“In a gully.” Some of the wine ran down his chin and across his soiled shirt. Like blood. “Lelean was dead. The wound must have been worse than I realised. I didn’t want to leave him there like that. He was the first one who ever trusted me to do anything. I knew . . .” He faltered. “I thought no one would come to search. There was the attack. All this.”

Bolitho took the empty glass from his nerveless fingers. “Go and rest, Mr Calvert. Tomorrow things may seem different.” He watched the other man’s eyes. Tomorrow? It was already here.

Calvert stared at him with sudden determination. “I will never forget that you sent men to look for me.” The determination faded. “But I couldn’t leave him there like that. He was just a boy.”

Bolitho recalled Broughton’s scathing comment, as if it had been spoken aloud in the room. Do him good! Well, perhaps after all he had been right.

He said gravely, “Many good men have died today, Mr Calvert. It is up to us to see their efforts are not wasted.” He paused before adding, “And to ensure that young Lelean’s trust is not betrayed.”

Long after Calvert had gone Bolitho sat slumped in the chair. What was the matter with him to offer Calvert such comfort?

Calvert was useless, and probably always would be. He came of a background and social climate which Bolitho had always mistrusted and often despised.

Was it because of that one spark which had been given him by the dead midshipman? Could he really hold on to such ideas in a war which had passed all reason and outwitted traditional sentiment?

Or was it that he had replaced Lelean with his own nephew? Would it have been fair to add to Calvert’s misery when inwardly he knew he would have acted the same had it been Adam out there in an unknown gully?

When the first grey fingers of dawn explored the wall of the commandant’s room Bolitho was still in the chair, dozing in exhausted sleep, and awakening at intervals to new doubts and problems.

On the top of the central tower Bickford was already awake and watching the probing light. After a while he could wait no longer and beckoned to a seaman who was standing nearby.

“Good enough, eh?” He could not stop grinning. His part of the action was done, and he was alive. “Run up the colours! That’ll make Coquette sit up and beg!”

* * *

At noon Bolitho climbed to the top of the central tower and leaned over the battlements to study the activity in the bay. Just after dawn the frigate Coquette, followed by Inch’s Hekla had passed through the narrow channel below the fortress, and within an hour had been joined by the battered and listing Navarra. Now, as he watched the boats pulling busily back and forth from the shore to the ships, from the marine outpost on the beaked headland to the pickets on the causeway, it was hard to remember it as the empty place it had once been.