Ebb tide

fitted with its two sheaves for the flag halliards.

'Well, of all the confounded nerve ...'

'I'm damned if I understand ...' Wheeler passed a hand over his furrowed brow. Next to him Wallace had begun a slow dégringolade beneath the table.

'Hang on for your cheese, Wallace,' someone said.

'Dale's right,' Drinkwater said, 'I remember not believing him when he swore he had told me the truth back in seventy-nine.'

'Whadya mean?' Wheeler asked.

A chorus of slurred voices demanded an explanation. 'Mr Dale made it out of pusser's cheese,' Drinkwater explained. 'He carved it out of a cheese which had been supplied for the hands to eat... it's cheese, d'you see? Cheese; it really is cheese!'

'Well I'm damned.' Wheeler sat back in his chair, looking fixedly at the object before him. 'Well, I'll be damned ...' and with that he slid slowly downwards, to join the company assembling beneath the table.

'Well, Nathaniel,' Appleby said, raising his glass and holding it up to the stumps of the candles in the candelabra, 'there are only a few of us worthy of remaining above the salt, it seems. Your health, sir.'

'And yours, Mr Appleby, and yours.'

'You don't care for any cheese, I take it?'

'Thank you, no.'

The next morning the marines turned out in order of route. Pulled ashore in the launch, bound for their billets at Chatham barracks, they left to ribald farewells from the high-spirited boats' crews. Wheeler departed with them, his pale face evidence of an aching head. Before he went down into the boat, he shook his fellow-officers' hands in farewell. To Drinkwater he said, 'Good luck, young shaver. Always remember what I have taught you: never flinch when you parry and always riposte.'

During the forenoon other officers left. Midshipman Baskerville and his gang were seen off without regret, but White, hung-over and emotional, took his departure with a catch in his voice.

'Damn it, Nat,' he said, wringing Drinkwater's hand, 'I'm deuced glad to be leaving, but sorry that we must part. You shall come and see us, eh? There's good shooting in Norfolk and there's always a bed at the Hall.'

'Of course, Chalky. We shall remain friends and I shall write as soon as I have determined what to do. You won't forget to deliver Blackmore's dunnage?'

'No, no. His house lies almost upon my direct route. I shall lodge at Colchester and make the detour to Harwich without undue delay'

'Please pass my condolences to his widow. You have my letter.'

'Of course.'

'Well goodbye, old fellow. Good fortune and thank you for your solicitude when I was aloft. Appleby considered you saved my life.'

'Then we are quits,' White said, following his sea-chest over the rail with a gallant smile that seemed to cause him some agony. Drinkwater, suffering himself, grinned unsympathetically.

After the departure of the officers and their dunnage of sea-chests, bundles, portmanteaux, sword-cases, hat-boxes and quadrant-boxes, the frigate's remaining boats were sent in to the boat-pond and she was left with a dockyard punt of uncertain antiquity to attend her. At noon the ship was boarded by the paymaster and his clerks who brought with them an iron-bound chest with its escort of marines from the dockyard detachment. The men were mustered to the shrilling of the pipes in an excited crowd under the final authority of the boatswain and his mates. They turned out in all the splendid finery of their best shore-going outfits, sporting ribboned hats, decorated pea-jackets, elaborately worked belts of white sennet and trousers with extravagantly flared legs. Many held their shoes in their hands and those who had donned theirs walked with the exaggerated awkwardness of men quite unused to such things. As each man received his due reward, signing or marking the purser's and the surgeon's ledgers for the deductions he had accrued over the commission, he turned away with a wide grin, picked up his ditty-bag and went to the rail in quest of transport. Word had passed along the river, and boats and wherries arrived to lie expectantly off Cyclops's quarters from where the unfortunate crew were confronted with the first joy of the shore, being subjected to the ravages of land-sharks who were demanding exorbitant charges to ferry them ashore.

In the wake of this exodus, the ship sank into a state of suspension, the silence along her decks eerie to those who had known them crowded with men and full of the buzz of human occupation.

Responsibility for the ship now fell upon the standing warrant officers, for Drinkwater's acting commission ceased the day Cyclops decommissioned, and in the absence of a master, the gunner was the senior. Drinkwater remained on board unofficially, his sole purpose in lingering to augment his knowledge and study, for he had received word from the Trinity House that he could attend for examination in a little over a fortnight and he was determined to secure at the very least a certificate as master as soon as possible. With the approval of the gunner, he therefore remained in the gunroom, and in that now echoing space once loud with Devaux and Wheeler's discourse, he unrolled Blackmore's charts and studied the legacy the old man had left him. Apart from a treatise on navigation, Drinkwater had found a dictionary and, to his surprise, some works of poetry. Somehow the memory of the sailing master and his didactic lectures on the mysteries of lunar distances did not square with the love-poems of Herrick and Rochester. Oddly, though, there seemed a strange, almost sinister message from beyond the grave implicit in a slim anthology which contained a work by Richard Kempenfelt. He read a couplet out loud:

Worlds and worlds round suns most distant roll,
And thought perplexes, but uplifts the soul ...

This discovery briefly diverted his thoughts to Elizabeth and the book of hers that he had found containing a hymn of the admiral's. But it was the manuscript books which most fascinated Drinkwater for, from his first appointment as second mate of a merchantman, Blackmore had kept notebooks containing details of anchorages and ports and the dangers of their approaches, of landfalls, conspicuous features, leads through swatchways and gatways, and the exhibited lights and daymarks of lighthouses and alarm vessels. Interspersed with the carefully scribed text were exquisite drawings, some washed in with water-colours, which turned these compendiums into private rutters of sailing directions. It was a double surprise to find these talents in the old man, filling Drinkwater with a profound regret that he had not done so earlier, that he had in some way failed the dead man. The discovery of these things after Blackmore's death laid a poignant burden upon him, a feeling of lost opportunity.

To the inhabitants of the cockpit as a whole, Blackmore had been a fussy old woman whose interest in versines, Napier's logarithms and plane sailing were as obsessive as they were boring. Fortunately Drinkwater had not found them so, and as a result had benefited from Blackmore's patiently shared experience. He was too young to know that such enthusiasm was enough for Blackmore and had decided the dying man to leave his professional papers to his aptest pupil.

Drinkwater turned the pages of Blackmore's rutters. They charted the dead man's life from the Gulf of Riga to the Dardanelles. There were notes on anchorages on the coasts of Kurland and Corsica, on ice in the Baltic and on the currents in the Strait of Gibraltar. There were notes of the approaches to Stralsund and some complex clearing marks off Ushant. There were observations on Blackmore's native Harwich Harbour, and on the Rivers Humber and Mersey, together with a neat chartlet of the Galuda River in South Carolina. Drinkwater shuddered. He remembered the Galuda too well, its mosquitoes, its dead and the manner of their dying. He did not care to think of such things and dismissed them from his mind. In an effort to concentrate, he wrote to Elizabeth, then bent himself to his studies.

Trinity House was an impressive building, situated on the rising ground of Tower Hill. Iron railings provided a forecourt to the stone façade, the ground floor of which comprised an arched entrance with Ionic columns supporting a plain entablature pierced by tall windows. These in turn were interspersed with ornate embellishments comprising the Corporation's arms and the medallions of King George III and Queen Charlotte, together with