'Which I now do, sir,' Paolo said, pulling the letter from the wallet and taking three steps to place it in Ramage's outstretched hand.

'If you will examine the seals and make sure they are intact, sir?'

Ramage looked up at the youth. 'Paolo!'

Orsini flushed and almost stuttered as he explained: 'Sir, my aunt said I was to say that as soon as I delivered the letter.'

Ramage turned over the letter, recognized the seals of Volterra and saw they were intact, and said solemnly: 'I have received the letter safely on the due day and the seals are unbroken.'

He looked up and saw tears forming in Paolo's eyes. In a few moments the poor boy would fa un brutta figura.

'You may go!' Ramage said quickly and the boy almost ran from the cabin. He had held back the tears long enough to avoid 'making a bad figure', but too late not to reveal that he knew something of the contents of the letter, and what he knew had upset him.

Deliver six months after the ship sailed . . . which was also six months after she left England for Paris on her way to Volterra. Ramage turned the letter over and over, strangely unwilling to prise open the seals and unfold the page. The paper was thick and he recognized it as her own, not the notepaper used in Palace Street. Was it a letter telling him...

Suddenly he slid his finger under the seals, opened the four folds and smoothed back the flaps. He read it through hurriedly to get the general sense and by the time his eye reached her signature he was angry, relieved and confused, all in the same instant, and his hands were trembling. He then began to read it again, slowly and carefully.

My dearest,

I am writing this while you prepare to leave England in the Calypso, and I pack to leave with the Herveys for Paris and then Volterra, but there will be one great difference; you will return to England, but I never shall.

Paolo will give you this letter in six months' time. By then I hope I shall be blurred in your memory, just as I pray you will be blurred in mine.

The reason is one we have talked over so frequently. My love and duty lies with my little kingdom. Your love and duty lies in England, the Navy, and the Blazey estate.

You must accept that we can never marry, because our religions are different and the people of Volterra would never accept a straniero after the years of French occupation. They will need reassuring by a ruler they know and trust - a role I hope to fill. They will expect heirs to be born - and you and I can never give them any because we cannot marry.

But please, Nico, look into your heart. You have known all this for years, but you have fought the knowledge, denied it, and tried to devise ways round it. You have failed because there is no way, and slowly this has affected us: slowly you have fallen out of love with me. Small things I say and do irritate you; the prospect of me going to Volterra makes you angry, but I think that without you realizing it the reason is that, inside you, you know this is the only answer; that we can never really be together. I mean as lovers.

For myself, yes, I have loved you deeply and perhaps I always shall (who can promise the future?), but now I go to Volterra in the certain knowledge that I shall marry another man and bear his children, and the succession will be secure for the future in my little kingdom.

I am weeping now, of course, and my memory goes back to a young woman in a cloak pointing a pistol at you in the Torre di Buranaccio at Capalbio. It was a strange meeting and since then we have loved each other, but for both of us that page in the story of our lives must turn.

By the time you receive this I shall either be in Volterra and perhaps already married to another man, or Bonaparte will have had his agents dispose of me. Either way, I have left your life and, my dearest Nico, I hope you will find a woman you love and who will love you as deeply as I did, and whom you can marry.

Think of me occasionally, as I shall think of you occasionally, if Bonaparte spares me, but only occasionally. If Paolo can serve with you, I shall be happy, but I suppose he will become a lieutenant and go to another ship. He worships you and you have become the father - uncle, anyway - that he never knew. He has never forgiven me because he thinks I should have broken our relationship long ago, since we could never marry. At his age, solutions are so simple.

So farewell, my Nico.

YourGianna.

His eyes blurred with tears. So she had known all along what he had for so long refused to admit to himself, that the hopelessness of it all had killed his love for her. Killed? No, not killed; changed its character. He had loved her as a woman, and as a mistress, to the exclusion of all other women. Then it had cooled until in the last year or two he had loved her as he would a favourite sister. And she was right about the irritations and the anger he had felt about her going to Volterra. Anger, yes; but much of it was guilt, too.

A guilt, he realized as he folded the letter carefully, that he need no longer feel. He stared at the polished top of his desk, his eyes following the sweep and curve and twists of the mahogany grain. So by now she could be married, and knowing Italian marriages and the demands of politics, perhaps already carrying another man's child.

He put the letter in a drawer and locked it. He could believe her wish that he would meet a woman he would love. The damnable irony, he reflected sourly, was that he never fell in love with women who were free to love him. Gianna held in the chains of religion and the heavy inheritance of a kingdom; Sarah held by - what? Something represented by a trunkful - two trunksful - of military uniform. Where was her heart? Probably buried in some grave in the plains and hills of Bengal.

If the peace held, he would send in his papers, find some good plain woman of respectable family, marry her and spend the rest of his days in St Kew. There was more pain attached to love than joy, and months at sea gave too much time for black thoughts; of unfaithfulness, of handsome Army officers dancing quadrilles, of - he stood up, grabbed his hat and went up to the quarterdeck, where the sun was bright.

It was particularly bright because the men were taking down the large harbour awning which almost completely shaded the quarterdeck. Soon it would be rolled up and stowed below and the smaller one, heavily roped, rigged in its place.

He looked at the island half encircling the bay. It was so peaceful that the events of the past weeks were impossible to believe - except that his left arm still pained him and his right leg ached, and he could see four or five Marines with cutlasses and pistols exercising some of the privateersmen who clanked across the deck in irons.

Wilkins Peak, Rockley Bay, Garret's, Aitken Bay, Wagstaffe Battery . . . They had all come to the Ilha da Trinidade and had (on paper) changed it. But Trinidade had changed all of them permanently: no one, privateersmen now in irons going to face trial or English aristocrat travelling home in a John Company ship, surveyor employed by the Admiralty Board or artist with a plentiful supply of paints, would ever be the same again. The memories would have changed them in some way.

After taking his noon sights five days later and working them out, Southwick walked over to Ramage, who had been pacing moodily up and down the weather side of the quarterdeck for an hour, and now stood at the rail staring forward at the horizon. Staring, Southwick knew, but not seeing.

'First five hundred miles, sir,' the master said. 'Only another four thousand or so to go and we'll be in the Chops of the Channel. Our latitude is fourteen degrees thirty-nine minutes South and the longitude is twenty-three degrees forty-seven minutes West.'

'That's an average of four knots,' Ramage said sourly. 'At this rate it'll take us more than forty days. Six weeks. That's if we don't spend a couple of weeks slamming about in the Doldrums -'