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in London had warned him. He needed rest, more treatment, regular care. It would have meant remaining ashore—worse than that, an appointment at the Admiralty.
    So why had he asked, almost demanded, another appointment with the fleet? Anywhere, or so it had sounded at the time to the Lords of Admiralty.
    Three of his superiors there had told him that he had more than earned a London appointment even before his last great victory. Yet when he had persisted, Bolitho had had the feeling they were equally glad he had declined their offers.
    Fate—it must be that. He turned and looked deep into the great cabin. The low, white deckhead, the pale green leather of the chairs, the screen doors which led to the sleeping quarters or to the teeming world of the ship beyond, where a sentry guarded his privacy around the clock.
    Hyperion— it had to be an act of Fate.
    He could recall the last time he had seen her, after he had worked her into Plymouth. The staring crowds who had thronged the waterfront and Hoe to watch the victor returning home. So many killed, so many more crippled for life after their triumph over Lequiller’s squadron in Biscay, and the capture of his great hundred-gun flagship Tornade which Bolitho was later to command as another admiral’s flag captain.
    But it was this ship which he always remembered. Hyperion, seventy-four. He had walked beside the dock in Plymouth on that awful day when he had said his last farewell; or so he had believed. Battered and ripped open by shot, her rigging and sails flayed to pieces, her splintered decks darkly stained with the blood of those who had fought. They said she would never stand in the line of battle again. There had been many moments while they had struggled back to port in foul weather when he had thought she would sink like some of her adversaries. As he had stood looking at her in the dock he had almost wished that she had found peace on the seabed. With the war growing and spreading, Hyperion had been made into a stores hulk. Mastless, her once-busy gundecks packed with casks and crates, she had become just a part of the dockyard.
    She was the first ship of the line Bolitho had ever commanded. Then, as now, he remained a frigate-man at heart, and the idea of being captain of a two-decker had appalled him. But then, too, he had been desperate, although for different reasons. Plagued by the fever which had nearly killed him in the Great South Sea, he was employed ashore at the Nore, recruiting, as the French Revolution swept across the continent like a forest fire. He could recall joining this ship at Gibraltar as if it was yesterday. She had been old and tired and yet she had taken him to her, as if in some way they needed each other.
    Bolitho heard the trill of calls, the great splash as the anchor plummeted down into the waters he knew so well.
    His flag captain would come to see him very soon now for orders. Try as he might, Bolitho could not see Captain Edmund Haven as an inspiring leader or his personal adviser.
    A colourless, impersonal sort of man, and yet even as he considered Haven he knew he was being unfair. Bolitho had joined the ship just days before they had weighed for the passage to the Indies. And in the thirty which had followed, Bolitho had stayed almost completely isolated in his own quarters, so that even Allday, his coxswain, was showing signs of concern.
    It was probably something Haven had said on their first tour of the ship, the day before they had put to sea.
    Haven had obviously thought it odd, eccentric perhaps, that his admiral should wish to see anything beyond his cabin or the poop, let alone show interest in the gundecks and orlop.
    Bolitho’s glance rested on the sword rack beside the screen. His own old sword, and the fine presentation one. How could Haven have understood? It was not his fault. Bolitho had taken his apparent dissatisfaction with his command like a personal insult. He had snapped, “This ship