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The Garden of Proserpine	By : DasTier Category: G through L > Horatio Hornblower Series Views: 1974 -:- 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.

Chapter List
- 1-The Garden of Proserpine
- 1
The Garden of Proserpine
Author: DT
Fandom: Hornblower [the books]
Summary:the slashy interpretation of the events in "Flying Colours', namely: HH=no ship + Bush=no foot -> mutual consolation? btw, the book carries a terrific amount of slash by itself.
Warning: beware of French insertions. the translation is enclosed at the end. much thanks to
Nimue and Natt, my French translators on the LJ, for skilful dubbing.
Note:the fic is based on the poem by Swinburne. [http://www.templeofdemeter.com/swinburneII.html]
***

...Even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea
A. C. Swinburne, "The Garden of Proserpine"

...Naked I stand before Thee, Ocean. My clothes are shed into the foam and stolen away by the waves. Their riot has washed the last of my footprints on the sand. They grate their roar onto the rocks and moon-blanched cliffs, leap up in their cadence, begin and cease their climb, incessant and failing day and night. The cliffs will not succumb; the ebb of wasted anger turns towards the ships. Withdrawn but not defeated, the waves sink their claws of froth into the timber, and tear it apart.

How they torture her, the one which was my ship. Like a dead whale's carcass, she lies thrown out onto a bank, stripped of all her glory. I am a Jonah vomited onto dry land, and I regret the death of my Leviathan.

***

"Sir? Wake up, sir."

A respectful tug at his sleeve woke him up. Brown's face was a mixture of concern and panic at such a breach of subordination, but Hornblower felt relieved. The impiety was timely; he had just had that dream again.

Its stubborn recurrence left him clueless. The "Sutherland" wasn't the best of the ships he had sailed, and it wasn't his favourite one. The sentence of a disappointing fate seemed to be written on her prow the moment he saw her first. The efforts he had invested into the ship appeared, in the end, to be wasted. Maybe, his dreaming about her was so uneasy because his conscience rebuked him for not having invested still more.

The deafening quiet of the Loire countryside in winter was around him. The snow-bound silence poured into the room as if the windows were not shielded with glass; the dwellers of the house seemed dormant, out of time in their hibernation. He was cut off from the life together with them, suspended between past and future in this glass-house of patient slumbers.

It was a winter of wet winds, but if there were waves still anywhere in this world, he didn't know. The water near the house was imprisoned under ice; he couldn't believe it was the same river that had fiercely rushed them downstream, intent on destroying anything that dared float on its surface.

He looked at the white sheets of the bed under him, then at the whitened lawn he could glimpse out of his window. The soft pallor reached across the garden and diffused into the coldness with no boundary definition. Daylight was diffused, too, opaque like fog and able to damp all sounds.

Did shipwrecks dream as well, and if they did, what were their dreams?

"Mr. Bush sends you his greetings, sir, and hopes you've had good rest."

William. His isolation would not be complete while the man was with him. After all, a ship survives as long as its crew lives. The life of the "Sutherland" had been split into dozens of tinier lives, each saved only by her sacrifice. Thus her wreck had a meaning, and only thus his surrender of her had purpose.

"Tell him I'll come to visit him as soon as I'm dressed."

They still stubbornly adhered to the naval rules in regulating their relationships. It was a part of elaborate pretence, a thin veil of denial of what had happened.

"The Count has proposed a game of whist for the evening. Now, I dare say, Mr. Bush looks dismal."

Hornblower grinned in sudden merriment. Any other pastime rang hollow in the quiet house, and in the end all talks abated and the hosts and their strange visitors sat still around the table, peering into the cards as if those were means to reenact the sleeping life outside. Battles were plotted and carried out between warring parties, the gaming table their battlefield and Bush's eternal frustration.

***

"Did you sleep well, sir?" asked Bush with the shrewdness of an old spouse the moment Hornblower's lean figure appeared in the doorframe of his room.

"And you?"

He watched the face of his officer become drawn into an obstinate mien of comfort. He had long ago learnt that Bush was a far better actor than himself: his face, now aristocratically pale from the prolonged seclusion from the sun, was able to feign expressions impenetrable in their outward content or, at least, indifference.

