The Flying Squadron Read online

  ‘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.’

  ‘Very well, Mr Frey, see to it.’

  Drinkwater left to Frey the mustering of the watch to hitch another fathom in the lee braces and haul down the leading tacks of the huge fore and mainsails. He looked over the ship and saw, despite eight months in dockyard hands, the ravages of time and long service. His Britannic Majesty’s frigate Patrician was a cut-down sixty-four-gun ship, a class considered too weak to stand in the line of battle. Instead, she had been razéed, deprived of a deck, and turned into a heavy frigate.

  A powerful cruiser when first modified, she had since completed an arduous circumnavigation under Drinkwater’s command. During this voyage she had doubled Cape Horn to the westward, fought a Russian seventy-four to a standstill and survived a typhoon in the China Seas. A winter spent in home waters under another post-captain had further tested her when she had grounded in the Baie de la Seine. Refloated with some difficulty she had subsequently languished in dock at Plymouth until recommissioned for special service. Her prime qualification for this selection was her newly coppered bottom which, it was thought, would give her the fast passages Government desired.

  ‘Well, we shall see,’ Drinkwater thought, watching the sunlight break through the cloud bank astern and suddenly transform the scene with its radiance, for nothing could mar the beauty of the morning.

  The grey waves sparkled, a rainbow danced in the shower of spray streaming away from the lee bow, the wave-crests shone with white and fleeting brilliance, and the details of the deck, the breeched guns, the racks of round shot, the halliards and clewlines coiled on the fife-rails, the standing rigging, all stood out with peculiar clarity, throwing their shadows across the planking.

  The sails arched above them, patched and dulled from service, adding their own shadows to the play of light and shade swinging back and forth across the wet deck, which itself already steamed under the sun’s influence.

  Drinkwater felt the warmth of the sunshine reach him through the thickness of his cloak, and with it the sharp aroma of coffee floated up from below. A feeling of contentment filled him, a feeling he had thought he would not, could not, experience again after the months of family life. He wished Elizabeth could be with him at that moment, to experience something of its magic. All she knew was the potency of its lure, manifested in the frequent abstraction of her husband. He sighed at the mild sensation of guilt, and at the fact that it came to him now to mar the perfection of the day, then dismissed it. A great deal had happened, he reflected reasonably, since he had last paced this deck and been summoned so peremptorily to London, what, a year ago?

  Then he had been in the spiritual doldrums, worn out with long service, seeing himself as the scapegoat of government secrecy and hag-ridden with guilt over the death of his old servant Tregembo in the mangrove swamps of Borneo. He had thought at the time that he could never surmount the guilt he had felt, and had accepted the mission to Helgoland in the autumn of 1809 with a grim, fatalistic resignation.

  But fate, in all things capricious, had brought him through the ordeal and, quite providentially, made him if not wealthy, then at least a man of comfortable means. True, he had been ill for some months afterwards, so reduced in spirits that the doctors of Petersfield feared for him; but the care of his wife, Elizabeth, and the kindness of old Tregembo’s widow Susan, their housekeeper, finally won their fight with the combination of the blue devils, exposure and old wounds.

  With the onset of summer Drinkwater and Elizabeth left the children in the care of Susan Tregembo and travelled, spending Christmas at Sir Richard and Lady White’s home in Norfolk where their children, Charlotte-Amelia and their own Richard, had joined them. It had been a memorable few months at the end of which Drinkwater’s convalescence was complete. It was from the Whites’ house that Drinkwater wrote to the Admiralty soliciting further employment. Nothing came of his application, however, and he was not much concerned. The short, cold winter days of walking or rid
ing, of wildfowling along the frozen salt-marsh, were pleasant enough, but the luxury of the long, pleasurable evenings with Elizabeth and the Whites was not lightly to be forsaken for the dubious honour of a quarterdeck in winter.

  ‘You’ll only get some damned seventy-four blockading Brest with the Black Rocks under your lee, and some damn fool sending you signals all day,’ White had mistakenly consoled him. For although Drinkwater did not have the means for an indefinite stay ashore, nor the inclination to consider his career over and to be superseded by the back-benches of the House of Commons, life was too pleasant not to submit, at least for the time being, to the whim of fate.

