The Flying Squadron

by Richard Woodman

  Comprehension dawned upon him and it was Drink-water’s turn to flush. ‘Forgive me . . . Mrs Shaw, of course, I am sorry, I had not realized, you are the daughter of the house . . .’

  ‘Daughter-in-law, Captain. Unfortunately I was not here to receive you . . .’

  ‘We were inconsiderately early,’ he said quickly and then turned to look round the dancers. His eye fell upon the bald head of their host. ‘I thought the tall lady in brown silk with Mr Shaw . . .’

  ‘Oh, she’d like to become Mrs Shaw, but she is actually still Mrs Denbigh, from Falmouth, a widow and a somewhat designing woman with two pretty daughters . . .’

  ‘Ah, and you are the young lady whose horse we startled this morning . . .’

  ‘With your preposterous cannon, yes, I spoke to my brother Charles about that. Why on earth you should have wished to disturb the peace and tranquillity of half Virginia with such nonsense passes my comprehension!’

  He remembered Captain Stewart walking at the head of the chestnut and talking to its rider. Righteous indignation lent colour to her cheeks.

  ‘I think a flag of truce is in order, Mistress Shaw, do you not?’

  ‘Is that what you have come here for? A flag of truce, or something more durable? My father-in-law sees no advantage in a war.’

  ‘What about your brother?’

  She shrugged. ‘He seems to be like most men – eager to fight.’

  ‘He would not be so eager had he spent his lifetime thus.’

  The conviction in Drinkwater’s tone made her look at him with renewed interest. ‘I know you to have brought a diplomatic mission . . .’ She looked round the ballroom.

  ‘No, he is not here. He has some notion of propriety that it would not be politic for him to step ashore until he has official approval . . .’

  ‘So you too are against an open breach between our countries?’

  ‘Certainly. And so, I think it is not indiscreet of me to say, is he.’

  ‘I am glad of that. You must meet my father-in-law later. Come, show me the moonlight on the Potomac, Captain Drinkwater.’

  She slipped her arm in his with sudden, easy familiarity, and they stepped through the French windows on to a battlemented terrace which crowned the rising ground upon which the house was built.

  ‘My late husband’s grandfather intended to build a castle on the hill here, hence its name. It was barely started when he was killed at the Battle of the Brandywine. This terrace is called “The Battery”, though it mounts nothing more offensive than a flower urn or two.’

  ‘Your husband’s grandfather had a fine eye for landscape, ma’am; it reminds me of an English deer-park.’

  ‘Your English deer-park, perhaps?’ she asked shrewdly.

  He laughed, thinking of Gantley Hall and its two modest farms. ‘Lord no, Mrs Shaw, my own house boasts nothing more impressive than a walled garden, a kitchen garden and an orchard which would fit upon the terrace here.’

  Mrs Shaw nodded to another couple taking the air. ‘And is there a wife, Captain Drinkwater, to go with all this domesticity?’

  He looked at her, about to ask if it mattered either way, while she waited, herself annoyed that it did. He nodded, turning the knife in the unguessed at and, for her, unexpected wound. ‘And a son and daughter. Do you have children, Mrs Shaw?’

  She shook her head and digested the fact in silence, comparing it with her own bereavement and catching the wistful note in his voice.

  ‘If you miss them, Captain,’ she asked softly, ‘why do you come here?’ There was a hint of Yankee hostility in the question.

  ‘That is a question I frequently ask myself, Mrs Shaw.’

  She sensed his retreat and found it surprisingly hurtful. Silence settled on them again and after a while she shivered.

  ‘Shall we go in?’ he asked.

  They turned back to the brilliantly lit ballroom. He was already remote again, ready to detach her as they approached the French windows. She stopped short of the light spilling on to the pavé.

  ‘Do you ride, Captain?’

  He halted, surprised. ‘Ride? After a fashion, an indifferent bad fashion, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Would you care to see some more of my beautiful country tomorrow?’

