“I am always careful,” snapped Hornblower, “but do you expect me to allow that privateer to behave as if this were Brest or Toulon?”
Braun came over to them.
“Baron Basse asks me to say to you, sir, that Bonaparte has 200,000 men on the borders of Pomerania. He wants me to say that one cannot offend the master of an army that size.”
“That bears out what I say, Captain,” said Hauptmann.
Here came Dumoulin, and Basse after him — no one would trust any one of his colleagues to be alone with the British captain for a moment. Hornblower’s tactical instinct came to his rescue; the best defensive is a vigorous local offensive. He turned on Hauptmann.
“May I ask, sir, how His Majesty maintains a consular agent in a port whose neutrality is in doubt?”
“It is necessary because of the need for licences to trade.”
“Are you accredited to the Swedish Government by His Majesty?”
“No, sir. I am accredited by His Bavarian Majesty.”
“His Bavarian Majesty?”
“I am a subject of His Bavarian Majesty.”
“Who happens to be at war with His Britannic Majesty,” said Hornblower dryly. The whole tangle of Baltic politics, of hole-and-corner hostilities and neutralities, was utterly beyond unravelling. Hornblower listened to everyone’s pleas and expostulations until he could bear it no longer; his impatience grew at length apparent to his anxious interviewers.
“I can form no conclusion at present, gentlemen,” said Hornblower. “I must have time to think over the information you have given me. Baron Basse, as representative of a governor-general, I fancy you are entitled to a seventeen-gun salute on leaving this ship?”
The salutes echoed over the yellow-green water as the officials went over the side. Seventeen guns for Baron Basse. Eleven for Dumoulin, the Consul-General. Hauptmann, as a mere consular agent, rated only five, the smallest salute noticed in naval ceremonial. Hornblower stood at the salute as Hauptmann went down into his boat, and then sprang into activity again.
“Signal for the captains of Moth, Harvey, and Clam to come on board,” he ordered, abruptly.
The bomb-vessels and the cutter were within easy signalling distance now; there were three hours of daylight left, and over there the spars of the French privateer still showed over the sand-dunes of Hiddensoe as though to taunt him.
CHAPTER NINE
Hornblower swung himself up over the side of the Harvey, where Lieutenant Mound stood at attention to welcome him with his two boatswain’s mates twittering their pipes. The bang of a gun, coming unexpectedly and not a yard from him, made him jump. As the Commodore was shifting his broad pendant from one ship to another (there it was breaking out at the lofty mast-head of the Harvey) it was the correct moment for another salute, which they were firing off with one of the four six-pounders which Harvey carried aft.
“Belay that nonsense,” said Hornblower.
Then he felt suddenly guilty. He had publicly described the Navy’s beloved ceremonial as nonsense — just as extraordinary he had applied the term to a compliment which ought to have delighted him as it was only the second time he had received it. But discipline had not apparently suffered, although young Mound was grinning broadly as he gave the order to cease firing.
“Square away and let’s get going, Mr Mound,” said Hornblower.
As the Harvey filled her sails and headed diagonally for the shore with Moth close astern, Hornblower looked round him. This was a new experience for him; in twenty years of service he had never seen action in a bomb-vessel. Above him towered the enormous mainmast (they had made a good job of replacing the spar shot away in the Sound) which had to make up in the amount of canvas it carried for the absence of a foremast. The mizzenmast, stepped far aft, was better proportioned to the diminutive vessel. The prodigious forestay necessary for the security of the mainmast was an iron chain, curiously incongruous amid the hempen rigging. The waist of the ketch was forward — that was the absurd but only way of describing her design — and there, on either side of her midline, were the two huge mortars which accounted for her quaint build. Hornblower knew that they were bedded upon a solid mass of oak against her kelson; under the direction of a gunner’s mate four hands were laying out the immense thirteen-inch shells which the mortars fired. The bos’un’s mate with another party had passed a cable out from a starboard gun-port, and, having carried it forward, were securing it to the anchor hanging at the cathead. That was the ‘spring’; Hornblower had often attached a spring to his cable as a practice evolution, but had never used one in action before. Close beside him in the port-side main-chains a hand was heaving the lead; Hornblower thought to himself that nine-tenths of the time he had spent in the Baltic the lead had been going, and presumably that would be the case for the rest of this commission.
“And a half three!” called the leadsman. These bomb-ketches drew less than nine feet.
Over there Raven was preparing to kedge off the shoal on which she was aground. Hornblower could see the cable, black against the water. She had already cleared away the raffle of her wrecked foretopmast. Clam was creeping out beyond her; Hornblower wondered if her gipsy-looking captain had fully grasped the complex instructions given him.
Mound was standing beside him, conning his ship. He was the only commissioned officer; a midshipman and two master’s mates kept watches, and the two latter were standing wide-legged aft measuring with sextants the vertical angle subtended by Blanchefleur‘s spars. Hornblower could sense through the vessel an atmosphere of light-heartedness, only to be expected when the captain was only twenty years old. Discipline was bound to be easier in these small craft — Hornblower had often heard crabbed captains of vast seniority bewailing the fact.
“Quarter less three!” called the leadsman.
Seventeen feet of water.
“We are within range now, sir,” said Mound.
“Those mortars of yours are more accurate when firing at less than extreme range, though, aren’t they?”
“Yes, sir. And I would prefer to have a little to spare, too, in case they can shift anchorage.”
“Leave yourself plenty of room to swing, though. We know nothing of these shoals.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
Mound swung round for a final glance at the tactical situation; at the spars of the Blanchefleur above the dunes where she was anchored far up the lagoon, the battery at the end of the spit, Clam taking up a position where she could see up the lagoon from a point just out of range of the battery, and lotus waiting beyond the entrance to cut off escape in case by any miracle the Blanchefleur should be able to claw her way out to windward and make a fresh attempt to reach Stralsund. Mound kept on reaching for his trouser pockets and then hastily refraining from putting his hands in, when he remembered the Commodore was beside him — an odd gesture, and he did it every few seconds.
“For God’s sake, man,” said Hornblower, “put your hands in your pockets and leave off fidgeting.”
“Aye aye, sir,” said Mound, a little startled. He plunged his hands in gratefully, and hunched his shoulders into a comfortable slouch, pleasantly relaxed. He took one more look round before calling to the midshipman standing by the cathead forward.