Hornblower and the Hotspur

Chapter XV

Now it was cold, horribly cold; the days were short and the nights were very, very long. Along with the cold weather came easterly winds—the one involved the other—and a reversal of the tactical situation. For although with the wind in the east Hotspur was relieved of the anxiety of being on a lee shore her responsibilities were proportionately increased. There was nothing academic now about noting the direction of the wind each hour, it was no mere navigational routine. Should the wind blow from any one of ten points of the compass out of thirty-two it would be possible even for the lubberly French to make their exit down the Goulet and enter the Atlantic. Should they make the attempt it was Hotspur’s duty to pass an instant warning for the Channel Fleet to form line of battle if the French were rash enough to challenge action, and to cover every exit—by the Raz, by the Iroise, by the Four—if, as would be more likely, they attempted merely to escape.

Today the last of the flood did not make until two o’clock in the afternoon, a most inconvenient time, for it was not until then that Hotspur could venture in to make her daily reconnaissance at closest range. To do so earlier would be to risk that a failure of the wind, leaving her at the mercy of the tide, would sweep her helplessly up, within range of the batteries on Petit Minou and the Capuchins—the Toulinguet battery; and more assuredly fatal than the batteries would be the reefs, Pollux and the Little Girls.

Hornblower came out on deck with the earliest light—not very early on this almost the shortest day of the year—to check the position of the ship while Prowse took the bearings of the Petit Minou and the Grand Gouin.

“Merry Christmas, sir,” said Bush. It was typical of a military service that Bush should have to touch his hat while saying those words.

“Thank you. The same to you, Mr. Bush.”

It was typical, also, that Hornblower should have been acutely aware that it was December 25th and yet should have forgotten that it was Christmas Day; tide tables made no reference to the festivals of the church.

“Any news of your good lady, sir?” asked Bush.

“Not yet,” answered Hornblower, with a smile that was only half-forced. “The letter I had yesterday was dated the eighteenth, but there’s nothing as yet.”

It was one more indication of the way the wind had been blowing, that he should have received a letter from Maria in six days; a victualler had brought it out with a fair wind. That also implied that it might be six weeks before his reply reached Maria, and in six weeks—in one week—everything would be changed, and the child would be born. A naval officer writing to his wife had to keep one eye on the wind-vane just as the Lords of the Admiralty had to do when drafting their orders for the movements of fleets. New Year’s Day was the date Maria and the midwife had decided upon; at that time Maria would be reading the letters he wrote a month ago. He wished he had written more sympathetically, but nothing he could do could recall, alter, or supplement those letters.

All he could do would be to spend some of this morning composing a letter that might belatedly compensate for the deficiencies of its predecessors (and Hornblower realized with a stab of conscience that this was not the first time he had reached that decision) while it would be even more difficult than usual because it would have to be composed with on eye to all eventualities. All eventualities; Hornblower felt in that moment the misgivings of every prospective father.

He spent until eleven o’clock on these unsatisfactory literary exercises and it was with guilty relief that he returned to the quarter-deck to take Hotspur up with the last of the tide with the well-remembered coasts closing in upon her on both sides. The weather was reasonably clear; not a sparkling Christmas Day, but with little enough haze at noon, when Hornblower gave the orders to hove Hotspur to, as close to Pollux Reef as he dared. The dull thud of a gun from Petit Minou coincided with his orders. The rebuilt battery there was firing its usual range-testing shot in the hope that this time he had come in too far. Did they recognize the ship that had done them so much damage? Presumably.

“Their morning salute, sir,” said Bush.

“Yes.”

Hornblower took the telescope into his gloved, yet frozen, hands and trained it up the Goulet as he always did. Often there was something new to observe. Today there was much.

“Four new ships at anchor, sir,” said Bush.

“I make it five. Isn’t that a new one—the frigate in line with the church steeple?”

“Don’t think so, sir. She’s shifted anchorage. Only four new ones by my count.”

“You’re right, Mr. Bush.”

“Yards crossed, sir. And—sir, would you look at those tops’l yards?”

Hornblower was already looking.

