The Flying Squadron (9 page)

Two bells struck; the passing of time surprised him, the watch had been changed an hour earlier. It was quite dark now, the horizon reduced to the white rearing crest of the
next wave ahead as it surged out of the gloom. Drinkwater was stiff and cramped, his muscles cracked as he straightened up.

The truth was, he wanted to go home. ‘Ah, well,' he muttered, ‘I have that in common with most of the fellows aboard.'

His left leg had gone to sleep and he almost fell as he tried to walk. ‘Damn,' he swore under his breath, hobbling to peer into the binnacle and check the course. The pain of returning circulation made him wince.

‘Course sou'west by west . . .' began the quartermaster.

‘Yes, yes, I can see that,' Drinkwater said testily. Frey loomed up alongside. Drinkwater was in no mood for pleasantries. ‘Good-night, Mr Frey,' he said, then called dutifully from the head of the companionway, ‘don't hesitate to call me if this wind freshens further.'

‘Aye, aye, sir,' the young officer responded confidently. All's right with the world, Drinkwater thought, heartened by Frey's cheerful tone. Mentally cursing the megrims, he descended to the gun deck and the stiffening marine outside his cabin door.

He had no idea afterwards why he paused there. He thought it might have been a lurch of the ship which prevented him momentarily from passing into the sanctuary of his cabin; on the other hand, the marine, a punctilious private named Todd, made a smart showing of his salute and Drinkwater threw back his cloak to free his hand to acknowledge this and open the door. Whatever the cause he was certain it was no more than some practical delay, not premonition or extra-sensory perception.

Yet in that moment of hiatus he knew something was wrong. Quite what, it took him a moment to discover, but the watchful, expectant look in Todd's eyes rang an alarm in Captain Drinkwater's consciousness. He passed into his cabin and stood, his back against the door, listening.

The ship was unusually quiet.

One became accustomed to its myriad creakings and groanings. One heard instead the noises of people, from the soft murmurs of men chatting in their messes, sitting and smoking at the tables suspended between the guns, or
idling on the berth deck, through the louder shouts of abuse or jocularity to the bawled orders and shrilling of pipes. The denser concentrations of humanity, like the marines' quarters or the midshipmen's so-called gunroom, produced their own noise, and the low hum generated by a watch below during the daytime was quite different from that produced, as now, when the watches below should have been asleep, or at least turned in.

What had troubled him outside his cabin door was not a total silence, but a curious modulation somewhere that was not
right
, existing alongside an equally curious
lack
of noise to which he could not lay a cause.

Irritated and a little alarmed, still cloaked though he had tossed his hat aside, he threw open the door and stalked outside. The gun deck was quiet. The men who slept there appeared to have turned in, for the few lamps showed bulging hammocks above the faintly gleaming gun breeches.

He turned abruptly and descended to the berth deck. Immediately he knew something
was
wrong. He sensed rather than saw a movement, but clearly heard the hissed caveat that greeted his intrusion. He moved quickly forward, ducking under hammocks and brushing them with his head and shoulders. Many of those slung were full and he provoked the occasional grunted protest from them, but more were empty and, with a mounting sense of apprehension, he dodged forward, aware of someone moving parallel to himself, trying to beat him but, having to move in semi-concealment, not making such light work of it.

He could hear the source of that strange modulation as he drew up beside the bitts and suddenly saw below him a press of men crowded into the cable-tier. Their faces were rapt, lit by the grim light of a brace of battle-lanterns as the listened in silence to a voice which, though it spoke in a low tone, carried with it such a weight of conviction it sounded upon the ears like a shout.

So strong was the impact of this oration that it, as much as astonishment, made Drinkwater pause to listen. In the wings of the berth deck, his shadower paused too.

‘The rights of kings might be supported as an argument;
nay, friends, adopted as a principle for good government were it not for the fact that it in all cases without exception reduces us to the status of subjects and, moreover, many of us to abject and necessary poverty. For to glorify one requires a court whose purpose is adulatory, if not purely idolatrous, and which, to support itself, requires the extraction of taxes from the subjected.

