The Flying Squadron (22 page)

‘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.

‘America certainly cannot pretend to wage war against us; she has no navy to do it with!'

The Statesman
,
London,
10 June 1812

‘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.

‘So what made your surgeon change his mind?'

Drinkwater wrenched his thoughts back to the present. ‘A theory – a theory he was developing into a thesis. If I understood him aright, it was his contention (and Metcalfe had, apparently, furnished him with evidence over a long period) that Metcalfe was, as it were, two people. No, that ain't right: he considered Metcalfe possessed two individual personalities . . . 

‘Pym argued we all have a tendency to be two people, a fusion of opposites, of contrary humours. The relationship between weaknesses and strengths, likes and dislikes, the imbalance of these humours and so forth, nevertheless produces an equilibrium which inclines in favour of one or the other, making us predominantly one type of person, or another and hence forming our characters.

‘He seemed to think Metcalfe's disparate parts were out of kilter in the sense that they exactly balanced, do you see? Thus, he postulated, if you conceive circumstances acting like the moon upon water, the water being these leanings, or inclinations inherent in us, our response is the vacillation of moods and humours. Because one humour predominates, we remain in character, whereas in Metcalfe's case the swings from one to another were equal, his personality was not weighted in favour of choler or sanguinity or phlegm, for instance, but swung more violently and uncontrollably from one
exclusive
humour to another.

‘Therefore he became wholly one half of his complete character, before changing and becoming the other. Pym
dignified his hypothesis the Pendular Personality and proposed to publish a treatise about it.'

‘But surely such a condition is, nevertheless, a form of madness.'

‘Yes, I suppose it is. Though Pym suggested that so rational an explanation made of it a disease, madness being a condition beyond explanation. At all events it does not sit happily upon a sea-officer's shoulders.'

Poor Metcalfe. He had wept with remorse when his accusers confronted him with the enormity of murder, yet a day later, when Drinkwater had visited him again, he had screamed ingratitude, claiming to have done everything and more that his commander wished for and chastising Drinkwater for abandoning a loyal subordinate capable of great distinction. Pym had prescribed laudanum and they had brought him back dopey with the opiate.

There had been nothing more that Drinkwater could have done for Metcalfe. He waited upon the man's wife in her lodgings at Southsea and expressed his condolences. He gave her a testimonial for the Sick and Hurt Board and twenty guineas to tide her over. She had a snot-nosed brat at her side and another barely off the breast. Drink-water had been led to believe Metcalfe came from a good family, but the appearance of his wife suggested a life of penurious scrimping and saving, of pretensions beyond means and ambitions beyond ability. The impression left by this sad meeting weighed heavily upon his own troubles as he made his way home.

Was Pym right? His theory had, as far as Drinkwater could judge, a logical attraction. He had himself proved to be two men and had behaved as such in the verdant woodlands of Virginia, so much so that he seemed now to be a different person to the man who had lain with Arabella Shaw. That careless spirit had been younger and wilder than the heat-stupefied, half-soaked, married and middle-aged sea-officer now sprawled before the fire in Gantley Hall. Had he, at least temporarily, suffered from an onset of the same dichotomous insanity which had seized so permanent a hold on Metcalfe? Was he in the grip of Pym's pendular personality?

The ridiculous humour of the alliteration escaped him.
One could argue he had done no more than thousands of men had done before him. He had, after all, spent most of his adult life cooped up on ship-board, estranged even from the body of his lawful wedded wife, so that the willing proximity of so enchanting, comely and passionate a woman as Arabella was irresistible. He could cite other encounters, with Doña Ana Maria Conchita Arguello de Salas and Hortense Santhonax, women whose beauty was fabled and yet with whom he had behaved with utter propriety, notwithstanding fate had thrown them together in unusual circumstances. He could
invent
no end of excuses for his momentary weakness and
invent
no end of specious proofs as to his probity. But he could think of no justification for his behaviour with Arabella.

He dared not look at his wife, lest she catch his eye and ask, in her acutely intuitive way, what troubled him. The events of that afternoon, the riot in the blood which had ended in their physical commingling, stood as a great sin in Drinkwater's mind.

Yet, God knew, he had committed greater sins. He was a murderer himself, perhaps more so than poor Metcalfe, for he had killed in cold blood, mechanically, under orders, at the behest of his Sovereign. And not once but many times.