He did too: he had felt it first when Baker and Kenton came back on board. He and Southwick had already guessed what the two lieutenants were likely to find (not the murdered women, of course) so they were not surprised. But with the return of the lieutenants, Aitken had become aware of a curious atmosphere on board. In a way it centred round the captain, yet Jackson and Rossi seemed affected. Not Stafford, and not Southwick: neither was an imaginative man; one could not imagine them having the second sight.

But he had felt very strongly this sense of - well, what? That the quarterdeck had grown chillier, like walking into the crypt of a church. That he had seen the whole episode before, although it was no stronger than a distant memory or a half - remembered dream. Yet he had known before it happened that Baker would produce a bundle of letters; he knew how the captain would take them and walk over to the companionway and down the steps, hunched as though the letters brought him bad news, instead of having been written by people of whom they had never heard.

That seaman Jackson, the captain's coxswain, he was just walking round as though bewildered, stunned almost, refusing to help Stafford finish cutting up a new pair of trousers. Rossi, too, the third one of that curious trinity, was sitting on his own, his thoughts miles away. Yet of all the men in the ship those two must have seen the most violence and bloodshed. What had upset them could not have been these senseless murders in the Tranquil. It was something else, as though a hand had reached out of the past and touched them on the shoulder.

The first time he had ever had this sensation of a touch from the past was when he was perhaps eleven or twelve years old and had walked from his home in Dunkeld down the steep hill towards the village.

It was a late autumn day with the last of the sun turning the leaves of the great beeches into burnished copper, and be had gone through the gate to the ruined cathedral. It was a stone skeleton; only the walls stood; the roof had long since gone. Yet it was easy to picture the fine stone building in its glory, men and women and children singing hymns, their voices echoing under the vaulted roof. The service would end and they would be blessed, and slowly they would go to their homes, pausing perhaps at the main door to talk for a few minutes, to exchange family news and to gossip perhaps, but feeling spiritually refreshed by the service.

Round the cathedral, lining the paths, were graves and the entrances to vaults; carved marble, stained by age, mottled by lichen, recording a couple of hundred years and more of the story of the people of Dunkeld, and the people walking to the gate would be passing the last resting places of their parents, grandparents, great - grandparents ... As a young boy on that autumn evening he had sensed all this and had in his imagination seen people dressed in clothes he did not recognize, and which he later discovered were the fashions of past centuries.

Between those earlier centuries and the time he stood there as a boy, the cathedral had been burned; the pews and the beams had gone up in flames and the roof had collapsed. No one had tried to repair it; moss and lichen grew in the stones, the grass spread over the tombs. It was something about which his mother would never speak. But as he stood there and thought about it the atmosphere had grown chilly. Not cold and not frightening, even though he had been only a boy. Just enough for him to realize he was experiencing something he would never be able to describe or explain. Indeed, he had never spoken of it Now the Calypso had changed. It was probably his imagination, but as he sat here looking at the captain, he knew that around Jackson and Rossi and the captain there was - well, an aura almost, as though they had stepped from the past Yet it was all absurd: the Calypso was a frigate built only five years ago in a French shipyard, captured only a few weeks ago by Mr Ramage, and Jackson was an American seaman who had volunteered to serve in the Royal Navy and Rossi was a Genoese - what did he call himself? a Genovesi?

-and that was that. He, James Aitken, a lieutenant in the Royal Navy and the Calypso's first lieutenant, was rambling amidst superstition like an ancient widowed crone outside her croft high in the Perthshire hills, weaving with gnarled hands and prattling through toothless gums and staring about her with fading eyes, living in a world of vague memories and dreams of what might have been.

Yet here was the captain referring to 'something unusual •i all this' and looking as if he had .just seen a ghost.

It was nothing to do with Aitken, but it had happened as the young Scot had entered the cabin: Ramage had had this overpowering sense that he knew what Aitken was going to say. Earlier he had found himself giving orders as though repeating the words from a play or something said in a dream. Southwick had been puzzled because he had not gone on board the Tranquil, and even Ramage had been surprised to sear himself telling Jackson he was not going.

While Baker and Kenton had been on board her, somehow be had known what they were seeing; he had known that women had been murdered. But he had dismissed all that as something he did not understand; he had given his orders, come down to his cabin and gone through the letters, and had thought of Gianna, and all the time he had pushed aside this-this what? '

And then as Aitken had come through the doorway he had remembered a story his father had told him. He must have been very young at the time, and Father was telling him something of the Ramage family; how one day, when he was grown op, he would become the Earl of Blazey in place of his father.

At first he had not understood; then he had realized his father was saying that when an earl died his eldest son became the next earl; that his father was the tenth earl, and he had succeeded his father, Ramage's grandfather, who was the ninth earl and who in turn had succeeded the eighth earl, who was Ramage's great-grandfather.

It was great-grandfather, Charles Uglow Ramage, the eighth earl of Blazey, about whom his father had told him the story. He could not remember many of the details - he had been so young that the story had little more significance than so many of the tales that his mother or father told him before he went to sleep at night.

But great - grandfather Charles, the second son, had been in Barbados during the Civil War, a Royalist, and for reasons which Ramage could no longer remember he had later fled the island and headed for Jamaica in the ship the family owned and which was used for supplying the plantation there. And something had happened which caused great - grandpa to become a buccaneer; he had hated the Spanish so bitterly that for years he harried the Main and the Spanish privateers - just as his great - grandson was doing now, only as a King's officer.

Ramage could remember faintly that there was some story of a privateer, perhaps more than one - indeed there must have been many of them at one time or another - but the details had gone, lost in childish memories of stories about pixies and gnomes and fairies with magic wands.

Had great - grandfather found a similar massacre? In his voyaging in the Caribbean - they called it the North Sea then, and the Pacific was the South Sea, and men were still alive who remembered Drake fighting the Spanish Armada as it came up the Channel - had he experienced something which made him so hate the Spanish that for the rest of his life he fought them?

Then he remembered the set of silver candlesticks used at dinner at home, three - branched candelabra, five of them but usually only two used unless there were many guests. Those candelabra had been part of the ransom paid after a raid on some town or other along the Main. There were several things - the candelabra, the smaller set of silver plate which was not used now because cleaning and polishing was wearing away the intricate design, said to be Moorish, those long - barrelled matchlock pistols and arquebuses which lined one of the halls, some of the armour, richly - chased corselets and helmets - all had been acquired by the eighth earl during his buccaneering days.