The flying squadron

'For God's sake, call me John.' Dungarth dropped into a creaking chair and waved Drinkwater to sit. 'They tell me your ship's held up, Nat.'

'Aye, dockyard delays, a shortage of almost everything ...'

'Including orders ...'

'So,' Drinkwater grinned, scratching his scarred cheek, 'you do have a hand in her inactivity.'

Dungarth shrugged. 'Interruption of the Baltic trade confounds the dockyards, I suppose, despite our best efforts', this with significance and a heavy emphasis on the plural pronoun, 'and the Tsar's declared intention of abandoning the dictates of Paris.'

'And lack of men, of course,' Drinkwater added, suddenly gloomy, 'always a want of them. I understand from Lieutenant Frey that every cruiser putting into the Sound poaches a handful despite my orders and those of the Port Admiral. They have even taken my coxswain.'

'Your worst enemies are always your own cloth, Nat.'

'I hope, my Lord,' put in Elizabeth, 'that that is not too enigmatic a response.'

'Ah-ha, ma'am, you're shrewd, but in this case mistaken. I have nothing to do with the felonious practices of cruiser captains.'

'Since I am so out of tune with you, then, my Lord,' Elizabeth said with mock severity, rising to draw the gentlemen after her and waving a relieved Dungarth back into his sagging chair, 'and since you are so lately come in, I shall leave you to your gossip and decanters.'

'You are cross with me, ma'am ...'

'Incensed, my Lord ...'

'But too gentle to tell me; you have an angel for a wife, Nathaniel.'

The men settled to their port and sat for a few moments in companionable silence.

'You're ready to go to sea again, aren't you, Nat?' Dungarth said at last.

'I've no need to argue the circumstances, my Lord ...'

'John, for heaven's sake

'You know the tug of one thing when the other is at hand.'

'This damned war has ruined us as men, though only God alone knows what it will do to us as a nation.'

'You want me for the Baltic?'

'If and when.'

'I loathe waiting.'

'If you commanded a ship of the line, you would be doing nothing other than waiting and watching off La Rochelle, or L'Orient, or Ushant...'

'The reflection does not stopper off my impatience.'

Dungarth looked at his friend with a shrewd eye.

Something's amiss, Nat; what the devil's eating you?'

Drinkwater met Dungarth's gaze. He had no need of pretence with so old and trusted a colleague. 'Unfinished business,' he replied.

'In the Baltic?'

'In America.'

'Not a woman like Hortense Santhonax? A temptress? No, a siren?'

'Not entirely, though I am not blameless in that quarter; more a feeling, an intuition.'

Dungarth's look changed to one of admiration and he slapped his good knee. 'My dear fellow, I knew you were the man for the task after I'm gone. 'Tis the feeling you need for the game, to be sure, and you have it in abundance. You'll suffer for it, as I warrant you already have done—are doing, by the look of you, but 'tis an indispensable ingredient for the puppet-master.'

Drinkwater shook his head at the use of this phrase, 'No, my Lord,' he said with firm formality, 'not that.'

'There is quite simply no one else,' Dungarth expostulated, waving this protest aside, 'but there is a little time. I'm not called to answer for my sins just yet.'

'You've heard news today, haven't you?' Drinkwater asked directly. 'Is it from the Baltic?'

'No, America. I've asked Moira to dinner tomorrow. He has correspondents in the southern states which in general are hostile to us but where he left a few friends. I think Vansittart's mission was, after all, a failure.'

Drinkwater went gloomily to bed. Elizabeth was reading one of Miss Austen's novels by candlelight, Drinkwater noticed, but closed it upon her finger and looked up at her husband who added his own candelabra to the one illuminating the bed. 'May one ask what you two find to talk about?'

Drinkwater knew the question to be arch, that its bluntness hid a pent-up and justifiable curiosity. Elizabeth, with her talent for divination, had sensed from the very length and earnestness of the men's deliberations that something more than mere idle male gossip about politics was in the air. He knew too, with some relief, that she had concluded his own preoccupations were bound up with these almost hermetic discussions.

He took off his coat and sat on the bed to kick off his shoes.

'He knows himself to be dying, Bess, and is concerned for his life's work. Did I ever tell you he was once, when I knew him as the first lieutenant of the Cyclops, the most liberal of men? He was largely sympathetic with the American rebels at one time. His implacable hatred of the French derives from the mischief done to the body of his wife. She died in Florence shortly after the outbreak of the revolution. He was bringing her back through France when the revolutionaries, seeing the arms on his coach, tore the coffin open ...'

'How awful…'

'You have seen Romney's portrait of her?'

'Yes, yes. She was extraordinarily beautiful.' Elizabeth paused, looked down at her book and set it aside. 'And ... ?'

'Dungarth has become', Drinkwater said with a sigh, 'the Admiralty's chief intelligencer, the repository and digest of a thousand titbits and snippets, reports of facts and rumours; in short a puppet-master pulling strings across half Europe, even as far as the steppes of Asia ...'

'And you are to succeed him?'

Drinkwater looked at his wife full-face. 'How the deuce ... ?'

She shrugged. 'I guessed. You have done nothing but closet yourselves and I know he is not a man to show prejudice to a woman merely because of her sex.'

Drinkwater nodded. 'Of course, I am quite inadequate to the task,' he said earnestly, 'but it appears no one else is fitter and I am slightly acquainted with something of the business, being known to agents in France and Russia ...'

'Spies, you mean,' Elizabeth said flatly and Drinkwater bridled at the implicit disapproval. He opened his mouth to explain, thought better of it and shifted tack.

'Anyway, Dungarth has invited Lord Moira to dinner tomorrow ...'

'And shall I be allowed to ... ?'

'Oh, come, Elizabeth,' Drinkwater said irritably, hooking a finger in his stock, 'I like this whole situation no better than you ...'

Elizabeth leaned forward and placed a finger on his lips.

Tell me who this Lord Moira is.'

'Better I tell you who he was. The Yankees knew him as Lord Rawdon, and he gave them hell through the pine-barrens of Georgia and the Carolinas in the American War. Of late his occupations have been more sedentary. He went into politics alongside Fox and the Whig party in opposition, and is an intimate of the Prince Regent, being numbered among the Holland House set...'

Elizabeth seemed bucked by this piece of news. 'Is he married?' she asked.

'To the Countess of Loudoun, his equal in her own right. He is also considered to be a man of singular ugliness,' he added waspishly.

'Oh,' said Elizabeth smiling, 'how fascinating.'

General Francis Rawdon Hastings, Earl of Moira, proved far from ugly, though bushy black eyebrows, a pair of sharply observant eyes and a dark complexion marked his appearance as unfashionable. He was, moreover, a man of strong opinions and frank speech. His oft-quoted opinion as to the virtue of American women expressed while a young man serving in North America had brought him a degree of wholly unmerited notoriety. His more solid achievements included distinguishing himself at the Battle of Bunker Hill and later defeating Washington's most able general, Nathaniel Greene, in the long and hard-fought campaign of the Carolinas. Such talents might have marked him out for command in the peninsula but, like Tarleton vegetating in County Cork, he was out to grass, though talked of as the next governor-general of India.