Angry and dejected he had walked to Lord North Street to remonstrate with Dungarth. He had long ago angered the authorities — in the person of John Barrow, the powerful Second Secretary — but had hoped that his destruction of the Russian line-of-battle ship Suvorov with a mere frigate would have mollified his detractor. Apparently he remained in bad odour.

There had been more to fuel Captain Drinkwater's ire than official disapprobation. In a sense he had been relieved to have been summoned so peremptorily to London. He did not want to go home to Petersfield, though he was longing to see his children and to hold his wife Elizabeth in his arms again. To go home meant confronting Susan Tregembo, and admitting to her the awful fact that in the distant jungle of Borneo he had been compelled to dispatch his loyal coxswain Tregembo, whose tortured body had been past all aid, with the very pistol that he now held. The fact that the killing of the old Cornishman had been an act of mercy brought no relief to Drinkwater's tormented spirit. He remained inconsolable, aware that the event would haunt him to his own death, and that in the meantime he could not burden his wife with either himself or his confession.(See A Private Revenge)

In such a state of turmoil and self-loathing, Drinkwater had arrived at Lord Dungarth's London house. A servant had shown him into a room he remembered, a room adorned with Romney's full length portrait of Dungarth's long-dead countess. The image of the beautiful young woman's cool gaze seemed full of omniscient accusation and he turned sharply away.