She smiled at him. "Oh ... you mean Trafalgar?"

" ’Course, I mean Trafalgar! You’re teasin’ me, aren’t you? You’ve gotta be."

"You were at Trafalgar! Really?" She was impressed, and she allowed it to show in her voice and her eyes.

"Surely I was. Never forget that if I live to be a hundred— which I won’t. Great day that was ... an’ terrible, too. I reckon there’s bin none other like it, nor won’t be again."

She poured the water onto the tea. "What ship were you on?"

"Why, the Victory, o’ course." He said it with pride in his voice so sharp and clear that for a moment she could hear in it the young man he had been over half a century before, when England had been on the brink of invasion by Napoleon’s armies and nothing stood between them and conquest except the wooden walls of the British fleet—and the skill and bravado of Horatio Nelson and the men who sailed with him. She felt a stirring of the same pride in herself, a shiver of excitement and knowledge of the cost, because she, too, had seen battle and knew its reality as well as its dream.

She brought the tea over to him and offered him a cup. He took it, and his eyes met hers over the rim.

"I was there," he said softly. "I remember that morning like it were yesterday. First signal come in about six. That was on the nineteenth of October. Enemy had their tops’1 yards hoisted. Least that’s what we heard later. Then they were coming out o’ port under sail. Half past nine and bright light over the sea when we heard it on the Victory." He shook his head. "All day we tacked and veered around toward Gibraltar, but we never saw ’em. Visibility was poor—you got to understand that. Weather gettin’ worse all the time. Under closereefed topsails, we were, an’ too close to Cádiz."

She nodded, sipping her tea, not interrupting.

"Admiral gave the signal to wear and come northwest, back to our first position. Next day, that was, you see?"

"Yes, I see. I know the battle was on the twenty-first."

He nodded again, appreciation in his face. "By dawn o’ the twenty-first the admiral had it exactly right. Twenty-one miles north by west o’ Cape Trafalgar, we were, and to windward o’ the enemy." His eyes were smiling, shining blue, like the sea that historic day. "I can smell the salt in the air," he said softly, screwing up his face as if the glare of the water blinded him still. "Ordered us into two columns and make full sail."

She did not speak.

He was smiling, his tea forgotten. "Made a notch on me gun, I did, like the man next to me. He was an Irishman, I remember. The admiral came around to all of us. He asked what we were doin’. The Irishman told him we were making a mark for another victory, like all the others, just in case he fell in the battle. Nelson laughed an’ said as he would make notches enough in the enemy’s ships.