On the quarterdeck it was as raw and unfriendly as one might expect before dawn in the Kattegat on a spring morning. The bustle of calling the watch had just subsided; the figures which loomed up in the darkness and hurriedly moved over to the port side, leaving the starboard side clear for him, were unrecognisable. But the thump of Bush’s wooden leg was unmistakable.
‘Captain Bush!’
‘Sir?’
‘What time is sunrise this morning?’
‘Er – about five-thirty, sir.’
‘I don’t want to know about what time it will be. I asked, “What time is sunrise?”’
A second’s silence while the crestfallen Bush absorbed this rebuke, and then another voice answered.
‘Five-thirty-four, sir.’
That was that fresh-faced lad, Carlin, the second lieutenant of the ship. Hornblower would have given something to be sure whether Carlin really knew when sunrise was, or whether he was merely guessing, taking a chance that his Commodore would not check his figures. As for Bush, it was bad luck on him that he should be rebuked publicly, but he should have known what time was sunrise, seeing that last night Hornblower had been making plans with him based on that very point. And it would do the discipline of the rest of the force no harm if it were known that the Commodore spared no one, not even the captain of a ship of the line, his best friend.
Hornblower took a turn or two up and down the deck. Seven days out from the Downs, and no news. With the wind steady from the westward, there could be no news – nothing could have got out from the Baltic, or even from Gothenburg. He had not seen a sail yesterday after rounding the Skaw and coming up the Kattegat. His last news from Sweden was fifteen days old, then, and in fifteen days anything could happen. Sweden might have easily changed from unfriendly neutrality to open hostility. Before him lay the passage of the Sound, three miles wide at its narrowest point; on the starboard side would be Denmark, undoubtedly hostile under Bonaparte’s domination whether she wanted to be or not. On the port side would be Sweden, and the main channel up the Sound lay under the guns of Helsingborg. If Sweden were England’s enemy the guns of Denmark and Sweden – of Elsinore and of Helsingborg – might easily cripple the squadron as they ran the gauntlet. And retreat would always be perilous and difficult, if not entirely cut off. It might be as well to delay, to send in a boat to discover how Sweden stood at the present moment.
But on the other hand, to send in a boat would warn Sweden of his presence. If he dashed in now, the moment there was light enough to see the channel, he might go scathless, taking the defences by surprise even if Sweden were hostile. His vessels might be knocked about, but with the wind west-by-north, in an ideal quarter, even a crippled ship could struggle along until the Sound widened and they would be out of range. If Sweden’s neutrality were still wobbling it would do no harm to let her see a British squadron handled with boldness and decision, nor for her to know that a British force were loose in the Baltic able to threaten her shores and ravage her shipping. Should Sweden turn hostile he could maintain himself one way or the other in the Baltic through the summer – and in a summer anything might happen – and with good fortune might fight his way out again in the autumn. There certainly were arguments in favour of temporising and delay and communicating with the shore, but there were more cogent arguments still in favour of prompt action.
The ship’s bell struck one sharp note; hardly more than an hour before dawn, and already over there to leeward there was a hint of grey in the sky. Hornblower opened his mouth to speak, and then checked himself. He had been about to issue a sharp order, consonant with the tenseness of the moment and with the accelerated beating of his pulse; but that was not the way he wanted to behave. While he had time to think and prepare himself he could still pose as a man of iron nerves.
‘Captain Bush!’ he managed to make himself drawl the words, and to give his orders with an air of complete indifference. ‘Signal all vessels to clear for action.’
‘Aye aye, sir.’
Two red lights at the main yardarm and a single gun; that was the night signal for danger from the enemy which would send all hands to quarters. It took several seconds to bring a light for the lanterns; by the time the signal was acknowledged the Nonsuch was well on the way to being cleared for action – the watch below turned up, the decks sanded and the fire-pumps manned, guns run out and bulkheads knocked down. It was still a pretty raw crew – Bush had been through purgatory trying to get his ship manned – but the job could have been worse done. Now the grey dawn had crept up over the eastern sky, and the rest of the squadron was just visible as vessels and not as solid nuclei in the gloom, but it was still not quite light enough to risk the passage. Hornblower turned to Bush and Hurst the first lieutenant.
