Hornblower and the Crisis

  ‘Goodbye, son,’ he said. Once more he was rewarded with a smile instantly concealed. ‘Goodbye, my dear. I shall write to you, of course.’

  She put up her mouth for kissing, but she held herself back from throwing herself into his arms, and she was alert to terminate the kiss at the same moment as he saw fit to withdraw. Hornblower climbed up into the chaise, and sat there, feeling oddly isolated. The postilion mounted and looked back over his shoulder.

  ‘London,’ said Hornblower.

  The horses moved forward and the small crowd of onlookers raised something like a cheer. Then the hoofs clattered on the cobbles and the chaise swung round the corner, abruptly cutting Maria off out of his sight.

  8

  ‘This’ll do,’ said Hornblower to the landlady.

  ‘Bring ’em up, ’Arry,’ yelled the landlady over her shoulder, and Hornblower heard the heavy feet of the idiot son on the uncarpeted stairs as he carried up his sea chest.

  There was a bed and a chair and a wash-hand stand; a mirror on the wall; all a man could need. These were the cheap lodgings recommended to him by the last postilion; there had been a certain commotion in the frowsy street when the post-chaise had turned into it from the Westminster Bridge Road and had pulled up outside the house – it was not at all the sort of street where post-chaises could be expected to be seen. The cries of the children outside who had been attracted by the sight could still be heard through the narrow window.

  ‘Anything you want?’ asked the landlady.

  ‘Hot water,’ said Hornblower.

  The landlady looked a little harder at the man who wanted hot water at nine in the morning.

  ‘Or right. I’ll get you some,’ she said.

  Hornblower looked round him at the room; it seemed to his disordered mind that if he were to relax his attention the room would have revolved round him on its own. He sat down in the chair; his backside felt as if it were one big bruise, as if it had been beaten with a club. It would have been far more comfortable to stretch out on the bed, but that he dared not do. He kicked off his shoes and wriggled out of his coat, and became aware that he stank.

  ‘’Ere’s your ’ot water,’ said the landlady, re-entering.

  ‘Thank you.’

  When the door closed again Hornblower pulled himself wearily to his feet and took off the rest of his clothes. That was better; he had not had them off for three days, and this room was sweltering hot with the June sun blazing down on the roof above. Stupid with fatigue, he more than once had to stop to think what he should do next, as he sought out clean clothing and unrolled his housewife. The face he saw in the mirror was covered with hair on which the dust lay thick and he turned away from it in disgust.

  It was a grisly and awkward business to wash himself inch by inch in the wash basin, but it was restorative in some small degree. Everything he had been wearing was infiltrated with dust, which had penetrated everywhere – some had even seeped into his sea chest and pattered out when he lifted out his clothes. With his final pint of hot water he applied himself to shave.

  That brought about a decided improvement in his appearance although even now the face that looked out at him from the mirror was drawn very fine and with a pallor that made his tan look as if it were something painted on – that reminded him to look closely at his left jaw. Wear and tear as well as the shave had removed the paint that Maria had noticed. He put on clean clothes – of course they were faintly damp as always when newly come from the sea and would stay so until he could get them washed in fresh water. Now he was ready; he had consumed exactly the hour he had allowed himself. He picked up his bundle of papers and walked stiffly down the stairs.

  He was still incredibly stupid with fatigue. During the last hours in the post-chaise he had nodded off repeatedly while sitting up and lurching over the rutted roads. To travel post-haste had a romantic sound but it was utterly exhausting. When changing horses he had allowed himself sometimes half an hour – ten minutes in which to eat and twenty in which to doze with his head pillowed on his arms resting on the table. Better to be a sea officer than a courier, he decided. He paid his halfpenny toll on the bridge; normally he would have been greatly interested in the river traffic below him, but he could not spare it a glance at present. Then he turned up Whitehall and reached the Admiralty.

  Dreadnought Foster had displayed good sense in giving him that note; the doorkeeper eyed him and his bundle with intense suspicion when he first applied himself to him – it was not only cranks and madmen that he had to turn away, but the naval officers who came to pester Their Lordships for employment.

