Yet the French were not the only ones making preparations: a glance over the rest of the page showed that the British were busy preparing suitable reception committees. Lord Romney had just reviewed 3,000 men of the Kentish Volunteers at his estate at Maidstone; the King had reviewed 1,500 of the Surrey Volunteers on Wimbledon Common. One news item described joint manoeuvres held in the streets of London by the Loyal Hackney, Royal Westminster, Whitechapel and Shoreditch and Wapping regiments. An advertisement at the foot of the column announced that, 'Members of the London and westminster volunteers may purchase warranted firelocks at 2£ each at G. rippon's warehouse, No. 3, Ludgate Hill. Cartouche boxes, pistols and swords may likewise be obtained.'

Every hamlet and town in the south-eastern corner of England must be swarming with patriotic citizens clutching ancient fowling pieces or newly-purchased muskets or, perhaps, only scythes or sickles, and eyeing strangers with suspicion since they expected to find Frenchmen lurking behind each hedge and thicket. Every poacher in the Weald of Kent and on Romney Marsh and Pevensey Level now had a perfect excuse for the magistrates when found on the squire's land with a fowling piece under his arm (though he would still be hard pressed to explain away a ferret in his pocket and nets over his shoulder).

For a moment Ramage imagined Gianna on one of her wild rides over the countryside suddenly reining her horse as a group of Volunteers emerged from a hedgerow, muskets at the ready, and Gianna explaining in her exuberant English that she simply enjoyed riding alone. Rustics, unable to distinguish an Italian accent from a French, and full of the wild stories the newspapers had been printing about Bonaparte's secret hot-air balloons and rafts driven by windmills, might think she was Bonaparte's modern equivalent of Joan of Arc, riding through the countryside intent on rousing innocent folk into bloody riot and vicious rebellion ...

He turned the page to skim through the rest of the news. A gale of wind had put four ships ashore at Plymouth, scattering the fishing fleet just returning to harbour, and knocking down trees and chimney pots. A 'new stein is to be built at Brighton, with the Duke of Marlborough and others patronizing the undertaking'. The King would not after all be attending the ball being given tonight by the Duchess of Manston, because the Queen was still indisposed and remaining at Windsor. That would disappoint Gianna.

There was a section he would point out to Gianna. Headed 'The Fashionable World', it began by announcing that, 'The female fashion is every day encroaching on the male costume.' The article explained that with dozens of volunteer units being formed all over the country and their officers designing the uniforms as well as buying the necessary muskets, powder and shot, it was inevitable that 'the ladies would soon follow the fashion.'

Ramage smiled to himself at the descriptions that followed. The fashionable colours for the Summer of 1801 were purple, puce, yellow and scarlet, and beads and feathers were becoming popular along with spangled nets for the hair. Morning hats and bonnets of velvet, plain and trimmed, 'are among the latest inventions.'

Walking and full dress for ladies, the Morning Post assured its readers, were in two styles. One was of yellow muslin trimmed with black ribbon and tassels and full epaulets; the other a round dress of white muslin with a spencer of scarlet satin trimmed with black lace, and topped by a small, round hat with a deep veil.

Certainly the military influence was obvious, Ramage thought sourly; he could just imagine all the general officers wearing small, round hats with deep veils and scarlet spencers as they reported to the Duke of York at the Horse Guards. (Now he came to think about it, why were those short jackets named after the man who had just resigned as First Lord of the Admiralty?) Complexions would be puce, and a general liverishness would probably turn the whites of their eyes to the fashionable shade of yellow. Gianna would find the prospect as amusing as he did. He pulled out his watch - nine o'clock. Well, no elegant young lady could take less than an hour over her toilet...

He turned to the back page, which was mostly advertisements. The first was intriguing. 'Two hundred guineas will be paid for a commission appointing an ensign to one of His Majesty's regiments (an old fashioned regiment) now serving in the East or West Indies.' Obviously some poor fellow was trying to escape a fate in England that he considered worse than the prospect of death in the Indies from any one of a dozen vile tropical diseases. The vengeance of a jilted woman? The threats of his creditors? Ramage shrugged his shoulders: from what he had recently seen in the West Indies, the poor fellow would be wiser to stay in England - better the devil you know...

The next advertisement claimed that the new magic lanterns were 'a pleasing family amusement . . . They are complete in boxes, each lantern with twelve glass slides, on which are finely painted about sixty grotesque figures which, by reflection, are magnified from a miniature to as large as nature, according to the size of the lanterns.'

The rest of the advertisements offered no scope to an imaginative mind, and he looked at his watch again - a quarter past nine. The room was brighter now, and through the window he could see that the cloud was breaking up. With luck it would turn out to be a warm summer's day - and, judging from the noise outside, the prospect was putting new vigour into the street hawkers. He could hear the distant call of an approaching pieman, although Mrs Hanson's pride in her cooking meant that there would be no custom for the poor fellow at Blazey House.

The sheer noise outside! The cries of pedlars and hucksters all trying to outshout each other; the clatter of horses' hooves and the drumming of coach and cartwheels. The fiddler on the corner of Palace Street was tuning up with what sounded like lethargic melancholy. Ye gods and little fishes, how he hated cities in general and London in particular: he was more than irritated by the social obligations that had forced the family to come to London, and his father had been testy from the moment he stepped into the coach. His mother had long since resigned herself to the fact that both the men in her life had had their characters moulded by long periods of watching distant sea horizons, whether looking for an enemy or a landfall, and making decisions in the isolation imposed by command. She was one of the few people who came near to understanding that it made both of them impatient with the triviality and shallowness of London society.

The Admiral enjoyed his life of retirement at St Kew and begrudged every moment spent away from Cornwall, since there was nothing in London that could compensate for giving up his daily ride across land which had belonged to the Ramage family for three hundred years. So far as the old Earl was concerned, there was no drawing-room conversation to equal the chats he had with his tenants and neighbours at St Kew, sharing their good news and their bad. There was not a bunion nor a bad back, a feeble grandmother or a sickly child, that John Uglow Ramage, tenth Earl of Blazey and Admiral of the White, did not know all about and, if sympathy or guineas were needed, had not done his utmost to help or cure.

As his son and heir, Ramage hoped he would prove as good a landlord and neighbour when the time came, but since he was just past his twenty-fifth birthday and the Admiral was as lively as a frigate in a Channel lop, it would be a good many years before he was put to the test.

Ramage had been relieved to find that, in the year and a half he had been away in the West Indies, his mother seemed to have grown younger while his father had certainly held his own. The reason, his mother had confided in a whisper one evening (touching the side of her nose with her index finger in the conspiratorial gesture used by Italians to indicate secret knowledge), was having Gianna staying with them: her youthful exuberance was infectious, even though, she had added with affection, "The Marchesa di Volterra Has Settled Down!'