Stewed mutton and pearl barley and potatoes and cabbage. It might have been a very pleasant dinner, except that the atmosphere was unfavourable; in two senses. The room, with its sea-coal fire, was unbearably hot. Thanks to the rain no washing could be hung out of doors, and Hornblower doubted if in the vicinity of Driver’s Alley washing could be hung out of doors unwatched in any case. So that on a clothes-horse on the other side of the room hung little Horatio’s clothing, and somehow nature arranged it that every stitch little Horatio wore had to be washed, as often as several times a day. Hanging on the horse were the long embroidered gowns, and the long flannel gowns with their scalloped borders, and the flannel shirts, and the binders, as well as the innumerable napkins that might have been expected to sacrifice themselves, like a rearguard, in the defence of the main body. Hornblower’s wet oilskins and Mrs Mason’s wet shawl added variant notes to the smells in the room, and Hornblower suspected that little Horatio, now in the cradle beside Maria’s chair, added yet another.
Hornblower thought of the keen clean air of the Atlantic and felt his lungs would burst. He did his best with his dinner, but it was a poor best.
“You’re not making a very good dinner, Horatio,” said Mrs Mason, peering suspiciously at his plate.
“I suppose I’m not very hungry.”
“Too much of Doughty’s cooking, I expect,” said Mrs Mason.
Hornblower knew already, without a word spoken, that the women were jealous of Doughty and ill at ease in his presence. Doughty had served the rich and the great; Doughty knew of fancy ways of cooking; Doughty wanted money to bring the cabin stores of the Hotspur up to his own fastidious standards; Doughty (in the women’s minds, at least) was probably supercilious about Driver’s Alley and the family his captain had married into.
“I can’t abide that Doughty,” said Maria – the word spoken now.
“He’s harmless enough, my dear,” said Hornblower.
“Harmless!” Mrs Mason said only that one word, but Demosthenes could not have put more vituperation into a whole Philippic; and yet, when the landlady came in to clear the table, Mrs Mason contrived to be at her loftiest.
As the landlady left the room Hornblower’s instincts guided him into an action of which he was actually unconscious. He threw up the window and drew the icy evening air deep into his lungs.
“You’ll give him his death!” said Maria’s voice, and Hornblower swung round, surprised.
Maria had snatched up little Horatio from his cradle and stood clasping him to her bosom, a lioness defending her cub from the manifest and well-known perils of the night air.
“I beg your pardon, dear,” said Hornblower. “I can’t imagine what I was thinking of.”
He knew perfectly well that little babies should be kept in stuffy heated rooms, and he was full of genuine contrition regarding little Horatio. But as he turned back and pulled the window shut again his mind was dwelling on the Blackstones and the Little Girls, on bleak harsh days and dangerous nights, on a deck that he could call his own. He was ready to go to sea again.
CHAPTER 18
With the coming of spring a new liveliness developed in the blockade of Brest. In every French port during the winter there had been much building of flat-bottomed boats. The French army, two hundred thousand strong, was still poised on the Channel coast, waiting for its chance to invade, and it needed gun-boats by the thousand to ferry it over when that chance should come. But the invasion coast from Boulogne to Ostend could not supply one-tenth, one-hundredth of the vessels needed; these had to be built whenever there were facilities, and then had to be moved along the coast to the assembling area.
To Hornblower’s mind Bonaparte – the Emperor Napoleon, as he was beginning to call himself – was displaying a certain confusion of ideas in adopting this course of action. Seamen and shipbuilding materials were scarce enough in France; it was absurd to waste them on invasion craft when invasion was impossible without a covering fleet, and when the French navy was too small to provide such a fleet. Lord St Vincent had raised an appreciative smile throughout the Royal Navy when he had said in the House of Lords regarding the French army, ‘I do not say they cannot come. I only say they cannot come by sea.’ The jest had called up a ludicrous picture in everyone’s mind of Bonaparte trying to transport an invading army by Montgolfier balloons, and the impossibility of such an attempt underlined the impossibility of the French building up a fleet strong enough to command the Channel even long enough for the gun-boats to row across.