  Games of bezique and whist, the sound of his daughter’s voice singing to Elizabeth’s accompaniment, the warmth of White’s stable and the smell of fresh meat from the kitchen had served to keep him content. Elizabeth was happy, and that alone was reward enough. He had played with Richard, Montcalm to his son’s Wolfe as they refought the capture of Quebec above a low clay cliff undercut by the River Glaven. Richard, a year senior to White’s boy Johnnie, died spectacularly in his young friend’s arms with victory assured as Drinkwater himself expired uncomfortably among the crackling stalks of long-dead bracken.

  He had led his daughter out at the New Year ball and seen her eyed by the local bloods, flinging her head up and laughing, sometimes catching her lower lip in her teeth as he had first seen Elizabeth do in an apple orchard in Cornwall thirty years earlier. And best of all, he had lain nightly beside his wife, moved to acts of deep affection, a poor acknowledgement of her gentle constancy.

  Nor had this idyll been rudely terminated by the intrusion of duty. In the end it had been crowned with an unexpected event, a circumstance of the utmost felicity for them all.

  Two days into the new year, as the spectre of reaction began to show its first signs with the planning of arrangements to return the children to their home in Hampshire, White received an unexpected letter from solicitors in Ipswich. Sir Richard had inherited a small estate betwixt the Deben and the Aide, a remote corner of Suffolk lying east of the main highway north from the county town, within sight of the desolate coast of Hollesley Bay and comprising one modest house and two farms. The estate had once formed part of the lands of a dispossessed priory, the ruins of which stood romantically in its northwest corner.

  ‘It sounds delightful,’ said Elizabeth over breakfast, as Catherine White explained the lie of the land and Sir Richard scratched his head and pulled a face.

  ‘Too damned far, m’dear,’ he explained, ‘no good to me. Belonged to a cousin o’ mine. Eccentric fellow; built the place but never married. House can’t be more than three years old.’ White picked up the letter again, searching for a fact. ‘They found him dead in a coppice, frozen stiff, poor devil.’

  They had fallen silent, sipping their chocolate with the spectre of untimely death haunting them.

  Later, as Drinkwater and White drew rein atop a low rise that looked west to the Palladian pile of Holkham Hall gilded in the sunshine of the winter morning, Sir Richard had turned in his saddle.

  ‘It’s the place for you, Nat . . .’

  ‘What is?’ asked Drinkwater, staring about momentarily confused, his mind having been fully occupied with his mount and the need to keep up with his host.

  ‘Gantley Hall. I can’t keep the place, damn it; have to sell it. What d’you say? Make me an offer.’ And he put spurs to his big hunter and cantered off, leaving Drinkwater staring open-mouthed after him.

  And so, after a visit in perfect spring weather when the red-brick façade glowed in the afternoon sun and the young apple trees were dusted with the faint, lambent green of new buds, Elizabeth pronounced herself delighted with the house. Less easily satisfied, Drinkwater had interviewed the sitting tenants in the two farms and voiced his doubts.

  ‘If I return to sea, my dear, how will you manage?’

  ‘Well enough, Nathaniel,’ Elizabeth had said, ‘as I have always done in your absence.’

  ‘But an estate . . .’

  ‘It is a very modest estate, my dear.’

  ‘But . . .’

  His protests were brushed aside and they concluded the treaty of sale. By midsummer they had removed from Hampshire and brought with them Louise Quilhampton, Elizabeth’s friend and companion; her son, Lieutenant James Quilhampton and his wife Catriona migrated with them, renting a house in Woodbridge, content to enjoy married life until, like Drinkwater himself, necessity drove James to petition the Admiralty for another posting.

  For Drinkwater the summons had come too early, but the letter was a personal one, penned by John Barrow, their Lordships’ Second Secretary, whose attitude to Captain Drinkwater had, hitherto, been cool.

  It transpired that Drinkwater’s success in Hamburg and Helgoland* had rehabilitated his reputation with Barrow. Behind the Second Secretary’s phrasing Drinkwater perceived the shadow of Lord Dungarth, head of the Admiralty’s Secret Department, and although his new posting did not derive from Dungarth but from the Foreign Office, he was not insensible to his Lordship’s backstairs influence:

  . . . To Conduct with all possible Dispatch the Bearer, Mr Henry St John Vansittart, to the shores of Chesapeake Bay, Providing Him with such Comforts and Necessities as may appear Desirable, to Land and Succour Him and Render Him all such as may, in the circumstances, be Appropriate . . .

