“Why don’t you use the backstay like a seaman?” demanded Bush, but Hornblower checked him.
“What is it?”
“Land, sir,” spluttered the seaman. He was wet to the skin with water streaming from every angle, whisked away by the wind as it dripped.
“Where away?”
“On the lee bow, sir.”
“How many points?”
He thought for a moment.
“A good four, sir.”
Hornblower looked across at Prowse.
“That’ll be Ushant, sir. We ought to weather it with plenty to spare.”
“I want to be sure of that. You’d better go aloft, Mr Prowse. Make the best estimate you can.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
It would not do Prowse any harm to make the tiring and exacting journey to the masthead.
“He’ll be opening fire soon, sir,” said Bush, referring to the Frenchman and not to Prowse’s departing figure. “Not much chance of replying as yet. On the other tack, maybe, sir.”
Bush was ready for a fight against any odds, and he was unaware that Hornblower had no intention of tacking again.
“We’ll see when the time comes,” said Hornblower.
“He’s opening fire now, sir.”
Hornblower whipped round, just in time to see a puff of smoke vanishing in the gale, and then others, all down the Loire’s side, enduring hardly for a second before the wind overcame the force of the powder that impelled them. That was all. No sound of the broadside reached them against the wind, and there was not a sight of the fall of shot.
“Long range, sir,” said Bush.
“A chance for him to exercise his guns’ crews,” said Hornblower.
His glass showed him the Loire’s gun-muzzles disappearing back into the ship as the guns were run in again for reloading. There was a strange unreality about all this, about the silence of that broadside, about the fact that Hotspur was under fire, about the fact that he himself might be dead at any moment now as the result of a lucky hit.
“He’s hoping for a lucky hit, I suppose, sir,” said Bush, echoing the very words of Hornblower’s thoughts in a manner that made the situation all the more uncanny and unreal.
“Naturally.” Hornblower forced himself to say that word, and in this strange mood his voice, pitched against the gale, seemed to come from very far away.
If the Frenchman had no objection to a prodigious waste of powder and shot he might as well open fire at this range, at extreme cannon-shot, in the hope of inflicting enough damage on Hotspur’s rigging to slow her down. Hornblower could think clearly enough, but it was as if he was looking on at someone else’s adventure.
Now Prowse was returning to the quarter-deck.
“We’ll weather the land by a good four miles, sir,” he said; the spray tossed up by the weather-bow had wetted him just as thoroughly as the seamen. He looked over at the Loire. “Not a chance of our paying off, I suppose, sir.”
“Of course not,” said Hornblower. Long before such a plan could bear fruit he would be engaged in close action were he to drop down to leeward, in the hope of forcing the Loire to go about to avoid running ashore. “How long before we’re up to the land?”
“Less than an hour, sir. Maybe half. It ought to be in sight from the deck any minute.”
“Yes!” said Bush. “There it is, sir!”
Over the lee bow Hornblower could see the black bold shoreline of Ushant. Now the three points of the triangle, Ushant, Hotspur and Loire, were all plain to him, and he could time his next move. He would have to hold on to his present course for some considerable time; he would have to brave further broadsides, whether he liked it or not – insane words those last, for no one could like being under fire. He trained his glass on the land, watching his ship’s movement relative to it, and then as he looked away he saw something momentarily out of the corner of his eye. It took him a couple of seconds to deduce what it was he had seen; two splashes, separated by a hundred feet in space and by a tenth of a second in time. A cannon-ball had skipped from the top of one wave crest and plunged into the next.