He eased the telescope carefully to one side, seeing the serried whitecaps cruising across the Sound, the wedge of headland and the hurrying ranks of leaden clouds. The wind was freshening from the north-west and there was a hint of snow in the air.

He held his breath and steadied the glass on a solitary ship which lay far out, seemingly motionless and making the only patch of colour against the bleak sea.

The Hyperion, his ship, was waiting for him. It was hard, no impossible, to picture her as the battered, shotscarred two-decker he had brought to Plymouth six months earlier after her desperate fight in the Mediterranean following Hood's failure to hold and occupy Toulon. Six months of pleading and bribing, of bullying dockyard workers and watching over every phase of the old ship's repairs and refit. And she was old. Twenty-two years had passed since her good Kentish oak had first tasted salt water, and almost all the time she had been in continuous commission. From the freezing misery of the Atlantic to maddening calms in the Indies. From the broadsides of the Mediterranean to patient blockade duty off one enemy port or another.

When she had been docked Bolitho had seen weed nearly six feet long scraped from her fat bilges. No wonder she had been so slow. Now, outwardly at least, she looked a new ship.

He watched the strange silvery light play across her tall side as she swung heavily at her anchor. Even at this distance he could see the taut black tracery of her rigging and shrouds, the double line of gun-ports, the small scarlet rectangle made by her ensign as it stood out in the freshening wind.