A quick order to the topmen had the main and mizentopsails furled, but he waited for the signal from Southwick which would indicate that the foretopsail now thrusting the Calypso astern had dug in the anchor.

He returned to watching the rubbish. Finally the palm fronds and broken branches slowed down and then stayed alongside. He watched a rock on Île Royale which was lined up with a headland on Île du Diable. The two remained lined up. If the rock had moved out of line that would have been proof that the anchor was dragging and the palm fronds were drifting in a current moving at the same speed as the frigate.

Ramage then jumped up on to the breech of a gun to watch La Robuste anchoring. She ended up positioned perfectly, and as her anchor hit the water, Ramage saw that the pilot's canoe had just arrived at the jetty.

'They're in a hurry,' Aitken commented.

'I'm not surprised: the pilot has never had such a startling report to make the governor,' Ramage said.

'Now what do we do?'

'We hoist out all the boats and wait,' Ramage said. 'Wait and practise.'

Sergeant Ferris was, usually, a patient man. He had a rule that he would explain something three times to a Marine or seaman he regarded as intelligent and four times to a fool. But no one valuing his pride, sanity or eardrums would dare cause a fifth. If he had any sense he would do what Marine Hart was doing.

Hart made up in bulk and loudness of voice what he lacked in intelligence, and this resulted in him being, at six feet two inches tall and sixteen stone, the largest of the Calypso's Marines with a bellow that sounded like a bull with spring fever.

Ferris, now commanding the Marine detachment in La Robuste, was thankful that Hart was an amiable man. This was due less to his nature than the fact that it was almost impossible to insult him. When he accidentally trod on someone's foot and was promptly called a 'bloody great big oaf', Hart would grin and say proudly: 'Ah, I am big, ain't I?' Hart had been a Marine for more than a year before he discovered to his surprise that an oaf was neither a special sort of promise nor a swear word.

'Let's have one more go, men,' Ferris said, although he knew the twenty Marines in his party understood that he was using 'men' instead of 'Hart' because the man was liable to sulk if he thought he was being singled out. Hart, who was also lefthanded, was not difficult or dangerous when he sulked but it was, as Mr Renwick once remarked, like having a stunned elephant lying at the foot of the stairs.

'The idea is this. We have one hundred and sixty Marines and seamen, an' that's dragging in every man that can wield a cutlash or fire a pistol.'

To Sergeant Ferris a cutlass was always a cutlash, no matter how many times he heard Mr Renwick and the Calypso's officers pronounce it correctly. On one occasion Renwick had taken him to one side and explained that it might be bad for discipline if privates heard such an ordinary word mispronounced. Ferris, a great believer in pipeclay and discipline, agreed wholeheartedly. 'So,' Renwick said, promptly sweeping into the linguistic breach, 'it's pronounced "cutlass".'

'S'right, sir,' Ferris agreed, 'cutlash, like I always say.'

Ferris looked round at his twenty men, careful not to glare at Hart. 'Now the captain reckons that eighty men (that's half the total: half one side and half the other) is too many to h'act h'as a disciplined force.'

Anyone except Hart who had served under Ferris knew that under stress (except of course in action), the sergeant sprinkled his sentences with both too many and too few aitches. He was not particular where they fell: a word with a vowel at its threshold was always a convenient spot.

'So h'it h'as been decided to divide the entire force, one hundred and sixty Marines and seamen, h'into eight parties each of twenty men. 'Ow h'about that, 'art, do you understand?'

'Yus, sergeant,' Hart said, nodding his head like a bear trying to disperse buzzing flies.

'Right. Now h'each party will 'ave its h'own h'objective.'

Hart was not alone in trying to sort out the sergeant's aspiration.

'Ours will be the starboard gangway. We clear h'it. I do not want' - he spaced the words and emphasized them - 'h'any of the h'enemy left alive on the starboard gangway.'

'Wot about the fo'c'sle, sergeant?' Hart asked lugubriously.

'None of your affair, my man: you just confine your h'activities to the starboard gangway.'

Hart digested this and then asked: 'Wot about the quarterdeck, sergeant?'

Ferris took a deep breath. They were a good crowd, he had to admit that. They did not quarrel among themselves or try to dodge sentry duty in the more cramped parts of the ship, and they all agreed that Hart when possible should be the sentry at the water butt on deck, when it was in use, rather than, say, sentry at the captain's cabin, where the headroom was five feet four inches, leaving Hart with a surplus of ten inches. But why Hart? What had Ferris ever done, he asked himself, to have a Hart?

'None of your affair, my man,' he repeated firmly, 'you just confine your h'activities to the starboard gangway.'

'But sergeant, what happens when we've done 'em all in on the starboard gangway? Don't seem fair that the fo'c'sle and the quarterdeck men and the rest of 'em get a bigger share than us. After all, we are Marines.'

Ware, Ferris suddenly remembered. In Hertfordshire. That was where Hart came from. 'Where?' 'Ware.' Yes, Ferris could remember that puzzling conversation with Marine Hart years ago.

But for once Hart was asking a good question. Once they'd cleared the gangway, were they expected just to stand there? Toss bodies over the side? Or what? Anyway, it gave him a chance to encourage Hart.

'That is a very pertinent question, my good man, and I'll raise it with Mr Wagstaffe.'

'Oh sergeant,' Hart said hastily, 'I wasn't trying to be pertinent: it just seemed we was being discrimbulated against.'

Not being pertinent? Ferris's brow wrinkled. He had never seen Hart so apologetic. What was wrong with 'pertinent'? It was a sergeant's word, like 'my man' was a sergeant's phrase. Suddenly he added two letters and saw the reason for Hart's apology.

'H'oh no, "pertinent" and "impertinent" are two h'utterly different words. "Pertinent" means - well, it's a good question. "Impertinent" is being rude to someone of a higher station, like a sergeant, or a lieutenant.'

That left 'discrimbulated'. Who would dare discrimbulate against Sergeant Ferris's party of men? That would risk a flogging. At least, it sounded as if it would. But ... well, that word had a sort of left-handed sound about it. Then Ferris sighed.

'Hart, my good man, you mean "discriminate". Believe me, no one's trying to discriminate against us. Mr Renwick was there when Mr Ramage drew a diagram of the ship's deck h'on a sheet of paper, and he divided it h'up into fo'c'sle, maindeck, starboard gangway, and larboard, quarterdeck and lowerdeck. Obviously most people are going to be on the maindeck, so four parties go there, one to the fo'c'sle, one to the quarterdeck, and one to each gangway: eight parties, one hundred and sixty men, plus a few under Midshipman Orsini to rescue the Royalists.'

'If you say so, sergeant,' Hart said. He did not understand, he was not convinced, nor, Ferris firmly believed, did the big ox want to be convinced. Like a bull giving an occasional bellow for no reason, and not because of any bad temper, Hart had these mild attacks from time to time.

On board the Calypso, Ramage filled in the last couple of lines of the day's entry in his journal. He had a strange 'someone-else-is-writing-this' sensation when he noted the Calypso's position, under the 'Bearings and distance at noon' column as 'Western extremity of Île Royale bearing north by east ¾ east five cables'. Nor was it often one could be so exact, but here in the lee of the islands the sea was calm and the wind steady, and as the French pilot book gave the heights of the three islands Paolo had been set to work with sextant and tables working out the distance. His first two attempts put Île Royale eleven and then seven miles away, but by the fifth sextant reading and set of calculations his answer coincided with Southwick's.