The Flying Squadron Read Free Page A

fathom in the lee braces and haul down the leading tacks of the huge fore and mainsails. He looked over the ship and saw, despite eight months in dockyard hands, the ravages of time and long service. His Britannic Majesty’s frigate
Patrician
was a cut-down sixty-four-gun ship, a class considered too weak to stand in the line of battle. Instead, she had been
razéed
, deprived of a deck, and turned into a heavy frigate.
    A powerful cruiser when first modified, she had since completed an arduous circumnavigation under Drinkwater’s command. During this voyage she had doubled Cape Horn to the westward, fought a Russian seventy-four to a standstill and survived a typhoon in the China Seas. A winter spent in home waters under another post-captain had further tested her when she had grounded in the Baie de la Seine. Refloated with some difficulty she had subsequently languished in dock at Plymouth until recommissionedfor special service. Her prime qualification for this selection was her newly coppered bottom which, it was thought, would give her the fast passages Government desired.
    â€˜Well, we shall see,’ Drinkwater thought, watching the sunlight break through the cloud bank astern and suddenly transform the scene with its radiance, for nothing could mar the beauty of the morning.
    The grey waves sparkled, a rainbow danced in the shower of spray streaming away from the lee bow, the wave-crests shone with white and fleeting brilliance, and the details of the deck, the breeched guns, the racks of round shot, the halliards and clewlines coiled on the fife-rails, the standing rigging, all stood out with peculiar clarity, throwing their shadows across the planking.
    The sails arched above them, patched and dulled from service, adding their own shadows to the play of light and shade swinging back and forth across the wet deck, which itself already steamed under the sun’s influence.
    Drinkwater felt the warmth of the sunshine reach him through the thickness of his cloak, and with it the sharp aroma of coffee floated up from below. A feeling of contentment filled him, a feeling he had thought he would not,
could
not, experience again after the months of family life. He wished Elizabeth could be with him at that moment, to experience something of its magic. All she knew was the potency of its lure, manifested in the frequent abstraction of her husband. He sighed at the mild sensation of guilt, and at the fact that it came to him now to mar the perfection of the day, then dismissed it. A great deal had happened, he reflected reasonably, since he had last paced this deck and been summoned so peremptorily to London, what, a year ago?
    Then he had been in the spiritual doldrums, worn out with long service, seeing himself as the scapegoat of government secrecy and hag-ridden with guilt over the death of his old servant Tregembo in the mangrove swamps of Borneo. He had thought at the time that he could never surmount the guilt he had felt, and had accepted the mission to Helgoland in the autumn of 1809 with a grim, fatalistic resignation.
    But fate, in all things capricious, had brought him through the ordeal and, quite providentially, made him if not wealthy, then at least a man of comfortable means. True, he had been ill for some months afterwards, so reduced in spirits that the doctors of Petersfield feared for him; but the care of his wife, Elizabeth, and the kindness of old Tregembo’s widow Susan, their housekeeper, finally won their fight with the combination of the blue devils, exposure and old wounds.
    With the onset of summer Drinkwater and Elizabeth left the children in the care of Susan Tregembo and travelled, spending Christmas at Sir Richard and Lady White’s home in Norfolk where their children, Charlotte-Amelia and their own Richard, had joined them. It had been a memorable few months at the end of which Drinkwater’s convalescence was complete. It was from the Whites’ house that