'Ah, devil take it, it's a damned nuisance. And now Appleby tells me it's gouty. And before you raise the matter of my bottle,' he hurried on with mock severity, 'I'll have you know that without it I'd be intolerable, see.' They grinned at each other, their relationship a stark contrast with the formality of Victory's quarterdeck. They had sailed together for six years, first in the twelve-gun cutter Kestrel, and their intimacy was established upon a mutually understood basis of friendship and professional distance. For Griffiths was an infirm man, subject to recurring malarial fevers, whose command had been bestowed for services rendered to British intelligence. Without Hellebore Griffiths would have rotted ashore, a lonely and embittered bachelor in anonymous lodgings. He had requested Drinkwater as his first lieutenant partly out of gratitude, partly out of friendship. And if Griffiths sought to protect his own career by delegating with perfect confidence to Drinkwater, he could console himself with the thought that he did the younger man a service.

'You forget, Mr Drinkwater, that if I had not broke my leg last year you'd not have been in command of Kestrel at Camperdown.'

Drinkwater agreed, but any further rejoinder was cut short by the arrival of the storeship commanders.

To starboard the dun-coloured foothills of the Atlas Mountains shone rose-red in the sunset. To larboard the hills of southern Spain fell to the low promontory of Tarifa. Far ahead of her elongated shadow the Mediterranean opened before the bowsprit of the brig. From her deck the horizontal light threw into sharp relief every detail of her fabric: the taut lines of her rigging, the beads of her blocks, her reddened canvas and an unnatural brilliance in her paintwork. Astern on either quarter, in dark silhouette, Hecuba and Molly followed them. Drinkwater ceased pacing as the skinny midshipman barred his way.