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Infamy	By : DasTier Category: G through L > Horatio Hornblower Series Views: 1967 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own the Hornblower series, nor any of the characters from it. I do not make any money from the writing of this story.

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- 1-Infamy
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Infamy [I]
Author: Das T.
Fandom: Horatio Hornblower, the books.
Pairing: Hornblower/Bush.
Disclaimer: Mr. Forester owns them all.
[set vaguely during one of those voyages near the French coast.]

If asked, Horatio Hornblower wouldn’t be able to answer, even with his life as a wager, when or why he started to see symbolism in the outlines of channels and straits on the maps. It was gradual: a stray wonder at the tightness of a narrowing, which at first he pinned down as a purely nautical interest, lingered in his mind in the idle hours. They were like bottle necks, through which the waters of one ocean were pouring into another. They were like lanes between squares, crooked and narrow and opening into wideness.

He wondered whether the waves of two oceans were clashing or embraced each other smoothly; he wondered what each strait could feel like. A long, velvety spiciness of the Straits of Malacca; a fickle and furious Magellan; the cold and unwelcoming Bering; wide Skagerrak, well-travelled and old. He also wondered how they could have been explored. At a distance from deck of a ship, observing and not daring to touch; or with boats coursing along the shoreline, tracing the contours like tentative fingers, shy at the first acquaintance.

Without exaggeration it could be said that Horatio Hornblower wondered a lot those days.

And those days were full of November drizzle, and grey sea, and the lulling swell of waves. If straits indeed had character, the dominant trait of the English Channel would be patient boredom. Stuck between the two most developed countries of the world, it seemed to partake, together with its name, a great deal of the British personality. Cold and conventional, toiling monotonously like the good old work-horse Thames that fed its waters with fog, ships, and flotsam. The French coast with its cheese, vine and merriment, concealed by that very fog, seemed at the moment non-existent.

Moreover, its boredom seemed contagious. It was dissolved in the air, in the heavy drops hanging sadly on every rope of the ship’s rigging. You breathed dullness, you licked it off your lips, it soaked your clothes. At it seemed to have a particular liking to the captain – an easy prey to the devil, who, as they say, makes work for idle hands.

Idleness was indeed a captain’s worst curse. Hornblower’s mind wandered loosely in vain attempts to escape inactivity, and its wanderings didn’t cease even in sleep. He felt bitter envy to the deck hands and their blissful tiredness after a day of routine work. Sometimes he considered what they might be doing there, in their private realm in the forecastle, and how much their real actions exceeded their captain’s awareness. But suspicions didn’t live long, and most often he assumed in their free hours they sought – and found - nothing but black depth of sleep. It was exactly what made him feel jealous.

For the captain, perhaps the only soul on the ship, was infected with insomnia. He didn’t know what was worse: red eyes and an eerie feeling of being distanced from reality after two, three days without proper sleep, or a few hours of uneven slumbers with bad dreams.

He labelled them bad in his waking hours, but while dreaming he wasn’t so sure. He concluded some of the images his sleeping mind toyed with had to come from severe homesickness. The only difficulty was that he didn’t feel his home to be in England, or any place ashore. In terms of comfort and spiritual well-being his home lay where he was now, in the creaking, shifting wooden structure carried over the mass of water where the wind, his hand, and the Admiralty’s guiding directed it.

It was something else that disturbed him. An inexplicable presence of warmth in his dreams, not sun-like, not fiery, but very personal and very familiar. He was vaguely aware that it shouldn’t be there, travelling all over him, that there was something inappropriate in how his body seemed to lean into this comforting warmth. Those dreams usually left him feeling exposed, and in the morning he was even more uptight than ever.

He listened to his First Lieutenant reporting the changes over the last watch and wondered – again! – whether Bush ever dreamt anything like that. Not likely; he must have had another of those peaceful nights that only well-done work and clear conscience can give.

“Sir?”

He shuddered, as if caught unawares over a criminal act. Coughing up a reply with his usual eloquence, he retreated to his cabin with a rashness that looked almost like a panicked flight.

Horatio Hornblower knew that if something – anything - didn’t happen anytime soon, he would be doomed.

***

The most painful was to realise that it happened because of his being bored. Of course, objectively, it wasn’t so; at least, not exclusively so. But he was unable to think without bias, and eagerly summoned all kinds of curses on his head. And hands. And lips. And other parts of his body.

Even after several days it was difficult to recollect how it happened. Those things are always so trite and tasteless when one tries to describe them. And vulgar – he had been avoiding the word, but it was time to face the truth. Yet those things were so simple once one’s mind is decided. Simple as any natural act. Simple to him as a married man. But as they say it, for the British there’s only one hole, and it’s the wrong one.

His skilfulness was the one particular bit he was trying to skip. Or rather, not skilfulness but a habit born by long years of practice when he had to endure Maria’s possessive tenderness, and care, and affection. Now the skilful one was his First Lieutenant, while he was as usual accepting the gift of worship like a capricious deity. That exactly pained him most: he cursed himself for letting Bush do it to him only to curse himself for not having responded better.

There wasn’t much. Mostly touches, reverent and gliding over his skin as if he were indeed a god carved in marble. He was just as cold, and not only from the residue of fog on his skin. A brief kiss let him feel the same British fog on Bush’s lips as they both had just descended from the quarterdeck. They would have to be back soon. Very soon. Time only enough to kiss again, and let himself be engulfed in the warm, familiar presence from his dreams.

Despite all the child’s sand walls his mind tried to build in denial, he had to admit that now this presence had a name.

