Hornblower and the Atropos

Chapter IX

Hornblower watched with a keen eye his crew at work as they took in sail while Atropos came gliding into Gibraltar Bay. He could call them welldrilled now. The long beat down the Channel, the battles with the Biscay gales, had made a correlated team of there. There was no confusion and only the minimum number of orders. The men came hurrying off the yards; he saw two figures swing themselves on to the main backstays and come sliding down all the way from the masthead, disdaining to use the shrouds and ratlines. They reached the deck simultaneously and stood grinning at each other for a moment—clearly they had been engaged in a race. One was Smiley, the midshipman of the maintop. The other—His Serene Highness the Prince of SeitzBunau. That boy had improved beyond all expectation. If ever he should sit on his throne again in his princely German capital he would have strange memories to recall.

But this was not the time for a captain to let his attention wander.

“Let go, Mr. Jones! “ he hailed, and the anchor fell, dragging the grumbling hawser out through the hawsehole; Hornblower watched while Atropos took up on her cable and then rode to her anchor. She was in her assigned berth; Hornblower looked up at the towering Rock and over at the Spanish shore. Nothing seemed to have changed since the last time—so many years ago—that he had come sailing into Gibraltar Bay. The sun was shining down on him, and it was good to feel this Mediterranean sun again, even though there was little warmth in it during this bleak winter weather.

“Call away my gig, if you please, Mr. Jones.”

Hornblower ran below to gird on his sword and to take the better of his two cocked hats out of its tin case so as to make himself as presentable as possible when he went ashore to pay his official calls. There was a very decided thrill in the thought that soon he would be reading the orders that would carry him forward into the next phase of his adventures—adventures possibly; more probably the mere dreariness of beating about on eternal blockade duty outside a French port.

Yet in Collingwood’s orders to him, when he came to read them, there was a paragraph which left him wondering what his fate was to be.

Mr. McCullum was awaiting him in the Governor’s anteroom. He was a burly, heavyset man in his early thirties, blueeyed and with a thick mat of black hair.

“Captain Horatio Hornblower?” there was a roll to the “r’s” which betrayed the county of his origin.

“Mr. McCullum?”

“Of the Company’s Service.”

The two men eyed each other.

“You are to take passage in my ship?”

“Aye.”

The fellow carried himself with an air of vast independence. Yet judging by the scantiness of the silver lace on his uniform, and by the fact that he wore no sword, he was not of a very lofty position in the Company’s hierarchy.

“Who are these native assistants of yours?”

“Three Sinhalese divers.”

“Sinhalese?”

Hornblower said the word with caution. He had never heard it before, at least pronounced in that way. He suspected that it meant something to do with Ceylon, but he was not going to make a display of his ignorance.

“Pearl divers from Ceylon,” said McCullum.

So he had guessed right. But he could not imagine for one moment why Collingwood, at grips with the French in the Mediterranean, should need Ceylonese pearl divers.

“And what is your official position, Mr. McCullum?”

“I am wreckmaster and salvage director of the Coromandel Coast.”

That went far to explain the man’s ostentatious lack of deference. He was one of those experts whose skill made them too valuable to be trifled with. He might have drifted out to India as a cabin boy or apprentice; presumably he had been treated like a menial while young, but he had learned a trade so well as now to be indispensable and in a position to repay the slights he had endured earlier. The more the gold lace he was addressing the brusquer was likely to be his manner.

“Very well, Mr. McCullum. I shall be sailing immediately and I shall be glad if you will come on board with your assistants at the earliest possible moment. Within an hour. Do you have any equipment with you to be shipped?”

“Very little besides my chest and the divers’ bundles. They are ready, along with the food for them.”

“Food?”

“The poor bodies”—McCullum narrowed the vowel sound until the word sounded like “puir”—“are benighted heathen, followers of Buddha. They wellnigh died on the voyage here, never having known what it was to have a full belly before. A scrap of vegetable, a drop of oil, a bit of fish for a relish. That’s what they’re used to living on.”

Oil? Vegetables? Ships of war could hardly be expected to supply such things.

