The shadow of the eagle

May 1814

Drinkwater had experienced no such premonition as Lieutenant Frey. The appearance of the Gremyashchi had finally laid to rest the vacillating anxieties and uncertainties of the preceding days, replacing them with a firm conviction that Hortense's report was about to be fulfilled. Nor did he consider Captain Count Rakov would divert the Antwerp ships from their purpose, as was the opinion of Lieutenant Hyde in the wardroom below. Drinkwater's assessment was quite otherwise: Rakov was on the scene to guarantee the matter. There would be no bloodshed, no international incident, Bonaparte would simply be removed from the Bourbon French ship bringing him to Flores, transferred to one of the Antwerp squadron and conducted to the United States.

It was quite clear that the only certain rendezvous where this could be accomplished without attracting undue attention was off the Azores, and the fact that no proper arrangements had been concluded with the Portuguese captain-general at Angra do Heroismo, was evidence none was necessary, for there had never been any real intention of landing Bonaparte in the first place. And to guarantee the Tsar's plan, revealing the sly hand of Talleyrand, the Bourbon commander of the French naval ship carrying the former Emperor into exile would not be accosted by a couple of Bonapartist pirates, but a squadron operating under the ensign of Imperial Russia.

It was a cleverly conceived plan, but, concluded Drinkwater, this embellishment made his own task acutely difficult. It was he alone who would have to assume responsibility for thwarting the Tsar's intention. Not that he entertained any personal doubts as to the rightness of this challenge. It was clearly not in British interests to have the foremost soldier in the world free to command troops in the United States. A successful invasion of Canada would be a disaster for Great Britain, and Drinkwater did not need the protection of Prince William Henry's orders to buttress his own moral doubts, only to afford protection from those in the establishment who might regard his action as intolerably high-handed.

What now nagged him was the impossibility of the task. At least two well-armed ships had sailed under the command of this Admiral Lejeune, and while Drinkwater might have had a chance to outmanoeuvre them, they were now reinforced by the Gremyashchi, a powerful frigate in her own right, which alone would be more than a match for Andromeda. He was conscious that the action his zeal had now made inevitable could end only in defeat. If any premonition disturbed the tranquillity of Nathaniel Drinkwater during those tedious days in late May, it was that death would take him at the moment of his country's hard-won victory.

In the circumstances such a death would not be without dishonour, but he doubted much credit would accrue to his actions to warm his widow's heart. Poor Elizabeth; she did not deserve such a fate. To be left alone to manage his small estate, not to mention the dependants he had foisted upon her, would be a terrible legacy. His death would, moreover, burden her with the promised annuity to Hortense!

The thought appalled him. In his headlong dash into the Atlantic, thoughts of an early death had not really occurred to him, for he had lived with risk for so long, and while he had intimated in the letter he had sent to his wife by the Trinity Yacht that complications had been introduced into their lives by recent events, meaning those at Calais, he had withheld details as being best dealt with face-to-face. Now he could not even leave her a second letter, for the chances of its being discovered after a bloody action were next to nothing.

He slumped at his desk as behind him a pale, watery sun set over a heaving grey sea. All about him Andromeda creaked mournfully, echoing his dismal thoughts and ushering in an attack of the blue-devils. As the daylight leached out of the sky and the twilight gloom increased, he fell into a doze. Hortense and Elizabeth were in the cabin with him, both were restored to the beauty they had possessed when he had first set eyes upon them and both improbably held hands like sisters, and smiled at him approvingly. He woke with a start, his heart beating furiously, possessed with a terrible fear of the unknown.

The cabin was completely dark. During his brief sleep and unknown to Drinkwater, Frampton had entered the cabin but seeing his commander asleep had beat a tactful retreat. Waking thus, Drinkwater was overcome with the feeling that the cabin was haunted by ghosts. In an instant, he had rammed his hat on his head and fled to the quarterdeck wrapped in his cloak.

