The Flying Squadron (2 page)

Frey suppressed a smile as Drinkwater raised his left eyebrow a trifle. The side party waited patiently while the man-ropes jerked and a young man, elegantly dressed in grey, finally hauled himself breathlessly on to the deck. Frey regarded the stranger with interest and a little wonder. The cut of the coat was so obviously fashionable that it was difficult not to assume the newcomer was a fop. Aware of the curiosity aroused by the contrast between the somewhat grubby informality of Frey's undress uniform coat and the attire of his companion, Drinkwater gave his guest a moment to recover his wind and gape about. Turning to the third lieutenant, Drinkwater asked, ‘First Lieutenant aboard, Mr Frey?'

‘Here, sir.'

Metcalfe materialized by magic, as if he had been there all along but chose that precise moment to forsake invisibility.

‘We'll get under weigh the moment the wind serves.'

Metcalfe cast his eyes aloft and turned nonchalantly on his heels, his whole demeanour indicating the fact that it was a flat calm. ‘Aye, aye, sir . . . when the wind serves.'

Frey, already irritated by the first lieutenant's idiosyncratic detachment, watched Captain Drinkwater's reaction to this piece of studied insolence with interest and anxiety.

‘You take my meaning, Mr Metcalfe?' There was the hint of an edge to Drinkwater's voice.

Metcalfe completed his slow gyration and met the cool appraisal of his new commander with an inclination of his head.

‘Perfectly, sir. May I remind you the ship still wants thirty-seven men to complete her establishment. The watch-bill . . .'

‘Then, sir,' snapped Drinkwater with a false formality, ‘you may take a party ashore when the launch is discharged and see what the stews of Dock Town will yield up.'

Frey noted the irritation in Drinkwater's tone as he turned back to the young man in grey.

‘Mr Vansittart, please allow me to conduct you below, your dunnage and servants will come aboard from the launch directly . . .'

Frey nodded dismissal to the side party and exchanged glances with Midshipman Belchambers. They were, with Mr Comley the boatswain and Mr Maggs the gunner, the only officers remaining from
Patrician
's last commission. Despite the drafts from the guardships at Plymouth and Portsmouth, the pickings of the Impress Service sent them by the Regulating Officers in the West Country and the sweepings of their own hot-press, they remained short of men.

Patrician
had been swinging at a buoy in the Hamoaze when Captain Drinkwater had first come aboard and read his commission to the assembled ship's company. Her officers had regarded with distaste the mixture of hedge-sleeping vagrants, pallid gaolbirds, lumpish yokels and under-nourished quota-men who formed too large a proportion of the people. Afterwards Lieutenant Gordon had spoken for them all: ‘ 'Tis hands of ability we want, seamen, for God's sake,' Gordon had continued despairingly, ‘not mere numbers to fill slots in a watch-bill.'

‘That's all you're going to get,' said Pym the surgeon, having inspected them for lice, the lues, ruptures and lesser horrors, adding with some relish, ‘a first lieutenant who slept in the ship would be an advantage . . .'

It was not, Frey thought, as Drinkwater and the grey-coated gentleman disappeared below, a very propitious start to the new commission. An absentee first luff, a crew of farm hands and footpads, with what looked like a diplomatic mission, did not augur well for the future. Mr Metcalfe had appeared eventually, in time to throw his
weight about while they had completed rigging, warped alongside the hulk and taken in powder and shot. He had a talent, Frey had observed as they dropped down to the anchorage at Cawsand, for a dangerous inconsistency which threatened to set the ship on its ears and kept its unsettled, ignorant and inexpert company in a constant state of nerves.

Mr Metcalfe was of the opinion efficiency manifested itself in proportion to the number of officers disposed about the deck and the orders given. He believed any transgression or failure should be corrected, not by instruction, but by abuse and punishment. Tactful attempts by the mild and sensitive David Gordon to point out the folly of this procedure brought down the wrath of Mr Metcalfe on the unfortunate head of the second lieutenant.

