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Faulkner said. ‘As for our future . . .’
    There was a knock at the cabin door and the two men fell silent as a gentleman entered. ‘Captain Faulkner?’
    â€˜Yes?’
    The man was elegantly dressed under his cloak and he withdrew a sealed letter from his gauntlet. ‘His Highness Prince Rupert heard of your return to Helveotsluys and desires that you wait upon him at your earliest convenience.’
    Faulkner looked at Mainwaring and the unspoken thought flashed between them. ‘I am obliged, sir,’ said Faulkner with a heavy emphasis that placed the matter of his discussion with Mainwaring beyond recall.
    â€˜You may take my horse, Kit,’ offered Mainwaring, indicating his understanding.
    â€˜If you are Sir Henry Mainwaring,’ the stranger said, ‘I am charged to request that you also attend His Highness.’

Part One
The Exile
1649

The Council of War
January 1649
    â€˜God’s wounds, but this wind chills to the very marrow of my bones and these casements give it free and unhindered passage!’
    Shaking his head, Mainwaring removed his hand from the window and stared at it, as though the keen gale, blowing in from the North Sea through the interstice, would leave some visible mark upon his skin. Neither Faulkner nor Katherine Villiers responded to Mainwaring’s unnecessary remark. The former stared half-heartedly at a chart spread out before him, a Dutch Waggoner lying open beside it; the latter bent over the threadbare stockings of Sir Henry’s that she was darning.
    A week after the two men had answered Prince Rupert’s summons, and attended his council of war aboard his flagship, the
Constant
Reformation
, they were back in their rooms at The Hague. Faulkner and Katherine had patched up their quarrel after a fashion, but the mood of both had been subdued. Their spirits had been further depressed by the news that had come from London a few days later: the King had been put on trial in his own palace. Faulkner recalled the white splendour of Whitehall Palace beneath the walls of which he had reacquainted himself with the lovely Katherine Villiers in happier times, times that seemed in retrospect to be so full of promise.
    He shot a glance at her, bending solicitously over Mainwaring’s laddered hose. Half his mind filled with venom, half with a tender pity that forced him to suppress a sob and turn it instead into a cough. He lowered his eyes swiftly as Katherine looked up. She must not divine his distress, whatever her own agony.
    His eyes wandered unseeing over the chart dedicated to ‘The Master, Wardens and Assistants of the Honourable Corporation of Trinity House’. It depicted the entire estuary of the Thames, extending to the so-called Weilings, the archipelago that choked the estuary of the River Schelde, and ran on to include the deep tidal inlets that ran between the islands. One such was the Haringvliet, or Herring-fleet, as the English mariners called it, upon which lay the port of Helvoetsluys, the base of the exiled Royalist fleet of the former King Charles I.
    But Faulkner saw none of this; his head was too full of Kate and her
affaire
with Charles, Prince of Wales, who, if the King’s trial came to the fatal term predicted by its advocates, would soon be King in the eyes of his supporters. Instead of the shoals and channels scrupulously laid out before him after assiduous survey, his mind’s eye could see only Katherine’s face, pale and pleading as she knelt before him after Mainwaring had dragged him back from Helvoetsluys.
    What, he had repeatedly asked himself, was he to make of her protestations?
    â€˜But Kit, it was nothing . . . nothing. A mere amusement . . . a playing between us, affectionate yes, but not . . .’ her voice had choked with the humiliation of it. ‘Not a carnal
knowing
such as you and I have known each other. Why, he esteems you, relies upon you for your loyalty.’
    â€˜Am I