“I’ve a puncheon of Spanish olive oil for them,” explained McCullum. “They’ve taken kindly to it, although it’s far removed from their buffalo butter. Lentils and onions and carrots. Give them salt beef and they’d die, and that would be poor business after shipping them all round the Cape of Good Hope.”

The statement was made with apparent callousness, but Hornblower suspected that the manner concealed some consideration for his unfortunate subordinates so far from their homes. He began to like McCullum a little better.

“I’ll give orders for them to be well looked after,” he said.

“Thank you.” That was the first shade of politeness that had crept into McCullum’s speech. “The poor devils have been perishing of cold here on the Rock. That makes them homesick, like, and a long way they are from home, too.”

“Why have they been sent here in any case?” asked Hornblower. That question had been striving for utterance for some time; he had not asked it because it would have given McCullum too good an opportunity to snub him.

“Because they can dive in sixteen and a half fathoms,” said McCullum, staring straight at him.

It was not quite a snub; Hornblower was aware that he owed the modification to his promise that they would be well treated. He would not risk another question despite his consuming curiosity. He was completely puzzled as to why the Mediterranean Fleet should need divers who could go down through a hundred feet of water. He contented himself with ending the interview with an offer to send a boat for McCullum and his men.

The Ceylonese when they made their appearance on the deck of the Atropos were of an appearance to excite pity. They held their white cotton clothes close about them against the cold; the keen air that blew down from the snowclad Spanish mountains set them shivering. They were thin, fraillooking men, and they looked about them with no curiosity, but with only a dull resignation in their dark eyes. They were of a deep brown colour, so as to excite the interest of the hands who gathered to stare. They spared no glances for the white men, but conversed briefly with each other in high piping musical voices.

“Give them the warmest corner of the ‘tween decks, Mr. Jones,” said Hornblower. “See that they are comfortable. Consult with Mr. McCullum regarding anything they may need. Allow me to present Mr. McCullum—Mr. Jones. I would be greatly obliged if you will extend to Mr. McCullum the hospitality of the wardroom.”

Hornblower had to phrase it that way. The wardroom theoretically was a voluntary association of officers, who could make their own choice as to what members they might admit. But it would be a bold set of officers who decided to exclude a wardroom guest recommended by their captain, as Jones and Hornblower both knew.

“You must provide a cot for Mr. McCullum, too, Mr. Jones, if you please. You can decide for yourself where you will put it.”

It was comforting to be able to say that. Hornblower knew perfectly well—and so did Jones, as his slightly dismayed expression revealed—that in a twentytwo gun sloop there was not a square foot of deck space to spare. Everyone was already overcrowded, and McCullum’s presence would add seriously to the overcrowding. But it was Jones who would have to find a way round the difficulty.

“Aye aye, sir,” said Jones; the interval that elapsed before he said it was the best indication of the involved train of thought he had been following out.

“Excellent,” said Hornblower. “You can attend to it after we’re under way. No more time to waste, Mr. Jones.”

Minutes were always valuable. The wind might always shift, or drop. An hour wasted now might mean the loss of a week. Hornblower was in a fever to get his ship clear of the Gut and into the wider waters of the Mediterranean, where he would have sea room in which to beat against a head wind should a Levanter come blowing out of the East. Before his mind’s eye he had a picture of the Western Mediterranean; the northwesterly blowing at present could carry him quickly along the southern coast of Spain, past the dangerous shoal of Alboran, until at Cape de Gata the Spanish coast trended away boldly to the northward. Once there he would be less restricted; until Cape de Gate was left behind he could not be happy. There was also—Hornblower could not deny it—his own personal desire to be up and doing, to find out what was awaiting him in the future, to put himself at least in the possible path of adventure. It was fortunate that his duty and his inclination should coincide in this way; one of the few small bits of good fortune, he told himself with amused grimness, that he had experienced since he had made his original choice of the career of a naval officer.

But at least he had come into Gibraltar Bay after dawn and he was leaving before nightfall. He could not be accused of wasting any time. They had rounded the Rock; Hornblower looked into the binnacle and up at the commission pendant blowing out from the masthead.

“Full and bye,” he ordered.

