*The
Ghost*
It was pure chance that took him past the place.
It would never have happened if Barbara had been with him, but she had cried off with a sick headache and Admiral Lord Hornblower had attended the Governor’s dinner alone. He never had liked such occasions and he never would, but that was not the cause of the bad mood that had repeatedly nagged at him here in Kingston. Barbara had noticed, but had not asked questions, she never did for which he was grateful.
Barbara knew he had been in the Indies as a young lieutenant but she knew nothing of the events that had happened there. Hardly anyone still living knew, and he was glad of that as well. If Barbara had known she would not have understood. She would have assumed that the past caused him pain, which it did not, or if it did it was the impersonal pain he might feel at reading some story in a book. Something that was a pity, but did not concern him.
Because it did not. Because he was not the same man who had almost met his death in Kingston two decades back. That idealistic young lieutenant no longer existed, had not existed these many years. Perhaps the last of him had died with William Bush: at all events he was gone. Lord Hornblower felt no connection to him, nor did he wish to. That boy had been far too foolish and vulnerable, too often wrong and helpless. He did not want to feel that that young man had in any way been him, all he felt towards him was a kind of detached pity.
The trouble was that other people might believe that boy had been him. Lord Exmouth, the former Captain Pellew, most certainly seemed to think so. Not that he ever spoke of Kingston, but on the occasions when they met recollections of Indefatigable days were all too prone to come to his lips. Hornblower found tales of that painfully inexperienced officer profoundly embarrassing. Couldn’t his old captain understand that he wanted nothing from those days? That the man he had, with such painful effort, made himself, did not want anyone to think him one and the same with that earlier, and so much lesser, self?
The trouble he felt was not pain: it was sheer embarrassment. The knowledge that Lt Hornblower’s mistakes had come close to preventing Admiral Hornblower from ever existing. The closeness of that long ago call was most disturbing. Of course he had had narrow escapes in battle, many of them, but that had been simply the fortune of war. Kingston had been... something else. And he did not like to recall how nearly the man he was might never have been.
Since Barbara was not with him he had chosen to walk to, and from, the dinner, rather than take a carriage or a sedan chair. And it just so happened that he passed the place. The old naval prison, abandoned and derelict now. He had heard that vagrants never went there, some tale that it was haunted, but he did not believe in ghosts and did not recall the story now.
It was an impulse, nothing more. He would not have sought out the place, but returning past it the notion came. Perhaps it would assist him to confront the past head on. Perhaps if for once he recalled the old tale, as deliberately as possible, instead of seeking to forget it, the irritation would fade from his mind. It would surely do no harm.
So he turned his steps towards the building.
The door was gone. He never intended to go further than the entrance, who knew what traps for the unwary that ruined interior might hold? He halted a few steps into the darkness, smelling the damp and decay of it, and telling himself that this had been a remarkably silly idea.
The sound of footsteps startled him. Sure and steady, they came from ahead, from inside the old ruin. Not so deserted after all then....
He never could quite recall how his sight in the next few seconds could have been so clear. He had no sensation of light flooding the place, yet the figure that stepped out of an inner doorway in front of him was as visible as if they had stood in the clear noon sun.
He looked quite solid, although Hornblower knew at first sight that that could not be so. He had halted, just after coming into view, and seemed to look directly at the intruder. Whether he had, in truth, perceived him, Hornblower would never know.
Because for the first and only time in his life Horatio Hornblower was completely overwhelmed by panic. Because after a heart-arrested moment he blundered around, and fled from the place as if the speed of his heels was the one chance of his soul’s salvation. He was streets away before pure breathlessness brought him to a painful halt. It took a long while to find his way out of the twisting back streets, and he could not rest that night but stayed awake and pacing until dawn.
Some days later he plucked up the nerve to ask a local worthy about the reputed haunting. The man was happy to talk, seemed to think it added a mark of distinction to the town.
Yes, the ghost had been described, by several people, and all descriptions tallied. That made the story hard to dismiss, did not the admiral agree?
A naval officer. A young man, wearing an old fashioned lieutenant’s uniform. No-one seemed to know who he might have been.
So ... it had not been simply his own mind playing tricks.
There was a little more to the description.
A tall young man, the worthy gentleman said, and lean-built, with dark hair.
And that, too fitted with what he had seen. A young lieutenant, in the uniform of the turn of the century. But it was the face that had caused such panic to invade his soul.
His face.
No, not his face.
He had known Lieutenant Hornblower was gone from this life.
He had not realised he walked.