Out of Metcalfe's hearing Moncrieff had shrewdly observed it a matter of prudence to ‘keep the weather gauge of Mr Metcalfe. He wants at least one of you Johnnies betwixt himself and trouble.' And failing to see the light of any comprehension in his messmates' eyes in the aftermath of Metcalfe's humiliation of Gordon, he had added, ‘to keep his own yard-arm clear, d'you see, and the smell of himself sweet in his own nostrils.'

The quaintness of Moncrieff's assertion had imprinted itself on the minds of his listeners and Mr Wyatt had affirmed the opinion as sound by a loud and conspicuous hawking into the cuspidor.

Sadly, the first lieutenant had had his way, for the mysteries of ‘official business' had kept Captain Drinkwater ashore almost continuously until this evening and Frey had not enjoyed his commander's absence.

‘Frey?' The peremptory and haughty tone of Metcalfe's voice cut aptly into Frey's train of thought.

‘Sir?' He looked round.

‘You heard the Captain, Frey. You and Belchambers are to take the launch and scour the town for seamen. Try the village there,' Metcalfe said, in his arch tone, nodding at Cawsand where the first faint lights were beginning to show in the cottage windows.

‘Aye, aye, sir.' Frey's acknowledgement was flat, formal
and expressionless. There were no seamen to be had in Cawsand, nor within a night's march into Cornwall. They might pick up a few drink-sodden wretches in the dens of Dock Town, but he was not optimistic and was disappointed in Drinkwater's suggestion that anything practical might be achieved. He was about to walk away when Metcalfe spoke again.

‘And Frey . . .'

‘Sir?'

‘Let me know', Metcalfe said with a pained and put-upon look, ‘when the Captain is coming aboard next time.'

‘The midshipman reported the boat's approach to you in the wardroom.'

‘Don't be insolent, Frey, you don't have the charm for it and it ill befits you.'

Frey bit off a hot retort and held his tongue, though he was quite unable to stop the colour mounting to his cheeks. Beyond Metcalfe's shoulder he could see Captain Drinkwater had returned to the quarterdeck.

‘I know you served in the ship's last commission,' Metcalfe went on, oblivious of the captain's approach, ‘but it don't signify with me, d'you see?'

‘Mr Frey.' Drinkwater's curt voice came as a relief to Frey.

‘Sir?'

Metcalfe swung round and saw Drinkwater. ‘Ah, sir, I was just directing Mr Frey to take command of the press . . .'

‘I told you to deal with that, Mr Metcalfe. Mr Frey has another duty to perform.'

‘Indeed, sir, may I ask what?'

Drinkwater ignored Metcalfe, addressing Frey directly, over the head of his first lieutenant. ‘The launch has, in addition to Mr Vansittart's personal effects and two servants, a large quantity of cabbages, Mr Frey. See they are got aboard and stowed carefully in nets. I want them exposed to the air.'

‘Cabbages, sir?' said the first lieutenant, his face registering exaggerated astonishment, ‘Are they your personal stores?'

‘No, Mister,' Drinkwater said, a note of asperity creeping
into his voice, ‘they are for the ship's company.'

The captain swung on his heel; Metcalfe stared after him until he was out of earshot.

‘Rum old devil, ain't he, Mr Frey?' and the remark shocked Frey for its shift of ground, betraying the inconsistency he had already noted in Metcalfe, but striking him now as deeper than mere pig-headedness.

Frey did his best to keep his voice non-committal. ‘Excuse me, sir, I've my duty to attend to.'

‘Ah, yes, the cabbages,' Metcalfe said, as though the earlier invitation to complicity had never passed his lips. Lapsing into an almost absent tone he muttered, ‘
Two
servants, damme,' then, raising his voice he bellowed, ‘Mr Belchambers! Lay aft here at the double!'

Captain Nathaniel Drinkwater hauled himself up the companionway against the heel of the ship and stepped on to the quarterdeck. Clapping one hand to his hat he took a quick reef in his billowing cloak with the other and made his way into the partial shelter of the mizen rigging.

