The flying squadron

Gantley Hall

'What became of him?'

Drinkwater stirred from his reverie and looked at his wife working at her tapestry frame. Between them the fire leapt and crackled, flaring at the updraft in the chimney. Its warmth combined with the rum toddy, a good dinner and the gale raging unregarded outside to induce a detached stupor in Captain Drinkwater. To his wife he seemed to be dozing peacefully; in reality he was on the rack of conscience.

'I’m sorry, my dear, what did you say?'

'What became of him?'

'Who?'

'Mr Metcalfe. You were telling me about him.'

'Of course, how stupid. Forgive me ...'

'There is nothing to forgive, you dozed off.'

'Yes,' Drinkwater lied, 'I must have ...'

A gust of wind slammed against the side of the house and the shutters and sashes of the withdrawing room rattled violently. Between them the fire flared into even greater activity, roaring and subsiding as it consumed the logs before their eyes, a remorseless foretaste of Hell, Drinkwater thought uncomfortably.

'God help sailors on a night like this,' he remarked tritely, taking refuge in the cliché as he stirred himself, bent forward and threw another brace of logs into the fire-basket. 'Metcalfe is in Haslar, the naval hospital at Gosport.'

'I know, Nathaniel,' Elizabeth chid him gently. 'Is he mad?'

Drinkwater pulled himself together and determined to make small talk with his wife. Her brown eyes regarded him over her poised needle and he felt uncomfortable under their scrutiny. Had she guessed anything? He had asked himself the same question in the weeks he had been home, examined every facet of his behaviour and concluded she could only have been suspicious because of his solicitude. He cursed himself for his stupidity; he was no dissembler.

'The doctors at Haslar were content to conclude it, yes, but our surgeon, Mr Pym, thought otherwise.'

'And yet the poor man was delivered up ...'

'We had no alternative and, to be candid, Bess, I fear I agreed with the bulk of medical opinion. The man was quite incapable of any rationality after the incident, his whole posture was preposterous ...'

Drinkwater recalled the way Metcalfe had stood back, the Ferguson rifle crooked in his left elbow, his right hand extended as though for applause, a curious, expectant look upon his face, an actor upon a stage of his own imagining. His whole attitude had been that of a man who had just achieved a wonder; only his eyes, eyes that stared directly at Drinkwater himself, seemed detached from the awful reality of the act he had just perpetrated.

Like everyone on Patrician's upper deck, Drinkwater was stunned; then a noise of indignation reached them, rolling across the water from the Stingray. A moment later it was taken up aboard Patrician. Thurston had been popular, his desertion connived at: his murder was resented. The undertones of combination and mutiny implicit in the events of the past days instantly rose up to confront Drinkwater. Metcalfe's action had provided a catalyst for disaffection to become transformed into open rebellion. He was within a whisker of losing control of his ship, of having her seized and possibly handed over to the Americans, her people seeking asylum, her loss to the Royal Navy an ignominious cause of rupture between Great Britain and the United States of America.

It was imperative he acted at once and he bellowed for silence, for the helm and braces to be trimmed and for Moncrieff to place Mr Metcalfe under immediate arrest, he was gratified, in a sweating relief, to see others, the marine officer, Sergeant Hudson, Comley the boatswain and Wyatt the master, move swiftly to divert trouble, to impose the bonds of conditioned discipline and strangle at birth the sudden surge of popular compassion and anger.

The Stingray had made no move to drop downstream in their wake as Drinkwater crowded on sail, as much to increase the distance between the two ships as to occupy the Patricians. Thus he had escaped into the Atlantic and set their course for home.

'If you were so certain, why did your surgeon think otherwise?' Elizabeth asked.

'Our opinions did not appear to differ at first. We confined Metcalfe to his cabin, put a guard on him and both of us agreed that insanity was the most humane explanation for his conduct, as much for himself as to avoid trouble with the people. There was, moreover, the possibility of diplomatic repercussions, though after I had discussed it with Vansittart, we concluded Captain Stewart was unlikely to have made a fuss, since it was quite clear Thurston was a deserter from Patrician and therefore his sheltering by Stewart could have constituted a provocative act. In the amiable circumstances then prevailing, at least according to Vansittart's account, Stewart would have embarrassed his own government and marred his already meagre chances of advancement.' Drinkwater paused, remembering the darkly handsome American. 'Stewart made a number of rather puerile threats against us if it came to war and doubtless has added the incident to his catalogue of British infamy, but I did not take him for a complete fool...'

'But you think, despite this trouble, it will not come to war?'

'No,' Drinkwater shook his head, 'I hope not.'

They relapsed into silence again. The gale lashed the house with a sudden flurry of rain and they both looked up, caught each other's eyes and smiled.

'It is good to have you home, my dear.'

'It is good to be home, Bess.'

He sincerely meant it, yet the gusting wind tugged at him, teasing him away from this domestic cosiness. Up and down the country men and women, even the humblest cottager, would be huddled about their fires of peat, driftwood or sea-coal. Why was it he had to suffer this perverse tugging away? In all honesty he wanted to be nowhere else on earth than here, beside his wife. Had he not blessed the severe and sudden leak that had confined Patrician to a graving dock in Dock Town, Plymouth, where her sprung garboard had caused the master-shipwright to scratch his head? He sighed, stared into the fire and missed the look his wife threw him.

'So what made your surgeon change his mind?'

Drinkwater wrenched his thoughts back to the present. 'A theory — a theory he was developing into a thesis. If I understood him aright, it was his contention (and Metcalfe had, apparently, furnished him with evidence over a long period) that Metcalfe was, as it were, two people. No, that ain't right: he considered Metcalfe possessed two individual personalities ...

'Pym argued we all have a tendency to be two people, a fusion of opposites, of contrary humours. The relationship between weaknesses and strengths, likes and dislikes, the imbalance of these humours and so forth, nevertheless produces an equilibrium which inclines in favour of one or the other, making us predominantly one type of person, or another and hence forming our characters.

'He seemed to think Metcalfe's disparate parts were out of kilter in the sense that they exactly balanced, do you see? Thus, he postulated, if you conceive circumstances acting like the moon upon water, the water being these leanings, or inclinations inherent in us, our response is the vacillation of moods and humours. Because one humour predominates, we remain in character, whereas in Metcalfe's case the swings from one to another were equal, his personality was not weighted in favour of choler or sanguinity or phlegm, for instance, but swung more violently and uncontrollably from one exclusive humour to another.

'Therefore he became wholly one half of his complete character, before changing and becoming the other. Pym dignified his hypothesis the Pendular Personality and proposed to publish a treatise about it.'

'But surely such a condition is, nevertheless, a form of madness.'

'Yes, I suppose it is. Though Pym suggested that so rational an explanation made of it a disease, madness being a condition beyond explanation. At all events it does not sit happily upon a sea-officer's shoulders.'

Poor Metcalfe. He had wept with remorse when his accusers confronted him with the enormity of murder, yet a day later, when Drinkwater had visited him again, he had screamed ingratitude, claiming to have done everything and more that his commander wished for and chastising Drinkwater for abandoning a loyal subordinate capable of great distinction. Pym had prescribed laudanum and they had brought him back dopey with the opiate.

There had been nothing more that Drinkwater could have done for Metcalfe. He waited upon the man's wife in her lodgings at Southsea and expressed his condolences. He gave her a testimonial for the Sick and Hurt Board and twenty guineas to tide her over. She had a snot-nosed brat at her side and another barely off the breast. Drinkwater had been led to believe Metcalfe came from a good family, but the appearance of his wife suggested a life of penurious scrimping and saving, of pretensions beyond means and ambitions beyond ability. The impression left by this sad meeting weighed heavily upon his own troubles as he made his way home.

Was Pym right? His theory had, as far as Drinkwater could judge, a logical attraction. He had himself proved to be two men and had behaved as such in the verdant woodlands of Virginia, so much so that he seemed now to be a different person to the man who had lain with Arabella Shaw. That careless spirit had been younger and wilder than the heat-stupefied, half-soaked, married and middle-aged sea-officer now sprawled before the fire in Gantley Hall. Had he, at least temporarily, suffered from an onset of the same dichotomous insanity which had seized so permanent a hold on Metcalfe? Was he in the grip of Pym's pendular personality?

The ridiculous humour of the alliteration escaped him.

One could argue he had done no more than thousands of men had done before him. He had, after all, spent most of his adult life cooped up on ship-board, estranged even from the body of his lawful wedded wife, so that the willing proximity of so enchanting, comely and passionate a woman as Arabella was irresistible. He could cite other encounters, with Dona Ana Maria Conchita Arguello de Salas and Hortense Santhonax, women whose beauty was fabled and yet with whom he had behaved with utter propriety, notwithstanding fate had thrown them together in unusual circumstances. He could invent no end of excuses for his momentary weakness and invent no end of specious proofs as to his probity. But he could think of no justification for his behaviour with Arabella.

He dared not look at his wife, lest she catch his eye and ask, in her acutely intuitive way, what troubled him. The events of that afternoon, the riot in the blood which had ended in their physical commingling, stood as a great sin in Drinkwater's mind.

Yet, God knew, he had committed greater sins. He was a murderer himself, perhaps more so than poor Metcalfe, for he had killed in cold blood, mechanically, under orders, at the behest of his Sovereign. And not once but many times.

He had shot out the brains of a Spanish seaman and hacked down a French officer long before his majority, yet had suffered no remorse, rather, he recollected, the contrary. Had the sanction of war relieved him of the trouble of a conscience over such matters? It was not logical to suppose that he suffered now merely because he loved his wife and he had threatened her with his mindless infidelity. Conscience should, if he understood it aright, prick him for every sin, not just the one that threatened his domestic security.

No, he had loved Arabella Shaw that afternoon, loved her as completely and consumingly as he had loved his wife and it was the diminution of the latter that wounded him most.

Arabella too had been driven by more than the demand of physical release, he was certain. She could have had the pick of those eager young officers, yet had chosen him, and as surely as he had recoiled after their wild fling, she had made no move to renew their passion, as if she too half-regretted it. She too harboured another love: that for her dead husband.

The moment he seized upon the thought, he doubted it.

'Could you still love me after my death?' he found himself blurting out, so introverted had his train of thought become.

Elizabeth looked up, hand poised above the circular frame, the candlelight playing upon the needle with its trail of scarlet thread.

'Why do you ask?'

He shrugged, colouring, wishing he had guarded his tongue and seized by a sudden conviction that Elizabeth knew all about his affair, that he had spoken in his sleep and had called Arabella's name in his dreams. 'A fancy I have,' he said lamely, 'a self-conceit...'

'I love you when you are not here,' she replied, 'it is as bad sometimes as being a widow.'

The phrases struck him as confirmation of his fears, yet it might be mere foolishness on his part. He felt her eyes upon him almost quizzically.

'You are exhausted with this war,' she said, watching her husband with concern, thinking him much older since he returned from America in a way she had not previously noticed.

'I am perverted by this war,' he wanted to say, but he nodded his weariness and thrust himself to his feet. He could not apportion blame elsewhere but within himself. 'I’ll take a turn outside before we go up, Bess,' he said instead, 'to see all's well.' He bent over her head and kissed her hair. The strands of grey caught the yellow light and looked almost golden.

'Don't be long,' she said, and the catch in her voice articulated her desire. He squeezed her shoulder. Yes, he would drown his senses in the all-encompassing warmth of her body, but first he must excoriate his soul.

The soughing of the wind in the trees was like the wild hiss of the sea when it leaps high alongside a running ship. The chill of the night and the gale pained him with a heartless mortification which he welcomed. The snorting and stamping from the stables told where the horses were distracted by the wild night and, as he struck the edge of the wood behind the house, he caught a glimpse of the lighthouses at Orfordness. Standing still he thought he could hear, just below the roar of the gale, the sussuration of shingle on the foreshore of Hollesley Bay. Turning his back to the wind and the sea, he headed inland.

The ruins of the old priory had seemed a fashionable embellishment to the acquisition of the hall, a Gothic fantasy within which to indulge his wife and daughter with picnics, not to mention his son to whom the ivy ruins had become a private kingdom. And while he loved the simple modernity of the house, these rambling ecclesiastical remnants had assumed an entirely different character in his mind.

This was the place he came when he was torn by the estrangement assailing all seamen, even when in the bosom of their families. Man returns always and most happily to the familiar, even when it pains him, for from there he can contemplate what he most desires in its most ideal, anticipatory state. For Drinkwater the ruined priory was the place where he came closest to the spiritual, and hence to what he conceived as God. His faith in the timeless wisdom of an omnipotent providence had been shaken by his riotous passion for Arabella. Intellectually he knew the thing to have been a temporary, if over­powering aberration, but he was rocked by its violence, by his own loss of control, by its pointlessness in a universe he imagined ordered. And then it struck him as a terrible self-delusion, this assumption. Either all was indeed vanity or all had a hidden purpose. If the former then every endeavour was destined to a redundancy comparable to the consecrated ruins about him; if the latter then every act was of unperceived, incomprehensible significance. Not only his adultery, but also Metcalfe's Parthian shot.

The enormous significance of this disarmingly simple choice rocked him to the very edge of sanity. He stood alone on the few flags that graced the roofless chancel, unconsciously spread his arms apart and howled at the magnificently merciless sky.

