*January
23rd *
Explanation: This references two of my previous stories, ‘Paternal Love’ and ‘Remembrance of Things Past’ but it was also written as my exploration of Barbara Hornblower. In fanfic Barbara tends to be either ignored or romanticised as Horatio’s soulmate, which unfortunately doesn’t convince me. This is my attempt to find a middle ground. It was also inspired by a coincidence of dates.
****************
Long ago he had heard of some king who had apologised for the amount of time it took him dying. He himself felt less apologetic than annoyed. The amount of time such a stupid business was taking offended him. When men spoke of the advantages of dying in one’s bed, he was sure they never pictured something as wearisome as this. His one desire was to get it over.
He knew that he was not lucid all the time, that between the long spells of unconsciousness, there were times when he was, to use the old euphemism, ‘not himself’. That too was offensive, he who had prided himself on his hard worked for control was angered that his mind should not be within his own power now.
Once, during one of the spells of understanding, he asked the date. That at least gave him an answer to one question. He knew now how much longer he would have to bear this for.
*
“I shall die on January 23rd.”
He’s raving again. Barbara Hornblower concluded sadly. It was a source of pain to see her husband in this state; strength and control stripped away, just another old man at the end of his life. She would have liked to leave the job of caring for him to the servants, no-one would think it wrong in a woman herself elderly if she should take to her room with prostration. However it was a wife’s duty to bear burdens such as these. Barbara had come to heartily dislike the word across her years of living with Hornblower but her own youthful training would not permit her to reject it.
Once she would have wept and beaten upon the wall to see her husband in such a state as this. But now she was old, and passion had long been spent, and so she went about the daily business calmly and hoped for his sake that all would be over soon.
*
Bush had not died in January. But Bush had been different, in ways that were intangible but definite. Good, uncomplicated William. He had never belonged in tangled webs of secrets and sufferings. He had been a simple man in the best sense of the word. Hornblower knew he had been lucky to know Bush, but he often felt that Bush had not been lucky to know him. He had deserved a better superior. Hornblower hoped that he had had better friends.
He did not believe in an afterlife. But if he should be wrong, the only thing that he would welcome would be the chance to see William Bush again.
*
“Horatio.”
As she had intended the use of his given name instead of her customary ‘my dear’ broke through whatever reverie he had been lost in. She saw the faded eyes snap open and swing questioningly towards her. She had to ask the question now, before the chance was lost and left her wondering forever.
“Who was she, Horatio?” He blinked at her, plainly not understanding. “I know there was a woman, before I ever met you. Not your first wife. Someone else. Someone you lost and never let go of. Who was she?”
She saw puzzlement, then the flicker in the eyes before he said distinctly, “There was no woman.”
“Please, tell me the truth. It’s far too late for jealousy. I want to know.” She wanted to put a name to the rival she had been unable to defeat.
“There was no woman.”
She accepted her loss, she would not demean the both of them by pleading. He had shut her out once again, as he always did. Once again she could do no more than accept, and attempt to smooth the little things since she could not aid him in the larger ones. It was not what she had hoped for, but marriage was a contract and she loved him still.
*
When he was gone there would be none left who remembered, none left who knew the things that had mattered, not the dry, lying tales of victories and heroes. Who could he have told them to? Hardly his wife, and never his son.
A man’s sons should be the joy of his old age, he knew, but although he cared fiercely for his only living child there had never been any meeting of minds between them and he knew better than to suppose that there could be one now. Richard was… not intelligent. He took after his blood mother in that regard, and was also showing an increasing tendency to be pompous and set in his ways. Still, Barbara loved Richard, and he her. That was something salvaged from his life. At least he had given her a child, if not of her own blood. And he had given his son a good mother to replace the one who died at birth.
He knew he had made Barbara unhappy. He had tried hard, but had never been able to give her what she sought. She had had more from him than Maria had ever done, but Barbara was more perceptive, and she had known, far better than Maria, what she had not received. He had given her the life she wanted, but not the love she wanted. And there were times when he had hurt her badly, and felt bitterly ashamed later. He should never have married her. He felt now he should never have married anyone, but he could not have borne to go through life forever alone.
