The business of transferring the huge weight of the ship had to be done with the utmost care. While it was being built, the ship had rested upon keel blocks made of elm wood, about five feet high and placed five feet apart. Around the outside of the hull, tall wooden poles, thirty or forty feet high, like ship's masts, acted as scaffolding. Starting from the end nearest the water, the riggers had swiftly moved, driving in huge wooden wedges to lift the ship off the blocks and then putting in the timber props that would guide her on her path down the rails. It was a long operation requiring great skill. For everything had to go right. If the ship lurched, it could crash on its side. If the angle of the slideways were too shallow she might not launch. Too steep and she might rush down into the water and go careering off, to get stuck on the mud banks across the river. Such things had happened. If all went well, however, the rising tide coming up under the stern would just ease the ship off the blocks, the wedges holding her would be knocked away and, slowed by drag ropes, she would slide gently down into the Beaulieu River, stern first, to be towed away downstream and out into the Solent.

Puckle walked round the ship. He loved the line of the huge keel and the workmanship that had gone into it. The inner keel was made of sections of elm. Outside this was another outer keel of oak. When the ships ran down the sliderails, or if ever, later, they ran aground, it was this outer keel that would endure the scraping, protecting the inner keel from harm.

He would be staying at the yard that night, for before the ship could be launched there was still one vital job to do.

The normal time to launch a ship at Buckler's Hard was an hour before high tide. At lowest tide, therefore, which, that night, would come shortly before dawn, gangs of men would go down to grease the slideways with melted tallow and soap. Puckle had asked to be one of them. He wouldn't have missed this last pre-dawn preparation for anything.

*

There was a quarter-moon that night and the sky was full of stars. At Albion Park the pale, classical facade of the house stared across the faintly glimmering sweep of its lawns to the gently shelving belt of small fields and woods that sank down, as though in a contented dream, to the Solent water. Beyond that, clearly visible in the moonlight, the long line of the Isle of Wight lay like a gentle guardian.