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tried to look at it, the glass wavered and he almost fell.
    The helmsman grabbed his arm. “You just hold tight to that stay, sir,” he said. “We don’t want you overboard.”
    It occurred to Kit to wonder what had happened to his predecessor. Had he too objected to Gasson’s habits? Had Gasson waited until he was too tired and cold to defend himself? A push, a splash, and no questions to answer? Kit clung to the stay and tried to keep his eyes open.
    That afternoon, with the wind rising but, as far as Kit could make out, the ship on a safe, true course for Plymouth, Alford approached Kit and looked him over with a critical grunt.
    “You look ill,” he said. “Get to bed and I’ll send some hot food. And for God’s sake when we get to Plymouth, keep your bloody trap shut.”
    “I can’t,” Kit said through chattering teeth. “I can’t do that.”
    “Then be prepared to meet a counter-accusation,” Alford advised him. “And don’t look to the company for support. There’s too much prize money at stake. God knows I would help if I could, but I can do nothing for you, Kit. That bastard has me by the throat.”
    Kit went below to wrestle with his conscience in the brief minutes before he fell into a feverish doze. Nightmares pursued him—Hollins’s fury, Livesy’s terror, the wind in the rigging wailing accusations. He started awake, roused by the cries of the watchmen, the thunder of feet. Head swimming, he clambered from his cot, only to be thrown to the floor as the ship heeled over with a terrible crash of timber.
    He would have drowned there but for Hollins. They scrambled through the wreckage to the deck, already awash astern as the Malvern settled back from the rocks that had impaled her, each wave adding to her ruin. Rain drove down. Wind tore the surface of the sea into spume. Alford stood amidships, bottle in hand, shouting orders to abandon ship. Of the captain there was no sign.
    “God save us,” one of the hands said. “No other bugger will.”
    “Then we must save ourselves.” Kit raised his voice to a wheezy bellow. “Cox’n? How many men were below? Have we boats enough for the rest?”
    “Most washed away, sir,” the cox’n replied. “Like the rest of us, no doubt.”
    And many of them were. The next big sea took Alford, bottle still in his hand as he disappeared into the foam. They managed to get the jolly boat away before Malvern began her final slide into the deep, but then it was every man for himself.
    Clinging to a grating, with the gruff old cox’n holding him on by the scruff of his neck, Kit called for names. Hollins was there and four others. The jolly boat crew tossed them a line to tow them to the shore, and so the voyage of the Malvern ended.
    Nobody else survived, although Kit did not know that at the time. It was a full week before he was well enough to understand that of a crew of eighty less than twenty had survived, and he was the only officer. Or that the Malvern, well-found and well-sailed ship that she was, had driven onto the rocks off Bovisand Bay within sight of home. The fury of the admiralty broke over them with greater force than anything the storm had summoned up.
    “What happened? I’ll tell you what happened,” Hollins said, still raging, and the realization that something far more sordid than nautical incompetence was going to be broadcast brought the court martial to a halt.
    Further witnesses were sought who had served on the Malvern or Gasson’s other commands. Now that Gasson was dead people seemed willing to speak up, not admitting anything on their own account, of course, but damning Gasson’s eyes for his unspeakable tastes while casting bright and accusing eyes over the surviving crewmembers.
    Bright and accusing eyes.
    “Damn it, now I have you,” Kit murmured into the dark. Tom Probert, that was it. Kit closed his eyes, comforted by the fact that while he might have an enemy at least Kit could put a name to him.
     

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