THE MIDSHIPMAN stood beneath the cabin skylight, his body accepting the heavy motion of the ship around him. After the cramped quarters of the midshipmen’s berth of the frigate in which he had taken passage from Plymouth, this powerful man-of-war seemed like a rock, and the great stern cabin a palace by comparison.

It was the anticipation which had sustained him when everything else seemed lost. Hope, despair, even fear had been ready companions until this moment.

The shipboard sounds were muffled, distant, voices far off and without meaning or purpose. Someone had warned him that joining a ship already in commission was always hard; there would be no friends or familiar faces to ease the jolts and scrapes. And this was to be his first ship.

It was still impossible to accept that he was here. He moved his head slightly and watched the cabin’s other occupant, who was sitting behind a desk, the document the midshipman had carried so carefully inside his coat to avoid spray from the boat’s oars turned towards the light of the sloping stern windows, and their glittering panorama of sea and sky.

The captain. The one man upon whom he had placed so much hope-a man he had never met before. His whole body was as taut as a signal halliard, his mouth like dust. It might be nothing. A cruel disappointment, the end of everything.

He realised with a start that the captain was looking at him, had asked him something. His age?

“Fourteen, sir.” It did not even sound like his own voice. He saw the captain’s eyes for the first time, more grey than blue, not unlike the sea beyond the spray-dappled windows.

There were other voices, nearer now. There was no more time.

Almost desperately he thrust his hand into his coat again, and held out the letter which he had guarded and nursed all the way from Falmouth.