Ричард Вудмен - Beneath the aurora

He turned and, leaning against the shutter, stared back into the room. It was small, containing the baize-covered desk, his chair and a wicker basket which stood on a square of carpet to keep his feet from the draught that blew between the wide deal floorboards. The window was flanked on one side by a tall cabinet whose glazed doors covered shelves of guard books, on the other by a low chest whose upper surface was a plane table. It had a trough for pencil and dividers, beneath which a series of shallow drawers contained several folios of charts. On its top was a long wooden box containing a single deep and narrow drawer.

The only other article of furniture in the room was a small, rickety, half-moon table set against the wall beside the door. Upon it were a pair of decanters, a biscuit barrel and four glasses. One contained a residual teaspoonful of madeira.

On the wall opposite the window, above the grate and mantelpiece, hung a gilt-framed canvas depicting a moonlit frigate action. It had been commissioned by Drinkwater and painted by the ageing Nicholas Pocock, whose house in Great George Street was hard by Storey's Gate into St James's Park. The painting showed the frigate Patrician overhauling and engaging the French National frigate Sybille and Drinkwater had described the canvas to his wife Elizabeth as 'a last vanity, m'dear. I shan't fight again, now that I've swallowed the anchor.'

The recollection made him turn to the window again, and stare down into the darkening street. Despite the weather, Whitehall was full of the evening's traffic: a foot patrol of guardsmen, a pair of doxies in a doorway cozening the grenadiers, whose bearskins lost their military air in the rain, a dog pissing against a porter's rest, and a handful of pathetic loiterers huddling out of the rain in the sparse and inadequate clothing of the indigent. Carriages came and went across his field of view, but he saw none of this. It depressed him; after the broad sweep of the distant horizon seen from the pristine standpoint of a frigate's quarterdeck, the horse turds and grime of Whitehall were a mockery.

He turned and, as abruptly as he had risen, closed the shutters against the night. Then he righted his capsized Windsor chair and sat in it. Picking up the paper he twisted round, held it to the flickering firelight and began to read out loud, as if by annunciating the ill-written words he would keep himself awake enough to assimilate their content.

'Sir, further to my communications of December last and May of this year, in which there was little of an unusual nature to report, it is now common knowledge here ...' Drinkwater had forgotten the origin of the paper and looked at the heading. 'Ah, yes,' he murmured, 'from Helgoland ... last month, no, July…'

He read on, 'that a considerable quantity of arms for equipping troops have lately arrived in Hamburg and in expectation of their shipment, have been placed in a ware­house which is guarded by ...'

There was a knock at the door and Drinkwater paused. 'Enter,' he called.

A slim, pinch-faced man with prematurely thinning hair appeared. He wore a black, waisted and high-collared coat. The points of his shirt poked up either side of his face, and a tight cravat in dark, watered silk frothed beneath a sharp, blue chin. The figure was elegant and, though daylight would have betrayed the threadbare nature of his dress, the candelabra he bore only enhanced the ascetic architecture of his skull.

'Ah, Templeton, about time you brought candles.'

'My apologies, Captain, I was delayed in the copy room ...'

'Scuttlebutt, I suppose.'

'I wish it were only gossip, sir, but I fear the worst.' Templeton's words were so full of foreboding that Drinkwater was compelled to look up. Templeton's head was bent askew in such a way that, though he stood, his eyes must of necessity look under his brow so that his whole demeanour bespoke grave concern.

'Which touches me, Mr Templeton?'

'Indeed, sir, I fear so.' A brief smirk passed across Templeton's features, the merest hint of satisfaction at having conveyed the full import of his meaning with such admirable economy. It would have passed a less intuitive man than Drinkwater unnoticed.

'Is this a secret of state, or merely one which is denied the Secret Department, Mr Templeton?' Drinkwater asked with heavy irony.

'The latter, Captain Drinkwater,' Templeton replied, the corners of his thin mouth creeping outwards in a smile, hinting at the possession of superior knowledge.

'Well, then, I am waiting. What is this gossip in the clerks' office?'

'I am afraid, sir, 'tis said this department is to be discontinued.'

A feeling of something akin to relief flooded through Drinkwater. There were times in a man's life when to submit to the inevitable meant avoiding disagreeable concomitances. He could never have explained to Elizabeth how constricted his soul was, cooped up in this tiny Admiralty office. He had accepted his appointment, half out of loyalty to his late predecessor, Lord Dungarth, half out of a sense of necessity.

This necessity was harder to define, exposing as it did the infirmities of his character. A believer in Providence, he knew his posting to this obscure office was only partly the result of Dungarth's dying wish. Fate had consigned him to it in expiation of his unfaithfulness to his wife, for his affaire with the Widow Shaw. [See The Flying Squadron .]

Now Templeton, his obsequious but able cipher clerk, a man steeped in the clandestine doings of the Secret Department, who possessed encyclopaedic knowledge of the letters pasted in the guard books resting behind the glass doors of the cabinet, brought him release from this imprisonment.

'I see you are shocked, Captain Drinkwater.'

'I am certainly surprised,' Drinkwater dissimulated. 'Upon what logic is this based?'

'Cost, I believe,' Templeton replied and added, rolling his eyes with lugubrious emphasis and pointing his right index finger upwards, though Drinkwater knew nothing but the attics were there, 'and a certain feeling among those whose business it is to attend to such matters, that our continued existence is no longer necessary.'

'The war is not yet over, Templeton.'

'I entirely agree, sir.'

Drinkwater realized Templeton awaited his reply as a matter of some importance. Indeed the clerk had confided in Drinkwater in order to rouse him to a defence of the Secret Department, not so much to contribute to ending the war by its continued existence, but to preserve Templeton's unique position within the Admiralty's bureaucratic hierarchy. Templeton was not the first to assume, quite wrongly, that Nathaniel Drinkwater was a man of influence. How else had he inherited this post of Head of the Secret Department?

How indeed? It was a conundrum which obsessed Drinkwater himself. He knew no more than that he had received a letter signed by the Second Secretary to the Board of Admiralty, John Barrow, appointing him, and a visit from the Earl of Moira explaining that it had been the dying wish of Lord Dungarth that Drinkwater should take over the office.

'Johnnie said you were the only man capable of doin' the job, Captain, the only man with the nous . He was emphatic upon the point, wanted me to tell you about a bookseller fellow in Paris, and a Madame de Santon, or some such, but he slipped away, poor devil. He was in a deuce of a lot of pain at the end, despite the paregoric.'

Moira had given him the key to the desk at which he now sat, striving for some temporizing reaction to Templeton's news.

'Barrow has not mentioned the matter...'

'It was only decided at Board this morning ...'

'You're damned quick with your intelligence,' Drinkwater snapped sharply. 'So much for the confidentiality of the copy room!'