Hornblower and the Hotspur h-3 Read online

“Mr. Bush! I’d like you on deck, if you please, as soon as you have completed your observations.”

  “Aye aye, sir.”

  Hotspur stole quietly along; there was no purpose in hurriedly setting additional sail and pretending to be innocent—the French fleet must have heard from a dozen sources about her continued presence in the approaches.

  “You’re not going to trust ‘em, sir?” This was from Bush, back on the quarter-deck and in a state of some anxiety; the anxiety was not displayed by any change in Bush’s imperturbable manner, but by the very fact that he volunteered advice in this positive form.

  Hornblower did not want to run away. He had the weather gauge, and in a moment he could set all sail and come to the wind and stand out to sea, but he did not want to. He could be quite sure that if he were to do so the frigate would follow his example and chase him, ignominiously, out into the Atlantic with his tail between his legs. A bold move would stimulate his crew, would impress the French and—this was the point—would subdue his own doubts about himself. This was a test. His instinct was to be cautious; but he told himself that his caution was probably an excuse for cowardice. His judgement told him that there was no need for caution; his fears told him that the French frigate was planning to lure him within range of her guns and then overwhelm him. He must act according to his judgement and he must abhor the counsel of his fears, but he wished his heart would not beat so feverishly, he wished his palms would not sweat nor his legs experience these pins-and-needles feelings. He wished Bush were not crowding him at the hammock netting, so that he might take a few paces up and down the quarter-deck, and then he told himself that he could not possibly at this moment pace up and down and reveal to the world that he was in a state of indecision.

  Today coasters had been swarming out of Brest, taking advantage of their fair wind; if war had been declared they would have been doing nothing of the sort. He had spoken to three different fishing boats, and from none of them had he received a hint of war—they might all have been taking part in a conspiracy to lull him into a sense of security, but that was most unlikely. If news of war had reached Brest only an hour ago the frigate could never have prepared herself for sea and come down the Goulet in this time. And to support his judgement from the other direction was the thought that the French naval authorities, even if war was not declared, would act in just this way. Hearing of the audacious British sloop cruising outside they would find men enough for the frigate by stripping other ships of their skeleton crews and would send her out to scare the British ship away. He must not be scared away; this wind could easily persist for days, and if he once ran down to leeward it would be a long time before he could beat back and resume his observation of Brest.

  The frigate was hull-up now; through his glass he could see her down to the waterline. She was big; there were her painted ports, twenty of them a side besides the guns on quarter-deck and forecastle. Eighteen pounders, probably; she had not merely twice as many guns as Hotspur but would discharge a weight of broadside four times as great. But her guns were not run out, and then Hornblower raised his glass to study her yards. He strained his eyes; this time he must not only trust his judgement but his eyesight. He was sure of what he saw. Fore-yard and fore-topsail-yard, main-yard and main-topsail-yard; they were not supported by chain slings. If the frigate were ready for action they would never have omitted that precaution. She could not be planning to fight; this could not be an ambush.

  “Any orders, sir?” asked Bush.

  Bush would have liked to clear for action, to open the ports and run out the guns. If anything could precipitate hostilities it would be that, and Hornblower remembered how his orders from Cornwallis, both written and oral, had stressed the necessity to do nothing that would bring on England the odium of starting a war.

  “Yes,” said Hornblower in reply to Bush’s question, but the relief that showed instantly in Bush’s expression changed back into concern as he noted the gleam in Hornblower’s eyes.

  “We must render passing honours, Mr. Bush,” said Hornblower. There was something madly stimulating in forcing himself to be coldly formal when internally he was boiling with excitement. That must be what went on inside one of Mr. Watt’s steam engines when the safety valve did not function.

  “Aye aye, sir,” said Bush; the disciplined answer, the only answer when a superior officer spoke.

  “Do you remember the procedure, Mr. Bush?”

  Never in his life had Hornblower rendered honours to a French ship of war; through his whole professional career until now sighting had meant fighting.

  “Yes, sir.”

