The shadow of the eagle

apparently unconcerned with the problems of her antiquity which preoccupied her senior officers. The ship's company turned the berth-deck inside out, washed clothes and bedding and stummed between decks, sweetening the air. Moreover, the warmer nights and drier weather meant the tarpaulins could be rolled back on the booms, ports opened during the daylight and the entire ship made more habitable. The mood of the people changed in proportion, along with the application of a lick of paint and varnish here and there to brighten up their miserable quarters, no thought having been given to this during the frigate's recent embellishment.

As details of Mr Marlowe's recovery permeated the ends of the ship most distant from the wardroom, they were accompanied by the explanation of illness as causing his temporary loss of control. Alongside this intelligence there went a blasphemous joke that he had been raised from the dead. Lieutenant Ashton's nickname for the captain of 'Our Father' was rather apt in this context and as a consequence the first lieutenant had, quite unbeknown to himself, acquired the soubriquet of Lazarus Marlowe. This, partly generating the changed mood of the ship's company, was yet as much a product of it. In this mild euphoria only Lieutenant Ashton and Sergeant McCann remained burdened, the one having lost control of his future, the other increasingly obsessed and preoccupied by his past.

Indeed, in the case of McCann, the improved weather only exacerbated his condition. As is common with many, memories of youth and past happiness were associated with sunny days and blue skies such as now dominated the flying frigate. Moreover, the farther west they ran, the nearer they drew to the United States, and the fact that this diminishing distance did not constitute a closing of the American coast, worked insidiously upon poor McCann.

Although they had seen a few ships in the Channel and in the Western Approaches, the wide blue reaches of the Atlantic yielded nothing beyond a pair of Portuguese schooners crossing for the Grand Banks. Captain Drinkwater, sensitive to the mellowing mood of the ship and encouraged by the transformation of Lieutenant Marlowe, ordered several gunnery practices as they romped steadily south and westwards.

In addition to the fulmars, gulls and gannets, the dark, marauding shapes of hawking skuas were to be seen intimidating even the large solan geese; flying fish now darted from either bow, pursued by albacore and occasionally driven on board where they were quickly tossed into frying pans to make impromptu feasts for lucky messes or the midshipmen's berth.

And with the flying fish and the albacore came the bottle-nosed dolphins, lifting easily from Andromeda's bow waves, racing in with seemingly effortless thrusts of their muscular tails, to ride the pressure wave that advanced unseen yet tangible, ahead of the massive bulk of the frigate's driving hull. Attempts to catch them usually failed, but occasionally one would succumb to a harpoon or a lure, to end up, poached slowly in Madeira, as steaks on the wardroom table.

On one such occasion, heady with their success, the officers invited Drinkwater to dinner, and notwithstanding the absence of Lieutenant Ashton on watch, they all enjoyed a jolly evening during which the discussion ranged from the general conduct of the late war and the difficulties of securing the person of Napoleon Bonaparte on a remote island, to the possible causes of Andromeda's leak and the contribution to literature of the unknown 'lady' who had written Pride and Prejudice.

Watching Marlowe preside over this pleasant evening, Drinkwater concluded his first lieutenant had made a supreme effort and overcome his unhappiness. Furthermore, Drinkwater began to entertain hopes of high endeavour from him, if things fell out as he hoped they would.

But as the days passed and the reckoning so assiduously calculated by Birkbeck, Marlowe and their coterie of half-willing midshipmen, showed them rapidly closing the Archipelago of the Azores, renewed doubts assailed Drinkwater. And while the pleasant weather drew smiles from his men, he paced the weather side of the quarterdeck for hour after hour, going over and over the interview with Hortense, wondering if he was not a quixotic fool after all, seduced at the last by a face which had haunted him for almost all his adult life. She had sought him out; she knew the role he had played in her husband's death; they had been enemies for a score or so of years; so why in God's name should he trust her now?

