“Quite right,” said Hornblower, and held up his newspaper between them again. Then he pulled it down again just long enough to say “Thank you.”

From behind his newspaper Hornblower heard his two staff officers creep out of the room and shut the door gently behind them. He was pleased with his performance; that final ‘thank you’ had been a masterly touch, conveying the impression that, even though he was loftily above such trifles as the mere destruction of a siege-train, he could yet remember his manners before his inferiors. Yet it was only a moment before he was sneering at himself for relishing such a petty triumph. He felt a sudden self-contempt, which even when it passed left him depressed and unhappy. The unhappiness had a special quality; Hornblower, laying aside his newspaper to look up at the play of shadows on the bedtester, suddenly realised he was lonely. He wanted company. He wanted friendship. Much more than that, he wanted comforting, he wanted affection, he wanted just what he could not have as Governor of this bleak, beleaguered city. He bore all the vast weight of responsibility, and he had no one to share his fears and hopes. Hornblower pulled himself up on the verge of an abyss of self-pity, his self-contempt greatly increased by the discovery. He had always been too self-analytical and too conscious of his own faults to be sorry for himself. His present loneliness was of his own making. He need not have been so gratuitously reserved with Dobbs and Howard; a sensible man would have shared their pleasure, would have sent for a bottle of champagne to celebrate the success, would have passed a pleasant hour or two with them—and would certainly have increased their pleasure and their loyalty by hinting that the success was largely due to their contributions to the plan, even though it was not true. For the ephemeral and extremely doubtful pleasure of showing himself to be what he was not, a man untouched by human emotions, he was now having to pay the present price of loneliness. Well, decided Hornblower, swallowing a decidedly bitter truth, it served him right.

He pulled out his watch; half an hour since the explosion, and the ebb tide had been running here at the river’s mouth for a full hour longer than that. It must have turned some time ago at Caudebec; it was to be hoped that Bush and his flotilla were running down with it, exulting in their victory. Fully twenty-five miles by road, thirty at least by river, from their nearest enemies at Le Havre, the soldiers of the French siege-train must have thought themselves perfectly secure with an army of nearly twenty thousand men to protect them from an enemy who so far had shown no sign of taking the offensive. Yet in less than six hours, even in darkness, well-manned boats with the racing Seine tide behind them could span the interval that infantry would take two days—the daylight hours of two days—to cross. Boats could strike and escape again in the course of a single night up the broad and bridgeless river; and the fact that the river was broad and bridgeless would encourage Quiot’s army to look upon the Seine as a protection to their flank and so to forget its potentialities as a highway for their enemies. Quiot had until recently commanded a division in the Imperial Guard, and never, in its ten victorious years, had the Imperial Guard taken part in an amphibious campaign.

Hornblower realised that he had been through all this train of thought before, many times over. He snuffed the guttered candles, looked at his watch again, and stretched his legs restlessly under his cloak. His hand fluttered tentatively towards the tumbled newspapers and was withdrawn immediately. Rather the unpalatable company of his own thoughts than that of The Times and the Morning Chronicle. Rather than either—humble pie, especially as it would be made a little more appetising by the knowledge that he would be doing his duty. He flung the cloak off his legs and rose to his feet. He went to some trouble to pull his coat into position, and he combed his hair with some care before sauntering out of his bedroom. The sentry at the door came to attention with a jerk—Hornblower guessed that he had been sleeping on his feet—while Hornblower crossed the hall to the room beyond. He opened the door into warm stuffiness. A single shaded candle hardly illuminated the room enough for him to see. Dobbs was asleep in a chair at a table, his head resting on his folded forearms; beyond the table lay Howard on a cot. The shadow there was so dense that Hornblower could not see his face, but he could hear his low, measured snores.

So nobody wanted his company after all. Hornblower withdrew and shut the door quietly. Brown presumably was asleep in some cubbyhole of his own; Hornblower toyed with the idea of sending for him and having him make him a cup of coffee, but decided against it out of pure humanity. He climbed back onto his own bed and dragged the cloak over him. A whistling draught decided him to draw the curtains round the bed, and he did so after extinguishing the candles. It occurred to him that he would have been much more comfortable had he undressed and got into the bed, but he could not face the effort—it suddenly became plain to him that he was very weary. His eyelids closed before the solid darkness within the curtains, and he slept, fully dressed.

The fact that he had not taken off his clothes told Brown and Dobbs and Howard at dawn that Hornblower had not been as composed and self-confident as he had tried to appear, but not one of them was foolish enough to comment on the fact. Brown merely opened the curtain and made his report.

“Day just breaking, sir. Cold morning with a bit o’ fog. The last o’ the ebb, sir, and no news as yet of Captain Bush an’ the flotilla.”

“Right,” said Hornblower, getting stiffly to his feet. He yawned and felt his bristling cheeks. He wished he knew how Bush had succeeded. He wished he did not feel so unwashed and unclean. He wanted his breakfast, but he wanted news of Bush even more. He was still deadly tired despite his hours of unbroken sleep. Then he fought down his weariness in a direct personal struggle like that of Christian with Apollyon.

“Get me a bath, Brown. Make it ready while I shave.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

Hornblower stripped off his clothes and proceeded to shave himself at the wash-hand-stand in the corner of the room. He kept his eyes from his naked body reflected in the mirror, from his skinny, hairy legs and slightly protuberant belly, as resolutely as he kept his mind from his fatigue and from his anxiety about Bush. Brown and a marine private came in carrying the bath and put it on the floor near him; Hornblower, shaving carefully round the corners of his lips, heard the hot water being poured into it from buckets. It took a little while to compound the mixture in the right proportion so as to get the temperature suitable; Hornblower stepped into it and sank down with a sigh of satisfaction—an immense amount of water poured over the sides, displaced by his body, but he did not care. He thought about soaping himself, but flinched from the effort and the physical contortions necessary, and instead he lay back and allowed himself to soak and relax. He closed his eyes.

“Sir!”

Howard’s voice caused him to reopen them.

“Two boats are in sight coming down the estuary, sir. Only two.”

Bush bad taken seven boats with him to Caudebec. Hornblower could only wait for Howard to finish his report.

“One of ‘em’s Camilla’s launch, sir, I can recognise her through the glass. I don’t think the other is from Nonsuch, but I can’t be sure.”

“Very good, Captain. I’ll join you in a moment.”

Ruin and destruction; five boats lost out of seven—and Bush lost too, seemingly. The destruction of the French siege-train—if it were destroyed—would be well worth the loss of the whole flotilla, to someone who could coldly balance profit and loss. But Bush gone! Hornblower could not bear the thought of it. He sprang from his bath and looked round for a towel. He saw none, and with exasperation tore a sheet from the bed on which to dry himself. Only when he was dry and seeking his clean shirt did he find the towels by the dressing-table where they should have been. He dressed hurriedly, and at every moment his fears and his sorrow on account of Bush increased—the first shock had not been nearly as severe as this growing realisation of his bereavement. He came out into the ante-room.