Hornblower 05 - Hornblower and the Atropos (20 page)

“You say he may live a few days? How many?”

“I know nothing about the patient's constitution, sir. But he is a powerful man in the prime of life. It might be as much as a week. It might even be more. But on the other hand if events take a bad turn he might be dead tomorrow.”

“But if it is several days? Will he retain his senses during that time?”

“Likely enough. When he ceases to, it is a sign of the approaching end. Then we can expect fever, restlessness, delirium, and death.”

Several days of consciousness were possible, therefore. And the faintest, remotest chance that McCullum would live after all.

“Supposing I took him to sea with me? Would that help? Or hinder?”

“You would have to ensure his immobility on account of the fractured ribs. But at sea he might even live longer. There are the usual Mediterranean agues in this island. And in addition there is an endemic low fever. My hospital is full of such cases.”

Now this was a piece of information that really helped in coming to a decision.

“Thank your doctor,” said Hornblower, and he took his decision. Then it was only a matter of minutes to make the arrangements with the surgeon and to take his leave. The gig took him back through the darkness, over the black water, to where Atropos' riding light showed faintly.

“Pass the word for the doctor to come to my cabin at once,” was Hornblower's reply to the salute of the officer of the watch.

Eisenbeiss came slowly in. There was something of apprehension and something of bravado in his manner. He was prepared to defend himself against the storm he was curtain was about to descend on him. What he did not expect was the reception he actually experienced. He approached the table behind which Hornblower was seated and stood sullen, meeting Hornblower's eyes with the guilty defiance of a man who has just taken another human's life.

“Mr. McCullum,” began Hornblower, and the doctor's thick lips showed a trace of a sneer, “is being sent on board here tonight. He is still alive.”

“On board here?” repeated the doctor, surprised into a change of attitude.

“You address me as 'sir'. Yes, I am having him sent over from the hospital. My orders to you are to make every preparation for his reception.”

The doctor's response was unintelligible German, but there could be no doubt it was an ejaculation of astonishment.

“Your answer to me is 'aye aye, sir',” snapped Hornblower, his pent-up emotion and strain almost making him tremble as he sat at the table. He could not prevent his fist from clenching, but he just managed to refrain from allowing it to pound the table. The intensity of his feelings must have had their effect telepathically.

“Aye aye, sir,” said the doctor grudgingly.

“Mr. McCullum's life is extremely valuable, doctor. Much more valuable than yours.”

The doctor could only mumble in reply to that.

“It is your duty to keep him alive.”

Hornblower's fist unclenched now, and he could make his points slowly, one by one, accentuating each with the slow tap of the tip of a lean forefinger on the table.

“You are to do all you can for him. If there is anything special that you require for the purpose you are to inform me and I shall endeavour to obtain it for you. His life is to be saved, or if not, it is to be prolonged as far as possible. I would recommend you to establish a hospital for him abaft No. 6 carronade on the starboard side, where the motion of the ship will be least felt, and where it will be possible to rig a shelter for him from the weather. You will apply to Mr. Jones for that. The ship's pigs can be taken forward where they will not discommode him.”

Hornblower's pause and glance called forth an “aye aye, sir” from the doctor's lips like a cork from out of a bottle, so that Hornblower could proceed.

“We sail at dawn tomorrow,” he went on. “Mr. McCullum is to live until we reach our destination, and until long after, long enough for him to execute the duty which has brought him from India. That is quite clear to you?”

“Yes, sir,” answered the doctor, although his puzzled expression proved that there was something about the orders which he could not explain to himself.

“You had better keep him alive,” continued Hornblower. “You had certainly better. If he dies I can try you for murder under the ordinary laws of England. Don't look at me like that. I am speaking the truth. The common law knows nothing about duels. I can hang you, doctor.”

The doctor was a shade paler, and his big hands tried to express what his paralyzed tongue would not.

“But simply hanging you would be too good for you, doctor,” said Hornblower. “I can do more than that, and I shall. You have a fat, fleshy back. The cat would sink deeply into it. You've seen men flogged — you saw two flogged last week. You heard them scream. You will scream at the gratings too, doctor. That I promise you.”

