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.