  ‘Then be so good as to give the orders.’

  “Aye aye, sir. All hands! All hands! Man the side! Mr. Wise! See that the men keep order. Sergeant of marines! Parade your men on the quarter-deck! Smartly now. Drummer on the right. Bos’n’s mates! Stand by to pipe on the beat of the drum.” Bush turned to Hornblower. “We’ve no music, sir, except the drum and the pipes.”

  “They won’t expect more,” said Hornblower, his eye still at his glass. One sergeant, one corporal, twelve privates and a drummer were all the marines allotted to a sloop of war, but Hornblower was not devoting any further thought to the marines. His whole attention was concentrated on the French frigate. No doubt on the Frenchman’s deck a dozen glasses were being trained on the Hotspur. As the bustle began on the Hotspur’s deck he could see a corresponding bustle on the Frenchman’s. They were manning the side, an enormous crowd of them. Carried by the water came the noise as four hundred excited Frenchmen took up their stations.

  “Silence!” ordered Bush at that very moment. There was a certain strangeness about his voice as he continued, because he did not want his words to be overheard in the Frenchman, and so he was endeavouring to bellow sotto voce. “Show the Frogs how a British crew behaves. Heads up, there, and keep still.”

  Blue coats and white breeches; these were French soldiers forming up on the frigate’s quarter-deck; Hornblower’s glass detected the flash of steel as bayonets were fixed, and the gleam of brass from the musical instruments. The ships were closing steadily on their converging courses, with the frigate under her greater canvas drawing ahead of the sloop. Nearer and nearer. Hotspur was the visiting ship. Hornblower put away his telescope.

  “Now,” he said.

  “Drum!” ordered Bush.

  The drummer beat a long roll.

  “Present-arr-ums!” ordered the sergeant of marines, and in a much lower voice, “One. Two. Three!”

  The muskets of the marines and the half-pike of the sergeant came to the present in the beautiful movements of the prescribed drill. The pipes of the bos’n’s mates twittered, long and agonizingly. Hornblower took off his hat and held it before his chest; the off-hand salute with hand to the brim was not for this occasion. He could see the French captain on his quarterdeck now, a bulky man, holding his hat over his head in the French fashion. On his breast gleamed a star, which must be this new-fangled Legion of Honour which Boney had instituted. Hornblower came back to reality; he had been the first to render the honours, and he must be the first to terminate them.

  He growled a word to Bush.

  “Drum!” ordered Bush, and the long roll ended. With that the twittering of the pipes died away, a little more raggedly than Hornblower liked. On the French quarter-deck someone—the drum major, perhaps—raised a long staff hung with brass bells into the air and brought it down again with a thump. Instantly the drums rolled, half a dozen of them, a martial, thrilling sound, and then over the water came the sound of music, that incomprehensible blend of noises which Hornblower could never appreciate; the drum major’s staff rose and fell rhythmically. At last the music stopped, with a final roll of the drums. Hornblower put on his hat, and the French captain did the same.

  “Sl-o-o-ope arrums,” yelled the sergeant of marina.

  “All hands! Dismiss!” yelled Bush, and then, reverting to his softer tone, “Quietly, there! Silence!”

&
nbsp; The hands were excited and prone to chatter with the order to dismiss—never in any of their lives, either, had they passed a French ship of war so close without guns firing. But Bush was determined to make the Frenchman believe that Hotspur was manned entirely by stoics. Wise with his rattan enforced the order, and the crew dispersed in an orderly mob, the good order only disturbed by a single quickly suppressed yelp as the rattan struck home on some rash posterior.

  “She’s the Loire, surely enough, sir,” said Bush. They could see the name entwined in gilded letters amid the scrollwork of the frigate’s stern; Hornblower remembered that Bush still was in ignorance of his source of information. It was amusing to be thought omniscient, even without justification.

  “And you were right, sir, not to run away from them,” went on Bush. Why was it so intolerable in this case to note the gleam of admiration in Bush’s eyes? Bush did not know of the quickening heartbeats and the sweaty palms.

