“Oh, no, please,” said the duchess. “I couldn’t bear it.” Hornblower shrugged his shoulders, and promptly forgot the duchess’s presence again as a new anxiety struck him. He dived below and came up again with the two big sealed envelopes of despatches. He took a belaying pin from the rail and began very carefully to tie the envelopes to the pin with a bit of line.
“Please,” said the duchess, “please, Mr Hornblower, tell me what you are doing?”
“I want to make sure these will sink when I throw them overboard if we’re captured,” said Hornblower grimly.
“Then they’ll be lost for good?”
“Better that than that the Spaniards should read ‘em,” said Hornblower with all the patience he could muster.
“I could look after them for you,” said the duchess. “Indeed I could.”
Hornblower looked keenly at her.
“No,” he said, “they might search your baggage. Probably they would.”
“Baggage!” said the duchess. “As if I’d put them in my baggage! I’ll put them next my skin — they won’t search me in any case. They’ll never find ‘em, not if I put ‘em up my petticoats.”
There was a brutal realism about those words that staggered Hornblower a little, but which also brought him to admit to himself that there was something in what the duchess was saying.
“If they capture us,” said the duchess, “— I pray they won’t, but if they do — they’ll never keep me prisoner. You know that. They’ll send me to Lisbon or put me aboard a King’s ship as soon as they can. Then the despatches will be delivered eventually. Late, but better late than never.”
“That’s so,” mused Hornblower.
“I’ll guard them like my life,” said the duchess. “I swear I’ll never part from them. I’ll tell no one I have them, not until I hand them to a King’s officer.”
She met Hornblower’s eyes with transparent honesty in her expression.
“Fog’s thinning, sir,” said Winyatt.
“Quick!” said the duchess.
There was no time for further debate. Hornblower slipped the envelopes from their binding of rope and handed them over to her, and replaced the belaying pin in the rail.
“These damned French fashions,” said the duchess. “I was right when I said I’d put these letters up my petticoats. There’s no room in my bosom.”
Certainly the upper part of her gown was not at all capacious; the waist was close up under the armpits and the rest of the dress hung down from there quite straight in utter defiance of anatomy.
“Give me a yard of that rope, quick!” said the duchess.
Winyatt cut her a length of the line with his knife and handed it to her. Already she was hauling at her petticoats; the appalled Hornblower saw a gleam of white thigh above her stocking tops before he tore his glance away. The fog was certainly thinning.
“You can look at me now,” said the duchess; but her petticoats only just fell in time as Hornblower looked round again. “They’re inside my shift, next my skin as I promised. With these Directory fashions no one wears stays any more. So I tied the rope round my waist outside my shift. One envelope is flat against my chest and the other against my back. Would you suspect anything?”
She turned round for Hornblower’s inspection.
“No, nothing shows,” he said. “I must thank Your Grace.”
“There is a certain thickening,” said the duchess, “but it does not matter what the Spaniards suspect as long as they do not suspect the truth.”
Momentary cessation of the need for action brought some embarrassment to Hornblower. To discuss with a woman her shift and stays — or the absence of them — was a strange thing to do.
A watery sun, still nearly level, was breaking through the mist and shining in his eyes. The mainsail cast a watery shadow on the deck. With every second the sun was growing brighter.
“Here it comes,” said Hunter.
The horizon ahead expanded rapidly, from a few yards to a hundred, from a hundred yards to half a mile. The sea was covered with ships. No less than six were in plain sight, four ships of the line and two big frigates, with the red-and-gold of Spain at their mastheads, and, what marked them even more obviously as Spaniards, huge wooden crosses hanging at their peaks.
“Wear ship again, Mr Hunter,” said Hornblower. “Back into the fog.”
That was the one chance of safety. Those ships running down towards them were bound to ask questions, and they could not hope to avoid them all. Le Reve spun around on her heel, but the fog-bank from which she had emerged was already attenuated, sucked up by the thirsty sun. They could see a drifting stretch of it ahead, but it was lazily rolling away from them at the same time as it was dwindling. The heavy sound of a cannon shot reached their ears, and close on their starboard quarter a ball threw up a fountain of water before plunging into the side of a wave just ahead. Hornblower looked round just in time to see the last of the puff of smoke from the bows of the frigate astern pursuing them.
“Starboard two points,” he said to the helmsman, trying to gauge at one and the same moment the frigate’s course, the direction of the wind, the bearing of the other ships, and that of the thin last nucleus of that wisp of fog.
“Starboard two points,” said the helmsman.
“Fore and main sheets!” said Hunter.
Another shot, far astern this time but laid true for line; Hornblower suddenly remembered the duchess.
“You must go below, Your Grace,” he said curtly.
“Oh, no, no, no!” burst out the duchess with angry vehemence. “Please let me stay here. I can’t go below to where that seasick maid of mine lies hoping to die. Not in that stinking box of a cabin.”
There would be no safety in that cabin, Hornblower reflected — Le Reve‘s scantlings were too fragile to keep out any shot at all. Down below the water line in the hold the women might be safe, but they would have to lie flat on top of beef barrels.
“Sail ahead!” screamed the lookout.
The mist there was parting and the outline of a ship of the line was emerging from it, less than a mile away and on almost the same course as Le Reve‘s. Thud — thud from the frigate astern. Those gunshots by now would have warned the whole Spanish fleet that something unusual was happening. The battleship ahead would know that the little sloop was being pursued. A ball tore through the air close by, with its usual terrifying noise. The ship ahead was awaiting their coming; Hornblower saw her topsails slowly turning.
“Hands to the sheets!” said Hornblower. “Mr Hunter, jibe her over.”
Le Reve came round again, heading for the lessening gap on the port side. The frigate astern turned to intercept. More jets of smoke from her bows. With an appalling noise a shot passed within a few feet of Hornblower, so that the wind of it made him stagger. There was a hole in the mainsail.
“Your Grace,” said Hornblower, “those aren’t warning shots —”
It was the ship of the line which fired them, having succeeded in clearing away and manning some of her upper-deck guns. It was as if the end of the world had come. One shot hit Le Reve‘s hull, and they felt the deck heave under their feet as a result as if the little ship were disintegrating. But the mast was hit at the same moment, stays and shrouds parting, splinters raining all round. Mast, sails, boom, gaff and all went from above them over the side to windward. The wreckage dragged in the sea and turned the helpless wreck round with the last of her way. The little group aft stood momentarily dazed.
“Anybody hurt?” asked Hornblower, recovering himself.
“On’y a scratch, sir,” said one voice.
It seemed a miracle that no one was killed.
“Carpenter’s mate, sound the well,” said Hornblower and then, recollecting himself, “No, damn it. Belay that order. If the Dons can save the ship, let ‘em try.”