Reluctantly, like a woman having a suckling child taken away from her, she lowered his head and helped Rossi cradle the wounded arm.

'He's so cold,' she said to no one in particular.

'Ma'am,' Jackson said, 'if you'd just walk away for a minute or two...'

'Why?' Her voice was harsh.

'Oh ... I just want to - well, remove his wet clothes!'

She leaned over, saw the pin shining in the lanternlight among the folds of silk, and pulled it out, and then unwrapped the stock. The triangle of curly black hair glistened and the men gently lifted the blanket. She held the stock for a moment. There was not a hint of warmth in the silk; it was as though it had been a corpse's loincloth.

Once he was lowered on to the makeshift mattress she took one and then the other blanket and covered him, leaving the left arm outside so that they could keep an eye on it. Already blood was seeping through the bandage, a spreading black stain in the candlelight. His eyes were closed, his breathing shallow. She had earlier watched the rise and fall of his ribs and any moment expected it to stop, as if the effort was too much.

The loss of blood and the shadows thrown by the lantern emphasized his features. His nose was thin and slightly curved, like a beak, and the bone made a white ridge. The cheekbones frightened her; it was almost as if parchment covered a skull. Above his right eye there were two scars on the brow, thin, white bars on the skin, which itself seemed almost grey. The eyes, closed now, were sunk even deeper under heavy brows. His hair, wet and tangled, looked like a clump of seaweed tossed carelessly on a beach by a wave.

His right hand was plucking at the blanket and trying to reach across to his left arm. Before she could move, Rossi had leaned over and with surprising gentleness put the hand back under the blanket. The lips moved and Rossi bent down and listened.

'I think he wants you, ma'am, if you're "Sarah".'

She felt a surge of pleasure, then realized that this Italian seaman had probably misheard a murmured 'Gianna' as 'Sarah'. He was thinking of the Marchesa.

'Nicholas...'

'Sarah,' he whispered, and there was no mistaking it, 'they shouldn't have brought me here.'

Misunderstanding him, she said: 'Don't worry, Mr Bowen will be here at any minute. It's not a bad wound; it is just that you've lost a lot of blood.'

'No ... I meant -' he seemed to lose consciousness for a moment, then she realized he had shut his eyes to fight off a wave of pain '- I'm sorry to have frightened you ... but the Lynx is next, and then home.'

Not knowing quite what he meant, she smoothed the hair from his brow and said: 'Don't worry about the Lynx now, all the hostages are safe.'

'Yardarm . . . both of them,' he murmured and seemed to lose consciousness.

'Yardarm?' she asked Jackson.

'Yes, ma'am,' the American said briskly, touching the side of his captain's throat to check the pulse, 'those privateersmen will hang from a ship's yardarm. Maybe not all of them, but the leaders. Not the Calypso's,' he explained. 'We'll probably take 'em back to England for trial.'

'You have to capture them first.'

'Oh, I'm sure the captain has a plan for that.'

She wanted to shake the American. Did the fool not realize his captain was dying? That he was slipping away from them even now, like smoke in the wind? And they could do nothing to prevent it: the great gash in his arm, now bound up and with a tourniquet above it, was not the problem. He was dying because as his men had swum with desperate haste to the Earl of Dodsworth with him lashed to the raft, his blood had been draining from his body with every pump of his heart. The men who had tied the first tourniquet could not see - did not think to look - that it had come undone.

As she began to weep, she understood that, such was their faith in him that a mention of the Lynx brought the confident comment that the captain would have a plan ... In her imagination she saw him dead, and remembered the funeral service, and the dreadful business of the body sewn up in a hammock and tipped over the side from a plank. One of the seamen had died of a fever off Capetown.

Jackson's body went taut for a moment, then he hurried to the entryport. He came back a few moments later and said: it's the boat with Mr Bowen.'

Obviously they had faith in this man Bowen. It was a pity that the Earl of Dodsworth's regular surgeon was a prisoner along with the rest of the ship's officers and men in the camp on shore.

Suddenly a man appeared out of the darkness behind her and knelt beside Nicholas. A hand went down to his face and a finger pushed back an eyelid. 'You still with us, sir?' The voice had a bantering note which infuriated her. Was this Bowen?

'I didn't cover one of their pawns,' Nicholas murmured. It was an extraordinary thing to say, but Bowen laughed and turned to the plump, elderly man now standing beside him, a man with flowing white hair and carrying a box with a rope handle.

'Put it down there, Southwick. We ought to have brought the chessboard. Now, Jackson, what happened?'

She wanted to tell him first to do something about the terrible pallor of his skin, to make him drink some brandy to stop this awful shivering.

'Cutlass slash across the upper arm, sir. We put a tourniquet on, just as you showed us years ago, and a bandage, and lowered him on the raft to tow him back to the Calypso. We hadn't gone above a hundred yards when Rossi reckons he'd never cover that distance alive, so we made for this ship, sir.'

'Why the devil didn't you go back to the Heliotrope?'

'She's French, sir. All that gabbling and panic with the passengers. They wouldn't keep out of the way once they saw Mr Ramage had been wounded - he'd spoken to all of them, o' course, when he first got on board. Oh yes, and Spurgeon was killed. It was trying to save him that led to Mr Ramage getting cut.'

Cut, indeed, she thought, not knowing that Jackson was using a slang word regularly spoken in the West Indies to describe a sword wound. It originated among the Negroes, when they slashed each other with machetes, but she had never heard the phrase.

Bowen had knelt while Jackson talked and was unwinding the bandage Rossi had just put on.

She said: 'It's a clean wound, I can tell you that.'

'Thank you, ma'am,' Bowen said courteously, and continued to unwind the strip of sheet.

'You might start it bleeding again.'

'It is still bleeding,' Bowen commented. 'But don't you worry. Perhaps you'd like to return to your cabin, ma'am? The sight of blood...'

Jackson coughed and said: 'The lady helped us hoist Mr Ramage on board and she found the tourniquet had come adrift. Then she cleaned the wound - the basin of water is still over there.'

'My apologies, ma'am,' Bowen said, and detecting more in Jackson's words than the bare meaning, added: 'Perhaps you would care to help me. A woman's touch is gentler than that of my clumsy but well-meaning shipmates. Now, Southwick -' he paused as he began to lift the bandage clear '- open the medicine chest for me and stand by with the pad of cloth you'll find in the top left-hand corner. Rossi, let's have that lantern closer. . .'

He now had the wound uncovered and seemed to be talking to himself. 'Ah yes, chipped the humerus bone slightly but no fracture because the blow was directed at a sharp angle downwards... missed the main artery... veins bleeding - that seems to be the main problem... Muscle torn but probably still functional...'

He bent over Ramage's head. 'Still with us, sir? Ah, good. Would you try to move your left hand slightly? Ah - yes, it hurts. Now just wriggle the fingers. That starts more bleeding but tells us that no ligaments have been cut. You'll be able to carve a roast in three or four weeks. Southwick, stand by with that pad... the lady did a very good job of cleaning the wound; nothing for me to do there. Now, I'm going to release the tourniquet for a minute or two, and then retie it. Except for the lady, you all know why, but as it looks rather alarming, should I explain, ma'am?'