"We're playing with the Count tonight."

"Oh no, please, not me, sir."

"Vous ne pouvez pas refuser," parried Hornblower. He fished out a deck of cards from his pocket. Bush might have become perfect in simulating content, but his captain's arsenal, handicapped as it was, still carried weapons effective enough to penetrate the barrier.

"Commençons."

"Is it necessary, sir?..."

"Absolutely. I don't want our host to find that the only amusement in the evening will be taunting a British officer for his lack of skills."

"Yes, but but is it necessary to exercise in French?"

In his cruelty he had brought his officer as near to open whining as any enemy ever dared hope to. It was a petty feat, and a dishonest one, and yet he felt appallingly smug.

The morning was only nominal in its scarce daylight; soon they had candles brought in, and Hornblower, long-sighted after years of peering into the ocean's vast scope, found it difficult to discern the suit of the cards in the mixed illumination. He assumed Bush might be having the same trouble, which, added atop of his usual perplexity over the game's tactics, left him devoid of any gambling vigour. With his knee propped up in a somewhat childish fear lest the opponent should cheat by peeking into his cards, he was an effigy of sacrifice, bearing his captain's whim with patient fatality.

"I've been wondering, sir," Bush proclaimed when Hornblower least expected it believing his partner to be too engrossed in contemplation of his next move, "wondering if one can grow tired with rest. Would it not be like this in Heaven - rest, and sleep, and then rest again, without a respite?"

"We should thank this place for being that way."

"Yes, but aren't you weary with doing nothing, sir?"

"I'm not doing nothing," Hornblower retorted and then confessed on the spur of the moment. "Every night, I dream. Of the "Sutherland"."

***

That evening, Comte de Gracay proposed a toast.

"To our guests - who, having been proclaimed dead, will one day raise in a resurrection that will be triumphant."

Hornblower studied the sweet sherry in his glass. The sparkle of gold at the bottom reminded him of Spain'neyaneyards which he had raided under the Mediterranean sun that seemed to be forever frozen in a shadowless noon. He didn't want to drink - the sweetness tasted like oblivion. They were now deceased officially: indeed, for dead men - deadly wine.

A single glass brought pink to Bush's cheeks and a desire for heedless chatter to his speech. Having quickened his b sen senses, the rush of wine was stopped only by the linguistic barrier that didn't allow Bush to express his exaltation to the fullest.

"I'm afraid I will be perfectly sleepless tonight," he admitted to Hornblower as the evening drew to an end. Brown had excused himself into polite absence early enough, in his disciplined tactfulness shunning the intimacy the noble hosts had wished to share with their higher-ranked guests. Hornblower decided to see to how the servants would relocate his disabled officer to his bedchamber, not so much out of duty but mostly because he felt wakeful himself.

After the servants had left it took Bush a while to realise that the wine had taken the better of him in a most treacherous way.

"Would you please wake up Brown, sir?"

"Absolutely not. Let me help you."

The drinks hadn't brought him inebriety but created a kind of melancholic distance. He observed Bush's embarrassment with vague, cold-blooded amusement.

"Not for the world, sir. This is...inappropriate."

"Come on, I'm not your captain any more. Had I been titled with a lordship, maybe then it'd be inappropriate, but now we are equal."

"We are not," replied Bush with firm conviction, which Hornblower ignored.

He chose, however, to grant his - former, he reminded himself - officer some privacy and stayed on the doorstep to the bedroom, leaving the door open in case of emergency. The world, chased away by the sherry, seemed diminished, as if seen through the wrong end of the eyeglass; he could glimpse the white spot of Bush's shirt in the dusk but it seemed far out of reach, its bearer but a silhouette.

"William, you look like a heron in the reeds," Hornblower remarked in a sudden fit of poetry and bit his tongue at the potential offence of his metaphor; the silhouette wavered but managed to keep its balance.

"I'm doing my best, sir. You will soon see that I'm also able to do without help in undressing."