“Full and bye, sir,” echoed the quartermaster at the wheel.

A keen gust of wind came blowing town out of the Sierra de Ronda, laying the Atropos over as the trimmed yards braced the sails to catch it. Over she lay; a short steep wave came after them, the remnants of an Atlantic roller that had survived its passage through the Gut. Atropos lifted her stern to it, heaving jerkily in this unnatural opposition of wind and wave. Spray burst under her counter, and spray burst round her bows as she plunged. She plunged again in the choppy sea. She was only a little ship, the smallest threemasted vessel in the service, the smallest that could merit a captain to command her. The lofty frigates, the massive seventyfours, could condescend to her. Hornblower looked round him at the wintry Mediterranean, at the fresh clouds obscuring the sinking sun. The waves could toss his ship about, the winds could heel her over, but standing there, braced on the quarterdeck, he was master of them. Exultation surged within him as his ship hurried forward into the unknown.

The exultation even remained when he quitted the deck and descended into the cabin. Here the prospect was cheerless in the extreme. He had mortified his flesh after he had come on board his ship at Deptford. His conscience had nagged at him for the scanty hours he had wasted with his wife and children; and he had never left his ship again for a moment after he had reported her ready for sea. No farewell to Maria lying in childbed, no last parting from little Horatio and little Maria. And no purchase of cabin equipment. The furniture about him was what the ship’s carpenter had made for him, canvas chairs, a roughandready table, a cot whose frame was strung with cordage to support a coarse canvas mattress stuffed with straw. A canvas pillow, strawfilled, to support his head; coarse Navy blankets to cover his skinny body. There was no carpet on the deck under his feet; the light came from a swinging and odorous ship’s lantern. A shelf with a hole in it supported a tin washbasin; on the bulkhead above it hung the scrap of polished steel mirror from Hornblower’s meagre canvas dressingroll. The most substantial articles present were the two sea chests in the corners; apart from them a monk’s cell could hardly have been more bare.

But there was no selfpity in Hornblower’s mind as he crouched under the low deck beams unhooking his stock preparatory to going to bed. He expected little from this world, and he could lead an inner life of the mind that could render him oblivious to discomfort. And he had saved a good deal of money by not furnishing his cabin, money which would pay the midwife’s fee, the long bill at the “George,” and the fare for the carrier’s cart which would convey Maria and the children to lodge with her mother at Southsea. He was thinking about them—they must be well on their way now as he drew the clammy blankets over himself and rested his cheek on the rough pillow. Then he had to forget Maria and the children as he reminded himself that as the Atropos’ junction with the fleet was so imminent he must exercise the midshipmen and the signal ratings in signalling. He must devote a good many hours to that, and there would not be much time to spare, for the creaking of the timbers, the heave of the ship, told him that the wind was holding steady.

The wind continued to hold fair. It was at noon on the sixth day that the lookout hailed the deck.

“Sail ho! Dead to loo’ard.”

“Bear down on her, Mr. Jones, if you please. Mr. Smiley! Take a glass and see what you make of her.”

This was the second of the rendezvous which Collingwood had named in his orders. Yesterday’s had been barren, off Cape Carbomara. Not a sail had been sighted since leaving Gibraltar. Collingwood’s frigates had swept the sea clear of French and Spanish shipping, and the British Levant convoy was not due for another month. And no one could guess what was going on in Italy at this moment.

“Captain, sir! She’s a frigate. One of ours.”

“Very well. Signal midshipman! Be ready with the private signal and our number.”

Thank Heaven for all the signaling exercise he had been giving during the last few days.

“Captain, sir! I can see mastheads beyond her. Looks like a fleet.”

“Very well, Mr. Jones, I’ll have the gunner make ready to salute the flag, if you please.”

There was the Mediterranean Fleet, a score of ships of the line, moving slowly in two columns over the blue sea under a blue sky.

“Frigate’s Maenad, 28, sir.”

“Very well.”

