And he had seen it in his sister’s eyes when she and Martyn had talked and laughed together. And in the watchful glances from his mother.

He walked to the opposite end of the screened lobby and peered through to the big double wheel, at the scrubbed gratings where two or more helmsmen would stand when the ship was under way, and heeling over to her towering pyramid of canvas. Another grating was propped upright by the mizzen, probably to dry, but suddenly reminiscent of those far-off days in Manxman and the first flogging he had ever witnessed. It was something you had to accept, a necessary discipline. What else would deter the persistent offender?

Accept, perhaps, but Bolitho had never grown accustomed to it. And yet he had seen some of the older hands bare their backs and boast of their endurance of the cat, as if the terrible scars were something to be carried with pride.

He could still remember standing with the other midshipmen, the very first time he had heard the pipe, ‘All hands lay aft to witness punishment!’

He had found himself gripping the arm of another middy, his entire body shaking to every crack of the lash across the torn skin.

And that other stark and brutal memory, which never completely left him, months or even a year after that, when he had been face-to-face with an enemy, unskilled and desperate, and carried bodily by the stamping, cursing crush of boarders across the other vessel’s deck. Pirates, smugglers, rebels… they were the enemy. Cutlass, pike and boarding axe, their faces masks of hate and anger. Sailors he knew, or thought he knew, stabbing and hacking heedless of the screams, men falling, voices urging them forward.