The Flying Squadron (21 page)

‘No. Stewart left word that we should drop downstream at, how d'you say? Four bells?'

Drinkwater grunted non-committally. It would be unwise to seek a meeting with Arabella. He had existed for eight days without her and he had no right to any expectations there. They both had their bitter-sweet memories. It was enough.

Besides, he was meditating something which would hardly endear him to any American.

An hour before dawn Drinkwater turned all hands from their cots and hammocks. The bosun's mates moved with
silent purpose through the berth deck, their pipes quiescent, their starters flicking at the bulging canvas forms, stifling the abusive protests.

‘Turn out, show a leg, you buggers, no noise, Cap'n's orders. Turn out, show a leg, no noise . . .'

‘What's happening?'

‘Man the capstan, afterguard aft to rouse out a spring, gun crews stand to.' Mr Comley, the boatswain, passed the word among the men tumbling out of their hammocks.

‘Come on, my bullies, lash up and stow. Look lively.'

‘We're gonna fuck the Yankees,' someone said and the echo of the statement ran about the berth deck as the men rolled their hammocks. Whatever their individual resentments, the abrupt and rude awakening shattered the boredom of the routine of a ship at anchor. An expectant excitement infected officers and men alike as they poured up through the hatchways, their bare feet slap-slapping on the decks as they ran to their stations like ghosts.

Wrapped in his cloak against the dawn chill Captain Drinkwater stood by the starboard hance and watched them emerge. Any evolution after a period of comparative idleness was a testing time. Men quickly became slack, lacked that crispness of reaction every commander relied upon. Eight days of riding to an anchor could, Drinkwater knew, have a bad effect.

In the waist Metcalfe leaned over the side as a spring was carried up the larboard side. Drinkwater waited patiently, trying to ignore the hissed instructions and advice offered to the toiling party dragging the heavy hemp over and round the multiplicity of obstructions along the
Patrician
's side. Finally they worked it forward and dangled it down until it was fished from the hawse-hole and dragged inboard to be wracked to the cable. He knew, from the sudden relaxation of the men involved, when they had finished, even before Midshipman Bel-chambers ran aft with the news.

‘Mr Wyatt requests permission to commence veering cable, sir.'

‘Very well.'

Aft on the gun deck the spring would have been hove
taught and belayed; now the slacking of the anchor cable would cause the ship's head to fall off, some of the weight being taken by the spring.

Drinkwater turned and spoke to the nearest gun-captain. ‘Campbell, watch your gun, now, tell me when she bears.'

‘Aye, sir,' the man growled, bending his head in concentration.

‘Mr Metcalfe, be ready to hold the cable.'

Metcalfe waited to pass the word down the forward companionway.

‘Gun's bearing, sir.'

‘Hold on,' Drinkwater called in a low voice and bent beside Campbell's 18-pounder. He could see the grey shape of the USS
Stingray
against the darker shore, her tracery of masts, yards and the geometric perfection of her rigging etched against the grey dawn.
Patrician
adjusted her own alignment and settled to her cable.

‘She's a mite off now she's brung up, sir,' Campbell said and Drinkwater could smell the sweat on the man.

‘Veer two fathoms,' Drinkwater called, straightening up. It would be enough. He turned to Frey. ‘Your boat ready, Mr Frey?'

‘Aye, sir.'

Drinkwater looked at the growing glow in the east, an ochreous backlighting of the overcast which seeped through it to suffuse the sky with a pale, bilious light.

‘We'll give it a minute longer,' Drinkwater said, raising his glass and staring at the American ship upon which details were emerging from the obscurity of the night.

‘We'll not want a wind outside,' someone muttered.

‘What's happening?' a voice said and a score of shadowy figures shushed the coatless Vansittart to silence. ‘For God's sake . . .'

‘Quiet, sir!' Metcalfe snapped, fidgeting as usual.

‘I forbid . . .' Vansittart began, but Frey took his elbow.

‘It's a piece of bluff, sir. The Captain wants his men back before he goes.'

‘But . . .'

‘Shhhh . . .' Drinkwater's figure loomed alongside him and Vansittart subsided into silence.

‘Very well.' Drinkwater shut his telescope with an audible snap. ‘Off you go, Frey.'

