The Flying Squadron

by Richard Woodman

  ‘Captain Drinkwater. Where in the devil’s name are you?’

  ‘Here, damn you! Here!’

  Why had he not held his tongue? Why had he identified himself so that, it seemed to him, even in the confusion the contending parties drew apart, exposing him to Stewart?

  But Stewart had seen Drinkwater jump aboard and had kicked or thrust aside those of his friends obstructing his passage. He bore a cavalry sabre and whirled it down in a slashing cut. Drinkwater drew back and lunged over the top of Stewart’s extended arm. The tip of his hanger caught the American’s right bicep, though it failed to penetrate. Stewart recovered and sought to riposte, but the darkness and the confusion helped neither man. Drinkwater was jostled aside. A small, wiry man advanced on Stewart. He was inside the American officer’s guard in a second, his tomahawk raised. The weapon caught the moonlight as it fell.

  ‘No!’ Drinkwater roared, but he was too late. The sabre fell to the deck and Stewart stood swaying, the dark blood gushing from his neck. ‘Caldecott,’ Drinkwater cried in recognition, and his coxswain turned. Just then the moon came clear of the clouds and illuminated the baleful scene. Caldecott’s face was a mask of hatred. His teeth were drawn back in a snarl, his eyes glittered with a feral madness as he sought another victim. Appalled, Drinkwater stepped aside, let him pass, and then with a groan Stewart fell against him. Drinkwater let go his hanger and it dangled from its martingale. He grabbed the falling Stewart, felt the dead weight of him as his head lolled back, the mouth agape.

  Drinkwater stood in the moonlight and held Stewart in his arms as the American died. His mind was filled with the thoughts of the likeness Stewart bore to his sister, and he was sickened to his soul. Mercifully a cloud obscured the moon and the noise of fighting drowned the howl of his anguish.

  ‘How are you, sir?’

  ‘Oh, well enough, James. It was only a scratch or two, you know.’

  ‘Pym said you were lucky . . .’

  ‘Pym talks a lot of nonsense. How’s Tucker?’

  ‘The fever broke last night. He’s weak, but will mend.’

  ‘For God’s sake, tell Pym not to bleed the poor devil.’

  ‘I doubt he’ll take my advice . . .’

  ‘Pour yourself a glass and sit down. I’ll have one too, if you please.’

  Drinkwater swung round and stared astern. The convoy was in good order, the recaptured Indiamen in their places, the prizes secure in the centre of the mass of ships. He had left a brace of Yankee schooners at large in the South Atlantic, but, under the circumstances, he did not think they would pose a great threat now the East India convoy was safe. He took the glass Quilhampton handed him. ‘I believe I owe you an explanation . . .’ Drinkwater smiled over the rim of his glass.

  ‘I confess to still being a little mystified, particularly about Sybille and this fellow Stewart you mentioned . . .’

  ‘I didn’t know about Sybille, James, I guessed. Oh, I had some clues, some evidence to suppose, were I in the same position, I would do the same thing . . .’

  ‘I understand about the privateers seeking to waylay the East India fleet. The French have done it before, it is an obvious move, but there was something else, wasn’t there?’

  ‘You may have heard stories, James, about my excursion in Sprite to the Potomac. I went to contact a woman, a potential source of intelligence. Ah, I see by your face you have heard . . .’

  ‘Well, there were some rumours, sir.’

  ‘There are always rumours aboard ship,’ Drinkwater went on, unaware of Quilhampton’s relief at learning his friend’s liaison with the American lady had so rational an explanation after the innuendoes he had heard. ‘She was able to give me certain information about Captain Stewart which confirmed what I had already guessed and deduced from information I had gleaned from Stewart and what I had been told in London.

