To Quilhampton the Drinkwater household represented 'home' more than the mean lodgings his mother maintained. Louise Quilhampton, a pretty, talkative widow assisted Elizabeth Drinkwater in a school run for the poor children of the town and surrounding villages. Her superficial qualities were a foil to Mistress Drinkwater's and she was more often to be found in the house of her friend where her frivolous chatter amused five-year-old Charlotte Amelia and the tiny and newest arrival in the Drinkwater menage, Richard Madoc.

James Quilhampton was as much part of the family as his mother had become. He had restrained Charlotte Amelia from interfering while her father sat for his portrait to the French prisoner of war, Gaston Bruilhac. And he had rescued her from a beating by Susan Tregembo, the cook, who had caught the child climbing over a fire to touch the cleverly applied worms of yellow and brown paint with which Bruilhac had painted the epaulette to mark Drinkwater's promotion to Master and Commander. That had been in the fall of the year one, when Drinkwater had returned from the Baltic and before he rejoined Lord Nelson for the fateful attack on Boulogne.

Quilhampton smiled at the recollection now as he looked at Bruilhac's creditable portrait and waited for Drinkwater to return from informing Elizabeth of their imminent departure.

That single epaulette which had so fascinated little Charlotte Amelia ought properly to have been transferred to Drinkwater's right shoulder, Quilhampton thought. Apart from concealing the drooping shoulder it was scandalous that Drinkwater had not been made post-captain for his part in extricating the boats after Nelson's daring night attack had failed. Their Lordships did not like failure and Quilhampton considered his patron had suffered because there were those in high places who were not sorry to see another of Nelson's enterprises fail.