The Calypso seemed to envelop him: the decks beneath his feet, the masts overhead, the guns loaded and with scores of men waiting beside them. The ship was silent and there was no movement, yet it needed only one shout from him and thirty-six guns and the carronades would be blasting the darkness.

It was all here, he marvelled; the contradictions of peace and war. The moonlight sparkled like idly tossed diamonds as a wave curled up lazily on the sandy beach; the cone-shaped peak of Peroni stood a thousand feet high like a Tuscan symbol, and farther round and twice as high, one segment dark in the moon shadow, was Ballone and beyond was Alma, within a few feet of the same height. And forming the background were the Apennines. He was back in Italy and it seemed as unreal as a dream.

As they approached the anchored vessels Southwick had murmured, "It was somewhere near here that you rescued the Marchesa, wasn't it, sir?" and he had grunted a bare acknowledgment. But of course it was nearby; just a score miles or so along the coast.

Southwick, like the rest of them - Stafford, Rossi and Jackson - was always waiting to hear that he and Gianna had become engaged. They did not know enough to realize that the answer was obvious: Gianna, Marchesa di Volterra, was the rightful ruler of the kingdom of Volterra. When this long and damnable war ended and the French were driven out of Italy, she would return to rule her people. How would they feel if she came back married to a straniero ? Curious that in Italian the nearest word one could get to "foreigner" was "stranger". To an Italian a straniero was anyone who came from somewhere else - another village, another province, another country: someone who was not of the same place as the speaker and, by inference, not to be trusted.

Gianna did not accept the existence of these difficulties, of course; Volterra would accept him because, Mama Mia, he would be the husband of the Marchesa . . . There were religious difficulties as well, but. . .

He shivered because that part of his personal future was uncertain; possibly insoluble. Anyway, for the moment he was within yards of his second home.

Second? Where was his first? Presumably England in general and Cornwall in particular. Yet if he was honest with himself - and being anchored like this in the lee of Punta Ala, having just nosed round Elba, was as good a time as any to be that - he was slowly becoming a man without a real home.

St Kew, the village forming the family estate in Cornwall, had been owned by the Ramages for five or six centuries, but for many generations the successive heads of the family had spent more time abroad than at home, usually on the King's business. His own father used to be away at sea for three or four years at a stretch, latterly as the commander-in-chief on various distant stations. Now Admiral the Earl of Blazey spent all his time in retirement at St Kew, happily being the squire, and also the Lord Lieutenant of Cornwall and Custos Rotulorum.

Meanwhile his son stayed at sea, still one of the youngest and nearly the most junior of the captains on the post list. He had not seen the latest Navy List, but presumably a few more lieutenants had recently made the leap to the post list, and because a captain's seniority dated from the time of his appointment, there would now be some names below his, so that they pushed him higher (slightly higher, and very slowly!). The two most important things speeding your move up the ladder of seniority were captains going off at the top of the list on promotion to admirals, some dying, and more lieutenants being "made post" below you.

Ramage suddenly felt guilty about Paolo, whom he could see going quietly from gun to gun, checking that all was well. He had a cutlass in a belt over his shoulder, and his dirk at his belt, a weapon he loved to use as a main-gauche. The boy must be fourteen years old now, and it was a couple of years since he had finally managed to get away from Volterra, escape through Naples and then reach a British ship of war. The voyage to England to join his aunt had decided the boy that he wanted to serve in the Royal Navy. Ramage could recall the arguments only too well: Gianna had simply announced that Paolo would serve with Nicholas. Because Captain Ramage was allowed to take up to six "young gentlemen" to sea with him as midshipmen, it was simple, she said; Paolo would be one of the six. Except, of course, that Captain Ramage did not like having too many midshipmen on board, and certainly did not want to be responsible for the safety in battle of the young nephew of the woman he loved.

Still, it was useless talking to either aunt or nephew about danger; both had already faced death several times and, as far as he could make out, and he had watched Gianna on a couple of occasions, they greeted it with an airy wave of the hand. So the boy had gone to sea and it seemed to work; Paolo had aIready been in three or four actions against the French where the only thing that saved his life was the quickness of his own cutlass or the dirk, and once Thomas Jackson had saved him from a French sword.

His use of the dirk as a main-gauche had started many of the seamen practising it - probably inspired by Will Stafford who, first hearing the phrase and not realizing it was French for "left hand", had asked: "What is a mango?" thinking, no doubt, that it was another variety of the fruit. After that Ramage had often seen seamen, a long piece of wood in the right hand as a cutlass and a short piece in the left representing the dagger, practising fencing, each trying to use the cutlass to swing his opponent round and leave his right side open, so that a dagger held in the left hand could be plunged in. The main-gauche was generally regarded by the British as not the sort of thing a gentleman would use. However, the Italian fencing master who had begun teaching young Paolo just as soon as he had learned to walk without staggering, was obviously a more practical man who considered that if relations had become so bad that men fought with swords, the object was to kill the adversary and stay alive oneself, and a main-gauche could often be an ace of trumps.

Ramage had been so wrapped up in his own thoughts when he first saw the Italian mainland once again the previous day, a distant blue-grey hint on the horizon, that he had not given a moment's thought to Paolo, who was seeing his homeland for the first time in several years and with the knowledge that it was still occupied by the enemy. Even the most optimistic of men could not guess when the French army would be driven out of Italy. Bonaparte occupied Europe from the North Sea to the Mediterranean, and, apart from occasional defeats at sea, seemed invincible. Paolo had borrowed a telescope, looked for two or three minutes, commented to Alberto Rossi that he had never previously seen Tuscany from seaward, and handed back the telescope. Unfeeling, self-controlled or indifferent? Ramage did not know.

In fact Paolo, almost overwhelmed with nostalgia, had been nearly in tears, but was imitating the Captain in hiding his feelings. Beyond that blue-grey blur the boy had pictured the many towers of the city of Volterra, tall, slim rectangles, and round it the cone-shaped hills with tiny towns perched on top, the dark green of the cypress trees covering the countryside, lining tracks and sheltering houses from the winds, and looking just like the broad blades of spears stuck hilt-first into the ground.

He recalled his own room in the palace and the armoury with the splendid collection of pistols - including some of the finest examples ever made in Pistoia, only a few miles away and the town which had given the world the word "pistol". It was when he commented on this recently to the Captain that Paolo had learned that the English word "bayonet" probably came from the French town of Bayonne, where the short swords fixed on to muskets had first been made. The Captain had known about "pistol" and "bayonet" but could not tell him where the word "dirk" came from, except to mutter something about Scotsmen.