Hornblower and the Crisis

  ‘Mr James!’ bellowed Hornblower. The signal midshipman was waiting at his elbow, but midshipmen should always be bellowed at, especially by a lieutenant with a very new commission.

  Hornblower reeled off the numbers, and the signal went soaring up to the yardarm; the signal halyards vibrated wildly as the gale tore at the flags. Captain Sawyer waited on deck for the reply; this business must be important. Hornblower read the message again, for until that moment he had only studied it as something to be transmitted. But even on reading it he did not know why the message should be important. Until three months before, he had been a prisoner in Spanish hands for two weary years, and there were gaps in his knowledge of recent history. The name of Barry McCool meant nothing to him.

  On the other hand, it seemed to mean a great deal to the Admiral, for hardly had sufficient time elapsed for the message to be carried below to him than a question soared up to the Victory’s yardarm.

  ‘Flag to Renown.’ Hornblower read those flags as they broke and was instantly for the rest of the message. ‘Is McCool alive?’

  ‘Reply affirmative,’ said Captain Sawyer.

  And the affirmative had hardly been hoisted before the next signal was fluttering in the Victory.

  ‘Have him on board at once. Court martial will assemble.’

  A court martial! Who on earth was this man McCool? A deserter? The recapture of a mere deserter would not be a matter for the Commander-in-Chief. A traitor? Strange that a traitor should be court martialled in the fleet. But there it was. A word from the captain sent Hart scurrying overside to bring this mysterious prisoner on board, while signal after signal went up from the Victory convening the court martial in the Renown.

  Hornblower was kept busy enough reading the messages; he had only a glance to spare when Hart had his prisoner and his sea chest hoisted up over the port side. A youngish man, tall and slender, his hands were tied behind him – which was why he had to be hoisted in – and he was hatless, so that his long red hair streamed in the wind. He wore a blue uniform with red facings – a French infantry uniform, apparently. The name, the uniform and the red hair combined to give Hornblower his first insight into the situation. McCool must be an Irishman. While Hornblower had been a prisoner in Ferrol, there had been, he knew, a bloody rebellion in Ireland. Irishmen who had escaped had taken service with France in large number. This must be one of them, but it hardly explained why the Admiral should take it upon himself to try him instead of handing him over to the civil authorities.

  Hornblower had to wait an hour for the explanation, until, at two bells in the next watch, dinner was served in the gun room.

  ‘There’ll be a pretty little ceremony tomorrow morning,’ said Clive, the surgeon. He put his hand to his neck in a gesture which Hornblower thought hideous.

  ‘I hope the effect will be salutary,’ said Roberts, the second lieutenant. The foot of the table, where he sat, was for the moment the head, because Buckland, the first lieutenant, was absent attending to the preparations for the court martial.

  ‘But why should we hang him?’ asked Hornblower.

  Roberts rolled an eye on him.

  ‘Deserter,’ he said, and then went on. ‘Of course, you’re a newcomer. I entered him myself, into this very ship, in ’98. Hart spotted him at once.’

  ‘But I thought he was a rebel?’

  ‘A rebel as well,’ said Roberts. ‘The quickest way out of Ireland – the only way, in fact – in ’98 was to join the armed forces.’

  ‘I see,’ said Hornblower.

  ‘We got a hundred hands that autumn,’ said Smith, another lieutenant.

  And no questions would be asked, thought Hornblower. His country, fighting for her life, needed seamen as a drowning man needs air, and was prepared to make them out of any raw material that presented itself.

  ‘McCool deserted one dark night when we were becalmed off the Penmarks,’ explained Roberts. ‘Got through a lower gun port with a grating to float him. We thought he was drowned until news came through from Paris that he was there, up to his old games. He boasted of what he’d done – that’s how we knew him to be O’Shaughnessy, as he called himself when we had him.’

  ‘Wolfe Tone had a French uniform,’ said Smith. ‘And they’d have strung him up if he hadn’t cut his own throat first.’

  ‘Uniform only aggravates the offence when he’s a deserter,’ said Roberts.

