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Admiral would have him in his fleet any day,’ said Phipps. ‘He has goodwill for boys.’
    â€˜Then heave-ho,’ said the others, grabbing Covington by the shoulders and frog-marching him ahead of them down the road. With their meeting over they declared their starvation, and broke into a trot. Covington ran with the sailor and his boys through the dark, out on a muddy road past the town and into a barn where they made a fire of sticks. They strung lanterns on beams and roasted potatoes and turnips in the coals. Covington liked the way they did everything with a snap, a rush, and then stretched their legs out before them and smoked their fierce pipes, which they plugged with tobacco handed around in pinches by John Phipps. One of them produced a pullet from his cloak and made ready to despatch it to perdition, only to find John Phipps’s cane across his neck. He asked where he had got the bird, and only allowed him to strangle it when satisfied it was from under a bush near a yeoman’s farm. ‘I would have you plucked if it came from any deserving poor,’ he said.
    With firelight licking their pinched faces the boys told stories of where they were from. All but one belonged in Bedfordshire and neighbouring counties. Like Covington they had been ejected from their workplaces or else hadnever known anything except wandering the roads. In the right season if they were lucky they dug potatoes, cut willows, and drove turkeys to market for the reward of a few grubby pence. Now they would take their chance on the sea. None of them except Able Seaman John Phipps had ever worked the sea, but it was their sworn intention to do so. Indeed, as Covington soon learned, such was the whole purpose of John Phipps’s preaching—to take boys with him to the ships. It was to cultivate and escort to the naval yards of Britain a clutch of would-be sailors imbued with a parable of Christ which they would live-out in rough waters. For what was a Christian to do except bear witness to his fellow-man, and if driven to extremes bear it alone where there were no spectators, on the perilous deeps. There was no better test than that of a Christian’s mettle. But Phipps was not in a mood to lead his boys to Portsmouth in a hurry and find them Christian commanders, of which he knew several. He first wanted to check they could read their scriptures, and show in their hearts a love of the unseen. Then they would be a power on the four seas, and return home with treasure beyond reckoning.
    Covington did not know if he had a love of the unseen.
    â€˜It was given to you by nature,’ said Phipps.
    â€˜What is it, though?’
    â€˜It knows you. Pray stick by my side. You and Joey Middleton here, I think you are my prizes.’
    Joey had a small, sad and eager face. He had the sniffles and a runny nose, and wiped his upper lip with the back of his hand. John Phipps gave him a woollen comforter from his deep pockets to wrap round his neck and keep himself warm. Joey was eleven years old but looked younger. He was the only one who knew ships, being a West Country boy from Devonport, where his father, he said, was a sailor with red hair. And his mother? She was in that town, too. But that is all he seemed to know, and John Phipps said that he had found him on a scow near Hull, curled up onthe deck as if he were chained there. A lean bosun and his wife had taken him in charge. They claimed he was their own, whipped him when they liked, and used him as their lackey or galley slave as they made their way around the coast. They had got so far from Joey’s birthplace that he believed himself to be in another country altogether, where English was barely spoken. And he forgot that he was free, had no conception of prayer, and so was in a fair pickle when John Phipps stole him away and started breathing faith into his bones.
    By the flame of a candle the Book was passed around. All stumbled over the words until it