Yorke and Southwick were waiting on the starboard side, and they were now joined by Wilson and the Lady Arabella's surgeon, Farrell, who stood a few paces apart. Bowen was conspicuously absent - there was more than a hint of the freethinker about Bowen, and in the past Ramage had often been shocked by some of the surgeon's comments. Yet if he was honest he had to admit they sometimes left him trying to find answers to disturbing questions. In fact, he thought sourly, he'd spent most of the last month trying to find answers to a different but equally bewildering variety of questions.

As he stood watching, left hand on the hilt of his sword, Ramage recalled, with a nostalgia that knotted his stomach muscles, all the many Sundays when he had conducted the service in the two ships he had commanded. The toothless John Smith, who usually stood on the capstan with his fiddle, playing some cheerful forebitter as the men heaved on the bars to weigh the anchor, would suck in his cheeks and crease his forehead in a frown of concentration as he sawed out the music of a hymn, and the ship's company would sing with gusto. When he first went to sea, Ramage suddenly remembered, his father had told him that he would find Divine Service was a ship's weather glass: if the men did not sing with their hearts in it, he should look for a defect in the captain or officers.

Stevens stopped abaft the table, clasped his hands behind his back, and slowly stared round the ship's company.

The wind hummed in the rigging; the downdraught from the mainsail curving down from high over their heads was chilly and flapped the edges of the Union Flag draped over the table. The Lady Arabella rolled with a ponderousness belying her elegant name as the seas swept up astern and passed under her: Ramage was reminded of a plump fishwife on her way to market. But for all that, it was a comfortable roll; regular enough that the men could balance without effort.

There was a heavy thump every two or three minutes as the packet's bow punched into a larger sea, showering up a sparkling spray which the sun scattered with rainbow patterns before it hit the deck and dribbled aft along the scuppers in prosaic rivulets of water. Almost without realizing he was doing it, Ramage braced back his shoulders: a bright and brisk day like this made up for a score of others when the sky was low with scudding grey clouds and wind drove rain and spray in blinding squalls.

After looking round at the ship's company - resentfully, it seemed to Ramage, as though conducting the service took him away from other more important work - Stevens removed his hat with a flourish, and everyone followed suit.

Catching sight of Southwick's flowing white hair, now fluffing out in the wind, Ramage saw the look of stern disapproval on his face: a ship's company standing round on deck as though on a quayside waiting for a ferry was obviously not the old Master's idea of the way Divine Service should be conducted.

Handing his hat to the nearest seaman, Stevens took a pair of spectacles from a pocket and put them on with great deliberation. He then took a prayer book from another pocket and, after giving a cough intended to get the men's attention, opened it.

At that moment the lookout at the bow shouted excitedly: "Sail - ho! Sail to loo'ard on the starboard bow!"

Ramage immediately watched Stevens. The man tossed the prayer book on to the table, removed his spectacles and thrust them into his pocket before taking his hat back from the seaman. But he did not do what everyone on deck but Ramage had done instinctively as soon as the lookout hailed - look over the starboard bow.

Stevens turned back to the binnacle box, opened the drawer beneath the compass, took out his telescope, and strode over to the aftermost gun on the starboard side. He climbed up to balance himself on the breech, but before looking through the telescope he turned and called, "Run up our colours, Mr Much."

He waited to see two seamen getting ready to hoist the big ensign before putting the telescope to his eye.

Puzzled at what he had seen, Ramage hurried to the main shrouds, unclipping his sword and handing it to Jackson. As he swung into the ratlines he saw Yorke perched halfway up, and as he scrambled up to join him he saw Southwick hurrying across the deck, obviously having run down to his cabin to collect his telescope.

Yorke moved to make room for Ramage, pointing without saying a word. On the horizon Ramage saw two tiny white rectangles, like visiting cards standing on end at the far side of a dark blue tablecloth. The hull of the ship was still hidden from sight below the horizon; only the masts and sails had lifted above the curvature of the earth.

But one glance told him all he needed to know. The ship was not square-rigged; she was a two-masted schooner carrying fore and aft sails. She was hard on the wind on the larboard tack, and she was steering an intercepting course. Miracles apart, there was only one thing she could be.

By now Southwick, puffing slightly, was beside him on the ratlines and turning to face outboard. He took one look at the horizon and gestured with the telescope. "I needn't have bothered to get this!"

"Our lookout must have been asleep," Yorke commented. "How many guns do you reckon she carries?"

"A dozen 4-pounders. These privateer schooners rely on boarding," Ramage said.

"She's dam' fast: we'll have a sight of her hull in a minute or two."

Ramage took Southwick's telescope, adjusted the focus - he had used it so many dozens of times he could do it automatically - and with an arm through a ratline he balanced himself against the Arabella's roll and put the telescope to his eye.

The schooner showed up with almost startling clarity in the circular lens: the lower part of her sails were dark where flying spray kept them soaking wet. Suddenly a long, low, black hull lifted for a moment under the sails like a distant whale, and then sank below the horizon again. He glanced down - they were perched about thirty feet up in the ratlines. From that height you could see the horizon at about six and a quarter miles. Again a random wave lifted the privateer's hull momentarily above the horizon, and he saw the spray slicing up from her stem. Hard to count, but half a dozen gun ports?

The privateersmen had been wide awake: from well down to leeward they had sighted the packet, estimated her track and hardened in sheets to steer an intercepting course ... all this had gone on even before Stevens had removed his hat.

Automatically Ramage began converting what he could see into a mental diagram. The Lady Arabella was running northeast before a quartering westerly wind, and the privateer was beating to windward on the larboard tack, making good a course somewhere between north-west and nor'-nor'-west. When I come to describe it later to Gianna, Ramage thought irrelevantly, the Arabella will be a coach thundering down a long straight road. The privateer will be a highwayman galloping along another road coming diagonally from the right. Unless Stevens does something about it, both coach and highwayman will meet at the crossroads.

The privateer is not travelling along her road as fast as the Arabella, my dear, since she's beating to windward, but that doesn't matter because the French have less distance to travel to the crossroads: it is about six miles away for the Arabella, but less than three for the privateer. But how, Gianna will ask, with that quizzical wrinkling of her brow, could the Arabella escape? And I will smile reassuringly: her fastest point of sailing was with the wind on the beam, so we immediately turned northwards to put the wind on the beam - taking a turning on the left, in other words, leaving Johnny Frenchman over on our right and well down to leeward: so far to leeward he could never beat up to us before nightfall. We would have no trouble dodging him once it was dark. By making a sudden and drastic alteration of course, at daylight on Monday morning there would be nothing to see on the horizon...