He almost instantly regretted this precipitate action. The quarterdeck was scarcely less congenial than the cabin; in fact it was a good deal less so. Night had fallen under a curtain of rain which knocked the sea down, hissed alongside as it struck the surface of the water and sharply reduced the temperature of the air. Ashton had the watch, his extra duty relieving Birkbeck of the task, and so the emotional air was even chillier than the atmospheric, though Drinkwater himself took little notice of this and, in his own way, only added to it by his presence.

His cloak was soon sodden, but he paced the windward quarter, his stride and balance adjusting to the swoop and roll of the ship as, with her yards braced up sharply, she stood northwards under easy sail, steering full-and-bye with the wind in the west-north-west. It was a dying breeze and about four bells the rain stopped abruptly as the wind veered a point or two. Drinkwater was vaguely aware of Lieutenant Ashton adjusting the course to the north-eastwards, maintaining the trim of the yards in accordance with the provision of Drinkwater's night orders for cruising stations. Within fifteen minutes the sky was clearing rapidly as the overcast rolled away to leeward and the stars shone out in all their glory.

If the air had been chilly before, it was positively cold now, or so it seemed to Drinkwater as the dramatic change woke him from his reverie and he found himself shivering. He was about to go below and seek the warm comfort of his cot, when something stopped him. He stood like a pointing hound, tingling with instinctive premonition. He looked anxiously aloft. The pale parallelograms of the topsails and topgallants were pale against the sky; the main course was loose in its buntlines, but the fore course was braced sharp up, its tack hauled down to the port bumkin. Behind him the quadrilateral spanker curved gracefully under the pressure of the wind. As he watched, it flogged easily, the failing wind easing and then filling it again, causing a fitful ripple to pass across the sail, from throat to clew. The lines of reef points pitter-patted against the tough canvas. Despite this apparently peaceful scene, something struck him as wrong. Something in the air which made his scalp creep.

'Mr Ashton!'

'Sir?' Ashton stirred from the starboard mizen rigging.

'Get the t'gallants off her!'

'The t'gallants, sir?'

'The t'gallants sir! And at once, d'you hear me?'

Drinkwater could almost hear Ashton's brain turning over the captain's lunatic order, but then the word was passed and the watch stirred out of its hiding places, hunkered down about the decks, and the shapes of men moved about the pin rails and prepared to go aloft. There was little urgency in their demeanour, obvious to Drinkwater's acute and experienced eye, even in the dark.

'Look lively there!' he cried, injecting a sharp urgency into the night. Ashton began to cross the deck towards him and Drinkwater turned away in silent rebuff, staring to windward, watching to see what would happen. Then he saw the cloud as it loomed into the night sky, rapidly blotting out the stars to the north-westwards. He could feel its presence as the air suddenly crackled with the dull menace of the thing, revealing the source of his premonition. It was odd, he thought, as he watched the vast boiling mass of it rear up and up into the heavens, how such a gigantic manifestation of energy could almost creep up on one unawares.

The cumulo-nimbus cloud moved towards them like a mythological creature; potent and awe-inspiring. Drinkwater had no idea of its altitude, indeed he was unable to see the distant anvil-shaped thunder head which was torn from its summit by the strong winds of the upper-atmosphere; nor did he know of the movement of air and moisture within it that made of it a cauldron seething at the temperature ice formed. What concerned him was the wind he knew it would generate at sea level, and the hail that might, in the next quarter of an hour, hit them with the force of buckshot.

Then, as if to signal an intelligence of its own, the thundercloud gave notice of its presence to the less observant men on Andromeda's deck. It was riven from top to bottom by a great flash as the differences in electrical charge within the cloud sought resolution. The sudden, instantaneous illumination galvanized the men into sudden, furious action and within minutes Andromeda's topgallants were off her before the first erratic gusts of the squall arrived; then it was upon them in unremitting fury, producing a high-pitched whine in the rigging as the full force of the wind struck them.

'Steady there,' Drinkwater said, striding across the deck to brace himself alongside the helmsmen, 'ease her