Reaching out like the tentacles of a sea monster, the scouting frigates lay far ahead of the main body of the fleet, four of them, with a fifth far to windward whence most likely would appear ships hostile or friendly. The air was clear; Hornblower on the quarterdeck with his glass to his eye could see the double column of topsails of ships of the line, close hauled, every ship exactly the same distance astern of her predecessor. He could see the viceadmiral’s flag at the foremast of the leader of the weather line.

“Mr. Carslake! Have the mailbags ready for sending off.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

His own packet of despatches for Collingwood was handy in his cabin.

“Signal midshipman! Can’t you see the flagship’s making a signal?”

“Yes, sir, but the flags are blowing straight away from us. I can’t make them out.”

“What do you think the repeating frigate’s for? Use your eyes.”

“General signal, sir. Number 41. That is ‘tack’, sir.”

“Very well.”

As Atropos had not yet officially joined the Mediterranean squadron a general signal could not apply to her. Down came the signal from the flagship’s yardarm; that was the executive moment. Round came the flagship’s yards; round came the yards of the scouting frigates, and of the leader of the lee column. One by one, at precise intervals, the succeeding ships in the columns came round in order; Hornblower could see the momentary backing and filling of the mizzentopsails which maintained the ships so exactly spaced. It was significant that the drill was being carried out under all plain sail, and not merely under the “fighting sails.” There was something thrilling in the sight of this perfection of drill; but at the same time something a little disturbing. Hornblower found himself wondering, with a qualm of doubt, if he would be able to maintain Atropos so exactly in station now that the time had come to join the fleet.

The manoeuvre was completed now; on its new tack the fleet was steadily plunging forward over the blue sea. There was more bunting fluttering at the flagship’s yardarm.

“General signal, sir. ‘Hands to dinner.’”

“Very well.”

Hornblower felt a bubbling of excitement within him as he stood and watched. The next signal would surely be for him.

“Our number, sir! Flag to Atropos. Take station to windward of me at two cables’ lengths.”

“Very well. Acknowledge.”

There were eyes turned upon him everywhere on deck. This was the moment of trial. He had to come down past the screening frigates, cross ahead of what was now the weather column, and come to the wind at the right moment and at the right distance. And the whole fleet would be watching the little ship. First he had to estimate how far the flagship would progress towards his starboard hand while he was running down to her. But there was nothing for it but to try; there was some faint comfort in being an officer in a fighting service where an order was something that must be obeyed.

“Quartermaster! Port a little. Meet her. Steady as you go! Keep her at that! Mr. Jones!”

“Aye aye, sir.”

No need for an order to Jones. He was more anxious—at least more apparently anxious—than Hornblower was. He had the hands at the braces trimming the yards already. Hornblower looked up at yards and commission pendant to assure himself that the bracing was exact. They had left the Maenad behind already; here they were passing Amphion, one of the central frigates in the screen. Hornblower could see her lying over as she thrashed to windward, the spray flying from her bows. He turned back to look at the flagship, nearly hull up, at least two of her three rows of checkered gunports visible.

“Port a little! Steady!”

He resented having to give that additional order; he wished he could have headed straight for his station with no alteration of course. The leading ship—she wore a rear admiral’s flag—of the weather column was now nearly on his port beam. Four cables’ length was the distance between the two columns, but as his station was to windward of the flagship, nearly on her starboard beam, he would be by no means between the two ships, nor equidistant from them. He juggled in his mind with the scalene triangle that could be drawn connecting Atropos with the two flagships.

“Mr. Jones! Clue up the mizzen tops’l.” Now Atropos would have a reserve of speed that he could call for if necessary. He was glad that he had subjected his crew to ceaseless sail drill ever since leaving Deptford. “Stand by the mizzen tops’l sheets.”

The reduction in the aftersail would make Atropos a little slower in coming to the wind; he must bear it in mind. They were fast approaching their station. His eye darted from one column of ships to the other; he could see all the starboard sides of one and all the port sides of the other. It might be useful to take sextant angles, but he would rather trust his eye in a trigonometrical problem as uncomplicated as this. His judgment told him this must be the moment. The bows were pointing at the flagship’s jibboom.

“Port your helm,” he ordered. Perhaps he was wrong. Perhaps the little ship’s response would be delayed. Perhaps—He had to keep his voice steady. “Bring her to the wind.”