“I can’t be sure.”

“I think those are tops’ls furled over-all, sir.”

“It’s possible.”

A sail furled over-all was much thinner and less noticeable, with the loose part gathered into the bunt about the mast, than one furled in the usual fashion.

“I’ll go up to the masthead myself, sir. And young Foreman has good eyes. I’ll take him with me.”

“Very well. No, wait a moment. Mr. Bush. I’ll go myself. Take charge of the ship, if you please. But you can send Foreman up.”

Hornblower’s decision to go aloft was proof of the importance he attached to observation of the new ships. He was uncomfortably aware of his slowness and awkwardness, and it was only reluctantly that he exhibited them to his lightfooted and lighthearted subordinates. But there was something about chose ships…

He was breathing heavily by the time he reached the fore-topmast-head, and it took several seconds to steady himself sufficiently to fix the ships in the field of the telescope, but he was much warmer. Foreman was there already, and the regular look-out shrank away out of the notice of his betters. Neither Foreman nor the look-out could be sure about those furled top sails.

They thought it likely, yet they would not commit themselves.

“D’you make out anything else about those ships, Mr. Foreman?”

“Well, no, sir. I can’t say that I do.”

“D’you think they’re riding high?”

“Maybe, yes, sir.”

Two of the new arrivals were small two-deckers—sixty-fours, probably—and the lower tier of gun-ports in each case might be farther above the water line than one might expect. It was not a matter of measurement, all the same; it was more a matter of intuition, of good taste. Those hulls were just not quite right, although, Foreman, willing enough to oblige, clearly did not share his feelings.

Hornblower’s glass swept the shores round the anchorage, questing for any further data. There were the rows of hutments that housed the troops. French soldiers were notoriously well able to look after themselves, to build themselves adequate shelter; the smoke of their cooking fires was clearly visible—today, of course, they would be cooking their Christmas dinners. It was from here that had come the battalion that had chased him back to the boats the day he blew up the battery. Hornblower’s glass checked itself, moved along, and returned again. With the breeze that was blowing he could not be certain, but it seemed to him that from two rows of huts there was no smoke to be seen. It was all a little vague; he could not even estimate the number of troops those huts would house; two thousand men, five thousand men; and he was still doubtful about the absence of cooking smoke.

“Captain, sir!” Bush was hailing from the deck. “The tide’s turned.”

“Very well. I’ll come down.”

He was abstracted and thoughtful when he reached the deck.

“Mr. Bush, I’ll be wanting fish for my dinner soon. Keep a special look-out for the Duke’s Freers.”

He had to pronounce it that way to make sure Bush under stood him. Two days later he found himself in his cabin drinking rum—pretending to drink rum—with the captain of the Deux Freres. He had bought himself half a dozen unidentifiable fish, which the captain strongly recommended as good eating. ‘Carrelets,’ the captain called them—Hornblower had a vague idea that they might be flounders. At any rate, he paid for them with a gold piece which the captain slipped without comment into the pockets of his scale-covered serge trousers.

Inevitably the conversation shifted to the sights to be seen up the Goulet, and from the general to the particular, centring on the new arrivals in the anchorage. The captain dismissed them with a gesture as unimportant.

“Arme’s en flute,” he said, casually.

En flute! That told the story. That locked into place the pieces of the puzzle. Hornblower took an unguarded gulp at his glass of rum and water and fought down the consequent cough so as to display no special interest. A ship of war with her guns taken out was like a flute when her ports were opened—she had a row of empty holes down her side.

“Not to fight,” explained the captain. “Only for stores, or troops, or what you will.”

For troops especially. Stores could best be carried in merchant ships designed for cargo, but ships of war were constructed to carry large numbers of men—their cooking arrangements and water storage facilities had been built in with that in mind. With only as many seamen on board as were necessary to work the ship there was room to spare for soldiers. Then the guns would be unnecessary, and at Brest they could be immediately employed in arming new ships. Removing the guns meant a vast increase in available deck space into which more troops could be crammed; the more there were the more strain on the cooking and watering arrangements, but on a short voyage they would not have long to suffer. A short voyage. Not the West Indies, nor Good Hope, and certainly not India. A forty-gun frigate armed en flute might have as many as a thousand soldiers packed into her. Three thousand men, plus a few hundred more in the armed escorts. The smallness of the number ruled out England—not even Bonaparte, so improvident with human life, would throw away a force that size in an invasion of England where there was at least a small army and a large militia. There was only one possible target; Ireland, where a disaffected population meant a weak militia.