The drink was putting incorrect implications in his mind, Hornblower concluded as he helped Bush hop along towards the bed. He forgot to turn away and watched, not even realising the focus of his gaze, how Bush tried to remove his clothes, vainly pulling at the wrong laces and missing the buttons.

"You're a man full of self-conceit, William," he diagnosed and, dropping to his knees, pushed Bush's hands out of the way to the buckl his his trousers.

"You shouldn't be doing that, sir..."

"If you want me to stop, say it in French," Hornblower demanded suddenly feeling brutal, and was satisfied to see that the attempt to formulate his protest in the alien language distracted Bush from the fight with his captain's hands.

"Tou ne devrais pas fare..."

"Faire, not fare. Shut up, William, you speak awful French."

***

The world closed in around him abruptly and down to the very minute detail, and he fought with momentary dizziness at the shock. No longer a darkling plain of half-dream half-wakefulness, the room advanced onto him, gentle candle glow highlighting every object. The dark gap of the window and the starless night outside. The warm mahogany of the furniture, and the white sheets of the bed. Himself, straddling Bush's hips. And Bush, unable to say a word and staring at him, mesmerized, like a mouse at the cobra.

He rolled off with the agility his body hadn't experienced in ages. He wasn't sure in his sorrow or regret, the same as he hadn't been sure in his joy only the moment ago when he was still feeling the other's body between his thighs.

He stood up, considering an apology. Under the thin sheet the contour of Bush's body was discernable, unfamiliar in its dissymmetry. The thought of apology faded in Hornblower's mind.

"Let me see it."

Bush shook his head in denial and pulled the sheet closer to his chest, like a virgin holding the hem of her skirt in a sincere and futile hope it'd stop the violator.

"Let me."

He insisted stubbornly. He put his hand on the sheet and tugged it downwards, his grip creasing the fabric. He could feel the warm relief of the body under it. Then, he could see it whole, unconcealed, mutilated, exposed to forever reproach him.

"I'm sorry." He slid the hand away to bury his face in his palms. Dead men never rise, and shipwrecks never set sail again.

***

...Why are you haunting me? What is the meaning of your overturned keel? Why are you lying here on the sand, your desecrated ribs a ghostless waste? Has the sea itself denied you final rest and expelled you from its depths?

Winds and waves have gnawed off the flesh and colour from your beams. What is the lesson that I must learn from their bleak, bone-like whiteness? Your single surviving mast points horizontally, to a shore invisible and away from the guiding constellations. Is it to show me that I had been blind in my reckoning of your fate?

The sky over the Loire in winter is always overcast and bleak. I long to see the stars again.

***

Hornblower woke up from the painful stiffness in his back. He didn't remember closing his eyes to sleep; he didn't remember finding repose on the floor. Perhaps the Count's sherry proved too strong for his weary nerves, after all. Now he was sitting with his back leaning against the bed and his cheek nested in Bush's open palm. Except for the cheek, which had been rather comfortable throughout the night, his body ached like a dozen blasted hells.

"Bon matin," he whispered, and Bush groaned in reply.

"Please, sir, not again! I admit my head isn't at its brightest today - I'm afraid it was very unwise for me to risk drinking that much."

Hornblower snickered and regretted the action at once. Every single muscle seemed to be crying in protest; he must be too old for such follies as spending his nights anywhere but in his own bed.

"Well, it's always time good enough to learn a new phrase. You never know what, and when, will come in practical."

"Hmm," in a sudden insight, Hornblower had just pronounced the word that had a magical appeal to his sensible officer. "In this case I will try to do my best. What was the particular expression you had in mind, sir?"

"Je t'aime."

"And what does it mean?"

" 'I love you'. Perhaps the most useful phrase to know in France. And anywhere in the world, for that matter," Hornblower added philosophically and wondered at the many things that could have been less bitter in his life if he had indeed made better and oftener use of that phrase.

"Je t'aime, sir."

"Excellent, Mr. Bush."