‘Morning, sir.' The third lieutenant approached, touched the fore-cock of his hat and added, quite unnecessarily, ‘A stiff breeze, sir.'

‘Indeed, Mr Frey.' Drinkwater stared aloft, at the whip of the topgallant masts and the flexing of the yards. The wind had veered a touch during the night and had hauled round into the north-west quarter. He knew from the tell-tale compass in his cabin that they were making a good course, but he knew also that the shift of wind would bring bright, squally weather. The first rays of the sun breaking above the cloud banks astern of them promised just such a day.

‘Let's hope we've seen the last of that damned rain and sea fret,' Drinkwater said, turning his attention forward again, where the bow swooped, curtseying to the oncoming grey seas.

Two days west of the Scillies, clear of soundings and with a fine easterly wind giving them the prospect of a quick passage, the weather had turned sour on them, closed in and assailed them with a head wind and sleeting rain.

‘Treacherous month, August,' Mr Wyatt the master had
said obscurely. In the breaks between the rain, a thick mist permeated the ship, filling the gun and berth decks with the unmistakable stink of damp timber, bilge, fungus and human misery. The landsmen, yokels and town labourers, petty felons and vagrants swept up by either the press or the corruption of the quota system which allowed substitutes to be bought and sold like slaves, spewed up their guts and were bullied and beaten into the stations where even their puny weight was necessary to work the heavy frigate to windward.

In his desperation to man the ship, Drinkwater had written to his old friend, Vice-Admiral Sir Richard White, bemoaning his situation.
You have no idea the Extremities to which we are driven in Manning the Fleet Nowadays. It matches the worst Excesses of the American War. We have every Class of Person, with hardly a Seaman amongst them and a large proportion of Men straight from Gaol
 .  . . .'

Sir Richard, quietly farming his Norfolk acres and making the occasional appearance in the House of Commons on behalf of a pocket borough, had written in reply,
My Dear Nathaniel, I send you Two Men whom you may find useful. Though both should be in Gaol, the one for Poaching, the other for Something Worse. I received your Letter the Morning they came before the Bench. Knowing you to be a confirmed Democrat you can attempt their Reformation. I thus console my Guilt and Dereliction of Duty in not having them Punished Properly according to the due forms, &c, &c, in sending them to Serve their King and Country
 . . .

Drinkwater grinned at the recollection. One of the men, Thurston, a former cobbler and of whom White had insinuated guilt of a great crime, was just then helping to hang a heavy coil of rope on a fife-rail pin at the base of the main mast. About thirty, the man had a lively and intelligent face. He must have felt Drinkwater's scrutiny, for he looked up, regarding Drinkwater unobsequiously but without a trace of boldness. He smiled, and Drinkwater felt a compulsion to smile back. Thurston touched his forelock respectfully and moved away. Drinkwater was left with the clear conviction that, in other circumstances, they might have been friends.

As to the crime for which Thurston had been condemned,
it was said to be sedition. Drinkwater's enquiries had elicited no more information beyond the fact that Thurston had been taken in a tavern in Fakenham, reading aloud from a Paineite broadsheet.

Sir Richard, not otherwise noted for his leniency, had not regarded the offence as meriting a prison sentence, though conditions in the berth deck were, Drinkwater knew, currently little better than those in a gaol house. Thurston's natural charm and the charge imputed to him would earn the man a certain esteem from his messmates. Prudence dictated Drinkwater keep a weather eye on him.

Drinkwater watched the bow of his ship rise and shrug aside a breaking wave. The impact made
Patrician
shudder and throw spray high into the air where the wind caught it and drove it across the deck to form a dark patch, drenching Thurston and the party of men with whom he went forward.

Frey crossed the deck to check the course at the binnacle then returned to Drinkwater's side.

‘She's holding sou'west three-quarters west, sir, and I think another haul on the fore and main tacks will give us a further quarter point to the westward.'