‘Furthermore, it promotes excessive pride amongst those close to the throne. This in turn excites envy among the middling sort who, gaining as they are power in the manufacturies, seek to adopt the manners and privileges of noblemen. Under the heels of this triple despotism are ground the poor, the weak, the hungry, the dispossessed, the homeless and the helpless: men, women and children – free-born Britons every one, God help them!'

Drinkwater drew back in retreat. He had not seen the speaker but knew the man's identity: Thurston, the Paineite, the disaffected seducer of men's minds, a suborner, a canting levelling republican subversive . . .

Drinkwater flew up the ladder and Todd snapped to attention, his face an enigmatic mask. Drinkwater had no idea whether or not the marine knew of the combination gathered in the cable-tier, but he surely must have done. Without pausing, saying nothing, but conveying much to the sentry, he sought the refuge of his cabin, his mind a whirl.

He had suspected something of the sort as he had edged forward under the hammocks. A meeting of Methodists, perhaps, even a mutinous assembly, but this, this was intolerable . . .

Why had he done nothing about it?

The thought brought him up with a round turn. The man keeping
cave
had known of his presence, if not his identity; Todd would soon let them know the captain had been down to the orlop and come up again looking as though he had seen a ghost! Good God, what was the matter with him?

And then the appalling thought struck him that Thurston spoke with an irrefutable logic. What little he knew of the Court of St James and the prancing, perfumed and
portentious Regent, struck a note of revulsion in his puritan heart . . .

And yet his duty, his allegiance . . .

‘God's bones!' he raged. What was he going to do, flog the lot of them? Suppose the bosun's mates refused? And how could he discover who was in attendance and who had turned in? Could he punish Thurston alone, and for what? Speaking a truth that some called sedition? White had been lenient; had White caught the refreshing breath of truth and let the man escape the horrors of the law's worst excess?

‘God damn them!' he snarled, finding himself at the decanter stowed in its fiddle. His hand was already on the stopper when he realized he had no time for such indulgence. He
had
to do something, something which was both everything and nothing, something that would not rouse them to spontaneous and hot-headed mutiny, for what Thurston was undoubtedly ignorant of was the fact that he might ignite something of which he was not master. Yet Drinkwater had to signify his displeasure, his disapproval and his power, in order to dissuade them from ever attempting any mass action. He realized what he faced was not mutiny, not something he could quell by summoning the marines and arming his officers. That would be desperate enough, for God's sake!

What he faced was something infinitely worse: its results would be mass desertion in the United States.

Patrician
slammed into a wave and Drinkwater felt her bow thrust into the air as she climbed over it and fell into the trough beyond.

‘God damn!' he swore again, with a mindless and futile anger. Then he snatched up his hat. Out on the gun deck he knew his visit had disturbed them. There was a low murmur of voices as men hurriedly turned in; he knew he had rattled them. Even if they did not know yet it was the captain who had discovered their meeting, they would guess it had been an officer.

He emerged on to the quarterdeck. All was still well there, he consoled himself. They would do nothing until
they arrived in American waters. Unless, of course, they decided to seize the ship . . .

‘Sir . . .' Frey began, seeing the captain unexpectedly on deck.

‘Call all hands,' Drinkwater snapped, ‘upon the instant, d'you hear?'

‘Aye, sir . . .' An astonished Frey relayed the order and the bosun's mate of the watch piped and shouted at the hatchways.

Drinkwater drew his cloak around him, stood at the windward hance and watched them turn up.

‘Sir . . . ?'

‘Double reef the tops'ls, Mr Frey, and look lively, a watch to each mast.' Drinkwater cut poor Frey off short and watched for Thurston. The men emerged, many of them stumbling uncertainly, torn unceremoniously from their hammocks by the shrilling of the pipes. Drinkwater was not an inhumane commander and worked his crew in three watches. To be turned up like this suggested some disaster in the offing, perhaps an enemy, and to the uncertainty of those aware their political meeting had been discovered was now to be added this element of panic.

Frey and his bosun's mate were already translating Drinkwater's order: ‘Way aloft, topmen! Double reef the tops'ls! Hands by the lee braces, halliards and bowlines . . . !'

