How could a man be free? He was tied to a trade, to a master, to his family, to his land, to his throne if one chased the argument to its summit. Even poor Thurston, exponent of freedom though he was, had been chained to his beliefs, governed to excess by his obsession with democracy. Everything everywhere was either passive in equilibrium, or else active in collision, in the process of transition ending in balance and inertia. In that state of grace men called natural order, equilibrium reigned; the affairs of men were otherwise and ran, for the most part, contrary to natural order. Shocking though it had been at the hand of a maniac, Thurston's murder was comprehensible if seen as a drawing upon himself, the libertarian extremist, the pistol ball of an extreme agent of repression.
In such a world what was a reasonable man to do? What he was doing now, Drinkwater concluded as he watched an officer mount the brig's quarter rail, clinging to the larboard gaff vang. He must hasten the end of this long, wearisome war. Duty ruled his existence and providence decided the outcome of his acts.
And what of Christian charity? What of compassion, his conscience whispered? He provided for his family; he was not unkind to his friends; he had done his best in those circumstances where his decisions impinged upon the lives of others; he had taken in those lame ducks whose existence depended upon his charity ...
'Schooner, 'hoy!'
There was a flurry of activity on the deck of the brig as she drew rapidly closer. Sundercombe came aft again, wandering with a studied casualness and impressing Drinkwater with his coolness. Forward, the staysail flapped over the Sprite's name.
'Schooner 'hoy? What ship?'
Drinkwater drew himself up, doffed his hat and waved. 'Tender to the United States ship Stingray, out of the Washington Navy Yard,' he hailed.
The brig was a cable distant, trimming her yards as she braced round to run parallel with the schooner.
'Have you had word? There's a British frigate cruising off the capes.'
'Must be Hasty,' a perplexed Sundercombe murmured.
'No,' Drinkwater called back. What the devil had induced Tyrell to douse French colours? 'When was she last sighted?'
'Day before yesterday. He took a Norfolk ship prize.'
'The hell he did!' Drinkwater shouted back with unfeigned surprise. 'He can't have seen those two sails to the south,' he muttered in an aside to Sundercombe.
'He's too big for you to take on, Cap'n,' the American continued as the two vessels surged alongside, their crews staring at one another, the Sprites gunners still crouching out of sight.
'Where are you bound?' Drinkwater pressed.
'The Delaware.'
'I could give you an escort. We could divert the Britisher, hold him off while you got out. I heard there were some French ships in the offing,' Drinkwater drawled.
Drinkwater watched the American officer throw a remark behind him then he nodded. 'I calculate you're correct, Cap'n, and we'd be mightily obliged.'
'I'll take station on your starboard quarter then. Can you make a little more sail?'
'Sure, and thanks.'
'My pleasure.' Drinkwater turned his attention inboard. 'I think we've hooked him, Mr Sundercombe. Keep your gunners well down. Let him draw ahead and then have us range up on his weather side.'
'Ease the foresheet, there,' Sundercombe growled, clearly not trusting himself to imitate an American accent like Drinkwater. The big gaff sail flogged and the schooner lost some way as the brig's crew raced aloft to impress the navy men and shook out their royals. Sundercombe went aft and lent his weight to the helmsman. Sprite luffed under the brig's stern and then, with the foresheet retrimmed, slowly overhauled her victim on her starboard side.
'Get your larboard guns ready,' Drinkwater said, aware the Americans could not hear him but anxious lest they might realize they had been deceived.
He thought he detected some such appreciation, someone pointing at them and drawing the attention of the officer he had seen on the brig's rail to something. He realized with a spurt of irritation that he had forgotten their name exposed on the larboard bow.
The Sprite was fast overhauling the brig and Drinkwater knew he dared delay no longer if, as the inconvenient discomfort of his conscience prompted, he was to avoid excessive bloodshed.
'Ensign, Caldecott! Run out your guns, Mr Sundercombe!'
They could not fail to see now. The jerky lowering of the American colours and the hand-over-hand ascent of the white ensign brought a howl of rage from the brig, a howl quite audible above the trundle of the 6-pounder carriages over the Sprite's pine decks.
'Strike, sir, or I'll open fire!' Drinkwater hailed.
'God damn you to hell!' came a defiant roar and Drinkwater nodded. The three 6-pounders barked in a ragged broadside. It was point-blank range; even at the maximum elevation originally intended to cripple the brig's rigging and with the schooner heeling to the breeze, the trajectories of the shot could not avoid hitting the brig's rail. What appeared like a burst of lethal splinters exploded over the brig's deck. A moment later, as the gun-captains' hands went up in signal of their readiness to fire again, the American flag came down.
An hour later the brig Louise of Norfolk, Virginia, Captain Samuel Bethnal, Master, had been fired. Bethnal and his people hoisted the lugsail of the red cutter lately belonging to His Britannic Majesty's frigate Patrician and miserably set course to the south-west and the coast of Virginia. To the east the horizon was broken only by the grey smudges of a pair of British frigates, and the twin jags of a schooner's sails as she slipped over the rim of the world and left the coast of America astern.
'I don't see the sense in it myself,' said Wyatt, burying his nose in a tankard and bracing himself as the Patrician shouldered her way through a swell. 'It ain't logical,' he added, surfacing briefly to deliver his final opinion on Captain Drinkwater's conduct in the dank haven of the wardroom.
'I suppose the Commodore has his reasons,' offered Pym with a detached and largely disinterested loyalty.
'I'm sure he has,' Simpson, the chaplain, said cautiously, then affirming, 'of course he has,' with an air of conviction, before destroying the effect by appending in a far from certain tone of voice: 'in fact I'm certain of it.'
Slowly Wyatt raised his face from the tankard. Rum ran from his slack mouth, adding gloss to an already greasy complexion. 'You don't know what you're talking about,' he mouthed with utter contempt.
'Nevertheless, Mr Wyatt,' the hitherto silent Frey piped up, 'I agree with Simpson and the surgeon.'
Wyatt turned his red eyes on the junior lieutenant. 'An' you know bugger all,' he said offensively.
Frey was about to leap to his feet when he felt Simpson's restraining hand on his sleeve. 'Hold hard, young man, he doesn't know what he's saying.'
'Don't know what I'm saying, d'you say? Is that what you said, you God-bothering bastard?' Wyatt rose unsteadily to his feet, instinctively bracing himself against Patrician's motion. 'With hundreds of bloody privateers shipping out of every creek and runnel on the coast of North America, we, we,' Wyatt slammed his now empty tankard on the table top with a dull, emphatic thud, 'we go waltzing off into the wide Atlantic with the strongest frigate squadron south of Halifax ...'
'We're going to rendezvous with the homeward Indiamen ...' Frey began, but was choked in mid-sentence.