With a flash of white stockings, a whirl of coat-tails and a dull gleam of gilt scabbard mountings, Frey went over the rail into the waiting boat.

Drinkwater returned to the hance and again levelled his Dollond glass. He could see a figure on the
Stingray
's quarterdeck stretch lazily. ‘Any moment now,' he said, for the benefit of the others. The cutter cleared the
Patrician
's stern and rapidly closed the gap between the two ships.

In the stillness the plash of her oars sounded unnaturally loud to the watching and waiting British. Then the challenge sounded in the strengthening daylight.

‘Boat, ahoy!'

‘Hey, what the hell . . . ?'

‘They've noticed our changed aspect,' Drinkwater observed, again peering through his glass. An officer was leaning over the side of the American sloop as the cutter swung to come alongside. Frey was standing up in her stern and they could hear an indistinct exchange. The cutter's oars were tossed, her bow nudged the
Stingray
's tumblehome and Frey nimbly ran along the thwarts between the oarsmen. A second later he was leaping up the sloop's side.

‘It's a master's mate . . . no, there's a lieutenant on deck without his coat . . . looks like Tucker, aye, 'tis, and there are men turning up.' The squeal of pipes came to them, floating across the smooth water.

‘What's Frey saying, sir?' Metcalfe asked in an agony of suspense, frustration and resentment, because Drinkwater had briefed the third lieutenant without mentioning anything to his second-in-command, though everyone grasped the gist of Frey's purpose. For Metcalfe it was one more incident in a long series of similar slights.

‘Why, to request an escort downstream, Mr Metcalfe,' jested the preoccupied Drinkwater, glass still clapped to his eye.

‘Not to demand the return of our men?' Metcalfe's dithering lack of comprehension, or dullness of wit, irritated Drinkwater. ‘That as well, Mr Metcalfe,' he added sarcastically.

Metcalfe turned on his heel wounded, his hands outspread, inviting his colleagues to share in his mystification. Drinkwater had ordered him from his bed an hour earlier, told him he wanted the ship's company turned-to at their stations, a spring roused out, run forward and hitched to the cable and thought that sufficient for him to be getting on with. Frey's briefing was a different matter. It had to be precise, exact, not subject to committee approval; besides, there had been no time for such niceties, however desirable. As Metcalfe turned he caught Gordon nudging Moncrieff at the first lieutenant's discomfiture. The ridicule struck Metcalfe like a blow.

‘Ah, here's Captain Stewart . . .'

Drinkwater's commentary had them craning over the hammock nettings. A group of pale figures in their shirt-sleeves were grouped round the darker figure of Lieutenant Frey in his full-dress. And as their attention was diverted to the
Stingray
, Metcalfe slipped below.

‘Good mornin', sir.'

Lieutenant Frey, unconsciously aping his commander's pronunciation, gave the emerging American commander a half-bow.

‘Captain Drinkwater's compliments, sir, and his apologies for disturbing you at this hour. He is aware you had arranged with Mr Vansittart via the master of the schooner that we should weigh and proceed in company at four bells, but he insists upon the immediate return of the British deserters you have been harbouring. Truth is, sir, we have known about their presence aboard your ship for several days; saw 'em, do you see, through our glasses. Captain Drinkwater was particularly desirous of not compromising Mr Vansittart's mission and hoped you'd return 'em yourself, but his patience is now run out to the bitter end and, well, you
will
oblige, sir, won't you? Otherwise . . .'

‘Otherwise what?'

Frey had enjoyed himself. He was not sure if he had the message word-perfect, but the gist of it, delivered at the run, as Drinkwater had ordered, had been surprisingly easy. Stewart, clogged with sleep, had twice or thrice tried
to interrupt him, but Frey had had the advantage and each successive statement had demanded Stewart's sleep-dulled concentration. In the end, despite himself, he had succumbed to the coercion.

‘Otherwise what?' he repeated angrily.

Frey heard Tucker mumble something about a spring and a cable.

‘Otherwise, sir, the most unpleasant consequences will arise. You lie under our guns.' Frey, his hat in his hand, stepped aside and, with a theatrical flourish about which he was afterwards overweeningly boastful, he indicated the unnatural angle of the
Patrician
and the ugly, black foreshortening of her gun muzzles.

