'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!'
Gantley Hall
'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.