"The flying squadron" - читать интересную книгу автора (Вудмен Ричард)

CHAPTER 10 The Parthian Shot

They lay in this limbo of uncertainty for eight days, one, it seemed to those disposed to seek signs amid the random circumstances of life, for every deserter. The fall of the year came slowly, barely yet touching these low latitudes, so the very air enervated them and the pastoral beauty of the scene was slowly soured by idleness and a lack of communication with the shore.

The Patricians, unpatrician-like, still pulled their miserable guard round themselves, while the Stingrays regularly ferried their commander ashore. It was clear to Drinkwater that although Shaw might have spoken to Stewart about the advantages accruing to an honest, open, apple-pie handover of the British deserters, the appeal had fallen on deaf ears. Since they now caught no more than an occasional glimpse of their men, Drinkwater knew that Stewart was guarding his prizes closer still.

To keep the pot boiling Drinkwater dispatched Frey in the launch for a three-day expedition along the Virginia and Maryland shores and Stewart had, perforce, to send a shadowing boat. As for Arabella, Drinkwater saw her three or four times as she rode out. Once they exchanged greetings, she with a wave, he with a doffing of his hat, but on the other occasions, distance prevented these formalities.

The lack of hospitality on Shaw's part discouraged Drinkwater and, when he sent an invitation to Shaw and his daughter-in-law to dine as his guests aboard Patrician (Lieutenant Gordon's questing boat-party having disturbed a covey of game birds), it was declined on the grounds of Mr Shaw's absence.

Drinkwater tried to convince himself all parties awaited the outcome of negotiations before re-establishing amicable relations, but he knew the matter of the deserters had come between them all. As for Arabella herself, he thought she wished to distance herself from him and respected her wishes. Besides, he had no desire to make a fool of himself.

'Why did Vansittart have to go via Baltimore, sir?' Frey asked on his return. He had made his report and he and Drinkwater had been consulting a chart, Frey tracing his aimless track along the shores of Chesapeake Bay. 'The Potomac leads directly up to Washington.'

'A matter of formalities, I suppose,' replied Drinkwater absently, filling two glasses. 'Perhaps they did not wish him to see the defences of Washington, or reconnoitre so obvious an approach.'

'He'll come back the same way, then?'

'I imagine so. I've really no idea.'

'I wish we were back, sir,' Frey said suddenly.

'Back? Where?'

'In home waters, off Ushant, in the Mediterranean, the Baltic, anywhere but here. God, we're not liked hereabouts.'

'We're an old enemy, Mr Frey ... Tell me have you executed any watercolours lately? I believe you were working on a folio…'

'Oh, those, no, I have abandoned the project.' Something wistfully regretful in Frey's tone prompted Drinkwater to probe.

'Not like you to abandon anything.'

'No, maybe not, sir, but this occasion proved the rule.'

'The wardroom's not the most conducive place, eh? Do 'em in here, I could do with a little society.'

'Begging your pardon, sir, but I don't think that a good idea...'

'Oh, why not... ? Ah, I see, presuming on our previous acquaintance, eh?'

'Something of the sort, sir.'

'Who? Not Moncrieff...' He knew already, but wanted lo see if Frey's admission would back his hunch.

'No, no, not Moncrieff, sir, he's a good fellow ...'

'Well, Wyatt then, he's no aesthete, though I'd have baulked at calling him a Philistine.'

'No, old Wyatt's a marline-spike officer, not well-versed, but experienced. I find the first lieutenant...'

'A difficult man, eh?'

'An inconsistent man, sir,' Frey admitted tactfully, the wine having its effect.

'Ah, diplomatic, Mr Frey, I must remember your talents in that direction. Perhaps you should have gone to Washington in place of Vansittart. He is certainly a curious fellow.'

'Vansittart, sir?' Frey frowned.

'No,' Drinkwater grinned, 'Metcalfe ...'

It was good to see Captain Drinkwater smiling, Frey thought as he finished his glass, it reminded him of happier times. There was something sinister about this interminable wait, knowing the deserters were within easy reach of them and that they possessed superior force and could scarcely be condemned for insisting their own be returned to them. Frey had, moreover, heard it expressed in a deliberate lower deck stage whisper meant for his ears, that was it not for Captain Drinkwater himself being in command, there would have been more than a handful of deserters.

Drinkwater, regarding his young prot#233;g#233;, wondered what sort of impositions Frey suffered in the wardroom. He had written Metcalfe off as an adequate but fossicking officer whose chief vice was irritation. It had not occurred to him that he was a contrary influence.

'Well, well, I had no idea.'

'There is something else, sir, something you should know about.'

'What is it?'

'The men are very restless, sir. I am concerned about it if we are forced to wait much longer.'

'Be patient, Mr Frey. I like this state of affairs no better than you or the hands, but we are tied to Vansittart's apron strings.'

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?'

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

Drinkwater grunted noncommittally. 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 Belchambers 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.

'Captain Stewart desires that you anchor until the appointed time of departure, sir.'

As the two ships drew closer a rising crescendo of abuse rose from the Stingray's people. It seemed to the watching Frey that they pushed Thurston forward, goading the British with his presence and their taunts. For his own part Thurston stood stock-still, aloof, as though wishing to be independent of the demonstration, yet the central figure in it.

'Damned insolent bastard!' Frey heard Wyatt say.

'Cool as a god-damned cucumber, by God,' agreed Moncrieff.

'Silence there!' Drinkwater snapped as a ripple of reaction spread along Patrician's gangway and down into the ship. 'Eyes in the ship!' Men were coming up from below, men who had no business on the upper deck. 'Send those men below, Mr Comley, upon the instant, sir!'

The noise, like a ground-swell gathering before it breaks, echoed back and forth between the two hulls as they drew level.

'Silence there!' he called again and a jeering bellow of mimicry bounced back from the Americans.

Suddenly Thurston fell backwards with a piercing cry. The Americans surrounding him gasped, then their jeering changed to outraged cries as the Patrician drew away.

'What the devil... ?' Drinkwater cried in the silence that fell instantly upon the Patrician's people. He was aware that amid the shouting there had been another noise, heard a split-second before Thurston fell with a scream.

'There! Does that please you, Captain Drinkwater?' a voice cut the air.

Lieutenant Metcalfe straightened up beside the transom of the launch on the boat booms. A wisp of smoke curled up from the muzzle of the Ferguson rifle.