  “It’s given our fellows a close look at a Frenchman,” said Hornblower, uneasily.

  “It certainly did that, sir,” agreed Bush. “I never expected in all my life to hear that tune from a French frigate!”

  “What tune?” asked Hornblower unguardedly, and was instantly furious with himself for this revelation of his weakness.

  “God Save The King, sir,” answered Bush, simply. Luckily it never occurred to him that anyone could possibly fail to recognize the national anthem. “If we’d had any music on board we’d have had to play their Marseillaise.”

  “So we would,” said Hornblower; it was desperately necessary to change the subject. “Look! He’s getting in his topgallants. Quick! Time him! We’ll see what sort of seamen they are.”

  Chapter VI

  Now it was blowing a gale, a two-reef gale from the westward. The unbelievably fine weather of the past week had come to an end, and now the Atlantic was asserting itself in its usual fashion. Under her close-reefed topsails Hotspur was battling against it, close-hauled on the port-tack. She was presenting her port bow to the huge rollers that were advancing upon her, unimpeded in their passage over three thousand miles of water, from Canada to France. She would roll, lift, pitch, and then roll again. The tremendous pressure of the wind on her topsails steadied her to the extent that she hardly leaned over at all to windward; she would heel over to starboard, hang for a moment, and then come back to the vertical. But even with her roll restricted in this fashion, she was pitching extravagantly, and she was rising and falling bodily as each wave passed under her bottom, so that a man standing on her deck would feel the pressure of his feet on her planking increasing and diminishing as she ascended and dropped away again. The wind was shrieking in the rigging, and her fabric groaned as the varying strains worked on her, bending her lengthwise, upward in the centre first and then upward at the ends next. But that groaning was a reassuring sound; there were no sharp cracks or disorderly noises, and what could be heard was merely an indication that Hotspur was being flexible and sensible instead of being rigid and brittle.

  Hornblower came out on to the quarter-deck. He was pallid with sea-sickness because the change of motion had found him out, but the attack had not been as severe as he had experienced during the run down-channel. He was muffled in his coat, and he had to support himself against the roll, for his sea-legs had not yet learned this advanced lesson. Bush appeared from the waist, followed by the boatswain; he touched his hat and then turned, with Wise beside him, to survey the ship in searching fashion.

  “It’s not until the first gale that you know what can carry away, sir,” said Bush.

  Gear that seemed perfectly well secured would begin to show alarming tendencies to come adrift when submitted to the unpredictable strains of continued heavy weather, and Bush and Wise had just completed a long tour of inspection.

  “Anything amiss?” asked Hornblower.

  “Only trifles, sir, except for the stream anchor. That’s secure again now.”

  Bush had a grin on his face and his eyes were dancing; obviously he enjoyed this change of climate, this bustling of the wind, and the activity it called for. He rubbed his hands and breathed deep of the gale. Hornblower could console himself with the memory that there had been times when he had enjoyed dirty weather, and even the hope that there would be more, but as he felt at present, he bitterly told himself, it was a hollow memory and an empty hope.

  Hornblower took his glass and looked about him. Momentarily the weather was fairly clear and the horizon at some distance. Far away on the starboard quarter the telescope picked up a flash of white; steadying himself as best he could he managed to catch it in the field again. That was the surf on Ar Men—curious Breton name, that—the most southerly and the most seaward of the rocks and reefs that littered the approaches to Brest. As he watched a fresh roller came in to catch the rock fully exposed. The surf burst upon it in a towering pillar of white water, reaching up as high as a first-rate’s main-topsails, before the wind hurled it into nothingness again. Then a fresh squall hurtled down upon the ship, bringing with it driving rain, so that the horizon closed in around them, and Hotspur became the centre of a tiny area of tossing grey sea, with the lowering clouds hardly clear of the mastheads.

