The Flying Squadron

by Richard Woodman

‘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.

  PART TWO

  The Commodore

  ‘America certainly cannot pretend to wage war against us; she has no navy to do it with!’

  The Statesman,

  London,

  10 June 1812

  Gantley Hall

  March 1812

  ‘What became of him?’

  Drinkwater stirred from his reverie and looked at his wife working at her tapestry frame. Between them the fire leapt and crackled, flaring at the updraft in the chimney. Its warmth combined with the rum toddy, a good dinner and the gale raging unregarded outside to induce a detached stupor in Captain Drinkwater. To his wife he seemed to be dozing peacefully; in reality he was on the rack of conscience.

  ‘I’m sorry, my dear, what did you say?’

  ‘What became of him?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Mr Metcalfe. You were telling me about him.’

  ‘Of course, how stupid. Forgive me . . .’

  ‘There is nothing to forgive, you dozed off.’

  ‘Yes,’ Drinkwater lied, ‘I must have . . .’

  A gust of wind slammed against the side of the house and the shutters and sashes of the withdrawing room rattled violently. Between them the fire flared into even greater activity, roaring and subsiding as it consumed the logs before their eyes, a remorseless foretaste of Hell, Drinkwater thought uncomfortably.

  ‘God help sailors on a night like this,’ he remarked tritely, taking refuge in the cliché as he stirred himself, bent forward and threw another brace of logs into the fire-basket. ‘Metcalfe is in Haslar, the naval hospital at Gosport.’

  ‘I know, Nathaniel,’ Elizabeth chid him gently. ‘Is he mad?’

  Drinkwater pulled himself together and determined to make small talk with his wife. Her brown eyes regarded him over her poised needle and he felt uncomfortable under their scrutiny. Had she guessed anything? He had asked himself the same question in the weeks he had been home, examined every facet of his behaviour and concluded she could only have been suspicious because of his solicitude. He cursed himself for his stupidity; he was no dissembler.

  ‘The doctors at Haslar were content to conclude it, yes, but our surgeon, Mr Pym, thought otherwise.’

  ‘And yet the poor man was delivered up . . .’

  ‘We had no alternative and, to be candid, Bess, I fear I agreed with the bulk of medical opinion. The man was quite incapable of any rationality after the incident, his whole posture was preposterous . . .’

  Drinkwater recalled the way Metcalfe had stood back
, the Ferguson rifle crooked in his left elbow, his right hand extended as though for applause, a curious, expectant look upon his face, an actor upon a stage of his own imagining. His whole attitude had been that of a man who had just achieved a wonder; only his eyes, eyes that stared directly at Drinkwater himself, seemed detached from the awful reality of the act he had just perpetrated.

  Like everyone on Patrician’s upper deck, Drinkwater was stunned; then a noise of indignation reached them, rolling across the water from the Stingray. A moment later it was taken up aboard Patrician. Thurston had been popular, his desertion connived at: his murder was resented. The undertones of combination and mutiny implicit in the events of the past days instantly rose up to confront Drinkwater. Metcalfe’s action had provided a catalyst for disaffection to become transformed into open rebellion. He was within a whisker of losing control of his ship, of having her seized and possibly handed over to the Americans, her people seeking asylum, her loss to the Royal Navy an ignominious cause of rupture between Great Britain and the United States of America.

  It was imperative he acted at once and he bellowed for silence, for the helm and braces to be trimmed and for Moncrieff to place Mr Metcalfe under immediate arrest, he was gratified, in a sweating relief, to see others, the marine officer, Sergeant Hudson, Comley the boatswain and Wyatt the master, move swiftly to divert trouble, to impose the bonds of conditioned discipline and strangle at birth the sudden surge of popular compassion and anger.

  The Stingray had made no move to drop downstream in their wake as Drinkwater crowded on sail, as much to increase the distance between the two ships as to occupy the Patricians. Thus he had escaped into the Atlantic and set their course for home.

  ‘If you were so certain, why did your surgeon think otherwise?’ Elizabeth asked.

  ‘Our opinions did not appear to differ at first. We confined Metcalfe to his cabin, put a guard on him and both of us agreed that insanity was the most humane explanation for his conduct, as much for himself as to avoid trouble with the people. There was, moreover, the possibility of diplomatic repercussions, though after I had discussed it with Vansittart, we concluded Captain Stewart was unlikely to have made a fuss, since it was quite clear Thurston was a deserter from Patrician and therefore his sheltering by Stewart could have constituted a provocative act. In the amiable circumstances then prevailing, at least according to Vansittart’s account, Stewart would have embarrassed his own government and marred his already meagre chances of advancement.’ Drinkwater paused, remembering the darkly handsome American. ‘Stewart made a number of rather puerile threats against us if it came to war and doubtless has added the incident to his catalogue of British infamy, but I did not take him for a complete fool . . .’

  ‘But you think, despite this trouble, it will not come to war?’

  ‘No,’ Drinkwater shook his head, ‘I hope not.’

