The Flying Squadron (23 page)

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.

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.