Beneath the aurora

'An impostor? How is that?'

'Come, sir,' said Drinkwater sharply, 'there are French agents in London, are there not?'

'I really have no idea.'

'I am sure Lord Castlereagh is aware of their presence.'

'How very unfortunate,' said the under-secretary. 'I had better inform his Lordship.'

'A moment. I'd be obliged if you would take me to the Admiralty.'

Drinkwater was fortunate that Barrow had not yet left. 'This is a damnable business,' he concluded.

'I do not think Lord Castlereagh will trouble himself overmuch, Captain.'

'No, probably not,' Drinkwater said, 'until Canada catches fire.'

Drinkwater returned to Lord North Street for the second time that day. He was in an ill humour and full of a sense of foreboding. He put this down to Bardolini's disappearance and Elizabeth's departure, and these circumstances undoubtedly made him nervously susceptible to a curious sensation of being followed. He could see no one in the gathering darkness and dismissed the idea as ludicrous.

But the moment he turned the corner he knew instinctively that something was wrong. He broke into a run and found his front door ajar. In the hall Williams was distraught; not half an hour earlier a carriage with drawn blinds had pulled up and a heavily cloaked figure had knocked at the door. Williams had opened it and had immediately been dashed aside. Thereafter two masked accomplices had appeared, forcing their way into the house and ransacking it.

'I thought it was the Colonel or yourself coming back, sir,' a shaken Williams confessed, his tranquillity of mind banished.

'Did you hear them speak?' Drinkwater asked, handing Williams a glass of wine.

'No, sir, but they weren't Frenchmen.'

'How d'you know?'

'I'd have smelled them, sir, no doubt about it. Besides, I think I heard one of them say something in English. He was quickly hushed up, but I am almost certain of it.'

'What did he say?'

'Oh, "nothing in here," something to that effect. They had just turned over the withdrawing-room.'

A faint wail came from below stairs. 'Did they molest your wife?'

'No, sir, but she is badly frightened. They were looking for papers ...'

'Were they, by God!'

'They broke into the strong-room.'

'They took everything?'

'Everything.'

Drinkwater closed his eyes. 'God's bones!' he blasphemed.

He waited upon Mr Barrow at nine the following morning. Curiously, the Second Secretary was not surprised to see him. 'You have heard, then?' he said, waving Drinkwater to a chair.

'Heard?'

'The body of your guest was found in an alley last evening. He had been severely beaten about the head and was unrecognizable but for the remnants of his uniform. Oddly enough I was with Murray last evening when Canning arrived with the news. It crossed my mind then that it might be our friend and I instituted enquiries.'

'You did not think to send me word…'

'Come, come, Captain, the man was an opportunist, like his master. He played for high stakes, and he lost. As for yourself, you would have insisted on viewing the corpse and drawing attention to your connection with the man.'

'Opportunist or not, he had placed himself under my protection.' Drinkwater remembered Elizabeth's assertion that Bardolini was a frightened man. 'Whoever killed Bardolini ransacked my house. I have spent half the night pacifying my housekeeper.'

'Did they, by heaven? D'you know why?'

'I think they were after papers. I have no idea what, apart from his accreditation, Bardolini carried. Whatever it was he did not take it to what he supposed to be a meeting with Lord Castlereagh.'

'Then they left empty-handed?' asked Barrow.

'More or less. I had some private papers…'

'Ahhh. How distressing for you ... Still, someone knew who he was and where he was in London.'

'That argues against your hope of keeping me out of the affair.'

'Damn it, yes,' Barrow frowned. 'And we must also assume they knew why he was here.'

'Exactiy so.'

'I should not delay in your own departure, Captain Drinkwater. Would you like me to pass word to the commander of the Kestrel to proceed? At least you have no need to divert to Helgoland now.'

'No. I'd be obliged if you would order Lieutenant Quilliampton to Leith without delay.'

'Consider it done.'

After the hectic activity of the past fortnight, there was a vast and wonderful pleasure in the day of the departure of HMS Andromeda from Leith Road that early October forenoon. The grey waters of the Firth of Forth were driven ahead of the ship by the fresh westerly breeze, quartered by fulmars and gannets whose colonies had whitened with their droppings the Bass Rock to the southward. Ahead of them lay the greener wedge of the Isle of May with its square stone light-tower and its antediluvian coal chauffer. To the north, clad in dying bracken, lay the dun coast of the ancient kingdom of Fife, a title whose pretentiousness reminded Drinkwater briefly of the sunburnt coast of Calabria and the compromised claims of the pretender to its tottering throne.

He had not realized how much he had missed the independence, even the solitariness, of command, or the sheer unalloyed pleasure of the thing. There was a purposeful simplicity in the way of life, for which, he admitted a little ruefully, his existence had fitted him at the expense of much else. It was, God knew, not the rollicking life of a sailor, or the seductiveness of sea-breezes that the British public thought all their ill-assorted and maltreated tars thrived upon.

If it had been, he would have enjoyed the passage north in the Leith packet which had stormed up the English coast from the Pool of London on the last dregs of the gale. As it was the heavily sparred and over-canvassed cutter with its crowded accommodation and puking passengers contained all the misery of seafaring. True, he had enjoyed the company of Captain McCrindle, a burly and bewhiskered Scot whose sole preoccupations were wind and tide, and who, when asked if he ever feared interception by a French corsair, had replied he would be verra much afeared, if there was the slightest chance of being overtaken by one!'

The old seaman's indignation made Drinkwater smile even now, but he threw the recollection aside as quickly as it had occurred for Lieutenant Mosse was claiming his attention.

'If you please, sir, she will lay a course clear of Fife Ness for the Bell Rock.'

'By all means, Mr Mosse, pray carry on.'

'Aye, aye, sir.'

Drinkwater watched the young second lieutenant. He was something of a dandy, a sharp contrast to the first luff, a more seasoned man who, like James Quilhampton aboard the cutter Kestrel dancing in their wake, was of an age to be at least a commander, if not made post. Drinkwater had yet to make up his mind about Lieutenant Huke, though he appeared a most competent officer, for there seemed about him a withdrawn quality that concealed a suspicion which made Drinkwater feel uneasy.

As for the other officers, apart from the master, a middle-aged man named Birkbeck, he had seen little of them since coming aboard three days earlier.

The crew seemed willing enough, moving about their duties with quiet purpose and a minimum degree of starting from the bosun's mates. The boat's crew which had met him had been commanded by a dapper midshipman named Fisher who, if he was setting out to make a good impression upon his new captain, had succeeded.

He could have wished for a heavier frigate, his old Patrician, perhaps, or at least Antigone with her 18-pounders, but Andromeda handled well, and if she was not the fastest or most weatherly class of frigate possessed by the Royal Navy, the ageing thirty-six gun, 12-pounder ships were known for their endurance and sea-kindliness.