  He thought of the enchantment inherent in such an invitation, the release from the isolated and tedious splendour of his command, the surrender to landscape, to fecund greenery after the harsh tones of sea and sky. Then he thought of the ship and the discontent seething between her decks, of men mewed up by force, of the guard-boat and the sentries with their orders, his orders to shoot . . .

  He had left a disgruntled Metcalfe aboard this evening; how could he leave them again and go gallivanting about on horseback in full view of the ship’s company?

  She took his hesitation for imminent refusal. She knew her brother’s return from Washington was as likely to bring rebuttal to the English peace overtures as acceptance, that the English frigate might overnight become an enemy and be compelled to put to sea. A sense of panic welled up within her, a sudden, overwhelming urge to see this man again; she tried to find something wittily memorable to say to him and compel him to change his mind.

  ‘I promise my habit will be less contentious, Captain,’ she said, furious that her voice trembled.

  He could not ignore her, or cast her aside. He told himself he had been more than off-hand with her earlier, that her father-in-law wanted peace and was clearly a man of substance and influence, a man to be encouraged; he told himself that such a meeting might aid the peace process just as he told himself a dinner party at Castle Point might include Captain Stewart and therefore open a discussion of potential interest to a British naval officer.

  ‘Have you a mount docile enough for a sailor?’

  ‘Certainly,’ she laughed, ‘provided you will lead me in to dinner.’

  He inclined his head and bowed, grinning widely. ‘I’m honoured, ma’am.’

  She smiled and dropped him a curtsey, and they re-entered the ballroom to be engulfed in the gaiety of the scene.

  The moon was almost at its culmination when they left Castle Point. The early hostility between the officers of the British and American ships had been skilfully averted by Mr Zebulon Shaw. The protestations of peace and amity, the toasts proposed, seconded and swallowed in assurance of the fact, and the fulsome, wine-warmed expressions of mutual goodwill had healed the incipient rift between the two rival factions. A breach of manners towards their host had thus been avoided. Furthermore, Drinkwater’s presence had curbed the taunts of the Americans and intimidated his own people. As far as Drinkwater knew, none of his officers had disgraced themselves, the virtue of the local maids remained intact, if intact it was at their landing, and with the exception of Mr Frey whose farewell had been overlong, all had come away merry, but lighthearted.

  It would doubtless have warmed Mr Shaw’s heart, Drinkwater thought as he waited to board the gig, if he could have seen Frey finally rejoin his companions, for he strode down the path to the water in company with Lieutenant Tucker, apparently the best of friends. It was only later that Drinkwater learned the cause of this unlikely alliance. While Tucker courted Miss Catherine Denbigh, Mr Frey had been smitten with her sister Pauline.

  As for his own farewell, it had consisted of the promise of a meeting on the morrow.

  And too long a glance between Mrs Shaw and himself.

  CHAPTER 7

  September 1811

  A Riot in the Blood

  His acceptance of Mistress Shaw’s invitation troubled Drinkwater the following forenoon. He did not advertise his forthcoming absence from the ship, indeed he busied himself with the routine of paperwork to such an extent as almost to convince himself he had no appointment to keep. Mullender guessed something unusual was afoot, since the captain called for his boots to be blacked, but Mullender, being incurious, gave the matter little thought, and although Drinkwater had a coxswain, the man had never replaced Tregembo as a ser
vant and confidant.

  Oddly it was Thurston who almost by default came closest to the captain’s soul that morning. Called in to make up the ship’s books and to assist in the standing routine inspections of the purser’s and surgeon’s ledgers, Thurston fell into conversation with the captain.

  Until then he had kept a respectful silence and attended to his duties, aware of the awful punishment Drinkwater had it in his power to dole out. He was conscious that the captain was neither inhumane nor illiberal, in so far as a post-captain in the Royal Navy could be expected to be either, having been guided in this matter by older heads who were less willing to heed the trumpets of revolution and had pointed out the virtues of service to the common weal. Thurston was intelligent enough and by then experienced enough to know the sea-service was different from life ashore and that, for cogent reasons, libertarian concepts were inimical to survival at sea. He had therefore learned to tread warily where Captain Drinkwater was concerned.

