The Flying Squadron (20 page)

And with that Frey took his dismissal. So downcast was his mood, he thought Drinkwater merely temporizing and failed to catch the faint intimation of a purpose in the captain's words.

Mr Pym was as new to
Patrician
and her commander as most of the other officers. However, he was not new to the Royal Navy, having been an assistant surgeon at Haslar Naval Hospital when Mr Lallo, the ship's former surgeon, was found dead in his cot. Pym had accepted the vacancy in a frigate ordered on special service with alacrity. He was an indolent, easy-going man who found his wife and seven children as heavy a burden upon his tolerance as his purse. He had subdued his wife's protests with the consolation that he could at last drop the ‘assistant' from his title and would receive a small increase in his emolument. Having thus satisfied her social pretensions, he had packed his instruments with his beloved books and contentedly joined
Patrician
.

Mr Pym was a quiet, private man. He possessed a kind heart, though he saw this as a vice since it had trapped him into a late marriage and ensured his broody and doting wife fell pregnant with dismal regularity, a circumstance which surprised and flattered his ageing self. He guarded this soft-heartedness, having learned early in his career not to display it aboard ship. Furthermore, like most easy-going and indolent men he was basically of a selfish disposition. The charm he possessed was used to ward off invasion of his privacy, and this latter he employed chiefly in reading. Books were Pym's secret delight.

He played cards with Wyatt, partly because they were of an age, but also by way of a break, a form, he told himself, of exercise between his voracious bouts of reading. As for his duties, he attended to these easily, holding a morning surgery, after which he spent the day as he pleased. Once a week, for the purpose of presenting the sick-book and discussing the state of the ship's company's health, he waited upon the captain.

Professionally he was not over-taxed. There were the usual crop of diseases: mostly skin complaints and an asthmatic or two, a few rheumatic cases, men with the
usual minor venereal infections, coupled with a baker's dozen of the inevitable hernias found aboard any man-of-war. There was nothing, it seemed, of a surgical, nor indeed of a general medical nature to interest Pym, and this rather disappointed him.

He had, as a young man, studied at St Bartholomew's under the lame, scrofulous, supercilious and misanthropic physician Mark Akenside. Under Akenside's influence, he had aspired to greatness at an age when all things seem possible to the young and they have yet to discover the limitations of their energies, gifts and circumstances.

Early in life he had fallen into bad company, a mildly dissolute life and debt. The Royal Navy put distance between himself and his creditors, gave him back his character and kept him out of harm's way; but ambition continued to nag, and believing success came from change rather than effort, he accepted a post at Haslar. Here he found himself relegated to the second class and sought consolation in marriage with its consequent burdensome family. The appointment to
Patrician
presented him, therefore, with a new opportunity.

As with many unimaginative and idly ambitious men, Pym failed to see any opportunity fate cast in his way. Obsessed with the end itself, he missed anything which might, with a little application, have provided him with the means. His books were too good a diversion, too absorbing a hobby. They tied up his mind, leaving it only room to brood upon his failure.

Until, in the hiatus of lying at anchor in the Potomac, he finished them.

To this disaster was now added a trail of men with imagined complaints. The artificial nature of exercises designed to keep them busy fostered a resentment only fuelled by the desertions. It was common knowledge on the lower deck that Thurston and his companions were aboard the
Stingray
. This, and the continuing useless search parties when each man was tempted from his duty by both the abuse offered when they came into contact with Americans and the healthy prosperity of the local population, combined to keep the pot of discontent simmering. Nor did the weather help. Warm and largely
windless, the poorly ventilated berth deck became stifling, despite the burning of gunpowder and sloppings of vinegar solution.

‘They are', Pym announced to the dining officers, ‘rotten with the corrupting disease of valetudinarianism.'

‘What's that?' asked Wyatt, his mouth full.

‘Malingering,' Metcalfe explained.

Pym made a mock bow to the first lieutenant for stealing his own thunder which Metcalfe, helping himself to another slice of roast snipe, did not see but which tickled Frey's sense of humour so that he first laughed and then choked.

Metcalfe looked up. ‘What's so damned funny?'

