On the Bitch

Horatio, Rear Admiral of the Red Lord Hornblower, walked the well-worn deck outside the Smallbridge Manor House in Kent, whereof he was lord and master by purchase. Head bent, hands clasped firmly behind his back, as if back aboard Lydia, or Nonsuch, or Atropos two decades ago, he marched. Yes, as if Captain William Bush, RN, were still alive, nervously awaiting orders and clutching the nearest shroud so that the "bump" of his wooden leg would not disturb his Admiral's thoughts. But Bush was blown to bits on the Lower Seine, where the marble monument Hornblower erected to his memory at fearful cost was now used by his late enemies as a pissoir by day and a Sodomite's haunt by night, their splashings and gruntings playing a strange dirge.

Hornblower did not curse. He'd expended all his profanity, blasphemy, and obscenity (for which he was justly renowned) as easily as cannonball and gunpowder long since. He just mourned, mourned for the dead, the vanished, for the life he loved and could no longer live. He was in close arrest, condemned by not courtmartial but by the calendar. There was no sea command for a balding, slightly unsurefooted old man.

No seagoing commands for old men.

Old! Damn them! On the beach forever!

He'd worn out the stairs at the Admiralty, worn out his frosty welcome from Barbara's Wellesley brothers, virtually kowtowed (whatever that was) to the Duke, begging for a command, even for a single ship. And all he got was Jimmy ("Cracker") Graham, First Lord, who didn't know a hawsepipe from a handspike, telling him "Reform, retrenchment, and peace." No jobs for anyone in the Navy who wasn't a true Blue Whig. Hornblower loathed politicians.

The Duke offered him bad Sherry, and pitied him he hadn't been at Waterloo. Or on the playing fields of Eton. Then he might find an Indian platoon for him out Poona way, where in May it reached 108 in the shade.

Barbara, his darling Barbara, whether fucking him deaf, dumb and blind in the South Atlantic homeward bound from Nicaraguan yellow fever, or standing demurely beside him like a Vestal Virgin while old Johnny Jervis looked down her bosom and congratulated him on his peerage, bowing low to conceal his hardon the lecherous old bastard, wanted him home, dancing attendance during the London Season. He'd fled from her while she wowed the diplomats at Vienna in '15 so he could fight in France, where he fucked some poor French girl with lovely tits and got her and everyone else who cared about him killed.

Barbara was married to Lord Leighton, killed at Rosas Bay, before him, but after he had fucked her. Thinking of that, Hornblower almost convulsed with hatred and jealousy. Shaking, he recalled Leighton, his commanding officer, lying on the deck of the Sutherland, his groin torn open by a splinter from the rail blown away by a Spanish 18-pounder. Leighton's huge, obscene banger was exposed, scrotum torn open and a testicle hanging out. "I didn't know whether to puke or laugh," he thought, and then remembered how he cried. That monstrous, filthy thing thrust into Barbara's gorgeous cunt, raping her to orgasms, while in his mind he watched, as if he himself were receiving rectal violation... he stepped drunkenly off the deck and vomited into the bushes.

He'd sooner be on the quarterdeck of a sinking 74 in the hottest, most hopeless, career-destroying battle the Navy ever lost than attend one banquet at the Mansion House or an at-home of Fat Fanny Graham, Cracker's gorgeous (and expensive) wife. Rumour had it she'd fucked everyone who got within three fathoms of her, male female and not sure, from foresail to poop rail and back again. Hornblower hadn't tried, didn't know, didn't care.

He'd been an excellent cardplayer, a professional gambler when on the beach in '02, but now the cards and the play disgusted him.

But if Barbara were unable to swan her way through the London Charivari from March to September, she would bite her lower lip, weep silently, and he'd get no slap-and-tickle unless her pre-period convulsed her. Then it was a quickie, when he'd have to jump out of bed and hop to stick his Michelangelo in a pitcher of hot water to get the blood off.