  ‘I have a letter for Mr Marsden from Admiral Foster,’ said Hornblower, and was interested to see the doorkeeper’s expression soften at once.

  ‘Would you please write a note to that effect on this form, sir?’ he asked.

  Hornblower wrote ‘Bringing a message from Rear Admiral Harry Foster’ and signed it, along with his boarding-house address.

  ‘This way, sir,’ said the doorkeeper. Presumably – certainly, indeed – the Admiral commanding at Plymouth would have the right of immediate access, personally or through an emissary, to Their Lordships’ Secretary.

  The doorkeeper led Hornblower into a waiting room and bustled off with the note and the letter; in the waiting room there were several officers sitting in attitudes of expectancy or impatience or resignation, and Hornblower exchanged formal ‘good mornings’ with them before sitting down in a corner of the room. It was a wooden chair, unfriendly to his tormented sitting parts, but it had a high back with wings against which it was comfortable to lean.

  Somehow Frenchmen had boarded the Princess by surprise, in the darkness. Now they were raging through the little ship, swinging cutlasses. Everything on board was in a turmoil while Hornblower struggled to free himself from his hammock to fight for his life. Someone was shouting ‘Wake up, sir!’ which was the very thing he wanted to do but could not. Then he realized that the words were being shouted into his ear and someone was shaking him by the shoulder. He blinked twice and came back to life and consciousness.

  ‘Mr Marsden will see you now, sir,’ said the unfamiliar figure who had awakened him.

  ‘Thank you,’ replied Hornblower, seizing his bundle and getting stiffly to his feet.

  ‘Fair off you was, sir,’ said the messenger. ‘Come this way, sir, please sir.’

  Hornblower could not remember whether the other individuals waiting were the same as he had first seen or had changed, but they eyed him with envious hostility as he walked but of the room.

  Mr Marsden was a tall and incredibly elegant gentleman of middle age, old-fashioned in that his hair was tied at the back with a ribbon, yet elegant all the same because the style exactly suited him. Hornblower knew him to be already a legendary figure. His name was known throughout England because it was to him that dispatches were addressed (‘Sir, I have the honour to inform you for the further information of Their Lordships that –’) and printed in the newspapers in that form. First Lords might come and First Lords might go – as Lord Barham had just come and Lord Melville had just gone – and so might Sea Lords, and so might Admirals, but Mr Marsden remained the Secretary. It was he who handled all the executive work of the greatest navy the world has ever seen. Of course he had a large staff, no fewer than forty clerks, so Hornblower had heard, and he had an assistant secretary, Mr Barrow, who was almost as well known as he was, but even so out of everybody in the world Mr Marsden could most nearly be described as the one who was fighting single-handed the war to the death against the French Empire and Bonaparte.

  It was a lovely elegant room looking out on to the Horse Guards Parade, a room that exactly suited Mr Marsden, who was seated at an oval table. At his shoulder stood an elderly clerk, grey-haired and lean, of an obviously junior grade, to judge by his threadbare coat and frayed linen.

  Only the briefest salutations were exchanged while Hornblower put his bundle down on the table.

  ‘See wh
at there is here, Dorsey,’ said Marsden over his shoulder to the clerk, and then, to Hornblower, ‘How did these come into your possession?’

  Hornblower told of the momentary capture of the Guèpe; Mr Marsden kept his grey eyes steadily on Horriblower’s face during the brief narrative.

  ‘The French captain was killed?’ asked Marsden.

  ‘Yes.’

  There was no need to tell about what Meadows’ cutlass had done to the French captain’s head.

  ‘That indicates that this may be genuine,’ decided Marsden, and Hornblower was puzzled momentarily until he realized that Marsden meant that there had been no ruse-de-guerre and that the papers had not been deliberately ‘planted’ on him.

  ‘Quite genuine, I think, sir. You see –’ he said, and went on to point out that the French brig could not have expected for one moment that the Princess would launch a counter-attack on her.

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Marsden; he was a man of icy-cold manner, speaking in a tone unchangingly formal. ‘You must understand that Bonaparte would sacrifice any man’s life if he could mislead us in exchange. But, as you say, Captain, these circumstances were completely unpredictable. What have you found, Dorsey?’

