*In the Night*
*The blade scythed down,
cutting through the boy’s neck and sending the head down into the basket, Lt
Hornblower had to will himself not to back away, to clamp down hard against the
rising nausea in his gut.
A scream choked in his throat, as the headless body rose from the platform, and moved down the steps, to stand with a long rank of others, all with bloodstains gushing from the hideous space where their necks should have been. He spun round, panicked, and Moncourant rose from where he had been seated to black his path. With mounting terror Hornblower saw the blood soaking through his neck-linen, and knew that at any moment the severed head might be dislodged from its balance between his shoulders.*
“Horatio!” Someone had grabbed at him and he struggled in horror. “Horatio, Wake up.” Darkness had enclosed him, everything was dark. “Horatio!” Hand grabbed his shoulders firmly, he could see nothing, but he knew the voice. “It was a dream, Horatio, just a dream.”
“Archie,” he gasped, and then grabbed for control, as he realised he was in his cot in the tiny, pitch-dark cabin that they shared, not in the square in Muzillac. When he was able to speak clearly again he said, “Sorry to have woken you.”
“You didn’t wake me,” was the quiet reply. Hornblower knew Kennedy did not always sleep well, but it was not something talked about between them. He was surprised, therefore, when Kennedy said softly, “Was it about what happened in France?”
He was tempted to brush off the question, retreat into silence, and with anyone else he would certainly have done it. But he found he did not mind that Archie had heard the nightmares, nor did he mind letting the officer’s mask slip just this once. This, after all, was the one person that he knew would not think less of him. And Archie had had his sleep disturbed several times of late, he deserved some answer.
“Yes. About the guillotine.” Although it had not equalled the horror of the hanging he had seen when he was ten, yet the sight of those beheadings had been a terrible thing. Now matter how often he angrily told himself that he should be used to violent deaths he could not shake the memory of it, the impersonality of the machine, the starkness of the mutilation, the sheer horror of seeing a life cut short in full flow, not in the heat and self-defence of battle, but coldly and wantonly. He could not forget. “I can’t describe it.”
“You don’t need to,” Kennedy said, so flatly that Hornblower found himself trying to read through the darkness in order to see his friend’s expression. After a moment Kennedy saved him from asking by saying, “I’ve seen it.”
“How?” Hornblower asked tentatively, although he could have made a guess.
“In France. I was held in a civilian gaol for a while. There was a guillotine in the courtyard below my window. And the cell next to mine… as my French got better I could talk a bit with other prisoners. Most of them didn’t seem to know why they were there. They weren’t even noble or anything. They never seemed to be there for very long.” His voice died away.
Hornblower tried to gauge in the dark where Archie must be crouching or kneeling beside him. He reached out, blunderingly, made contact with a shoulder, and gripped it hard. “Why didn’t you tell me?” Silly question. Would he have said anything in Archie’s place? But it was the nearest he could come to sympathy, and probably the closest that Archie’s pride would let him come.
“What was the point?” He felt Kennedy shift a little, although not restively.
“I thought we were fighting to stop that kind of massacre,” Hornblower said bitterly.
“I don’t know why we’re fighting anymore, only that we are.” The tone was weary. Hornblower had a sudden vivid picture of the boy who had been bubbling over with eagerness for the fight, back in the days when they first knew each other. “It was a mess, you know. When I was trying to get away and went through the areas where the royalists and the republicans had been fighting each other…. I’d no idea. No idea that was what land fighting does.”
Hornblower was uneasily aware that he still had very little idea of what land fighting did, and this did not seem like a good time to ask for details.
“You don’t have to stay,” he said softly, sure that the captain would give Kennedy an honourable discharge, if that was what he wanted.
“Where else would I go? And I didn’t say I wanted to leave. I don’t. Do you?”
That was a hard question, and typical of Archie. It was not a matter he wished to confront, but he owed an answer of some sort.
He enjoyed the calculation, whether navigation or the tactical problems Captain Pellew liked to set his young officers. Sometimes he enjoyed the camaraderie. He did not like the fighting, or the brutal discipline, or the sea-sickness, or the always damp and smelly conditions, or the enforced closeness, the lack of solitude. He did not like this life, yet if he was offered a chance to leave he would not have taken it, and all he could have said in explanation was that it was too late.
“Where else would I go?” he said at last. It was not an answer, but it was the best that he could do.
Another shift beneath his hand. “Do you think you can sleep now, Horatio?”
“I can try.” He was really dreadfully tired, not that that was unusual. “Thank you, Archie.”
“You’ve done as much for me. Goodnight, Horatio.”
“Goodnight,” Hornblower said, although conscious of the irony in the words. The night had been far from good.