'Why, to request an escort downstream, Mr Metcalfe,' jested the preoccupied Drinkwater, glass still clapped to his eye.
'Not to demand the return of our men?' Metcalfe's dithering lack of comprehension, or dullness of wit, irritated Drinkwater. 'That as well, Mr Metcalfe,' he added sarcastically.
Metcalfe turned on his heel wounded, his hands outspread, inviting his colleagues to share in his mystification. Drinkwater had ordered him from his bed an hour earlier, told him he wanted the ship's company turned-to at their stations, a spring roused out, run forward and hitched to the cable and thought that sufficient for him to be getting on with. Frey's briefing was a different matter. It had to be precise, exact, not subject to committee approval; besides, there had been no time for such niceties, however desirable. As Metcalfe turned he caught Gordon nudging Moncrieff at the first lieutenant's discomfiture. The ridicule struck Metcalfe like a blow.
'Ah, here's Captain Stewart...'
Drinkwater's commentary had them craning over the hammock nettings. A group of pale figures in their shirt-sleeves were grouped round the darker figure of Lieutenant Frey in his full-dress. And as their attention was diverted to the Stingray, Metcalfe slipped below.
'Good mornin', sir.'
Lieutenant Frey, unconsciously aping his commander's pronunciation, gave the emerging American commander a half-bow.
'Captain Drinkwater's compliments, sir, and his apologies for disturbing you at this hour. He is aware you had arranged with Mr Vansittart via the master of the schooner that we should weigh and proceed in company at four bells, but he insists upon the immediate return of the British deserters you have been harbouring. Truth is, sir, we have known about their presence aboard your ship for several days; saw 'em, do you see, through our glasses. Captain Drinkwater was particularly desirous of not compromising Mr Vansittart's mission and hoped you'd return 'em yourself, but his patience is now run out to the bitter end and, well, you will oblige, sir, won't you? Otherwise…'
'Otherwise what?'
Frey had enjoyed himself. He was not sure if he had the message word-perfect, but the gist of it, delivered at the run, as Drinkwater had ordered, had been surprisingly easy. Stewart, clogged with sleep, had twice or thrice tried to interrupt him, but Frey had had the advantage and each successive statement had demanded Stewart's sleep-dulled concentration. In the end, despite himself, he had succumbed to the coercion.
'Otherwise what?' he repeated angrily.
Frey heard Tucker mumble something about a spring and a cable.
'Otherwise, sir, the most unpleasant consequences will arise. You lie under our guns.' Frey, his hat in his hand, stepped aside and, with a theatrical flourish about which he was afterwards overweeningly boastful, he indicated the unnatural angle of the Patrician and the ugly, black foreshortening of her gun muzzles.
'Why you goddammed ...' Stewart's face was flushed and his eyes staring as he transferred them from Frey to the Patrician, then back to Frey.
'I believe, sir,' Frey continued, overriding Stewart's erupting anger, 'your removal from your command might be a consequence of interfering with the speedy return of a British emissary after such a happy accommodation has been reached by our two governments.'
Whether or not Stewart knew he was due to be replaced, or that the matter was a mere possibility, Frey had no idea. It was to be his last card and it appeared to work. The American captain clamped his mouth in a grimace and let his breath hiss out between his teeth. The muscles of his jaw worked furiously and when he spoke his voice cracked with the strain of self-control.
'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.