'I don't follow ...'
'He was killed at the Battle of the Brandywine a year later,' Shaw explained. 'Although a lieutenant in Wagonner's Virginia regiment in Scotch Willie Maxwell's brigade, he had been sent with a message to Wayne at Chadd's Ford where he stopped a Hessian ball. He died instantly ...'
'I am sorry to hear it, sir,' Vansittart replied.
Shaw shrugged. 'Oh, I bear no ill-will, time heals all things and he died in good company.'
'He died fighting the English,' slurred Stewart.
Shaw seemed embarrassed at the interruption and addressed Drinkwater. 'You served at the time, Captain, did you not?'
'Aye, sir. I served in Carolina — and lost friends there. It had become a filthy business by then. The circumstances of death were less glorious. There was a midshipman whose end was foul.'
'How so?' Stewart put the decanter down and looked up. His intake of wine had been steady throughout the meal and beads of sweat stood out on his forehead. A prurient curiosity blinked through his blurring eyes and Drinkwater wanted to wound the cocksure fool, to disabuse him of his misconceptions of war.
'He was captured and mutilated, Captain Stewart,' Drinkwater said quietly.
'I think we should join ...' Shaw began, but Stewart ignored his host.
'Whadya mean — mutilated?'
Vansittart half-rose, but his face was turned expectantly towards Drinkwater. The curiosity of the two younger men sent a sudden shudder of revulsion through Drinkwater. The one sought glory in war, the other thought of the business as a gigantic game in which whole divisions of men might be moved across continents as a matter of birth-right.
'We found him with his own bollocks in his mouth, Captain Stewart.'
'I am sorry about Charles,' Arabella said as they stood once more on the terrace.
'It was nothing.'
'For a moment I thought…'
'That I would call him out?' Drinkwater chuckled, 'God's bones, no ... I am too old for that tomfoolery.'
'I am glad to hear it.' She pressed his arm and they stood in silence. The moon was riding clear of a low bank of cloud and the stridulation of cicadas filled the air. In the room behind them Stewart had fallen asleep; Vansittart and Shaw were deep in discussion.
'I am sorry,' she said suddenly.
'For what?'
'I feel now that I should not have asked you to come this morning.'
'My dear, what has passed between us has passed. We may or may not be judged, I don't know
'Remorse will turn you against me.'
'I can never be anything more to you than I was today, you know that. But I shall never be anything less.'
'I marked you as a man of constancy.'
'You must have faith in your intuition…'
'Nathaniel, suppose there are consequences?'
A cold sensation wrapped itself about his heart. 'Is it likely?'
'It is not impossible,' she whispered fearfully.
'I will give you an address in London. I will not abandon a child.' He paused. Pride cometh before a fall, he recalled. The modest competence, the acquisition of Gantley Hall, his wife and family — how he had jeopardized them by his casual dalliance with this woman. A riot in the blood, she had called it...
But looking at her he yearned to kiss her again.
'Arabella ...' She turned her face towards him when a movement at the end of the terrace caught his eye.
'Who the devil... ?'
'It's me, sir, Frey.'
Gently he detached himself from her, aware, even in that prescient moment when he knew something was wrong, how reluctant she was to let him go. 'Mr Frey? What the devil do you here?'
'Eight men have run, sir. Made off in the blue cutter left alongside from the watering party.'
'God damn and blast it!'
CHAPTER 9
After the Fall
'What's to be done, sir?'
'Quiet, boy!'
Midshipman Belchambers' whispered query was hissed into silence by the first lieutenant. Metcalfe fidgeted, clasping and unclasping his hands, then ran a crooked finger round the inside of his stock. He felt Frey's eyes upon him in the preternatural chiaroscuro of the moonlit quarterdeck and concluded that he did not like Frey: he and Captain Drinkwater were, what was it? Too close, yes, that was it, too close; the bonding of long service affronted Metcalfe's hierarchical sensibilities, disturbed him where it had no right to. He felt the silent reproach in Vansittart's presence among them, conceiving the young diplomat one of Drinkwater's party when, by all the social conventions and familial traditions, Metcalfe knew he should not be so constantly at Drinkwater's side. Belchambers was another, a lesser example of the first. He snapped the eager boy to cringing silence and faced aft, unaware of the irrationality of his train of thought, as apparently expectant as all the other officers ranged on deck, awaiting the reaction from the shadowy figure standing right aft at the taffrail.
Captain Drinkwater stared astern, towards the confluence of the Potomac with Chesapeake Bay wherein drained the waters of a dozen rivers. The moon rode high, clear of the clouds, apparently diminished in diameter due to its altitude, yet lending a weird clarity to the dismal scene. Captain Drinkwater had been lost in this contemplation for almost ten minutes, while his officers waited on the quarterdeck and below them the ship seethed. Barely a man slept after the hue and cry had been raised and Metcalfe, Gordon, Frey, Moncrieff and his marines, with drawn swords and hand-held bayonets, had called the roll and scoured the ship.
'For God's sake...' Metcalfe muttered, much louder than he intended. He met Vansittart's eyes and shrugged. 'The buggers could be anywhere,' he said, as if Vansittart had asked him a question, 'anywhere, damn them.'
'Do you search for them tonight?'
Metcalfe jerked his head aft, but still Drinkwater remained motionless, his hands clasped behind his back, his head facing away from them. All decisions waited upon the captain's pleasure now he was back on board.
It had been in Drinkwater's mind to vent his temper upon those responsible for the desertions: Metcalfe as his own deputy, the officer of the watch and his subordinates, down to the marine sentries and the men in the guard-boat.
But he knew he would be guilty of a grave injustice if he did, and he was already guilty of so much that day that the prospect of adding to the woeful catalogue of folly appalled him.
Standing beneath the pale splendour of the moon he felt himself a victim of all the paradoxes visited upon mankind. And yet his sense of responsibility was too keen to submit to so cosy a justification; the harsh self-condemnation of his puritan soul rejected the libertine's absolution.
In the cool of the night his old wounds ached intrusively, the body sharing the hurt of the mind. Mentally and physically he gave himself no chance of surrender to passion, refused to acknowledge the mutual hunger in, and irresistible attraction between himself and Arabella. Perhaps, had he remained in Arabella's presence, he would not have judged himself so harshly, would have placed events in their perspective. But Frey had been the agent of fate and brought the news of providence's swift retribution.
'Pride', he again and again recalled his mother saying, 'always comes before a fall,' and now he remembered another saw she was fond of, a social pretension in its way, almost an aspiration: 'Remember, you are not born to pleasure, Nathaniel, it is not for us. We are of the middling sort...'
He had heard the phrase recently and, in remembering, he confronted his own ineluctable culpability. Thurston had used it only that morning. A sudden anger burst in upon his brain. He should never have let Thurston have his head and spew his republican cant so readily! God, what a damned fool he had been to listen; to listen and to be half-convinced the fellow spoke something akin to the truth!