“There’ll be a pretty little ceremony tomorrow morning,” said Clive, the surgeon. He put his hand to his neck in a gesture which Hornblower thought hideous.

“I hope the effect will be salutary,” said Roberts, they second lieutenant. The foot of the table, where he sat, was for the moment the head, because Buckland, the first lieutenant, was absent attending to the preparations for the court martial.

“But why should we hang him?” asked Hornblower.

Roberts rolled an eye on him.

“Deserter,” he said, and then went on. “Of course, you’re a newcomer. I entered him myself, into this very ship, in ‘98. Hart spotted him at once.”

“But I thought he was a rebel?”

“A rebel as well,” said Roberts. “The quickest way out of Ireland — the only way, in fact — in ‘98 was to join the armed forces.”

“I see,” said Hornblower.

“We got a hundred hands that autumn,” said Smith, another lieutenant.

And no questions would be asked, thought Hornblower. His country, fighting for her life, needed seamen as a drowning man needs air, and was prepared to make them out of any raw material that presented itself.

“McCool deserted one dark night when we were becalmed off the Penmarks,” explained Roberts. “Got through a lower gunport with a grating to float him. We thought he was drowned until news came through from Paris that he was there, up to his old games. He boasted of what he’d done — that’s how we knew him to be O’Shaughnessy, as he called himself when we had him.”

“Wolfe Tone had a French uniform,” said Smith. “And they’d have strung him up if he hadn’t cut his own throat first.”

“Uniform only aggravates the offence when he’s a deserter,” said Roberts.

Hornblower had much to think about. First there was the nauseating thought that there would be an execution in the morning.