  Hornblower had much to think about. First there was the nauseating thought that there would be an execution in the morning. Then there was this eternal Irish problem, about which the more he thought the more muddled he became. If just the bare facts were considered, there could be no problem. In the world at the moment, Ireland could choose only between the domination of England and the domination of France; no other possibility existed in a world at war. And it seemed unbelievable that anyone would wish to escape from English overlordship – absentee landlords and Catholic disabilities notwithstanding – in order to submit to the rapacity and cruelty and venality of the French republic. To risk one’s life to effect such an exchange would be a most illogical thing to do, but logic, Hornblower concluded sadly, had no bearing upon patriotism, and the bare facts were the least considerable factors.

  And in the same way the English methods were subject to criticism as well. There could be no doubt that the Irish people looked upon Wolfe Tone and Fitzgerald as martyrs, and would look upon McCool in the same light. There was nothing so effective as a few martyrdoms to ennoble and invigorate a cause.

  The hanging of McCool would merely be adding fuel to the fire that England sought to extinguish. Two peoples actuated by the most urgent of motives – self-preservation and patriotism – were at grips in a struggle which could have no satisfactory ending for any lengthy time to come.

  Buckland, the first lieutenant, came into the gun room with the preoccupied look commonly worn by first lieutenants with a weight of responsibility on their shoulders. He ran his glance over the assembled company, and all the junior officers, sensing that unpleasant duties were about to be allocated, did their unobtrusive best not to meet his eye. Inevitably it was the name of the most junior lieutenant which rose to Buckland’s lips.

  ‘Mr Hornblower,’ he said.

  ‘Sir!’ replied Hornblower, doing his best now to keep resignation out of his voice.

  ‘I am going to make you responsible for the prisoner.’

  ‘Sir?’ said Hornblower, with a different intonation.

  ‘Hart will be giving evidence at the court martial,’ explained Buckland – it was a vast condescension that he should deign to explain at all. ‘The master-at-arms is a fool, you know. I want McCool brought up for trial safe and sound, and I want him kept safe and sound afterward. I’m repeating the captain’s own words, Mr Hornblower.’

  ‘Aye, aye, sir,’ said Hornblower, for there was nothing else to be said.

  ‘No Wolfe Tone tricks with McCool,’ said Smith.

  Wolfe Tone had cut his own throat the night before he was due to be hanged, and had died in agony a week later.

  ‘Ask me for anything you may need, Mr Hornblower,’ said Buckland.

  ‘Aye, aye, sir.’

  ‘Side boys!’ suddenly roared a voice on deck overhead, and Buckland hurried out; the approach of an officer of rank meant that the court martial was beginning to assemble.

  Hornblower’s chin was on his breast. It was a hard, unrelenting world, and he was an officer in the hardest and most unrelenting service in that world – a service in which a man could no more say ‘I cannot’ than he could say ‘I dare not’.

  ‘Bad luck, Horny,’ said Smith, with surprising gentleness, and there were other murmurs of sympathy from round the table.

  ‘Obey orders, young man,’ said Roberts quietly.

  Hornblower rose from his chair. He could not trust himself to speak, so that it was with a hurried bow that he quitted the company at the table.

  ‘’E’s ’ere, safe an’ sound, Mr ’Ornblower,??
? said the master-at-arms, halting in the darkness of the lower ‘tween decks.

  A marine sentry at the door moved out of the way, and the master-at-arms shone the light of his candle lantern on a keyhole in the door and inserted the key.

  ‘I put ‘im in this empty storeroom, sir,’ went on the master-at-arms. ‘’E’s got two of my corporals along with ’im.’

  The door opened, revealing the light of another candle lantern. The air inside the room was foul; McCool was sitting on a chest, while two of the ship’s corporals sat on the deck with their backs to the bulkhead. The corporals rose at an officer’s entrance, but even so, there was almost no room for the two newcomers. Hornblower cast a vigilant eye round the arrangements. There appeared to be no chance of escape or suicide. In the end, he steeled himself to meet McCool’s eyes.

  ‘I have been put in charge of you,’ he said.

  ‘That is most gratifying to me, Mr – Mr –’ said McCool, rising from the chest.