“They are no danger to me, then,” said Hornblower, hoping that the interval during which he had been making these deductions had not been so long as to be obvious.

“Not even to this little ship,” agreed the Breton captain with a smile.

It called for the exertion of all Hornblower’s moral strength to continue the interview without allowing his agitation to show. He wanted to get instantly into action, but he dared not appear impatient; the Breton captain wanted another three-finger glass of rum and was unaware of any need for haste. Luckily Hornblower remembered an admonition from Doughty, who had impressed on him the desirability of buying cider as well as fish, and Hornblower introduced the new subject. Yes, agreed the captain, there was a keg of cider on board the Deux Freres, but he could not say how much was left, as they had tapped it already during the day. He would sell what was left.

Hornblower forced himself to bargain; he did not want the Breton captain to know that his recent piece of information was worth further gold. He suggested that the cider, of an unknown quantity, should be given him for nothing extra, and the captain with an avaricious gleam in his peasant’s eye, indignantly refused. For some minutes the argument proceeded while the rum sank lower in the captain’s glass.

“One franc, then,” offered Hornblower at last. “Twenty sous.”

“Twenty sous and a glass of rum,” said the captain, and Hornblower had to reconcile himself to that much further delay, but it was worth it to retain the captain’s respect and to allay the captain’s suspicions.

So that it was with his head swimming with rum—a sensation he detested—that Hornblower sat down at last to write his urgent despatch, having seen his guest down the side. No mere signal could convey all that he wanted to say, and no signal would be secret enough, either. He had to choose his words as carefully as the rum would permit, as he stated his suspicions that the French might be planning an invasion of Ireland, and as he gave his reasons for those suspicions. He was satisfied at last, and wrote ‘H. Hornblower, Commander,’ at the foot of the letter. Then he turned over the sheet and wrote the address: ‘Rear Admiral William Parker, Commanding the Inshore Squadron,’ on the other side, and folded and sealed the letter. Parker was one of the extensive Parker clan; there were and had been admirals and captains innumerable with that name, none of them specially distinguished; perhaps this letter would alter that tradition.

He sent it off—a long and arduous trip for the boat, and waited impatiently for the acknowledgement.

Sir,

Your letter of this date has been received and will be given my full attention.

Your ob’d serv’t,

Wm. Parker.

Hornblower read the few words in a flash; he had opened the letter on the quarter-deck without waiting to retire with it to his cabin, and he put it in his pocket hoping that his expression betrayed no disappointment.

“Mr. Bush,” he said, “we shall have to maintain a closer watch than ever over the Goulet, particularly at night and in thick weather.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

Probably Parker needed time to digest the information, and would later produce a plan; until that time it was Hornblower’s duty to act without orders.

“I shall take the ship up to the Little Girls whenever I can do so unobserved.”

“The Little Girls? Aye aye, sir.”

It was a very sharp glance that Bush directed at him. No one in his senses—at least no one except under the strongest compulsion—would risk his ship near those navigational dangers in conditions of bad visibility. True; but the compulsions existed. Three thousand well-trained French soldiers landing in Ireland would set that distressful country in a flame from end to end, a wilder flame than had burned in 1798.

“We’ll try it tonight,” said Hornblower.

“Aye aye, sir.”

The Little Girls lay squarely in the middle of the channel of the Goulet; on either side lay a fairway a scant quarter of a mile wide, and up and down those fairways raced the tide; it would only be during the ebb that the French would be likely to come down. No, that was not strictly true, for the French could stem the flood tide with a fair wind—with this chill easterly wind blowing. The Goulet had to be watched in all conditions of bad visibility and Hotspur had to do the watching.