No, he told himself bitterly, there was not even that excuse. He was lying to himself, like an errant schoolboy trying to avoid half a dozen with the birch by telling a string of lies. There was no excuse. Within moments of reading Renouf's orders telling him to make for Crete he had wondered if the bomb ketches were intended to join a French fleet assembling there. He had even speculated to Southwick that the French fleet and troops might be preparing for a new attack somewhere; a piece of speculation which had drawn from Southwick the sour memory that they had missed the Battle of Aboukir Bay, when Nelson had smashed a French fleet and wrecked Bonaparte's first attack on Egypt.

There he had left it: he had not taken the obvious extra step; the one that would have led him to the next question - the final, main, obvious and vital question which the Admiralty must have answered as soon as possible: exactly where is the French fleet bound?

If they intended an invasion of the Morea, Egypt or the eastern end of the Mediterranean, then Britain was going to have to scrape together a fleet from somewhere, and an army, to drive them out again.

That was the question. What about the answer? It could be anything. The French might be doing just what he had thought of first - using the bomb ketches as defences for an anchorage. The transfer of the bomb ketches might be some whim of a Minister of Marine, and the cavalry and troops being carried by the once two, now probably three frigates, might be a routine replacement. The lack of British ships of war made supplying garrisons by sea easy for the French. Troops died of diseases, and so did horses. The transfer of artillery might also be routine; the garrison did not have any guns, and the lack might now be being made up. Finally the frigates, bombs and troops might be part of some massive operation planned by Bonaparte in complete secrecy.

Ramage had a simple choice: he could act on the assumption that it was a normal change-of-garrison operation, and proceed to do what he could to destroy or capture the frigates. That was just the sort of thing his orders expected him to do. Or he could try to find out whether they were joining a fleet, and its destination, and then sink or capture the frigates.

Renouf knew nothing more than that he was to go to Crete; Ramage was sure of that. If he knew nothing more, then that drunken sot who had been commanding the Brutus would be equally ignorant. It was clear that when the original orders were drawn up for the two bomb ketches while they were still in Brest, it was intended that they should go up to Toulon to get more provisions and water.

That was odd, he thought suddenly, because it added many hundreds of miles to the voyage when they were in fact passing large Spanish naval bases like Cartagena, where they could water and provision. Perhaps the French guessed that the Spanish were so short of everything that a couple of French bomb ketches would get little more than derisory remarks about their odd rig if they visited a Spanish port and asked for stores.

By the time the bombs arrived in Toulon something had happened to make it necessary to give them an escort - not all the way from Toulon to Crete; only from just north of Rome. Was that significant? Probably not; the troops, cavalry and artillery the frigates were to carry to Crete were probably doing garrison duty in Tuscany preventing the sporadic attacks by Italian partisans, and it had dawned on the French that they were not vitally needed in Italy. Perhaps France was so short of men that, for a great operation to be mounted from Crete, soldiers had to be collected from every possible place.

Whichever it was, it fitted - either harbour defence by the bomb ketches and garrison replacement by the troops sailing in the frigates, or preparations for a great invasion, using Crete as the assembly point.

For all that, "either, or" still brought the Fructidor and the Brutus to anchor off Porto Ercole with three frigates moored stern-to the jetty inside the harbour embarking soldiers, frightened horses and field guns. The final question was how could Ramage discover the ultimate destination of the troops and bomb ketches?

Within reach, there were just two people likely to be able to answer the questions: the senior of the French frigate captains, or the senior of the army officers who would be embarking. Even they might not know; in the interests of secrecy, the Ministries of Marine and of War in Paris might only have told them to go to Crete, where the general and admiral commanding the expedition would give them fresh and final orders . . .

There was just a hope that at Porto Ercole the senior navy and army officers would know that Crete was in fact their final destination and that all this was a perfectly normal operation, a rotation of the regular garrison and strengthening of the usual defences.

Ramage eyed the mountains far inland that formed the spine of the Italian peninsula. He needed a group of men who spoke fluent Italian so that they could wander round Argentario without being bothered by the Italians, and fluent enough in French to be able to chat with senior French army or navy officers . . .

Apart from himself, only young Paolo and the seaman Rossi spoke Italian. Rossi's native Genoa was now a French republic, so he would be shot as a traitor if he was caught. That left Ramage and Paolo. Yet the French would strap Paolo to the guillotine the moment they found they had caught not just an aristo but the heir to the kingdom of Volterra.

A strange, high-pitched noise, musical and reedy, was coming from the Brutus; young Martin was playing his flute. It was a more musical version of the kind of flute often played by Italian shepherds. He could remember from the days when he had lived there as a boy how often, when riding across the Tuscan hills, he would gradually become aware that in the distance someone was playing what could well be Pan pipes. The music would begin almost imperceptibly, like warmth from a rising sun. Usually it turned out to be a young boy sitting in the shade of a wild olive tree, playing to himself as he kept an eye on a dozen goats and twice as many kids which played like children, chasing each other - most of them seemed to be twins: did goats never have single kids? He remembered the kids jumping into the air, all four legs stiff, and then running to their mothers and butting against the teats. It was a scene going back to Biblical times and earlier . . . "Blower" Martin, fourth lieutenant, playing his flute with an audience of tanned and tough seamen on board a French prize was neither historic nor romantic; simply unusual. Someone ought to pass round Martin's hat to see how much money they could collect.

He stopped at the quarterdeck rail and held the woodwork, his body rigid. Southwick looked at him in alarm but then did not move because over the years he had seen it happen several times: that was how ideas hit the Captain. After a minute Ramage turned to him and said: "Make the signal for captains to come on board: I want to talk to Wagstaffe and Aitken."