'Yes, Tregembo, what is it?'

Drinkwater peeled off his plastron and gauntlet. His shirt stuck to his lean body, still emaciated after his wounding. A few loose locks of hair had escaped the queue and were plasted down the side of his head.

'I brought it as soon as I saw the seal, zur,' rumbled the old Cornishman as he handed the packet to Drinkwater. Quilhampton caught sight of the red wafer of the Admiralty with its fouled anchor device as Drinkwater tore it open.

Waiting with quickening pulse Quilhampton regarded his old commander with mounting impatience. He saw the colour drain from Drinkwater's face so that the thin scar on the left cheek and the blue powder burns above the eye seemed abruptly conspicuous.

'What is it, m'sieur? Not bad news?' Bescond too watched anxiously. He had come to admire the thin sea-officer with the drooping shoulder and his even skinnier companion with the wooden left hand. To Bescond they personified the dogged resistance of his adopted country to the monsters beyond the Channel who had massacred his parents and driven a pitchfork into the belly of his pregnant wife.

'Mr Q,' said Drinkwater with sudden formality, ignoring the Frenchman.

'Sir?' answered Quilhampton, aware that the contents of the packet had transformed the salle d'armes into a quarterdeck.

'It seems we have a ship at last! M. Bescond, my best attentions to you, I give you good day. Tregembo, my coat! God's bones, Mr Q, I have been made a "Job Captain", appointed to a sloop of war!'

An elated James Quilhampton accompanied Drinkwater to his house in Petersfield High Street. Since his widowed mother had obtained him a midshipman's berth on the brig Hellebore, thanks to the good offices of Lieutenant Drinkwater, Quilhampton had considered himself personally bound to his senior. Slight though Drinkwater's influence was, Quilhampton recognised the fact that he had no other patron. He therefore accorded Drinkwater an absolute loyalty that was the product of his generous nature. His own mother's close ties with Elizabeth Drinkwater had made him an intimate of the house in the High Street and it had been Quilhampton who, with Mr Lettsom, late surgeon of the bomb vessel Virago, had brought Drinkwater home after his terrible wounding off Boulogne.