In his bedroom there was a privacy to be obtained which he could not hope for elsewhere. He dismissed Brown as soon as the latter had lighted the candles in the stick on the night table at the bedhead, and with a grateful sigh he stretched himself out on the bed, careless of his uniform. He rose again to get his boat-cloak and spread it over himself, for the room was dank and cold despite the fire in the grate. Then at last he could take the newspaper from the top of the pile at the bedhead, and set himself to read seriously the marked passages at which previously he had merely glanced—Barbara had sent him those newspapers; her letter, read and reread, was in his pocket, but all through the day he had not found leisure for the papers.

If the Press was, as it claimed to be, the voice of the people, then the British public most strongly approved of him and his recent actions. It was strangely difficult for Hornblower to recapture the mood of only a few weeks back; the manifold distractions of his duties as Governor of Le Havre made the events preceding the capture of the city very blurred and indistinct in his memory. But here was The Times running over with praise for his handling of the situation in the Bay of the Seine. The measures he had taken to make it impossible for the mutineers to take the Flame in to the French authorities were described as ‘a masterpiece of the ingenuity and skill which we have come to expect of this brilliant officer’. The pontifical manner of the article left Hornblower with the Impression that it would have been more appropriate if the ‘we’ had been spelt with a capital W.

Here was the Morning Chronicle expatiating on his capture of the Flame across the decks of the Bonne Celestine. There was only one example in history of a similar feat—Nelson’s capture of the San Josef at Cape St. Vincent. Hornblower’s eyebrows rose as he read. The comparison was quite absurd. There had been nothing else for him to do; he had had only to fight the Bonne Celestine’s crew, for hardly a man in the Flame’s company had raised a hand to prevent the vessel’s recapture. And it was nonsense to compare him with Nelson. Nelson had been brilliant, a man of lightning thought, the inspiration of all who came in contact with him. He himself was only a fortunate plodder by comparison. Extraordinary good fortune was the root of all his success; good fortune, and long thought, and the devotion of his subordinates. It was perfectly horrible that he should be compared with Nelson; horrible and indecent. As Hornblower read on he felt a disquieting sensation in his stomach, exactly as he felt during his first hours at sea after a spell on land, when the ship he was in slid down a wave. Now that this comparison with Nelson had been made the public and the service would judge his future actions by the same standard, and would turn and rend him in their disappointment should he fail. He had climbed high, and as a natural result there was a precipice at his feet. Hornblower remembered how he had felt as a king’s letter-boy, when he had first climbed to the main-truck of the Indefatigable. The climbing had not been so difficult, not even the futtock-shrouds, but when at the masthead he had looked down he felt dizzy and nauseated, appalled at the distance below him—just as he felt now.

He flung the Morning Chronicle aside and took up the Anti Gallican. The writer here gloated over the fate of the mutineers. He exulted over the death of Nathaniel Sweet, laying special stress on the fact that he had died at Hornblower’s own hands. He went on to hope that Sweet’s accessories in the horrible crime of mutiny would shortly meet the fate they deserved, and he hoped that the happy issue of Hornblower’s recapture of the Flame would not be allowed to serve as an excuse for mercy or sentimental considerations. Hornblower, with twenty sentences of death awaiting his signature, felt his nausea renewed. This writer in the Anti Gallican did not know what death was. Before Hornblower’s eyes floated once more the memory of Sweet’s white hair in the water as the smoke from the musket-shot drifted away. That old man—Chadwick had sworn to disrate him and then flog him. Hornblower decided for the twentieth time that he would have mutinied, too, if confronted with the certainty of a flogging. This writer knew nothing of the sickening crack of the cat-o’-nine-tails as it fell on a naked back. He could never have heard the yell of agony of a grown man under torment.

A later number of The Times discussed the capture of Le Havre. There were the words he had been dreading to read, but in Latin, as one might expect of The Times. Initium finis—the beginning of the end. The Times expected Bonaparte’s dominion, which had endured all these years, to melt away in the next few days. The crossing of the Rhine, the fall of Le Havre, the declaration of Bordeaux in favour of the Bourbons, made the writer certain that Bonaparte would be dethroned immediately. Yet Bonaparte with a solid army was still striking back at his enemies today. The last reports told of his victories over the Prussians and the Austrians; Wellington in the south was making only the slowest progress against Soult. No one could foresee an immediate end to the war save this inky scribbler safe in some dusty office in Printing House Square.

But there was a morbid fascination about reading these newspapers. Hornblower put down this copy and reached for another, knowing as he did so that it would only disgust him or frighten him. It was as hard to resist as opium was to an addict. Horablower read on and on through the marked passages, which dealt mainly with his own achievements, in much the same way that an old maid, by chance alone in her house on a wintry night, might go on reading one of Monk Lewis’s terrifying novels, too frightened to stop, and yet knowing that every word she read would only make the stopping more frightening still.

He had hardly finished the pile of newspapers when he noticed the bed jar slightly under him and the candle-flames flicker for a moment. He paid almost no attention to the phenomenon—it might have been a heavy gun being fired, although he had not heard the explosion—but a few seconds later he heard the bedroom door stealthily opened. He looked up to see Brown peering round the corner at him to see if he were asleep.

“What do you want?” he snapped. His ill-temper was so obvious that even Brown hesitated to speak.

“Out with it,” snarled Hornblower. “Why am I being disturbed contrary to my orders?”

Howard and Dobbs made their appearance behind Brown; it was to their credit that they were willing not merely to take the responsibility but to receive the first impact of the wrath of the Commodore.

“There’s been an explosion, sir,” said Howard. “We saw the flash of it in the sky, east by north of here—I took the bearing. That could be at Caudebec.”

“We felt the jar, sir,” said Dobbs. “But there was no sound—too far away. A big explosion to shake us here and yet be unheard.”

That meant, almost for certain, that Bush had been successful. He must have captured the French powder-barges and blown them up. A thousand rounds for each of twenty-four twenty-four pounders—the minimum for a siege; eight pounds of powder for each round. That would be eight times twenty-four thousand. That would be nearly two hundred thousand pounds. That would be almost a hundred tons. A hundred tons of gunpowder would make a fair explosion. Having computed his calculation, Hornblower refocused his eyes on Dobbs and Howard; until then he had looked at them without seeing them. Brown had tactfully slipped out from this council of his betters.

“Well?” said Hornblower.

“We thought you would like to know about it, sir,” said Dobbs, lamely.