The Flying Squadron Read Free Page B

Drinkwater wrote to the Admiralty soliciting further employment. Nothing came of his application, however, and he was not much concerned. The short, cold winter days of walking or riding, of wildfowling along the frozen salt-marsh, were pleasant enough, but the luxury of the long, pleasurable evenings with Elizabeth and the Whites was not lightly to be forsaken for the dubious honour of a quarterdeck in winter.
    â€˜You’ll only get some damned seventy-four blockading Brest with the Black Rocks under your lee, and some damn fool sending you signals all day,’ White had mistakenly consoled him. For although Drinkwater did not have the means for an indefinite stay ashore, nor the inclination to consider his career over and to be superseded by the back-benches of the House of Commons, life was too pleasant not to submit, at least for the time being, to the whim of fate.
    Games of bezique and whist, the sound of his daughter’s voice singing to Elizabeth’s accompaniment, the warmth of White’s stable and the smell of fresh meat from the kitchen had served to keep him content. Elizabeth was happy, and that alone was reward enough. He had played with Richard, Montcalm to his son’s Wolfe as they refought the capture of Quebec above a low clay cliff undercut by the River Glaven. Richard, a year senior toWhite’s boy Johnnie, died spectacularly in his young friend’s arms with victory assured as Drinkwater himself expired uncomfortably among the crackling stalks of long-dead bracken.
    He had led his daughter out at the New Year ball and seen her eyed by the local bloods, flinging her head up and laughing, sometimes catching her lower lip in her teeth as he had first seen Elizabeth do in an apple orchard in Cornwall thirty years earlier. And best of all, he had lain nightly beside his wife, moved to acts of deep affection, a poor acknowledgement of her gentle constancy.
    Nor had this idyll been rudely terminated by the intrusion of duty. In the end it had been crowned with an unexpected event, a circumstance of the utmost felicity for them all.
    Two days into the new year, as the spectre of reaction began to show its first signs with the planning of arrangements to return the children to their home in Hampshire, White received an unexpected letter from solicitors in Ipswich. Sir Richard had inherited a small estate betwixt the Deben and the Aide, a remote corner of Suffolk lying east of the main highway north from the county town, within sight of the desolate coast of Hollesley Bay and comprising one modest house and two farms. The estate had once formed part of the lands of a dispossessed priory, the ruins of which stood romantically in its northwest corner.
    â€˜It sounds delightful,’ said Elizabeth over breakfast, as Catherine White explained the lie of the land and Sir Richard scratched his head and pulled a face.
    â€˜Too damned far, m’dear,’ he explained, ‘no good to me. Belonged to a cousin o’ mine. Eccentric fellow; built the place but never married. House can’t be more than three years old.’ White picked up the letter again, searching for a fact. ‘They found him dead in a coppice, frozen stiff, poor devil.’
    They had fallen silent, sipping their chocolate with the spectre of untimely death haunting them.
    Later, as Drinkwater and White drew rein atop a low rise that looked west to the Palladian pile of Holkham Hallgilded in the sunshine of the winter morning, Sir Richard had turned in his saddle.
    â€˜It’s the place for you, Nat . . .’
    â€˜What is?’ asked Drinkwater, staring about momentarily confused, his mind having been fully occupied with his mount and the need to keep up with his host.
    â€˜Gantley Hall. I can’t keep the place, damn it; have to sell it. What d’you say? Make me an offer.’ And he put spurs to his big hunter and cantered off, leaving Drinkwater staring open-mouthed after him.
    And