  ‘Hornblower.’

  ‘I am delighted to make your acquaintance, Mr Hornblower.’

  McCool spoke in a cultured voice, with only enough of Ireland in it to betray his origin. He had tied back the red locks into a neat queue, and even in the faint candlelight his blue eyes gave strange reflections.

  ‘Is there anything you need?’ asked Hornblower.

  ‘I could eat and I could drink,’ replied McCool. ‘Seeing that nothing has passed my lips since the Espérance was captured.’

  That was yesterday. The man had had neither food nor water for more than twenty-four hours.

  ‘I will see to it,’ said Hornblower. ‘Anything more?’

  ‘A mattress – a cushion – something on which I can sit,’ said McCool. He waved a hand towards his sea chest. ‘I bear an honoured name, but I have no desire to bear it imprinted on my person.’

  The sea chest was of a rich mahogany. The lid was a thick slab of wood whose surface had been chiselled down to leave his name – B. I. McCool – standing out in high relief.

  ‘I’ll send you in a mattress too,’ said Hornblower.

  A lieutenant in uniform appeared at the door.

  ‘I’m Payne, on the Admiral’s staff,’ he explained to Hornblower. ‘I have orders to search this man.’

  ‘Certainly,’ said Hornblower.

  ‘You have my permission,’ said McCool.

  The master-at-arms and his assistants had to quit the crowded little room to enable Payne to do his work, while Hornblower stood in the corner and watched. Payne was quick and efficient. He made McCool strip to the skin and examined his clothes with care – seams, linings and buttons. He crumpled each portion carefully, with his ear to the material, apparently to hear if there were papers concealed inside. Then he knelt down to the chest; the key was already in the lock, and he swung it open. Uniforms, shirts, underclothing, gloves; each article was taken out, examined and laid aside. There were two small portraits of children, to which Payne gave special attention without discovering anything.

  ‘The things you are looking for,’ said McCool, ‘were all dropped overside before the prize-crew could reach the Espérance. You’ll find nothing to betray my fellow countrymen, and you may as well save yourself that trouble.’

  ‘You can put your clothes on again,’ said Payne curtly to McCool. He nodded to Hornblower and hurried out again.

  ‘A man whose politeness is quite overwhelming,’ said McCool, buttoning his breeches.

  ‘I’ll attend to your requests,’ said Hornblower.

  He paused only long enough to enjoin the strictest vigilance on the master-at-arms and the ship’s corporals before hastening away to give orders for McCool to be given food and water, and he returned quickly. McCool drank his quart of water eagerly, and made effort to eat the ship’s biscuit and meat.

  ‘No knife. No fork,’ he commented.

  ‘No,’ replied Hornblower in a tone devoid of expression.

  ‘I understand.’

  It was strange to stand there gazing down at this man who was going to die tomorrow, biting not very efficiently at the lump of tough meat which he held to his teeth.

  The bulkhead against which Hornblower leaned vibrated slightly, and the sound of a gun came faintly down to them. It was the signal that the court martial was about to open.

  ‘Do we go?’ asked McCool.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then I can leave this delicious food without any breach of good manners.’

  Up the ladders to the main deck, two marines leading, McCool following them, Hornblower following him, and two ship’s corporals bringing up the rear.

  ‘I have frequently traversed these decks,’ said McCool, looking round him, ‘with less ceremonial.’

  Hornblower was watching carefully lest he should break away and throw himself into the sea.

  The court martial. Gold lace and curt efficient routine, as the Renown swung to her anchors and the timbers of the ship transmitted the sound of the rigging vibrating in the gale. Evidence of identification. Curt questions.

  ‘Nothing I could say would be listened to amid these emblems of tyranny,’ said McCool in reply to the president of the court.

  It needed no more than fifteen minutes to condemn a man to death: ‘The sentence of this court is that you, Barry Ignatius McCool, by hanged by the neck –’

  The storeroom to which Hornblower escorted McCool back was now a condemned cell. A hurrying midshipman asked for Hornblower almost as soon as they arrived there.

  ‘Captain’s compliments, sir, and he’d like to speak to you.’