CHAPTER 11 A Crossing of Rubicons

When the assassination occurred, Captain and Mrs Nathaniel Drinkwater were in London as guests of Lord Dungarth, no more than a few hundred yards from the lobby of Parliament where the Prime Minister was shot. Spencer Perceval's policy of non-conciliation with the Americans, maintained against a vociferous opposition led by the liberal Whitbread and the banker Baring, also flew in the face of Canning's advice. His calm leadership through the Regency crisis was unappreciated in the country, where the Prince Regent was unpopular, and by retaining his former post as Chancellor of the Exchequer he attracted obloquy, for he controlled the nation's purse-strings. He was widely blamed for the economic chaos prevailing in the country. The middle classes held him responsible for the widespread bankruptcies among themselves, while the town labourers, who had been driven to loom- and machine-smashing in a spate of desperate vandalism, thought him an agent of the devil.

The authorities ruthlessly hanged sixteen Luddite frame-breakers, but failed to quell the widespread discontent resulting from inflation, the depreciation of the pound sterling, bad harvests and a consequent depression. Perceval's name was inseparable from these misfortunes. Starvation, vagrancy and the ills of unemployment in the crowded industrial wens tied down regiments of light horse, while the drain of gold in support of the Portuguese and Spanish in their fight against the French invader further exacerbated the situation.

But Great Britain was not alone. France herself was in the grip of depression and the Tsar of Russia had withdrawn from Napoleon's Continental System sixteen months earlier in an attempt to repair the damage it had done to his own country's economy. Lord Dungarth had been sanguine that open hostilities between Russia and France would follow. For years the efforts of his Secret Department had been largely devoted to promoting this breach, but time had passed and although rumour rebounded, particularly from a Parisian bookseller in British pay who reported the ordering of all available books about Russia by the Tuileries, nothing concrete happened.

Closer to home Perceval was as intransigent as the Admiralty were devoid of instructions for His Britannic Majesty's frigate Patrician. He refused any revocation of Britain's Orders-in-Council, even to reopen trade with the United States. Although both the French and British issued special licences to beat their own embargoes by the back door, it was insufficient to relieve the general distress. On 11 May, four days after the Drinkwaters had come up to town, Perceval was shot by a Lancastrian bankrupt named Bellingham. The assassin was declared mad, a diagnosis uncomfortably close to Drinkwater's own solution of the dilemma of Metcalfe.

It was to be the first in a series of events which were to make the year 1812, already heavy with astrological portents, so memorable. Even the inactivity of his frigate seemed to the susceptible Drinkwater to be but a hiatus, a calm presaging a storm.

For Drinkwater and Elizabeth, his Lordship's invitation was a mark of both favour and condescension. Elizabeth was openly flattered but worried about her wardrobe, certain that her own homespun was quite inappropriate and that even the best efforts of the self-styled couturiers of Ipswich were equally unsuitable. She need not have worried. Dungarth was an ageing, peg-legged widower, his house in Lord North Street chilly and without a trace of feminine frippery. The bachelor establishment was, he declared on their arrival, entirely at Elizabeth's disposal and she was to consider herself its mistress. For himself, he required only two meals a day and the more or less constant company of her husband.

Drinkwater was reluctant to tell his wife of their private conversations. She correctly deduced they had some bearing upon affairs of state. In any case the earl redeemed himself by his society during the evenings. Drinkwater knew the effort it cost him, but he held his peace; Elizabeth was enchanted and flattered, and blossomed under Dungarth's generous patronage. They visited a number of distinguished houses, which gratified Elizabeth's curiosity and her desire to sample society, though she continued to suffer agonies over her lack of fashionable attire. Conscience compelled Drinkwater to remedy this deficiency to some extent, but she nevertheless felt her provincial awkwardness acutely. Her ignorance of affairs of the world, by which was meant not what she read in the broadsheets (about which she was exceedingly well-informed) but the gossip and innuendo of the ton, provoked sufficient faux pas to spoil several evenings. It was an experience she soon tired of.

As for Dungarth, Drinkwater was appalled by his appearance. He had marked the earl's decline at their last meeting, but Dungarth's obesity was dropsical in its extent and his corpulent figure distressed him for its awkwardness as much as it stirred the pity of his friends.

'I am told it is fashionable,' he grumbled, putting a brave face on it, 'that the friends of Holland House all eat like hogs to put on the kind of weight borne by the Prince of Wales, imitation being the sincerest form of flattery. But, by God, I 'd sell my soul to the devil if it went with a stone or two of this gross avoirdupois. Forgive me, m'dear,' he apologized to Elizabeth.

'Please, my Lord ...' She waved aside his embarrassment, moved by the brave and gallant twinkle in his hazel eyes.

'For God's sake, call me John.' Dungarth dropped into a creaking chair and waved Drinkwater to sit. 'They tell me your ship's held up, Nat.'

'Aye, dockyard delays, a shortage of almost everything ...'

'Including orders ...'

'So,' Drinkwater grinned, scratching his scarred cheek, 'you do have a hand in her inactivity.'

Dungarth shrugged. 'Interruption of the Baltic trade confounds the dockyards, I suppose, despite our best efforts', this with significance and a heavy emphasis on the plural pronoun, 'and the Tsar's declared intention of abandoning the dictates of Paris.'

'And lack of men, of course,' Drinkwater added, suddenly gloomy, 'always a want of them. I understand from Lieutenant Frey that every cruiser putting into the Sound poaches a handful despite my orders and those of the Port Admiral. They have even taken my coxswain.'

'Your worst enemies are always your own cloth, Nat.'

'I hope, my Lord,' put in Elizabeth, 'that that is not too enigmatic a response.'

'Ah-ha, ma'am, you're shrewd, but in this case mistaken. I have nothing to do with the felonious practices of cruiser captains.'

'Since I am so out of tune with you, then, my Lord,' Elizabeth said with mock severity, rising to draw the gentlemen after her and waving a relieved Dungarth back into his sagging chair, 'and since you are so lately come in, I shall leave you to your gossip and decanters.'

'You are cross with me, ma'am ...'

'Incensed, my Lord ...'

'But too gentle to tell me; you have an angel for a wife, Nathaniel.'

The men settled to their port and sat for a few moments in companionable silence.

'You're ready to go to sea again, aren't you, Nat?' Dungarth said at last.

'I've no need to argue the circumstances, my Lord ...'

'John, for heaven's sake

'You know the tug of one thing when the other is at hand.'

'This damned war has ruined us as men, though only God alone knows what it will do to us as a nation.'

'You want me for the Baltic?'

'If and when.'

'I loathe waiting.'

'If you commanded a ship of the line, you would be doing nothing other than waiting and watching off La Rochelle, or L'Orient, or Ushant...'

'The reflection does not stopper off my impatience.'

Dungarth looked at his friend with a shrewd eye.

Something's amiss, Nat; what the devil's eating you?'

Drinkwater met Dungarth's gaze. He had no need of pretence with so old and trusted a colleague. 'Unfinished business,' he replied.

'In the Baltic?'

'In America.'

'Not a woman like Hortense Santhonax? A temptress? No, a siren?'

'Not entirely, though I am not blameless in that quarter; more a feeling, an intuition.'

Dungarth's look changed to one of admiration and he slapped his good knee. 'My dear fellow, I knew you were the man for the task after I'm gone. 'Tis the feeling you need for the game, to be sure, and you have it in abundance. You'll suffer for it, as I warrant you already have done—are doing, by the look of you, but 'tis an indispensable ingredient for the puppet-master.'

Drinkwater shook his head at the use of this phrase, 'No, my Lord,' he said with firm formality, 'not that.'

'There is quite simply no one else,' Dungarth expostulated, waving this protest aside, 'but there is a little time. I'm not called to answer for my sins just yet.'

'You've heard news today, haven't you?' Drinkwater asked directly. 'Is it from the Baltic?'

'No, America. I've asked Moira to dinner tomorrow. He has correspondents in the southern states which in general are hostile to us but where he left a few friends. I think Vansittart's mission was, after all, a failure.'

Drinkwater went gloomily to bed. Elizabeth was reading one of Miss Austen's novels by candlelight, Drinkwater noticed, but closed it upon her finger and looked up at her husband who added his own candelabra to the one illuminating the bed. 'May one ask what you two find to talk about?'

Drinkwater knew the question to be arch, that its bluntness hid a pent-up and justifiable curiosity. Elizabeth, with her talent for divination, had sensed from the very length and earnestness of the men's deliberations that something more than mere idle male gossip about politics was in the air. He knew too, with some relief, that she had concluded his own preoccupations were bound up with these almost hermetic discussions.

He took off his coat and sat on the bed to kick off his shoes.

'He knows himself to be dying, Bess, and is concerned for his life's work. Did I ever tell you he was once, when I knew him as the first lieutenant of the Cyclops, the most liberal of men? He was largely sympathetic with the American rebels at one time. His implacable hatred of the French derives from the mischief done to the body of his wife. She died in Florence shortly after the outbreak of the revolution. He was bringing her back through France when the revolutionaries, seeing the arms on his coach, tore the coffin open ...'

'How awful…'

'You have seen Romney's portrait of her?'

'Yes, yes. She was extraordinarily beautiful.' Elizabeth paused, looked down at her book and set it aside. 'And ... ?'

'Dungarth has become', Drinkwater said with a sigh, 'the Admiralty's chief intelligencer, the repository and digest of a thousand titbits and snippets, reports of facts and rumours; in short a puppet-master pulling strings across half Europe, even as far as the steppes of Asia ...'

'And you are to succeed him?'

Drinkwater looked at his wife full-face. 'How the deuce ... ?'

She shrugged. 'I guessed. You have done nothing but closet yourselves and I know he is not a man to show prejudice to a woman merely because of her sex.'

Drinkwater nodded. 'Of course, I am quite inadequate to the task,' he said earnestly, 'but it appears no one else is fitter and I am slightly acquainted with something of the business, being known to agents in France and Russia ...'

'Spies, you mean,' Elizabeth said flatly and Drinkwater bridled at the implicit disapproval. He opened his mouth to explain, thought better of it and shifted tack.

'Anyway, Dungarth has invited Lord Moira to dinner tomorrow ...'

'And shall I be allowed to ... ?'

'Oh, come, Elizabeth,' Drinkwater said irritably, hooking a finger in his stock, 'I like this whole situation no better than you ...'

Elizabeth leaned forward and placed a finger on his lips.

Tell me who this Lord Moira is.'

'Better I tell you who he was. The Yankees knew him as Lord Rawdon, and he gave them hell through the pine-barrens of Georgia and the Carolinas in the American War. Of late his occupations have been more sedentary. He went into politics alongside Fox and the Whig party in opposition, and is an intimate of the Prince Regent, being numbered among the Holland House set...'

Elizabeth seemed bucked by this piece of news. 'Is he married?' she asked.

'To the Countess of Loudoun, his equal in her own right. He is also considered to be a man of singular ugliness,' he added waspishly.

'Oh,' said Elizabeth smiling, 'how fascinating.'

General Francis Rawdon Hastings, Earl of Moira, proved far from ugly, though bushy black eyebrows, a pair of sharply observant eyes and a dark complexion marked his appearance as unfashionable. He was, moreover, a man of strong opinions and frank speech. His oft-quoted opinion as to the virtue of American women expressed while a young man serving in North America had brought him a degree of wholly unmerited notoriety. His more solid achievements included distinguishing himself at the Battle of Bunker Hill and later defeating Washington's most able general, Nathaniel Greene, in the long and hard-fought campaign of the Carolinas. Such talents might have marked him out for command in the peninsula but, like Tarleton vegetating in County Cork, he was out to grass, though talked of as the next governor-general of India.

'Frank has news of a determined war-party in the Congress,' Dungarth said as he carved the beef with its oyster stuffing.

'War hawks, they style themselves,' Moira said, sipping the glass of burgundy Dungarth's man Williams poured for him. 'Your health, ma'am,' he added, inclining his head in Elizabeth's direction. 'We shan't bore you with our political clap-trap?'

'Mrs Drinkwater is better informed than most of your subalterns, Frank,' Dungarth said.

'That ain't difficult,' replied Moira, smiling engagingly, 'though I mean that as no slight to you, ma'am.'

'And what are the designs of these hawks, my Lord; my husband tells me the Americans have no navy to speak of.'

'Canada, ma'am, they covet Canada. They tried for it in the late rebellion and failed, they'll try for it again. As for their navy, I can't answer for it. I understand they've a deal of gunboats and such, much like the radeaux they had on Lake Champlain, I imagine, but as to a regular navy, well, I don't know.' Moira shrugged dismissively.

'They've some fine ships,' said Dungarth, 'but too few in commission and a fierce competition for them.'

'And some determined men to command them,' Drinkwater agreed, thinking of Captain Stewart.

'So,' said Moira, between mouthfuls, 'we may have the upper hand at sea, but with half the army marching and counter-marching in Spain', Moira paused to allow his opinion of Wellesley's generalship to pervade the atmosphere of the dining-room, 'and the other half aiding the civil power in the north, they have the advantage on land. I'm damned if I know what, begging your pardon, Mistress Drinkwater, will transpire if they do decide on war and advance on Canada.'

'Is it that much a matter of chance, then?' Drinkwater asked. 'I mean to say, will Madison blow like a weather-cock to the prevailing breeze?'

'So my correspondents in the southern states write, and they, needless to say, are opposed to this madness. Everywhere they are surrounded by men intent upon it.' This gloomy assessment laid a silence on them. 'I suppose we'll drum up sufficient ruffians to hold Canada. There are enough loyalists in New Brunswick to form a division, I daresay, and the Six Nations of Mohawks are more inclined to favour us than the perfidious Yankees. With the navy blockading the coast, I daresay things will turn out to our advantage in the end.'