***

He listened to the thumps from the room next to his, muffled by the thick walls but still audible to his concerned ear. For the last few days Bush had been practicing the dreary and tricky task of walking on the legs one of which was artificial. Hornblower couldn't bring himself to be present during every hour of that training. He chided himself for such weakness, and yet was unable to overcome his reluctance.

He often closed his eyes; sometimes he even pressed his palms over his ears, even if briefly, because the next moment he was already cursing himself with the same fervour Bush was cursing his awkwardness behind the wall. It was only the first time on foot that Bush was surprised at the difficulties he now faced; soon enough astonishment gave way to irritation, and then to misery.

"I will learn, sir," he would promise Hornblower repeatedly, as if his captain was going to censure him.

I will learn, Hornblower would promise himself in silent echo and then think of the "Sutherland". Stubbornly, much like Bush was mustering courage to conquer his maiming, he tried to puzzle out the meaning of his persistent dream.

The first ship he surrendered. He had always been wary a ship would sink when under his command. The "Sutherland" didn't sink: it was pulled out onto a bank near Rosas and then looted of all her surviving belongings. It was a mockery of a ship's fate - to end its life in the hands of land-treading hyenas. She should have gone down, into the swallowing sea and the tranquillity underneath its surface, forever unreachable to both friends and foes. The ship in his dreams did not resent her captain's betrayal; she mourned her shallow grave of sand, over which the waves would never sing their eternal note of sadness.

And, instead of regret for his lost chances, instead of the dark premonition about his life and career, he found in himself only sympathy. Not only Bush had been crippled; his own legs were cut together with the masts of his ship. He wasn't made for walking on dry land. He had forgotten how solid it could be when one fell down.

And the sky that domed over it was solid as well, as if a cup full of snow had been put over the world, and he felt blind inside.

***

After Hornblower had cracked the conundrum of the dream, his sleep became barren. It was as if he was falling into a dark pit in the evening, only to wake up a few hours later feeling more tired than before going to bed.

He sat up and rubbed his eyes in the inevitability to live through another of the many days that were so perfectly alike. Soon there was a knock on the door, but he didn't allow himself to believe there might be anything out of the usual behind it.

"Can I come in, sir?"

Slowly, far from as steadily as he would like himself to be but yet helped by nobody, Bush stumbled into the room, a proud smile on his face and all rules of discipline forgotten. If Hornblower had been lethargic before, in a blink he was fully awake.

"William!" He searched for words that could sound an appropriate congratulation, remembered that it was his commands the consequences of which Bush had to fight, and then lost track of his thought completely. Not that Bush seemed to be expecting any voiced praise from his captain, quite satisfied simply to see the joy on his face.

"I have also learned a few new words. Tu sais que t'es baisable, sir."

"Goodness! Whoever has taught you that?"

"Brown, sir. He says it's very a vernacular compliment. He assured me everybody he says it to usually glows with happiness."

Feeling his lips stretch into a grin despite his will, Hornblower had to admit that Brown couldn't be more right.

***

That night he climbed to the upper floor of the house, as close to the sky as he could get. The cold breeze that was quickly seeping into the room through the open window carried neither the roar nor the scent of the sea. But it carried soft murmurs of the sleeping forest below, and the smell of wet earth, and a promise of an early spring.

He had hoped the strong breeze would drive away the clouds and give him a view of the swarm of stars. The sky was still overcast. He waited, regardless of the late time and stubborn beyond reason. Billowing clouds were rushing above him like waves, and again he thought that everything was turned upside down on dry land.

A narrow gap formed briefly in the west. He looked at it with hope, knowing that somewhere out in the ocean a navigator on a ship had to be looking up just as he did, this sudden clearance his chance to find his bearings.

Instead of the swarm he saw only a single star. A lonely wolf's star far away over the invisible ocean.

And he knew it wasn't about death.

*End*

***
footnote about the French phrases [in order of appearance]
1. Vous ne pouvez pas refuser - You can't refuse.
2. Commençons - let us begin.
3. Tou ne devrais pas fare [cela] - You shouldn't be doing that.
4. Je t'aime - I love you.
5. Tu sais que t'es baisable - Do you know that you are fuckable.
- 1
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The Garden of Proserpine