His response to anyone else during the course of the evening was the same.

Next morning, as Gus served breakfast in the wardroom, Mason caught his eye. ‘Saw you dancing last night. You’re pretty light on your feet.’

Gus felt irrationally pleased with himself.

The dancing went on for several nights and Gus found himself increasingly sought after. Occasionally Lofty made a concession and allowed one of the other men to partner him, but it was made clear that it was only for the space of one dance. Gus was relieved to find, however, that during the day he was treated no differently by any of them from before.

New rumours were circulating. The captain was not looking for any more merchant ships as prizes; instead he was going to attack San Francisco and possibly capture one of the treasure steamers which carried gold from there to the Atlantic seaboard of the United States. But as the weeks passed and they reached the same latitude as the city without altering course towards it, it became clear that if Waddell had ever intended to attack he had changed his mind. Gus was aware of growing tensions in the wardroom. Even the senior officers were kept in the dark about the captain’s intentions and they resented it. Coupled with the lack of any firm news about the fate of the Confederacy, it made them uneasy and bad-tempered.

For the first time Gus began to think seriously about his own future. To begin with he had been so happy to escape from the school, and to find himself at sea, that he had not thought beyond the next day. Then there had been the excitement of taking prizes and the changing weather conditions from tropical to Antarctic and back to tropical and then to the wonders of the Arctic. There were days when he was bored, and others when he was exhausted by the heat or chilled to the marrow by the cold; but the whole ship had had such a sense of purpose, in which they were all united, that he had been swept along by it, almost without thinking. Now that sense of purpose was gone and he was beginning to think that, if the Confederate cause was really lost, they might all find themselves accused of piracy. And the punishment for that was death, was it not?