Ferguson staggered to his feet, his eyes wide with a kind of madness. “I’ll kill you for that!”

He swung his fist, but Allday caught his wrist in midair. “Save it!” Allday glared at Pochin’s grinning face. “His wife is sick, Pochin! Give him some rest!”

Old Ben Strachan said vaguely, “I ’ad a wife once.” He scratched his shaggy grey beard. “Blessed if I can remember ’er name now!”

Some of the men laughed, and Allday hissed fiercely, “Get a grip, Bryan! You can’t beat men like Pochin. He envies you, that’s all!”

Ferguson hardly heard the friendly warning in Allday’s voice. Pochin’s goading tone had opened the misery in his heart with renewed force, so that he could see his wife propped in her bed by the window as clearly as if he had just entered the room. That day, when the press gang had pushed him down the hillside, she would have been sitting there, waiting for his return. Now he was never going back. Would never see her again.

He staggered to his feet and threw the plate of meat down on the deck. “I can’t!” He was screaming. “I won’t!”

A horse-faced fo’c’s’leman named Betts jumped to his feet as if shaken from a deep sleep. “Don’t jeer at ’im, mates!” He stood swaying below one of the lanterns. “He’s ’ad enough for a bit.”

Pochin groaned. “Lord save us!” He rolled his eyes in mock concern.

Betts snarled, “Jesus Christ! What do you have to suffer before you understand? This man is sick with fear for his wife, and others here have equal troubles. Yet all some of you can do is scoff at ’em!”

Allday shifted in his seat. Ferguson’s sudden despair had touched some hidden spring in the men’s emotions. Weeks, and in some cases years at sea without ever putting a foot on dry land were beginning to take a cruel toll. But this was dangerous and blind. He held up his hand and said calmly, “Easy, lads. Easy.”

Betts glared down at him, his salt-reddened eyes only half focusing on Allday’s face. “How can you interfere?” His voice was slurred. “We live like animals, on food that was rotten even afore it was put in casks!” He pulled his knife from his belt and drove it into the tables. “While those pigs down aft live like kings!” He peered round for support. “Well, ain’t I right? That bastard Evans is as sleek as a churchyard rat on what he stole from our food!”

“Well, now. Did I hear my name mentioned?”

The berth deck froze into silence as Evans, the purser, moved into a patch of lamplight.

With his long coat buttoned to his throat and his hair pulled back severely above his narrow face he looked for all the world like a ferret on the attack. He put his head on one side. “Well, I’m waiting!”

Allday watched him narrowly. There was something evil and frightening about the little Welsh purser. All the more so because any one of the men grouped around him could have ended his life with a single blow.