“Sir,” said Dorsey. “You have brought us something valuable. Very valuable, I should say, sir. This is the first of its kind to come into our possession.”

He handed it to Marsden, and tapped the seals with his finger.

“Those are the seals of this newfangled Empire of Bonaparte’s, sir,” he said. “Three good specimens.”

It was only a few months before, as Hornblower realized, that Bonaparte had proclaimed himself Emperor and the Republican Consulate had given place to the Empire. When Marsden permitted him to look closely, he could see the imperial eagle with its thunderbolt, but to his mind not quite as dignified a bird as it might be, for the feathers that sheathed its legs offered a grotesque impression of trousers.

“I would like to open this carefully, sir,” said Dorsey.

“Very well. You may go and attend to it.”

Fate hung in the balance for Hornblower at that moment; somehow Hornblower was aware of it, with uneasy premonition, while Marsden kept his cold eyes fixed on his face, apparently as a preliminary to dismissing him.

Later in his life — even within a month or two — Hornblower could look back in perspective at this moment as one in which his destiny was diverted in one direction instead of in another, dependent on a single minute’s difference in timing. He was reminded, when he looked back, of the occasions when musket balls had missed him by no more than a foot or so; the smallest, microscopic correction of aim on the part of the marksman would have laid Hornblower lifeless, his career at an end. Similarly at this moment a few seconds’ delay along the telegraph route, a minute’s dilatoriness on the part of a messenger, and Hornblower’s life would have followed a different path.

For the door at the end of the room opened abruptly and another elegant gentleman came striding in. He was some years younger than Marsden, and dressed soberly but in the very height of fashion, his lightly starched collar reaching to his ears, and a white waistcoat picked out with black calling unobtrusive attention to the slenderness of his waist. Marsden looked round with some annoyance at this intrusion, but restrained himself when he saw who the intruder was, especially when he saw a sheet of paper fluttering in his hand.

“Villeneuve’s in Ferrol,” said the newcomer. “This has just come by telegraph. Calder fought him off Finisterre and was given the slip.”

Marsden took the dispatch and read it with care.

“This will be for His Lordship,” he said, calmly, rising with deliberation from his chair. Even then he did not noticeably hurry. “Mr. Barrow, this is Captain Hornblower. You had better hear about his recent acquisition.”

Marsden went out through a hardly perceptible door behind him, bearing news of the most vital, desperate importance. Villeneuve had more than twenty ships of the line, French and Spanish — ships which could cover Bonaparte’s crossing of the Channel — and he had been lost to sight for the last three weeks since Nelson had pursued him to the West Indies. Calder had been stationed off Finisterre to intercept and destroy him and had apparently failed in his mission.

“What is this acquisition, Captain?” asked Barrow, the simple question breaking into Hornblower’s train of thought like a pistol shot.

“Only a dispatch from Bonaparte, sir,” he said. He used the ‘sir’ deliberately, despite his confusion — Barrow was after all the Second Secretary, and his name was nearly as well known as Marsden’s.

“But that may be of vital importance, Captain. What was the purport of it?”

“It is being opened at the present moment, sir. Mr. Dorsey is attending to that.”

“I see. Dorsey in forty years in this office has become accustomed to handling captured documents. It is his particular department.”

“I fancied so, sir.”

There was a moment’s pause, while Hornblower braced himself to make the request that was clamouring inside him for release.

“What about this news, sir? What about Villeneuve? Could you tell me, sir?”

“No harm in your knowing,” said Barrow. “A Gazette will have to be issued as soon as it can be arranged. Calder met Villeneuve off Finisterre. He was in action with him for the best part of two days — it was thick weather — and then they seem to have parted.”

“No prizes, sir?”

“Calder seems to have taken a couple of Spaniards.”

Two fleets, each of twenty ships or more, had fought for two days with no more result than that. England would be furious — for that matter England might be in very serious peril. The French had probably employed their usual evasive tactics, edging down to leeward with their broad sides fully in action while the British tried to close and paid the price for the attempt.

“And Villeneuve broke through into Ferrol, sir?”

“Yes.”

“That’s a difficult place to watch,” commented Hornblower.

“Do you know Ferrol?” demanded Barrow, sharply.

“Fairly well, sir.”

“How?”

“I was a prisoner of war there in ‘97, sir.”

“Did you escape?”

“No, sir, they set me free.”

“By exchange?”

“No, sir.”

“Then why?”

“I helped to save life in a shipwreck.”

“You did? So you know about conditions in Ferrol?”

“Fairly well, sir, as I said.”

“Indeed. And you say it’s a difficult to watch. Why?”

Sitting in a peaceful office in London a man could experience as many surprises as on the deck of a frigate at sea. Instead of a white squall suddenly whipping out of an unexpected quarter, or instead of an enemy suddenly appearing on the horizon, here was a question demanding an immediate answer regarding the difficulty of blockading Ferrol. This was a civilian, a landsman, who needed the information, and urgently. For the first time in a century the First Lord was a seaman, an Admiral — it would be a feather in the Second Secretary’s cap if in the next, immediate conference he could display familiarity with conditions in Ferrol.

Hornblower had to express in words what up to that moment he had only been conscious of as a result of his seaman’s instinct. He had to think fast to present an orderly statement.

“First of all it’s a matter of distance,” he began. “It’s not like blockading Brest.”

Plymouth would be the base in each case; from Plymouth to Brest was less than fifty leagues, while from Plymouth to Ferrol was nearly two hundred — communication and supply would be four times as difficult, as Hornblower pointed out.

“Even more with prevailing westerly winds,” he added.

“Please go on, Captain,” said Barrow.

“But really that is not as important as the other factors, sir,” said Hornblower.

It was easy to go on from there. A fleet blockading Ferrol had no friendly refuge to leeward. A fleet blockading Brest could run to Tor Bay in a westerly tempest — the strategy of the past fifty years had been based on that geographical fact. A fleet blockading Cadiz could rely on the friendly neutrality of Portugal, and had Lisbon on one flank and Gibraltar on the other. Nelson watching Toulon had made use of anchorages on the Sardinian coast. But off Ferrol it would be a different story. Westerly gales would drive a blockading fleet into the culdesac of the Bay of Biscay whose shores were not merely hostile but wild and steepto, with rain and fog. To keep watch over Villeneuve in Ferrol, particularly in winter, would impose an intolerable strain on the watcher, especially as the exits from Ferrol were far easier and more convenient than the single exit from Brest — the largest imaginable fleet could sortie from Ferrol in a single tide, which no large French fleet had ever succeeded in doing from Brest. He recalled what he had observed in Ferrol regarding the facilities for the prompt watering of a fleet, for berthing, for supply; the winds that were favourable for exit and the winds that made exit impossible; the chances of a blockader making furtive contact with the shore — as he himself had later done off Brest — and the facilities to maintain close observation over a blockaded force.