'If we can afford it,' put in Elizabeth shrewdly.

'You are well informed, ma'am, my compliments.' Moira downed another glass of the burgundy. 'The India trade will sustain us, though I don't doubt but it'll be a close-run thing.'

'There is one matter we have not considered,' Drinkwater said, an uncomfortable thought striking him with a growing foreboding. He realized that for months he had been subconsciously brooding on Stewart's last remarks. The American officer's allusion to the bluff-bowed British frigates was a criticism that had stuck in Drinkwater's craw if only for its very accuracy. The memory, thirty years old, of being prize-master aboard the Yankee privateer schooner Algonquin when a young midshipman had been all the evidence he needed to realize Stewart had been indiscreet; that, and the knowledge Stewart had himself commanded a schooner.

They were all looking at him expectantly.

'The Americans will use privateers, my Lords, if it comes to war; scores of 'em, schooners mostly, manned with the most energetic young officers they can muster from their mercantile and naval stock…'

He was gratified by the exchange of appreciative looks between Moira and Dungarth. He sensed, in a moment of self-esteem, he had divined the passing of a test.

'They will attack our trade wherever they are able, just as they did in the last war. Moreover, their success will tempt out the more active of the French commanders and corsairs who would not need to rely on the blockaded ports of Europe, but could shift their operations to American bases where there will be no dearth of support and sympathy, reviving the old alliance of '79 in the name of the twin republics…'

'Do you have any more horrors for us, Captain?' Moira asked mockingly.

'Do you want any more, my Lord?' Drinkwater asked seriously. 'They will ambush the India trade, attack our fishing fleets and whalers, ravage the West Indies ...'

'And how do you know all this, Captain?' Moira asked drily.

'It is what he would do in Madison's place, ain't it, Nathaniel?'

'It is certainly what I would do if I were Secretary of Madison's navy, my Lords, and wanted to compensate for its weaknesses. When it cannot achieve something itself, the state encourages its more rapacious citizenry to do it on its behalf.'

'And will it come to this?' Elizabeth asked. 'You are all talking as if the matter were a fait accompli.'

'If Napoleon don't invade Russia, Elizabeth,' Dungarth said with solemn intimacy, 'then he will surely not miss the opportunity to capitalize on a breach between London and Washington which he has for months now been so assiduously encouraging.' And then he snicked his fingers with such violence that the sudden noise made them jump and the candle-flames flickered, adding, as if it had just occurred to him, 'By God! It's what he has been waiting for!'

And for a moment they stared at the puffy face of the once-handsome man, transfigured as it was by realization.

And so it proved, despite a stone-walling by the so-called doves. The hawks, roaring into the Congress chamber banging cuspidors, startled a tedious orator into sitting and conceding the floor. Thus provoked, Speaker Clay put the question which was carried almost two to one in favour of war with Great Britain. Later the Senate agreed and within two days the National Intelligencer of Washington, the Freeman's Journal and Mercantile Advertiser of Philadelphia and every other broadsheet in the United States repeated the text of the Act opening hostilities. Even the news that the British had finally set aside the infamous Orders-in-Council, anxious to protect the American supplies vital to Wellington's advancing army, failed to stem the headlong dash to war. Madison's intention of issuing letters-of-marque and of general-reprisal against the goods, vessels and effects of the government and subjects of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland was quoted alongside the declaration.

'America, having obtained her independence from Great Britain, is going to engage her old enemy to prove the young eagle is ready to supersede the old lion,' Drinkwater explained later to his children as they watched in silence while he ordered the packing of his sea-chest.

Within days Napoleon's Grande Armée began to cross the River Nieman and invade Russia. Half a million men, French, Austrians, Prussians, Saxons, Württemburgers, Italians, Poles, marched, as Marshal Marmont was long afterwards to recall, 'surrounded by a kind of radiance'.

'Now we shall see, Nat,' said Dungarth, the warmth of final achievement mixed with the excitement of a vast gamble, what this clash of Titans will decide.'

For Captain and Mrs Drinkwater there were less euphoric considerations. He waited upon their Lordships at the Admiralty immediately and within two days had received his orders. Indeed, the presence of Captain Drinkwater in the capital was considered 'most fortuitous'. While the focus of Dungarth's apprehensions lay to the east, Drinkwater shared Moira's concern for the outcome of events upon the Western Ocean and beyond. At the end of June the Drinkwaters returned home to Suffolk and their children. He was impatient, his heart beating at a faster pace. Patrician was to be hurried to sea again, her lack of men notwithstanding.

Drinkwater's last days at Gantley Hall were spent writing letters which Richard, his son, took into Woodbridge for the post. Drinkwater dismissed Richard's pleas to be rated captain's servant aboard the Patrician. Instead he roused Lieutenant Quilhampton from his connubial bliss, thundering upon his cottage door on a wet evening when the sun set behind yellow cloud.

'My dear sir,' said Quilhampton, stepping backwards and beckoning Drinkwater indoors. 'We heard you had gone up to town ...'

'You've heard of the outbreak of war with America?' Drinkwater snapped, cutting short his host's pleasantries.

'Well, yes, yesterday. I meant to try for a ship ...'

'My dear James, I have no time, forgive me... ma'am,' he bowed curtly to Catriona who had come into the room from the kitchen beyond, with an offer of tea, 'can you spare your husband?'

'You have a ship for me?' broke in Quilhampton, nodding to his wife and ignoring her silent protest.

'Not exactly, James. As a lieutenant I can get you a cutter or a gun-brig, but nothing more. I am, however, desperate for a first luff in Patrician.' He paused, watching the disappointment clear in Quilhampton's expression. 'It ain't what you want, I know, but nor is it as bad as you think, James. I am to be the senior captain of a flying squadron ...'

'A commodore, sir?'

'Aye, but only of the second class. They will not let me have a post-captain under me, but I can promise you advancement at the first opportunity, to Master and Commander at the very least…'

'I'll come, sir, of course I will.' Quilhampton held out his remaining hand.

'That's handsome of you, James, damned handsome,' Drinkwater grinned, seizing the outstretched paw. 'God bless you, my friend.'

'He was mortified you sailed for America without him last autumn, Captain Drinkwater,' Catriona said quietly in her Scots accent, pouring the bohea. Drinkwater noticed her thickening waist and recalled Elizabeth telling him the Quilhamptons were expecting.

'My dear, I am an insensitive dullard, forgive me, my congratulations to you both

Catriona handed him a cup. The delicate scent of the tea filled the room, but cup and saucer chattered slightly from the shaking of her hand. She caught his eye, her own fierce and tearful beneath the mop of tawny hair. 'My child needs a father, Captain. Even a one-armed one is better than none.'

'Ma'am ...' Drinkwater stammered, 'I am, I mean, I, er...'

'Take him,' she said and withdrew, retiring to her kitchen.

Drinkwater looked at Quilhampton who shrugged.

'When can you be ready?'

'Tomorrow?'

'We'll post. Time is of the essence.'

'Talking of which, I have something ...' Quilhampton turned aside and opened the door of a long-case clock that ticked majestically in a corner. He lifted a dark, dusty bottle from its base.

'Cognac, James?' Drinkwater asked, raising an eyebrow, 'How reprehensible.' Quilhampton smiled at Drinkwater's ill-disguised expression of appreciation.

'It is usually Hollands on this coast, but I can't stand the stuff. This', he held up the bottle after lacing both their cups of tea, 'the rector of Waldringfield mysteriously acquires.'

'Here's to the confinement, James. Tell her to stay with Elizabeth when her time comes.'

'I will, and thank you. Here's to the ship.'

CHAPTER 12 David and Goliath

What is it, Mr Gordon?' Drinkwater emerged on to the quarterdeck and clapped his hand to his hat as a gust of wind tore at his cloak.

'Hasty, sir; she's just fired a gun and thrown out the signal for a sail in sight.'

'Very well. Make Hasty's number and tell him to investigate.'

'Aye, aye, sir.'

Fishing for his Dollond glass Drinkwater levelled it at the small twenty-eight gun frigate bobbing on the rim of the horizon as they exchanged signals with her over the five miles of heaving grey Atlantic. Then he cast a quick look round the circumscribed circle of their visible horizon at the other ships of the squadron.

The little schooner Sprite clung to Patrician like a child to a parent, while two miles to leeward he could make out the thirty-eight gun, 18-pounder frigate Cymbeline, and beyond her the topsails of Icarus, a thirty-two, mounting 12-pounders on her gun deck.

'Hasty acknowledges, sir.'

Drinkwater swung back to Gordon and nodded. 'Very well. And now I think 'tis time we hoisted French colours with a gun to loo'ard, if you please, Mr Gordon.'

Midshipman Belchambers had anticipated the order, for it had long been known that they would close the American coast under an equivocal disguise. The red, white and blue bunting spilled from his arms as the assisting yeoman tugged at the halliards. Clear of the wind eddies about the deck, the tricolour snapped out clear of the bunt of the spanker and rose, stiff as a board, to the peak. The trio of officers watched the curiosity for a moment, then Drinkwater held his pocket-glass out to the midshipman.

'Up you go, Mr Belchambers. Keep me informed. We should sight land before sunset.' He hoped he sounded confident, instead of merely optimistic, for they had not obtained a single sight during the week the gale had prevailed.

The boom of the signal gun drowned Belchambers' reply, but he scampered away, tucking the precious spy-glass in his trousers and reaching for the main shrouds. Drinkwater stared at Hasty again as she shook out her topgallants. Captain Tyrell was very young, younger than poor Quilhampton, and he was inordinately proud of his command which, by contrast, was grown old, though of a class universally acknowledged as pretty. Drinkwater suspected a multitude of defects lurked beneath the paint, whitewash and gilded brightwork of her dandified appearance. Yet the young man in command seemed efficient enough, had understood the signals thrown out on their tedious passage across the Atlantic and handled his ship with every sign of competence. Perhaps he had a good sailing-master, Drinkwater thought, again turning his attention to the Sprite: they must be damnably uncomfortable aboard the schooner.

Sprite's commander was a different kettle of fish, a man of middle age whose commission as lieutenant was but two years old. Lieutenant Sundercombe had come up the hard way, pressed into the Royal Navy from a Guinea slaver whose mate he had been. He had languished on the lower deck for five years before winning recognition and being rated master's mate. There was both a resentment and a burning passion in the man, Drinkwater had concluded, which was doubtless due to his enforced service as a seaman. Maybe contact with the helpless human cargo carried on the middle passage had made him philosophical about the whims and vagaries of fate, maybe not. His most significant attribute as far as Drinkwater was concerned was his skill as a fore-and-aft sailor. His Majesty's armed schooner Sprite had been built in the Bahamas to an American design and attached to the squadron as a dispatch vessel.

As for the other frigates and their captains, the bluff and hearty Thorowgood of the Cymbeline and the stooped and consumptive Ashby of the Icarus, though as different as chalk from cheese in appearance, were typical of their generation. With the exception of Sundercombe and his schooner, in whose selection Drinkwater had enlisted Dungarth's influence, the histories of the younger men were unremarkable, their appointment to join his so-called 'flying squadron' uninfluenced by anything other than the Admiratlty's sudden fright at the depredations of Yankee privateers. None of them had seen action of any real kind, rising quickly through patronage or influence, and had been either cruising uneventfully in home waters or employed on convoy duties. Tyrell on the Irish coast where, in the Cove of Cork, he had been able to titivate his ship to his heart's content; and Thorowgood in the West Indies, where rum and women of colour seemed to have made a deep impression upon him. Ashby looked too frail to remain long in this world, though he possessed an admirable doggedness if his conduct in the recent gale was anything to go by, for Icarus had carried away her fore topmast shortly before sunset a few days earlier and had been separated from the rest of the squadron. The last that had been seen of her as she disappeared behind a grey curtain of rain was not encouraging. The violent line squall had dragged waterspouts from the surface of the sea and the wild sweep of lowering cloud had compelled them all to look to their own ships and shorten sail with alacrity. Patrician's raw crew, once more decimated by idleness and filled from every available and unsuitable source, had been hard-pressed for an hour.

Captain Ashby had fired guns to disperse a spout that threatened his frigate and these had been taken for distress signals. When the weather cleared, however, there was no sign of the Icarus, and though the squadron reversed course until darkness and then hove-to for the night, the dawn showed the three remaining frigates and the schooner alone.

'I suppose', Drinkwater had remarked as David Gordon returned to the deck shaking his head after sweeping the horizon from the masthead, 'our still being in company is a small miracle.'

But two days later Ashby's Icarus had hove over the eastern horizon, her damage repaired and a cloud of canvas rashly set, proving at least that she was a fast sailer and Ashby a resourceful man with a competent ship's company. Now, as the gale blew itself out and they closed the lee of the American coast, Drinkwater chewed over their prospects of success and the risky means by which he hoped to achieve it. His orders gave him wide discretion; the problem with such latitude was that his judgement was proportionately open to criticism.

'A sail, I hear, sir,' said Quilhampton, coming on deck and touching the fore-cock of his hat at the lonely figure jammed at the foot of the weather mizen rigging.

Drinkwater stirred out of his brown study. 'Ah, James, yes; Tyrell's gone to investigate and Belchambers is aloft keeping an eye on the chase.'

'I see we've the frog ensign at the peak ...'

'You disapprove?'

Quilhampton shrugged and cast his eyes upwards. 'I comprehend your reasoning, sir, it just feels damned odd ...'

