Ebb tide

Frey, reduced to genteel penury on a lieutenant's half-pay, now occupied himself as a portraitist and had within a short time earned himself a reputation in the locality, being much in demand and receiving commissions from officers of both the sea and land services, many of whom wanted their exploits at sea or in the peninsula recorded with their likenesses. He therefore executed battle scenes as well as formal portraits. As a consequence of his assiduous industry, he had a busy studio and had rescued both himself and his wife from the threat of poverty.

Despite this activity, Frey was not averse to joining Drinkwater in offering his own services to the Admiralty, and when Drinkwater received a letter requesting and requiring him to submit his cutter for survey at Harwich as soon as may be convenient, he sent word to Frey. Their Lordships had fallen in with Drinkwater's suggestion that, provided he gave his services as a volunteer, Lieutenant Frey should notionally command the cutter, which would be taken up for hire provided she satisfied the surveyor resident at the naval yard at Harwich.

Neither Catriona nor Elizabeth greeted the news with enthusiasm, but Drinkwater's explanation that he doubted Kestrel would do much more than act as tender to the transports slightly mollified his own wife. Catriona, having lost her first husband, was less easily consoled, for she had conceived the notion that she might as certainly lose her second husband as she had the first in a vessel of the same name. Poor Frey, who was devoted to her, was clearly torn between the prospect of playing a part in the new campaign with the inducement of professional preferment or of continuing his work as a provincial artist. However, during March, a string of sittings were cancelled due to the flood of army officers returning to the colours, and this recession in trade and the prospect of full pay overcame Catriona's misgivings with the potent argument, traditionally attractive to a MacEwan, of sound economic sense.

Drinkwater took on two unemployed seamen at his own expense and, having laid in some stores, wood and water, sailed from the Ore to arrive at Harwich on 6 April. He presented himself the following morning to the naval commissioner of transports at the Three Cups, a local public house, where his deposition that the vessel was newly built dispensed with the inconvenience of a survey. Captain Scanderbeg, the commissioner, though senior to Drinkwater, had previously been employed ashore and was too hard-pressed to make an issue of such matters.

'Sir,' he had agreed civilly, 'if you say she is new-built and sound, I shall not detain you. The documents for a demise charter will be prepared by this evening.'

At sunset on 7 April 1815, the yacht Kestrel became a hired cutter on government service. However, the matter of an armament proved more difficult until the eager Frey discovered eight swivel guns which had been taken out of a merchantman then undergoing repairs at the naval yard. With a little judicious lubrication of palms and throats, he inveigled four of the small pieces out of the hands of the vessel's master, along with a supply of powder and shot. More powder and some additional bird-shot were a matter of requisition, to be supplied by the artillery officer in the Harwich Redoubt, a place already known to Drinkwater.

'Were we here at any other time, in any other circumstances, Frey, we should have found our path strewn with every obstacle known to the ingenious mind of man, but this', Drinkwater gestured at the bustle of the port as they stood on Kestrel's deck, 'almost beggars belief!'

Harwich Harbour was largely a roadstead with no wharfage beyond the slips of the naval yard. The town, dominated by the spire of its church of St Nicholas, the patron of sailors, stood upon a small, low peninsula, surrounded by river, sea and saltmarsh, and commanded the entrance to the haven formed by the confluence of the rivers Stour and Orwell with the guns of its newly built redoubt. A notable battle had been fought in the town's narrow streets in 1803 when the Impress Service decided to round up the greater part of its male population for His Majesty's service. The local inhabitants were, however, versed almost to a man in the ways of the sea, and the over-eager regulating officers soon discovered that they had miscalculated and found themselves imprisoned with their prisoners, while the doughty wives of their victims waved their gutting knives in the streets outside. In fear of their lives, the press-gang eventually released their unwilling recruits and retreated with a few 'volunteers', men whose absence from the town meant they avoided unplanned matrimony or a summoning before the misnamed justices for the illegal acquisition of game. It was after this, known locally as 'the Battle of Harwich', that Scanderbeg had arrived to tighten up the public service.