  ‘Nothing of great importance except this, sir.’

  ‘This’ was of course the leaden-covered dispatch. Dorsey was looking keenly at the twine which bound up the sandwich.

  ‘That’s not the work of Paris,’ he said. ‘That was tied in the ship. This label was probably written by the captain, too Pardon me, sir.’

  Dorsey reached down and took a penknife from the tray in front of Marsden, and cut the twine, and the sandwich fell apart.

  ‘Ah!’ said Dorsey.

  It was a large linen envelope, heavily sealed in three places, and Dorsey studied the seals closely before looking over at Hornblower.

  ‘Sir,’ said Dorsey. ‘You have brought us something valuable. Very valuable, I should say, sir. This is the first of its kind to come into our possession.’

  He handed it to Marsden, and tapped the seals with his finger.

  ‘Those are the seals of this newfangled Empire of Bonaparte’s, sir,’ he said. ‘Three good specimens.’

  It was only a few months before, as Hornblower realized, that Bonaparte had proclaimed himself Emperor and the Republican Consulate had given place to the Empire. When Marsden permitted him to look closely, he could see the imperial eagle with its thunderbolt, but to his mind not quite as dignified a bird as it might be, for the feathers that sheathed its legs offered a grotesque impression of trousers.

  ‘I would like to open this carefully, sir,’ said Dorsey.

  ‘Very well. You may go and attend to it.’

  Fate hung in the balance for Hornblower at that moment; somehow Hornblower was aware of it, with uneasy premonition, while Marsden kept his cold eyes fixed on his face, apparently as a preliminary to dismissing him.

  Later in his life – even within a month or two – Hornblower could look back in perspective at this moment as one in which his destiny was diverted in one direction instead of in another, dependent on a single minute’s difference in timing. He was reminded, when he looked back, of the occasions when musket balls had missed him by no more than a foot or so; the smallest, microscopic correction of aim on the part of the marksman would have laid Hornblower lifeless, his career at an end. Similarly at this moment a few seconds’ delay along the telegraph route, a minute’s dilatoriness on the part of a messenger, and Hornblower’s life would have followed a different path.

  For the door at the end of the room opened abruptly and another elegant gentleman came striding in. He was some years younger than Marsden, and dressed soberly but in the very height of fashion, his lightly starched collar reaching to his ears, and a white waistcoat picked out with black calling unobtrusive attention to the slenderness of his waist. Marsden looked round with some annoyance at this intrusion, but restrained himself when he saw who the intruder was, especially when he saw a sheet of paper fluttering in his hand.

  ‘Villeneuve’s in Ferrol,’ said the newcomer. ‘This has just come by telegraph. Calder fought him off Finisterre and was given the slip.’

  Marsden took the dispatch and read it with care.

  ‘This will be for His Lordship,’ he said, calmly, rising with deliberation from his chair. Even then he did not noticeably hurry. ‘Mr Barrow, this is Captain Hornblower. You had better hear about his recent acquisition.’

  Marsden went out through a hardly perceptible door behind him, bearing news of the most vital, desperate importance. Villeneuve had more than twenty ships of the line, French and Spanish – ships which could cover Bonaparte’s crossing of the Channel – and he had been lost to sight for the last three weeks since Nelson had pursued him to the West Indies. Calder had been stationed off Finisterre to intercept and destroy him and had apparently failed in his mission.

  ‘What is this acquisition, Captain?’ asked Barrow, the simple question breaking into Hornblower’s train of thought like a pistol shot.

  ‘Only a dispatch from Bonaparte, sir,’ he said. He used the ‘sir’ deliberately, despite his confusion – Barrow was after all the Second Secretary, and his name was nearly as well known as Marsden’s.

  ‘But that may be of vital importance, Captain. What was the purport of it?’

  ‘It is being opened at the present moment, sir. Mr Dorsey is attending to that.’

  ‘I see. Dorsey in forty years in this office has become accustomed to handling captured documents. It is his particular department.’

  ‘I fancied so, sir.’

  There was a moment’s pause, while Hornblower braced himself to make the request that was clamouring inside him for release.

