He was a genius of sorts, a man whose mind could disinter a hidden fact, cross-refer it to some other seemingly unrelated circumstance and draw a thread of logic from the process. Except, of course, when he disagreed, as at present. Then he could be monstrously stubborn. Drinkwater sometimes marvelled at the obscure man's abilities, quite oblivious of his own part in these deliberations and the confidence his personal imprimatur gave Templeton. He was more likely to see himself as a fish out of water, an ageing and foppish extravagant in his bottle-green coat and his increasingly affected mode of speaking. It seemed to him that he had reached this point in his life without quite knowing how he had got there, carried, like a piece of wood on the tide, into some shallow backwater and left grounded in a creek.

He had fondly supposed that he would see something of his wife, but Elizabeth and the children were almost a hundred miles away, in Suffolk, while he vegetated in the capital, choking on smoke and falling victim to the blue devils and every quinsy and ague coughed over him by London's denizens! Moira had implied he might mastermind a coup, insisting Dungarth knew him capable of executing some brilliant feat. But while Drinkwater had pored in fascination over the papers pasted in the guard books, prompted by a natural curiosity concerning the fate of Madame Santhonax, whose husband Drinkwater had killed in action, he had come to realize all such opportunities seemed to reside firmly in the past, and the distant past at that. [See Baltic Mission.]

His present duties seemed to entail nothing more than reading endless reports and dispatches, many of no apparent meaning, still less of significance, until he dozed over them, half asleep with inertia.

'God's bones,' he had snapped at Templeton one morning, 'what am I to make of this catalogue of stupefying facts? If they conceal some great truth then it passes over my head.'