“No!” said the doctor — “you can't —”

“You address me as 'sir', and you do not contradict me. You heard my promise? I shall carry it out. I can, and I shall.”

In a ship detached far from superior authority there was nothing a captain might not do, and the doctor knew it. And with Hornblower's grim face before him and those remorseless eyes staring into his the doctor could not doubt the possibility. Hornblower was trying to keep his expression set hard, and to pay no attention to the internal calculations that persisted in maintaining themselves inside him. There might be terrible trouble if the Admiralty ever heard he had flogged a warranted doctor, but then the Admiralty might never hear of an incident in the distant Levant. And there was the other doubt — with McCullum once dead, so that nothing could bring him to life, Hornblower could not really believe he would torture a human being to no practical purpose. But as long as Eisenbeiss did not guess that, it did not matter.

“That is an quite clear to you now, doctor?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then my order is that you start making your arrangements now.”

It was a really great surprise to Hornblower when Eisenbeiss still hesitated. He was about to speak more sharply still, cutting into the feverish gestures of the big hands, when Eisenbeiss spoke again.

“Do you forget something, sir?”

“What do you think I have forgotten?” asked Hornblower, playing for time instead of flatly refusing to listen to any arguments — proof enough that he was a little shaken by Eisenbeiss's persistence.

“Mr. McCullum and I — we are enemies,” said Eisenbeiss.

It was true that Hornblower had forgotten that. He was so engrossed with his chessboard manipulation of human pieces that he had overlooked a vital factor. But he must not admit it.

“And what of that?” he asked coldly, hoping his discomfiture was not too apparent.

“I shot him,” said Eisenbeiss. There was a vivid gesture by the big right hand that had held the pistol, which enabled Hornblower to visualize the whole duel. “What will he say if I attend him?”

“Whose was the challenge?” asked Hornblower, still playing for time.

“He challenged me,” said Eisenbeiss. “He said — he said I was no Baron, and I said he was no gentleman. 'I will kill you for that,' he said, and so we fought.”

Eisenbeiss had certainly said the thing that would best rouse McCullum's fury.

“You are convinced you are a Baron?” asked Hornblower — curiosity urged him to ask the question as well as the need for time to reassemble his thoughts. The Baron drew himself up as far as the deck-beams over his head allowed.

“I know I am, sir. My patent of nobility is signed by His Serene Highness himself.”

“When did he do that?”

"As soon as — as soon as we were alone. Only His Serene Highness and I managed to cross the frontier when Bonaparte's men entered Seitz-Bunau. The others all took service with the tyrant. It was not fit that His Serene Highness should be attended only by a bourgeois. Only a noble could attend him to bed or serve his food. He had to have a High Chamberlain to regulate his ceremonial, and a Secretary of State to manage his foreign affairs. So His Serene Highness ennobled me — that is why I bear the title of Baron and gave me the high offices of State.

“On your advice?”

“I was the only adviser he had left.”

This was very interesting and much as Hornblower had imagined it, but it was not the point. Hornblower was more ready now to face the real issue.

“In the duel,” he asked, “you exchanged shots?”

“His bullet went past my ear,” answered Eisenbeiss.

“Then honour is satisfied on both sides,” said Hornblower, more to himself than to the doctor.

Technically that was perfectly correct. An exchange of shots, and still more the shedding of blood, ended any affair of honour. The principals could meet again socially as if there had been no trouble between them. But to meet in the relative positions of doctor and patient might be something different. He would have to deal with that difficulty when it arose.

“You are quite right to remind me about this, doctor,” he said, with the last appearance of judicial calm that he could summon up. “I shall bear it in mind.”

Eisenbeiss looked at him a little blankly, and Hornblower put on his hard face again.

“But it makes no difference at all to my promise to you. Rest assured of that,” he continued. “My orders still stand. They — still — stand.”

It was several seconds before the reluctant answer came.

“Aye aye, sir.”

“On your way out would you please be good enough to pass the word for Mr. Turner, the new sailing master?”

“Aye aye, sir.”

That showed the subtle difference between an order and a request — but both of them had to be obeyed.

“Now, Mr. Turner,” said Hornblower when Turner arrived in the cabin, “our destination is Marmorice Bay, and we sail at dawn tomorrow. I want to know about the winds we can expect at this time of year. I want to lose no time at all in arriving there. Every hour — I may say every minute is of importance.”

