Chapter One

      ‘Buck up, Captain Everard,’ he told his reflection in the mirror. ‘You promised you would do this, so to Kent you will go.’

      Joseph Everard, post captain, Royal Navy, turned around to stare hard at Lieutenant David Newsome’s paltry heap of personal effects on his desk, wishing he could make it go away. It remained there unmovable, another sad testament to the fleet action now called Trafalgar. That one word was enough to convey all the horror, the pounding and the fire, which combined to create the most bittersweet of victories, with the well-nigh inconceivable loss of Vice Admiral Sir Horatio Nelson.

      Had anyone been interested, Joe could have explained his reluctance to deliver David’s effects in person. It wasn’t because his second luff had done anything amiss, or behaved in any way unbecoming an officer and a gentleman. True, he was young, but weren’t we all, at some point?

      Joe had done this sad duty many times before, whenever possible. He should have been inured to the tears, the sadness and the resentment, even, when a mother, father or wife had stared daggers at him, as if he was the author of their misery, and not Napoleon. Left to his own devices, Joe Everard would happily have served King and country patrolling the seven seas and engaging in no fleet actions whatsoever. He had never required a major, lengthy war to prove his manhood.

      They were all puppets in the hands of Napoleon. Now that war had resumed, after the brief Peace of Amiens, Joe saw no shortcut to victory for years.

      Something worse explained his reluctance for this distasteful duty, something Lord St Vincent, or as he had been then, Captain John Jervis, had described one night.

      They had come off victorious in some fleet action or other—they tended to blur together—and Captain Jervis and his men were moping about in the wardroom. The wounded were tended and quiet, and the pumps in the bowels of the ship had finished their noisy job.

      ‘Look at us,’ Captain Jervis had remarked to his first lieutenant, an unfortunate fellow who died the following year at Camperdown. ‘There is nothing quite as daunting as the lethargy that victory brings.’

      No doubt. Trafalgar, a victory as huge as anyone