  ‘What about this news, sir? What about Villeneuve? Could you tell me, sir?’

  ‘No harm in your knowing,’ said Barrow. ‘A Gazette will have to be issued as soon as it can be arranged. Calder met Villeneuve off Finisterre. He was in action with him for the best part of two days – it was thick weather – and then they seem to have parted.’

  ‘No prizes, sir?’

  ‘Calder seems to have taken a couple of Spaniards.’

  Two fleets, each of twenty ships or more, had fought for two days with no more result than that. England would be furious – for that matter England might be in very serious peril. The French had probably employed their usual evasive tactics, edging down to leeward with their broad sides fully in action while the British tried to close and paid the price for the attempt.

  ‘And Villeneuve broke through into Ferrol, sir?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That’s a difficult place to watch,’ commented Hornblower.

  ‘Do you know Ferrol?’ demanded Barrow, sharply.

  ‘Fairly well, sir.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I was a prisoner of war there in ’97, sir.’

  ‘Did you escape?’

  ‘No, sir, they set me free.’

  ‘By exchange?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Then why?’

  ‘I helped to save life in a shipwreck.’

  ‘You did? So you know about conditions in Ferrol?’

  ‘Fairly well, sir, as I said.’

  ‘Indeed. And you say it’s a difficult place to watch. Why?’

  Sitting in a peaceful office in London a man could experience as many surprises as on the deck of a frigate at sea. Instead of a white squall suddenly whipping out of an unexpected quarter, or instead of an enemy suddenly appearing on the horizon, here was a question demanding an immediate answer regarding the difficulty of blockading Ferrol. This was a civilian, a landsman, who needed the information, and urgently. For the first time in a century the First Lord was a seaman, an Admiral – it would be a feather in the Second Secretary’s cap if in the next, immediate conference he could display familiarity with conditions in Ferrol.

  Hornblower had to express in words what up to that moment he had only been conscious of as a result of his seam
an’s instinct. He had to think fast to present an orderly statement.

  ‘First of all it’s matter of distance,’ he began. ‘It’s not like blockading Brest.’

  Plymouth would be the base in each case; from Plymouth to Brest was less than fifty leagues, while from Plymouth to Ferrol was nearly two hundred – communication and supply would be four times as difficult, as Hornblower pointed out.

  ‘Even more with prevailing westerly winds,’ he added.

  ‘Please go on, Captain,’ said Barrow.

  ‘But really that is not as important as the other factors, sir,’ said Hornblower.

  It was easy to go on from there. A fleet blockading Ferrol had no friendly refuge to leeward. A fleet blockading Brest could run to Tor Bay in a westerly tempest – the strategy of the past fifty years had been based on that geographical fact. A fleet blockading Cadiz could rely on the friendly neutrality of Portugal, and had Lisbon on one flank and Gibraltar on the other. Nelson watching Toulon had made use of anchorages on the Sardinian coast. But off Ferrol it would be a different story. Westerly gales would drive a blockading fleet into the cul-de-sac of the Bay of Biscay whose shores were not merely hostile but wild and steep-to, with rain and fog. To keep watch over Villeneuve in Ferrol, particularly in winter, would impose an intolerable strain on the watcher, especially as the exits from Ferrol were far easier and more convenient than the single exit from Brest – the largest imaginable fleet could sortie from Ferrol in a single tide, which no large French fleet had ever succeeded in doing from Brest. He recalled what he had observed in Ferrol regarding the facilities for the prompt watering of a fleet, for berthing, for supply; the winds that were favourable for exit and the winds that made exit impossible; the chances of a blockader making furtive contact with the shore – as he himself had later done off Brest – and the facilities to maintain close observation over a blockaded force.

  ‘You seem to have made good use of your time in Ferrol, Captain,’ said Barrow.

  Hornblower would have shrugged his shoulders, but restrained himself in time from indulging in so un-English a gesture. The memory of that desperately unhappy time came back to him in a flood and he was momentarily lost in retrospective misery. He came back into the present to find Barrow’s eyes still fixed on him with curiosity, and he realized, self-consciously, that for a moment he had allowed Barrow a glimpse into his inner feelings.