Frey spluttered and went purple. ‘God, he's not laughing!' Moncrieff rose and slammed a hearty palm between Frey's shoulder blades. The piece of wing dislodged itself and flew across the table on to Metcalfe's plate.

‘God damn you for an insolent puppy,' Metcalfe exploded, and in the same instant Pym received inspiration and enlightenment. He knew Metcalfe had not seen his own rudeness for he had been looking at the first lieutenant when he produced his little sarcasm. He knew his own mood was due to his having run out of books. A vague idea was stirring that a sure cure to his problem was to write one of his own, though the thought of the necessary effort bothered him. Parallel with these undercurrents of thought had been a detached observation of the first lieutenant's conduct. In this as in much else, Pym was lazy, blind to the clinical opportunity the concupiscence of a frigate's wardroom gave him. He merely concluded Metcalfe would, like so many other naval officers of his era, end up raving in Haslar.

‘Though he don't drink much,' he had observed to Wyatt when they had been gossiping.

‘Perhaps he's poxed,' Wyatt had suggested in his own down-to-earth manner.

‘Or has incipient mercurial nephritis,' Pym had humbugged elevatingly.

But now, watching Metcalfe while the others stared at Frey recovering his breath and his composure, Pym
thought him mad from another source and the seed of an idea finally germinated in his mind.

‘I say, Metcalfe,' Moncrieff growled as Frey exchanged near-asphixiation for indignation.

‘I . . . ain't . . . a . . . damned . . . puppy!' Frey gasped.

‘You even talk like the man,' Metcalfe went on, and Pym realized Metcalfe's train of thought was somehow not normal. Here again was the recurrence of this obsessive disparagement of Captain Drinkwater, and Pym wondered at its root. Metcalfe's condemnation of the captain had become almost a ritual of his wardroom conversation, ignored by the others, tolerated only because he was the first lieutenant. Captains had a right to be eccentric, disobliging even, and first lieutenants an obligation to be unswervingly, silently loyal. That was how the writ ran in Pym's understanding.

Poor Frey, unaware of any irregularity in Metcalfe's personality beyond the generally unpleasant, thought the first lieutenant must have heard something about the confidences he and Drinkwater had exchanged earlier. He resolved to have words with Mullender, forgetting in his anger that Mullender had not been in the pantry, and disgusted that Metcalfe had such spies about the ship.

‘Take that back, sir . . .'

‘Steady, Frey . . .' Moncrieff advised.

‘Stap me, you're all in this.' There was a bewildered wildness in Metcalfe's eyes. ‘Why are you looking at me, Pym? Don't
you
think such insolence is intolerable?'

And so the patient delivered himself to the quack and Pym received the means by which he was to achieve fame. ‘To a degree, yes, Mr Metcalfe. I concur you've been badly treated,' Pym went on, mentally rubbing his hands with glee and ignoring the astonishment of his messmates' faces. ‘Come, sir, don't let your meat spoil. Afterwards you and I shall take a turn on deck.'

For a moment Metcalfe stared at the surgeon, something akin to disbelief upon his face. Pym, in a rare and perceptive moment, interpreted it as relief. Metcalfe bent to his dinner and over his head Pym winked at the others.

Pym was not objective enough to recognize the crisis
Metcalfe had reached. He preened his self-esteem even while planning his therapy and probing his patient's mind. Overall lay a vague image of his discovery in print, a seminal work dislodging Brown's
Elements of Medicine
. He would complement Keil's
Anatomy
, Shaw's
Practice of Physic;
alongside Munro on the bones and Douglas on the muscles, they would set Pym's
On the Mind
. Yet amid this self-conceit and at the moment imperfectly glimpsed, Pym had caught sight of a great paradox. Within Metcalfe he sensed a twin existence . . . 

And already the opening words of his treatise came to him:
Just as
, in utero,
a foetus may divide and produce two unique human beings, so in the skull, twin brains may develop, to dominate the conduct and produce responsive contrariness and a lack of logical direction
 . . . 

Pleased with the portentious ring of the phrases he abandoned them, setting the composition aside as Metcalfe, unsuspicious, soothed by Pym's solicitude, confirmed the growing certainty in Pym's ecstatic imagination.

‘Damn the man, Mr Pym,' Metcalfe was saying, ‘what is he about? The men have run and we know where they are.'

