“Captain Bush!” he managed to make himself drawl the words, and to give his orders with an air of complete indifference. “Signal all vessels to clear for action.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
Two red lights at the main yard-arm and a single gun; that was the night signal for danger from the enemy which would send all hands to quarters. It took several seconds to bring a light for the lanterns; by the time the signal was acknowledged the Nonsuch was well on the way to being cleared for action – the watch below turned up, the decks sanded and the fire-pumps manned, guns run out and bulkheads knocked down. It was still a pretty raw crew – Bush had been through purgatory trying to get his ship manned – but the job could have been worse done. Now the grey dawn had crept up over the eastern sky, and the rest of the squadron was just visible as vessels and not as solid nuclei in the gloom, but it was still not quite light enough to risk the passage. Hornblower turned to Bush and Hurst, the first lieutenant.
“If you please,” he drawled, dragging out every word with all the nonchalance he could muster, “I will have the signal bent ready for hoisting, ‘Proceed to leeward in the order of battle’.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
Everything was done now. This last two minutes of waiting in inactivity, with nothing left to do, were especially trying. Hornblower was about to walk up and down, when he remembered that he must stand still to maintain his pose of indifference. The batteries on shore might have their furnaces alight, to heat shot red-hot; there was a possibility that in a few minutes the whole force of which he was so proud might be no more than a chain of blazing wrecks. Now it was time.
“Hoist,” said Hornblower. “Captain Bush, I’ll trouble you to square away and follow the squadron.”
“Aye aye, sir,” said Bush.
Bush’s voice hinted at suppressed excitement; and it came to Hornblower, with a blinding flash of revelation, that his pose was ineffective with Bush. The latter had learned, during years of experience, that when Hornblower stood still instead of walking about, and when he drawled out his words as he was doing at present, then in Hornblower’s opinion there was danger ahead. It was an intensely interesting discovery, but there was no time to think about it, not with the squadron going up the Sound.
Lotus was leading. Vickery, her commander, was the man Hornblower had picked out as the captain with the steadiest nerves who could be trusted to lead without flinching. Hornblower would have liked to have led himself, but in this operation the rear would be the post of danger – the leading ships might well get through before the gunners on shore could get to their guns and find the range – and the Nonsuch as the most solidly built and best able to endure fire must come last so as to be able to succour and tow out of action any disabled ship. Hornblower watched Lotus set topsails and courses and square away. The cutter Clam followed – she was the feeblest of all; a single shot might sink her, and she must be given the best chance of getting through. Then the two ugly bomb-ketches, and then the other sloop, Raven, just ahead of Nonsuch; Hornblower was not sorry to have the opportunity to watch how her commander, Cole, would behave in action. Nonsuch followed, driving hard with the strong breeze on her starboard quarter. Hornblower watched Bush shaking the wind out of the mizzen-topsail so as to keep exact station astern of the Raven. The big two-decker seemed a lumbering clumsy thing compared with the grace and elegance of the sloops.
That was Sweden in sight now, Cape Kullen, now on the port bow.
“A cast of the log, if you please, Mr Hurst.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
Hornblower thought Hurst looked a little sidelong at him, unable to conceive why any sane man should want a cast of the log at a moment when the ship was about to risk everything; but Hornblower wanted to know how long the strain was likely to endure, and what was the use of being a Commodore if one could not then indulge one’s whims? A midshipman and a couple of quartermasters came running aft with log and glass; the speed of the ship was sufficient to make the quartermaster’s arms vibrate as he held the reel above his head.