***

It seemed ridiculous, but, among other things, he was tortured by the thought that he had turned out to be a bad kisser. The First Lieutenant’s belief in the overall perfection of his captain must have been shuttered. There was little consolation in thinking that he couldn’t possibly have brought himself to have more exercise with Maria. In fact, any thought featuring Maria caused even more disturbance, be it about kissing or not. Once he spent a whole evening contemplating whether he should already classify himself as an adulterer.

The only real comfort was that Bush apparently was even more clumsily unpractised than his captain. But, Hornblower had to confess, he learned fast for his age. As with many other things, Bush even here had a particular attention to prosaic facts, while Hornblower indulged in feverish speculation. He could only set his mind adrift and trust his Lieutenant to know at what angle to approach his face so that their noses didn’t collide; when to stop the shallow dabbling of their lips and go for a deeper dive where their tongues would clash. For the time being, Hornblower didn’t do much but receive and perceive. Sometimes he felt his life was centered neither in the heart nor in the brain, but on his lips.

He cheated himself with the belief that he’d have been comfortable to stop at that. But as the fog condensed around the ship and bound it with blindness, their private trip in the captain’s cabin had to progress. And so one day, after the evening change of watch, Bush unwrapped his captain from the many layers of dampened clothes and undid every belt and button holding together the woollen armour that was Hornblower’s last line of defence.

And so Captain Hornblower was guilty as charged, and the notorious Article XXIX looked him straight in the face. It was the law; it wouldn’t take into consideration that they had painfully little comfort in his hammock, and that it didn’t get any better on the floor. It would disregard the blush of shame when Bush whispered sweet and naïve encouragement in his ear. And of course, it would ignore the fact that without those encouragements his role in the ‘shocking act’ wouldn’t have gone beyond mere intention.

Captain Hornblower was a sodomite, and he suspected, a bad sodomite.

Not that Bush complained, really.

***

“They love nothing more than buggery jokes in the fo’c’sle. Possibly, only buggery itself.”

Hornblower was too busy trying to make up his mind as to what he thought about Bush’s improving skills of heavy but polite petting to realise his First Lieutenant had just perpetrated a joke. Sadly, it was not the kind of witticism he could appreciate. It was a crime. They hanged men for that. The thought gyrated in his tired mind, punctuated his every move with its simple rhythm.

He should be blessing the fog, and low visibility, and a particularly lazy wind – all natural factors that seemed to have conspired to keep him free of any other duty but to stay in his captain’s cabin doing his private captain’s things. They kept the lights off, but a streak of candlelight leaked through the crack under the door. They hadn’t yet learned to cuddle, and it was a true feat to lie side by side on the floor of Hornblower’s crammed cabin. The planks under the thin blanket were as hard as his doubts about his position on them.

Feeling disapproval in his captain’s silence, Bush tried to make himself invisible in the darkness.

“Do they know?”

Bush didn’t answer, but Hornblower could feel uneasiness in the way he shifted against him. Arm against arm. Shoulder against shoulder. Hip against hip. It was late, useless, and physically impossible to think about maintaining distance and decorum.

“So, do they already know?”

“They love their captain. They will never tell.”

That was a meagre consolation. Hornblower shut his eyes tight, only to encounter under his eyelids a kind of darkness more impenetrable than that of the night.

“It was consensual, sir. Please have no doubts about that. It is not a crime when it’s consensual.”

He cringed at the incongruity of being sir’ed under such circumstances, then reprimanded himself still more for self-centeredness. He commanded himself to lean forth for a kiss with the timidity of an old turtle sticking its head out of its shell.

“What shall we do when the fog clears?”

He shouldn’t be the one asking such questions; he was still the ship’s navigator, after all. He could feel Bush straining the imagination he didn’t have for a reply that would be both soothing and realistic.

“We’ll sail on. But it takes days for the fog to clear in this part of the Channel. Sometimes even weeks.”

He could bet there was an undertone of good-natured humour in Bush’s whisper.

***

What ailed him most was not spiritual anguish, which he had come to accept as inevitable, but a deeper kind of concern that he might be the source of physical pain. He handled Bush like at home he handled the china cup he was allowed to drink from as a child. Ironically, his guilty attention often turned out more of a hassle than help. He was ashamed of his not so perfect body, of its awkward movements. He bathed in shame at the terrible well-being achieved after (and despite) those fussy stirrings.

He feared the day the fog would dissipate and present him again with a cruel world to face.

***

The veil of fog lifted, after four days, to let in the pale autumn sunshine and a colder wind. The sails flapped catching the breeze, and the captain woke up to find himself supremalonalone, as a good captain should be.

On the quarterdeck Hornblower learnt that there was yet one more fear to encounter. All the ship’s company was astir, after days in the grey soup glad at last to see the rigging they tackled. With the vision clear, the drilling routine was back, and he saw Bush beam with happy anticipation.

Hornblower paced the deck with a calm face and a turmoil in his thoughts. Article XXIX was not only about decency or condemning an unnatural act; it argued against a breach of discipline and order. He almost laughed out loud hysterically as he remembered how Bush firmly refused to quit his role of an ‘underling’, saying that subordination should be maintained in all cases. But if the rumours had already spread, what authority could they both claim anywhere on this ship but inside his cabin?

He looked at the hands at the masts and felt his heart skip a beat. Years at sea had taught him to have no illusions about the ordinary seaman’s morale; but it had always been a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ agreement. As long as things didn’t get violent, he didn’t see a reason to intervene into what was going on below the deck. He even believed that as long as the captain’s behaviour remained immaculate, the crew’s misdemeanours would be reigned in by conscience. And now, what he, himself a miserable sinner, could require of the men even less restricted by the rank than him?

The mast hands rushed up, climbing the rigging as if they had grown wings, and Bush turned to his captain to salute the task readily fulfilled. Hornblower let out a sigh, which he hurried to stifle. It was not relief. It was only a respite.

Around him, life rolled on with the waves.
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Infamy