Allday leaned forward to watch until they had disappeared on the curving staircase. He would not worry too much, he decided. Bolitho had a great deal on his mind, but he had shown his steel to her ladyship and the other bitch with the bare shoulders and the glance that would sit fair on a Plymouth trollop.

He reflected on the passage to Cape Town. It would be like no other, he thought. With Lady Catherine, Captain Keen and young Jenour in company, it would be more like a yacht than a voyage on the King's business. Allday considered Lady Catherine. How different from the sluts he had seen in this house. Tall, beautiful; a real sailor's woman, who could turn a man's heart into water or fire just by looking at him. She even cared about the Bolitho estate in Falmouth and had according to Ferguson, the steward and Allday's good friend, done wonders already with her suggestions and advice on how to make it pay again, to restore the losses incurred when Bolitho's father Captain James had been forced to sell much of the land to settle his other son's gambling debts.

Now they were all gone, he thought grimly. Apart from young Adam, to whom Bolitho had given the family name: there would be no more of them. It made him uneasy to imagine the old grey house empty, with none of its sons to come home from the sea.

It was something he shared with Bolitho, and a preoccupation he worried about in private. That one day the enemy's steel or a blast from the cannon's jaws would separate them. Like the master and his faithful dog, each fearful that the other would be left alone.

Upstairs conversation was returning to the dining-room. Bolitho barely noticed as they stopped outside an ornate gilded door.

Belinda faced him coldly. "As Elizabeth's father, I thought you should know. Had you been at sea I might have acted differently. But I knew you would be with… her."

"You were right." He returned the cold, steady stare. "Had my lady caught the fever from poor Dulcie Herrick I think I would have ended my life." He saw the shot go home. "But not before I had done for you!"