Vibart said wearily, “Stand that man on his feet. He makes me sick!”

Another at the end of the rank said in a tight voice. “I am a shepherd, I’m excused from the press!” He stared round challengingly until his eye fell on Brock. “Ask him, sir. The gunner will bear me out!”

Brock sauntered across to him and held up his cane. “Roll up your sleeve.” He sounded bored, even indifferent, and several of the watching men forgot their shocked misery to lean from the rank and watch.

The man in question took a half-pace away, but not quickly enough. Like a steel claw Brock’s hand fastened on his rough shirt and tore it from his arm to display an interwoven tattoo of crossed flags and cannon.

Brock stepped back and swayed on his heels. He looked along the rank. “No man has a tattoo like that unless he is a seaman.” His voice was slow and patient, like a schoolmaster with a new class. “No man would recognise me as a gunner unless he had served in a King’s ship!”

Without warning his cane flashed in the weak sunlight. When it returned to his side the other man had blood on his face where it had cut almost to the bone.

The gunner looked at him levelly. “Most of all, I dislike being taken for a fool!” He turned his back, dismissing the man from his mind.

A seaman yelled, “Another signal, sir! One more group comin’ down the road!”

Vibart sheathed his sword. “Very well.” He looked coldly at the shivering line of men. “You are entering an honourable service. You have just learned the first lesson. Don’t make me teach you another!”

Maynard fell into step beside him his face troubled. “It seems a pity that there is no other way, sir?”

Vibart did not reply. Like the man who had begged for his wife, such statements lacked both purpose and meaning. Only aboard the ship did anything count for any of them.

* * *

Bolitho sipped at his port and waited until the servant girl had cleared away the table. His stomach had long grown used to meagre and poorly cooked shipboard food, so that the excellent meal of good Cornish lamb left him feeling glutted and uncomfortable.

Across the table his father, James Bolitho, drummed impatiently on the polished wood with his one remaining hand and then took a long swallow of port. He seemed ill at ease, even nervous, as he had been from the moment of his son’s arrival.

Bolitho watched him quietly and waited. There was such a change in his father. From his own boyhood days to the present time Bolitho had seen his father only on rarely spaced occasions when he had returned here to the family home. From foreign wars and far-off countries, from exploits which children could only guess at. He could remember him as tall and grave in his naval uniform, shedding his service self-discipline like a cloak as he had come through that familiar doorway beside the portraits of the Bolitho family. Men like himself, like his son, sailors first and foremost.