  ‘There was something about Stewart, whom I had met earlier, when Patrician was in the Potomac, before you joined us. I had a feeling about him; he practically challenged me, an odd notion unless one nursed a secret in which one had a great deal of confidence. Then luck threw something my way, quite by chance and so circumstantial that I did not know what it was until I recalled the matter much later. The woman dwelt in her father-in-law’s house. His name was Shaw. When I first met him, Shaw was a veritable cooing dove, opposed to war. A day later, when we met in different circumstances and I needed his help, he seemed to have cooled. When I left you and shipped in the sprite, I returned as you now know to contact the woman, Captain Stewart’s sister and Shaw’s daughter-in-law. I saw old Shaw working on some papers. I was at the time apprehensive at the prospect of shinning up a drain pipe at my time of life and chiefly concerned with avoiding detection. I think, having been rebuffed by Shaw, I was instinctively suspicious of him. I didn’t take much notice at the time and it was only weeks afterwards that I remembered what I had seen through a crack in the curtains . . .’

  ‘Well, sir?’

  ‘One draught of a sheer-plan, one chart and three or four sheets of paper that looked like accounts. I was quite unaware that Shaw had an intimate knowledge of nautical matters and it suddenly struck me the chart was of Brest.’

  Quilhampton was frowning, then he shrugged and waited for Drinkwater to supply the explanation.

  ‘You see, James, the Americans have plenty of men, trained naval officers like Stewart and Tucker plus their own considerable mercantile marine to draw from. Their problem is insufficient naval vessels. I stumbled on the first part of their strategy after we encountered the whaler, Altair. The news her master, Orwig, brought of an American frigate at large made me realize the Americans could increase the size of their fleet at a stroke by operating their own flying squadrons of a heavy frigate and a swarm of Baltimore schooners, d’you see?’

  ‘Aye, by heaven, I do . . .’

  ‘Then, when we interrogated Tucker, he mentioned a French frigate in the offing and I began to consider the implications of a revival of the old alliance, a combination of American seamen manning French-built ships. You may not be aware, James, but the French and their allies, in every suitable port between the Baltic and the Mediterranean, have been building men-o’-war of every class, including ships-of-the-line. If such ships ever got to sea and combined with additional flying squadrons of these damnable frigates and schooners . . .’

  ‘They would have had us by the throat,’ Quilhampton said in a tone of appalled wonder and growing comprehension. ‘And was this all to be paid for by John Company’s profits from India and China?’

  Drinkwater nodded, ‘I believe so . . .’

  ‘It’s a diabolically clever notion,’ Quilhampton said appreciatively, then frowned. ‘What was Shaw’s part in all this?’

  ‘No more than a hook upon which my suspicions were obstinately pegged. Like Stewart, I couldn’t get rid of the notion of the fellow. Shaw was obviously tied up with American diplomacy and foreign policy by his very solicitude for Vansittart and the fact that Stewart had us anchor in the Potomac. Then there were those papers and so forth. Finally . . .’ Drinkwater tapped a sheaf of documents lying on the table behind him, ‘there was Stewart aboard a French frigate in the South Atlantic after a mid-ocean rendezvous, with this bundle weighted about his waist. No wonder the poor fellow succumbed to Caldecott’s tomahawk.’

  ‘The papers implicate Shaw?’

  ‘Yes, he was, as it were, the broker between the French and the Americans. In concert with the French invasion of Russia the consequences of the success of this joint venture are not to be contemplated.’

  ‘It would have compelled us to raise the blockade of Europe and let the French fleet out . . .’

  ‘It really doesn’t do to think of such an eventuality,’ said Drinkwater, suppressing a shudder. ‘Come, fill your glass again.’

  He had not told Quilhampton the whole story, but enough of it to make sense. Besides, how could he tell his friend of what he had learned from Arabella in her boudoir, another
Parisian dress discarded on her bed, that curious moment of reticence followed by her wholesale condemnation of men and their scheming? Was that why providence had made them lovers, so he might divine these things? He threw aside the thought, discarded it with the sense of relief flooding through him. He smiled at Quilhampton.

  ‘I make you a toast, James: to the ladies.’

  ‘God bless ’em!’

  The Puppet-master

  March 1813

  ‘Johnnie? Can you hear me?’

  Lord Moira bent over the man in the sick-bed. The grossness had fallen away, leaving a face that seemed twenty years younger but for the yellow pallor of approaching death.

  ‘Frank, is that you?’ Lord Dungarth opened his eyes.

  ‘Yes. How are you today?’

  ‘As you see, failing fast . . .’

  ‘Come, you mustn’t give up hope.’

