight,’ explained the captain. ‘Only for stores, or troops, or what you will.’
For troops especially. Stores could best be carried in merchant ships designed for cargo, but ships of war were constructed to carry large numbers of men – their cooking arrangements and water storage facilities had been built in with that in mind. With only as many seamen on board as were necessary to work the ship there was room to spare for soldiers. Then the guns would be unnecessary, and at Brest they could be immediately employed in arming new ships. Removing the guns meant a vast increase in available deck space into which more troops could be crammed; the more there were the more strain on the cooking and watering arrangements, but on a short voyage they would not have long to suffer. A short voyage. Not the West Indies, nor Good Hope, and certainly not India. A forty-gun frigate armed en flûte might have as many as a thousand soldiers packed into her. Three thousand men, plus a few hundred more in the armed escorts. The smallness of the number ruled out England – not even Bonaparte, so improvident with human life, would throw away a force that size in an invasion of England where there was at least a small army and a large militia. There was only one possible target; Ireland, where a disaffected population meant a weak militia.
‘They are no danger to me, then,’ said Hornblower, hoping that the interval during which he had been making these deductions had not been so long as to be obvious.
‘Not even to this little ship,’ agreed the Breton captain with a smile.
It called for the exertion of all Hornblower’s moral strength to continue the interview without allowing his agitation to show. He wanted to get instantly into action, but he dared not appear impatient; the Breton captain wanted another three-finger glass of rum and was unaware of any need for haste. Luckily Hornblower remembered an admonition from Doughty, who had impressed on him the desirability of buying cider as well as fish, and Hornblower introduced the new subject. Yes, agreed the captain, there was a keg of cider on board the Deux Frères, but he could not say how much was left, as they had tapped it already during the day. He would sell what was left.
Hornblower forced himself to bargain; he did not want the Breton captain to know that his recent piece of information was worth further gold. He suggested that the cider, of an unknown quantity, should be given him for nothing extra, and the captain with an avaricious gleam in his peasant’s eye, indignantly refused. For some minutes the argument proceeded while the rum sank lower in the captain’s glass.
‘One franc, then,’ offered Hornblower at last. ‘Twenty sous.
’
‘Twenty sous and a glass of rum,’ said the captain, and Hornblower had to reconcile himself to that much further delay, but it was worth it to retain the captain’s respect and to allay the captain’s suspicions.
So that it was with his head swimming with rum – a sensation he detested – that Hornblower sat down at last to write his urgent despatch, having seen his guest down the side. No mere signal could convey all that he wanted to say, and no signal would be secret enough, either. He had to choose his words as carefully as the rum would permit, as he stated his suspicions that the French might be planning an invasion of Ireland, and as he gave his reasons for those suspicions. He was satisfied at last, and wrote ‘H. Hornblower, Commander,’ at the foot of the letter. Then he turned over the sheet and wrote the address: ‘Rear Admiral William Parker, Commanding the Inshore Squadron,’ on the other side, and folded and sealed the letter. Parker was one of the extensive Parker clan; there were and had been admirals and captains innumerable with that name, none of them specially distinguished; perhaps his letter would alter that tradition.
He sent it off – a long and arduous trip for the boat, and waited impatiently for the acknowledgement.
‘Sir,
Your letter of this date has been received and will be given my full attention.
Your ob’d serv’t,
Wm. Parker.’
Hornblower read the few words in a flash; he had opened the letter on the quarter-deck without waiting to retire with it to his cabin, and he put it in his pocket hoping that his expression betrayed no disappointment.
‘Mr Bush,’ he said, ‘We shall have to maintain a closer watch than ever over the Goulet, particularly at night and in thick weather.’
‘Aye aye, sir.’
Probably Parker needed time to digest the information, and would later produce a plan; until that time it was Hornblower’s duty to act without orders.
‘I shall take the ship up to the Little Girls whenever I can do so unobserved.’
‘The Little Girls? Aye aye, sir.’
It was a very sharp glance that Bush directed at him. No one in his senses – at least no one except under the strongest compulsion – would risk his ship near those navigational dangers in conditions of bad visibility. True; but the compulsions existed. Three thousand well-trained French soldiers landing in Ireland would set that distressful country in a flame from end to end, a wilder flame than had burned in 1798.
‘We’ll try it tonight,’ said Hornblower.
‘Aye aye, sir.’
The Little Girls lay squarely in the middle of the channel of the Goulet; on either side lay a fairway a scant quarter of a mile wide, and up and down those fairways raced the tide; it would only be during the ebb that the French would be likely to come down. No, that was not strictly true, for the French could stem the flood tide with a fair wind – with this chill easterly wind blowing. The Goulet had to be watched in all conditions of bad visibility and Hotspur had to do the watching.
XVI
‘I beg your pardon, sir,’ said Bush, lingering after delivering his afternoon report, and hesitating before taking the next step he had clearly decided upon.
‘Yes, Mr Bush?’
‘You know, sir, you’re not looking as well as you should.’
‘Indeed?’
‘You’ve been doing too much, sir. Day and night.’
‘That’s a strange thing for a seaman to say, Mr Bush. And a King’s officer.’
‘It’s true, all the same, sir. You haven’t had an hour’s sleep at a time for days. You’re thinner than I’ve ever known you, sir.’
‘Thank you, Mr Bush. I’m going to turn in now, as a matter of fact.’
