Work Text:
1. It is a Tuesday. The fourteenth of the month, 1812. The airs off the sea were strong and fresh as Bush passed through the dockyard early this morning, yet inside it is as still as a grave. The windows do not open; the dirty glass is shut tight against the outside world.
There is a fly crawling across the ink-stained pages on the desk.
2. He leaves echoes and footprints in the grime when he walks; they aren't quite the same. He paces to the window, stops, paces back. The table is cleaner than the wooden floor, yet more cluttered. It has marks, scratches, it creaks under the strain when Bush leans on it. It looks as though it has been old for a long time. The drawer still slides silently though, and Bush keeps his more important items in there: his pipe, some correspondence. Hornblower's hand is easy to read.
On the surface there is a pile of orders, a pile of requisitions, of letters, documentation, rubbish. Bush knows where everything is, even though the piles overlap and the pages fit themselves into one another. The curious fly walks across all of it.
3. When he arrives in the mornings he can smell tobacco.
There have been a few nights, lately, when Bush wakes from a dream and could swear he smells hot gunpowder. Waking leaves him disoriented, it feels like the enveloping silence after an almighty blast.
Smoke and tar and salt; it's all still in his head. Years ago a woman's finger had wandered across his palm and she said there will be a battle. She said, It has all been written. Bush gave her a coin, placed it on the little table and walked unsteadily down the street.
4. Bush watches the fly on the windowpane. It travels up and left and stops and up and back to where it started.
He thinks: Stupid little beast.
He thinks: How did it get in here?
He thinks: You can't get out.
5. Another ship arrives for the breaker's yard. Bush stands by while she passes, taking in her pocked hull, the damaged oak. The way she glides, parting the water. God damn his eyes.
6. The woman's name was Rose. She smiled when he sat down and didn't smile when he left, and Gerard jostled him outside and grinned and asked Bush if he had got what he paid for.
No, he thinks. Because he'll never go to sea again, so she was wrong. She must have been wrong.
7. Some days he says barely a word, for lack of company and things to say. There's no need of it because his business is so much paper and standing watch as old ships are pulled in. He knows them, mostly; remembers their names and what they used to do. This one, she sailed to Jamaica, her timbers stretching under the hot sun.
The lad who brings the dispatches reminds Bush of a midshipman, a tall, cheerful boy, dead at Trafalgar. When that ship comes in the men will take apart the deck he stood on. What they won't know is that it is the boy's good fortune, to be finished and gone; if the surgeon had saved him he'd have been taken home where everyone could look on the pieces, the ones left and the ones missing, and then he would be put somewhere out of the way.
Bush thinks about Trafalgar and remembers the damned stinging of his eyes, the snapped beams, the fading boom as Admiral Nelson staggered and fell back. Smoke and salt. Red and blue. When they sailed the Admiral had stood with his head up and he wore his uniform exactly, Bush thinks, as it should be worn. The only difference was in one blue sleeve, pinned near his chest like a medal.
8. The dirt which obscures the view can't shut out the gleam of daylight on water.
9. The fly has given up its exploration and is trying to force its way through the window, it beats its head again and again, buzzing, hitting, buzzing. Out, out, out.
Bush turns and paces back to the table and shoves at his chair so he can drop down into it. The weight of his wooden leg drags at his hip, a mournful ache above and below. He sifts the pile in front of him and picks up his quill to mend it. He shaves it neat with the knife until it is fit for writing.
10. The Admiral had been with Captain Hardy before the end, which was as it should be. How glad Hardy must have been, later when he could think of it. A great man, Admiral Nelson. Bush is of the opinion that Hornblower will be like him some day, though it's Bush with the stump. The fin, as Nelson might have said.
How much harder the loss of an arm than a leg? Bush wonders. What difference if you can still walk the deck and do your duty?
11. I hope, his sister had once written in a letter to him. Perhaps she went on, I hope you are well or I hope you have been able to find employment, or I hope you will think of your family. Bush doesn't remember how it went now, but the beginning stayed with him, the sense memory of ink and thin paper, the sentiment buried in a lot of words. I hope.
At the door there is a solid knock; the dispatches have arrived. It is Tuesday, the fourteenth of the month, 1812. Bush takes the bundle in two hands, and realises the noise of the fly has stopped.