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nation’s hero, was buried at sea. Near his old
Hyperion,
where so many had died, men Ferguson had never forgotten. The same ship Adam had joined as a fourteen year old midshipman. Nancy, Lady Roxby, would be remembering that too, Adam in a captain’s uniform, but to her still the boy who had walked from Penzance when his mother had died. The name ‘Bolitho’written on a scrap of paper was all he had had. And now he was the last Bolitho.
    There were to be other, grander ceremonies in the near future, in Plymouth, and then at Westminster Abbey, and he wondered if Lady Catherine would go to London and risk the prying eyes and the jealous tongues which had dogged her relationship with the nation’s hero.
    He heard a step in the yard and guessed it was Young Matthew, the senior coachman, making his rounds, visiting the horses, his dog Bosun puffing slowly behind him. Old now, the dog was partly deaf and had failing eyesight, but no stranger would ever pass him without his croaking bark.
    Matthew had been in church also. Still called ‘young’, but a married man now, he was another part of the family,
the little crew
as Sir Richard had called them.
    Buried at sea. Perhaps it was better. No aftermath, no false display of grief. Or would there be?
    He thought of the tablet on the wall of the church beneath the marble bust of Captain Julius Bolitho, who had fallen in battle in 1664.
    The spirits of their fathers
    Shall start from every wave;
    For the deck it was their field of fame,
    And ocean was their grave.
    It said it all, especially to those assembled in the old church in this place of seafarers, the navy and the coastguard, fishermen and sailors from the packets and traders which sailed on every tide throughout the year. The sea was their life. It was also the enemy.
    He had sensed it when the church had resounded at the last to
The Sailors’ Hymn
.
    He had heard the bang of a solitary gun, like the one which had preceded the service, and seen Adam turn once to look at his first lieutenant. People had parted to allow the family to leave. Lady Catherine had reached out to touch Ferguson’s sleeve as she had passed; he had seen the veil clinging to her face.
    He went to the window again. The lights were still burning.He would send one of the girls to deal with it, if Grace was too stricken to do it.
    He thought of the shipwreck again. Adam had come to the house when Vice-Admiral Keen’s young wife had been there; Keen, too, had been aboard the
Golden Plover
.
    Zenoria, from the village of Zennor. He knew Allday had suspected something between them, and he himself had wondered what had happened that night. Then the girl lost her only child, her son by Keen, in an accident, and had thrown herself off the cliff at the notorious Trystan’s Leap. He had been with Catherine Somervell when they had brought the small, broken body ashore.
    Adam Bolitho had certainly changed in some way. Matured? He considered it. No, it went far deeper than that.
    Something Allday had said stood out in his mind, like the epitaph.
    They looked so right together
.
    Captain Adam Bolitho sat in one of the high-backed chairs by the open hearth and half-listened to the occasional moan of the wind. It was freshening, south-easterly; they would have to keep their wits about them tomorrow when
Unrivalled
weighed anchor.
    He shifted slightly in the chair, which with its twin was amongst the oldest furniture in the house. It was turned away from the dark windows, away from the sea.
    He stared at the goblet of brandy on the table beside him, catching the candlelight which brought life to this room, the grave portraits, the paintings of unknown ships and forgotten battles.
    How many Bolithos had sat here like this, he wondered, not knowing what the next horizon might bring, or if they would ever return?
    His uncle must have thought it on that last day when he had left this house to join his flagship. Leaving Catherine outside