Free The Flying Squadron by Richard Woodman Page B

groanings. One heard instead the noises of people, from the soft murmurs of men chatting in their messes, sitting and smoking at the tables suspended between the guns, oridling on the berth deck, through the louder shouts of abuse or jocularity to the bawled orders and shrilling of pipes. The denser concentrations of humanity, like the marines’ quarters or the midshipmen’s so-called gunroom, produced their own noise, and the low hum generated by a watch below during the daytime was quite different from that produced, as now, when the watches below should have been asleep, or at least turned in.
    What had troubled him outside his cabin door was not a total silence, but a curious modulation somewhere that was not
right
, existing alongside an equally curious
lack
of noise to which he could not lay a cause.
    Irritated and a little alarmed, still cloaked though he had tossed his hat aside, he threw open the door and stalked outside. The gun deck was quiet. The men who slept there appeared to have turned in, for the few lamps showed bulging hammocks above the faintly gleaming gun breeches.
    He turned abruptly and descended to the berth deck. Immediately he knew something
was
wrong. He sensed rather than saw a movement, but clearly heard the hissed caveat that greeted his intrusion. He moved quickly forward, ducking under hammocks and brushing them with his head and shoulders. Many of those slung were full and he provoked the occasional grunted protest from them, but more were empty and, with a mounting sense of apprehension, he dodged forward, aware of someone moving parallel to himself, trying to beat him but, having to move in semi-concealment, not making such light work of it.
    He could hear the source of that strange modulation as he drew up beside the bitts and suddenly saw below him a press of men crowded into the cable-tier. Their faces were rapt, lit by the grim light of a brace of battle-lanterns as the listened in silence to a voice which, though it spoke in a low tone, carried with it such a weight of conviction it sounded upon the ears like a shout.
    So strong was the impact of this oration that it, as much as astonishment, made Drinkwater pause to listen. In the wings of the berth deck, his shadower paused too.
    â€˜The rights of kings might be supported as an argument;nay, friends, adopted as a principle for good government were it not for the fact that it in all cases without exception reduces us to the status of subjects and, moreover, many of us to abject and necessary poverty. For to glorify one requires a court whose purpose is adulatory, if not purely idolatrous, and which, to support itself, requires the extraction of taxes from the subjected.
    â€˜Furthermore, it promotes excessive pride amongst those close to the throne. This in turn excites envy among the middling sort who, gaining as they are power in the manufacturies, seek to adopt the manners and privileges of noblemen. Under the heels of this triple despotism are ground the poor, the weak, the hungry, the dispossessed, the homeless and the helpless: men, women and children – free-born Britons every one, God help them!’
    Drinkwater drew back in retreat. He had not seen the speaker but knew the man’s identity: Thurston, the Paineite, the disaffected seducer of men’s minds, a suborner, a canting levelling republican subversive . . .
    Drinkwater flew up the ladder and Todd snapped to attention, his face an enigmatic mask. Drinkwater had no idea whether or not the marine knew of the combination gathered in the cable-tier, but he surely must have done. Without pausing, saying nothing, but conveying much to the sentry, he sought the refuge of his cabin, his mind a whirl.
    He had suspected something of the sort as he had edged forward under the hammocks. A meeting of Methodists, perhaps, even a mutinous assembly, but this, this was intolerable . . .
    Why had he done nothing about it?
    The thought brought him