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The Temeraire swung at her anchor with the changing of the tide. Lieutenant Bush, once again a third lieutenant on a ship of the line, once again in the ship lanes of Portsmouth, once again watching a supply boat pull away, tried not to scowl in the cold. His warmest coat had sunk on the Hotpsur and the damp fog hanging around the ship sunk into him making his old scars feel like there wasn’t a bit of wool between him and the wind. As the boat disappeared into the mists, the ship was alone in its own world.
The scant crew was quiet about their duties. The newly arrived midshipman of the watch had been appropriately scared into stopping his infernal humming. The ship still smelt of fresh paint, tar, carpentry, and routines following its action at Trafalgar. Hardly a prize winning action, though it was. The first lieutenant was kept busy with the duties of aiding the captain in keeping the ship afloat as they awaited they admittance to drydock. Bush, no longer the first lieutenant, was left to the boredom of empty watches. He grit his teeth at the monotony. He almost wished the snotty would start humming again and give him a reason to growl.
His replacement relieved him of his watch and he descended to the relative warmth and light of the wardroom. Crumley and Elling were sat with a forgotten chess set between them speaking. Bush half listened to their conversation as he settled into a chair on the far side of the table and rested his eyes. A familiar name in the conversation caught his attention. Hornblower.
“Right in the downs? The Frenchies were bold.” Crumley said with a note of recognition.
“Not so bold as to save themselves.” Elling laughed. “Jack said the poor prize captain was falling over himself. Gave up the ship before the first privateer could choke. Atropos took a prize before they even truly got to sea.”
“The Atropos took a prize in the downs?” Bush inserted himself into the conversation. Somehow he wasn’t surprised that the first news he heard of his former captain was something so unlikely.
The two senior lieutenants both leaned back in their chairs, widening the circle to include him.
“Yes, a disguised privateer took a merchant only to be taken right back within the hour.” Elling explained. “Some pea soup settled around the ships at anchor and the frogs snuck under the cover. My nephew— my sister’s boy— is a midshipman aboard and sent a letter. It was his first action. Not a canon fired but it was quiet a change from his last captain.”
He finished with a sardonic grin that Crumley returned.
“Not to speak ill of a senior officer, of course.” Elling added quickly.
Bush frowned. A bit of scuttlebutt about Hornblower retaking a ship and capturing a prize in the downs without a shot fired was hardly speaking ill of the man.
“And this is Hornblower’s first command?” Crumley frowned at the eternal competition of younger, foolhardy officers.
“Not his first.” Bush corrected. “He acted as a commander in two vessels previously. Hotspur was his for two years before he was made captain.”
“Hotspur? That was your last posting. Didn’t the sloop sink?” Crumley’s frown deepened.
“Not under his command.” Bush said shortly. He surely must have mentioned Hornblower’s name before while recollecting his last posting in this same wardroom.
Elling spun a taken piece from the chess game between his fingers and considered his next words.
“Did you serve under him for long?”
“I was his first officer for the whole of his command of the Hotspur. We served as lieutenants together aboard a first-rate for a voyage to the West Indies as well.”
Crumley and Elling exchanged a look.
“Two years under the man…” Elling said lowly. “I suspect you’ve seen much of his character.”
“A fair amount. What do you mean by it?”
“My nephew’s letter gave more details than will appear in the Gazette. The man near executed the whole of the French prize crew on a whim.”
Bush scoffed. “Executing captured prisoners in the downs?”
Elling nodded and spread his nephew’s letter across the table. “Atropos was alerted to a potential disturbance by a gunshot and an oar in the tide. After finding the Amelia Jane in the fog and seeing through the prize crew’s deception, they took the ship and released the merchantmen. Jack thought that would be the end of it but the captain demanded the privateers executed then and there. One by one, strung from the yardarms as pirates while their companions watched. When the Amelia Jane’s captain objected where Jack could not, Hornblower claimed they had no papers. Said he ‘wanted to see them danglin’.”
Bush would have laughed if not for Elling’s grim expression. The words were absurd. While he would of course deny it, he secretly suspected that his old brother in arms had deliberately allowed the steward Doughty to escape with his ‘error’ in leaving the condemned man unattended. Executing an entire crew of privateers was absurd, doubly so for a man as bound by honor as Hornblower.
“The first frog was being fitted for a rope necklace when the prize captain let slip the privateer's disguise. Hornblower returned to Atropos and took it in the fog with three losses. Jack’s sure he would have strung them all up, no word of a trial, if the prize wasn’t there.”
“The prize was a sitting snake among the ducks in the Downs.” Crumley pointed out. “Any reasonable man would take the ship before condemning prisoners.”
