“I bought all the eggs there were, sir. Two and a half dozen,” said Carslake in the course of his report.
“Good,” said Hornblower, but without any fervour, and that was clear proof that his mind was not on what Carslake was saying. Normally the thought of eggs, boiled, scrambled, or poached, would have excited him. The untoward events at Malta had prevented his buying any there for himself. He had not even laid in a store of pickled eggs at Deptford.
Carslake droned himself to a stop.
“Thank you, Mr. Carslake,” said Hornblower. “Mr. Turner, come below end I’ll hear what you have to say.”
Turner had apparently kept his eyes and ears open, as Hornblower had ordered him to.
“The Mudir has no force here at all worth mentioning, sir,” said Turner, his wizened old face animated and lively. “I doubt if he could raise twenty‑five armed men all told. He came down with two guards as old as himself.”
“Y’ou spoke with him?”
“Y’es, sir. I gave him — Mr. Carslake and I gave him — ten guineas to open the market for us. Another ten guineas tomorrow, is what we’ve promised him.”
No, harm in keeping local authority on his side as long as possible, thought Hornblower.
“And was he friendly?” he asked.
“We‑ell, sir. I wouldn’t say that, not exactly, sir. Maybe it was because he wanted our money. I wouldn’t call him friendly, sir.”
He would be reserved and cautious, Hornblower decided, not anxious to commit himself without instructions from superior authority, and yet not averse to pocketing twenty pieces of gold — pickings for an average year, Hornblower guessed — when the opportunity presented itself.
“The Vali’s carried off the local army, sir,” went on Turner. “That was plain enough from the way the Mudir talked. But I don’t know why, sir. Maybe there’s trouble with the Greeks again. There’s always trouble in the Archipelago.”
Rebellion was endemic among the Greek subjects of Turkey. Fire and Sword, massacre and desolation, piracy and revolt, swept islands and mainland periodically. And nowadays with French influence penetrating from the Seven Islands, and Russia taking a suspiciously humanitarian interest in the welfare of Turkey’s Orthodox subjects, there were fresh sources of trouble and unrest.
“One point’s clear, anyway,” said Hornblower, “and that is that the Vali’s not here at present.”
“That’s so, sir.”
It would take time for a message to reach the Vali, or even the Vali’s subordinate, the — the Kaimakam, decided Hornblower, fishing the strange title out of his memory with an effort. The political situation was involved beyond any simple disentanglement. Turkey had been Britain’s enthusiastic any recently, when Bonaparte had conquered Egypt and invaded Syria and threatened Constantinople. But Russia and Turkey were chronic enemies — they had fought half a dozen wars in the last half century — and now Russia and England were allies, and Russia and France were enemies, even though since Austerlitz there was no way in which they could attack each other. There could be no doubt in the world that the French ambassador in Constantinople was doing his best to incite Turkey to a fresh war with Russia; no doubt at all that Russia since the days of Catherine the Great was casting covetous eyes on Constantinople and the Dardanelles.
The Greek unrest was an established fact. So was the ambition of the local Turkish governors. The tottering Turkish government would seize any opportunity to play off one possible enemy against the other, and would view with the deepest suspicion — there was even the religious factor to be borne in mind — any British activity amid Turkish possessions. With England and France locked in a death struggle the Turks could hardly be blamed if they suspected England of buying Russia’s continued alliance with a promise of a slice of Turkish territory; luckily France, with a far worse record, was liable to be similarly suspected. When the Sultan heard — if ever he did hear — of the presence of a British ship of war in Marmorice Bay, he would wonder what intrigues were brewing with the Vali, and if Sultan or Vali heard that a quarter of a million in gold and silver lay at the bottom of Marmorice Bay it could be taken for granted that none would be salvaged unless the lion’s share went into Turkish hands.