the clusters of seamen and scarlet-coated marines. His ship, all one hundred and fifty feet of her, over a thousand tons of weapons, masts and spars, and the men to serve and fight her.
His uncle had confided that he had always hated heights, had feared going aloft when his ship had made or reefed sails. Another lesson Adam had learned, that fear could be contained if it seemed more dangerous to reveal it.
He glanced at his companion. A leathery face and a pair of the keenest eyes he had seen, like polished glass.
He hesitated. “Sullivan, isn’t it?”
The seaman showed his uneven teeth. “Thass me, sir.” He smiled slightly as Adam unslung the telescope.
“Where away?” It was strange: despite his attempt to stay at arm’s length, the ship was closing in. A face he could barely recall. A typical Jack, some would say. Hard, rough, and, in their way, simple men.
“Same bearin’, sir.”
He steadied the glass, raising it very carefully as breaking crests leaped into view, magnified into small tidal waves in the powerful lens.
He felt the spar quiver and shake against his body, mast upon mast, down to the ship’s keelson. He could remember the genuine pleasure and pride of the men who had built her when he had insisted they come aboard for her commissioning.
And there she was, rising and dipping, her canvas dark against the scudding clouds.
The lookout said, “Square-rigged at the fore, sir.”
Adam nodded and waited for the glass to steady again. A brigantine, handling well in the offshore wind, almost bows-on. When he lowered the glass she seemed to drop away to a mere sliver of colour and movement. It never failed to surprise him that men like Sullivan, who would scorn a telescope, or trade it for a new knife or fresh clothing, or drink if it was offered, could still see and recognise another vessel when a landsman might not even notice it.
“Local, d’ you think?”
Sullivan watched him with sudden interest. “Spaniard, I’d say, sir. I seen ’em afore, as far to the south’rd as Good Hope. Handy little craft.” He added doubtfully, “Rightly ’andled, ’er course, sir!”
Adam took another look. The master was right. They would never catch her with the wind against them. And why should they care? Lose more time and distance when tomorrow they should lie in the shadow of the Rock?
It was like yesterday. He had been returning to Plymouth and it had been reported that a boat had been heading out to meet them. Not merely a boat: an admiral’s barge, the flag officer himself coming to tell him, to be the first to prepare him for the news of his uncle’s death. Vice-Admiral Valentine Keen. His uncle’s friend. He felt the same stab of guilt; he would never lose it. Zenoria’s husband. After her death he had married again. But like that moment alone in the silence of the house, he had thought only of Zenoria. What he had done.
Keen had told him what he knew, the circumstances of Bolitho’s death and of his burial at sea. Nothing was definite, except that his flagship had engaged two frigates, manned by renegades and traitors who, with others, had aided Napoleon’s escape from Elba; he had marched on Paris almost before the allies had recovered from the shock.
Bethune would know more of the details by now, where the frigates had taken refuge prior to their unexpected meeting with Frobisher, who was involved, how it had been planned. He found he was gripping the telescope so tightly that his knuckles were almost white. Spain was an ally now. And yet a Spaniard had been involved.
He repeated quietly, “Spaniard, you say?”
The man regarded him thoughtfully. Sir Richard Bolitho’s nephew. A fire-eater, they said. A fighter. Sullivan had been at sea on and off for most of his forty years, and had served several captains, but could not recall ever speaking to one. And this one had even known his name.
“I’d wager a wet on it, sir.”
A wet. What John Allday would say. Where was he now? How would he go on? The old dog without his master.
Adam smiled. “A wager it is then. A wet you shall have!” He seized a stay and began to slide towards the deck, heedless of the tar on his white breeches. Instinct? Or the need to prove something? When he reached the deck the others were waiting for him.
“Sir?” Galbraith, poised and guarded.
“Spanish brigantine. He’s a damned good lookout.”
Galbraith relaxed slowly. “Sullivan? The best, sir.”
Adam did not hear him. “That vessel is following us.” He looked at him directly. It was there. Doubt. Caution. Uncertainty. “I shall not forget that craft, Mr Galbraith.”
Wynter leaned forward and said eagerly, “An enemy, sir?”
“An assassin, I believe, Mr Wynter.”
He swung away; Jago was holding his hat for him. “See that the wardroom mess provides a double tot for Sullivan when he is relieved.”
They watched him walk to the companion-way, as if, like the two midshipmen he had seen earlier, he did not have a care in the world.
Midshipman Fielding stood examining the telescope which the captain had just returned to him. He would put it in the next letter to his parents, when he got round to it. How the captain had spoken to him. No longer a stranger… He smiled, pleased at the aptness of the phrase. That was it.
He recalled the time he had gone to waken the captain when Lieutenant Wynter had been concerned about the wind. He had dared to touch his arm. It had been hot, as if the captain had had a fever. And he had called out something. A woman’s name.
He would leave that out of the letter. It was private.
But he wondered who the woman was.
It was like sharing something. He thought of the captain’s easy confidence when he had slithered down to the deck like one of the topmen. Perhaps the others had not noticed it.
He smiled again, pleased with himself. No longer a stranger.
Vice-Admiral Sir Graham Bethune walked to the quarter window of the great cabin and observed the activity of countless small craft in the shadow of the Rock. He had visited Gibraltar many times throughout his career, never thinking that one day his own flagship would be lying here, with himself at the peak of his profession. Although a frigate captain earlier in the war, he had been surprised and not a little dismayed to discover how his post at the Admiralty had softened him.
He glanced at the dress coat with its heavy gold-laced epaulettes which hung on one of the chairs, the measure of the success which had brought him to this. He was one of the youngest flag officers on the Navy List. He had always told himself that he would not change, that he was no different from that young, untried captain in his first serious encounter with the enemy, with only his own skills and determination to sustain him.
Or from the midshipman. He stared at the shadowed side of the Rock. Aboard the little sloop-of-war Sparrow, Richard Bolitho’s first command.
He still could not come to terms with it. He could remember the signal being brought to his spacious rooms at the Admiralty, the writing blurring as he had read and understood that the impossible had happened: Napoleon had surrendered. Abdicated. It had ended. A release for so many, but for him like a great door being slammed shut.
He stared around the cabin, the rippling reflections of water on the low deckhead. It had seemed so small, so cramped after his life in London. He had changed.
He could hear the movement of the men on the upper deck, the creak of tackles as stores sent across from one of the supply vessels from England were hoisted inboard.
His thoughts returned to Catherine Somervell, from whom they were never far away. That night at the reception at Castlereagh’s home, when Admiral Lord Rhodes had stunned the guests by calling Bolitho’s wife to join him and share the applause for her absent husband. When Bethune had begged to be allowed to escort Catherine to her Chelsea house, she had refused. She had been composed enough to consider him; there was enough scandal. Later he had heard of the attack at her home, a disgusting attempt to rape her by a Captain Oliphant, apparently a cousin of Rhodes. After that, things had moved quickly. Rhodes had not become First Lord as he had hoped and
