'A glass of wine, Captain?' The flag-lieutenant beckoned a servant forward and Drinkwater hitched his sword between his legs, laid his cocked hat across his lap and took the tall Venetian goblet from the salver. 'Thank you. I have two bags of mail for the fleet in my barge and a draft of forty-three men for the squadron…'

'I shall inform the Captain of the Fleet, sir. Sir William, your permission?'

'By all means.' The admiral bent over the opened dispatches as the flag-lieutenant left the cabin. The servant withdrew and Drinkwater was left with Cornwallis, his immobile secretary and another man, a dark stranger in civilian clothes, who seemed to be regarding Drinkwater with some interest and whose evident curiosity Drinkwater found rather irksome and embarrassing. He avoided this scrutiny by studying his surroundings. The great cabin of His Britannic Majesty's 112-gun ship Ville de Paris was a luxurious compartment compared with his own. As a first-rate line of battleship the Ville de Paris was almost a new ship, built as a replacement for Rodney's prize, the flagship of Admiral De Grasse, taken at the Battle of Saintes in the American War and so badly knocked about that she had foundered on her way home across the stormy Atlantic. It was an irony that a ship so named should bear the flag of the officer responsible for keeping the French fleet bottled up in Brest. Drinkwater did not envy the admiral his luxury: the monotony of blockade duty would have oppressed him. Even in a frigate attached to the inshore squadron cruising off Ushant, the perils of tides and rocks would far outweigh the risk of danger from the enemy coupled as they were with the prevailing strong westerly winds. As his old friend Richard White constantly wrote and told him, he was lucky to have avoided such an arduous and thankless task.