“Bring her to the wind on the starboard tack,” he snapped at Prowse, and Hotspur swung round further still, the invisible hands hauling at the invisible braces.
There was the second ship in the French line just completing her turn, with Hotspur‘s bows pointing almost straight at her.
“Starboard a little.” Hotspur‘s bows swung away. “Meet her.”
He wanted to be as close alongside as he possibly could be without running foul of her.
“I’ve sent a good hand up with the lights, sir.” This was Bush reporting. “Another two minutes and they’ll be ready.”
“Get down to the guns,” snapped Hornblower, and then, with the need for silence at an end, he reached for the speaking-trumpet.
“Main-deck! Man the starboard guns! Run ‘em out.”
How would the French squadron be composed? It would have an armed escort, not to fight its way through the Channel Fleet, but to protect the transports, after the escape, from stray British cruising frigates. There would be two big frigates, one in the van and one bringing up the rear, while the intermediate ships would be defenceless transports, frigates armed en flute.
“Starboard! Steady!”
Yard arm to yard arm with the second ship in the line, going down the Goulet alongside her, ghost ships side by side in the falling snow. The rumble of gun-trucks had ceased.
“Fire!”
At ten guns, ten hands jerked at the lanyards, and Hotspur‘s side burst into flame, illuminating the sails and hull of the Frenchman with a bright glare; in the instantaneous glare snowflakes were visible as if stationary in mid air.
“Fire away, you men!”
There were cries and shouts to be heard from the French ship, and then a French voice speaking almost in his ear — the French captain hailing him from thirty yards away with his speaking-trumpet pointed straight at him. It would be an expostulation, the French captain wondering why a French ship should be firing into him, here where no British ship could possibly be. The words were cut off abruptly by the bang and the flash of the first gun of the second broadside, the others following as the men loaded and fired as fast as they could. Each flash brought a momentary revelation of the French ship, a flickering, intermittent picture. Those nine-pounder balls were crashing into a ship crammed with men. At this very moment, as he stood there rigid on the deck, men were dying in agony by the score just over there, for no more reason than that they had been forced into the service of a continental tyrant. Surely the French would not be able to bear it. Surely they would flinch under this unexpected and unexplainable attack. Ah! She was turning away, although she had nowhere to turn to except the cliffs and shoals of the shore close overside. There were the three red lights on her mizzen topsail yard. By accident or design she had put her helm down. He must make sure of her.
“Port a little.”
Hotspur swung to starboard, her guns blazing. Enough.
“Starboard a little. Steady as you go.”
Now the speaking-trumpet. “Cease fire!”
The silence that followed was broken by the crash as the Frenchman struck the shore, the clatter of falling spars, the yells of despair. And in this darkness, after the glare of the guns, he was blinder than ever, and yet he must act as if he could see; he must waste no moment.
“Back the main tops’l! Stay by the braces!”
The rest of the French line must be coming down, willy-nilly; with the wind over their quarter and the ebb under their keels and rocks on either side of them they could do nothing else. He must think quicker than they; he still had the advantage of surprise — the French captain in the following ship would not yet have had time to collect his thoughts.
The Little Girls were under their lee; he must not delay another moment.
“Braces, there!”
Here she came, looming up, close, close, yells of panic from her forecastle.
“Hard-a-starboard!”
Hotspur had just enough way through the water to respond to her rudder; the two bows swung from each other, collision averted by a hair’s breadth.
“Fire!”
The Frenchman’s sails were all a-shiver; she was not under proper control, and with those nine-pounder balls sweeping her deck she would not recover quickly. Hotspur must not pass ahead of her; he still had a little time and a little room to spare.
“Main tops’l aback!”
This was a well-drilled crew; the ship was working like a machine. Even the powder-boys, climbing and descending the ladders in pitch darkness, were carrying out their duties with exactitude, keeping the guns supplied with powder, for the guns never ceased from firing, bellowing in deafening fashion and bathing the Frenchman with orange light while the smoke blew heavily away on the disengaged side.
He could not spare another moment with the main topsail aback. He must fill and draw ahead even if it meant disengagement.
“Braces, there!”
He had not noticed until now the infernal din of the quarterdeck carronades beside him; they were firing rapidly, sweeping the transport’s deck with grape. In their flashes he saw the Frenchman’s masts drawing aft as Hotspur regained her way. Then in the next flash he saw something else, another momentary picture — a ship’s bowsprit crossing the Frenchman’s deck from the disengaged side, and he heard a crash and the screams. The next Frenchman astern had run bows on into her colleague. The first rending crash was followed by others; he strode aft to try to see, but already the darkness had closed like a wall round his blinded eyes. He could only listen, but what he heard told him the story. The ship that rammed was swinging with the wind, her bowsprit tearing through shrouds and halliards until it snapped against the main-mast. Then the fore-topmast would fall, yards would fall. The two ships were locked together and helpless, with the Little Girls under their lee. Now he saw blue lights burning as they tried to deal with the hopeless situation; with the ships swinging the blue lights and the red lights on the yards were revolving round each other like some planetary system. There was no chance of escape for them, as wind and current carried him away he thought he heard the crash as they struck upon the Little Girls, but he could not be sure, and there was no time — of course there was no time — to think about it. At this stage of the ebb there was an eddy that set in upon Pollux Reef and he must allow for that. Then he would be out in the Iroise, whose waters he used to think so dangerous before he had ventured up the Goulet, and an unknown number of ships was coming down from Brest, forewarned now by all the firing and the tumult that an enemy was in their midst.
He took a hash glance into the binnacle, gauged the force of the wind on his cheeks. The enemy — what there was left of them — would certainly, with this wind, run for the Raz du Sein, and would certainly give the Trepieds shoal a wide berth. He must post himself to intercept them; the next ship in the line must be close at hand in any case, but in a few seconds she would no longer be confined to the narrow channel of the Goulet. And what would the first frigate be doing the one he had allowed to pass without attacking her?
“Main chains, there! Get the lead going.”
He must keep up to windward as best he could.
“No bottom! No bottom with this line.”
He was clear of Pollux, then.
“Avast, there, with the lead.”
They stood on steadily on the starboard-tack; in the impenetrable darkness he could hear Profuse breathing heavily at his side and all else was silence round him. He would have to take another cast of the lead soon enough. What was that? Wind and water had brought a distinctive sound to his ears, a solemn noise, of a solid body falling into the water. It was the sound of a lead being cast — and then followed, at the appropriate interval, the high pitched cry of the leadsman. There was a ship just up there to windward, and now with the distance lessening and with his hearing concentrated in that direction he could hear other sounds, voices, the working of yards. He leaned over the rail and spoke quietly down into the waist.