‘Hands to the sheets, Mr Freeman, please. I’m going between them – there. Stand to your guns, men! Now, hard down!’
The wheel went over, and the Porta Coeli came about on the other tack, handily as anyone could desire. Hornblower heard the thunder of a shot close under her bows, and then the deck erupted in a flying shower of splinters from a jagged hole close to the mainmast bitts – a twenty-four-pound shot, fired upwards at close elevation, had pierced the brig’s frail timbers, and, continuing its flight, had burst through the deck.
‘Ready about! Hard over!’ yelled Hornblower, and the Porta Coeli tacked again into the narrow gap between two gunboats. Her carronades went off in rapid succession on both sides. Looking to starboard, Hornblower had one gunboat under his eye. He saw her there, half a dozen men standing by the tiller aft, two men at each sweep amidships tugging wildly to swing her round, a dozen men at the gun forward. A man with a red handkerchief round his head stood by the mast, resting his hand against it – Hornblower could even see his open mouth as his jaw dropped and he saw death upon him. Then the shots came smashing in. The man with the red handkerchief disappeared – maybe he was dashed overboard, but most likely he was smashed into pulp. The frail frame of the gunboat – nothing more than a big rowing-boat strengthened forward for a gun – disintegrated; her side caved in under the shots as though under the blows of some vast hammer. The sea poured in even as Hornblower looked; the shots, fired with extreme depression, must have gone on through the gunboat’s bottom after piercing her side. The dead weight of the gun in her bows took charge as her stability vanished, and her bows surged under while her stem was still above water. Then the gun slid out, relieving her of its weight, and the wreck righted itself for an instant before capsizing. A few men swam among the wreckage. Hornblower looked over to port; the other gunboat had been as hard hit, lying at that moment just at the surface with the remains of her crew swimming by her. Whoever had been in command of those gunboats had been a reckless fool to expose the frail vessels to the fire of a real vessel of war – even one as tiny as the Porta Coeli – as long as the latter was under proper command. Gunboats were only of use to batter into submission ships helplessly aground or dismasted.
The chasse-marée and the Flame, still alongside each other, were close ahead.
‘Mr Freeman, load with canister, if you please. We’ll run alongside the Frenchman. One broadside, and we’ll board her in the smoke.’
‘Aye aye, sir.’
Freeman turned to bellow orders to his crew.
‘Mr Freeman, I shall want every available hand in the boarding-party. You’ll stay here—’
‘Sir!’
‘You’ll stay here. Pick six good seamen to stay with you to work the brig out again if we don’t come back. Is that clear, Mr Freeman?’
‘Yes, Sir Horatio.’
There was still time for Freeman to make the arrangements as the Porta Coeli surged up towards the Frenchman. There was still time for Hornblower to realise with surprise that what he had said about not coming back was sincere, and no mere bombast to stimulate the men. He was most oddly determined to conquer or die, he, the man who was afraid of shadows. The men were yelling madly as the Porta Coeli drew up to the Frenchman, whose name – the Bonne Celestine of Honfleur – was now visible on her stern. Blue uniforms and white breeches could be seen aboard her; soldiers – it was true, then, that Bonaparte’s need for trained artillerymen had forced him to conscript his seamen, replacing them with raw conscript soldiers. A pity the action was not taking place out at sea, for then they would most of them be seasick.
‘Lay us alongside,’ said Hornblower to the helmsman. There was confusion on the decks of the Bonne Celestine; Hornblower could see men running to the guns on her disengaged port side.
‘Quiet, you men!’ bellowed Hornblower. ‘Quiet!’
Silence fell on the brig; Hornblower had hardly to raise his voice to make himself heard on the tiny deck.
‘See that every shot tell, you gunners,’ said Hornblower. ‘Boarders, are you ready to come with me?’