He ignored the importance of her news and processed events through the filter of guessed motives, suspicions, old anxieties and even fears. He recalled, with that peculiar insistence that only the lonely can as they chew on introspection, how she had seemed an almost demonic presence at one time; an embodiment of all the restless energies of imperial France. She had loomed in his imagination larger than any metaphor: for she alone had represented the enemy, and her beauty had seemed diabolical in its power. He had felt this influence suffocating him, drowning him as he fell flailing beneath the overwhelming power of Hortense as the white lady, so that in the wake of the dream, when the rational world reasserted itself, there always lurked a hint of his own impending madness. He shied away from this like a frightened horse, clinging at logic to prevent the otherwise inevitable overwhelming by the 'blue-devils' of mental depression.

He forced himself to consider again Hortense's motives. Why should she do this? Had she not simply been beggared by the damnable war, as she claimed? And what advantage could she gain by casting one ageing fool of a British naval officer on some ludicrous quest amid the billows of the North Atlantic, if the reason for it were not true? He discarded the morbid, fanciful and faintly ridiculous assumptions of his private thoughts, calming himself with the more rational figurings-out of the ordinary.

As his mother was once fond of saying with the bitterness of premature bereavement playing around the corners of her mouth, there was no fool like an old fool. But to set against that charge he brought the experience of a lifetime in the sea-service and a familiarity with the machinations of secret diplomacy.

Nevertheless, there was also the forbidding spectre of their Lordships' disapprobation, as the stock phrase had it. His departure on his self-appointed quest may well have had the blessing of His Royal Highness, the Prince William Henry, Duke of Clarence and so on and so forth, but their Lordships would be well aware that he was well aware that the whole Royal Navy of Great Britain was well aware that His Royal Highness, the Prince William Henry, and so on and so forth, was a buffoon, if not an incompetent!

On the other hand, what point would there be in him dashing off into the Atlantic on his own initiative if he had no good motive? Everyone knew that although the war in Europe was over, the war in North America was not, and it remained perfectly possible for Bonaparte to cause mayhem in Canada. While that much was possible, if not probable, there was another factor Drinkwater now had to consider. Andromeda was officially unfit for further active service; she should have been laid up preparatory to passing to the breakers' yard, and her crew, drafted especially for the Royal Escort duty to France, would almost certainly be dispersed to man more sea-worthy ships refitting for the augmentation of the blockade of the eastern seaboard of the United States. Indeed, at that very moment some of those ships might be eagerly awaiting their draft, and thus delayed by Andromeda's absence.

Amid all his considerations of grand strategy, it was this doubt that remained the most disturbing. Try how he might, Drinkwater was unable to argue his way out of this almost certain error of judgement!

Up and down he paced; not seeing the work of the ship passing all about him, scarcely hearing the bells striking the half-hour, the watch-words of the lookouts or the occasional order passed along. He was oblivious to the break-up of the daily navigation class, made so convenient while the solution to the problem of Andromeda's day's work was so easily reconciled in the north-east wind by the simple application of a plane traverse; nor did he notice the daily quarterdeck parade of Hyde's lobsters, nor remark upon Sergeant McCann's uncharacteristically less-than-perfect turnout. Nor indeed, did Captain Drinkwater observe either the energy of the first lieutenant, or the complementary disinterest of the third. Instead he revolved his wretched arguments in a tediously endless mental circumambulation, locked into the introversion of isolation and independent command.

But whatever these private anxieties might constitute, and whatever paramountcy they might assume in any commander's thoughts, the cares of his ship will always intrude, and on this occasion they took the form of Mr Midshipman 'Tom' Paine over whom the preoccupied Drinkwater almost fell as the youngster dodged about in front of him to attract his attention.

'God's bones! What in heaven's name is the matter?' Drinkwater finally acknowledged the jumping jack trying to waylay him. 'Why Mr Paine, what the devil d'you want?'

Paine was not a whit discomfited by the difficulties he had experienced in accomplishing his simple errand. Jokes about Old Nat were legion in the cockpit.