He watched the men scampering to the braces, and then looked at the two-decker, as like an elderly but experienced warrior she opened her double line of ports and ran out her guns.

A voice pealed out suddenly, “Deck there! Ships on the starboard bow!” A pause while every eye peered up at the tiny figure in the main crosstrees. “Two ship o’ the line! An’ two frigates!”

Bolitho tried to control his impatience. At the rear of the small line Phalarope would engage last. By then, it might all be decided, he thought bitterly.

The sails flapped dejectedly, and he heard the helmsmen curse as the wheel went slack. “Wind is backing to the east, sir!” Proby looked mournful.

“Very well.” Bolitho lifted his glass and tried to see the nearest enemy ships. The gunfire was louder and unending, but the main battle fleets seemed stationary as before. It was of course an illusion.

Beyond the Cassius’s flapping main course he saw a brief picture of the ships indicated by the lookout. Two big ones very close in line. With two smaller sails, one on either beam. But the falling wind was playing havoc with his own men, he thought angrily. They had cheered, expecting to fight or die in glory. But this waiting, this agonising waiting, while all the time that slowly advancing fleet grew and grew, until the once exuberant seamen seemed too stunned to move, or drag their eyes from the smoke-shrouded ships.

Bolitho said, “I am going aloft, Mr Okes.” Without a glance at the sweating lieutenant he strode to the starboard gangway and made his way to the main shrouds. Even as a young midshipman Bolitho had never achieved a good head for heights, but after a quick look at the listless sails he started on the long climb to the maintopmast.

As he swung through the lubber’s hole of the maintop the waiting marines stared at him without speaking, and then turned their eyes back to the embattled fleets. The air was dinning with noise, and Bolitho’s nostrils seemed full of the smell of powder and burned wood.

He found a solitary seaman perched in the crosstrees, and waited to regain his breath before opening his glass to stare over and beyond the slow-moving Cassius.

It was impossible to tell one line of battle from the other. The main British and French squadrons were practically ship to ship, yardarm to yardarm, their masts and sails enveloped in a dense pall of trapped gunsmoke.

He shifted the glass and tried not to look at the deck far below his dangling legs. Then he stiffened. The ships which this lookout had reported minutes earlier were breaking away from the main battle. The two ships of the line were in fact linked by a stout cable, and as he peered through the forerigging he realised that the furthest vessel, a big three-decker, was partially disabled and without either bowsprit or foremast.

The towing ship, hampered by her massive consort, yawed from side to side, her sails puffing and then falling slack in the sluggish wind. As she swung the sunlight threw strange shadows on her tall side, and on the gleaming rows of guns already run out and prepared to fight.