The admiral's flag lieutenant was tense, even embarrassed.

"Sir Robert requests that you wait a few moments, Captain Bolitho." His hand rested on the adjoining door. "An unexpected visitor… you understand, sir."

Adam walked into the other room, light and spacious, as he remembered it from previous visits. When he had been given Unrivalled, fresh from the builder's yard, the first to carry her name on the Navy List. And later, meeting Vice Admiral Valentine Keen, when Keen had held this command. And last year, in July, when he had joined Lord Exmouth's fleet for the inevitable attack on Algiers. In those eight months so much had happened, while here in Plymouth there was yet another admiral, Sir Robert Burch, probably in his last appointment.

The lieutenant was saying, "We all watched you arrive, sir. It is some time since I have witnessed such crowds. Some must have been awake before dawn."

Adam laid his hat on a chair and walked to a window. It was not the flag lieutenant's fault; it rarely was. He had been one himself. He bit his lip. Under his uncle. Another world, it seemed now. And his uncle…

Sir Richard Bolitho had died nearly two years ago, killed on the deck of his flagship Frobisher, cut down by a single shot. The memory still burned as if it were yesterday.

The other man watched his face closely, trying to miss nothing. The young frigate captain whose name had appeared in the Gazette so many times, fighting hand to hand against any foe which had offered itself, before the war had ended and the sworn enemies had moved into an uneasy alliance. How long might it last? And for what reason? Perhaps the battle of Algiers would come to be remembered as the last great battle under sail. Lord Exmouth had been a frigate captain, probably the most famous and successful to emerge from that everlasting war. He must have put all doubts aside to break the unwritten rule he had always followed: never force an action where ships are pitted against sited shore batteries, and in his case a thousand enemy guns.