The wheel spun over. There was a nervous second or two. Then he felt the heel of the ship alter under his feet; and he saw the flagship come round on Atropos’ port beam, and he knew Atropos was turning.

“Steady!”

The yards were braced up; strong arms were hauling on the tacks. A moment or two while Atropos regained the small amount of way she had lost through her turn; but even making allowance for that he could see that the flagship was slowly headreaching on her.

“Mr. Jones! Sheet home the mizzen tops’l.”

With the mizzen topsail drawing full they would headreach in turn upon the flagship.

“Keep the hands at the braces there!”

Occasionally spilling the wind from the mizzen topsail would enable Atropos to keep her speed equal to the flagship’s. Hornblower felt the wind on his neck; he looked up at the pendant and at the flagship. He was exactly to windward of her, and there was two cables’ lengths between them.

“Mr. Jones! You may begin the salute.”

Fifteen guns for a viceadmiral, a minute and a quarter to fire them. That might be long enough for him to regain his composure, and for his heart to resume its normal rate of beating. Now they were part of the Mediterranean Fleet, the tiniest, most insignificant part of it. Hornblower looked down the massive lines of ships ploughing along behind them, threedeckers, twodeckers, ships of a hundred guns and ships of seventyfour, the ships which had fought at Trafalgar, the roar of whose cannons had dashed from Bonaparte’s lips the heady cup of world domination. On the invisibly distant Mediterranean shores that encompassed them armies might march, kings might be set up and kings might be pulled down; but it was these ships which in the end would decide the destiny of the world, as long as the men who sailed them retained their skill, as long as they remained ready to endure danger and hardship, as long as the government at home remained resolute and unafraid.

“Our number, sir! Flag to Atropos. ‘Welcome.’”

“Reply to Flag. ‘Respectful greetings.’” Eager hands worked vigorously on the signal halyards.

“Signal ‘Atropos to Flag. Have aboard dispatches and letters for fleet’.”

“Flagship acknowledges, sir.”

“Flagship’s signalling again,” announced Still; from a point of vantage on the weather side he could see through his glass enough of the flagship’s quarter-deck, despite the fact that she was heeling away from him, to make out that signal ratings were bending fresh flags on the halliards. The dark lumps soared up to the flagship’s yardarm and broke into gailycoloured bunting.

“General signal. ‘Heave to on the starboard tack.’”

“Acknowledge, Mr. Jones! Clue up the courses.”

Hornblower watched the hands at the cluegarnets and buntlines, the hands at the tacks and sheets.

“Signal’s down, sir.”

Hornblower had already seen the first movement of descent.

“Back the mizzen tops’l. Let her come up.”

Atropos rode easily, just meeting the waves with her bow, as the sharp struggle with the wind changed to yielding acquiescence, like a girl’s resistance giving way in her lover’s arms. But this was no time for that sort of sentimental simile—here was another long signal from the flagship.

“General signal. ‘Send to’—our number, sir—‘for letters.’”

“Mr. Carslake! Have those mailbags on deck at once. You’ll have a boat from every ship in the fleet alongside.”

It was at least a month—it might well be two—since any letters had reached the Fleet from England. Not a newspaper, not a word. Possibly some of the ships present had not yet seen the accounts in the press of the victory they had won at Trafalgar four months before. Atropos had brought a respite from the dreadful isolation in which a fleet at sea habitually lived. Boats would be hastening as fast as sail or oar could drive them to collect the pitifully lean mailbags.

Another signal.

“Our number, sir. ‘Flag to Atropos. Come and report.’”

“Call away my gig.”

He was wearing the shabbier of his two coats. There was just time, when he ran below to get the packets of dispatches, change his coat, to pass a comb through his hair, and twitch his neckcloth into position. He was back on deck just as his gig touched the water. Lusty work at the oars carried him round to the flagship. A chair dangled at her side, now almost lipped as a wave rose at it, now high above the water as the wave passed on. He had to watch carefully for his chance; as it was there was an uncomfortable moment when he hung by his arms as the gig went away from under him. But he managed to seat himself, and he felt the chair soar swiftly upwards as the hands above hauled on the tackle. The pipes shrilled as his head reached the level of the maindeck and the chair was swung in. He stepped aboard with his hand to the brim of his hat.