  ‘Damn it, Frank, don’t cozen me. The quacks will kill me with their nostrums and leeches quicker than this damned distemper. I’m as good as dead.’ Dungarth paused, catching his breath. ‘Listen, there’s something I want you to do for me.’ He raised a trembling hand to his throat. The skin was translucent, the blood vessels below, ribbed and dark, writhing over the stretched tendons. Parting his nightshirt, Lord Dungarth withdrew a key, suspended from his neck by a thin black ribbon. ‘Help . . . me.’ He gasped with the effort.

  Moira assisted Dungarth to raise his head and eased the ribbon over the bald skull.

  ‘It is the key to my desk at the Admiralty. You are to make sure Captain Drinkwater receives it. Upon your word of honour, d’you understand?’

  ‘Upon my word, Johnnie, I promise.’

  Dungarth sighed and sank back on to his pillow. ‘What news of the French?’

  ‘The Russians are approaching the Rhine and Wellington the Pyrenees.’

  ‘And from America?’

  ‘Not so good . . .’

  ‘Is there news of Drinkwater yet?’ Dungarth broke in feebly.

  ‘We shall learn something in a few days,’ Moira disembled.

  ‘I shan’t last a few days, but he’s the man, Frank. He has the ability . . . the nous.’

  Despite himself, Moira smiled at the use of the Greek word, then wondered if the man Drinkwater, in whom Dungarth had such faith, really had the intuition his friend thought. A diseased man was, in Moira’s experience, no very reliable judge.

  ‘Tell him about the bookseller in the Rue de’laaah . . .’ Pain distorted Dungarth’s face. Moira reached for the bottle beside the bed and poured the neat laudanum drops into a tumbler of water.

  ‘Here, old fellow,’ he said, putting an arm about Dungarth and lifting his shoulders. With his other hand he held the glass to his friend’s lips.

  ‘You still pull strings, then?’ Moira said admiringly.

  ‘To the end, mon ami, to the end the puppet-master. Don’t forget Drinkwater . . .’ Dungarth whispered as his eyes closed. ‘Your word upon it, Frank, your word . . .’

  Author’s Note

  The depredations of privateers are largely unrecorded in purely naval histories, but ‘letters-of-marque and reprisal’ were issued in copious numbers by both the French and American governments at this time. Indeed, most American merchant ships carried them, so the distinction between the dedicated privateer and the opportunist cargo-carrier is somewhat blurred. However, the astonishing successes of the corsairs in the war against British trade were far from insignificant and the most interesting of the vessels used by the Americans was the Baltimore clipper schooner which possessed a revolutionary new hull form, with hollow entry and run, the antithesis of the frigates and sloops sent against them. Nevertheless, many were captured and, like the fast French frigates before them, adopted and copied by the Royal Navy.

  The lengths to which the British went to keep Wellington’s army in the Iberian peninsula supplied were often devious. American traders were quite happy to supply both sides, no matter their government was at war with one of them. Much of the investment available for the later expansion of nineteenth-century America originally came from this source.

  Napoleon assiduously worked on an American rupture with Great Britain, seeking to embroil his implacable enemy with an opponent who had designs on Canada and posed a very real threat at sea.

  Henry Vansittart is my own invention, though a King’s messenger was sent to Washington at the time Drinkwater first arrived in the Potomac. The surplus of American naval officers is also a fact; many brilliant young men were unable to find employment in naval vessels and were driven, like Stewart, to find other ways of demonstrating the fervour of their patriotism.

  The value of the frigate actions between the Royal and United States navies was much exaggerated and had little real effect. In America they provided the foundation for a tradition of glory; in Britain they were taken as a sign that the Royal Navy was in decline. The Americans assumed that, like schoolboys with a triumphant conker, the victor accrued to itself the triumphs of its victim. This was plainly nonsense. The value of a navy rests on its strategic power and the fate of its individual parts is only significant if it materially affects this. The Royal Navy suffered such damage in the early years of the Second World War, not between 1812 and 1814. The defeat of a handful of British cruisers did not diminish the great and wearying achievement of continental blockade and when this was extended to America, the balance swung back in favour of the British. Nevertheless, it rattled the British public at the time, and was thought to be of greater importance than the destruction of the Grand Army in the cold of a Russian winter.