“I have never yet known the world offended by an act of clemency, Your Royal Highness.”
“You have strange ideas of clemency, sir. It appears to me as if this remarkable suggestion of yours has some purpose other than is apparent. Perhaps you are a Liberal yourself, one of these dangerous men who consider themselves thinkers. It would be a good stroke of policy for you to induce my family to brand itself by its first act as willing to condone revolution.”
The monstrous imputation took Hornblower completely aback.
“Sir!” he spluttered. “Your Royal Highness—”
Even if he had been speaking in English words would have failed him. In French he was utterly helpless. It was not merely the insult, but it was the revelation of the Bourbon narrow-mindedness and suspicious cunning that helped to strike him dumb.
“I do not see fit to accede to your request, sir,” said the Duke, his hand on the bellrope.
Outside the audience chamber Hornblower strode past courtiers and sentries, his cheeks burning. He was blind with fury—it was very rarely that he was as angry as this; nearly always his tendency to look at both sides of a question kept him equable and easy-going; weak, he phrased it to himself in moments of self-contempt. He stamped into his office, flung himself into his chair and sprang up from it again a second later, walked round the room and sat down again. Dobbs and Howard looked with astonishment at the thundercloud on his brow, and after their first glance bent their gaze studiously upon the papers before them. Hornblower tore open his neckcloth. He ripped open the buttons of his waistcoat, and the dangerous pressure within began to subside. His mind was in a maelstrom of activity, but over the waves of thought, like a beam of sunshine through a squall at sea, came a gleam of amusement at his own fury. With no softening of his resolution his mischievous sense of humour began to assert itself; it only took a few minutes for him to decide on his next action.
“I want those French fellows brought in here who came with the Duke,” he announced. “The equerry, and the chevalier d’honneur, and the almoner. Colonel Dobbs, I’ll trouble you to make ready to write from my dictation.”
The emigre advisers of the Duke filed into the room a little puzzled and apprehensive; Hornblower received them still sitting, in fact almost lounging back in his chair.
“Good morning, gentlemen” he said, cheerfully. “I have asked you to come to hear the letter I am about to dictate to the Prime Minister. I think you understand English well enough to get the gist of the letter. Are you ready, Colonel?
’To the Right Honourable Lord Liverpool.
My Lord, I find I am compelled to send back to England His Royal Highness the Duke d’Angouleme’.”
” Sir!” said the astonished equerry, breaking in, but Hornblower waved him impatiently to silence.
“Go on, Colonel, please.
’I regret to have to inform Your Lordship that His Royal Highness has not displayed the helpful spirit the British nation is entitled to look for in an ally’.”
The equerry and the chevalier d’honneur and the almoner were on their feet by now. Howard was goggling at him across the room; Dobbs’ face was invisible as he bent over his pen, but the back of his neck was a warm purple which clashed with the scarlet of his tunic.
“Please go on, Colonel.
’During the few days in which I have had the honour of working with His Royal Highness, it has been made plain to me that His Royal Highness has neither the tact nor the administrative ability desirable in one in so high a station’.”
“Sir!” said the equerry. “You cannot send that letter.”
He spoke first in French and then in English; the chevalier d’honneur and the almoner made bilingual noises of agreement.
“No?” said Hornblower.
“And you cannot send His Royal Highness back to England. You cannot! You cannot!”
“No?” said Hornblower again, leaning back in his chair.
The protests died away on the lips of the three Frenchmen. They knew as well as Hornblower, as soon as they were forced to realise the unpalatable truth, who it was that held the power in Le Havre. It was the man who had under his command the only disciplined and reliable military force, the man who had only to give the word to abandon the city to the wrath of Bonaparte, the man at whose word the ships came in and went out again.
“Don’t tell me,” said Hornblower with elaborate concern, “that His Royal Highness would physically oppose an order from me consigning him on board a ship? Have you gentlemen ever witnessed a deserter being brought in? The frogmarch is a most undignified method of progression. Painful, too, I am informed.”
“But that letter,” said the equerry, “would discredit His Royal Highness in the eyes of the world. It would be a most serious blow to the cause of the Family. It might endanger the succession.”
“I was aware of that when I invited you gentlemen to hear me dictate it.”
“You would never send it,” said the equerry with a momentary doubt regarding Hornblower’s strength of will.
“I can only assure you gentlemen that I both can and will.”
Eyes met eyes across the room, and the equerry’s doubt vanished. Hornblower’s mind was entirely made up.
“Perhaps, sir,” said the equerry, clearing his throat and looking sidelong at his colleagues for their approval, “there has been some misunderstanding. If His Royal Highness has refused some request of Your Excellency’s, as I gather has been the case, it must have been because His Royal Highness did not know how much importance Your Excellency attached to the matter. If Your Excellency would allow us to make further representations to His Royal Highness—”
Hornblower was looking at Howard, who very intelligently recognised his cue.
“Yes, sir,” said Howard. “I’m sure His Royal Highness will understand.”
Dobbs looked up from his paper and made corroborative sounds. But it took several minutes before Hornblower could be persuaded to postpone putting his decision into instant effect. It was only with the greatest reluctance that he yielded to the pleadings of his own staff and the Duke’s. After the equerry had led his colleagues from the room to seek the Duke, Hornblower sat back with a real relaxation replacing the one he had simulated. He was tingling and glowing both with the after effects of excitement and with his diplomatic victory.
“His Royal Highness will see reason,” said Dobbs.
“No doubt about it,” agreed Howard, judiciously.
Hornblower thought of the twenty seamen chained in the hold of the Nonsuch, expecting to be hanged tomorrow.
“An idea has struck me, sir,” said Howard. “I can send a flag of truce out to the French forces. A parlementaire—a mounted officer with a white flag and a trumpeter. He can carry a letter from you to General Quiot, asking for news about Captain Bush. If Quiot knows anything at all I’m sure he’ll have the courtesy to inform you, sir.”
Bush! In the excitement of the last hour Hornblower had forgotten about Bush. His pleasurable excitement escaped from him like grain from a ripped sack. Depression closed in upon him again. The others saw the change that came over him; as an example of the affection for him which he had inspired in this short time of contact it is worthy of mention that they would rather have seen the black thundercloud of rage on his brow than this wounded unhappiness.
Chapter XIV
It was the day that the parlementaire returned; Hornblower would always remember it for that reason. Quiot’s courteous letter left no ground for hope whatever; the gruesome details which it included told the whole story. A few rags and tatters of men had been found and had been buried, but nothing that could be identified as any individual. Bush was dead; that burly body of his had been torn into shreds by the explosion. Hornblower was angry with himself for allowing the fact that Bush’s grave would never be marked, that his remains were utterly destroyed, to increase his sadness. If Bush had been given a choice, he presumably would have chosen to die at sea, struck down by a shot in the moment of victory at the climax of a ship-to-ship action; he would have wished to have been buried in his hammock, round-shot at his feet and head, with seamen weeping as the grating tilted and the hammock slid from under the flag into the sea and the ship rocked on the waves, hove-to with backed topsails. It was a horrid irony that he should have met his end in a minor skirmish on a river bank, blown into bloody unidentifiable rags.