Allday walked into the sunlight and squinted up at the flag which curled from the mizzen.

“I still say he should be Sir Richard!”

The young lieutenant on watch considered ordering him about his affairs and then recalled what he had been told of the admiral’s coxswain. Instead, he moved to the opposite side of the quarterdeck.

When the anchorage was eventually plunged into darkness, with only the riding lights and occasional beam from the shore to divide sea from land, even the Benbow felt to be resting. Exhausted from their constant work aloft and below, her people lay packed in their hammocks like pods in some sealed cavern. Beneath the lines of hammocks the guns stood quietly behind their ports, dreaming perhaps of those times when they had shaken the life from the air and made the world cringe with their fury.

Right aft in the great cabin Bolitho sat at his desk, a lantern spiralling gently above him as the ship pulled and tested her cables.

To most of the squadron, and to many of Benbow’s people, he was a name, a leader, whose flag they obeyed. Some had served with him before and were proud of it, proud to be able to give him his nickname which none of the new hands would know. Equality Dick. There were others who had created their own image of the young rear-admiral, as if by expanding it they would increase their own immortality and fame. There were a few, a very few, like the faithful Ozzard who was dozing like a mouse in his pantry, who saw Bolitho’s moods in the early morning or at the end of a great storm or sea-chase. Or Allday, who had been drawn to him when on the face of things he should have had their first meeting marred by the hatred and humiliation of a press-gang. Herrick, who had fallen asleep over the last pile of signed reports from the other captains, had known him at the height of excitement and at the depths of despair. Perhaps he better than any other would have recognized the Richard Bolitho who sat poised at his desk, the pen held deliberately above the paper, his mind lost to everything but the girl he was leaving behind.