  They relapsed into silence again. The gale lashed the house with a sudden flurry of rain and they both looked up, caught each other’s eyes and smiled.

  ‘It is good to have you home, my dear.’

  ‘It is good to be home, Bess.’

  He sincerely meant it, yet the gusting wind tugged at him, teasing him away from this domestic cosiness. Up and down the country men and women, even the humblest cottager, would be huddled about their fires of peat, driftwood or sea-coal. Why was it he had to suffer this perverse tugging away? In all honesty he wanted to be nowhere else on earth than here, beside his wife. Had he not blessed the severe and sudden leak that had confined Patrician to a graving dock in Dock Town, Plymouth, where her sprung garboard had caused the master-shipwright to scratch his head? He sighed, stared into the fire and missed the look his wife threw him.

  ‘So what made your surgeon change his mind?’

  Drinkwater wrenched his thoughts back to the present. ‘A theory – a theory he was developing into a thesis. If I understood him aright, it was his contention (and Metcalfe had, apparently, furnished him with evidence over a long period) that Metcalfe was, as it were, two people. No, that ain’t right: he considered Metcalfe possessed two individual personalities . . .

  ‘Pym argued we all have a tendency to be two people, a fusion of opposites, of contrary humours. The relationship between weaknesses and strengths, likes and dislikes, the imbalance of these humours and so forth, nevertheless produces an equilibrium which inclines in favour of one or the other, making us predominantly one type of person, or another and hence forming our characters.

  ‘He seemed to think Metcalfe’s disparate parts were out of kilter in the sense that they exactly balanced, do you see? Thus, he postulated, if you conceive circumstances acting like the moon upon water, the water being these leanings, or inclinations inherent in us, our response is the vacillation of moods and humours. Because one humour predominates, we remain in character, whereas in Metcalfe’s case the swings from one to another were equal, his personality was not weighted in favour of choler or sanguinity or phlegm, for instance, but swung more violently and uncontrollably from one exclusive humour to another.

  ‘Therefore he became wholly one half of his complete character, before changing and becoming the other. Pym dignified his hypothesis the Pendular Personality and proposed to publish a treatise about it.’

  ‘But surely such a condition is, nevertheless, a form of madness.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose it is. Though Pym suggested that so rational an explanation made of it a disease, madness being a condition beyond explanation. At all events it does not sit happily upon a sea-officer’s shoulders.’

  Poor Metcalfe. He had wept with remorse when his accusers confronted him with the enormity of murder, yet a day later, when Drinkwater had visited him again, he had screamed ingratitude, claiming to have done everything and more that his commander wished for and chastising Drinkwater for abandoning a loyal subordinate capable of great distinction. Pym had prescribed laudanum and they had brought him back dopey with the opiate.

  There had been nothing more that Drinkwater could have done for Metcalfe. He waited upon the man’s wife in her lodgings at Southsea and expressed his condolences. He gave her a testimonial for the Sick and Hurt Board and twenty guineas to tide her over. She had a snot-nosed brat at her side and another barely off the breast. Drink-water had been led to believe Metcalfe came from a good family, but the appearance of his wife suggested a life of penurious scrimping and saving, of pretensions beyond means and ambitions beyond ability. The impression left by this sad meeting weighed heavily upon his own troubles as he made his way home.

  Was Pym right? His theory had, as far as Drinkwater could judge, a logical attraction. He had himself proved to be two men and had behaved as such in the verdant woodlands of Virginia, so much so that he seemed now to be a different person to the man who had lain with Arabella Shaw. That careless spirit had been younger and wilder than the heat-stupefied, half-soaked, married and middle-aged sea-officer now sprawled before the fire in Gantley Hall. Had he, at least temporarily, suffered from an onset of the same dichotomous insanity which had seized so permanent a hold on Metcalfe? Was he in the grip of Pym’s pendular personality?

  The ridiculous humour of the alliteration escaped him. One could argue he had done no more than thousands of men had done before him. He had, after all, spent most of his adult life cooped up on ship-board, estranged even from the body of his lawful wedded wife, so that the willing proximity of so enchanting, comely and passionate a woman as Arabella was irresistible. He could cite other encounters, with Doña Ana Maria Conchita Arguello de Salas and Hortense Santhonax, women whose beauty was fabled and yet with whom he had behaved with utter propriety, notwithstanding fate had thrown them together in unusual circumstances. He could invent no end of excuses for his momentary weakness and invent no end of specious proofs as to his probity. But he could think of no justification for his behaviour with Arabella.

  He dared not look at his wife, lest she catch his eye and ask, in her acutely intuitive way, what troubled
him. The events of that afternoon, the riot in the blood which had ended in their physical commingling, stood as a great sin in Drinkwater’s mind.

  Yet, God knew, he had committed greater sins. He was a murderer himself, perhaps more so than poor Metcalfe, for he had killed in cold blood, mechanically, under orders, at the behest of his Sovereign. And not once but many times.

  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 . . .’