It was a wide low room—a disused storeroom, in fact—lit and ventilated only by a few heavily barred apertures opening into the fortress ditch. It stank of closely confined humanity and it was at present filled with a babel of sound as what was left of the crew of the Sutherland plied questions at someone hidden in the middle of the crowd. At Hornblower’s entrance the crowd fell apart and the new prisoner came forward; he was naked save for his duck trousers and a long pigtail hung down his back.
“Who are you?” demanded Hornblower.
“Phillips, sir. Maintopman in the Pluto.”
His honest blue eyes met Hornblower’s gaze without a sign of flinching. Hornblower could guess that he was neither a deserter nor a spy—he had borne both possibilities in mind.
“How did you come here?”
“We was settin’ sail, sir, to beat out o’ the bay. We’d just seen the old Sutherland take fire, an’ Cap’n Elliott he says to us, he says, sir, ‘Now’s the time, my lads. Top’sls and to’gar’ns.’ So up we went aloft, sir, an’ I’d just taken the earring o’ the main to’gar’n when down came the mast, sir, an’ I was pitched off into the water. So was a lot o’ my mates, sir, but just then the Frenchy which was burnin’ blew up, an’ I think the wreckage killed a lot of ‘em, sir, ‘cos I found I was alone, an’ Pluto was gone away, an’ so I swum for the shore, an’ there was a lot of Frenchies what I think had swum from the burning Frenchy an’ they took me to some sojers an’ the sojers brought me here, sir. There was a orficer what arst me questions—it’d ‘a made you laugh, sir, to hear him trying to speak English—but I wasn’t sayin’ nothin’, sir. An’ when they see that they puts me in here along with the others, sir. I was just telling ‘em about the fight, sir. There was the old Pluto, an’ Caligula, sir, an’—”