Flying Colours. By C.S. Forester

Flying Colours

C. S. Forester (1938)

E-book downloaded from the Internet

The book begins with Hornblower in captivity in Rosas. Soon, in midwinter, he and and an injured Bush and a ‘coxwain’ Brown are sent to Paris for show trial. The charge is that he sailed under false colours (he once used the French flag on the Sutherland to pull off a trick) and therefore is a spy, likely to be shot. On the way all three escape from the carriage in which they are travelling, and find shelter in the chateau of a local nobelman on the banks of the Loire. The nobelman is a royalist with sympathies for the ‘ancien regime’. In the next six or eight months Hornblower falls in love with the nobelman’s widowed daughter-in-law Marie, Bush recovers and learns to use a wooden leg, and they all build a shallow boat. On this boat the three of them sail down the Loire, dressed as fisherman, and reach the sea port of Nantes. Here, dressed as customs officials, they steal a French ship and sail it to England with ‘flying colours’. He is formally arrested for his role in letting the Sutherland sink, but in the ensuing court martial is honourably cleared. He learns that Sir Percy Leighton died in the action in Rosas, and also that his wife Maria died in childbirth, though the child was safe, and now in the care of Lady Barbara. He is knighted, goes to meet his son at Lady Barbara’s and find that she still loves him and wants him.