‘I’m glad of that, sir.’
‘See that I’m called the moment the weather shows signs of thickening.’
‘Aye aye, sir.’
‘Can I trust you, Mr Bush?’
That brought a smile into what was too serious a conversation.
‘You can, sir.’
‘Thank you, Mr Bush.’
It was interesting after Bush’s departure to look into the speckled chipped mirror and observe his thinness, the cheeks and temples fallen in, the sharp nose and the pointed chin. But this was not the real Hornblower. The real one was inside, unaffected – as yet, at least – by privation or strain. The real Hornblower looked out at him from the hollow eyes in the mirror with a twinkle of recognition, a twinkle that brightened, not with malice, but with something akin to that – a kind of cynical amusement – at the sight of Hornblower seeking proof of the weaknesses of the flesh. But time was too precious to waste; the weary body that the real Hornblower had to drag about demanded repose. And, as regards the weaknesses of the flesh, how delightful, how comforting it was to clasp to his stomach the hot-water bottle that Doughty had put into his cot, to feel warm and relaxed despite the clamminess of the bedclothes and the searching cold that pervaded the cabin.
‘Sir,’ said Doughty, coming into the cabin after what seemed to be one minute’s interval but which, his watch told him, was two hours. ‘Mr Prowse sent me. It’s snowing, sir.’
‘Very well. I’ll come.’
How often had he said those words? Every time the weather had thickened he had taken Hotspur up the Goulet, enduring the strain of advancing blind up into frightful danger, watching wind and tide, making the most elaborate calculations, alert for any change in conditions, ready to dash out again at the first hint of improvement, not only to evade the fire of the batteries, but also to prevent the French from discovering the close watch that was being maintained over them.
‘It’s only just started to snow, sir,’ Doughty was saying. ‘But Mr Prowse says it’s set in for the night.’
With Doughty’s assistance Hornblower had bundled himself automatically into his deck clothing without noticing what he was doing. He went out into a changed world, where his feet trod a thin carpet of snow on the deck, and where Prowse loomed up in the darkness shimmering in the white coating of snow on his oilskins.
‘Wind’s nor’ by east, sir, moderate. An hour of flood still to go.’
‘Thank you. Turn the hands up and send them to quarters, if you please. They can sleep at the guns.’
‘Aye aye, sir.’
‘Five minutes from now I don’t want to hear a sound.’
‘Aye aye, sir.’
This was only regular routine. The less the distance one could see the readier the ship had to be to open fire should an enemy loom up close alongside. But there was no routine about his own duties; everytime he took the ship up conditions were different, the wind blowing from a different compass point and the tide of a different age. This was the first time the wind had been so far round to the north. Tonight he would have to shave the shallows off Petit Minou as close as he dared, and then, close-hauled, with the last of the flood behind him, Hotspur could just ascend the northern channel, with the Little Girls to starboard.
There was spirit left in the crew; there were jokes and cries of surprise when they emerged into the snow from the stinking warmth of the ’tween deck, but sharp orders suppressed every sound. Hotspur was deadly quiet, like a ghost ship when the yards had been trimmed and the helm orders given and she began to make her way through the impenetrable night, night more impenetrable than ever with the air full of snowflakes silently dropping down upon them.
A shuttered lantern at the taffrail for reading the log, although the log’s indications were of minor importance, when speed over the ground could be so different – instinct and experience were more important. Two hands in the port-side main-chains with the lead. Hornblower on the weather side of the quarter-deck could hear quite a quiet call, even though there was a hand stationed to relay it if necessary. Five fathoms. Four fathoms. If his navigation were faulty they would strike before the next cast. Aground under the guns of Petit Minou, ruined and destroyed; Hornblower could not restrain himself from clenching his gloved hands and tightening his muscles. Six a
nd a half fathoms. That was what he had calculated upon, but it was a relief, nevertheless – Hornblower felt a small contempt for himself at feeling relieved, at his lack of faith in his own judgement.
‘Full and bye,’ he ordered.
They were as close under Petit Minou as possible, a quarter of a mile from those well-known hills, but there was nothing visible at all. There might be a solid black wall a yard from Hornblower’s eyes whichever way he turned them. Eleven fathoms; they were on the edge of the fairway now. The last of the flood, two days after the lowest neaps, and wind north by east; the current should be less than a knot and the eddy off Mengam non-existent.
‘No bottom!’
More than twenty fathoms; that was right.
‘A good night this for the Frogs, sir,’ muttered Bush beside him; he had been waiting for this moment.
Certainly it was a good night for the French if they were determined to escape. They knew the times of ebb and flood as well as he did. They would see the snow. Comfortable time for them to up anchor and get under weigh, and make the passage of the Goulet with a fair wind and ebb tide. Impossible for them to escape by the Four with this wind; the Iroise was guarded – he hoped – by the Inshore Squadron, but on a night as black as this they might try it in preference to the difficult Raz du Sein.
Nineteen fathoms; he was above the Little Girls, and he could be confident of weathering Mengam. Nineteen fathoms.
‘Should be slack water now, sir,’ muttered Prowse, who had just looked at his watch in the light of the shaded binnacle.
They were above Mengam now; the lead should record a fairly steady nineteen fathoms for the next few minutes, and it was time that he should plan out the next move – the next move but one, rather. He conjured up the chart before his mental eye.