'Patience, sir,' Templeton had soothed, 'gold is never found in great quantities.'

'Damn you for your philosophical cant, Templeton! Did Lord Dungarth never venture abroad, eh? Send himself on some mission to rouse his blood?'

'Yes, sir, indeed he did, and lost a leg if you recall, when his carriage was mined by Bonaparte's police.'

'You are altogether too reasonable for your own good, Templeton. If you were on my quarterdeck I should mast-head you for your impudence.'

'You are not on your quarterdeck, Captain Drinkwater,' Templeton had replied coolly, with that fastidious detachment which could either annoy or amuse Drinkwater.

'More's the damned pity,' Drinkwater had flung back, irritated on this occasion and aware that here, in the Admiralty, he was bereft of the trappings of pomp he had become so used to. It reduced the bottle-green coat to the uniform of a kind of servitude and his clipped speech to a pompous mannerism acquired at sea through the isolation of command. Neither consideration brought him much comfort, for the one reminded him of what he had relinquished, the other of what he had become.

Nevertheless, Drinkwater mused, leaning back in his chair and staring into the fire's dying embers, it seemed enough for Templeton methodically to unscramble the reports of spies while Drinkwater himself ached for something useful to do, instead of this tedious seeking of windmills to tilt at.

He was fast asleep when Templeton knocked on the door and he woke with a start as the clerk urgently shook his shoulder. Templeton's thin visage hung over him like a spectre.

'Captain Drinkwater, sir, wake up!'

'What the devil ...?' Drinkwater's heart pounded with alarm, for there was something wild in Templeton's eye.

'I have just received a message from Harwich, sir. Sent up post-haste by a Lieutenant Sparkman.'