'Any ruse that allows us time to gather intelligence is worth adopting.'

'Has Icarus gone off flying the thing, sir?'

'If he obeyed orders he has, yes.'

'Deck there!' Both officers broke off to stare upwards to where Belchambers swung against the monotone grey of the overcast, his arm outstretched. 'Land, sir, four points on the starboard bow!'

'What of the chase?' Drinkwater bellowed back.

'Looks like a schooner, sir, to the sou'westward. Hasty's hull down but I don't think he's gaining.'

'He won't against a Yankee schooner,' Drinkwater grumbled to his first lieutenant. 'Though Belchambers can't see it yet, she'll be tucked under the lee of the land there with a beam wind, damn it.' Drinkwater sighed, and made a hopeless gesture with his hand. 'I really don't know how best to achieve success…'

'I heard scores of Yankee merchantmen left New York on the eve of the declaration with clearances for the Tagus,' remarked Quilhampton.

'Aye, and we'll buy their cargoes, just to keep Wellington's army in the field, and issue licences for more, I daresay.' He thought of the boasting finality he had threatened Captain Stewart with, calling up the iron ring of blockade to confound the American's airy theories of maritime war. Now the government in London showed every sign of pusillanimity in their desire not to interfere with supplies to the army in Spain. 'I wish to God the government would order a full blockade and bring the Americans to their senses quickly.'

'They misjudged the Yankee's temper,' agreed Quilhampton, 'thinking they would be content with the eventual rescinding of the Orders-in-Council.'

'Too little too late,' grumbled Drinkwater, 'and then David struck Goliath right betwixt the eyes…'

No further reference was necessary between the two men to conjure up in their minds the humiliations the despised Yankee navy had visited upon the proud might of the British. Before leaving Plymouth they had heard that Commodore Rodgers' squadron had sailed from New York on the outbreak of war and, though the commodore had missed the West India convoy, his ships had chased the British frigate Belvidera and taken seven merchantmen before returning to Boston. Furthermore the Essex had seized the troop transport Alert and ten other ships. They knew, too, that the USS Constitution had escaped a British squadron by kedging in a calm, and finally, a week or two later, she had brought His Britannic Majesty's frigate Guerrière to battle and hammered her into submission with devastating broadsides.

The latest edition of The Times they had brought with them from England was full of outrage and unanswered questions at this blow to Britannia's prestige. The defeat of a single British frigate was considered incomprehensible, outweighed Wellington's defeat of the French at Salamanca and obscured the news that Napoleon had entered Moscow. On their passage westward, Drinkwater had plenty of time to mull over the problems his discretionary orders had brought him. They contained a caution about single cruisers engaging 'the unusually heavily armed and built frigates of the enemy', and the desirability of 'drawing them down upon a ship-of-the-line', an admission of weakness that Drinkwater found shocking, if sensible, had a ship-of-the-line been within hail. Yet he had been under no illusion that with 'so powerful a force as four frigates' great things were expected of him, and was conscious that he sailed on detached service, not under the direct command of either Sawyer at Halifax or his successor, Sir John Borlase Warren, even then proceeding westwards like themselves.

Drinkwater had been close enough to Admiralty thinking in those last weeks before he sailed, when he cast about desperately for men to make up his ship's company again and the Admiralty dithered, to know of their Lordships' concern over Commodore Rodgers. The news that Rodgers had sailed with a squadron and had not dispersed his ships, added to the rumour that he had been after the West India convoy and had sailed almost within sight of the Scillies, had caused consternation at the Admiralty. To defend so many interests, the convoy routes from the West Indies, from India and the Baltic, the coastal trades and the distant fisheries and, by far the most important, the supply route to Lisbon and Wellington's Anglo-Portuguese army, meant the deployment of a disproportionate number of ships spread over a quarter of the world's oceans. Until Warren reached Halifax and organized some offensive operations with the inadequate resources in that theatre, Captain Drinkwater's scratch squadron was the only force able to mount offensive operations against the Americans. With a thousand men-of-war at sea the irony of the situation was overwhelming.

Drinkwater had twice posted up to London for consultations, briefings and last-minute modifications to his orders. Suddenly the fact that he was a senior captain fortuitously on hand to combat the alarming situation was not so flattering. Imbued with a sense of urgency, the difficulties the Admiralty experienced in scraping together the exigous collection of ships they had at last dignified with the name of 'flying squadron' seemed trivial; Drinkwater was more concerned with his lack of manpower.

Now, however, after the most pressing problem had been at least partially solved, the Admiralty's concern was understandable.

Byron of the Belvidera had reported well of the American squadron's abilities, though outraged he had been attacked without a warning that hostilities had commenced. His escape he had attributed to superior sailing, not knowing the true cause was the explosion of a gun in which Rodgers himself had been wounded. Drinkwater did not share the overweening assumption of superiority nursed by young bloods like Tyrell and Thorowgood. He was too old or too honest with himself not to harbour doubts. Even ship for ship, his squadron matched against a squadron of Yankees could, he admitted privately to himself, be bested.

If Stewart was anything to go by, the American navy did not lack men of temper and determination, young men, too, men with experience of waging war in the Mediterranean, three thousand miles from their nearest base.

'I think we should not regard the Americans with too much contempt, James,' he said, in summation of his thoughts.

But any concurrence from Quilhampton was cut short by Belchambers hailing the deck again.

'Hasty's broken off the chase, sir!'

'Where away is the chase herself?' Drinkwater shouted.

'Can't see her, sir.'

'He's lost her, by God,' snapped Quilhampton.

'She's fast, James,' Drinkwater said consolingly, 'don't blame Tyrell; I tell you these damned Yankees are going to give us all a confounded headache before we're through.'

Quilhampton's sigh of resignation was audible even above the noise of the wind in the rigging, though whether it was submission to Drinkwater's argument or his excuse for Tyrell's failure, Drinkwater did not know. He felt a twinge of pity for his friend; perhaps Quilhampton himself should be in command of Patrician, perhaps he would make a better job of the task ahead ...

Well,' Quilhampton said, breaking into Drinkwater's gloom, 'at least we've got Warren taking over from that old fart Sawyer at Halifax.'

'Yes. I knew Sir John once, when I was master's mate in the cutter Kestrel. He had command of a flying squadron just after the outbreak of war with France…'

Odd he made that distinction between war with France and war with the United States, when he knew it was all part of the same, interminable struggle.

'Warren had some of the finest frigates in the navy with him, the Flora, the Melampus, the Diamond under Sir Sydney Smith, Nagle's Artois and the Arethusa under Pellew ...'

'And look what we've got,' grumbled Quilhampton, watching Hasty approach. 'Not a bloody Pellew in sight...'

The little sixth-rate bore down towards them. They could see the French ensign at Hasty's gaff, before losing sight of it behind the bellying bunt of her topsails. As she surged past, to dodge under Sprite's stern and come round again in Patrician's wake, Captain Tyrell stood on her rail and raised his hat. Drinkwater acknowledged the salute and felt the wind nearly carry his own into the sea running in marbled green and white between the two frigates.

'Too fast for us, sir!' he heard Tyrell hail, 'A privateer schooner by the look of her. She ran like smoke!'

Drinkwater waved his hat in acknowledgement. It was no more, nor anything less than he had expected.

'The problem is, where to start,' Drinkwater said, leaning over the chart. 'It would be a simple matter if my orders were to blockade the Chesapeake…'

'I'm damned if I know why they aren't, sir,' Quilhampton fizzed.

'It isn't government policy, James, at least not yet. Warren has a damnably difficult job, but he must maintain American supplies to the Tagus. Such a policy may, if we are lucky, promote sentiments of opposition to President Madison who has to maintain at least the illusion of not coming in on the French side in the peninsula. Warren will do his best to foment this discord by appealing to American mercantile avarice and issuing licences.'

'I see,' said Quilhampton, looking at his commander and thinking him unusually well-informed and then remembering the summonses, post-haste, to London from Plymouth. 'On the other hand Yankee avarice will be fired by the vision of plundering our trade,' protested Quilhampton, coming to terms with the enormous complexities Madison's declaration of war had caused. 'And we know the Americans have skilful seamen aplenty, men trained in the mercantile marine...?'

'Who know exactly where to intercept our trade.' Drinkwater overrode Quilhampton's exposition. 'And our task is to sweep — an apt verb for a copying clerk to apply, if impossible to obey in practice — to sweep the seas for American privateers…'

'With a handful of elderly frigates that can't catch a cold in a squall of rain, let alone a Baltimore schooner on or off the wind.' Quilhampton's protesting asides were meant to be signals of sympathy; they only served to irritate Drinkwater. Or was he annoyed because, all unbidden, his eyes were drawn to the legend Potomac on the chart. He fell silent and, watching his face, Quilhampton knew from experience that his expression presaged an idea which, in its turn, would lather a plan. He shifted tack, moved to noises of positive encouragement.

'Of course with good visibility we can form a line abreast to cover fifty miles of sea and if we conduct such a sweep, at a local point of trade, a point at which these smart Yankee skippers will reason they can best intercept a homeward convoy...'

'Yes, but which homeward convoy, James?' Drinkwater snapped, his voice suddenly vibrant with determination.

'Well, the West India trade, sir,' Quilhampton said, riffling through the other charts on the table and drawing out a second one. 'Now the hurricane season is over, I suggest—here.' He stabbed his finger at the northern end of the Florida Strait, where the Gulf Stream favoured homeward ships, but where the channel between the coast and the Great Bahama Banks narrowed to less than sixty miles. 'With the Sprite to increase our scouting front,' went on Quilhampton, 'we could almost completely cover the strait.' He paused, then added, 'Though I suppose we need her in the centre of the line to let slip like a hound and tie down any privateers until we can come up in the frigates.' Pleased with himself, he looked up at Drinkwater.

The captain's face was clouded and he was not looking at the chart of the Florida Strait. Instead he seemed abstracted, as though he had not been listening, obsessed with the chart of the Chesapeake. Quilhampton coughed discreetly, drawing attention to his presence, if not his expressed opinion. Drinkwater looked up.

'Er... yes. Yes. I applaud your tactics, James, but not your strategy.'

'Oh,' Quilhampton bridled, puzzled.

'No offence, but what would you do?'

'As I say, the Florida Strait…'

'No, no, forgive me, I haven't made myself clear. Suppose, well perhaps for you it is not so much a supposition, for you may sympathize with my hypothesis, but suppose you are a bold, resolute American officer — an ambitious man, but not one who gained distinction in the quasi-war with France, or the Tripolitan adventure and, as a result, out of favour, denied a naval ship but, being still a man of influence, one who could command a letter-of-marque, perhaps a small squadron of them…'

'It would make no difference ...'

'Bear with me, James,' Drinkwater said tolerantly. 'Now you know perfectly well that every other privateer commander will make his station either the Florida Strait, or the Windward Passage, or some other focal point to intercept the West India ships ...'

'Yes, but there'll be rich enough pickings for all,' insisted Quilhampton, knowing the way Drinkwater thought, 'and it'll rouse the sugar lobby, bring pressure to bear in Parliament and win the successful privateersman a reputation quicker perhaps than command of a Yankee frigate.'

'D'you rest your case?' Drinkwater asked drily.

Quilhampton blushed, aware that he had presumed on friendship at the cost of respect for rank.

'I beg your pardon, sir.'

'There's no need for that; you're my first lieutenant, such considerations must be encouraged, but think bigger, James. You're very ambitious, ambitious enough to attempt the single-handed destruction of the British government at a stroke, not merely stirring up an opposition lobby.' Quilhampton looked blank. 'Come on; you know how parlous a state our country's in ...' Drinkwater paused, expectant. 'No?'

'I'm afraid not, sir ...'

'Look; we need American wheat to supply Wellington; with what do we pay for it?'

'Gold, sir.'

'Or maybe a trifling amount of manufactures, to be sure, but principally gold. It is what the American masters want to take home with them. We need a Portuguese army in the field; with what do we pay them? And what do we pay the Spaniards with for fighting to free their own country?'

'Gold again…'

'And our troops do not live off the land but pay the Spaniards for their provisions in ... ?'

'Gold.'

'Quite so. A privateersman could stop the advance of Wellington for six weeks if he took a cargo of boots, or greatcoats, or cartridges. But there's precious little profit in a prize containing anything so prosaic. So the death-or-glory Yankee skipper will go for the source of our wealth, James...'

'You mean the India fleet, sir?'

'Exactly,' Drinkwater said triumphantly, 'the East Indiamen. They'll be leaving the factories now, catching the north-east monsoon down through the Indian seas, a convoy of 'em. Richer pickings than their West India cousins, by far.'

'So where would you intercept them, sir, St Helena?' Drinkwater could tell by Quilhampton's tone that he was sceptical, suggesting the British outpost as some remote, almost ridiculous area.

'I think so,' he said with perfect gravity, amused by the sharp look Quilhampton threw him. 'But first we'll blockade the Chesapeake, show our noses to the enemy. Let it be known there are detached flying squadrons at sea, it may deter them a little. I'll shift to the Sprite for a day or two.' Drinkwater grinned at the look of surprise spreading on Quilhampton's face. 'You'll be in command, James.'

'But why, sir? I mean, why shift to the Sprite?'

'Because I intend paying a visit to the Potomac. There is something I wish to know.'

CHAPTER 13 The Intruder

'Do we have much further to go, sir?' Sundercombe asked, looming out of the darkness. 'The wind is dying.'