‘If you please,’ he drawled, dragging out every word with all the nonchalance he could muster, ‘I will have the signal bent ready for hoisting, “Proceed to leeward in the order of battle”.’
‘Aye aye, sir.’
Everything was done now. This last two minutes of waiting in inactivity, with nothing left to do, were especially trying. Hornblower was about to walk up and down, when he remembered that he must stand still to maintain his pose of indifference. The batteries on shore might have their furnaces alight, to heat shot red-hot; there was a possibility that in a few minutes the whole force of which he was so proud might be no more than a chain of blazing wrecks. Now it was time.
‘Hoist,’ said Hornblower. ‘Captain Bush, I’ll trouble you to square away and follow the squadron.’
‘Aye aye, sir,’ said Bush.
Bush’s voice hinted at suppressed excitement; and it came to Hornblower, with a blinding flash of revelation, that his pose was ineffective with Bush. The latter had learned, during years of experience, that when Hornblower stood still instead of walking about, and when he drawled out his words as he was doing at present, then in Hornblower’s opinion there was danger ahead. It was an intensely interesting discovery, but there was no time to think about it, not with the squadron going up the Sound.
Lotus was leading. Vickery, her commander, was the man Hornblower had picked out as the captain with the steadiest nerves who could be trusted to lead without flinching. Hornblower would have liked to have led himself, but in this operation the rear would be the post of danger – the leading ships might well get through before the gunners on shore could get to their guns and find the range – and the Nonsuch as the most solidly built and best able to endure fire must come last so as to be able to succour and tow out of action any disabled ship. Hornblower watched Lotus set topsails and courses and square away. The cutter Clam followed – she was the feeblest of all; a single shot might sink her, and she must be given the best chance of getting through. Then the two ugly bomb-ketches, and then the other sloop, Raven, just ahead of Nonsuch; Hornblower was not sorry to have the opportunity to watch how her commander, Cole, would behave in action. Nonsuch followed, driving hard with the strong breeze on her starboard quarter. Hornblower watched Bush shaking the wind out of the mizzen-topsail so as to keep exact station astern of the Raven. The big two-decker seemed a lumbering clumsy thing compared with the grace and elegance of the sloops.
That was Sweden in sight now, Cape Kullen, now on the port bow.
‘A cast of the log, if you please, Mr Hurst.’
‘Aye aye, sir.’
Hornblower thought Hurst looked a little sidelong at him, unable to conceive why any sane man should want a cast of the log at a moment when the ship was about to risk everything; but Hornblower wanted to know how long the strain was likely to endure, and what was the use of being a Commodore if one could not then indulge one’s whims? A midshipman and a couple of quartermasters came running aft with log and glass; the speed of the ship was sufficient to make the quartermaster’s arms vibrate as he held the reel above his head.
‘Nigh on nine knots, sir,’ reported the midshipman to Hurst.
‘Nigh on nine knots, sir,’ reported Hurst to H
ornblower.
‘Very good.’
It would be a full eight hours, then, before they were beyond Saltholm and comparatively out of danger. There was the Danish coast on the starboard bow now, just visible in the half-light; the channel was narrowing fast. Hornblower could imagine sleepy sentries and lookouts peering from their posts at the hardly visible sails, and calling to their sergeants, and the sergeants coming sleepily to see for themselves and then hastening away to tell their lieutenants and then the drums beating to arms and the gunners running to their pieces. On the Danish side they would make ready to fire, for there were the minions of Bonaparte, and any sail was likely to be an enemy. But on the Swedish side? What had Bernadotte decided during the last few days? Was Bonaparte’s Marshal still neutral, or had he at last made up his mind to throw the weight of Sweden on the side of his native land?