*
Richard was not being much help. Men were so childish sometimes, even the best of them. Still, in a way she was pleased by Richard’s helpless grief, seeing in it a sign that his father’s distance had never troubled his straightforward soul. Her husband, she always felt, had never valued Richard as he should. True, Richard was by no means his father’s equal intellectually, but he was good-hearted and affectionate and discharged his cavalry duties successfully.
She was very grateful for Richard. Having borne no children to either of her husbands she felt sure that her body must have been somehow incapable. Without the son of his first wife her husband might have minded that. Moreover the task she had undertaken as an act of charity, the rearing of that poor dead woman’s child, had brought the greatest rewards of her life. She was glad that Richard grieved for his father. That was the way things should be.
*
Sometimes memory threw up scenes from the past, almost shocking in their vividness. They filled some time as he waited for release.
Lord Exmouth had been a long time in his dying, also. Well, he had followed Exmouth in many things, although he was not proud of the knowledge, it should be no surprise that he would follow him in this as well.
They had had little contact in the years after the man he had first known as Captain Pellew had retired from active service. That had been deliberate, for he had not wished for more meetings than polite formality enforced, yet when in his last illness his old mentor had asked for him he had gone. He remembered now seeing that wasted face as he entered the room and thinking how often the approach of death drains individuality from men.
But not Archie. Archie blazed with life at the last….
“You sent for me?” he had said at last. He did not say ‘sir’.
The old head moved a little, restlessly. “I wanted to ask you… something. But now you are here…. I do not think I could bear the answer. Either answer.”
There was no reply he could make to that, and so silence followed silence until at last the question of his own burst out.
“Why? Kingston, I mean. I never understood why. It wasn’t needed. It wasn’t like you to let Hammond take charge. So why?”
“I can’t tell you.” To his horror he realised the old man was weeping. “It wouldn’t help you to know. Whatever the truth, it wouldn’t help you now.”
He did not press. Whatever the dying man meant, if he even knew himself, it would not help. Nothing would help now, it was far too late.
“Did it truly hurt you so much? It never seemed….”
What answer could he give? He could say with truth he did not know how much of what he disliked in himself had been shaped by that time, so long ago. He could not, and would not, say he did not suffer.
Silence seemed to be answer in itself. “Go. I should not have asked for you.” He had turned to leave without regret, yet more words had followed, only just aloud, “But I did love you as my own son, Horatio. God forgive me, but I did, always, always….”
He had gone back then, and stood beside the bed, but for all his efforts could not think of anything to say.
*
He was wandering more frequently now. Sometimes he muttered, too low for her to distinguish the words, although she listened hard, in the hopes of catching some clue to the enigma she had spent the bulk of her life with.
She had always felt the pain within him, but in her youthful arrogance had believed that she could heal it, make him forget the past. She had been sure once that he would love her as she wished one day. Instead she had ended by living with that pain as constantly as he did. Could another woman have done differently, one who could show tenderness more readily, one not locked in the barriers imposed by her own loveless youth? She would never know.
Well, she had had a better marriage than many women. Some spells of happiness, a few estrangements, mostly they simply rubbed along together. He was invariably courteous, did not shame her by flaunting mistresses – though she knew well he had not always been faithful. That would have been easier to bear if she had not felt he was not simply following lust, but searching for something that she could not give.
Still, not a bad marriage. She had had the pleasure of being married to a man whom others admired, and rightly. She had had her place as a leader of society. That was what she had wanted at the beginning, and she had got her wish. No use crying over the belief life might hold more. It could certainly have held much less.
*
He had felt almost angered by the date of Exmouth’s death. Forty years to the day since he had first witnessed life leave a man in a shabby Portsmouth inn. Nine years after that he had sat by Archie’s bed and been unable even to take his hand. The same day exactly. It had felt wrong that Exmouth should intrude on that date. But if Exmouth had died on that day he felt sure that he himself would also, that the web should be complete. January 23rd would end it.
He hoped that it would end. Hoped there would be no reunions. To see poor Maria or Marie whom he had led to her death once again was not something that he wished for. And Archie…. He knew he could not look Archie Kennedy in the face.
After so many years they would have no common ground, nothing to say to each other that would not be painful. He was not the young man he had been in Kingston, he had difficulty even remembering what that young man had been like. Yet it was not time alone that had severed the old bond beyond all hope of renewal, he himself had done that as he shaped himself to be the man the Navy wanted. Archie Kennedy would have had no time for a man like Admiral Hornblower. He feared to meet that clear-eyed gaze and see contempt, he feared still more to see pity. Justify it how you would, he knew he had misused Archie’s final gift and he would rather face the devil in person than see Lt Kennedy again.
