Kydd leaped to his feet, the boat teetering over and just recovering. He dropped to the tiller and they altered course for the stranger.

“What if it’s a Frenchie?” Kydd asked.

Renzi looked at him and shrugged.

The evening waves reared up higher, it seemed, dusky shadows in their wake, the beginnings of a sunset ahead. In a fever of excitement they saw the white fleck come in and out of existence, then remain steady.

“If it’s a Frog, c’n we get away agin’?” the private wanted to know.

“I’m afraid not,” Renzi replied. Almost anything afloat would outsail their little craft. There was no point in hiding the fact.

The white grew in size, resolving into three distinct blobs, and Renzi could see that it was a ship-rigged vessel on a broad reach, cutting their course ahead. Her hull was obscured most of the time by the heave of the swell, but it was sufficient to note that she had but one gundeck, and therefore was not Duke William. The disappointment was hard yet he had no reason to think that it would be Duke William and he was angry with himself for the loose thinking.

“Une frégate française, je crois!” the fisherman said, with great satisfaction.

The masts altered their aspect, and it was apparent that the ship was turning to intercept. “He thinks it’s a French frigate,” Renzi told Kydd quietly.

“Ce vaisseau-là c’est La Concorde de L’Orient,” the old man said definitively.

“What’s he say?” Kydd said.

“Says that’s La Concorde.”

“You sure?” Kydd said, his voice unnaturally intense.

“Yes.”

“Ha!” Kydd shouted. He transfixed the old man with a look of triumph. “Tell the old bastard that it’s a French frigate, all right – but she was taken by us in the first week of the war! By Circe 32, if my memory serves aright!” He laughed.

With a bone in her teeth the frigate came along in fine style – and, sure enough, above the yellow and black of her hull streamed out the white ensign of Admiral Howe’s fleet.

The soldiers, roused from their stupor, capered insanely. The private tore off his red coat and waved it frantically over his head, screaming in delight.

“God rot me! An’ what could yer do then, Tom?”

Stirk’s interest encouraged Kydd to go on. He grinned at the circle of faces and said, “Well, what else could I do if I didn’t fancy spendin’ me days in a Frog chokey? It was over the fence and in with the pigs ’n’ all their shite.”

There was a hissing of indrawn breath. The dog-watch was well under way, the off-duty watchmen taking a pipe of baccy on the fo’c’sle in the gentle glow of the lanthorns, others with their grog cans.

“Hey now, Pedro! Yon Kydd – his pot has the mark of Moll Thompson upon it!”

The Iberian started, then grimaced. “For a story li’ that, I give,” he said, filling Kydd’s empty tankard from a small beer tub.

“Where is Renzi?” Claggett asked.

Kydd looked at him levelly and said, “He’s got his reasons right enough, Samuel. We just leave him alone, should he want it that way.”

“Didn’t mean ter be nosy, Tom, but yer must admit, he’s a queer fish, is Renzi.” Kydd said nothing, drinking his beer and still regarding Claggett steadily. “Yair, well, ’e’s yer friend an’ all,” Claggett said.

“I were taken once, but it weren’t the Johnny Crapauds!” Doggo’s roughened voice cut into the silence, his features animated.

“Well, ’oo was it, then?” said Jewkes.

Doggo looked at him. “Why, it were in… let me see, year ’eighty-six, it were.” He scratched at his side. “I were waister in the Dainty sloop, ’n’ we took the ground one night on the Barbary coast. Not th’ best place ter be, yer’ll admit. Well, seas get up ’n’ next thing she’s a-poundin’ something cruel. Starts ter break up, so’s we gets thrown in the oggin all standin’. O’ course, we nearly all drowns. In fac’, it were just me left to tell yez the tale. Well, I gets dashed ashore ’n’ just manages ter crawl up the strand, when all these A-rabs on ’orses comes ridin’ up. I ’eard o’ these Bedoos before, see, they’re bad cess, but I can’t do anythin’ like I am. They ties me up ’n’ rides off with me ter their camp.”

His ugly face grew solemn. “There, mates, it were right roaratorious, what wi’ me bein’ a white man ’n’ all. See, they wants me as their slave. ’N’ that’s what I was, sure enough – has to bow ’n’ scrape, all togged up in saucy gear wi’ turban ’n’ all – you’d ’ave ’ad a good laff should you’ve seen me! Yeah, seemed I were there ferever.”

“Did yer get away, Doggo?” Jewkes asked, bringing on a general laugh at his question.

There was a play at discovering his pot was empty. After it was filled again, Doggo continued. “Well, mates, seems an A-rab princess falls in love wi’ me, takes me fer her own. Sees me un’appy like, it breaks ’er heart. So she decides to put love before dooty ’n’ after a night o’ passion sees me off afore dawn on a fast horse, ’n’ here I is!”

The whole fo’c’sle fell about in laughter.

With the spreading warmth of the drink inside, the soft dusk and his shipmates about him, Kydd lay back happily, staring up at the stars just beginning to wink into existence in an ultramarine sky, and pondered at the extremes of experience that life could bring.

It was sheer luck that Duke William and her escorting frigates had been passing at that particular time. She had been on passage back to her station after landing her evacuees in Plymouth, and at no time would ever have contemplated a blockade of their part of the coast. In the sick bay men writhed in pain, wretches who would have reason to curse the experience if they survived, but Kydd had – and without a scratch. And the old fisherman had been set free with his boat, but had fiercely scorned the couple of guineas offered him by the frigate captain and sailed off making obscene gestures.

And, of course, the proud moment of being received in the great cabin by his captain to tell his story. “Remarkable!” Caldwell had said, making free with his scented handkerchief at certain points in the tale. Besides ordering a gratis issue of slops to replace their tattered and smelly clothes, he had courteously enquired if there was anything further he could do for Kydd.

“To be rated seaman!” Kydd had replied immediately.

Raising his eyebrows, the Captain had glanced at his clerk. “Should you satisfy the boatswain, by all means.”

The tough old boatswain had been plain. It would not be easy. “Hand, reef and steer, that’s only the start of it, lad. Good seaman knows a mort more. But I’ll see as how you gets a proper chance to get it all under yer belt.”

He was as good as his word. Paired off with Doud, Kydd found himself in every conceivable element of seamanship. From the tip of the jibboom to the royal yardarms, the cro’jack to the fore topsail stuns’l boom, sometimes frightened, always determined, he steadily made their personal acquaintance. Doud was a prime seaman, having been to sea since a boy; he was also an excellent choice as mentor. He challenged and cajoled Kydd unmercifully, but was always ready with a hand or an explanation.

“We’ll take in a first reef in the topsails, I believe,” said Lieutenant Lockwood. His serious young face studied the gray scud overhead.

“Way aloft, topmen – man topsail clewlines and buntlines! Weather topsail braces!”

The watch on deck was mustered: some began their skyward climb to the tops while others at the braces heaved laboriously around the yards to lay them square to their marks. The sails, no longer taut and working, flapped noisily.

It was Kydd’s first experience at laying out on the yardarm. It was one thing moving out on a steadily pulling set and drawing sail, as he had already done with Doud, and another to achieve something on a loose cloud of flogging canvas.

The captain of the top was unsympathetic. “Weather yardarm, cully,” he ordered.