  ‘Very good,’ said Hornblower.

  ‘The Admiral’s with him, sir,’ added the midshipman in a burst of confidence.

  Rear Admiral the Honourable Sir William Cornwallis was indeed in the captain’s cabin, along with Payne and Captain Sawyer. He started to go straight to the point the moment Hornblower had been presented to him.

  ‘You’re the officer charged with carrying out the execution?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Now look’ee here, young sir –’

  Cornwallis was a popular admiral, strict but kindly, and of unflinching courage and towering professional ability. Under his nickname of ‘Billy Blue’ he was the hero of uncounted anecdotes and ballads. But having got so far in what he was intending to say, he betrayed a hesitation alien to his character. Hornblower waited for him to continue.

  ‘Look’ee here,’ said Cornwallis again. ‘There’s to be no speechifying when he’s strung up.’

  ‘No, sir?’ said Hornblower.

  ‘A quarter of the hands in this ship are Irish,’ went on Cornwallis. ‘I’d as lief have a light taken into the magazine as to have McCool make a speech to ’em.’

  ‘I understand, sir,’ said Hornblower.

  But there was a ghastly routine about executions. From time immemorial the condemned man had been allowed to address his last words to the onlookers.

  ‘String him up,’ said Cornwallis, ‘and that’ll show ’em what to expect if they run off. But once let him open his mouth – That fellow has the gift of the gab, and we’ll have this crew unsettled for the next six months.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘So see to it, young sir. Fill him full o’ rum, maybe. But let him speak at your peril.’

  ‘Aye, aye, sir.’

  Payne followed Hornblower out of the cabin when he was dismissed.

  ‘You might stuff his mouth with oakum,’ he suggested. ‘With his hands tied he could not get it out.’

  ‘Yes.’ said Hornblower, his blood running cold.

  ‘I’ve found a priest for him,’ went on Payne, ‘but he’s Irish too. We can’t rely on him to tell McCool to keep his mouth shut.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Hornblower.

  ‘McCool’s devilish cunning. No doubt he’d throw everything overboard before they captured him.’

  ‘What was he intending to do?’ asked Hornblower.

  ‘Land in Ireland and stir up fresh tr
ouble. Lucky we caught him. Lucky for that matter, we could charge him with desertion and make a quick business of it.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Hornblower.

  ‘Don’t rely on making him drunk,’ said Payne, ‘although that was Billy Blue’s advice. Drunk or sober, these Irishmen can always talk. I’ve given you the best hint.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Hornblower, concealing a shudder.

  He went back into the condemned cell like a man condemned himself. McCool was sitting on the straw mattress Hornblower had had sent in, and the two ship’s corporals still had him under their observation.

  ‘Here comes Jack Ketch,’ said McCool with a smile that almost escaped appearing forced.

  Hornblower plunged into the matter in hand; he could see no tactful way of approach.

  ‘Tomorrow –’ he said.

  ‘Yes, tomorrow?’

  ‘Tomorrow you are to make no speeches,’ he said.

  ‘None? No farewell to my countrymen?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You are robbing a condemned man of his last privilege.’

  ‘I have my orders,’ said Hornblower.

  ‘And you propose to enforce them?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘May I ask how?’

  ‘I can stop your mouth with tow,’ said Hornblower brutally.

  McCool looked at the pale, strained face. ‘You do not appear to me to be the ideal executioner,’ said McCool, and then a new idea seemed to strike him. ‘Supposing I were to save you that trouble?’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I could give you my parole to say nothing.’

  Hornblower tried to conceal his doubts as to whether he could trust a fanatic about to die.

  ‘Oh, you wouldn’t have to trust my bare word,’ said McCool bitterly. ‘We can strike a bargain, if you will. You need not carry out your half unless I have already carried out mine.’

  ‘A bargain?’

  ‘Yes. Allow me to write to my widow. Promise me to send her the letter and my sea chest here – you can see it is of sentimental value – and I, on my side, promise to say no word from the time of leaving this place here until – until –’ Even McCool faltered at that point. ‘Is that explicit enough?’