This uncle is wrong, Bush realizes, as the jolly boat heads out to his first ship, his first duty. The sea isn't a woman.

It's freedom.

He sends money home when he has it, keeping his sisters in whatever it is women and girls so desperately need. He hears the others - the Lieutenants - talk and knows it to be useless things like books and trinkets and cloth. But not cloth as men understand it - not wool and linen and oilcloth. Women buy and indulge with satins and lace, ribbons and festooning about which William dares not ask.

Instead he stays aboard the ship and learns what is to be done and how and who is to do it. He has no imagination for strategy or tactics, he knows that already, but he knows the ship and what it can do and, more importantly perhaps, where it can take him.

He spends his first night ashore at fifteen, goaded by the other mids. He goes to the tavern and drinks and watches, following the movements of the drunk and volatile crowd. The woman is past her prime and smells but she is cheap and he has little coin to spare.

She laughs at his attempts and then guides him, teaching him her build and rigging, showing him how to coax her through the storm. He pays again for a second lesson in another room, another whore. As he sees it now, he knows all he needs. The secrets lie in having the tools and, as with everything else, knowing how to use them.

His ship is like a woman and he learns to woo her. He shines and polishes her until she gleams like gems and jewels, like all the things he cannot afford. His mother is gone and his money buys food and essentials, but his sisters live a life with little more than he provides.

Unlike his sisters in Chichester, the sea sparkles and dances. His ship courts the waves and he watches entranced, never quite sure of what he sees.

Hornblower is nothing like anything Bush has ever seen.

He is ideas and plans, cool strategy to be obeyed, and yet he seems little more than a child - too long limbs and wide eyes, face bare of any of the markings of age.

He is incomprehensible and indefinable and Bush watches in a kind of awe. There is something to be owed here, as he does to his sisters, and something to be courted, as to the sea. Hornblower requires something of him, and he is not sure what it is, but it comes in commands and demands and orders, and those Bush understands, so he carries them out and lets them carry him away.

Bush has served under many men and with many more, but only this one, his subordinate, has ever made him think beyond the moment of what is into what lies ahead, what will be.

He wants to die.

He stares at the swollen, red stump of his leg and thinks about death. If he dies there will be something paid to his sisters, a stipend, and they will fare well for some time. If he dies there will be freedom from this overwhelming burden of grief and disappointment he feels, this surety that he has failed somewhere, failed Hornblower.

If he dies his life will be over in truth, not just in this vague way that is filled with looks that range from pity and horror, from the look on his Commander's face that cannot quite convey anything but that Bush is the embodiment of their defeat.

He craves death, but will not die.

The Loire is a new start.

Away from the deep drifts of snow and the lack of purpose. Away from doing nothing but breathing air that tastes like ash and French wine, thick and sweet and hard to keep down. The boat is solid beneath them, and the air is thick with the wet of the river, of spring, of beginnings.

He closes his eyes in the moments of peace and ignores the throb of pain in his leg, ignores the reminders that whatever he had is now gone. He has no life, no future, but he will die an Englishman, not in some grand house in the depths of France.

He will die on English soil or he will die fighting. He doesn't care which now that both are available to him. It is only when he looks at Hornblower and Brown and sees how far they've come that he dares think he might not die at all.

Sheerness is hell itself.

Like Sisyphus, rolling his rock up the hill again and again, never reaching the top, he's kept from his heart and his blood on the waves and instead drifts aimlessly on land. He tastes dirt instead of water and eats meat that tastes of fresh blood and not of salt and brine. He is chained to a desk and the only wooden sound he hears beneath his feet is the constant thud of his stump on the dock.

He sits beside his fire and watches the sails in the distance and wishes himself dead.

The Sutherland beats with the sound of his own heart. He can hear it in the movement of the men and the whip of the sails, can hear it in the running of the rigging and the chatter of his men. He can hear it in the rough holystone on the deck and can feel it in the energy of movement. It moves and breathes with him.

He has a reprieve, he knows. Whatever prayers he may have offered up to God and to the ghosts of seas long past - Neptune, Triton and Njörðr - he has been granted a boon to be back on the waves, been given freedom to live a life he thought lost, to die a death he had no hopes of winning back again.

He breathes the air like fire in his lungs and stands at Hornblower's side.

He knows it means death. He knows the moment he reaches for Hornblower's hand. There is no coming back from this and ultimate victory will cost the ultimate price.

It is the right death, his death. The death he deserves, the death he's earned. This is not a hero's death, but a proper sailor's death. He will give his life to the sea, just as the sea gave life to him.