Fate played strange tricks. Now Allday was coxswain and friend to Sir Richard Bolitho, and Ferguson was steward to the Bolitho estate. And Bolitho had been the captain of that ship, which had snatched them from the beach to serve the King.

He sighed. It was better to get it over with. They had doubtless seen or heard the trap rattle into the yard.

Unis, Allday's wife, was waiting to greet him.

"Why, Bryan, this is a surprise. You're all us at the market today!"

Ferguson walked through the doorway and glanced at the scrubbed tables, the flowers and the polished brasses. Welcoming and neat, like the woman who had greeted him.

"John's out the back, doing something or other." She smiled. "My John, that is."

The other John was Unis's brother, a one-legged soldier of the line, without whom she could never have managed with Allday at sea much of the time. Then she asked, "You want to see him? Nothing wrong up at the house, is there?"

He said, "A messenger came today, Unis." It was pointless to try and make light of it. "From the Admiralty."

She sat on a bench and stared at her arms, which were dusted with flour. "I thought… with the surrender an' that… it was all behind us. Will Sir Richard be needed again?" She touched the flour on her skin. "My John?"

"It may be so." He thought of Catherine Somervell's face after the messenger had departed. He had heard her exclaim, "It's so unfair! So wrong!"

Just weeks since his return from the war across the Atlantic. Maybe they wanted to honour him in some way.

He heard Allday scraping his shoes at the parlour door and said, "John would not be forced to go, Unis. Sir Richard would not do it."