Mister Tidwell watched them go. Harvey and Sloan. Twelve years old, future officers, two of an uncontrollable band of twenty-four who harassed officers and men and Mister Tidwell without mercy.

Especially Mister Tidwell. He was their schoolmaster.

The crackbrained idea which sent young men of twelve to sea, fostered in the dim past by King Charles, who thought his navy needed officers trained from infancy, had only been capped by another king’s thought that these urchins should have the benefits of schooling at the hands of a trained master.

Mister Tidwell, along with several score of well-meaning professors, had long suffered the effects of those laws.

The small pay and the arduous life offered little attraction to any man of the day, much less a learned gentleman, and so His Majesty had been forced to conceive a stratagem which was nothing more than literary press ganging.

Two years before Mister Tidwell had written a paper. A mild, well worded paper, which dealt with the tax system. For that he had been sent to sea. And here he was, standing in the Swiftsure’s scuppers, watching battle approach, knowing that he was even now late for the cockpit.

Marines swarmed up the ratlines, white crossbelts shimmering, muskets clenched, faces strained as they took their posts in the crosstrees. Mister Tidwell envied those Marines. Their sole duty consisted of taking pot shots at Marines in the rigging of the French ships, and what if they did die? They at least stayed out in the sun and air.

The long and short of Mister Tidwell’s aversion to answering that call to quarters was blood.

A horizontal plume of smoke rapped out from the Frenchman’s bow chasers. Round shot smashed solidly into the rail. Splinters sang like shrapnel. Two sailors clutched their lacerated faces and leaned sickly against their guns. One of them looked at the maw of the hatch from whence came a stream of powder monkeys bearing their leathern buckets. He looked away again and strove to staunch the flow of blood with his white cotton shirt. No, that gunner certainly did not want to go below to the hospital.

The Frenchman was a quarter of a mile away, swinging into position for a broadside. On the Swiftsure, drums still rolled and trumpets blared, filling Mister Tidwell with uneasiness.

Gun captains blew on their matches. A twenty-four pounder spurted flame from muzzle and touchhole, leaped up and slammed back on the deck, splintering a wooden wheel. The shot sang through the Frenchman’s rigging.

The broadside smashed out, enveloping the entire enemy ship with smoke. Sails and spars rained on the Swiftsure’s deck. A Marine came down like a shot tropical bird, hitting the planks solidly to roll over on his face. An officer leaned over him for a moment, hand pressed against the crimsoning crossbelts, and then jerked his thumb toward the rail. The Marine was thrown over the side.

Lucky, thought Mister Tidwell. The man hadn’t lived to see the cockpit in action.

A hand fell on Tidwell’s shoulder. A petty officer, face contorted with excitement and anger, shook the gray coat and sent Mister Tidwell hurtling toward the hatch.

A midshipman, holding a musket bigger than he was, paused in his ascent up a ratline long enough to grin. Mister Tidwell reproved the boy with a glance and then went below.

No one paid any attention to him on the second gun deck. The cannon had begun to fire, bucking out of line, filling the place with choking fumes. Mister Tidwell paused for a moment, reluctant to go below again. He saw the sweating torsos of the gunners through the dim welter of round shot, flying splinters, gashed beams and exploding guns.

He sighed, and then shrugging his small shoulders inside his gray frock coat, he adjusted his eye glasses and went down another ladder to the third gun deck.

The stream of black powder monkeys and their black cargoes choked the passageway for a moment. Mister Tidwell stood aside to let them by. Powder was strewn all over the planking. One match would finish the ship. It was ever thus.

Mister Tidwell went aft, ducking his head to avoid the beams. A tall man was forced to take to his hands and knees through this passageway. The cockpit was ahead.

A great lantern filled with sputtering candles burned against the beams. The midshipmen slept here when things were peaceful. Now the midshipmen’s chests had been drawn together to make a low table. A piece of tarpaulin, already black with blood, was spread over the surface.

The surgeon, a tall, gaunt impassive gentleman, stood over a small stove heating his saws and knives and soldering irons. His assistants were placing buckets all about the improvised table, making ready for the men soon to come.

This was Mister Tidwell’s battle station. Here he was no longer schoolmaster to the midshipmen, he was part of the surgeon’s machine.