Drinkwater saw, from the sudden widening of Tyrell's eyes, that he had not, until that moment, considered the possibility.
'Well, Wyatt, what d'you make of the news?' Frey asked as the officers sat over their wine and the Patrician heeled to the gathering south-easterly breeze which promised to be the long-sought trade wind.
'The American ships were lucky. I expect their gunners were British deserters. It wouldn't have happened ten years ago ...'
'I don't mean the American victories, Wyatt, I mean the effect their being at sea has on the safety of the East Indiamen, something you were prepared to regard as ...'
'Don't resurrect old arguments, Mr Frey,' Simpson cautioned. 'Let sleeping dogs lie.'
'Oh ye of little faith,' Frey said, throwing the remark at the master, who buried his nose in his slopping tankard.
On the deck above Drinkwater dozed in his cot. Orwig's news was worrying. He had felt as though someone had punched him in the belly earlier, such was its impact. The latitude allowed in discretionary orders could hang an officer if he made the wrong decision more certainly than it could bring him success. There were so many options open, but only one which could be taken up. He dulled his anxiety with half a bottle of blackstrap and then settled to think the matter over. Yet the more he worried at the problem, the more convinced he was of the rightness of his decision, despite its unorthodox roots.
The logic of the thing was inescapable; as he had said to Quilhampton and repeated in substance to Dungarth, it was not only what he would have done himself had he been in Stewart's shoes, but what he would do if given President Madison's choices. Over and over he turned the thing until he dozed off in his chair. After some fifteen minutes the empty wine glass slipped from his fingers and the crash of its breaking woke him with a start.
The sudden shock made his heart pound, the wine made his head ache and his mouth felt foul. He rubbed his face, grinding his knuckles into his eyes. Bright scarlet and yellow flashes danced before him.
'God's bones!' he exlaimed, leaping to his feet and striking his head a numbing blow on the deck beams above. He sank back into his chair, his hands over his skull, feeling the bruise rising. 'God damn and blast it,' he muttered through clenched teeth, 'was I dreaming, or not?'
Mullender looked in from the pantry and smartly withdrew. Captain Drinkwater's antics seemed scarcely normal, but Mullender knew personal survival for men in his station largely depended on feigned indifference.
'I was dreaming,' Drinkwater continued to himself, 'but it wasn't a phantasm.' He sat up, dropping his hands from his head and staring straight before him, seeing not the bulkhead, but a glimpse of a room through a gap in heavy brocaded curtains and a litter of papers spread about an escritoire.
Had Mullender chosen this moment to enquire after the well-being of his master, he would have thought him stark, staring mad; but Captain Nathaniel Drinkwater had never been saner in his life.
PART THREE
A Furious Aside
'O miserable advocates! In the name of God, what was done with this immense superiority of force?'
'Oh, what a charm is hereby dissolved! What hopes, will be excited in the breasts of our enemies!'
The Admiralty
Lord Dungarth set down the stained paper he had been reading and rose from the desk, heaving himself on to the crutch which bent under his weight. The reflection of his gross figure in the uncurtained window disgusted him momentarily, until he was close enough to the glass to peer through.
Below, the carriage lights in Whitehall threw their glimmering illumination on streaks of sleeting rain that threatened to turn to snow before the night had ended. He raised his eyes above the roof-tops and gazed at the night sky. Dark clouds streaked across, permitting the occasional glimpse of a pair of stars.
The vision of his long-dead wife's face formed itself around the distant stars, then cloud obscured her image and he saw only the pale hemisphere of his own bald and reflected head. The onset of the pain overwhelmed him; the attacks were more frequent now, more intense, like the pains of labour as the moment of crisis approached. He seemed to shrink on his crutch, diminished in size as death sapped at his very being.
The pain ebbed and ceased to be an overwhelming preoccupation; he was aware of the stink of his own fearful sweat. Slowly he turned and began the long haul back to his desk. He slumped into his creaking chair and, with a shaking hand, reached for the decanter. He had given up hiding the laudanum and, with a carelessly shaking hand, added half a dozen drops to the oporto.
Sipping the concoction, he half-closed his eyes, trying to recapture the vision of his countess, but instead there came before his mind's eye a picture of gunfire and dismasted ships: the Guerrière, the Macedonian, with more to follow, he felt certain, the imminence of death and the opiate lending him prescience, an awareness of approaching bad tidings.
And yet...
His hand reached out tremulously, seeking the travel-stained dispatch in its curious, runic cipher. He had thought, too, that disaster and defeat were inevitable from that quarter after the news of the Russians' abandonment of Moscow following the battle at Borodino.
But now ...
He frowned with the effort of focusing on the piece of paper. He was so used to the cryptography, he needed no key to decode it, but read the words as if they headlined a broadsheet: French army have abandoned Moscow. Line of retreat dictated by Russian pursuit. Attacks to be mounted at their crossing of the Beresina ...
Lord Dungarth looked up at the dark window. The sleet had turned to snow. The secret dispatch was already a month old.
'At last,' he whispered as the pain gathered itself again and he drained the glass.
CHAPTER 16
The Dogs of War
It was high summer in the southern hemisphere, day after day of blue skies dusted with fair-weather cumulus. Sunlight sparkled off the sapphire seas and the wavecaps broke into rainbows as they tumbled. For a week the squadron tacked wearily to windward. Gulls, petrels and frigate birds rode the invisible air currents disturbed by their passage, amusing the bored lookouts who saw nothing beyond the topgallants of the ships on either flank, though the visibility was as far as the eye could see. A sense of futility was borne in upon them all with their growing comprehension of the vastness of the ocean.
In the wardroom, grumbling and criticism accompanied every meal and even the inhabitants of the lower deck, whose burden was at its lightest in such prime sailing conditions, were permeated by a gloom begun by the news of the three British frigate defeats, and daily worsened with their frustration at discovering no sail upon the broad bosom of the South Atlantic.
As for Drinkwater himself, he endured the loneliness and isolation of his position by withdrawing into himself. Even Quilhampton's diligent and loyal support seemed less enthusiastic, a remnant of past friendship, rather than the whole-hearted support of the present. Quilhampton was friendly with Frey, Drinkwater noted, supposing them both to be presuming on long acquaintanceship and discussing his own descent into madness.