Ellice had looked up as the man had kicked out wildly and then fallen lifeless even as the severed limb had dropped into a waiting trough. He had seen Herrick’s face stiff with shock and had remarked in his thick, tipsy voice, “A day indeed, Mr ’Errick! I sew an’ I stitch, I saws an’ I probes, but still they rushes to join their mates aloft!” He had rolled his rheumy eyes towards heaven and had reached for a squat leather bottle. “Maybe a little nip for yer-self, Mr ’Errick?” He had lifted it against the light. “No? Ah well then, a little sustenance for meself!”

He had given the merest nod to his loblolly boy, who in turn had pointed out another man by the ship’s rounded side. The latter had been immediately seized and hauled screaming across the chests, his cries unheeded as Ellice wiped his mouth and had then ripped away the shirt from the man’s lacerated arm.

Herrick had turned away, his face sweating as the man’s scream had probed deeper into his eardrums. He had stopped in his tracks, suddenly aware that Bolitho was standing slightly behind him.

Bolitho had moved slowly around the pain-racked figures, his voice soothing but too soft for Herrick to comprehend. Here he had reached to touch a man’s hand as it groped blindly for comfort or reassurance. There he had stopped to close the eyes of a man already dead. At one instant he had paused beneath a spiralling lantern and had asked quietly, “How many, Mr Ellice? What is the bill?”

Ellice had grunted and gestured to his men that he had completed his ministrations with the limp figure across the sheets. “Twenty killed, Cap’n! Twenty more badly wounded, an’ another thirty ’alf an’ ’alf!”

It was then that Herrick had seen Bolitho’s mask momentarily drop away. There had been pain on his face. Pain and despair.

Herrick had immediately forgotten his anger and resentment at the captain’s remarks earlier on the quarterdeck. The Bolitho he had seen on the ship’s side waving his sword had been real. So, too, was this one.

He stared down at the canvas-shrouded corpses and tried to remember the faces to fit against the names scrawled on each lolling bundle. But already they were fading, lost in memory like the smoke of the battle which had struck them down.

Herrick started as he caught sight of Lieutenant Okes’s thin figure moving slowly along the shadowed main deck. He had hardly seen Okes at all since the action. It was as if the man had been waiting for the hard-driven sailors to finish their work so that he could have the deck to himself.

There had been that moment immediately after the sound of the last shot had rolled away in the smoke. Okes had staggered up through a hatchway, his eyes wild and uncontrolled. He had seemed shocked beyond understanding as he had looked around him, as if expecting to see the enemy ship alongside. Okes had seen Herrick watching him, and his eyes had strayed past to the smoking guns in the battery which he had left to fend for themselves.