Another yell answered him. Thirty men were crouching by the bulwarks with pikes and cutlasses; the firing of the broadside and the dropping of the mainsail would set free thirty more, a small enough force unless the broadside should do great execution and the untrained landsmen in the Bonne Celestine should flinch. Hornblower stole a glance at the helmsman, a grey-bearded seaman, who was coolly gauging the distance between the two vessels while at the same time watching the mainsail as it shivered as the Porta Coeli came to the wind. A good seaman, that – Hornblower made a mental note to remember him for commendation. The helmsman whirled the wheel over.
‘Down mains’l,’ roared Freeman.
The Borne Celestine’s guns bellowed deafeningly, and Hornblower felt powder grains strike his face as the smoke eddied round him. He drew his sword as the Porta Coeli’s carronades crashed out, and the two vessels came together with a squealing of timber. He sprang upon the bulwark in the smoke, sword in hand; at the same moment a figure beside him cleared the bulwark in a single motion and dropped upon the Bonne Celestine’s deck – Brown, waving a cutlass. Hornblower leaped after him, but Brown stayed in front of him, striking to left and right at the shadowy figures looming in the smoke. Here there was a pile of dead and wounded men, caught in the blast of canister from one of the Porta Coeli’s carronades. Hornblower stumbled over a limb, and recovered himself in time to see a bayonet on the end of a musket lunging at him. A violent twisting of his body evaded the thrust. There was a pistol in his left hand, and he fired with the muzzle almost against the Frenchman’s breast. Now the wind had blown the cannon-smoke clear. Forward some of the boarders were fighting with a group of the enemy cornered in the bow – the clash of the blades came clearly to Hornblower’s ears – but aft there was not a Frenchman to be seen. Gibbons, master’s mate, was at the halliards running down the tricolour from the masthead. At the starboard side lay the Flame, and over her bulwarks were visible French infantry shakoes; Hornblower saw a man’s head and shoulders appear, saw a musket being pointed. It shifted its aim from Gibbons to Hornblower, and in that instant Hornblower fired the other barrel of his pistol, and the Frenchman fell down below the bulwarks, just as a fresh wave of boarders came pouring on board from the Porta Coeli.
‘Come on!’ yelled Hornblower – it was desperately important to make sure of the Flame before a defence could be organised.
The brigs stood higher out of the water than did the chasse-marée; this time they had to climb upward. He got his left elbow over the bulwark, and tried to swing himself up, but his sword hampered him.
‘Help me, damn you!’ he snarled over his shoulder, and a seaman put his shoulder under Hornblower’s stern and heaved him up with such surprising goodwill that he shot over the bulwarks and fell on his face in the scuppers on the other side, his sword slithering over the deck. He started to crawl forward towards it, but a sixth sense warned him of danger, and he flung himself down and forward inside the sweep of a cutlass, and cannoned against the shins of the man who wielded it. Then a wave of men burst over him, and he was kicked and trodden on and then crushed beneath a writhing body with which he grappled with desperate strength. He could hear Brown’s voice roaring over him, pistols banging, sword-blades dashing before sudden silence fell round him. The man with whom he was struggling went suddenly limp and inert, and then was dragged off him. He rose to his feet.
‘Are you wounded, sir?’ asked Brown.
‘No,’ he answered. Three or four dead men lay on the deck; aft a group of French soldiers with a French seaman or two among them stood by the wheel, disarmed, while two British sailors, pistol in hand, stood guard over them. A French officer, blood dripping from his right sleeve, and with tears on his cheeks – he was no more than a boy – was sitting on the deck, and Hornblower was about to address him when his attention was suddenly distracted.
‘Sir! Sir!’
It was an English seama
n he did not recognise, in a striped shirt of white and red, his pigtail shaking from side to side as he gesticulated with the violence of his emotion.
‘Sir! I was fightin’ against the Frogs. Your men saw me. Me an’ these other lads here.’
He motioned behind him to an anxious little group of seamen who had heretofore hung back, but now came forward, some of them bursting into speech, all of them nodding their heads in agreement.
‘Mutineers?’ asked Hornblower. In the heat of battle he had forgotten about the mutiny.
‘I’m no mutineer, sir. I did what I had to or they’d ’a killed me. Ain’t that so, mates?’
‘Stand back, there!’ blared Brown; there was blood on the blade of his cutlass.