*
There would be much to be done. The death of Admiral Lord Hornblower would be commemorated with full pomp and circumstance. There had been several such funerals in her family of late, as long lives reached their close. She would not attend the service, it was family custom that only men did that, but she meant to organise the details.
Richard could give an oration, he did that kind of thing well, but she would write it. Later there would be a grand tomb, a monument listing the dead man’s achievements. Only of late years had she begun to understand that her husband did not like the trappings of rank and standing, they embarrassed him. For years she had worked to give him what she believed to be his due and he had acquiesced to a burden not a pleasure. She sighed now as she thought of the social occasions he had attended, stiff and awkward; the great houses he had treated, she now saw, as hers not his; the uneasy and ultimately unsuccessful political career that she had urged. Understanding had come too late to her.
He could not be troubled by what was done when he was gone. The trappings she had once found so important had come to matter little to her now, with old age all that had fallen away. But they would matter to Richard and that was what counted. Richard would have the grand funeral he would feel his father deserved.
She would have her son and her grandchildren. She still had good health. Society remained an amusement. She would not be unhappy.
She could only hope death would bring her husband the peace that she had never managed to give. She wished he could have been honest with her at the last.
*
There came a time when he again knew his wife was sitting by him, and struggled to make some amends this once at least. “I’m sorry,” he whispered to her. “I did try.” But sorry mended nothing, he knew that. “I have loved you, very much.”
But this was no romantic novel where the word of love healed all. “You loved me with your mind and with your body,” Barbara said, and he was shocked to hear the shake in her voice. “Never with your heart. I never touched your heart.”
He could not deny the words were true. “Do not reproach yourself,” his wife said. “You never promised me love of any kind. You did not deceive me, I deceived myself, and I accepted that long since. I am only sorry I could not make you happy.”
His mind had blurred again and he could think only of all the pain he had caused through the years, to so many. Long life had been a burden, he would be glad to lay it down.
*
Some time after the funeral she visited the mausoleum where they had laid him and found a stranger there, a very old man with an empty sleeve and a younger man hovering protectively near-by. Barbara guessed why he must be here and was not indignant at trespass as her young self might have been.
“Have you come to pay respects to the admiral?” she asked graciously.
“I don’t know ‘bout that, ma’am,” he replied with the bluntness of the old. “I never knew the admiral. But there were a young lieutenant once who headed my division. I don’t know if he’s here, but I came in any case.”
“You knew Lt Hornblower then, Mr –?”
“Oldroyd, ma’am. I knew him, til I lost my arm and he found me a shore job, which is more than many officers would have bothered with. And I heard more of him after, my old mates would come and see me sometimes. Only they said less and less about him as time went on, and old Matty, he said: ‘Just let it be, Oldroyd. He’ll be an admiral sure enough, and whether it was worth it ain’t our business.’ Never did know what he meant by that. But I thought I’d come.”
“I’m sure he would appreciate that,” Barbara said, and felt that her words, which were meant as politeness, somehow went astray.
“As to that I wouldn’t know. I didn’t come for him. I came because there’s no-one left now who remembers the old times.”
“He will be remembered,” Barbara said. “There are books written, as long as the histories of those wars are told he will not be forgotten.” And yet the words trailed off, as memory told her he had never liked those books.
“I never did learn to read, ma’am, but I think that’s what’s written down in your books, it won’t be the things that I remember. Folks as weren’t there never do know what’s important. I was a foolish young man, and my grandson here would say I’m a foolish old one, but I was there, and your fancy writers never were. So I’ll do my own remembering, thank you, ma’am.”
It was only afterwards that she realised she might have questioned the man, found some clue to the painful mystery, but he was gone now and there would be no answers for her. She must make the most of what present she had left.
It was only that night she realised her husband had indeed died on January 23rd.
**End**
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Endnote: Edward Pellew, Lord Exmouth died on January 23rd 1833, forty years to the day after the news of the execution of Louis XVI reached England. The rest is my construction, although we do know that the court-martial in Retribution takes place in January 1802.