“But a purse would sweeten the deal.”
Bush tried to not bristle under the sidelong insult. “The purse was irrelevant. Hornblower gave up fatter prizes for lighter demands than catching a privateer in the downs.”
“No captain truly fights without a notion of prize money. Even as we do our duty, more than one motive can move a man.” Crumley took a diplomatic middle point.
Bush had no response to that. He saw the fingers of Elling’s right hand rap against the table. His left hand remained still atop the letter from his nephew. Only one of the fingers remained whole and bore the fresh signs of the damage that had taken the rest. At the time of the injury, Bush had been aware of the explosion among the other man’s gun line. The smoke and din of the gunnery had made the single grenade irrelevant. Moments later, as the Redoubtable had come along the Temeraire, he had seen Elling moving to repel boarders with a cutlass in one hand and a pistol in the other. It wasn’t until the battle was over and the surgeon’s were doing their worst that he had truly lost the rest of the hand. The heat of battle screaming through the veins did strange things to a man.
His next watch gave him too much time to think about those strange things. Trafalgar had been Hell but he had seen plenty of Hell in his time in the service. Most action was Hell, in some way or another. It was almost reasonable for strange behaviors to follow. He had seen men freeze as still as statues or weep like children. He had also seen men steadfast while grapeshot cut down their messmates and seen reasonable, even-keeled men turn into devils ready to throw themselves to their deaths for the chance of blood.
There had been touches of that madness in Hornblower’s eyes as they fired on the ships fleeing Samana bay. That active, fierce mind had been trained wholly on the goal of stopping the Spanish ships from escaping. The satisfaction of sending red hot destruction at men was intoxicating. He’d seen a cold, calmer satisfaction at the destruction they had wrought more times than he had count from the Hotspur’s quarterdeck. None of it had been the sort of cruel amusement that he’d seen in midshipmen toying with youngsters new to their berths. It wasn’t the sort of self-assured gleam of a captain who truly enjoyed a good flogging.
Bush flexed his numb hands at his sides and paced. His shoes clicked on the planking. The sound was muffled in the fog that was settling around them once again. It had been some time since he had seen Hornblower. Truly, he hadn’t known the man for that long. Perhaps there was some deep seated glee in removing pirates from the globe that he hadn’t seen before. Perhaps a true captaincy had brought out something in him that hadn’t had room to grow in a lieutenant or commander’s uniform. It wasn’t impossible. He had once spent an enlightening night with a commander he had known as a midshipman drinking far too much wine and learning far too much about how his old messmate found the wives of captured merchant ships amusing.
He thought of his arrival on another deck of another ship-of-the-line. He had seen a coltish, near-slovenly lieutenant reprimand a gunner with all the proper bite of a vicious officer but a moment later, he caught his first true glimpse of Hornblower when the man let him see the gleam behind his eyes. He seen rare peeks behind the mask in the years after that first meeting and considered it a privilege to see the few moments where his commanding officer had allowed himself to be a human
Of course, telling Hornblower Bush knew he was a human as well as an officer would result in nothing but sharp words and scowls to make up for the perceived failing.
Elling’s nephew seeing through the act was as unlikely as Hornblower deciding to execute an entire prize crew for his amusement. It was all an act and a harsh one at that, Bush realized. Atropos was a foreign crew of men who only knew Hornblower as a young captain at the bottom of the captaincy lists. Some officers spent their first week flogging their men raw. As a midshipman, Bush had seen one of the men in his division hung over a stolen piece of scrimshaw the third day of a new captain’s commission. It had not been a happy ship, but it had been a well-ordered ship with a respected captain.
He turned up the collar of his coat against the cold and smiled, despite the bloody memories. Hornblower had found a far more effective and less deadly way of instilling respect in his new ship. Word was even passing among the fleet now. There was a satisfaction not just in catching onto one of Hornblower’s schemes but knowing that he had seen through a ruse that had fooled others.
Bush smothered his grin at the inside joke and spared a thought for whatever first lieutenant served aboard the Atropos. The man would have much to learn. It was more likely than not that he would never see Hornblower again. There was a undutiful part of him that wished he could trade Temeraire for Atropos, as childish as the thought was. There would be reports in the Gazette, of course, but that was a far cry from standing at the man’s side.
A gap in the thinning fog let pale morning light wash over the polished decks of his ship. Beyond the rails, the silhouette of Portsmouth harbor sat on the edge of the sea. England and everything that the navy fought for was a canon shot away. Somewhere else, perhaps still in the Downs or sailing to a foreign sea, he could imagine Hornblower pacing a deck. Wherever Atropos was destined for, he was sure that its captain would be doing his duty.