A vivid prophetic picture suddenly leaped into Hornblower’s mind’s eye – the court martial, the semicircle of judges in glittering full dress, the tormented prisoners, tongue-tied, watching, only half understanding, the proceedings which would determine their lives or deaths, and he himself giving his evidence, trying conscientiously to remember every word spoken on both sides; one word remembered might make the difference between the lash and the rope.
‘Arrest those men!’ he snapped. ‘Put them under confinement.’
‘Sir! Sir!’
‘None o’ that!’ growled Brown.
Remorseless hands dragged the protesting men away.
‘Where are the other mutineers?’ demanded Hornblower.
‘Down below, sir, I fancies,’ said Brown. ‘Some o’ the Frenchies is down there, too.’
Odd how a beaten crew so often scuttled below. Hornblower honestly believed that he would rather face the fighting madness of the victors on deck than surrender ignominiously in the dark confines of the ’tween-decks.
A loud hail from the Porta Coeli came to his ears.
‘Sir Horatio!’ hailed Freeman’s voice. ‘We’ll be all aground if we don’t get way on the ships soon. I request permission to cast off and make sail.’
‘Wait!’ replied Hornblower.
He looked together round him; the three ships locked together, prisoners under guard here, there, and everywhere. Below decks, both in the Bonne Celestine and in the Flame, there were enemies still unsecured, probably many more in total than he had men under his orders. A shattering crash below him, followed by screams and cries; the Flame shook under a violent blow. Hornblower remembered the sound of a cannon-shot striking on his inattentive ears a second before; he looked round. The two surviving gunboats were resting on their oars a couple of cables’ lengths away, their bows pointing at the group of ships. Hornblower could guess they were in shoal water, almost immune from attack. A jet of smoke from one of the gunboats, and another frightful crash below, and more screams. Those twenty-four-pounder balls were probably smashing through the whole frail length of the brig, whose timbers could resist their impact hardly better than paper. Hornblower plunged into the urgency of the business before him like a man into a raging torrent which he had to swim.
‘Get those hatches battened down, Brown!’ he ordered. ‘Put a sentry over each. Mr Gibbons!’
‘Sir?’
‘Secure your hatches. Get ready to make sail.’
‘Aye aye, sir.’
‘What topmen are there here? Man the halliards. Who can take the wheel? Wheel none of you? Mr Gibbons! Have you a quartermaster to spare? Send one here immediately. Mr Freeman! You can cast off and make sail. Rendezvous at the other prize.’
Another shot from those accursed gunboats crashed into the Flame’s stern below him. Thank God the wind was off shore and he could get clear of them. The Porta Coeli had set her boom-mainsail again and had got clear of the Bonne Celestine; Gibbons was supervising the setting of the latter’s lug-mainsail while half a dozen hands boomed her off from the Flame.
‘Hoist away!’ ordered Hornblower as the vessels separated. ‘Hard a-starboard, Quartermaster.’
A sound overside attracted his attention. Men – mutineers or Frenchmen – were scrambling out through the shot-holes and hurling themselves into the sea, swimming towards the gunboats. Hornblower saw the white hair of Nathaniel Sweet trailing on the surface of the water as he struck out, twenty feet away from him. Of all the mutineers he was the one who most certainly must not be allowed to escape. For the sake of England, for the sake of the service, he must die. The seaman acting as sentry at the after hatchway did not look as if he were a capable marksman.
‘Give me your musket,’ said Hornblower, snatching it.
He looked at priming and flint as he hurried back to the taffrail. He trained the weapon on the white head, and pulled the trigger. The smoke blew back into his face, obscuring his view only for a moment. The long white hair was visible for a second at the surface when he looked again, and then it sank, slowly, out of sight. Sweet was dead. Maybe there was an old widow who would bewail him, but it was better that Sweet was dead. Hornblower turned back to the business of navigating the Flame back to the rendezvous.