So he went. And was miserable. But Barbara was happy. Though being English aristocracy, she didn't show it.

Happy. Until the rumours started.

Richard Arthur Hornblower had been a happy, loving child. Not a sailor, nor had he the makings of a soldier, but kind. Always laughing, playing in the mud. Happiest with Mama and Papa, a favorite of Ramsbottom, his old nurse.

But Eton changed him, made him melancholy, withdrawn. No scholar, he scraped by at first, but something overwhelmed him, and he begged to be withdrawn.

Now, living in London on an allowance from Barbara's family fortune, he eschewed society and had no employment.

The rumours said he was an habitué of a molly house in Vere Street, Marylebone, where he practised, and was practised upon, with all kinds of abominable practises. His son was a Somdomite, misspelled, misplaced, misliked.

Hornblower remembered he was at an interminable evening at the Townhouse of Lord Bitzfugger. Lady Bitzfugger, the younger daughter of an Irish peer whose wealth was Lord Bitzfugger's greatest attraction to his lady, was in a flutter with all the attendees who ranked higher than her sottish husband.

Bitzfugger himself staggered over to Hornblower, rolling like a Sheerness hoveller in a nor'east blow. "I say, Almirante, hear your lad is a quare boyo, a reg'lar bend-and-spread-'em for the boys." Hornblower struck Bitzfugger on the check with his palm. "My seconds, Sir, will wait upon you tomorrow. Barbara, we must go!"

Queen Vicky, new to the throne but wise to the ways of the world, let it be known before Hornblower's seconds could confront Lord Bitzfugger that anyone participating in an affair of honour, and their families even unto the fourth generation, would be banned from Her Presence. A written apology followed. Hornblower was enraged that any woman would so meddle in his affairs, but had he not ignominiously surrendered, Barbara's innermost regions would be barred to him forever, and he'd have to pull something besides rank to get off for the rest of his life.

Life was so much easier at sea. No women with their vaporings and flutterings (even Barbara, true as steel, brave as any man, was a slave to her uterus and society); at sea there were only men, starved, flogged and bullied into obedience, officers who worshipped and emulated him seeking promotion; weevily hardtack and slimy water (with crocks of butter, cheese, and cases of Bordeaux bought with Barbara's money), the sun, rain, wind, sea and sky...and the not-unlikely chance of being disembowelled and with your balls torn off by a broadside or dying of scurvy...that was life, by Christ, not this higgling, mincing round of marching to someone else's tune in a foggy, rainy, smelling-of-shit Land of Hope and Glory.

He remembered the whorehouses of Jamaica where he spent 100 pounds of prize money in one week as a junior lieutenant, of the Russian noblewoman at Konigsberg who gave him fleas (and thank God nothing worse), of Maria his first wife (what a wretched fuck she was).

And his son and heir; for all the fees he paid Eton, all the boy learnt was to take it up the ass or down the throat. Hornblower almost spewed again.

Then he remembered how pressgangs scooped up whatever was on the streets and auctioned the frailest of them off on the foc'sle (which they called the "fucksle parade"). He knew better than trying to stop it; the pressgangs would just avoid his ship, and he'd have no crew. Besides, he'd rather the men got off by fagfucking as they called it, rather than self-abuse; fewer cases of inflamed prostate. And the screams of the raped soon died away as they got used to it.

Hornblower reeled with disgust. All his honour, rank, property, dignity, sacrificed because some damned bitch (to whose dynasty he had sworn undying loyalty, and in whose defense he was prepared to be disembowelled and castrated by the first broadside he happened upon) threatened to deny him a look at her scrawny tits under two yards of cambric.

The decking outside Smallbridge Manor House was looked upon by his tenants and whatever country riffraff heard of it, as an old seadog's eccentricity.

Hell, no! It was his salvation. The church clock struck. Barbara would be taking her tea. He had better go in; he might even get lucky tonight.