'What is it?' He raised himself on a precarious elbow and quizzed the midshipman as the cot lanyards alternately slackened and snapped taut so that his awkwardly prone body was feather-light one second and leaden the next. The ship's stern was lifted rapidly as a sea slammed viciously under her transom and against her stern windows over which the dead-lights had been dropped. Water drove in round the sashes, squirting over the settee before running to join the mess slopping back and forth across the chequer-painted canvas on the deck.

Midshipman Belchambers grabbed a corner of the sideboard, his Adam's apple bobbing uncertainly above his grubby stock.

'I can't say, sir,' he gabbled and, clapping a hand over his mouth, fled from the captain's presence.

Drinkwater stared after the boy. The grey gleam of water, mixed with fragments of biscuit from the shattered china barrel, flowed in miniature torrents round the legs of the lashed table, and overturned chairs slid back and forth, back and forth ...

'God's bones!' Drinkwater blasphemed through clenched teeth, hoisting himself carefully out of his cot and seeking a footing in his stockinged feet amid the cold swirl of the water. The shards of porcelain grated across the deck like shingle on a beach as he felt his stockings take up the water. Drinkwater's shins were already criss-crossed with bruises, his old shoulder wound ached abominably, his mouth was foul with the taste of bile and his eyes ground grittily in their sockets, sure evidence of lack of sleep.

He clung upright with difficulty, drawing on coat and cloak, despite the stuffiness of the air. Outside his cabin the marine sentry slithered towards him and they collided amid a confused and embarrassed explosion of apology and profanity. Patrician's motion was unpredictably irregular, a bucking, scending, rolling caused by the seas which slammed her sides and ran below by a hundred leaky routes. A rancid stench rose from the crowded berth-deck below and was given seeming embodiment by the creaks and groans of the labouring ship. Grasping the companionway man-ropes, Drinkwater climbed carefully on deck.