Though for long a packet station, whose inn-keepers and publicans were notorious for fleecing travellers for the bare necessities of a night's lodging and whose civil officers understood that a certain necessary urgency might prevail in matters of official communication, the little town was unused to coping with the unprecedented military influx which now assailed it. Every inn and every lodging-house seemed stuffed with redcoats. Stands of arms littered the paved walkways of the narrow streets, horses were tethered in lines upon the green, and an ancillary village of canvas tents lay between the old gatehouse of Harwich and the adjacent twin town of Dovercourt. The remnants of the hospital, used for the accommodation of thousands of soldiers dying of the Walcheren fever but six years earlier, had been revived to harbour battalions of infantry, troops of cavalry and batteries of artillery.

The only consistent military organization obvious to a casual observer was a determined effort on the part of officers and men alike to assume attitudes of ease as close as possible to a source of liquor. True, the occasional horseman rode in from Colchester on a lathering horse, calling out for directions to the adjutant of a regiment of foot, or desiring to be directed immediately to the lodgings of Colonel So-and-so, but soon afterwards, a shrewd observer might have noted, the immediacy had gone out of the young aide's quest and he would be seen quaffing a glass or two, or attempting the intimate, if temporary, acquaintance of an absent fisherman's wife or daughter. And all this inactive activity was accompanied by a vast and querulous noise which spilled into the streets from open doors, and accompanied everyone abroad in the narrow lanes and narrower alleyways which divided up the town.

As for Colonel So-and-so, he had gone to ground in a room in the Three Cups or the Drum and Monkey, with or without a local moll, but assuredly clasping a bottle or two. The only industry clearly under weigh was that of the seamen, whom the soldiers had temporarily displaced from the role of the town's habitual drunks. These men laboured off the beach which flanked the eastern side of the town, ferrying a steady dribble of infantrymen and their equipment in flat lighters out to the transports waiting at anchor on the Shelf whose blue pendants lifted languidly in the light airs from the west.

'The army embarks,' intoned Frey, getting out his sketching block. 'Tis odd that the gentlemen who wish for their likenesses to be shown against great sieges never ask me to paint such confusion, yet it seems to be the means by which the army goes to war.'

'Indeed it is and I find it rather frightening,' Drinkwater added. 'Do you suppose the French proceed in the same way?'

'I suppose', Frey said, laughing, 'that they do it with a good deal more noise, better food and more humour ...'

'Why more humour?' Drinkwater asked, mildly puzzled.

'They must be more inured to it than our fellows,' Frey answered, with that simple logic which so characterized his level-headed good sense. 'If you do something idiotic many times, you must laugh at it in due course, surely?'

Drinkwater shrugged. 'It is a point of view I had not considered before. Perhaps you are right.'

'Men laugh in action, at the point of death, and men laugh on the gallows, so I suppose it is quite natural, some sort of reflex to ease the mind.'

'Or mask it from common sense,' Drinkwater added.

'Yes, probably. I confess I should not like to be landed on a foreign beach and march to meet an enemy who might kill me. At least if I die on a ship, I am among friends.'

'I suppose these lobsters consider their battalions constituted of friends.'

'I still pity them,' said Frey, finishing off his rapid sketch of the Harwich waterfront. He looked up at Drinkwater. 'Do we have any orders, sir?'

'Well, I have received nothing, Mr Frey, but as lieutenant-in-command, perhaps you should solicit some from the commissioner, Captain Scanderbeg. He has his office in the Three Cups, in Church Street, adjacent to the church.'

'There is one other thing, sir.'

'What is that?'

'We need a small-arms chest. You and I have our swords and I have a single pistol...'

'I have a brace of them, but certainly we have nothing for the men. Do you ask Scanderbeg.'