'Bring her to an anchor, Mr Sundercombe, then haul the cutter alongside and I'll continue by boat. You'll be all right lying hereabouts and I'll be back by dawn. If I'm not, keep the American colours hoisted and lie quiet.'

'If I'm attacked, sir, or challenged?'

'Get out to sea.'

Drinkwater sensed the relief in Sundercombe's voice. They were seventy miles from the Atlantic, though only sixty from Hasty, ordered inside the Virginia capes to flaunt French colours in an attempt to keep inquisitive Americans guessing. They had left Hasty before noon, ignored the merchant ships anchored in Mockjack Bay and the James and York rivers, and headed north, exchanging innocent waves with passing fishing boats and coasters. Sundercombe's was an unenviable task, and Drinkwater had given him no opportunity to ask questions, nor offered him an explanation. The fewer people who knew what he was doing, the better. If he was wrong in his hunch, the sooner they got out to sea the better, though their presence under either French or British colours would confuse the enemy. If he had guessed correctly, confirmation would give him the confidence he needed, though he could not deny a powerful ulterior motive: the chance of seeing Arabella Shaw again swelled a bubble of anticipation in his belly. Either way, if he lost Hasty or the schooner in the Chesapeake, he would be hard put to offer an explanation. Assuming he survived any such engagement, of course. He thrust such megrimish thoughts roughly aside.

'Pass word for Caldecott.'

Drinkwater's new coxswain rolled aft, a small, wiry figure, even in the darkness.

'I'm going on in the cutter, Caldecott. I have to make a rendezvous, with an informer,' he added, lest the man thought otherwise. 'I want perfect silence in the boat, particularly when and where I tell you to beach her. You must then stand by the place until I return. The slightest noise will raise the alarm and if any of your bullies think of desertin', dissuade them. They might have got away with it a twelve-month ago, but no one loves an Englishman hereabouts now. D'you understand me?'

'Aye, sir. No one'll desert, an' I'll swing if a single noise escapes their bleedin' mouths.' The raw Cockney accent cut the night.

'Good. There'll be a bottle or two for good conduct when we get back.'

'Beg pardon, sir ...'

'What is it?'

"Ow long'll you be?'

'An hour or two at the most. Now make ready. It's almost midnight.'

'Aye, aye, sir.'

Moonrise was at about two, but they were two days after the new moon and the thin sliver of the distant satellite would scarcely betray them. Besides, it was clouding over.

The Sprite's gaffs came down, the mast hoops rattling in their descent, and from forward came the splash of the anchor and the low rumble of cable. The schooner's crew moved in disciplined silence about the deck and Drinkwater marked the fact, reminding himself to advance Sundercombe, if it came into his power.

'Your cutter's alongside, sir. I've had a barricoe of water and a bag of biscuit put in it,' Sundercombe paused, as if weighing up his superior. 'I did not think it would be appropriate to add any liquor though ...' His voice tailed off, inviting praise or condemnation.

'You acted quite properly, Mr Sundercombe. We can enjoy a glass later, when this business is over.' Drinkwater had explained to Caldecott, he ought at the very least to confide now in Mr Sundercombe. 'I intend to meet an informer, d'you see, Mr Sundercombe?'

'You have a rendezvous arranged, sir?' The question was shrewd.

'No, but I know the person's house.' Drinkwater made a move, a signal the confidence was over. 'I shall be back by dawn.'

'Good fortune, sir.'

Sundercombe watched as Drinkwater threw his leg over the schooner's rail and clambered down into the waiting boat. A few moments later it pulled into the darkness, the dim, pale splashes of the oar blades gradually fading with the soft noise of their movement.

'What's he up to?' A man in the plain blue of master's mate asked Sundercombe after reporting the Sprite brought to her anchor.

'Damned if I know,' growled the lieutenant.

Caldecott's men pulled silently upstream for an hour before Drinkwater began to recognize features in the landscape that betokened the confluence of the Potomac with the Chesapeake. He ordered the tiller over and they inclined their course more to the westward, entering the Potomac itself, a grey swathe between the darker shadows of the wooded banks up which they worked their way.

'Inshore now,' he murmured at last, and Caldecott swung the boat's head. 'Easy now, lads.'

The men no longer pulled, merely dipped their oar blades in the rhythm which had become almost hypnotic while the cutter carried her way. A roosting heron rose, startled, with a heavy flapping of its large wings. Drinkwater caught sight of the outline of Castle Point against the sky.

'Here's the place,' whispered Drinkwater.

'Oars,' hissed Caldecot. 'Toss oars. Boat your oars.' The knock and rumble of the oars as they were stowed were terminated in the sharp crunch and lurch as the boat grounded. Drinkwater stood up. He could see the eastern wing of the house clearly now, pale in the darkness, the surrounding trees gathered like protective wood spirits guarding it against incursions like his own. Before him the lawns came to the water's edge. He bent towards Caldecott's ear.

'Remember what I said.'

'No fear of forgettin', sir.'

'Keep quiet, you men,' he said in a low voice as he stepped from thwart to thwart. A moment later his boots landed on the gravel and he was ashore on enemy territory. He pulled his cloak closely round him and checked the seaman's knife lodged in its sheath in the small of his back. Taking a backward glance at the boat, he began to walk boldly up towards the house.

'Where's 'e gone, Bill?' someone asked.

'For a fuck, I shouldn't wonder, lucky bastard.'

'Stow it,' growled Caldecott, 'or it'll be you that's lucked.'

Immediately upon leaving the boat Drinkwater knew he had allowed himself insufficient time. The information he wanted had seemed vital in the security of Patrician's cabin, vital to the scenario he had conjured out of Dungarth's intelligence reports, Moira's correspondence, the Admiralty's fears and his own peculiar brand of intuition, guesswork and faith in providence. Others would call it luck, no doubt, but to Drinkwater it was the hunch upon which he gambled his reputation.

Within minutes he reached the trees surrounding the stables forming the eastern wing of the house. He tried to recall where old Zebulon Shaw kept his hounds and thanked heaven for a windless night. He paused to catch his breath, looking back and seeing no sign of the boat or her crew tucked under the low river-bank. Noises came from the kitchen wing, a few bars of a song and the clatter of dishes, suggesting the servants were about late. He moved off, round the front of the house, traversing it in the shelter of the battlemented terrace until he reached the steps. Below the balustrade where he and Arabella had first traded the repartee which had had such fateful consequences, he stepped back and looked up at the facade.

There were lights still burning behind the heavy, brocade curtains. He tried to recall the plan of the house, located the withdrawing room and moved cautiously on to the terrace. An attack of nerves made him look down at the deserted lawns and the glimmer of the Potomac, empty now, where once, an age ago it seemed, the Patrician and the Stingray had lain uneasily together.

A fissure in the curtains revealed Shaw seated at an escritoire, his wig abandoned, the candlelight shining on his bald pate and a pen in his hand. A variety of papers were scattered on the small area of boards visible to Drinkwater.

With a thumping heart he stepped back and looked up again at the black windows whose glazed panes stared out indifferently at the night. Her bedroom was on the first floor, one of the rooms he had seen lit the evening before he had dined at Castle Point. A drain-pipe led directly up beside the shallow balcony upon which tall casements opened. Throwing back his cloak Drinkwater drew a deep breath and began to climb.

It was fortunate the house was not old, nor that the drain-pipe's fastenings had been skimped, for he struggled manfully in his effort to be silent. The climb was no more than fifteen feet, yet it took all his strength to claw his way up the wall and get his footing on the balcony's stone rail.

He stopped to catch his breath again, ruminating on the ruinous effects of age and short-windedness, aware that here, this close to her, he could not stop the terrible pounding of his heart. He strained his ears, but could hear nothing beyond the curtains. Putting his hand behind his back he drew the seaman's sheath knife, inserting the steel blade between the edges of the windows. With infinite care he located the latch and increased the pressure. To his relief it gave way easily, but he could afford no further delay, not knowing the noise its release had made within. He thrust aside the drapery and stepped inside the bedroom.

She was not alone, but sitting before a mirror, bathed in golden candlelight while her maid brushed out her hair. The unexpected presence of another person surprised him, instantly putting him on his guard, and drove the carefully prepared speech from his head. The unexpected, however, made him cautious not reckless. He drew the door to behind him and faced the astonished pair.

Both women had turned as he burst in. The maid, a white woman of uncertain years and not the negress Drinkwater might have thought likely had he anticipated her being there, dropped the hairbrush and squealed, putting her hands to her face as she backed away. Arabella, deathly pale, her face like wax, her eyes fixed upon the cloaked figure of the intruder, put out a hand to silence the frightened woman.

'There is no cause for alarm,' he said, a catch in his voice.

With a slow majesty Arabella rose to her feet and confronted the intruder. Her recently removed dress lay across her bed and she wore a fine silk negligee over her chemise. Her disarray twisted Drinkwater's gut with a tortuous spasm of desire and she caught this flickering regard of herself, sensed her mastery of his passion at the instant of knowing she might as easily lose it if he meditated rape.

'You! What is it you want?' Her voice trembled with emotion and the maid, pressed back against the wall, watched in terrified fascination, aware of a tension existing in the room extending beyond the mere fact of the stranger's burglarous entry. She too recognized the man, though he did not know her.

Drinkwater suppressed the goading of desire, aware she had divined the effect of her déshabillé, and annoyed by it. The reflection steadied him again, reminded him of his purpose, of the enormity of his gamble.

'Only a word, ma'am. I shall not detain you long, nor do I offer you any harm.' He shot a look at the maid. 'Will she hold her tongue?'

Arabella looked round at the quailing yet immobile figure. 'Tell me something of your purpose,' she said, addressing Drinkwater again.

'To speak with you,' he said simply, with a lover's implication, gratified that she lowered her eyes, momentarily confused. She remained silent, struggling with his dramatic and violent appearance. Again she turned to her maid and, in a low voice, murmured something. Drinkwater recognized the language and his words arrested the woman's trembling retreat towards the door.

'She is French?' he asked, his voice suddenly harsh.

Arabella nodded. 'Yes, but she can be trusted. She will say nothing about your being here.'

Drinkwater fixed the woman with his most balefully intimidating glare. He was not unduly worried. He had Patrician's red cutter's crew of nine men within hail, men who would delight in rescuing him if it meant they might also make free with the contents of Castle Point while they were about it.

'I am not alone,' he warned, 'there are others outside.'

His stare made the poor woman cringe, her hand desperately reaching for the door-knob.

'She understands, Nathaniel,' Arabella insisted, lowering the tension between the three of them.

'Very well.'

Arabella nodded, the maid fled and they were alone in the perfumed intimacy of her boudoir.

'Why have you come back?' she whispered, her face contorted with anguish as she sat back upon the chair and her right hand drew the silk wrap defensively about her breast.

'Are you in health, Arabella?' he asked, keeping his distance, hardening his painfully thumping heart at her plight.

'Yes,' she nodded, seizing the proprieties he offered, ignoring the incongruity of their situation, 'and you?'

'Yes,' he paused and she saw the struggle in his own face.

'You have nothing to fear,' she said more firmly, looking at him, 'I miscarried in the second month.'

She had conceived! The shock of it struck Drinkwater like a whiplash. It brought him no goatish pleasure, only an appalling regret and a piteous compassion which was out of kilter with his present purpose. 'My dear...' he made a move towards her, then stopped at the precise moment she held up her hand to arrest him.

'No! It is over, and it is for the best!'

He avoided her eyes. 'Yes,' he mumbled, 'the war...'

'I did not mean the war, Nathaniel, though that too is an impediment now.' She paused, then added, 'You found your wife well?'

'Arabella,' he protested, utterly confused, desperately hanging on to the reason for his unceremonious arrival. In his heart he had no real wish to revive their liaison and her continuing assumption piqued him.

'No blame attaches to you,' she said, sensing his mood, 'but why have you come back?'

He sighed, ashamed of himself now the moment of truth had come. 'I need some information, Arabella, information I thought our former intimacy might entitle me at least to ask of you.'

'You wish me to turn traitor?' she enquired, that lilting, bantering tone on which they had first established their friendship back in her voice, 'just as I once turned whore.'

'No,' he replied levelly, pleased he had at least anticipated this question. 'I merely wish to know if the Stingray is at sea under your brother's command. Such a question may easily be discovered from other sources; it is rumoured that a Yankee comes cheaper than Judas Iscariot.'

She opened her mouth to protest and then a curiously reticent look crossed her face. Her eyes searched his for some clue, as though he had said something implicit and she was gauging the extent of his knowledge. Then, as soon as the expression appeared it had faded and he was mystified, almost uncertain whether or not he had read it aright, merely left staring at her singular beauty.

'Why should you wish to know this? And why come all the way from England and up the Chesapeake if it may be bought from some fisherman for a few dollars?'

'Because I wished for an excuse to see you,' he replied, voicing a gallant half-truth, 'and because it might stop your brother and I from trying to kill each other,' he lied. He watched the words sink in, hoping she might recall the respective attitudes he and Stewart had professed when the possibility of war between their two countries had been discussed. He hoped, too, she might not begin to guess how large was the ocean and how unlikely they were to meet. Unless ...

'The Stingray, Captain Drinkwater, is undergoing repairs at the Washington Navy Yard,' she said with a cool and dismissive air. 'My brother is unemployed by the Navy Department... out of your reach…'

He admired her quick intelligence, her guessing of his dissimulation, and was now only mildly offended at her assumption of motive.

'Madam,' he said with a wry smile that savaged her with its attractiveness, 'I do not meditate any revenge, I assure you.'

