'She's leaving the line and wearing round!' Southwick exclaimed incredulously. Ramage realized at once the Commodore's intention. But the Captain was a mile farther away than the Kathleen: a mile she'd take twenty minutes to cover. And unless Cordoba's leading ships could be delayed for twenty minutes, she'd arrive too late.

The fantasy which had become an idea now became a necessity if the Commodore was to succeed, and Ramage felt fear. Swiftly he sketched on the pad, did some calculations in his head, and then turned to Southwick. He could not look the old man in the eye as he said in a strangled voice barely recognizable as his own: 'Mr. Southwick, I'll trouble you to tack the ship and steer to intercept the San Nicolas.'

Turning away quickly, not wanting to see Southwick's face, he looked back at the Captain. After wearing round, she'd come back through the line astern of the Diadem and ahead of the Excellent. Then (alone and, he guessed, not only without orders but in defiance of them) the Commodore would steer for the leading - nearest, anyway - Spaniards.

Southwick had given the necessary orders to put the Kathleen about on the other tack before fully realizing the significance of what Ramage was planning to do. Once he did understand he felt humbled that someone young enough to be his son could make such a decision with no apparent fear or doubt. He was pacing up and down with the same relaxed, almost cat-like walk as if he was on watch, and occasionally he rubbed that scar.

Without thinking, Southwick spontaneously strode up to Ramage, looked at him directly with his bloodshot eyes, and said softly with a mixture of pride, affection and admiration: 'If you could have lived long enough, you'd have been as great an admiral as your father.'

With that he turned and began bellowing orders which steadied the Kathleen on her new course with Cordoba's leading ships approaching broad on her larboard bow, the British line stretching away on her larboard quarter, and the Captain just passing clear of the Excellent’s bow and breaking away from the line.

There was nothing more to do for a few minutes and Ramage leaned back against the taffrail looking for the hundredth time at Cordoba's ships. Only then did he picture the physical results of his decision, and as he did so the real fear came.

It came slowly, like autumn mist rising almost imperceptibly in a valley; it went through his body like fine rain soaking into a cotton shirt. And Ramage felt he had two selves. One was a physical body whose strength had suddenly vanished, whose hands trembled, whose knees had no muscles, whose stomach was a sponge slopping with cold water, whose vision sharpened to make colours brighter, outlines harder, details which normally passed unnoticed show up almost stark. The other self was remote, aloof from his body, aghast at what was to be done, appalled that he had planned it, yet knowing full well he had ordered it and coldly determined to see to its execution.

And then he remembered watching the Commodore and realizing the little man often had the same look in his eye that Southwick had when he was in a killing mood. And he remembered wondering then whether he could himself kill a man in cold blood. Well, the wondering was over. Now he knew he could kill sixty men in cold blood, sixty of his own men, not the enemy, and the realization made him want to vomit.

He found himself looking at a coil of rope: fear made him see it with such clarity that he might never have seen rope before in his life. Every inch or so was flecked with a coloured yarn - 'The Rogue's Yarn', a strand put in when the rope was made up in the Royal dockyards, so if it was stolen it would always be recognizable as Navy Board property. Had he - and Southwick, and Commodore Nelson, and perhaps half the commission and warrant officers in the Fleet - a Rogue's Yarn woven into their souls that set them apart from other people, that let them kill their own men and the enemy without compunction?

Yet when he looked again at the Spanish ships and knew he had less than half an hour to live, the fear ebbed away as silently as it had come. Slowly he realized fear came only when death was a matter of chance, a possibility (or even probability) yet beyond a man's certain, knowledge or control. But now, because he knew for certain he'd be killed as a result of his own deliberate decision - thus removing the element of chance - he accepted its inevitability and unexpectedly found an inner peace and, more important, an outward calm.

Or was it really just cold-bloodedness? Perhaps - it was hard to distinguish.

Jackson had saved his life - and despite his loyalty and bravery, Jackson must die. Southwick, who cheerfully obeyed every order from someone a third of his age (and a tenth of his experience, for that matter) had been told a few moments ago that he was in fact sentenced to death – and merely expressed genuine regret that Lieutenant Ramage would not live out the day because otherwise he'd have become as great an admiral as his father. Poor father – John Uglow Ramage, tenth Earl of Blazey, Admiral of the White, would also be the last earl: his only son was also his only male heir, so one of the oldest earldoms in the kingdom would become extinct. Poor mother, for that matter. He closed his eyes for a moment and pictured Gianna but opened them almost at once: if anyone could make him change his mind...

Then there was Stafford, the Cockney locksmith who'd prefer to watch the guillotine blade drop, should he ever be strapped down on 'The Widow', instead of being blindfolded. Bridewell Lane wouldn't see him again. Then the rest of those with him at Cartagena - Fuller of the fishing line; the young Genovesi, Rossi; the cheery coloured seaman Maxton; and Sven Jensen ... And the Kathleen herself; she lived, had a will of her own, had peculiar little quirks her captain had to understand and pander to, who responded with all her wooden soul when sailed properly, but became dead in the water the moment anyone ignored for a moment the precise set of her sails or used her helm with a hard hand. Matchwood - he was consigning her to matchwood, shattered flotsam to be cast up piece by piece at the whim of wind and current for month after month and probably year after year along the Portuguese, Spanish and African coasts. Men speaking many languages would seize those pieces of her timbers and carry them home to burn on their fires or patch their homes and never know whence they came.

He found his eyes fixed on a few square inches of deck planking at his feet: he saw each hard ridge of grain standing proud above the tiny valleys where the softer wood between had been scrubbed away over the years by countless seamen. He saw the grain, the knots, the very texture of the wood with a new clarity, as though for all his life without realizing it he'd been looking through a steamed-up glass window which had been suddenly and unexpectedly wiped clear. He saw the wrinkling of his soft black leather boots marked as white lines where salt had dried in the creases. He felt the downdraught of the mainsail and glanced up to realize he'd never before really seen the texture of the sail. Nor, as he looked over the larboard bow, the gentle pyramiding of the sea. Nor the deadliness of a group of five or six enemy sail of the line, one of them the largest ship in the world, the biggest thing the hand of man had ever created to float on the sea, and intended only to kill.

The sight brought him back to the immediate present and the limited future. The Kathleen was close enough now for the hulls of Cordoba's leading ships to be outlined above the line of the horizon, and for a moment their size and slow progress took Ramage back to a childhood episode: crouching muddy, nervous and excited in the rushes at the side of a lake, his eyes only a few inches above the water, watching swans returning to their nests near by with their cygnets: rounded, majestic, splendid in their graceful movements, yet each with hard, wicked and spiteful eyes, ready to savage anything in their path - particularly a small boy lurking in the rushes.