‘Quite, quite, Mr Metcalfe, what do you propose, that we should take them by force and precipitate a crisis at this delicate juncture?' Their situation had been much rehearsed in the wardroom during the week and Pym laid out the logic to see where Metcalfe diverged from its uncompromising path, for he was familiar with a method used to cure the megrims by first rooting out their source.

‘We should beat 'em, Pym', Metcalfe said fervently, ‘blow 'em from the water, pound 'em to pieces . . .' The wildness was back in Metcalfe's eyes now and Pym felt disappointment. This was a normal, naval, fire-eating madness after all.

‘Perhaps,' he said disconsolately, ‘we are to take our leave without raising the matter.' He paused, seeking to lead Metcalfe's thoughts along a different path. ‘It is clear to me and all the others you dislike Captain Drinkwater, though he seems reasonable enough to me . . .'

Metcalfe grunted but offered no more.

‘Well, I suppose you require his good opinion for advancement . . .' the surgeon suggested slyly.

‘Me, Pym? What the devil for? I may make my own opportunities, damn it.'

‘Well,' said Pym shrugging, a sense of failure, of approaching boredom, of finding the task he had set himself too difficult making him lose interest. It had seemed a good idea earlier, but perhaps that was the wine. He failed to recognize Metcalfe's massive self-delusion and reverted to a clinical examination. Stopping his pacing, he compelled Metcalfe to do the same. The two turned inwards and Pym looked deliberately into Metcalfe's eyes, while saying with exaggerated and insincere concern, ‘How can you be sure of that, Mr Metcalfe? It seems to me the war is a stalemate. All the opportunities seem to have evaporated.'

‘If we were to fight
them
,' Metcalfe replied, jerking his head in the direction of the
Stingray
, ‘then things would soon be different.'

‘But,' said Pym frowning, suspending his clandestine examination of Metcalfe's pupils and rekindling his theory, ‘I thought you once expressed a contrary opinion, or was that', he affected a conspiratorial expression, ‘merely a matter of dissembling; of, shall we say, seeking the captain's good opinion?'

Metcalfe stared back at the surgeon. ‘Good opinion?' he murmured, almost abstractedly, and Pym's heart leapt with enthusiasm again. ‘Oh, yes, perhaps . . . yes, perhaps it was.'

And Metcalfe, like a man who had suddenly remembered a forgotten appointment, abruptly walked away. Pym watched him go. ‘It's not going to be easy,' he muttered to himself, but later that afternoon he fashioned a new quill-nib and began to write:
I conducted my first series of clinical observations, engaging my patient in conversation designed to draw out certain convictions, simultaneously examining his eyes for luetic symptoms. He displayed a vehement conviction at first, which yielded to a meeker and contrary opinion when this was suggested, thus exhibiting a predisposition towards influence
 . . . 

Pym sat back very pleased with himself and at that
moment the quarter sentry called out that the schooner aboard which Vansittart had left for Baltimore was in sight.

‘It is good news,' Vansittart said, sitting back in the offered chair and taking the glass Drinkwater held out. ‘I think we shall simply rescind the Orders-in-Council where the United States are concerned, provided they do not press the matter of sailors' rights. There seems little pressure to do so in Washington, whatever may be said elsewhere.'

‘I daresay seamen are as cheaply had here as elsewhere,' Drinkwater observed, marvelling at this change of diplomatic tack. ‘Did you meet Mr Madison?'

‘Alas, no, Augustus Foster handled all formal negotiations, but I learned something of interest to you.'

‘To me? What the devil was that?'

‘Captain Stewart is shortly to be relieved of his command.'

‘Why? Surely not because of his indiscreet . . . ?'

‘No, no, nothing to do with that,' Vansittart affirmed, swallowing a draught of Madeira. ‘It seems to be Navy Department policy to rotate the commanders of their, how d'you say, ships and vessels? Is that it? Anyway, he won't be allowed the opportunity of quenching his fire-eating ardour one way or another now.'

‘Well, there is my consolation for eating humble pie and holdin' my hand.' Drinkwater explained about the location of his deserters. ‘And it don't taste so bad either. So we may weigh at first light?'