“After the Baltic and that hell at Copenhagen, who would have expected I should be sent to sea again within weeks?”

He looked around the quiet cabin as if listening for those lost sounds of battle. The despairing cries of the wounded, the jubilant cheers of the Danish boarders as they had swarmed up through these very stern windows to die on Major Clinton’s bloodied bayonets.

“How will she see it, Thomas? What use are words like duty and honour to a lady who has already given and lost so much?”

Herrick watched him, scarcely daring to breathe. He could see it all exactly. Bolitho hurrying back to Falmouth, preparing his explanations, how he would describe his obligations to Beauchamp even if it turned out to be a fruitless gesture.

Beauchamp had given his health in the war against France. He had selected young men to replace older ones whose minds had been left behind by a war which had expanded beyond their imagination.

He had offered Bolitho his first chance to command a squadron. Now he was dying, his work still unfinished.

Herrick knew Bolitho better than himself. So that was why Bolitho had come to the ship. The house had been empty and with no way of telling Belinda Laidlaw what had been decided.

“She’ll despise me, Thomas. Someone else should have gone in my place. Rear-admirals, especially junior ones, are two a penny. What am I? Some kind of god?”

Herrick smiled. “She’ll not think anything like that, and you know it! We both do.”

“Do we?” Bolitho walked past him, his hand brushing his shoulder as if to reassure himself. “I wanted to stay. But I needed to do Beauchamp’s bidding. I owe him that much.”

It had been like that old dream again. The house empty but for the servants, the wall above the sea lined with wild flowers and humming with insects. But the principal players were not there to enjoy it. Not even Pascoe, and that was almost as unnerving. He had received a letter of appointment to another ship within hours of Bolitho leaving for London.