Partridge blew his nose violently into a green handkerchief, and then froze as Broughton shot him a savage glance. But the admiral said nothing, and the white-haired master thrust the offending handkerchief into his coat, grinning sheepishly at Tothill.

Bolitho rested one palm on his sword. The ship was alive, a vital, intricate weapon of war. He recalled his last fight aboard the Navarra, the stark contrast between this ordered world of discipline and training and the other ship’s crude defences. The frightened Spanish seamen as they allowed their terror to change to bloody ferocity, hacking at the retreating boarders until there was none left alive. The half-naked women resting from their efforts at the pumps, shining in their sweat as he had passed. Meheux cursing as he had slipped in the Spanish captain’s blood, and Ashton’s youthful voice rising above the din as he had urged his gunners to fire and reload in his amateur Spanish.

And little Pareja. Wanting to please him. Feeling really needed, perhaps for the first time in his life. He thought too of his widow, wondering what she was doing at this moment. Hating him for leaving her without a husband? Regretting all the things which had brought her to Spain in the first place? It was hard to tell. A strange woman, he thought. He had never met anyone quite like her before. Wearing the finery of a wealthy lady, yet with the bold and fiery arrogance of one used to a much harder life than Pareja had given her.

Tothill’s voice shook him from his thoughts. “Signal from Zeus, sir. Repeated by Tanais.” He was scribbling busily on his slate. “Enemy in sight, sir.”

Broughton swore silently. “Hell’s teeth!”

Tanais’s topsails and rigging had hidden Rattray’s signal from the flagship, so time had been lost in repeating it down the line. Bolitho frowned. It was another argument for having Euryalus leading, he thought. He could imagine Rattray passing his order to a midshipman like Tothill. He would be very aware of his position in the van and would want to get his signal hoisted as soon as possible. There was nothing in the signal book which would suffice for a word like Djafou. Wanting to make haste and avoid spelling it out letter by letter, he had made a more familiar signal instead. Captain Falcon would have devised something more imaginative, or said nothing at all. How easy it was to know a ship’s ways once you knew her captain.

The land had changed colour as the sun climbed higher above its own image, the purples giving way to scorched green, the grey rocks and gullies becoming sharper defined, as if from an artist’s drawing in the Gazette.

But the overall appearance had not changed. Treeless and without any sign of life, above which the air was already distorted in haze, or perhaps it was dust swirling around on the steady sea breeze.

There was the western headland, and overlapping it, its nearest side still in deep shadow, the one shaped like a great beak. Exactly abeam was a round hill, the side of which had cracked and fallen into the sea. It was a good four miles distant, but Bolitho could see the sea breaking in white feathers across the crumbled rocks, driven along the cheerless shoreline by the wind, as if searching for an inlet.