  Thus ran his instructions and thus far his duty had been light, for poor Vansittart proved a miserable sailor and had yet to make a single appearance at Drinkwater’s table. Perhaps, mused Drinkwater, stirring himself and beginning a slow promenade between the windward hance and the taffrail, the seductive aroma of coffee would finally tempt the unfortunate man from his cot.

  Reaching the after end of his walk Drinkwater nodded at the stiffening marine sentry posted at the quarter to heave the emergency lifebuoy at any sailor unfortunate enough to fall overboard. For a moment he stood watching the sea birds quartering their wake.

  Frey pegged the new course on the traverse board and met Drinkwater as he turned forward again.

  ‘West sou’west, sir,’ Frey announced with an air of triumph.

  ‘Very well,’ Drinkwater nodded, recalled to the present. He wanted a quick passage, not so much to conform to their Lordships’ orders as to avoid the equinoctial gales blowing up from Cape Hatteras. After discharging his diplomatic duty he was under orders to return Mr Vansittart to London and had high hopes of seeing in the new year of 1812 with his family at Gantley Hall, even, perhaps, returning some of Sir Richard White’s generous hospitality.

  There was also the question of James Quilhampton, who looked to Drinkwater for interest and advancement. They had discussed the possibility of his serving under Drinkwater, but the matter had been compromised by the appointment of Metcalfe to the Patrician. Besides, Quilhampton had had independent command of a gunbrig and itched again for his own quarterdeck, no matter how small. The career of His Majesty’s gun-brig Tracker had terminated suddenly in capture, and though cleared by a court-martial, Quilhampton wanted nothing more than to prove himself.*

  Drinkwater could only support his friend’s ambition and promise to do what he could, leaving Quilhampton to enjoy the favours of his bride for a little longer.

  But there were more immediate and pressing matters to consider, matters upon which all these wild and selfish speculations depended. To these Drinkwater now gave his attention.

  ‘How are the men shaping up in your opinion, Mr Frey?’

  ‘You know how it is, sir. At the moment the old hands delight in showing the landsmen their superiority and in frightening them with their antics aloft.’

  ‘Aye, I’ve seen the conceit of the t’gallant yard monkeys.’

  ‘In a day or two they’ll tire of that and begin to complain that all the labour falls on their shoulders.’

  ‘Once we run out of fresh food, I expect,’ Drinkwater added.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Frey thought of the cabbages stowed in the boats on
the booms and the rupture they had caused between himself and the first lieutenant. Relations between Mr Metcalfe and himself were not cordial.

  ‘Happily this passage should settle most of them into the ship’s routine and teach them their business,’ Drinkwater went on, thinking of White’s caution. ‘Thank heavens we ain’t keeping watch and ward off Ushant with the Black Rocks under our lee and the guns at St Matthew contestin’ the point every time we stick our nose into Brest Road . . . Good Lord . . .’

  Drinkwater broke off, excused himself and walked forward as the pale figure of Vansittart appeared, rising cautiously from the companionway.

  ‘Good mornin’, Vansittart. How d’you fare today?’

  Vansittart drew a dank lock of hair back from his forehead, looked upwards and caught sight of the swaying mastheads. Frey saw him swallow and seize the rail with white knuckles.

  ‘Stare at the horizon, man,’ Drinkwater snapped sharply, catching hold of him. ‘Come, sir, walk to the rail. There, ’tis easy once you have the knack of it.’

  Beneath their feet the deck bucked as Patrician slammed into a wave. Vansittart staggered, but kept his balance and reached the bulwark. Sweat stood in beads upon his face and he slowly shook his distressed head.

  ‘Dear God, Captain, if I had known . . .’

  ‘The horizon, sir, keep your eyes on the horizon.’

  The four men at the frigate’s double wheel wore broad grins. Two of them, landsmen manning the after wheel, had been in a similar condition a few days earlier. They chuckled with the relish of the relieved.

  ‘Mind your steering there,’ Frey growled, suppressing his own amusement. He regarded Vansittart’s stained and unbuckled knee breeches, the rumpled stockings, loose stock and revolting shirt. The contrast with his first dandified appearance aboard Patrician was most marked, the more so since his ensemble was the same. Such disregard for his person indicated the extremity of his illness.

  ‘You will become accustomed to the motion, I promise you,’ Drinkwater was saying, ‘but you must have some breakfast.’