‘Why you goddammed . . .' Stewart's face was flushed and his eyes staring as he transferred them from Frey to the
Patrician
, then back to Frey.

‘I believe, sir,' Frey continued, overriding Stewart's erupting anger, ‘your removal from your command might be a consequence of interfering with the speedy return of a British emissary after such a happy accommodation has been reached by our two governments.'

Whether or not Stewart knew he was due to be replaced, or that the matter was a mere possibility, Frey had no idea. It was to be his last card and it appeared to work. The American captain clamped his mouth in a grimace and let his breath hiss out between his teeth. The muscles of his jaw worked furiously and when he spoke his voice cracked with the strain of self-control.

‘Turn 'em over, Jonas.' Stewart turned on his heel and made for the companionway. Lieutenant Tucker hesitated, stared after his commander, then shrugged and repeated Stewart's order to the officers and men gathering about them.

‘Bring up the King's men,' he sneered and sparked off a chorus of muttered curses and imprecations. Frey's cool affront began to quail before this unrestrained hostility.

‘Fuck King George,' someone called out, an Irishman, Frey thought afterwards. As if stiffened by that rebel obscenity, Stewart paused, ‘like Achilles at the entrance to his tent', Frey later reported, and addressed the British officer.

‘Tell your Captain Drinkwater, Lieutenant,' Stewart said venomously, ‘that if ever our two countries
do
find themselves at war, this ship, or another ship,
any
other ship commanded by Charles Stewart will prove itself more than a match for one of His Britannic Majesty's apple-bowed frigates!'

‘His gauntlet thrown down, he disappeared like Punch, sir,' Frey reported later, ‘though his people thought this a great joke, and then I was involved in receiving the deserters . . .'

The reluctant downcast shambling of the half-comprehending Russians, the fury and abuse and scuffling necessary to get the others down into the boat and the obvious distress of the American seamen in having to carry out so nauseating a duty upset Frey. He was a young man of sensitivity and not yet entirely brutalized by his Service.

‘Obliged, sir,' he said at last to Tucker, aware that the moral ascendancy he had so conspicuously flaunted a few moments earlier had now passed to the American officer and the cross-armed men ranked behind him. It was a moment or two before he realized he had only received seven men. He stared down into the boat where recaptured and captors were confronting each other none too happily.

He turned to Tucker. ‘Where's Thurston?'

Tucker shrugged and grinned. ‘I dunno. Maybe he weren't cut out for the sea-life, mister. Maybe he ran away from us too. Anyway he ain't to be found.'

The men ranged behind Tucker seemed to surge forward. Honour could be satisfied with seven out of eight. Frey knew when he was well-off and clamped his hat on his head.

‘I'm obliged, Mr Tucker. Good-day.' And stepping backwards, his hands on the man-ropes, he slid dextrously down to the boat. ‘Shove off!' he ordered curtly. ‘Down oars! Give way together!'

An hour and a half later His Britannic Majesty's frigate
Patrician
broke her anchor out of the mud of the Potomac river, let fall her topsails, hoisted her jib and fore-topmast
staysail and unbrailed her spanker. With her foreyards hauled aback and her main and mizen braced up sharp, her bow fell off and she turned slowly downstream, squaring her foreyards as she steadied on course and gathered way to pass the United States sloop-of-war
Stingray
.

‘Good riddance,' Frey breathed with boyish elation after his virtuoso performance of the morning.

Captain Drinkwater crossed the deck and levelled his glass at the sloop. Her crew were spontaneously lining the rail, climbing into the lower rigging.

‘Frey,' he suddenly called sharply.

‘Sir?' Frey ran up alongside the captain.

‘Who's that fellow just abaft the chess-tree?' Drinkwater asked, holding out his glass. Frey peered through the telescope.

‘It's Thurston, sir!'

‘Yes it is, ain't it . . .' Drinkwater took back the glass and levelled it again. They were almost alongside the American ship; in a moment they would have swept past.

Frey hovered, half-expecting an order. Behind him Moncrieff hissed
‘There's Thurston!'
and the man's name passed like wildfire along the deck.

On the
Stingray's
quarterdeck Lieutenant Tucker, now in his own full-dress uniform, raised a speaking trumpet.