Free Ebb Tide by Richard Woodman Page B

station, sought only the meagre comfort of his hammock or cot as he came below from the greater misery of the deck.
    Relieved by White, Midshipman Drinkwater made his bruised and buffeted way below and clambered wearily into his hammock. The dark of the orlop deck was punctured by the swaying lanterns which imparted their weird and monstrous shadows as they oscillated at different rates to the laden hammocks. From below came the swirl and effluvia of the bilge, counterpoint to the creaks and groans of the frigate's hull and the faint thrum of the gale roaring above through the mast and rigging.
    Despite his exhaustion, Drinkwater was unable to sleep. His active brain rebelled against the fatigue of his body. Dulled by the monotony of the gale and the necessity of ignoring his protesting and empty stomach, it now refused to let him drift into the seaman's one palliative for misery, the balm of exhausted sleep.
    It hardly seemed possible that Cyclops was the same frigate that had fought under Rodney in the Moonlight Battle, or that the sullen faces of the seamen were those that had followed the young Midshipman Drinkwater through the bilge of the Yankee schooner Algonquin in a bid to avert confinement in a French fortress. But it was not the weather or the duty of a winter cruise in the North Sea which had induced this sleepless anxiety, it was the misery which prevailed aboard, so reminiscent of his first months in the frigate when the very cockpit to which an unkind fate had now returned him had been dominated by the vicious presence of the bugger Morris. Far from obtaining a commission, Drinkwater had found himself deprived of the privacy and privileges of the acting rank to which he had grown accustomed.
    It was a cruel blow, made worse by the departure of Devaux. After the tragic loss of Captain Hope aboard the Royal George, Lieutenant Devaux had briefly commanded the ship for the passage to Sheerness. On arrival there, Devaux, whose eldest brother had blown out his own brains over a gambling debt, now learned the news, already months old, that his second brother had died in the trenches before Yorktown. Devaux thus found himself the 6th Earl of Dungarth in the Irish peerage, and this change in his circumstances induced Miss Charlotte Dixon, a young woman outstanding for her beauty and intelligence, to consent to become his countess. As Miss Dixon was not merely lovely and clever but also the sole daughter of a nabob, Dungarth was in some hopes of repairing his family's fortunes and swiftly relinquished the profession of a naval officer. To Drinkwater, Devaux's departure seemed like a double desertion, for the first lieutenant, poor though he might be, left to make an advantageous marriage, abandoning his lieutenant's commission without a second thought. Drinkwater, for whom such a qualification seemed an impossible attainment, was left to muse upon the inequities of life, with only the thin consolation of his correspondence with Elizabeth to help him come to terms with his return to the midshipmen's mess. 'I am sorry, my dear fellow,' Devaux had said on their last night in the gunroom as Cyclops lay within half a mile of the light-vessel at the Nore. 'I should have liked to help you but my naval service is over. Perhaps we shall meet again, perhaps when there is peace you will come and stay with us ...'
    Perhaps... perhaps ... How full of pathos that word seemed, and how Drinkwater envied Devaux the use of that plural pronoun.
    Under orders though they were, their brief halt at Sheerness saw changes in the cockpit, as well as in the gunroom, but most of all a new commander read his commission to the ship's company.
    Captain Smetherley, whose father supported the new government of Lord Rockingham, was twenty-six years old. Pleasant in disposition, he possessed an easy manner of command but had little practical experience to his name. He had been entered on a ship's books as a boy, had dodged the regulations and had been