The formality had evaporated the passion between them. He was no longer a slave to their concupiscence; his imagination ran in a contrary direction.

'He is at sea, though, ma'am, is he not?'

She inclined her head. 'Perhaps.'

'In a Baltimore clipper schooner...' He flattened his tone, kept the interrogative out of his voice, made of the question a statement of fact and watched like a falcon the tiny reactive muscles about her lovely eyes.

'You knew,' she said before perceiving his trap and clenching her fist in her anger. 'You ... you ...' She stammered her outrage and he stepped forward and put a hand upon her shoulder. The white silk was warmed by the soft flesh beneath.

'Arabella ...' She looked up, her eyes bright with fury. 'I truly mean no harm to either of you, but I have my obligations as you have yours. Please do not be angry with me. The web we find ourselves caught in is not of our making.'

She put her hand on his and it felt like a talon as it clawed at him. 'Why do you help weave it, then? You men are all the same! Why, you knew all along,' she whispered. Her fingers dug into the back of his hand, bearing it down upon her own shoulder as though she wanted to mutilate herself for her treachery. As he bent to kiss her hair the door was flung open with a crash of the handle upon the plaster.

Drinkwater looked round. Zebulon Shaw stood in the doorway with a scatter gun levelled at Drinkwater's belly. Behind him, the dull gleam of a musket barrel in his hands, was the dark presence of the negro groom and the pale face of the maid.

'Take your hands off!' Shaw roared.

Shaw's misreading of the situation in thinking the moment of anguished intimacy one of imminent violence, moved Drinkwater to fury. Arabella, too, reacted.

'Father ...' she expostulated, but Drinkwater seized her shoulders, drew her to her feet, jerked her round and pulled her to him. Whipping the knife from his belt he held it to her neck, hissing a reassurance in her ear.

He had no idea to what extent and in what detail the French maid had betrayed her mistress; he hoped she had acted protectively with some discretion, concerned only for Arabella's safety in the presence of a man who, once her lover, was now at the very least an enemy. Whatever the niceties, he could, he realized, avoid compromising Arabella further while at the same time facilitating his escape. Zebulon Shaw's next remark gave him grounds for thinking he had guessed right.

'Drinkwater? Is it you? What in hell's name d'you mean by ... ?'

'I wished to know the whereabouts of the USS Stingray, Mr Shaw, and if you'll stand aside, I'll trouble your home no further. I have armed men outside and I have no need to remind you we are at war.'

Shaw's tongue flicked out over dry lips and his face lost its resolute expression. Drinkwater pressed his advantage.

'I apologize for my method,' he went on, sensing Shaw's indecision, 'and it would distress me even more if I had to add mutilation or murder to a trifling burglary.' As he spoke he moved the knife menacingly across Arabella's white throat.

'Damn you!' Shaw growled, drawing back.

'Very well, Mrs Shaw,' Drinkwater said with a calm insolence, 'precede me and no harm will come to you.' He pressed her gently forward, passed into the passage and ran the gauntlet of Shaw and the negro, glaring at the maid as she held up a wildly flickering candelabra in a shaking hand. 'No tricks, sir ...'

They were convinced by his show of bravado in which Arabella played her part submissively.

'Go, sir,' Shaw called after them, 'go and be damned to you if this is how you treat our hospitality ...'

'Needs must, sir, when the devil drives,' Drinkwater flung over his shoulder as they reached the head of the staircase. 'Careful, m'dear,' he muttered to Arabella as they descended to the darkened hall.

Shaw and the negro covered their descent and Drinkwater was aware of open doors closing on their approach as inquisitive servants, roused by noises on the floor above, retreated before the sight of the cloaked intruder with their mistress a hostage. He paused at the main door and turned.

'Remain here, Shaw. I shall take your daughter-in-law a pistol shot from the house and release her. I trust you to wait here.'

'Be damned, Captain ...'

'Do you agree?'

Shaw grunted. 'Under protest, yes, I agree.'

'I bid you farewell, Mr Shaw, and I repeat my apologies that the harsh necessities of war compel me to this action. Perhaps in happier times…'

He had the door open and thrust Arabella through, followed her and pulled the door to behind them, then seized her hand.

'Beyond the trees,' he ordered, walking quickly down the wide steps and across the gravel. 'And hurry, I pray you. I do not want you to catch a fever. I am sorry for what has happened. No blame attaches to you and if your maid was at least loyal to you, then I think no great harm can have been done. Tell your father-in-law you confessed only that your brother no longer had command of the Stingray'.

They reached the trees as he finished this monologue and he let go her wrist. She turned and faced him.

'I am sorry we must part like this,' he ran on, 'as sorry as I was by the manner of our last parting.'

'Sir,' she said, drawing her breath with difficulty, 'I should hate you for this humiliation, but I cannot pretend ... no, it is no matter. It was guilt the last time, guilt and shame and the confusion of love, but it was better than this!' She almost spat the last word at him. 'God,' her voice rose, exasperation and hurt charging it with a desperate vehemence, 'had I not... damn you! Go, for God's sake, go quickly.'

'God bless you, Arabella.'

'Go!'

He turned and ran, not hearing her poor, strangled cry, wondering why on earth he had invoked the Deity. A moment later he cannoned into Caldecott.

'Damn you, Caldecott — is the boat ready?'

'Beg pardon. Aye, sir.'

Drinkwater looked back. There was a brief flash of pale silk and then only the trees and their shadows stood between him and Castle Point.

'Everything all right, sir?'

In answer to Caldecott's query the wild barking of dogs, the gleam of lanterns and shouts of men filled the night. Then came the sharp crack of a musket.

'Not exactly. Come on, let's go.'

CHAPTER 14 Cry Havoc ...

'What d'you make of her, Mr Sundercombe?'

'I’m not sure, sir, beyond the fact she's a native and determined to pass close.'

Sundercombe handed Drinkwater his telescope. The American brig had trimmed her yards and laid a course to intercept the Sprite as the schooner ran south to pass the Virginia capes and reach the open Atlantic. It was mid-morning and Drinkwater was bleary-eyed from insufficient sleep. He had trouble focusing and passed the glass back to Sundercombe.

'Send your gun's crews quietly to their stations, load canister on ball, but don't run 'em out. Tell them when they get word, to aim high and cut up her riggin'. You handle the ship, I'll give the order to open fire.' Drinkwater looked up at the stars and bars rippling at the main peak. 'Better pass word for my coxswain.'

'I'm 'ere, sir, an' I've got some coffee.'

'Obliged, Caldecott...' Drinkwater took the hot mug.

Sundercombe was already issuing orders, turning up the watch below and giving instructions quietly to his gunners. The Sprite mounted six 6-pounders a side, enough to startle the stranger if Drinkwater timed his bird-scaring broadside correctly. He sipped gratefully at the scalding coffee which tasted of acorns.

'Caldecott,' he said, 'I want you to stand by the ensign halliards with one of our cutter's crew. The moment I give you the word, that ensign aloft must come down and our own be hoisted, d'you understand? 'Tis a matter of extreme punctilio.'

'Punctilio — aye, aye, sir.'

Drinkwater grinned after the retreating seaman. He seemed suitably imbued with gravitas. Quilhampton had discovered him and sent him aft for approval, concerned that Drinkwater had himself found no substitute for old Tregembo. 'You must have a cox'n, sir. I can't spare a midshipman every time you want a boat,' Quilhampton had protested.

'Can't, or won't?' Drinkwater had enquired.

'You must have a cox'n,' Quilhampton repeated doggedly, the flat assertion brooking no protest.

'Oh, very well,' Drinkwater relented, 'have you someone in mind?' Half an hour later the stunted form of Caldecott stood before him. 'Have you acted in a personal capacity before, Caldecott?' Drinkwater had asked, watching the man's eyes darting about the cabin and revealing a bright and curious interest.

'I 'ave, sir, to Captings Dawson and Peachey, sir, an' I was bargeman to Lord Collin'wood in the old Ocean, sir, an' 'ad lots of occasions to be 'andling 'is Lordship's personal an' diplomatic effects, sir.'

'Matter of punctilio,' Drinkwater now heard Caldecott repeat to his oarsman and, still grinning, he watched the Yankee brig bear down upon them.

The sight combined with the coffee and the invigorating chill of the morning breeze to cheer him, making him forget his fatigue. His brief nap had laid a period of time between this forenoon and the events of the previous night. They might have occurred to a different man. He was filled with a sudden happiness such as he had not felt for many, many months, the inspiriting renewal discovered by the penitent sinner.

Was that why he had called upon God to bless Arabella last night? Did he detect the finger of the Deity or providence in that last encounter; or in the fortuitous natural abortion of the child their helpless lust had made?

It was, he realized, much, much more than that. Cerlainly their odd, mutual avoidance had been in some strange way a holding back in anticipation of the final parting which had now occurred. They were, he reflected without bitterness, not young, and though their affair had not lacked heat it had not been conducted without a little wisdom. Moreover, she had loved him as he had loved her, with the self-wounding passion of hopeless intensity. Such things happened, rocked the boats of otherwise loyal lives and sent their ripples out to slap the planking of other such boats, God help them all.

But there was also the timely confirmation of his hunch. The drunk and incautious Stewart had opened his mind and had put Drinkwater in possession of a key, not to the strategic planning of Madison and his colleagues, but to the freebooting aspirations of his commercial warriors, the privateersmen and their backers. Drinkwater was as certain of this as of the breeze itself.

Sundercombe approached and stood beside him. The brig was two miles away, a merchant ship by the look of her.

'There's a brace of sail hull down to the s'uthard,' Sundercombe volunteered.

'Hasty?'

'One of 'em perhaps, sir.'

The old sensation of excitement and anxiety wormed in Drinkwater's gut. They had nothing much to fear from the brig, he thought, any more than the brig had to fear from the schooner she was so trustingly running down towards. Unmistakably Yankee in design, the American ensign at her peak and approaching from the direction of Baltimore, the Sprite could be nothing other than a privateer putting to sea. He looked along the waist. The gunners crouched at their pieces, waiting.

'We've forgotten something,' Drinkwater said sharply. 'Have your men drop the fore topm'st stays'l. Contrive to have it hang over the starboard rail and cover our trail boards. Have the men fuss about up there, as though dissatisfied with something. Those men yonder may smell a rat if they know there's no Sprite out of Baltimore or the Chesapeake.'

With a sharp intake of breath, Sundercombe hurried off. He had large yellow teeth, like an old horse, thought Drinkwater. He suddenly craved the catharsis of action, knowing that in a few moments he would open fire on the defenceless ship. What else was there for him to do? He was a King's officer, bound by his duty. They were all shackled, one way or another, making a nonsense of notions of liberty.

How could a man be free? He was tied to a trade, to a master, to his family, to his land, to his throne if one chased the argument to its summit. Even poor Thurston, exponent of freedom though he was, had been chained to his beliefs, governed to excess by his obsession with democracy. Everything everywhere was either passive in equilibrium, or else active in collision, in the process of transition ending in balance and inertia. In that state of grace men called natural order, equilibrium reigned; the affairs of men were otherwise and ran, for the most part, contrary to natural order. Shocking though it had been at the hand of a maniac, Thurston's murder was comprehensible if seen as a drawing upon himself, the libertarian extremist, the pistol ball of an extreme agent of repression.

In such a world what was a reasonable man to do? What he was doing now, Drinkwater concluded as he watched an officer mount the brig's quarter rail, clinging to the larboard gaff vang. He must hasten the end of this long, wearisome war. Duty ruled his existence and providence decided the outcome of his acts.

And what of Christian charity? What of compassion, his conscience whispered? He provided for his family; he was not unkind to his friends; he had done his best in those circumstances where his decisions impinged upon the lives of others; he had taken in those lame ducks whose existence depended upon his charity ...

'Schooner, 'hoy!'

There was a flurry of activity on the deck of the brig as she drew rapidly closer. Sundercombe came aft again, wandering with a studied casualness and impressing Drinkwater with his coolness. Forward, the staysail flapped over the Sprite's name.

'Schooner 'hoy? What ship?'

Drinkwater drew himself up, doffed his hat and waved. 'Tender to the United States ship Stingray, out of the Washington Navy Yard,' he hailed.

The brig was a cable distant, trimming her yards as she braced round to run parallel with the schooner.

'Have you had word? There's a British frigate cruising off the capes.'

'Must be Hasty,' a perplexed Sundercombe murmured.

'No,' Drinkwater called back. What the devil had in­duced Tyrell to douse French colours? 'When was she last sighted?'

'Day before yesterday. He took a Norfolk ship prize.'

'The hell he did!' Drinkwater shouted back with unfeigned surprise. 'He can't have seen those two sails to the south,' he muttered in an aside to Sundercombe.

'He's too big for you to take on, Cap'n,' the American continued as the two vessels surged alongside, their crews staring at one another, the Sprites gunners still crouching out of sight.

'Where are you bound?' Drinkwater pressed.

'The Delaware.'

'I could give you an escort. We could divert the Britisher, hold him off while you got out. I heard there were some French ships in the offing,' Drinkwater drawled.

Drinkwater watched the American officer throw a remark behind him then he nodded. 'I calculate you're correct, Cap'n, and we'd be mightily obliged.'

'I'll take station on your starboard quarter then. Can you make a little more sail?'

'Sure, and thanks.'

'My pleasure.' Drinkwater turned his attention inboard. 'I think we've hooked him, Mr Sundercombe. Keep your gunners well down. Let him draw ahead and then have us range up on his weather side.'

