“Take ’em away and read ’em in, Mr Hurst,” said Bush, rubbing his hands again. “Now, sir, shall we take a look at that damned renegade Englishman?”
Clarke was lying on the main-deck of the Nonsuch, to which he had been hoisted from the boat by a tackle at the yardarm, and the surgeon was still bending over him. He had tried to blow out his brains, but he had only succeeded in shattering his lower jaw. There was blood on his blue coat and on his white trousers, and his whole head was swathed in bandages, and he lay tossing in agony on the canvas sheet in which he had been hoisted. Hornblower peered down at him. The features he could see, chalk white so that the tan looked like a coat of dirt, were pinched and refined and weak, a thin nose and hollow cheeks, brown eyes like a woman’s, with scant sandy eyebrows above them. What little hair Hornblower could see was scanty and sandy too. Hornblower wondered what combination of circumstances could have led him into betraying his country and taking service with Bonaparte. Hatred of imprisonment, perhaps – Hornblower had known what it was to be a prisoner, in Ferrol and Rosas and in France. Yet that over-refined face did not seem to indicate the sort of personality that would fret itself to pieces in confinement. It might have been a woman, perhaps, who had driven him or led him to this, or he might be a deserter from the Navy who had fled to escape punishment – it would be interesting to see if his back was scarred with the cat-o’-nine-tails. He might perhaps be an Irishman, one of those fanatic who in their desire to hurt England refused to see that the worst England had ever done to Ireland would be nothing compared with what Bonaparte would do to her if she were once in his power.
Whatever might be the case, he was a man of ability and quick wit. As soon as he had seen that Lotus had cut him of from escape to the mainland he had resolutely taken the only course that gave him any chance of safety. He had steered the Maggie Jones as innocently as kiss-your-hand up to Nonsuch; that suggestion of smallpox had been an ingenious one, an his conversation by speaking-trumpet had been very nearly natural.
“Is he going to live?” asked Bush of the surgeon.
“No, sir. The mandible is extensively comminuted on both sides – I mean his jaw is shattered, sir. There is some splintering of the maxilla as well, and his tongue – the whole glosso-pharyngeal region, in fact – is in rags. The haemorrhage may prove fatal – in other words the man may bleed to death, although I do not think he will, now. But I do not think anything on earth can stop mortification – gangrene, in other words, sir – which in this area will prove immediately fatal. In any event the man will die of inanition, of hunger and thirst that is to say, even if we could keep him alive for a while by injections per rectum.”
It was ghoulish to smile at the surgeon’s pomposity, to make the inevitable light speech.
“It sounds as if nothing could save him, then.”
It was a human life they were discussing.
“We must hang him, sir, before he dies,” said Bush, turning to Hornblower. “We can convene a court martial -”
“He cannot defend himself,” replied Hornblower.
Bush spread his hands in a gesticulation which for him was vastly eloquent.
“What defence has he to offer, sir? We have all the evidence we need. The prisoners have supplied it apart from the obvious facts.”
“He might be able to rebut the evidence if he could speak,” said Hornblower. It was an absurd thing to say. There could be no possible doubt of Clarke’s guilt – his attempt at suicide proved it even if nothing else did; but Hornblower knew perfectly well that he was quite incapable of hanging a man who was physically unable to make any defence.
“He’ll slip through our fingers if we wait, sir.”
“Then let him.”