The deck was as white as paper, as white as the gloves and the shirts of the sideboys. Gold leaf gleamed in the sun, the most elaborate Turks’ heads adorned the ropework. The King’s own yacht could not be smarter than the quarterdeck of the Ocean–that was what could be done in the flagship of a victorious admiral. It was as well to remember that Collingwood’s previous flagship, the Royal Sovereign, had been pounded into a mastless hulk, with four hundred dead and wounded on board her, at Trafalgar. The lieutenant of the watch, his telescope quite dazzling with polished brass and pipe clayed twine, wore spotless and unwrinkled white trousers; the buttons on his wellfitting coat winked in the sunshine. It occurred to Hornblower that to be always as smart as that, in a ship additionally crowded by the presence of an admiral and his staff, could be by no means easy. Service in a flagship might be the quick way to promotion, but there were many crumpled petals in the bed of roses. The flag captain, Rotherham—Hornblower knew his name; it had appeared in a hundred newspaper accounts of Trafalgar—and the flag lieutenant were equally smart as they made him welcome.

“His Lordship is awaiting you below, sir,” said the flag lieutenant “Will you come this way?”

Collingwood shook hands with him in the great cabin below. He was a large man, stoopshouldered, with a pleasant smile. He eagerly took the packets Hornblower offered him, glancing at the superscriptions. One he kept in his hands, the others he gave to his secretary. He remembered his manners as he was about to break the seal.

“Please sit down, captain. Harkness, a glass of Madeira for Captain Hornblower. Or there is some Marsala that I can recommend, sir. Please forgive me for a moment. You will understand when I tell you these are letters from my wife.”

It was an upholstered chair in which Hornblower sat; under his feet was a thick carpet; there were a couple of pictures in gilt frames on the bulkheads; silver lamps hung by silver chains from the deckbeams. Looking round him while Collingwood eagerly skimmed through his letters, Hornblower thought of all this being hurriedly bundled away when the Ocean cleared for action. But what held his attention most was two long boxes against the great stern windows. They were filled with earth and were planted with flowers—hyacinths and daffodils, blooming and lovely. The scent of the hyacinths reached Hornblower’s nostrils where he sat. There was something fantastically charming about them here at sea.

“I’ve been successful with my bulbs this year,” said Collingwood, putting his letters in his pocket and following Hornblower’s glance. He walked over and tilted up a daffodil bloom with sensitive fingers, looking down into its open face. “They are beautiful, aren’t they? Soon the daffodils will be flowering in England—some time, perhaps, I’ll see them again. Meanwhile these help to keep me contented. It is three years since I last set foot on land.”

Commandersin-Chief might win peerages and pensions, but their children, too, grew up without knowing their fathers. And Collingwood had walked shottorn decks in a hundred fights; but Hornblower, looking at the wistful smile, thought of other things than battles—thirty thousand turbulent seamen to be kept disciplined and efficient, court-martial findings to be confirmed, the eternal problems of provisions and water, convoys and blockade.

“You will give me the pleasure of your company at dinner, Captain?” asked Collingwood.

“I should be honoured, my lord.”

It was gratifying to bring that phrase out pat like that, with hardly more than the least feeling of embarrassment.

“That is excellent. You will be able to tell me all the gossip of home. I fear there will be no other opportunity for some time, as Atropos will not be staying with the Fleet.”

“Indeed, my lord?”

This was a moment of high excitement, when the future was about to be revealed to him. But of course the excitement must not be allowed to appear; only the guarded interest of a selfcontained captain ready for anything.

“I fear so—not that you young captains with your saucy little ships want to stay tied to a fleet’s apron strings.”

Collingwood was smiling again, but there was something in the words that started a new train of thought in Hornblower’s mind. Of course, Collingwood had watched the advent of the newest recruit to his fleet with a keen eye. Hornblower suddenly realized that if Atropos had been clumsy in taking up station, or dilatory in answering signals, his reception here might not have been so pleasant. He might be standing at attention at this moment submitting with a tightshut mouth to a dressingdown exemplary in its drastic quality. The thought caused a little prickling of gooseflesh at the back of his neck. It reduced his reply to a not very coherent mumble.

