The Flying Squadron (12 page)

‘I see; is it usual then for such a curious beast to be absent from his ship under the circumstances?'

‘The circumstances being your arrival, I should say it was essential,' Drinkwater said.

‘Might he not be suspicious of your taking men out of his ship?'

‘To be truthful, Vansittart, I am more concerned to stop my men deserting to his.'

‘D'you think it likely?' asked Vansittart, displaying a mild surprise.

‘Certainly 'tis a possibility. Did you not mark the furling of the sails? You noticed we were slower.'

‘I, er, assumed it not to be significant . . .'

‘The last tucks in the fore t'gallant were deliberately
delayed. I conceive that to have been a mark of sympathy with the Yankees.'

‘A form of insolence, d'you mean?'

‘Something of the kind.' Drinkwater raised his voice, ‘Mr Metcalfe! Mr Moncrieff!'

When the two officers had approached he said, ‘Gentlemen, I wish you to consider the possibility of desertion to the American ship or', he looked towards the longer distance separating the frigate from the lush greensward sweeping down to the Potomac, ‘directly ashore. Mr Moncrieff, your sentries are to be especially alert. They must first challenge but thereafter they may fire. They are to bear loaded weapons.' He turned to the first lieutenant. ‘Mr Metcalfe, we will row a guard-boat day and night. The midshipmen to be in command. There will be no communication whatsoever with either the shore or the American ship.' He paused. ‘I am sorry for the Draconian measures, gentlemen, but I'm sure you'll understand.'

‘Of course, sir,' Moncrieff nodded.

‘Yes, sir,' Metcalfe acknowledged.

‘You will be pleased to pass on to all the officers that the desertion of a single man in such circumstances', he gestured at their idyllic, land-locked situation, ‘may not be a disaster in practical terms for the ship, but it will be a considerable embarrassment to the Service. I therefore require the lieutenants and the master to maintain their watches even though we are anchored. Is that understood?'

‘Aye, aye, sir,' Metcalfe said woodenly.

‘You
are
taking this seriously,' Vansittart said, after the two officers had been dismissed.

Vansittart's apparent flippancy revealed the maritime naïvety of the man. Vansittart had not been witness to Thurston's oratory; nor would he have been so susceptible, Drinkwater thought, coming as he did from a family long in the public service. Mr Vansittart would have scoffed at Captain Drinkwater's misgivings. Such guilty considerations had kept Drinkwater from revealing anything of his private thoughts. Besides, he did not need to be told his duty and he had at least the satisfaction of knowing that Thurston was kept obedient and under his
immediate eye. ‘Oh yes, indeed I am,' he said, ‘I cannot tolerate a single desertion. The consequences acting upon the remainder of the people would be most unfortunate.'

They passed an uneasy night. The knocking of the guard-boat's oar looms against the thole pins, the routine calls of the sentinels that all was well, and the airless, unaccustomed stillness of the ship after her ocean passage, combined with Drinkwater's anxiety to keep him awake, or half-dozing, until dawn, when sheer exhaustion carried him off.

They estimated that Captain Stewart, at best, would not return until the following evening. The parallel existences of the two ships passed the hours: the trilling of the pipes, the shouting of orders and the regularity of the bells, each chiming just sufficiently asynchronously to remind their companies they each belonged to different navies, lent a suspense to the day. Occasionally a boat put off from the American ship and her midshipmen doffed their hats to those rowing their tedious duty round
Patrician
. The absence of so crude and despotic a routine about the
Stingray
was a permanent reproach to the British and a source of delight to the Americans.

Towards late afternoon, however, the returning American cutter, instead of taking a sweep round the circuit of the guard-boat, cut inside, making for
Patrician
's side. A midshipman, smart in blue, white and gold, a black cockade in his stovepipe hat, came smartly up the side and, saluting in due form, handed a note to the officer of the watch, Lieutenant Frey. Frey took the missive below to Captain Drinkwater.

