The Corvette Read Online Free PDF Page B

head as the coach leapt forward. The blast of the horn covered his laughter. They had been less than the permitted five minutes in changing their horses.
    Above the racing coach the sky was bright with stars. A slim, crescent moon was rising. The mail was passing through the market-gardencountry north of Biggleswade and the horses were stretching out. He did not encourage his fellow outsiders to converse, indeed their deference to his rank made it clear that Mr Quilhampton had been telling tall stories. He was left alone with his thoughts and dismissed those of Elizabeth and the children to concentrate upon the future. He was pleased to be appointed to the
Melusine
even as a ‘Job Captain’, a stand-in. It was a stroke of good fortune, for she would be manned by volunteers having been in service throughout the peace. All her men would be thorough-going seamen. The officers, however, were likely to be different, probably place-seekers and time-servers. Influence and patronage had triumphed once again, even in the short period of the Peace of Amiens. Worthy officers of humble origins had been denied appointments.
Melusine
was unlikely to have avoided this blight. He knew nothing about Palgrave beyond the fact that he was a baronet and had been compelled to resign his command after being seriously wounded in a duel. In the sober judgement of Nathaniel Drinkwater those two facts spoke volumes.
    He shivered and then cursed the widow MacEwan for her sagacity. The night air and the cold had found the knotted muscles in his shoulder. Holding fast with one hand he searched for the flask of brandy in his tail-pocket with the other. The coach swayed as the guard rose to pierce the night with his post-horn. As he swigged the fiery liquid Drinkwater was aware of a toll-keeper wrapped in a blanket as he threw wide his toll-gate to allow the mail through.
    The glorious speed of the coach seemed to speak to him of all things British and he smiled at himself, amused that such considerations still had the power to move him. His grim experience off Boulogne and the brush with death that followed had shaken his faith in providence. The ache in his shoulder further reminded him that he was going to venture into Arctic waters where he would need all the fortitude he could muster. Command of the
Melusine
and her charges would be his first experience of truly independent responsibility and, in that midnight hour, he began to feel the isolation of it.
    He took another swig of brandy and remembered the melancholia he had suffered after the fever of his recovery had subsided. The ‘blue-devils’ were an old malady, endemic among sea-officers and induced by loneliness, responsibility and, some men maintained, the enforced chastity of the life. Drinkwater was acutely conscious that he owed his full recovery from these ‘megrims’ to the love of his wife and friends. This thought combined with the stimulation of the brandy to raise his spirits.
    Tonight he was racing to join a ship beneath a cloudless sky at what surely must be twelve miles to the hour! His thoughts ran on in a more philosophic vein, recalling Dungarth’s long speech on the ambitions of France and the defence of liberty. He might talk of freedom being the goal of British policies, but at this very moment the press was out in every British sea-port, enslaving Britons for service in her Navy with as savage a hand as her landowners had appropriated and enclosed the countryside through which he was passing. The complexities of human society bewildered and exasperated Drinkwater and while his ordered mind was repelled by the nameless perfidies of politics, he was aware of the conflict it mirrored in himself.
    There were many in Britain and Europe who welcomed the new order of things that had emerged from the bloody excesses of the French Revolution. Bonaparte was the foremost of these, an example of the exasperation of youth and talent at the blind intractability of