  Drinkwater, on the other hand, now regarded Thurston with more interest than suspicion. By keeping the man to hand and working him hard, by altering his status from pressed man to captain’s clerk and by making him a party to a measure of the frigate’s more open secrets, Drinkwater had sought to seduce the revolutionary by responsibility.

  Prompted by his guilty conscience, he addressed Thurston while the clerk cleared away pen, ink and sand.

  ‘Well, Thurston,’ he began, ‘are you settled in your new employment?’

  ‘Well enough, thank you, sir, under the circumstances.’

  ‘What circumstances?’ asked Drinkwater, puzzled.

  ‘Of being held against my will, sir.’

  Drinkwater gave a short cough to mask his surprise at the man’s candour. ‘I believe you to be luckier than you deserve, Thurston. You could have been transported.’

  ‘That is true, sir, but that would have been a greater injustice. It in no way mollifies my outrage at being carried to sea. Both punishments, if punishments they be, are unjust.’

  ‘Sedition is a serious matter,’ said Drinkwater, regretting starting this conversation yet feeling he could not dismiss its subject lightly, despite the increasingly pressing nature of his engagement. ‘You do not truly advocate rule by the mob?’

  ‘Of course not, sir, but the mob is a consequence of the ill construction of government. By exalting some men, others are debased, until this distortion is inconsistent with natural order. The vast mass of mankind is consigned to the background of the human picture, to bring forward, with greater glare, the puppet-show of state and aristocracy.’

  ‘A puppet-show, you say,’ Drinkwater said, somewhat nonplussed.

  ‘Indeed, sir, there is no class of men who despise monarchy more than courtiers.’

  ‘You have had much experience of courtiers, have you, Thurston?’ Drinkwater asked drily.

  ‘My father was in the service of a duke, sir. It amounts to the same thing,’ Thurston answered coolly.

  ‘Ah, I see, so you do not want mobocracy?’ Drinkwater said, returning to the safer ground of his earlier remark.

  ‘No. Governments arise out of a man’s individual weakness. He places himself and his own in the common stock of society. Locke says for the preservation of his property, but also for the security of his family. He becomes a proprietor in society and draws upon its common capital as a right, thus it follows that a civil right flows from a natural right. If all men behaved with equal respect the one to another, then an equilibrium would exist within society. Each man would give and take according to his means and abilities, thus the differences whose abolition is so much feared by those who misunderstand, would themselves be a natural, earned and unenvied consequence of civil rights, a right in themselves; but no man would want, be beggared or dispossessed, for he would by right hold that of the common stock to which he was entitled.’

  ‘And if he failed to gain that stock, or to hold it . . . ?’

  ‘He could not fail to gain it, it would be his by natural right. You only raise the matter of loss because you have lived under English law and know it to be possible even when a man does not actively break the law. Dispossession by enclosure, by loom and seed-drill and steam-engine, have severally destroyed the hopes of many, because artful men have seized upon this common stock and called it their own; they have then held it by the immoderate use of superstition and power, created a monarchy under which their privileges stand and are upheld by the law.’ Thurston paused.

  ‘That is all very well . . .’

  ‘You know the doggerel, sir, I’m sure,’ Thurston went on relentlessly:

  ‘The law doth punish man or woman

  That steals the goose from off the common,

  But lets the greater felon loose,

  That steals the common off the goose.’

  ‘That is clever, Thurston . . .’

  ‘As it is true, sir. I do not seek to justify the excesses of a mob, even when it is made up of men without hope. But I do not condone the maintenance, at the expense of the unfortunate, of a parasitic court, of a self-perpetuating legislature, an unjust judiciary, the practitioners of sycophancy, nor all the recipients of privilege, those jacks-in-office who extract the last penny from a man in order that he may prove himself a free-born Englishman!’