  She was as close in to that lee shore as Hornblower dared risk. A timid man would have gone out farther to sea at the first sign of bad weather, but then a timid man would be likely next to find himself with a shift of wind far away to leeward of the post he was supposed to be watching. Then whole days might pass before he could be back at his post—days when that wind would be fair for the French to do whatever they wanted, unobserved. It was as if there were a line drawn on the chart along with the parallels of longitude—rashness on the one side, boldness on the other, and Hornblower keeping to the very boundary of rashness. Now there was nothing further to do except—as always in the navy—to watch and wait. To battle with the gale with a wary eye noting every shift in the wind, to struggle northward on one tack and then to go about and struggle southward on the other, beating up and down outside Brest until he had a chance to risk a closer view again. So he had done all day yesterday, and so he would do for countless days to come should the threatening war break out. He went back into his cabin to conceal another flurry of sea-sickness.

  Some time after the misery had in part subsided he was summoned by a thundering at the door.

  “What is it?”

  “Lookout’s hailing from the masthead, sir. Mr. Bush is calling him down.”

  “I’ll come.”

  Hornblower emerged just in time to see the look-out transfer himself to the backstay and come sliding all the way down the deck.

  “Mr. Cargill,” said Bush. “Send another hand aloft to take his place.”

  Bush turned to Hornblower.

  “I couldn’t hear what this man was saying, sir, thanks to the winds so I called him down. Well, what d’you have to say?”

  The look-out stood cap in hand, a little abashed at confronting the officers.

  “Don’t rightly know if it’s important, sir. But during that last clear spell I caught a glimpse of the French frigate.”

  “Where away?” demanded Hornblower; at the last moment before he spoke he had managed to modify his originally intended brusqueness. There was nothing to be gained and something to be lost by bullying this man.

  “Two points on the lee bow, sir. She was hull-down but I could see her tops’ls, sir. I know ‘em.”

  Since the incident of the passing honours Hotspur had frequently sighted the Loire at various points in the Iroise channel—it had been a little like a game of hide-and-seek.

  “What was her course?”

  “She was close-hauled, sir, under double-reefed tops’ls, on the starboard-tack, sir.”

  “You were quite right to report her. Get back to your post now. Keep that other man aloft with you.”

  “Aye aye, sir.”

  The man turned away and Hornblower gazed out to sea. Thick weather had closed round them again,
and the horizon was close in. Was there anything odd about the Loire’s coming out and braving the gale? She might well wish to drill her men in heavy weather. No; he had to be honest in his thinking, and that was a rather un-French notion. There was a very marked tendency in the French navy to conserve material in a miserly fashion.

  Hornblower became aware that Bush was standing beside him waiting for him to speak.

  “What do you think, Mr. Bush?”

  “I expect she anchored last night in Berthon Bay, sir.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised.”

  Bush was referring to Bertheaume Bay, just on the seaward side of the Goulet, where it was just possible to ride to a long cable with the wind anywhere to the north of west. And if she lay there she would be in touch with the shore. She could receive news and orders sent overland from Brest, ten miles away. She might have heard of a declaration of war. She might be hoping to take Hotspur by surprise, and he must act on that assumption. In that case the safest thing to do would be to put the ship about. Heading south on the starboard-tack he would have plenty of sea room, would be in no danger from a lee shore, and would be so far ahead of the Loire as to be able to laugh at pursuit. But—this was like Hamlet’s soliloquy, at the point where Hamlet says ‘There’s the rub’—he would be far from his post when Cornwallis should arrive, absent perhaps for days. No, this was a case where he must risk his ship. Hotspur was only a trifle in the clash of two enormous navies. She was important to him personally, but the information she had gleaned was a hundred times more important than her fabric to Cornwallis.

  “We’ll hold our course, Mr. Bush,” said Hornblower.

  “She was two points on our lee bow, sir,” said Bush. “We ought to be well to windward of her when we meet.”

  Hornblower had already made that calculation; if the result had been different he would have put Hotspur about five minutes ago and would have been racing for safety.

  “Clearing again a little, sir,” commented Bush, looking about him, and at that very moment the masthead yelled again.