Time was of importance, to make the most of a dying man's last hours.

Hornblower and the “Atropos”

These were the blue waters where history had been made, where the future of civilization had been decided, more than once and more than twice. Here Greek had fought against Persian, Athenian against Spartan, Crusader against Saracen, Hospitaller against Turk. The penteconters of Byzantium had furrowed the seas here, and the caracks of Pisa. Great cities had luxuriated in untold wealth. Only just over the horizon on the port beam was Rhodes, where a comparatively minor city had erected one of the seven wonders of the world, so that two thousand years later the adjective colossal was part of the vocabulary of people whose ancestors wore skins and painted themselves with woad at the time when the Rhodians were debating the nature of the Infinite. Now conditions were reversed. Here came Atropos, guided by sextant and compass, driven by the wind harnessed to her well-planned sails, armed with her long guns and carronades — a triumph of modern invention, in short — emerging from the wealthiest corner of the world into one where misgovernment and disease, anarchy and war, had left deserts where here had been fertile fields, villages where there had been cities, and hovels where there had been palaces. But there was no time to philosophize in this profound fashion. The sands in the hour-glass beside the binnacle were running low, and the moment was approaching when course should be altered.

“Mr. Turner!”

“Sir!”

“We'll alter course when the watch is called.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

“Doctor!”

“Sir!”

“Stand by for a change of course”

“Aye aye, sir.”

McCullum's invalid bed was disposed athwart ships between Nos. 6 and 7 carronades on the starboard side; a simple tackle attached to the bedhead enabled the level of the bed to be adjusted with the change of course, so that the patient lay as horizontal as might be, whichever way the ship might be heeling. It was the doctor's responsibility to attend to that.

The watch was being called.

“Very good, Mr. Turner.”

“Headsail sheets! Hands to the braces!”

Turner was an efficient seaman, despite his age. Hornblower could be sure of that by now. He stood by and watched him lay the ship close to the wind. Still came and touched his hat to Turner to take over the watch.

“We ought to raise the Seven Capes on this tack, sir,” said Turner, coming over to Hornblower.

“I fancy so,” said Hornblower.

The passage from Malta had been comfortingly rapid. They had lain becalmed for a single night to the south of Crete, but with the morning the wind had got up again from a westerly quarter. There had not been a single breath of Levanter — the equinox was still too far off for that, apparently — and every day had seen at least a hundred miles made good. And McCullum was still alive.

Hornblower walked forward to where he lay. Eisenbeiss was bending over him, his fingers on his pulse, and with the cessation of the bustle of going about the three Ceylonese divers had returned, to squat round the foot of the bed, their eyes on their master. To have those three pairs of melancholy eyes gazing at him would, Hornblower thought, have a most depressing effect, but apparently McCullum had no objection.

“All well, Mr. McCullum?” asked Hornblower.

“Not — quite as well as I would like.”

It was distressing to see how slowly and painfully the head turned on the pillow. The heavy beard that had sprouted over his face could not conceal the fact that McCullum was more hollow-checked, more feverish eyed, than yesterday. The decline had been very marked; the day they sailed McCullum had appeared hardly more than slightly wounded, and the second day he had seemed better still — he had protested against being kept in bed, but that night he had taken a turn for the worse and had sunk steadily ever since, just as the garrison surgeon and Eisenbeiss had gloomily predicted.

Of course those had not been his only protests. McCullum had been as angry as his muddled condition would allow when he emerged from his narcotic to find he was under the treatment of the man who had shot him. He had struggled against his weakness and his bandages. It had called for Hornblower's personal intervention — fortunately Atropos was clear of the harbour mouth when McCullum regained consciousness — to calm him down. “It's a blackguard trick to pursue an affair of honour after an exchange of shots,” Hornblower had said, and “It's the Doctor who's attending to you, not the Baron,” and then the clinching argument “Don't be a fool, man. There's no other surgeon within fifty miles. Do you want to die?” So McCullum had yielded, and had submitted his tortured body to Eisenbeiss's ministrations, perhaps deriving some comfort from the ignoble things the doctor had to do for him.