“Lay us alongside,” said Hornblower to the helmsman. There was confusion on the decks of the Bonne Celestine; Hornblower could see men running to the guns on her disengaged port side.
“Quiet, you men!” bellowed Hornblower. “Quiet!”
Silence fell on the brig; Hornblower had hardly to raise his voice to make himself heard on the tiny deck.
“See that every shot tells, you gunners,” said Hornblower. “Boarders, are you ready to come with me?”
Another yell answered him. Thirty men were crouching by the bulwarks with pikes and cutlasses; the firing of the broadside and the dropping of the mainsail would set free thirty more, a small enough force unless the broadside should do great execution and the untrained landsmen in the Bonne Celestine should flinch. Hornblower stole a glance at the helmsman, a grey-bearded seaman, who was coolly gauging the distance between the two vessels while at the same time watching the mainsail as it shivered as the Porta Coeli came to the wind. A good seaman, that — Hornblower made a mental note to remember him for commendation. The helmsman whirled the wheel over.
“Down mains’l,” roared Freeman.
The Bonne Celestine‘s guns bellowed deafeningly, and Hornblower felt powder grains strike his face as the smoke eddied round him. He drew his sword as the Porta Coeli‘s carronades crashed out, and the two vessels came together with a squealing of timber. He sprang upon the bulwark in the smoke, sword in hand; at the same moment a figure beside him cleared the bulwark in a single motion and dropped upon the Bonne Celestine‘s deck — Brown, waving a cutlass. Hornblower leaped after him, but Brown stayed in front of him, striking to left and right at the shadowy figures looming in the smoke. Here there was a pile of dead and wounded men, caught in the blast of canister from one of the Porta Coeli‘s carronades. Hornblower stumbled over a limb, and recovered himself in time to see a bayonet on the end of a musket lunging at him. A violent twisting of his body evaded the thrust. There was a pistol in his left hand, and he fired with the muzzle almost against the Frenchman’s breast. Now the wind had blown the cannon-smoke clear. Forward some of the boarders were fighting with a group of the enemy cornered in the bow — the clash of the blades came clearly to Hornblower’s ears — but aft there was not a Frenchman to be seen. Gibbons, master’s mate, was at the halliards running down the tricolour from the masthead. At the starboard side lay the Flame, and over her bulwarks were visible French infantry shakoes; Hornblower saw a man’s head and shoulders appear, saw a musket being pointed. It shifted its aim from Gibbons to Hornblower, and in that instant Hornblower fired the other barrel of his pistol, and the Frenchman fell down below the bulwarks, just as a fresh wave of boarders came pouring on board from the Porta Coeli.
“Come on!” yelled Hornblower — it was desperately important to make sure of the Flame before a defence could be organised.
The brigs stood higher out of the water than did the chasse-marée; this time they had to climb upward. He got his left elbow over the bulwark, and tried to swing himself up, but his sword hampered him.
“Help me, damn you!” he snarled over his shoulder, and a seaman put his shoulder under Hornblower’s stern and heaved him up with such surprising goodwill that he shot over the bulwarks and fell on his face in the scuppers on the other side, his sword slithering over the deck. He started to crawl forward towards it, but a sixth sense warned him of danger, and he flung himself down and forward inside the sweep of a cutlass, and cannoned against the shins of the man who wielded it. Then a wave of men burst over him, and he was kicked and trodden on and then crushed beneath a writhing body with which he grappled with desperate strength. He could hear Brown’s voice roaring over him, pistols banging, sword-blades clashing before sudden silence fell round him. The man with whom he was struggling went suddenly limp and inert, and then was dragged off him. He rose to his feet.
“Are you wounded, sir?” asked Brown.
“No,” he answered. Three or four dead men lay on the deck; aft a group of French soldiers with a French seaman or two among them stood by the wheel, disarmed, while two British sailors, pistol in hand, stood guard over them. A French officer, blood dripping from his right sleeve, and with tears on his cheeks — he was no more than a boy — was sitting on the deck, and Hornblower was about to address him when his attention was suddenly distracted.
“Sir! Sir!”
It was an English seaman he did not recognise, in a striped shirt of white and red, his pigtail shaking from side to side as he gesticulated with the violence of his emotion.
“Sir! I was fightin’ against the Frogs. Your men saw me. Me an’ these other lads here.”
He motioned behind him to an anxious little group of seamen who had heretofore hung back, but now came forward, some of them bursting into speech, all of them nodding their heads in agreement.
“Mutineers?” asked Hornblower. In the heat of battle he had forgotten about the mutiny.
“I’m no mutineer, sir. I did what I had to or they’d ‘a killed me. Ain’t that so, mates?”
“Stand back, there!” blared Brown; there was blood on the blade of his cutlass.
A vivid prophetic picture suddenly leaped into Hornblower’s mind’s eye — the court martial, the semicircle of judges in glittering full dress, the tormented prisoners, tongue-tied, watching, only half understanding, the proceedings which would determine their lives or deaths, and he himself giving his evidence, trying conscientiously to remember every word spoken on both sides; one word remembered might make the difference between the lash and the rope.
“Arrest those men!” he snapped. “Put them under confinement.”
“Sir! Sir!”
“None o’ that!” growled Brown.
Remorseless hands dragged the protesting men away.
“Where are the other mutineers?” demanded Hornblower.
“Down below, sir, I fancies,” said Brown. “Some o’ the Frenchies is down there, too.”
Odd how a beaten crew so often scuttled below. Hornblower honestly believed that he would rather face the fighting madness of the victors on deck than surrender ignominiously in the dark confines of the ‘tween-decks.
A loud hail from the Porta Coeli came to his ears.
“Sir Horatio!” hailed Freeman’s voice. “We’ll be all aground if we don’t get way on the ships soon. I request permission to cast off and make sail.”
“Wait!” replied Hornblower.
He looked round him; the three ships locked together, prisoners under guard here, there, and everywhere. Below decks, both in the Bonne Celestine and in the Flame, there were enemies still unsecured, probably many more in total than he had men under his orders. A shattering crash below him, followed by screams and cries; the Flame shook under a violent blow. Hornblower remembered the sound of a cannon-shot striking on his inattentive ears a second before; he looked round. The two surviving gunboats were resting on their oars a couple of cables’ lengths away, their bows pointing at the group of ships. Hornblower could guess they were in shoal water, almost immune from attack. A jet of smoke from one of the gunboats, and another frightful crash below, and more screams. Those twenty-four-pounder balls were probably smashing through the whole frail length of the brig, whose timbers could resist their impact hardly better than paper. Hornblower plunged into the urgency of the business before him like a man into a raging torrent which he had to swim.