‘Enter.' The September sunshine slanted into the great cabin, picking up motes of dust in the heavy air. Drinkwater, his shoes kicked off and in his shirt sleeves, was slumped in a chair dozing before the stern windows.

‘What is it?' he murmured drowsily, his eyes closed.

‘Message from the shore, sir.'

‘Read it, then.'

Frey slit the wafer. ‘It's an invitation, sir . . . er, Mr Zebulon and Mistress Arabella Shaw of Castle Point request the pleasure of the company of the Captain of the
English frigate and his officers, at six of the clock . . .' Frey broke off, a note of excitement testimony to the boredom of his young life. ‘There'll be food, sir, and music, and', he added wistfully, ‘company.'

‘I suppose you'd like me to accept on your behalf, Mr Frey.'

‘Well, yes please, sir.' The merest suggestion that Drink-water might refuse clearly alarmed Frey.

‘Zebulon who?' Drinkwater queried in a disinterested voice.

‘Er,' Frey studied the invitation again. ‘Shaw, sir.'

Drinkwater was silent for a while. ‘You were with me on the
Melusine
, weren't you?'

‘Yes, sir,' replied Frey, impatiently wondering where this line of questioning was leading them and rather hurt that it was necessary.

‘We didn't have much opportunity for social life in the Greenland Sea, did we?'

‘Not a great deal, sir.'

‘And the natives were not particularly attractive, were they?'

‘No, sir, their huts weren't quite like the wigwam ashore there, sir.' Ducking his head Frey could see a white corner of the stables adjoining the classical frontage of Castle Point.

‘I wonder why they call it Castle Point . . . ?'

‘There are some battlements, sir.'

‘Are there? Well, well.' Gantley Hall had no battlements. ‘You'd better call Thurston . . .'

‘I'll write the reply myself, sir, if you like,' Frey said, then thinking he was being too forward he added, ‘there's a midshipman from the Yankee sloop waiting on deck . . .'

‘Is there, by God?' Drinkwater said, sitting up, rubbing his eyes and feeling for his shoes. ‘Then we'd better jump to it and not keep young Master Jonathan waiting . . .'

‘I beg your pardon . . .'

‘Don't be a fool, Frey. I know full well you want to stretch your legs, and preferably alongside a rich Virginian belle in the figures of a waltz. It's a damned sight better than takin' the air on the quarterdeck, ain't it?'

Drinkwater gestured for the note; Frey gave it to him.
The paper gave off a faint fragrance and was covered in an elegant, feminine script. Presumably the patrician hand of Mistress Shaw. Going to his desk he drew a sheet of paper towards him, lifted the lid of his ink-well and picked up the Mitchell's pen Elizabeth had given him.

‘To Mister and Mistress Zebulon Shaw . . .' he murmured as he wrote, wondering what manner of man and wife owned so luxurious a property. The bare untitled names reminded him of the virtues of republicanism. Perhaps it was as well he had not summoned Thurston to pen this acceptance. When he had sanded it dry he gave it to Frey.

‘There, Mr Frey, and remember we are ourselves ambassadors in our small way.'

‘Aye, aye, sir,' replied Frey, grinning happily and retreating as hurriedly as decency permitted.

‘Lord, Lootenant, you
are
hot!'

Arabella Shaw looked up at the handsome face of the English officer.

‘And you, ma'am,' Lieutenant Gordon replied with equal candour, ‘are beautiful.'

He smiled down at her, blaming his own goatishness on her soft body and its capacity to arouse. He clasped her waist tighter as they whirled together in the waltz. She judged him to be a year or so short of thirty, at least ten years her junior, but with a chilling absence of two fingers on his left hand. She could feel the lust in him, pliantly urgent. He might have excused his obtrusiveness by claiming an overlong period at sea, but he pretended it did not exist and she acknowledged this intimate flattery by lowering her eyes.

