The officer looked meaningly at Bolitho and said briefly, “Horse and rider! That means one thing, Captain. The bait has been accepted. It will be tonight, or not at all!”

There was a shout from the forecastle as a blinding needle of light stabbed out from the bleak headland. Someone was using a heliograph, and from further inland Bolitho heard the eager beating of drums.

He asked, “How did they get a signal?”

The officer closed his mouth and then said not unkindly, “There is a chain of fishing boats out there, Captain. They pass the sighting reports from boat to boat. The nearest one is well in sight of the hill lookouts!” He looked embarrassed. “Why not try and forget it? There’s nothing you can do now. Any more than I could do if the situation were reversed!”

Bolitho looked at him thoughtfully. “Thank you. I will try to remember that.” Then he resumed his pacing, and with a shrug the officer returned to the opposite side of the poop.

The short truce was over. They were no longer fellow sailors. The flashing heliograph had made them enemies once more.

* * *

“It’ll be sunset in one hour!” Daniel Proby, the Phalarope’s master, scribbled slowly on his slate and then ambled across to join Herrick by the weather rail. “But in all my experience I’ve not seen one like this!”

Herrick brought his mind back to the present and followed Proby’s mournful gaze across the vast glittering waste of open sea.

For most of the afternoon and early evening the frigate had pushed her way steadily north-east, and now as she lay close-hauled on the port tack, every mast and spar, every inch of straining canvas shone with the hue of burnished copper. The sky, which for days had remained bright blue and empty, was streaked with long cruising clouds, streaming like trails of glowing smoke towards the far horizon. It was an angry sky, and the sea was reacting to the change in its own way. Instead of short, choppy whitecaps the surface had altered to advancing lines of hump-backed rollers, one behind the other in neatly matched ranks which made the ship heave and groan as her figurehead lifted to the sky and then plunged forward and down in drawn-out, sickening swoops.

Herrick said, “Maybe a storm is coming through from the Atlantic?”

The master shook his head, unconvinced. “You don’t get much in the way of storms at this time of year.” He glanced aloft as the sails thundered as if to mock his words. “All the same, we will have to take in another reef if it don’t improve a bit.”

In spite of his gloom Herrick was able to smile to himself. He could not see Vibart being happy about that. For two days, since he had received his new orders, he had been driving the ship like a madman. He thought back again to the moment a lookout had sighted the distant sail. For an instant they had all imagined it was a patrolling frigate or the Cassius herself. But it had been a fast-moving brig, her low hull smothered in spray as she had gone about and run down towards the Phalarope.