There were the low cliffs of Elsinore, and there were the steeples of Helsingborg in plain view to port, and the fortress above the town. Lotus, nearly a mile ahead, must be into the narrows. Hornblower levelled his glass at her; her yards were bracing round for the turn, and still no shot had been fired. Clam was turning next – please God the clumsy bomb-ketches did not misbehave. Ah! There it was. The heavy dull boom of a gun, and then the sullen roar of a salvo. Hornblower turned his glass to the Swedish coast. He could see no smoke there. Then to the Danish side. Smoke was evident, although the brisk wind was dispersing it fast. Under Bush’s orders the helmsman was putting the wheel over a spoke or two, in readiness for the turn; Elsinore and Helsingborg were suddenly surprisingly near. Three miles wide was the channel, and Vickery in Lotus was carrying out his orders correctly, and keeping well to the port side of the fairway, two miles from Denmark, and only a mile from Sweden, with every vessel following exactly in his track. If the Swedish guns came into action and were well handled, they could deal the squadron some shrewd blows. Three jets of water from the surface of the sea on the starboard beam; although the eye could not see the ball that made them it was easy to imagine one could, as it skipped over the surface, but the last jet was a full cable’s length from the side. The Swedish guns were still not firing; Hornblower wished he could tell whether it was because the Swedish gunners were taken by surprise or because they were under orders not to fire.
Elsinore was abaft the beam now, and the channel was opening wide. Hornblower shut his telescope with a snap, and a decided feeling of anticlimax. He could hardly imagine now what he had been worrying about. Calling up in his mind’s eye the chart that he had so anxiously studied, he calculated that it would be an hour before they were in range of the shore again, where the fairway lay close in to the Swedish island of Hven – however that was pronounced in these barbarous northern tongues. This latter thought made him glance round. Braun was at his station on the quarterdeck, in attendance on the Commodore, as he should be. With his hands on the rail he was gazing over at the Swedish shore; Hornblower could not see his face, but every line of the man’s figure disclosed rapt attention. The poor devil of an exile was looking longingly on the shores on which he could never hope to set foot. The world was full of exiles, but Hornblower felt sorry for this one.
Here came the sun, peeping between two Swedish hills as they opened up the valley. It was full daylight, with every promise of a fine day. The minute warmth of the sun, as the shadow of the mizzen-rigging ran across the quarterdeck, suddenly awoke in Hornblower the knowledge that he was stiff and chilled with having made himself stand still so long. He took a turn or two along the quarterdeck, restoring his circulation, and the fresh knowledge was borne in upon him that he wanted his breakfast. Glamorous visions of steaming cups of coffee danced momentarily in his mind’s eye, and it was with a sense of acute disappointment that he remembered that, with the ship cleared for action and all fires out, there was no chance of hot food at all. So acute was the disappointment that he realised guiltily that his six months ashore had made him soft and self-indulgent; it was with positive distaste that he contemplated the prospect of breakfasting off biscuit and cold meat, and washing them down with ship’s water which already had obviously been kept a long time in cask.
The thought reminded him of the men standing patiently at their guns. He wished Bush would remember about them, too. Hornblower could not possibly interfere in the details of the internal management of the ship – he would do more harm than good if he were to try – but he yearned to give the orders which were running through his mind. He tried for a moment to convey his wishes to Bush telepathically, but Bush seemed unreceptive, just as Hornblower expected. He walked over to the lee side as though to get a better view of the Swedish coast, stopping within two yards of Bush.
‘Sweden still seems to be neutral,’ he said, casually.
‘Yes, sir.’
‘We shall know better when we reach Hven – God knows how one’s supposed to pronounce that. We must pass close under the guns there; the fairway’s that side.’
‘Yes, sir, I remember.’
‘But there’s nearly an hour before we come to it. I shall have a bite of breakfast brought up to me here. Will you join me, Captain?’
‘Thank you, sir. I shall be delighted.’
An invitation of that sort from a Commodore was as good as a command to a captain. But Bush was far too good an officer to dream of eating food when his men could not do so. Hornblower could see in his face his struggle against his nervous but impractical desire to have his crew at their guns every moment of this tense time; Bush, after all, was new to command and found his responsibility heavy. But good sense won him over in the end.
