Earl St Vincent rose as Drinkwater was ushered into the big office. He wore an old undress uniform with the stars of his orders embroidered upon his breast.

'Captain Drinkwater, pray take a seat.' He used the courtesy title and motioned Drinkwater to an upright chair and re-seated himself. Somewhat nervously Drinkwater sat, vaguely aware of two or three portraits that stared down at him and a magnificent sea-battle that he took for a representation of the action of St Valentine's Day off Cape St Vincent.

'May I congratulate you, Captain, upon your appointment.'

'Thank you, my Lord. It was unexpected.'

'But not undeserved.'

'Your Lordship is most kind.' Drinkwater bowed awkwardly from the waist and submitted himself to the First Lord's scrutiny. St Vincent congratulated his instinct. Commander Drinkwater would be about forty years of age, he judged. The grey eyes he remembered from their brief encounter in '98, together with the high forehead and the mop of hair that gave him a still youthful appearance despite the streaks of grey at his temples. The mouth was a little compressed, hiding the fullness of the lips and deep furrows ran down from his nose to bracket its corners. Drinkwater's complexion was a trifle pale beneath its weathering but it bore the mark of combat, a thin scar down the left cheek from a sword point, St Vincent thought, together with some tiny powder burns dotted over one eye like random inkspots.

'You have quite recovered from your wound, Captain?'

'Quite, my Lord.'

'What were the circumstances of your acquiring it?'

'I commanded the bomb tender Virago, my Lord, in Lord Nelson's attack on the Invasion Flotilla in December of year one. I had gone forward in a boat to reconnoitre the position when a shell burst above the boat. Several men were regrettably lost. I was more fortunate.' Drinkwater thought of Mr Matchett dying in his arms while the pain from his own wound seeped with a curiously attenuated shock throughout his system.