He was at breakfast with Barbara when the news arrived; Barbara in a grey-blue informal garment with the silver coffee-pot before her, pouring his coffee, and being helped by him to bacon and eggs—a domesticity that was still unreal to him. He had been hard at work for three hours before he had come in to breakfast, and he was still too set in his ways to make the change easily from a military atmosphere to one of connubial intimacy.
“Thank you, dear,” said Barbara, accepting the plate from him.
A thump at the door.
“Come in!” yelled Hornblower.
It was Dobbs, one of the few people privileged to knock at that door when Sir Horatio was at breakfast with his wife.
“Despatch from the army, sir. The Frogs have gone.”
“Gone?”
“Up-stick and away, sir. Quiot marched for Paris last night. There’s not a French soldier in Rouen.”
The report that Hornblower took from Dobbs’ hand merely repeated in more formal language what Dobbs had said. Bonaparte must be desperate for troops to defend his capital; by recalling Quiot he had left all Normandy exposed to the invader.
“We must follow him up,” said Hornblower to himself, and then to Dobbs, “Tell Howard—no I’ll come myself. Excuse me, my dear.”
“Is there not even time,” said Barbara to him, sternly, “to drink your coffee and eat your breakfast?”
The struggle on Hornblower’s face was so apparent that she laughed outright at him.
“Drake,” she went on, “had time to finish the game and beat the Spaniards too. I was taught that in the schoolroom.”
“You’re quite right, my dear,” said Hornblower. “Dobbs, I’ll be with you in ten minutes.”
Hornblower applied himself to bacon and eggs. Maybe it would be good for discipline, in the best sense of the term, if it became known that the legendary Hornblower, the man of so many exploits, was human enough to listen sometimes to his wife’s protests.
“This is victory,” he said, looking at Barbara across the table. “This is the end.”
He knew it in his soul now; he had arrived at this conclusion by no mere intellectual process. The tyrant of Europe, the man who had bathed the world in blood, was about to fall. Barbara met his eyes, and their emotion admitted of no words. The world which had been at war since their childhood was about to know peace, and peace had something of the unknown about it.
“Peace,” said Barbara.
Hornblower felt a little unsteady. It was impossible for him to analyse his feelings, for he had no data from which to begin his deductions. He had joined the Navy as a boy, and he had known war ever since; he could know nothing of the Hornblower, the purely hypothetical Hornblower, who would have existed had there been no war. Twenty-one years of frightful strain, of peril and hardship, had made a very different man of him from what he would have become otherwise. Hornblower was no born fighting man; he was a talented and sensitive individual whom chance had forced into fighting, and his talents had brought him success as a fighter just as they would have brought him success in other walks of life, but he had had to pay a higher price. His morbid sensitiveness, his touchy pride, the quirks and weaknesses of his character might well be the result of the strains and sorrows he had had to endure. There was a coldness between him and his wife at the moment (a coldness masked by camaraderie; the passion to which both of them had given free rein had done nothing to dispel it) which might in large part be attributed to the defects of his character—a small part of it was Barbara’s fault, but most of it was his. Hornblower wiped his mouth and stood up. “I really should go, dear,” he said. “Please forgive me.”
“Of course you must go if you have your duty to do,” she answered, and held up her lips to him.
He kissed her and hurried from the room. Even with the kiss on his lips he knew that it was a mistake for a man to have his wife with him on active service; it was liable to soften him, to say nothing of the practical inconveniences, like the occasion two nights ago when an urgent message had to be brought in to him when he was in bed with Barbara. In the office he read the reconnaissance report again. It stated unequivocally that no contact could be made with any Imperial troops whatever, and that prominent citizens of Rouen, escaping from the town, assured the outposts that not a Bonapartist soldier remained there. Rouen was his for the taking, and obviously the tendency to desert Bonaparte and join the Bourbons was becoming more and more marked. Every day the number of people who came into Le Havre by road or by boat to make their submission to the Duke grew larger and larger.
“Vive le Roi!” was what they called out as they neared the sentries. “Long live the King!”
That was the password which marked the Bourbonist—no Bonapartist, no Jacobin, no republican would soil his lips with those words. And the number of deserters and refractory conscripts who came pouring in was growing enormous. The ranks of Bonaparte’s army were leaking like a sieve, and Bonaparte would find it difficult to replace the missing ones, when his conscripts were taking to the woods or fleeing to English protection to avoid service. It might be thought possible that a Bourbonist army could be built up from this material, but the attempt was a failure from the start. Those runaways objected not merely to fighting for Bonaparte, but to fighting at all. The Royalist army which Angoulême had been sent here to organise still numbered less than a thousand men, and of these thousand more than half were officers, old émigrés sent here after serving in the armies of the enemies of France.
But Rouen awaited a conqueror, nevertheless. His militia brigade could tramp the miry roads to the city, and he and Angoulême could get into carriages and drive after them. He would have to make the entrance as spectacular as possible; the capital of Normandy was no mean city, and beyond it lay Paris, quivering and sensitive. A fresh idea struck him. In eastern France the allied monarchs were riding every few days into some new captured town. It was in his power to escort Angoulême into Rouen in more spectacular fashion, demonstrating at the same time the long arm of England’s sea-power, and rubbing in the lesson that it was England’s naval strength which had turned the balance of the war. The wind was westerly; he was a little vague about the state of the tide, but he could wait until it should serve.
“Captain Howard,” he said, looking up, “warn Flame and Porta Coeli to be ready to get under way. I shall take the Duke and Duchess up to Rouen by water. And their whole suite—yes, I’ll take Lady Barbara too. Warn the captains to make preparations for their reception and accommodation. Send me Hau to settle the details. Colonel Dobbs, would you be interested in a little yachting trip?”
It seemed indeed like a yachting trip next morning, when they gathered on the quarter-deck of the Porta Coeli, a group of men in brilliant uniforms and women in gay dresses. Porta Coeli had already warped away from the quay, from which they rowed out to her, and Freeman, at a nod from Hornblower, had only to bellow the orders for sail to be set and the anchor hove in for them to start up the broad estuary. The sun was shining with the full promise of spring, the wavelets gleamed and danced. Down below decks, Hornblower could guess from the sounds, there was trouble and toil, while they were still trying to rig accommodation for the royal party, but here by the taffrail all was laughter and expectancy. And it was heavenly to tread a deck again, to feel the wind on his cheeks, to look aft and see Flame under all fore-and-aft sail in her station astern, to have the white ensign overhead and his broad pendant hoisted, even though the Bourbon white and gold flew beside it.