Drinkwater had no difficulty in singling out Thurston. The man made no effort to merge inconspicuously with the mass of the people, but stood stock still for a moment, at the far end of the starboard gangway. There was no one between them, until a petty officer shoved him roughly into his station with a cut of his starter across Thurston's buttocks.

With a sudden feeling of guilt, Drinkwater turned away. Was he one of Thurston's ‘middling sort', apeing the manners and seeking the privileges of a discredited nobility? Was the acquisition of Gantley Hall such an act?

‘Is something the matter?'

‘Eh, what?'

Vansittart stood beside him, the silk dressing-gown
flamboyant even in the darkness of a rising gale.

‘Matter, Mr Vansittart?' said Drinkwater, aware of the irony of his situation, ‘Why no, we are shortening sail, there's a blow coming on.'

‘Oh dear. Then we are to be further delayed.'

‘I'm afraid so, but this is one thing we cannot change – the weather, I mean,' he added. Vansittart shuffled away. ‘My dear fellow,' Drinkwater said after him in a low, inaudible voice, ‘if only you knew by what a slender silken thread the world holds together.'

Far above him men laid out to secure the reef points. Thus far he had the measure of them, and
Deo gratias
, the wind was freshening rapidly!

‘Call all hands!'

Drinkwater clapped a hand to his hat as
Patrician
lurched into another wave and the resulting explosion of spray hissed over the weather bow, a fine grey cloud in the first glimmer of dawn. Jamming himself in his familiar station at the mizen rigging he waited for the men to turn up. The bosun's pipes pierced his tired brain and rang in his ears, for he had not slept a wink.

‘Another reef, sir?' Lieutenant Gordon struggled up the deck towards him, his cloak flapping wildly in the down-draught from the double reefed main topsail. In the lee of the mizen rigging what passed for shelter enabled the two sea-officers to speak without actually shouting. Gordon's expectant face was visible now as the light grew.

‘No, Mr Gordon. All hands to lay aft. And I want the officers and marines drawn up properly. Please make my wishes known.' Drinkwater saw the look of uncertainty at the unusual nature of the instruction cross Gordon's face. ‘Do you pass the word, if you please,' Drinkwater prompted. He rasped a fist across his stubbled chin. His eyes were hot and gritty with sleeplessness and he felt a petulant temper hovering. He had spent the night wondering what best to do to stave off the trouble he knew was brewing, trouble far worse than a little bad blood between his officers. He tried to imagine what the wholesale desertion of a British frigate's crew would mean in terms of repercussions. In the United States it would be
hailed as a moral victory, evidence of the rottenness and tyranny of monarchy, a sign of the rightness of the emerging cause, perhaps even fuel for the fire of rebellion certain prominent Americans wished to ignite in Canada.

For the Royal Navy itself it would be a dishonour. Already the trickle of deserters from British men-of-war had prompted the stop-and-search policy of cruiser captains, a prime cause of the deterioration in Anglo-American relations. The Americans were justifiably touchy about interference with their ships. The practice of British officers boarding them on the high seas and taking men out of them on the flimsy pretext that they had been British seamen, was a high-handed action, a deliberate dishonour to their flag and a provocation designed to humiliate them. The extent to which this arrogant practice prevailed was uncertain, as was the counter-rumour that trained British seamen made up the gun-crews aboard Yankee frigates; men who would give good account of themselves if it came to a fight, desperate men who resented having been pressed from their homes but who were, nevertheless, traitors.

In this atmosphere of half-truths and exaggeration the defection of
Patrician
's people would be a death-blow for British hopes of avoiding war. The Ministry in London might be able to overlook the case of ‘mistaken identity' which had allegedly occurred the night the USS
President
fired into the inferior
Little Belt
; it would be quite unable to extend this tolerance to the desertion of an entire ship's company. His Majesty's frigate
Patrician
would become notorious, synonymous with the
Hermione
, whose crew had mutinied and carried their frigate into a Spanish-American port, or the
Danae
's people who had surrendered to the French. Such considerations made Drinkwater's blood run cold, not merely for himself and the helpless, humiliated and shameful state to which he would be reduced, but also for the awful disruption to the mission which would otherwise avert a stupid rupture with the United States.