'Ease the foresheet, there,' Sundercombe growled, clearly not trusting himself to imitate an American accent like Drinkwater. The big gaff sail flogged and the schooner lost some way as the brig's crew raced aloft to impress the navy men and shook out their royals. Sundercombe went aft and lent his weight to the helmsman. Sprite luffed under the brig's stern and then, with the foresheet retrimmed, slowly overhauled her victim on her starboard side.

'Get your larboard guns ready,' Drinkwater said, aware the Americans could not hear him but anxious lest they might realize they had been deceived.

He thought he detected some such appreciation, someone pointing at them and drawing the attention of the officer he had seen on the brig's rail to something. He realized with a spurt of irritation that he had forgotten their name exposed on the larboard bow.

The Sprite was fast overhauling the brig and Drinkwater knew he dared delay no longer if, as the inconvenient discomfort of his conscience prompted, he was to avoid excessive bloodshed.

'Ensign, Caldecott! Run out your guns, Mr Sundercombe!'

They could not fail to see now. The jerky lowering of the American colours and the hand-over-hand ascent of the white ensign brought a howl of rage from the brig, a howl quite audible above the trundle of the 6-pounder carriages over the Sprite's pine decks.

'Strike, sir, or I'll open fire!' Drinkwater hailed.

'God damn you to hell!' came a defiant roar and Drinkwater nodded. The three 6-pounders barked in a ragged broadside. It was point-blank range; even at the maximum elevation originally intended to cripple the brig's rigging and with the schooner heeling to the breeze, the trajectories of the shot could not avoid hitting the brig's rail. What appeared like a burst of lethal splinters exploded over the brig's deck. A moment later, as the gun-captains' hands went up in signal of their readiness to fire again, the American flag came down.

An hour later the brig Louise of Norfolk, Virginia, Captain Samuel Bethnal, Master, had been fired. Bethnal and his people hoisted the lugsail of the red cutter lately belonging to His Britannic Majesty's frigate Patrician and miserably set course to the south-west and the coast of Virginia. To the east the horizon was broken only by the grey smudges of a pair of British frigates, and the twin jags of a schooner's sails as she slipped over the rim of the world and left the coast of America astern.

'I don't see the sense in it myself,' said Wyatt, burying his nose in a tankard and bracing himself as the Patrician shouldered her way through a swell. 'It ain't logical,' he added, surfacing briefly to deliver his final opinion on Captain Drinkwater's conduct in the dank haven of the wardroom.

'I suppose the Commodore has his reasons,' offered Pym with a detached and largely disinterested loyalty.

'I'm sure he has,' Simpson, the chaplain, said cautiously, then affirming, 'of course he has,' with an air of conviction, before destroying the effect by appending in a far from certain tone of voice: 'in fact I'm certain of it.'

Slowly Wyatt raised his face from the tankard. Rum ran from his slack mouth, adding gloss to an already greasy complexion. 'You don't know what you're talking about,' he mouthed with utter contempt.

'Nevertheless, Mr Wyatt,' the hitherto silent Frey piped up, 'I agree with Simpson and the surgeon.'

Wyatt turned his red eyes on the junior lieutenant. 'An' you know bugger all,' he said offensively.

Frey was about to leap to his feet when he felt Simpson's restraining hand on his sleeve. 'Hold hard, young man, he doesn't know what he's saying.'

'Don't know what I'm saying, d'you say? Is that what you said, you God-bothering bastard?' Wyatt rose unsteadily to his feet, instinctively bracing himself against Patrician's motion. 'With hundreds of bloody privateers shipping out of every creek and runnel on the coast of North America, we, we,' Wyatt slammed his now empty tankard on the table top with a dull, emphatic thud, 'we go waltzing off into the wide Atlantic with the strongest frigate squadron south of Halifax ...'

'We're going to rendezvous with the homeward Indiamen ...' Frey began, but was choked in mid-sentence.

'Indiamen be buggered. If we were going to do that why did we go all the way to America?'

'Why did we go to America then, Wyatt?' Pym asked provocatively.

Wyatt swung a pitying look on Pym. 'So he', Wyatt gestured a thumb at the deck above, 'could lay with his lady love again.'

'Mr Wyatt, hold your tongue!' Frey snapped, leaping to his feet and this time avoiding Simpson's tardy hand.

'Ah, be buggered,' Wyatt sneered, 'Caldecott saw the woman; half naked she was, in her shift...'

'Are you drunk again, Mr Wyatt?'

Quilhampton stood just inside the doorway, his one hand grasping a stanchion. The creaking of the ship and the gloom of the day had allowed him to enter un­observed. Wyatt swung ponderously on his accuser as the other officers heaved a sigh of collective relief. As the frigate lurched and rolled to leeward, the master lost his already unsteady balance and reached for the back of his chair which he only succeeded in knocking over. The motion of the frigate accelerated their fall and Wyatt stretched full length on the deck. He made no move to recover himself and for a long, expectant moment no one in the wardroom moved. Then a snore broke what passed for silence between decks.

'I see you are,' said Quilhampton drily. Looking round the table, he continued, 'Let us avoid complete dishonour, gentlemen, and get the old soak into his cot without the benefit of the messman.'

They rallied round the one-armed lieutenant and, shuffling awkwardly with the dead weight of the big man between them, squeezed into his cabin and manhandled Wyatt into his swinging cot.

Catching their breath they regarded their late burden for a moment.

'Sad when you see drink consume an otherwise able man, ain't it?' Quilhampton asked in a general way. 'I presume he was running the Captain down again.'

'Yes,' Frey said, 'like Metcalfe used to, and in a particularly personal manner, too.'

'It was disgraceful,' said Simpson.

'This story about the woman again, was it?' asked Quilhampton.

'Indeed it was, Mr Q,' said Simpson.

'Well, gentlemen, let me tell you something,' Quilhampton said, herding them back into the common area of the wardroom where they resumed their places at the battered table. 'I have been acquainted with Captain Drinkwater for many years and in that time I have not known him to act improperly. Moreover, I do know him to have the confidence of government, and that if he claims this mysterious woman was an agent, or a spy, then that is very likely what she was. Now I think we can cease speculatin' on the matter and assume the Captain knows what he is doin', eh?' Quilhampton looked round the table as Moncrieff came in.

'Don't you think, Mr Q,' Simpson said, his neat, rosebud mouth pursed primly, 'that you should properly refer to Drinkwater as the Commodore?'

'I daresay I should, Mr Simpson,' Quilhampton said laconically, helping himself to a biscuit, 'what is it, Moncrieff?'

'I am a messenger, James. The Captain, I beg your pardon, Mr Simpson, the Commodore,' Moncrieff said, with ironic emphasis, desires a word with you.'

Quilhampton brushed his coat, rose and bowed to the company. 'Gentlemen, excuse me ...'

'I suppose they think I'm mad in the wardroom?' Drinkwater said flatly, not expecting contradiction. He remained bent over the chart as Quilhampton replied, 'Something like that, sir.'

Drinkwater looked up at his first lieutenant. 'You're damnably cheerful.'

'The weather's to my taste, sir.'

'You're perverse, James.'

'My wife says something similar, sir.' They grinned at each other.

'What is it they say?' Drinkwater asked, now he had Quilhampton's full attention. He saw Quilhampton drop his eyes, saw the evasive, non-committal shrug and listened to the half-truth.

'Oh, that damned fool Wyatt thinks we should stay on the American coast. I've tried to explain, but...'

Again the shrug and then Quilhampton looked up and caught a bleak look of utter loneliness on Drinkwater's face, a look which vanished as Drinkwater recovered himself, cast adrift his abstracted train of thought and fixed his eyes upon his friend.

'I'll admit to it being a long shot, James; perhaps a very long shot, and certainly a risky one. I appreciate too, that twenty-two days out of the Chesapeake with nothing to our account beyond a fired brig don't amount to much but...'

Quilhampton watched now, saw the inward glance take ignition from the conviction lurking somewhere inside this man he respected and loved, but could never understand.

'You have explained to me, sir, at least in part, but may I presume?'

'Of course.'

'We are on the defensive now. Even our blockading squadrons keep watch and ward off the French ports as the first line of defence against invasion. To some extent I share Wyatt's misgivings. We are a long way from home. Our present passage to the South Atlantic exposes our rear when every ship should be sealing home waters against the enemy. That is where, I have heard you yourself say, American privateers struck hardest during the last war. I fear, sir, for what may happen if you have miscalculated…'

Drinkwater gave a short bark of a laugh. 'So do I, James,' he interrupted.

'How are you so sure?'

'Because if I were in the same position this is what I would do.'

'And you really think it is him? This man Stewart?'

'Yes.'

'How?'

'I don't really know ...'

'Then how can you be sure of his mind?'

'I can't be entirely sure of it, James ...'

'But,' Quilhampton expostulated vainly, frustrated at Drinkwater's failure to see where the decision to sail south might lead them, 'a month ago you were in doubt as to how to proceed…'

'But we reasoned here, in this very cabin, the interception of the East India fleet was the most likely thing,' Drinkwater paused. 'Come, James, have faith; stick like a limpet to your decision.' There was a vehemence, a wildness in Drinkwater's voice, almost a passion that disturbed Quilhampton. It just then occurred to him with a vivid awfulness that Drinkwater might indeed be on the verge of madness. He stared at his friend and tried again: 'But how ... ?'

'By the prickin' of my thumbs,' Drinkwater said, looking down at the chart again, and Quilhampton withdrew, a cold and chilling sensation laying siege to his heart.

'What do you think, damn it?' Quilhampton asked Pym as the surgeon, spectacles perched on the end of his nose, looked up from the candlelit pages that he held before him against the roll of the ship. 'They're your confounded theories, ain't they? All this bloody obsession and conviction and what-not. Damn it, Pym, I've known the man since I was a boy. He's brilliant, but dogged like so many of us with never quite bein' in the right place at the right time. He got me out of Hamburg in terrible circumstances, all the way down the Elbe in the winter in a blasted duck-punt...'

'Yes, I heard about that.'

'D'you think the ordeal might have turned his mind?'

Pym shrugged. 'This', he tapped the notes he had abandoned when Quilhampton sought him out, 'is no more than a theory, based on a single case, that of your predecessor. I don't know about Drinkwater ... You say he's changed?'

The use of Drinkwater's unqualified surname shocked Quilhampton. It almost smacked of mutiny, as if Pym, in his detached, objectively professional way, had actually committed a preliminary act by divesting Drinkwater of his rank. Quilhampton shied away from committing himself.

'Certainly,' Pym rumbled on, 'there are signs of obsession in his conduct, but I have to say we are not party to his orders and, as you yourself suggested, these may be of a clandestine nature. Wasn't he in Hamburg on some such mission?'

'Yes,' Quilhampton agreed, worried at the direction the conversation was taking.

'Perhaps,' Pym suggested with an air of slyness, removing his spectacles and leaning back in his chair to clean them on his neck-cloth, 'there is something else the matter.'

'What the deuce d'you mean?' Quilhampton asked sharply.

'You've heard the stories of the woman. Perhaps it isn't obsession he suffers from, but remorse ...'

'Preposterous!' snapped Quilhampton dismissively, starting to his feet and looking down at the surgeon.

'If you say so, Mr Q.' Pym replaced the spectacles and picked up his pen.

'I most emphatically do say so, Mr Pym.' Quilhampton turned the handle on the surgeon's cabin door, then paused in his exit. 'This conversation, Mr Pym, must be regarded as confidential.'

'We can regard it as never having happened if you wish, Mr Q.'

Quilhampton expelled his breath. 'It would be best, I think.'

'I think so too.'

'Obliged. Good-night, Mr Pym.'

Pym bent to his manuscript and picked up his pen. The ship's motion was easier now and the lantern gyrated less, so he was able to write without the flying shadows distracting his failing sight.

It seems to me from a long observation of commanders in His Majesty's navy, that unopposed command may distort the reasoning powers of a clever man, that the balance of his rational, thinking mind may be warped by lack of good counter-argument and his imagination seized by obsession.

Pym paused, tapping his pen on the broken teeth of his lower jaw. 'The trouble is,' he puzzled to himself, 'this is quite the reverse of a man vacillating between two distinct manners of thought. And if I am to identify the one, I needs must also consider the other.'

A warm glow of ambitious satisfaction welled in his stomach. Perhaps, unlike his subjects, he was in the right place at the right time. He dipped his pen and bent to his task.

CHAPTER 15 The Whaler

'The rendezvous, gentlemen.' Drinkwater tapped the spread chart with the closed points of the dividers and watched as they leaned forward to study the tiny, isolated archipelago a few miles north of the Equator and already far astern of them as they ran down the latitude of Ascension Island. 'St Paul's Rocks, as likely a spot for the Americans to use too, so ensure you approach them with caution, should you become detached, and that you use the private signals…'

He looked round at them. Ashby was still studying the chart but Thorowgood's florid face, evidence, Drinkwater suspected, of a self-indulgent Christmas, hung on his every word, while Sundercombe, a mere lieutenant in the company of four post-captains, regarded him thoughtfully from the rear.

'Now as for our cruising station, you will observe the rhumb-line from Ascension to St Helena as being exactly contrary to the south-east trade wind ...'

They would, he explained, sweep in extended line abreast, the frigates just in sight of one another, tacking at dawn and dusk, in the hope of intercepting the East India convoy before any American privateers.

