She was bringing something out from the pocket of her cloak and pressing it into his hand.
“It’s only gloves, dear, but my love comes with them,” she went on. “I could make nothing better for you in this little time. I would have liked to have embroidered something for you — I would have liked to give you something worthy of you. But I have been stitching at these every moment since — since —”
She could not go on, but once more she straightened her back and refused to break down.
“I’ll be able to think of you every moment I wear them,” said Hornblower. He struggled into the gloves despite the handicap of the bag he was carrying; they were splendid thick woollen gloves, each with separate thumb and forefinger.
“They fit me to perfection. I thank you for the kind thought, dear.”
Now they were at the head of the steep slope down the Hard, and this horrible ordeal would soon be over.
“You have the seventeen pounds safely?” asked Hornblower — an unnecessary question.
“Yes, thank you, dearest. I fear it is too much —”
“And you’ll be able to draw my monthly half pay,” went on Hornblower harshly, to keep the emotion from his voice, and then, realizing how harshly, he continued. “It is time to say good‑bye now, darling.”
He had forced himself to use that unaccustomed last word. The water level was far up the Hard; that meant, as he had known when he had given the orders, that the tide was at the flood. He would be able to take advantage of the ebb.
“Darling!” said Maria, turning to him and lifting up her face to him in its hood.
He kissed her; down at the water’s edge there was the familiar rattle of oars on thwarts, and the sound of male voices, as his boat’s crew perceived the two shadowy figures on the Hard. Maria heard those sounds as clearly as Hornblower did, and she quickly snatched away from him the cold lips she had raised to his.
“Good‑bye, my angel.”
There was nothing else to say now, nothing else to do; this was the end of this brief experience. He turned his back on Maria; he turned his back on peace and on civilian married life and walked down towards war.
Chapter 3
“Slack water now, sir,” announced Bush. “First of the ebb in ten minutes. And anchor’s hove short, sir.”
“Thank you, Mr Bush.” There was enough grey light in the sky now to see Bush’s face as something more definite than a blur. At Bush’s shoulder stood Prowse, the acting‑master, senior master’s mate with an acting‑warrant. He was competing unobtrusively with Bush for Hornblower’s attention. Prowse was charged, by Admiralty instructions, with ‘navigating and conducting the ship from port to port under the direction of the captain’. But there was no reason at all why Hornblower should not give his other officers every opportunity to exercise their skill; on the contrary. And it was possible, even likely, that Prowse, with thirty years of sea duty behind him, would endeavour to take the direction of the ship out of the hands of a young and inexperienced captain.
“Mr Bush!” said Hornblower. “Get the ship under way, if you please. Set a course to weather the Foreland.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
Hornblower watched Bush keenly, while doing his best not to appear to be doing so. Bush took a final glance round him, gauging the gentle wind and the likely course of the ebb.
“Stand by there, at the capstan,” he ordered. “Loose the heads’ls. Hands aloft to loose the tops’ls.”
Hornblower could see in a flash that he could place implicit reliance on Bush’s seamanship. He knew he should never have doubted it, but his memories were two years old and might have been blurred by the passage of time. Bush gave his orders in a well‑timed sequence. With the anchor broken out Hotspur gathered momentary sternway. With the wheel hard over and the forecastle hands drawing at the headsail sheets she brought her head round. Bush sheeted home and ordered hands to the braces. In the sweetest possible way Hotspur caught the gentle wind, lying over hardly more than a degree or two. In a moment she was under way, slipping forward through the water, rudder balanced against sail‑pressure, a living, lovely thing.