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but he felt unable to move. Massie was the second lieutenant, a serious young man who held the appointment because his father was a vice-admiral. He was, as yet, an unknown quantity.
    Massie said, ‘I wonder if Sir Richard’s lady will be there.’
    He heard their feet move away. An innocent remark? And who did he mean? Catherine, or Belinda, Lady Bolitho?
    And there would be spite to bring out the worst. Shortly after
Unrivalled
had commissioned, the news of Emma Hamilton’s death had been released. Nelson’s lover and inspiration and the nation’s darling, but she had been allowed to die alone in Calais, in poverty, abandoned by so-called friends and those who had been entrusted with her care.
    The ship moved slightly to her cable and he saw his reflection in the thick glass.
    Brokenly he said, ‘I’ll never forget, Uncle!’
    But the ship moved again, and he was alone.
    Bryan Ferguson, the Bolitho estate’s one-armed steward, stared at the two ledgers on his table. Both had remained unopened. It was late evening but through the window he could still see tall trees silhouetted against the sky, as if the day was reluctant to end. He stood up and walked to the cupboard, pausing as the creeper outside the window rustled slightly. A wind, freshening from the south-east at last, as some of the fishermen had said it would. After all that stillness. Ferguson opened the cupboard and took out a stone bottle and one glass.
After all that sadness
.
    There was another glass in there, too, kept especially forthe times when John Allday came over on some pretext or other from the little inn at Fallowfield on the Helford River. The Old Hyperion: even the name had a deeper significance this day.
    It might be a while yet before John Allday came here. The
Frobisher,
Sir Richard Bolitho’s flagship, was coming home to be paid off. Or maybe not, now that Napoleon was in France on the rampage again. And it was only last year that the town had gone wild at the news: the allied armies were in Paris, Bonaparte was finished. Exile in Elba had not been enough; he had heard Lady Catherine say that it was like putting an eagle in an aviary. Others were of the opinion that Boney should have been hanged after all the misery and murder he had caused.
    But Allday would not remain on board the ship where Sir Richard had fallen. Only when he was back, perhaps sitting here with a wet between those big hands, would they know the real story. Unis, his wife, who ran the Old Hyperion, often received letters from him, but Allday himself could not write, so his words came through George Avery, Bolitho’s flag lieutenant. Theirs was a rare and strange relationship within the rigid bounds of the navy, and Allday had once remarked that it seemed wrong that while the flag lieutenant read and wrote his letters for him, he never received any himself. And from the moment when the dreadful news had broken in Falmouth, Ferguson had known that Allday would never entrust that moment to anyone, or share it, or commit it to paper. He would tell them himself, in person. If he could.
    He coughed; he had swallowed a measure of rum without noticing that he had poured it. He sat down again and stared at the unopened ledgers. Above his head he could hear his wife Grace moving about. Unable to rest, unable even to deal with her usual duties as housekeeper, a position of which she was very proud. As he was.
    He gripped the glass tightly with the one hand which was now able to do so much. Once he had believed he would be useless, just another piece of human flotsam left behind in this seemingly endless war. But Grace had nursed him through all of it. Now he found himself recalling the moment mostly at times like these, in the shadows, when it was easier to picturethe towering pyramids of sails, the lines of French ships, the deafening crash and roar of broadsides as the two fleets had joined in a bloody embrace. It had seemed to take all day