'We know the Indiamen will have at least one frigate as escort, but Yankee clipper-schooners will have no trouble outmanoeuvring her and cutting out the choicest victims at their will. News of hostilities with America will have reached the Cape by now and it may be that a second cruiser will have been attached; not that that will make very much difference. However, four additional frigates plus a schooner to match Yankee nimbleness', he paused and smiled at Sundercombe, 'should bring the convoy home safely. Any questions?'

'Sir,' said Ashby, 'may I enquire whether your orders were to escort the East Indiamen, or remain on the American coast? I mean no criticism, but had we proceeded directly to the Cape we would have met with the India fleet for a certainty.'

A groundswell of concurrence rose from the other post-captains. Drinkwater had no way of knowing that the news of the silk petticoat had spread round the squadron by that mysterious telegraphy which exists among ships in company. Sprite's tendering and message-bearing had much to do with it, and the breath of intrigue had engendered a note of misgiving into the minds of Drinkwater's young and ambitious juniors.

For himself, his own sense of guilt had been superseded by the conviction that he had picked up a vital trail at Castle Point, and he saw in Ashby's mildly impertinent question, full of the criticism he denied, the arrogance of young bucks seeking the downfall of an old bull. He lacked in their eyes, he knew, the bold dash expected of a frigate captain, and was, moreover, a tarpaulin officer of an older school than they cared to associate with. He knew, too, they had objected to his burning of the Louise. Tyrell, by being in sight in Hasty, would have had a legitimate claim to the prize money her sale might have realized, while the general principle of burning valuable prizes appealed to none of them. Ashby's question invited a snub; he decided to administer a lecture. Signalling Mullender to offer wine and sweet-treacle biscuits to his guests, he stared out of the stern windows. Only the lightest of breezes ruffled the sea and Patrician ghosted along, the other frigates' boats towing in the slight ripples of her wake. He knew from the silence, broken only by the soft chink of decanter on glass, that they waited for his reply. He swung on them with a sudden, unexpected ferocity.

'You cannot buy yourself into the sea-service, gentlemen, as you can into the army. A ship-of-the-line is not to be had like a regiment or a whore. Oh, to be sure, interest, be it parliamentary or petticoat, sees many a fool up the quarterdeck ladder. But that does not prevent an able man getting there, though it stops many. Fortunately for the sea-service that peculiarly snobbish genius of the English, that of giving the greater glory to what costs 'em most, is absent in principle from naval promotion.'

He paused, glaring at them, gratified to see in their eyes the expressions of the midshipmen they once had been.

'Nevertheless, a deal of useless articles have arrived on quarterdecks. Since Lord Nelson's apotheosis at Trafalgar, the Royal Navy has appealed to the second of England's vices after snobbery: that of fashion. How a service which accepts boys to be sodomized or killed at twelve or thirteen, poxed at eighteen and shot or knighted by their majority should become fashionable, is a matter for philosophers more objective than myself. All I know is that those of us who remember the last war with the Americans, if we aren't rotting ashore, dead, or been promoted to flags or dockyards, have been consigned to the living entombment of blockade, whilst injudiciously fashionable young men command our cruisers and risk destruction at the hands of the Americans ...'

'Excuse me, sir.'

'What the devil d'you want?' Drinkwater broke off his diatribe, aware that Belchambers had been hovering by the door for some time. 'Excuse me a moment, gentlemen,' Drinkwater said, secretly delighted that Thorowgood was nearly purple with fury and Ashby's eyes glittered dangerously. Tyrell was studying his nails.

'The wind's freshening a trifle, sir, and Mr Quilhampton says there's a strange sail coming up from the south-'ard. She's carrying a wind and looks to be a whaler.'

The news transformed the gathering, the whiff of a prize, a Yankee whaler, affected them all, with the exception of their commodore.

'Shall we go on deck, gentlemen, and see what we make of this newcomer before you return to your ships?'

The notion of waiting aboard Patrician while the whaler closed the squadron obviously irritated them still further.

Coolly Drinkwater led the way past the ramrod figure of the marine sentry and up the quarterdeck ladder.

'British colours, sir.'

Quilhampton, who had the deck, lowered his glass and offered it to Drinkwater. Behind them the knot of frustrated frigate commanders and Lieutenant Sundercombe, who stood slightly apart and gravitated towards Mr Wyatt beside the binnacle, drew pocket-glasses from their tail pockets. With irritable snaps the telescopes were raised.

'Maybe a ruse,' growled Thorowgood in a stage whisper.

'Indeed it might,' Ashby added archly.

The whaler, her low rig extended laterally by studding sails, came up from the south with a bone in her teeth. Gradually her sails fell slack as she closed the British frigates and her way fell off.

'I think not, gentlemen, she's losing the wind and lowering a boat.'

They watched as the whaleboat danced over the wavelets towards Patrician, the most advanced of the squadron.

'He's pulling pell-mell. Ain't he afraid we might press such active fellows?' Drinkwater asked in an aside to Quilhampton.

'D'you want me to, sir?'

'I think we should see what he has to say, Mr Q,' Drinkwater replied.

The whaleboat swung parallel to the Patrician's side, half a pistolshot to starboard.

'Good-day, sir,' Drinkwater called, standing conspicuously beside the hance. 'You seem in a damned hurry.'

'Aye, sir, I've news, damnable news. Do I have to shout it out, or may I come aboard with the promise that you won't molest my men?'

'Come aboard. You have my word on the matter of your men.' Drinkwater's heart was suddenly thumping excitedly in his breast. A sense of anticipation filled him, a sense of luck and providence conspiring to bring him at last the news he so desired.

The whaling master clambered over the rail. He was a big, bluff, elderly man, dressed in an old-fashioned brown coat with grey breeches and red woollen stockings, despite the warmth of the day. He drew off his hat and revealed a bald pate and a fringe of long, lank hair.

'I'm Cap'n Hugh Orwig, master of the whaling barque Altair homeward bound towards Milford,' the man said in a rush, waving aside any introductions Drinkwater might have felt propriety compelled him to offer, 'you'll be after news of the Yankee frigate.'

'What Yankee frigate?' Drinkwater asked sharply. 'You ain't chasing a Yankee frigate?' 'Not specifically, but if you've news of one at large ...' 'News, Cap'n? Bloody hell, I've news for you, aye, all of you,' he nodded at the semi-circle of gold epaulettes that caught the sunshine as they drew closer.

'I heard yesterday, from a Portuguese brig, that a big Yankee frigate has taken the Java, British frigate ...'

'Stap me...' An explosion of incredulity behind him caused Drinkwater to turn and glare at his subordinates. 'The Java, you say ... ?' He could not place the ship. 'A former Frenchman, sir,' Ashby said smoothly, 'formerly the Renommée, taken off Madagascar in May, the year before last, by Captain Schomberg's squadron. I believe Lambert to have been in command.'

'Thank you, Captain Ashby.' Drinkwater returned to Orwig. 'D'you know the name of the American frigate?'

'No, sir, but I don't think she was the same as took the Macedonian.'

'What's that you say? The Macedonians been taken too?' 'Aye, Cap'n, didn't you know? I fell in with another Milford ship, the Martha, Cap'n Raynes; cruising for Sperm we were, off Martin Vaz, and he told me the Macedonian had been knocked to pieces by the United States, said the alarm had gone out there was a Yankee squadron at large…' 'God's bones!'

The sense of having been caught out laid its cold fingers round Drinkwater's heart. The American ships must have left from New York or Boston; they could have slipped past within a few miles of his own vessels! It was quite possible the Americans would attempt to combine their heavy frigates with a swarm of privateers, privateers with trained but surplus naval officers like Stewart and, perhaps, Lieutenant Tucker, to command them. It struck him that if such a thing occurred, the United States navy might quadruple itself at a stroke, greatly reducing the assumed superiority of the Royal Navy! The thought made his blood run cold and about him it had precipitated a buzz of angry reaction.

'When did this happen?' he heard Ashby asking Orwig.

'Sometime in October, I think. Off the Canaries, Raynes said,' Orwig replied, adding in a surprised tone, 'I thought you gennelmen would have knowed.'

'No, sir, we did not know.' Ashby's tone was icily accusatory, levelled at Drinkwater as though, in condemning his superior officer for glaring into one crystal ball, he had failed to divine the truth in another, and taking Drinkwater's silence for bewilderment.

'Well, we know now,' Drinkwater said, rounding on them, 'and the India fleet is all the more in need of our protection.' Quilhampton caught his attention; the first lieutenant's face was twisted with anxiety and apprehension.

'You'll be seekin' convoy, Captain Orwig?' Drinkwater enquired.

Orwig nodded, then shook his head. 'You'll not be able to spare it, Cap'n, not if the Yankees are as good as they seem and you've the India fleet to consider. Leadenhall Street will not forgive you if you lose them their annual profit.'

Drinkwater had no need to contemplate the consequences of the displeasure of the Court of Directors of the Honourable East India Company. 'And you, Captain,' he said, warming to the elderly man's consideration, 'how long did it take you to fill your barrels?'

Three years, sir, an' in all three oceans.'

'Then you shall have convoy, sir, and my hand upon it. I would not have you or your company end a three-year voyage in American hands. Captain Tyrell...'

'Sir?' Tyrell stepped forward.

'I will write you out orders in a few moments, the sense of which will be to take Captain Orwig, and such other British merchantmen as you may sight, under your protection and convoy them to Milford Haven and then Plymouth. You will take also my dispatches and there await the instructions of their Lordships. Please take this opportunity to discuss details with Captain Orwig.' Drinkwater ignored the astonished look on Tyrell's face and addressed Ashby, Thorowgood and Sundercombe. 'Return to your ships, if you please, gentlemen. We will proceed as we agreed the moment I have written Captain Tyrell's orders. Your servant, gentlemen; Captain Orwig, a safe passage; Captain Tyrell, I'd be obliged if you'd wait upon me when you have concluded your business with Orwig.'

In his cabin Drinkwater drew pen, ink and paper towards him and wrote furiously for twenty minutes. He first addressed a brief report of proceedings to the Admiralty, stating he had reason to believe a force of privateers was loose in the South Atlantic. That much, insubstantial as it was in fact, yet justified the detachment of Hasty. Next he wrote to his wife, enclosing the missive with his private letter to Lord Dungarth to whom he gave vent to his concern over an American frigate squadron supported by private auxiliaries operating on the British trade routes. He was completing this last when Tyrell knocked and came in.

'Sit down, Tyrell, help yourself to another glass, I shall be with you directly.'

'Captain Drinkwater, I don't wish to appear importunate…'

'Then don't, my dear fellow,' said Drinkwater, looking up as he sanded the last sheet and stifling Tyrell's protest. 'Now listen, I want you to deliver this letter to Lord Dungarth when you call on the Admiralty. It is for his hand only, and if you fail to find his Lordship at the Admiralty, you are to wait upon him at his residence in Lord North Street; d'you understand?'

'Yes.'

'Good.' Drinkwater rose, handed over the papers and extended his right hand. 'Good luck, and don't get yourself taken if you can help it.'

Drinkwater saw, from the sudden widening of Tyrell's eyes, that he had not, until that moment, considered the possibility.

'Well, Wyatt, what d'you make of the news?' Frey asked as the officers sat over their wine and the Patrician heeled to the gathering south-easterly breeze which promised to be the long-sought trade wind.

'The American ships were lucky. I expect their gunners were British deserters. It wouldn't have happened ten years ago ...'

'I don't mean the American victories, Wyatt, I mean the effect their being at sea has on the safety of the East Indiamen, something you were prepared to regard as ...'

'Don't resurrect old arguments, Mr Frey,' Simpson cautioned. 'Let sleeping dogs lie.'

'Oh ye of little faith,' Frey said, throwing the remark at the master, who buried his nose in his slopping tankard.

On the deck above Drinkwater dozed in his cot. Orwig's news was worrying. He had felt as though someone had punched him in the belly earlier, such was its impact. The latitude allowed in discretionary orders could hang an officer if he made the wrong decision more certainly than it could bring him success. There were so many options open, but only one which could be taken up. He dulled his anxiety with half a bottle of blackstrap and then settled to think the matter over. Yet the more he worried at the problem, the more convinced he was of the rightness of his decision, despite its unorthodox roots.

The logic of the thing was inescapable; as he had said to Quilhampton and repeated in substance to Dungarth, it was not only what he would have done himself had he been in Stewart's shoes, but what he would do if given President Madison's choices. Over and over he turned the thing until he dozed off in his chair. After some fifteen minutes the empty wine glass slipped from his fingers and the crash of its breaking woke him with a start.

The sudden shock made his heart pound, the wine made his head ache and his mouth felt foul. He rubbed his face, grinding his knuckles into his eyes. Bright scarlet and yellow flashes danced before him.

'God's bones!' he exlaimed, leaping to his feet and striking his head a numbing blow on the deck beams above. He sank back into his chair, his hands over his skull, feeling the bruise rising. 'God damn and blast it,' he muttered through clenched teeth, 'was I dreaming, or not?'

Mullender looked in from the pantry and smartly withdrew. Captain Drinkwater's antics seemed scarcely normal, but Mullender knew personal survival for men in his station largely depended on feigned indifference.

'I was dreaming,' Drinkwater continued to himself, 'but it wasn't a phantasm.' He sat up, dropping his hands from his head and staring straight before him, seeing not the bulkhead, but a glimpse of a room through a gap in heavy brocaded curtains and a litter of papers spread about an escritoire.

Had Mullender chosen this moment to enquire after the well-being of his master, he would have thought him stark, staring mad; but Captain Nathaniel Drinkwater had never been saner in his life.