“You have this man McCullum and his natives on board?” asked Collingwood.

“Yes, my lord.”

Only a little selfrestraint was necessary to refrain from asking what the mission would be; Collingwood would tell him.

“You are not acquainted with the Levant?”

“No, my lord.”

So it was to be the Levant, among the Turks and the Greeks and the Syrians.

“You soon will be, captain. After taking my dispatches to Malta you will convey Mr. McCullum to Marmorice Bay and assist him in his operations there.”

Marmorice Bay? That was on the coast of Asia Minor. The fleet and transports which had attacked Egypt some years ago had rendezvoused there. It was a far cry from Deptford.

“Aye aye, my lord,” said Hornblower.

“I understand you have no sailing master in Atropos.”

“No, my lord. Two master’s mates.”

“In Malta you will have a sailing master assigned to you. George Turner; he is familiar with Turkish waters and he was with the fleet in Marmorice. He took the bearings when Speedwell sank.”

Speedwell? Hornblower raked back in his memory. She was the transport which had capsized and sunk at her anchors in a sudden gale of wind in Marmorice Bay.

“Yes, my lord.”

“She had on board the military chest of the expeditionary force. I don’t expect you knew that.”

“No, indeed, my lord.”

“A very considerable sum in gold and silver coin for the pay and subsistence of the troops a quarter of a million sterling. She sank in water far deeper than any diver in the service could reach. But as no one knew what our gallant allies the Turks might contrive by way of salvage with infinite leisure it was decided to keep the loss a secret. And for once a secret remained a secret.”

“Yes, my lord.”

Certainly it was not common knowledge that a quarter of a million in coin lay at the bottom of Marmorice Bay.

“So the Government had to send to India for divers who could reach those depths.”

“I see, my lord.”

“Now it will be your duty to go to Marmorice Bay and with the assistance of McCullum and Turner to recover that treasure.”

“Aye aye, my lord.”

No imagination could ever compass the possible range of duties of a naval officer. But it was satisfactory that the words he had just uttered were the only ones a naval officer could say in such circumstances.

“You will have to be careful in your dealings with our friend the Turk. He will be curious about your presence in Marmorice, and when he ascertains the object of your visit he may raise objections. You will have to conduct yourself according to the circumstances of the moment.”

“Aye aye, my lord.”

“You will not find all this in your orders, captain. But you must understand that the Cabinet has no wish for complications with the Turks. Yet at the same time a quarter of a million sterling in cash would be a Godsend to the Government today—or any day. The money is badly needed, but no offense should be offered to the Turks.”

It was necessary to steer clear of Scylla and yet not fall into Charybdis, said Hornblower to himself.

“I think I understand, my lord.”

“Fortunately it is an unfrequented coast. The Turks maintain very small forces, either military or naval, in the locality. That does not mean that you should attempt to carry off matters with a high hand.”

Not in Atropos with eleven popguns a side, thought Hornblower, and then he mentally withdrew the sneer. He understood what Collingwood meant.

“No, my lord.”

“Very well then, captain, thank you.”

The secretary at Collingwood’s elbow had a pile of opened despatches in hand, and was clearly waiting for a break in the conversation to give him an opportunity to intervene, and the flag lieutenant was hovering in the background. Both of them moved in at once.

“Dinner will be in half an hour, my lord,” said the flag lieutenant.

“These are the urgent letters, my lord,” said the secretary.

Hornblower rose to his feet in some embarrassment.

“Perhaps, captain, you would enjoy a turn on the quarterdeck, eh?” asked Collingwood. “Flags here would keep you company, I’m sure.”

When a viceadmiral made suggestions to a captain and a flag lieutenant he did not have to wait long before they were acted upon. But out on the quarterdeck, pacing up and down making polite conversation, Hornblower could have wished that Collingwood had not been so thoughtful as to provide him with company. He had a great deal to think about.