'Beg pardon, sir, but the boat's returning.'
The midshipman's puckish face, appearing disembodied round the door, had more than the usual impish look about it as Drinkwater woke from his nap with a start accompanied by an undignified grunt.
'The boat's returning, sir.' There was a hint of impudence about the young man's repetition which irritated Drinkwater who considered himself taken for a somnolent old fool.
'Very well, damn it, I heard you the first time!'
The querulous tone of the captain's voice sent the lad into full retreat. He had seen poor Paine return to the cockpit. Drinkwater was left alone to gather his wits. He could not imagine why he felt so tired, and rose stiffly, bracing himself against the lurch of the ship. Rinsing his mouth and donning hat and coat, he went on deck.
On the quarterdeck he forced himself to wait with an outward appearance of disinterest as Andromeda was hove-to and the red cutter brought in under the swinging davit falls. He forbore staring over the side while the fumbling snatches of the bow and stern-sheetsman captured the wildly oscillating blocks and caught the hooks in the lifting chains, whereupon the two lines of seamen tailing on to the falls ran smartly along the gangway at the boatswain's holloa to 'hoist away!'
With the boat swinging at the mizen channels and the griping lines being passed, Drinkwater could see Frey attending to the boat, giving no thought to the anxiety of his commander's mind. But as Frey climbed over the rail and jumped to the deck, he could contain himself no longer.
'Well, Mr Frey?' he asked eagerly, consumed with impatience to learn what intelligence Frey had gleaned ashore. Drinkwater had convinced himself that at Angra the Portuguese Captain-General, overlord of the Azores, would have by now received specific instructions to prepare to receive 'General Bonaparte'. He was not to be disappointed; immediately Frey confronted him, Drinkwater felt the flood of relief sweat itself out of his body, betraying the extent of his inner anxiety.
'The Portuguese Governor received me with every courtesy and said that he had received a despatch brought by Captain Count Rakov to the effect that preparations were to be made to receive Boney and to have him held under open arrest at some villa or other in the country outside Santa Cruz. He also protested that he had received no instructions from Lisbon as to whether he was supposed to cede an island, or to regard Boney as a prisoner. There were some other details about the size of Boney's suite and personal staff which I have to confess I didn't hoist in.'
'No matter ...' Drinkwater ruminated for a moment, then asked Frey, 'And did you learn when Bonaparte was expected?'
Frey shook his head. 'No, sir, not really. Gilbert asked, but His Excellency did not know and could offer no clues himself. He let Gilbert read the despatch, which was in French, and all Gilbert could conclude was the tone of the language suggested the matter was imminent and that no further information would precede the arrival of Napoleon.'
'Well, that is something,' Drinkwater said.
'But is that sufficient, sir? I mean, it was no more than an intimation.'
'By a shrewd man who, I think, knows his business.' Drinkwater smiled and added, 'I think this enough to act upon.'
'Then we did not labour in vain,' Frey said, pleased that Drinkwater regarded the niggardly news with such relish.
'Not at all. Short of actually running into Boney and his entourage, I think we can pronounce ourselves satisfied.'
'May I ask, then, why we don't simply await the arrival of Boney at Santa Cruz?' Frey asked.
'Because, my dear fellow, we have no real business with Boney; our task is to prevent him being spirited to the United States and to intercept those ships sent by his followers to accomplish this. To do otherwise would be to exceed our instructions,' Drinkwater said, concluding, 'We do not want to be the cause of an incident which might rupture the peace.' He suppressed a shudder at the thought. Exceeding an instruction that was largely self-wrought would have his name earn eternal odium by their Lordships if this affair miscarried.
'I see.' Frey nodded, unaware of the turmoil concealed by his commander's apparently worldly wisdom. 'It could be a long wait then.'
'Perhaps,' Drinkwater replied, and, thus dismissed, Frey disappeared below to divest himself of his boat-cloak and wet breeches while his commander fell to a slow pacing of the quarterdeck, nodding permission for Birkbeck to get the ship under weigh again as soon as the quarter-boat was hoisted.
Despite his misgivings, Drinkwater was clearer in his mind now. There seemed to him little doubt Rakov had brought the news to Angra in pursuit of Tsar Alexander's policy. But was finding Andromeda on station off Flores a shock to Rakov, particularly as Rakov had last seen her in Calais Road? In order to implement his master's policy, if he knew about it in detail, Rakov must have realized that the Antwerp ships would profit by his escort, and while Drinkwater might commit Andromeda to an action with two men-of-war acting illegally under an outlawed flag, the presence of a powerful Russian frigate would dissuade even a zealous British officer from compromising his own country's honour by firing into an ally!
As for the degree to which Captain Count Rakov was privy to Tsar Alexander's secret intentions, Drinkwater could only conclude however Rakov saw the presence of Andromeda, that of Gremyashehi was more revealing to himself. There seemed a strong possibility that Rakov's task in conveying the despatch to Angra might be subsidiary to that of pursuing and outwitting Captain Nathaniel Drinkwater of His Britannic Majesty's frigate Andromeda. Quite apart from anything else, it would be a small but personal revenge for Captain Drinkwater's destruction of the Suvorov.
And then it occurred to Drinkwater that something must have happened to Hortense, for how else could Rakov have followed so swiftly in their own wake? It seemed that while the war was over, the old game of cat and mouse would go on, though who was now the cat and who the mouse, remained anyone's guess.
For Sergeant McCann the fact that Lieutenant Ashton was compelled to stand watch-and-watch held no more satisfaction for him than the beating of Mr Paine. Ashton's double insult had wounded him deeply, vulnerable as he was, reinforcing his feelings of inadequacy as well as affronting his sensibility. These feelings were exacerbated by Ashton's unrepentant attitude, manifested by the lieutenant's haughtiness as he nursed his own wounded pride through the tedious extra duties imposed upon him by Captain Drinkwater.
Under such stress, the predominant aspects of the temperaments of both men dominated their behaviour; the sergeant of marines nursed his grievance, the lieutenant cultivated his touchily arrogant sense of honour. And such was the indifference to private woe aboard the frigate, each man in his personal isolation formed dark schemes of revenge. Under the foreseeable circumstances, such imagined and impractical fantasies were no more than simple, cathartic chimeras.
These disaffections were set against the burgeoning of Mr Marlowe who, under Drinkwater's kindly eye and with the tacit support of Frey, seemed to grow in confidence and stature in the following few days. Frey rather liked Marlowe, whose dark visage held a certain attraction, and had engaged to execute a small portrait of the first lieutenant, a departure for Frey, whose subjects were more usually small watercolour paintings or pencil drawings of the ship and the landmarks which she passed in her wanderings. As for Marlowe, his contribution to the relative success of Birkbeck and the carpenter in partially staunching the inflow of water by caulking and doubling the inner ceiling of the hull, had lent substance of a practical nature to his increased stature. It was thus easier for his fellow shipmates to attribute his former behaviour to indisposition, and for him to gain confidence in proportion.