Mr Midshipman Hornblower by C. S. Forester

There was no need to tell the hands to do it quietly; they were as well aware of their danger as anyone. Le Rêve silently rounded-to, the sheets were hauled in and coiled down without a sound; and the sloop, as close to the wind as she would lie, heeled to the small wind, meeting the lumpy waves with her port bow.

“We’ll be crossing their course now,” said Hornblower.

“Please God it’ll be under their sterns and not their bows,” said Winyatt.

There was the duchess still in her cloak and hood, standing right aft as much out of the way as possible.

“Don’t you think Your Grace had better go below?” asked Hornblower, making use by a great effort of the formal form of address.

“Oh, no, please,” said the duchess. “I couldn’t bear it.” Hornblower shrugged his shoulders, and promptly forgot the duchess’s presence again as a new anxiety struck him. He dived below and came up again with the two big sealed envelopes of despatches. He took a belaying pin from the rail and began very carefully to tie the envelopes to the pin with a bit of line.

“Please,” said the duchess, “please, Mr Hornblower, tell me what you are doing?”

“I want to make sure these will sink when I throw them overboard if we’re captured,” said Hornblower grimly.

“Then they’ll be lost for good?”

“Better that than that the Spaniards should read ’em,” said Hornblower with all the patience he could muster.

“I could look after them for you,” said the duchess. “Indeed I could.”

Hornblower looked keenly at her.

“No,” he said, “they might search your baggage. Probably they would.”

“Baggage!” said the duchess. “As if I’d put them in my baggage! I’ll put them next my skin — they won’t search me in any case. They’ll never find ’em, not if I put ’em up my petticoats.”

There was a brutal realism about those words that staggered Hornblower a little, but which also brought him to admit to himself that there was something in what the duchess was saying.

“If they capture us,” said the duchess, “— I pray they won’t, but if they do — they’ll never keep me prisoner. You know that. They’ll send me to Lisbon or put me aboard a King’s ship as soon as they can. Then the despatches will be delivered eventually. Late, but better late than never.”

“That’s so,” mused Hornblower.

“I’ll guard them like my life,” said the duchess. “I swear I’ll never part from them. I’ll tell no one I have them, not until I hand them to a King’s officer.”

She met Hornblower’s eyes with transparent honesty in her expression.

“Fog’s thinning, sir,” said Winyatt.

“Quick!” said the duchess.

There was no time for further debate. Hornblower slipped the envelopes from their binding of rope and handed them over to her, and replaced the belaying pin in the rail.

“These damned French fashions,” said the duchess. “I was right when I said I’d put these letters up my petticoats. There’s no room in my bosom.”

Certainly the upper part of her gown was not at all capacious; the waist was close up under the armpits and the rest of the dress hung down from there quite straight in utter defiance of anatomy.

“Give me a yard of that rope, quick!” said the duchess.

Winyatt cut her a length of the line with his knife and handed it to her. Already she was hauling at her petticoats; the appalled Hornblower saw a gleam of white thigh above her stocking tops before he tore his glance away. The fog was certainly thinning.

“You can look at me now,” said the duchess; but her petticoats only just fell in time as Hornblower looked round again. “They’re inside my shift, next my skin as I promised. With these Directory fashions no one wears stays any more. So I tied the rope round my waist outside my shift. One envelope is flat against my chest and the other against my back. Would you suspect anything?”

She turned round for Hornblower’s inspection.

“No, nothing shows,” he said. “I must thank Your Grace.”

“There is a certain thickening,” said the duchess, “but it does not matter what the Spaniards suspect as long as they do not suspect the truth.”

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