Mr Gordon took this for surrender; not, he realized, of the citadel, but of an outwork, a ravelin. He gathered her closer still, enchanted by the scent of her hair in his nostrils, her exotic perfume and the swell of her breasts against his chest.

Mistress Shaw endured his rough attentions and curtseyed formally as the music stopped. As he returned her to her seat, she quietly cursed her own weakness for suggesting this evening. Her widowhood had begun to irk her and she had felt the impromtu ball an occasion enabling her to cast aside more than a year of mourning, besides helping her father-in-law do what he could to stop
the imminent rupture between the United States and Great Britain. He had enthusiastically adopted her suggestion of inviting the officers of both naval ships to a rout.

She had to admit her own motives were far less philanthropic. It had been curiosity which tipped her judgement in favour of making the suggestion; curiosity to see the English officers. She had been a girl at the time of Yorktown when the hated redcoats had surrendered sullenly against overwhelming odds. Defeat had not robbed them of their potent terror to a young mind and the childish impression had remained. She still thought of them as bogey-men inhabiting the dark, threatening spectres to be conjured up when children were disobedient. And once again they were at large, plundering American ships off their own coastline and carrying off innocent sailors like the Barbary pirates with whom her country had already been at war. Tonight she had thought, with a
frisson
of fearful delight, she would see these mythological beings for herself and she was half-disappointed, half-relieved that they were not the pop-eyed, dissolute, viciously indolent exquisites she had expected.

There had been, too, the added inducement to exhibit a new gown, a gay, uninhibited contrast with the black bombazine which for so long had hidden her figure. To this was added a patriotic justification, for the gown had been smuggled from Paris to replace her widow's weeds and she wore it in defiance of the British blockade. The wicked desire to try its effects on English sophisticates (as she imagined them to be) had honed her anticipation. She had had enough of the male society of Virginia. The rich, elderly and often dissolute men who had shown an interest in her had seemed either opportunist or calculating. Their expressions of regard had been too contrived for sincerity, or their desires too obvious for a permanent attachment. None had struck an answering longing in her own heart. For her all men had died with her husband, whose mutilated body they had found already putrefying beside his exhausted horse. They said the stump of an Indian arrow in his back had killed him when mounting, and not the dreadful, nightmare gallop of a terrified
mount whose rider had fallen backwards with one foot caught in a stirrup.

They reached the table and Gordon's mangled hand gave her a sharp reminder of the mortality of men. She was suddenly sorry for him and ashamed of her soft breasts that jutted,
à la Marie-Louise
, to tantalize him. She sat and sipped from her glass while Gordon, handsome and eager, hovered uncertainly. She was about to ask him to sit too, since his awkwardness was unsettling her, when he was superseded. A tall, gaunt young Scot in the scarlet and blue facings of her childhood fancy, a glittering gorget and white cravat reflecting on a pugnacious chin, elbowed Gordon aside. She sensed some tacit agreement, for Gordon withdrew unprotesting and bowing. She felt cheap, not wicked, as if the subtleties of wearing the gown were lost on these boors and had merely made of her a whore. The lobsterback officer was bending over her hand.

‘Quentin Moncrieff, ma'am, Royal Marines, at your service. The band is about to strike up, I believe, and I would be obliged if you would do me the honour . . .'

The leg he put forward was well muscled, the bow elegant enough, and, as if to emphasize his authority, the music began again, silencing the buzz of chatter. She submitted, Moncrieff led her out and almost at once she regretted Gordon's honest lust as Moncrieff's flattery assaulted her.

Both had the same end in view; she had clearly been pointed out as a widow, perhaps in a moment of weakness by the rather gauche-looking American officers grouped around one table muttering amongst themselves and regarding their visitors with suspicion. She supposed she had upset them by dancing exclusively with the British; it was a good thing her brother was not here, though Lieutenant Tucker would doubtless keep him informed.