  Drinkwater wondered if, as a post-captain, he was himself included in that awful list as a recipient of privilege? Did Gantley Hall exist in even its moderate freehold at the expense of a dispossessed yeomanry? Yet he knew to what inequities Thurston referred. From the prevarications and vastly tedious pettifoggings of the High Court of Chancery, to the perquisites and bribes recognized as being necessary to further the public service, no area of life seemed exempt. He looked at his desk. If he and Thurston did not attend to their business properly, if these very books were not properly kept, then a mean-minded Admiralty clerk might postpone their clearance at the end of a commission. Such a delay meant his ship’s company would not be paid, further exacerbating an already unjust system which failed to pay men for their labour until a commission ended, forcing them to resort to usurers who bought up their ‘tickets’ at discount rates, advancing the poor devils cash at far less than face value. It was customary for captains to pass a little money over with their books, to expedite the matter.

  ‘How many widows’ men have we entered for this morning, Thurston?’ Drinkwater referred to the allowed practice of bearing upon a man-o’-war’s books a number of non-existent men to provide a sum for relieving the hardships of the dependants of those lost or killed at sea by disease or action.

  ‘The regulation six, sir.’

  ‘I could make it twelve . . . and either pocket the difference myself, or distribute it among the needy.’

  ‘Sir, I had not meant anything personal . . .’

  ‘I had not thought so, but either act would be illegal, within the strict letter of the regulations.’

  ‘You suggest that I should wait for a better life in heaven then, sir?’ Thurston asked, with a curious bitter hardening of his face.

  ‘Do you truly think this world is capable of improvement?’

  ‘Most assuredly so, sir.’

  ‘They thought so in France, yet they have ended up with an Emperor Napoleon and have trampled on half the nations of Europe . . .’

  Thurston shrugged, apparently undisconcerted by this irrefutable logic. ‘They are the French, sir, and have merely trampled upon courts,’ he said. Drinkwater suppressed a laugh with difficulty. Time was drawing on and he was more anxious than ever to escape the oppressive confines of the ship. ‘They order things very differently hereabouts . . .’ Thurston’s eyes wandered wistfully through the stern windows to the sweep of green grass and deciduous woodland bordering the river. ‘Very differently.’

  ‘Thurston, you know very well why I had you made into my clerk, don’t you?’

  ‘I think so, sir.’

  ‘You know so, sir . . . and you know why I cannot tolerate your spreading your cr
eed aboard this ship.’

  ‘I know that, sir, and I pity you.’

  ‘Have a care, Thurston, have a care, you may not find things would fall out quite as you wish even in Utopia. I am aware some men think you dangerous, while others think you mad. I am aware too that cranks are small things which make revolutions . . .’ The pun brought a smile back to Thurston’s face, ‘but the word on ship-board also signifies unstable and top-heavy, so have a care. Do you understand?’

  ‘Oh, I understand, sir.’

  They faced each other for a moment, the one, unresponsible and armed with the truth; the other worn down by obligations and compromised by the nature of the world.

  ‘Pass word to call away my barge, if you please.’

  On Drinkwater’s insistence they rode away from the house directly inland. He had first enquired if there was news of Stewart’s return with Vansittart’s passport and having thus acquitted himself of the last demands of duty he gave himself up to pleasure with a rare and uncharacteristic enthusiasm.

  Vansittart reading his novel and patiently awaiting the acceptance of his credentials; Metcalfe, irritated by his non-participation in the previous evening’s rout and further annoyed by Drinkwater’s departure this morning; Frey, moonstruck and vacant; even Thurston righting all the world’s ills with his honest and impossible creed – all could go hang for an hour or two. He had given them enough to keep them busy. A wood and watering party sent off under adequate guard, a restowing of the hold and a rattling down of the rigging should guard against the devil finding work for idle hands . . .

  It did not occur to him as he kicked the roan mare after the spirited chestnut gelding that he was the only one whose hands were, at least metaphorically, empty.

  ‘Do we go alone?’ he had asked as she walked the leading horse round the rearward corner of the house and so cut off the view of the river.

  She had turned and patted a bulging saddle-bag. ‘I have a luncheon here,’ she called gaily, ‘or do you think me in need of a chaperon?’ The notion caused her to burst out into a peal of laughter and spur her horse.