In the darkness and at this speed Kestrel could be in among the breakers before there was time to go about. Anxiously he strode forward to hail the lookout at the crosstrees. 'Who's aloft?'

'Tregembo, zur.' The Cornishman's burr was reassuring. Tregembo had turned up like a bad penny, one of the draft of six men from the Nore guardship that had completed Kestrel's complement. Drinkwater had known Tregembo on the frigate Cyclops where the man had been committed for smuggling. He was still serving out the sentence of a court that had hanged his father for offering revenue officers armed resistance. To mitigate the widow's grief her son was drafted into the navy. That he had appeared on the deck of Kestrel was another link in the chain of coincidences that Drinkwater found difficult to dismiss as merely random.

'Keep a damned good lookout, Tregembo!'

'Aye, aye, zur.'

Drinkwater went aft and luffed the cutter while a cast of the lead was taken. 'By the mark, five.' Kestrel filled and drove on. There was a tension on deck now and Drinkwater felt himself the centre of it. Jessup hovered solicitously close. Why the devil did Griffiths not come on deck? Five fathoms was shoal water, but it was shoal water hereabouts for miles. They might be anywhere off the Somme estuary. He suppressed a surge of panic and made up his mind. He would let her run for a mile or two and sound again.

'Breakers, zur! Fine on the lee bow!'

Drinkwater rushed forward and leapt into the sagging larboard shrouds. He stared ahead and could see nothing. Then he saw them, a patch of greyness, lighter than the surrounding sea. His heart beat violently as he cudgelled his memory. Then he had it, Les Ridins du Treport, an isolated patch with little water over it at this state of the tide. He was beginning to see the logic of a landfall at low water. He made a minor adjustment to the course, judging the east-going stream already away close in with the coast. They had about three miles to go.