Mr Forester hated that funnel. Even now a sulphurous shimmer from its top told of the banked boiler hidden down below and, if he looked across on the starboard quarter, he could see the faint but unmistakable pall of its smoke laid on the grey surface of the sea. With the boiler fires banked, the funnel was quiescent, a malevolent threat which, it seemed to Forester in his more irritable moments, possessed a secret hatred for the mate, for he was engaged in a ceaseless war with the thing. Mr Forester had been bred in a tough school and had spent most of his life under sail. He had, moreover, seen service in the Royal Navy as master's mate and had been in Codrington's flagship, the Asia, at Navarino. He was therefore accustomed to decks being white, not besmirched by soot and smuts. Steam, whatever its advocates might claim, seemed to Forester to have introduced as many problems as it had solved. He sighed and let his gaze roll aft again. Beyond the long after deck with its saloon skylight and the glazed lights which illuminated the staterooms below, rose the huge ensign staff. A seaman stood alongside it, the halliards of the large defaced red ensign ready in his hands. Its snapping fly bore the same device as formed the jack and it was repeated yet again in the flag which stood out like a board from the mainmast truck high above his head, indicating the presence on board the steamer of an Elder Brother of the Trinity House.

Satisfied, Forester turned forward again, distracted by the noise of voices almost immediately below him on the foredeck where the crew closed up round the polished brass barrel of the short six-pounder, one of four carriage-mounted guns borne on the long deck of the Trinity House Steam Vessel Vestal.

'Colour party mustered, sir,' Potts reported, as the gun-captain below the bridge knelt behind his gun's breech, one hand upraised.