VIII
This fellow Lebrun was an infernal nuisance, demanding a private interview in this fashion. Hornblower had quite enough to do as it was; the gaping shot-holes in Flame’s side had to be patched sufficiently well to enable her to recross the Channel; the exiguous crew of the Porta Coeli – not all of them seamen by any means – had to be distributed through no fewer than four vessels (the two brigs, the Indiaman, and the chasse-marée), while at the same time an adequate guard must be maintained over more than a hundred prisoners of one nationality or another; the mutineers must be supervised so that nothing could happen to prejudice their trial; worst of all, there was a long report to be made out. Some people would think this last an easy task, seeing that there was a long string of successes to report, two prizes taken, the Flame recaptured, most of the mutineers in irons below decks and their ringleader slain by Hornblower’s own hand. But there was the physical labour of writing it out, and Hornblower was very weary. Moreover, the composition of it would be difficult, for Hornblower could foresee having to steer a ticklish course between the Scylla of open boastfulness and the Charybdis of mock-modesty – how often had his lips wrinkled in distaste when reading the literary efforts of other officers! And the killing of Nathaniel Sweet by the terrible Commodore Hornblower, although it would look well in a naval history, and although, from the point of view of the discipline of the service, it was the best way in which the affair could have ended, might not appear so well in Barbara’s eyes. He himself did not relish the memory of that white head sinking beneath the waves, and he felt that Barbara, with her attention forcibly called to the fact that he had shed blood, had taken a human life, with his own hands (those hands which she said she loved, which she had sometimes kissed), might feel a repulsion, a distaste.
Hornblower shook himself free from a clinging tangle of thoughts and memories, of Barbara and Nathaniel Sweet, to find himself still staring abstractedly at the young seaman who had brought to him Freeman’s message regarding Lebrun’s request.
‘My compliments to Mr Freeman, and he can send this fellow in to me,’ he said.
‘Aye aye, sir,’ said the seaman, his knuckles to his forehead, turning away with intense relief. The Commodore had been looking through and through him for three minutes at least – three hours, it seemed like, to the seaman.
An armed guard brought Lebrun into the cabin, and Hornblower looked him keenly over. He was one of the half-dozen prisoners taken when the Porta Coeli came into Le Havre, one of the deputation which had mounted her deck to welcome her under the impression that she was the Flame coming in to surrender.
‘Monsieur speaks French?’ said Lebrun.
‘A little.’
‘More than a little, if all the tales about Captain Hornblower are true,’ replied Lebrun.
‘What is your business?’ snapped Hornblower, cutting short this continental floweriness. Lebrun was a youngish man, of olive complexion, with glistening white teeth, who conveyed a general impression of oiliness.
‘I am adjoint to Baron Momas, Mayor of Le Havre.’
‘Yes?’ Hornblower tried to show no sign of interest, but he knew that under the Imperial régime the mayor of a large town like Le Havre was a most important person, and that his adjoint – his assistant, or deputy – was a very important permanent official.
‘The firm of Momas Frères is one you must have heard of. It has traded with the Americas for generations – the history of its rise is identical with the history of the development of Le Havre itself.’
‘Yes?’
‘Similarly, the war and the blockade have had a most disastrous effect upon the fortunes both of the firm of Momas and upon the city of Le Havre.’
‘Yes?’
‘The Caryatide, the vessel that you so ingeniously captured two days ago, monsieur, might have restored the fortunes of us all – a single vessel running the blockade, as you will readily understand, is worth ten vessels arriving in peacetime.’
‘Yes?’
‘M. le Baron and the city of Le Havre will be desperate, I have no doubt, as the result of her capture before her cargo could be taken out.’
‘Yes?’
The two men eyed each other, like duellists during a pause, Hornblower determined to betray none of the curiosity and interest that he felt, and Lebrun hesitating before finally committing himself.
‘I take it, monsieur, that anything further I have to say will be treated as entirely confidential.’
‘I promise nothing. In fact, I can only say that it will be my duty to report anything you say to the Government of His Majesty of Great Britain.’
‘They will be discreet for their own sake, I expect,’ ruminated Lebrun.
‘His Majesty’s ministers can make their own decisions,’ said Hornblower.