‘Mr Hurst. Dismiss the watch below. Half an hour for them to get their breakfast.’
That was exactly the order Hornblower had wanted him to give – but the pleasure at having brought it about did not in Hornblower’s mind counterbalance the annoyance at having had to make a bit of casual conversation, and now there would have to be polite small talk over the breakfast. The tense silence of the ship at quarters changed to the bustle of dismissing the watch; Bush bawled orders for chairs and a table to be brought up to the quarterdeck, and fussed over having them set up just where the Commodore would like them. A glance from Hornblower to Brown sufficed to spread the table with the delicacies suitable for the occasion which Brown could select from the stores Barbara had sent on board – the best hard bread money could buy; butter in a stone crock, not nearly rancid yet; strawberry jam; a heavily smoked ham; a smoked mutton ham from an Exmoor farm; Cheddar and Stilton cheese; potted char. Brown had had a brilliant idea, and squeezed some of the dwindling store of lemons for lemonade in order to disguise the flavour of the ship’s water; he knew that Hornblower was quite incapable of drinking beer, even small beer, at breakfast time – and beer was the only alternative.
Bush ran an appreciative eye over the loaded table, and at Hornblower’s invitation sat down with appetite. Bush had been poor, too, most of his life, with a host of indigent female relations dependent on his pay. He was not yet surfeited with luxury. But Hornblower’s characteristic cross-grainedness had got the better of him; he had wanted coffee, and he could not have coffee, and so he wanted nothing at all. Even lemonade was a mere mockery; he ate resentfully. It seemed to him that Bush, spreading potted char liberally on a biscuit and eating with all the appetite one might expect of him after a night on deck, was doing so deliberately to annoy him. Bush cocked an eye at him across the table and thought better of his first idea of making an appreciative comment on the food. If his queer Commodore chose to be in a bad mood it was best to leave him in it – Bush was better than a wife, thought Hornblower, his acute perceptions noting the gesture.
Hornblower pulled out his watch as a reminder to Bush of the next thing to be done.
‘Call the watch below. Dismiss the watch on deck for breakfast,’ ordered Bush.
It was strange – dramatic, presumably, would be the right word – to be sitting here in this Baltic sunshine, breakfasting at leisure while no more than thr
ee miles away the hordes of the tyrant of Europe could only gaze at them impotently. Brown was offering cigars; Bush cut the end off his with the big sailor’s clasp-knife which he brought out of a side pocket, and Brown brought the smouldering slow match from the tub beside the quarterdeck carronades to give them a light. Hornblower breathed in the smoke luxuriously and found it impossible to maintain his evil humour, now with the sun shining, his cigar drawing well, and the advanced guard of a million French soldiers three miles distant. The table was whipped away from between them and he stretched his legs. Even Bush did the same – at least, he sat farther back instead of perching on the edge of his chair; his wooden leg stuck out straight before him although the other one remained decorously bent. The Nonsuch was still thrashing along gloriously under plain sail, heeling a little to the wind, with the green sea creaming joyously under her bows. Hornblower pulled at his cigar again in strange spiritual peace. After his recent discontent it was like the unbelievable cessation of toothache.
‘Hven nearly within random shot, sir,’ reported the first lieutenant.
‘Call all hands to quarters,’ ordered Bush, with a glance at Hornblower.
But Hornblower sat on tranquilly. He felt suddenly quite certain that the guns on Hven would not open fire, and he did not want to throw away ungratefully the cigar which had served him so well. Bush took a second glance at him and decided to sit still too. He hardly deigned to spare a glance for Hven as it came up under the lee bow and passed away under the lee quarter. Hornblower thought of Saltholm and Amager lying ahead; that would be the time of greatest danger, for both islands were in Danish hands and the twelve-fathom channel passed between them and close to both of them. But there was plenty of time to finish this cigar. It was with sincere regret that he drew the last puff, rose slowly to his feet, and sauntered to the lee rail to pitch the end carefully overside.
Admiral Hornblower Page 27