12 Hornblower and the Crisis

That brought about a decided improvement in his appearance although even now the face that looked out at him from the mirror was drawn very fine and with a pallor that made his tan look as if it were something painted on — that reminded him to look closely at his left jaw. Wear and tear as well as the shave had removed the paint that Maria had noticed. He put on clean clothes — of course they were faintly damp as always when newly come from the sea and would stay so until he could get them washed in fresh water. Now he was ready; he had consumed exactly the hour he had allowed himself. He picked up his bundle of papers and walked stiffly down the stairs.

He was still incredibly stupid with fatigue. During the last hours in the post-chaise he had nodded off repeatedly while sitting up and lurching over the rutted roads. To travel post-haste had a romantic sound but it was utterly exhausting. When changing horses he had allowed himself sometimes half an hour — ten minutes in which to eat and twenty in which to doze with his head pillowed on his arms resting on the table. Better to be a sea officer than a courier, he decided. He paid his halfpenny toll on the bridge; normally he would have been greatly interested in the river traffic below him, but he could not spare it a glance at present. Then he turned up Whitehall and reached the Admiralty.

Dreadnought Foster had displayed good sense in giving him that note; the doorkeeper eyed him and his bundle with intense suspicion when he first applied himself to him — it was not only cranks and madmen that he had to turn away, but the naval officers who came to pester Their Lordships for employment.

“I have a letter for Mr Marsden from Admiral Foster,” said Hornblower, and was interested to see the doorkeeper’s expression soften at once.

“Would you please write a note to that effect on this form, sir?” he asked.

Hornblower wrote ‘Bringing a message from Rear-Admiral Harry Foster’ and signed it, along with his boarding- house address.

“This way, sir,” said the doorkeeper. Presumably — certainly, indeed — the Admiral commanding at Plymouth would have the right of immediate access, personally or through an emissary, to Their Lordships’ Secretary.

The doorkeeper led Hornblower into a waiting room and bustled off with the note and the letter; in the waiting room there were several officers sitting in attitudes of expectancy or impatience or resignation, and Hornblower exchanged formal ‘good mornings’ with them before sitting down in a corner of the room. It was a wooden chair, unfriendly to his tormented sitting parts, but it had a high back with wings against which it was comfortable to lean.

Somehow Frenchmen had boarded the Princess by surprise, in the darkness. Now they were raging through the little ship, swinging cutlasses. Everything on board was in a turmoil while Hornblower struggled to free himself from his hammock to fight for his life. Someone was shouting ‘Wake up, sir!’ which was the very thing he wanted to do but could not. Then he realized that the words were being shouted into his ear and someone was shaking him by the shoulder. He blinked twice and came back to life and consciousness.

“Mr Marsden will see you now, sir,” said the unfamiliar figure who had awakened him.

“Thank you,” replied Hornblower, seizing his bundle and getting stiffly to his feet.

“Fair off you was, sir,” said the messenger. “Come this way, sir, please sir.”

Hornblower could not remember whether the other individuals waiting were the same as he had first seen or had changed, but they eyed him with envious hostility as he walked out of the room.

Mr Marsden was a tall and incredibly elegant gentleman of middle age, old-fashioned in that his hair was tied at the back with a ribbon, yet elegant all the same because the style exactly suited him. Hornblower knew him to be already a legendary figure. His name was known throughout England because it was to him that dispatches were addressed (‘Sir, I have the honour to inform you for the further information of Their Lordships that —’) and printed in the newspapers in that form. First Lords might come and First Lords might go — as Lord Barham had just come and Lord Melville had just gone — and so might Sea Lords, and so might Admirals, but Mr Marsden remained the Secretary. It was he who handled all the executive work of the greatest navy the world had ever seen. Of course he had a large staff, no fewer than forty clerks, so Hornblower had heard, and he had an assistant secretary, Mr Barrow, who was almost as well known as he was, but even so out of everybody in the world Mr Marsden could most nearly be described as the one who was fighting single-handed the war to the death against the French Empire and Bonaparte.

It was a lovely elegant room looking out on to the Horse Guards Parade, a room that exactly suited Mr Marsden, who was seated at an oval table. At his shoulder stood an elderly clerk, gray-haired and lean, of an obviously junior grade, to judge by his threadbare coat and frayed linen.

Only the briefest salutations were exchanged while Hornblower put his bundle down on the table.

“See what there is here, Dorsey,” said Marsden over his shoulder to the clerk, and then, to Hornblower, “How did these come into your possession?”

Hornblower told of the momentary capture of the Guepe; Mr Marsden kept his grey eyes steadily on Hornblower’s face during the brief narrative.

“The French captain was killed?” asked Marsden.

“Yes.”

There was no need to tell about what Meadows’ cutlass had done to the French captain’s head.

“That indicates that this may be genuine,” decided Marsden, and Hornblower was puzzled momentarily until he realized that Marsden meant that there had been no ruse-de-guerre and that the papers had not been deliberately ‘planted’ on him.

“Quite genuine, I think, sir. You see —” he said, and went on to point out that the French brig could not have expected for one moment that the Princess would launch a counter-attack on her.

“Yes,” agreed Marsden; he was a man of icy-cold manner, speaking in a tone unchangingly formal. “You must understand that Bonaparte would sacrifice any man’s life if he could mislead us in exchange. But, as you say, Captain, these circumstances were completely unpredictable. What have you found, Dorsey?”

“Nothing of great importance except this, sir.”

‘This’ was of course the leaden covered dispatch. Dorsey was looking keenly at the twine which bound up the sandwich.

“That’s not the work of Paris,” he said. “That was tied in the ship. This label was probably written by the captain, too. Pardon me, sir.”