Beneath the Aurora Read Free Page A

would have betrayed the threadbare nature of his dress, the candelabra he bore only enhanced the ascetic architecture of his skull.
    â€˜Ah, Templeton, about time you brought candles.’
    â€˜My apologies, Captain, I was delayed in the copy room . . .’
    â€˜Scuttlebutt, I suppose.’
    â€˜I wish it were only gossip, sir, but I fear the worst.’ Templeton’s words were so full of foreboding that Drinkwater was compelled to look up. Templeton’s head was bent askew in such a way that, though he stood, his eyes must of necessity look under his brow so that his whole demeanour bespoke grave concern.
    â€˜Which touches me, Mr Templeton?’
    â€˜Indeed, sir, I fear so.’ A brief smirk passed across Templeton’s features, the merest hint of satisfaction at having conveyed the full import of his meaning with such admirable economy. It would have passed a less intuitive man than Drinkwater unnoticed.
    â€˜Is this a secret of state, or merely one which is denied the Secret Department, Mr Templeton?’ Drinkwater asked with heavy irony.
    â€˜The latter, Captain Drinkwater,’ Templeton replied, the corners of his thin mouth creeping outwards in a smile, hinting at the possession of superior knowledge.
    â€˜Well, then, I am waiting. What is this gossip in the clerks’ office?’
    â€˜I am afraid, sir, ’tis said this department is to be discontinued.’
    A feeling of something akin to relief flooded through Drinkwater. There were times in a man’s life when to submit to the inevitable meant avoiding disagreeable concomitances. He could never have explained to Elizabeth how constricted his soul was, cooped up in this tiny Admiralty office. He had accepted his appointment, half out of loyalty to his late predecessor, Lord Dungarth, half out of a sense of necessity.
    This necessity was harder to define, exposing as it did the infirmities of his character. A believer in Providence, he knew his posting to this obscure office was only partly the result of Dungarth’s dying wish. Fate had consigned him to it in expiation of his unfaithfulness to his wife, for his
affaire
with the Widow Shaw. *
    Now Templeton, his obsequious but able cipher clerk, a man steeped in the clandestine doings of the Secret Department, who possessed encyclopaedic knowledge of the letters pasted in the guard books resting behind the glass doors of the cabinet, brought him release from this imprisonment.
    â€˜I see you are shocked, Captain Drinkwater.’
    â€˜I am certainly surprised,’ Drinkwater dissimulated. ‘Upon what logic is this based?’
    â€˜Cost, I believe,’ Templeton replied and added, rolling his eyes with lugubrious emphasis and pointing his right index finger upwards, though Drinkwater knew nothing but the attics were there, ‘and a certain feeling among those whose business it is to attend to such matters, that our continued existence is no longer necessary.’
    â€˜The war is not yet over, Templeton.’
    â€˜I entirely agree, sir.’
    Drinkwater realized Templeton awaited his reply as a matter of some importance. Indeed the clerk had confided in Drinkwater in order to rouse him to a defence of the Secret Department, not so much to contribute to ending the war by its continued existence, but to preserve Templeton’s unique position within the Admiralty’s bureaucratic hierarchy. Templeton was not the first to assume, quite wrongly, that NathanielDrinkwater was a man of influence. How else had he inherited this post of Head of the Secret Department?
    How indeed? It was a conundrum which obsessed Drinkwater himself. He knew no more than that he had received a letter signed by the Second Secretary to the Board of Admiralty, John Barrow, appointing him, and a visit from the Earl of Moira explaining that it had been the dying wish of Lord Dungarth that Drinkwater should take over the office.
    â€˜Johnnie said you were