"Your surgeon," he muttered, "he did a fine job. Just cuts, from splinters. No permanent damage - if I understood his French correctly."

Ramage stood back as the man hobbled from the cabin, glanced at the seaman stretched on the table and murmured a few words of encouragement, and then made his way up the companionway, able to walk more easily than Ramage expected because the kneecap had not been damaged.

Ramage led the way to his cabin, then stood back at the top of the companionway, noting Poitier's obvious familiarity with this type of ship: the duck of the head at the fifth step of the companionway to avoid a deck beam, sharp turn aft at the bottom to enter the captain's cabin, the nod to the Marine sentry who came to attention and was obviously about to challenge Poitier until he saw Ramage following.

Inside the cabin, Ramage twisted the armchair round until it faced the desk, and gestured towards it. Poitier sat down carefully, as though expecting it to be some trick chair with arms that would seize him, and then he sighed as it gave him relief from the pain in his leg. Ramage tossed his hat on to the settee and sat in the straight-backed chair at the desk. He took a key from his pocket, opened the lower drawer and took out the documents, putting them squarely in front of him on the desk.

"Admiral," he said quietly, "I must congratulate you on your recent promotion -"

Poitier inclined his head in acknowledgement. This too was information the Englishman had obviously obtained from some of the men.

"- which I imagine you never expected. You are a Breton, no?"

Poitier nodded. "You speak very good French, Captain. Fluent, in fact. I would have -" he paused for a moment, his eyes searching Ramage's face warily. "Do you come from Paris? Are you a royalist?"

Ramage shook his head. "You flatter me. No, I am English. I must apologize for not introducing myself: my name is Ramage, Nicholas Ramage." He pronounced the name in the French way, and Poitier seemed to freeze.

"Lord Ramage?" he asked, seeming breathless, his hands grasping the arms of the chair as though he expected to be tipped out of it at any moment.

"Yes - why? Is my reputation so bad?"

Admiral Poitier shook his head. "Not bad in that sense . . ."

"What sense?" Ramage asked, curious but at the same time flattered that the French in Toulon had even heard of him, let alone given him an assessment.

"Well, talk from the West Indies . . . that you abandoned drowning men after sinking their ships - that sort of thing."

Ramage thought back over several years in the Caribbean; he remembered the trouble and risks he had taken to rescue the survivors - scores, indeed hundreds of them - in the action in which he had captured the Calypso. Risks, because the rescued were so numerous they could have seized the ship from the rescuers, and that had led to a warning from his own admiral. In crossing the Atlantic the story had undergone a radical change ...

He looked directly at Admiral Poitier. "Do you believe such stories now?"

Poitier shook his head vigorously. "I do not believe them now and I did not really believe them then. You understand that newspapers like Le Moniteur have to print stories of British atrocities." He gave a short, dry laugh. "Now I think about it, I should really have been able to say: 'Yes, Captain Lord Ramage?' when you came down to me in the cabin and addressed me as 'Admiral Poitier'. The attack on Porto Ercole, the sinking of one of my frigates using one of my own bomb ketches . . . yes, it has the Ramage touch."

"You flatter me," Ramage said, thinking that Admiral Poitier's compliment meant a good deal more than the grudging treatment he had recently received from the commander-in-chief on the Jamaica Station. "However . . ." he said, his tone changing to indicate that the conversation was now taking a different turn, "I believe you were engaged upon 'a special service', with your frigates and the bomb ketches."

"Of course not," Poitier said slowly, as if considering each word. "Just a routine cruise."

"With bomb ketches?"

"I met them by chance."

"But three frigates and two bomb ketches - an unusual squadron to be cruising in the Mediterranean, you must admit. What targets are there for bomb ketches? With few ships of my own country - this one is almost an exception - in the Mediterranean, is not a squadron of three frigates rather large?"

Poitier could not see that the documents on the desk came from his own cabin in the Furet, Ramage realized. Most British naval officers would know that such grey-tinted paper would not be used by the Admiralty or commanders-in-chief, but, after years of war, a Frenchman would have forgotten that really white paper still existed.

"Admiral," Ramage began, tapping the small pile of documents, "I have been -"

He had heard someone clattering down the companionway and now the sentry knocking on the door interrupted him. "Captain, sir: Mr Aitken would like to see you."

"Send him in."

Aitken had a broad grin on his face and Ramage realized that the Scot was a handsome fellow, a fact which was usually disguised by his sombre expression.

Noting Poitier's presence, the first lieutenant said: "May I report to you privately, sir?"

Damn! Ramage had spent some time leading up to the right moment - creating it, in fact - when he would confront Poitier and force the secret of the expedition out of him. Now Aitken had arrived at the wrong moment. Yet Aitken would not have intruded unless. . . Ramage picked up his hat and followed the Scotsman from the cabin, telling the sentry to latch back the door and keep an eye on the prisoner.

Halfway up the companionway Ramage hissed up at Aitken: "What's happened?"

"That xebec, sir: Wagstaffe's sent it. Orsini's brought news of what happened at Porto Ercole."

Ramage stopped climbing. "What happened that we don't know about?"

"Well, nothing really important, sir," Aitken said lamely. "I just thought -"

"Very well, tell Orsini to wait: I want half an hour with this French officer ..."

Aitken acknowledged the order and Ramage went down the companionway, apologized to a startled Poitier for the interruption, and sat down at his desk after dropping his hat on the settee once again.

"We were discussing your orders," he reminded Poitier, "and you claimed you were on a routine cruise."

"Yes," Poitier said, obviously becoming bored, as well as tired and shaky from his leg wound. "A routine cruise. We'd sighted nothing; we needed wood and water . . ."

"Why choose Porto Ercole and not a large port like Leghorn?"

"Light winds," Poitier said smoothly. "It would have taken days -"

"But you arrived off Argentario from the direction of Leghorn," Ramage interrupted. "I saw you."

"That is true," Poitier admitted. "I like Porto Ercole. The wine, plenty of wild boar from the Maremma, as much fresh water and wood as we need . . ." The Frenchman's voice had a confidential note, as though he was confessing to Ramage that he had a weakness for roast boar.

Ramage nodded understandingly but then the Frenchman saw his eyes narrow, the skin over his cheeks and nose tautening, and his left hand slap down three or four times on some papers, the heavy signet ring on the little finger banging on the desk top. "Admiral, you were engaged in some secret operation. I want to know what it was."

Poitier held out his hands, palms upwards. "Yes, I admit it, of course. The bomb ketches give that away. The details I do not know: they were secret, you understand - probably only the Minister of Marine and a few others would know the details. Nothing was in writing - except for assembling some of the ships. Only the senior army commanders and the admirals received verbal orders about the destination. You do the same in England."