The door opened and Lord Nelson beckoned him into the next room.

The First Lord, sitting at the table which was bare except for an inkwell, penholder, sandbox and two single candlesticks, looked up and nodded. 'From today you are under Lord Nelson's orders. I should warn you that secrecy is vital, so don't gossip.' He looked up and smiled, as if to take the edge off his harsh words. 'Don't look so hurt; you'll be the one that Bonaparte guillotines, not me.'

Lord Nelson ran a hand through his wavy and greying hair. 'It is too early in the morning to talk of guillotines, eh Ramage? Come along, the First Lord has given me my orders concerning you, so let us leave him with the rest of his day's business.'

The Admiral led him to a room along the corridor and sat down at a small table, reaching for a leather portfolio. As he fumbled with the straps Ramage reached forward to help, but Nelson shook his head. 'I've been without a second arm so long now that I'm used to it. This is the only thing that bothers me.' He pointed to his sightless eye. 'I think I'd sacrifice the other arm to have the sight back.'

He tipped the contents of the portfolio on to the table, and Ramage saw that much of it comprised pages cut from French newspapers and journals. The Admiral selected several sheets of notepaper, pushing the rest towards Ramage. 'Glance through those,' he said, 'then you'll know as much about Bonaparte's intentions as the regular readers of Le Moniteur.'

The pages, covering nearly a year, contained dozens of newspaper reports of Bonaparte's invasion plans or rather, as much of them as he wanted revealed by allowing them to be published. Some of the reports referred to orders that Bonaparte had given to his admirals and generals - these were in suitably flowery language and gave nothing away. Others showed how the Army of England, as it was hopefully called, had been assembled along the Channel coast over the past few months. But the most remarkable described how France's inventors were helping in the task of transporting the great Army to England.

Here were the original reports from which the British newspapers drew their accounts and people like Gillray drew their cartoons: huge, hot-air balloons which could carry a hundred men in gondolas slung beneath for the 'Descente en Angleterre'; great rafts propelled by sails, oars and huge windmills with their blades somehow geared to paddlewheels mounted on the side of the rafts. The actual invasion barges were described in enough detail for Ramage to guess they were designed by men used to Mediterranean galleys and who over-rated the choppiness of the Channel in anything of a breeze. Little more than great boxes, they must be so heavy that they would need half a gale o' wind to move them under sail. Likewise the gunboats intended to protect the barges seemed more suitable for operation on a large lake than in the Channel, with its treacherous weather and strong currents.

Lord Nelson glanced up as he put down the last page. 'Well, what do you make of it?'

Ramage hesitated: what comment could a mere lieutenant make to the Navy's most successful fighting admiral that would not sound stupid, impertinent, banal - or all three?

'Tell me,' Nelson said sharply, 'if you commanded three hundred of those barges laden with troops and artillery, and two hundred gunboats fully armed, how would you rate your chances of making a successful landing on the Kent or Sussex coast?'

'If I had a brisk easterly wind and a dark night sir,' Ramage said diffidently, 'and the Royal Navy was not around, I'd hope to get fifty, perhaps a hundred, of the barges ashore in England. But they'd probably be scattered along miles of the beaches: it would be impossible to keep them concentrated.'

'Why?' Nelson demanded querulously. 'Doesn't say much for your skill as a commander, does it? Unless you kept the barges together you wouldn't stand a chance: a hundred seasick Frenchmen landing from a single barge in one place, and another hundred getting ashore a mile away - why, even the local Sea Fencible companies could mop them up!'

Ramage flushed but stuck to his opinion. ‘The French won't have enough trained men to command the barges, sir. They would scatter from the moment they left port. Apart from Calais and Boulogne, the other French ports are tiny and dry out at low water, so at least two-thirds of the barges will come from those two ports. Even a hundred barges – not to mention gunboats and sloops - leaving Calais on one tide: why, the confusion would be enormous. They seem to be so cumbersome that with anything but a soldier's wind they can't manoeuvre. So they'd leave the French coast scattered, and I doubt if they could get into any sort of formation in the darkness before they reached England at dawn.'

'Where would you lose the two hundred, then? You said only a hundred would arrive.'

'Collisions, sir. That would bring masts tumbling down like corn before a scythe. And if they are being rowed, it needn't be an actual collision: one barge getting too close to another one means all the oars are ripped away and the rowers injured.'

'Two hundred lost like that?'

'No, sir: perhaps a hundred. Another fifty or so would be lost on sandbanks by navigational mistakes and poor seamanship while leaving the harbours in France - or hitting rocks and reefs on the English coast. The rest would probably sink because the planking opened up - poor construction, gun carriages breaking loose from their lashings, horses stampeding...’

'You're a damnably depressing fellow, Ramage! Are you always as gloomy as this?' The Admiral's expression made it clear he was teasing.

'No, sir, just that the barges and gunboats described here don't seem to have been designed by the French Navy - they have fine ships - and ninety per cent of the men on board will be landlubbers. Why, Bonaparte hardly has enough officers and men for the Fleet. And I was only answering your question, sir; I'm not counting losses caught by the Royal Navy.'

'Very well,' said the Admiral, 'another hypothetical question. You are allowed to pick your weather - and Bonaparte's only orders are that you have to concentrate the barges along a ten mile stretch of the Kent or Sussex coast. But now the Royal Navy is at sea. How many barges will you get ashore?'

'A few dozen, sir, and they'd be even more scattered,' Ramage said promptly.

'I'm glad Bonaparte can't hear you; he'd be dismayed!' The Admiral flattened the sheets of paper he had been holding. 'Now, the point of all this is that I want you to read and remember every scrap of information in the Admiralty's possession about Bonaparte's plans for his invasion, and forget everything you know about our defences. In case you are captured,' he added.

'I have a very poor memory, anyway,' Ramage said apologetically, appalled at the thought of learning facts and figures by rote. 'I mean, for learning and remembering numbers.'

Lord Nelson shook his head and said grimly. 'There's nothing to alarm you here -' he tapped the papers, 'because we know precious little about the barge and gunboat flotillas, apart from what has been published in the Moniteur. What we know from our agents - mostly emigrés, and their information out of date - is written down here. All the items of interest from the Moniteur are there - the ones you've glanced at. Put it all together and it doesn't make a big pile, does it?' he noted ruefully. 'Now, I want to run through what's written here; then you can spend the rest of the day digesting it.'

Quickly he read aloud from the written notes, which were the totals of barges and gunboats reported to have been completed and launched at each of the ports, the numbers actually under construction at the same ports, and the numbers believed to have been ordered but not yet started. Another list gave sites of army camps round Boulogne and Calais and some details of the troops and artillery occupying them, with possible sites for further camps. A third list gave the names of the senior French military and naval officers and their roles in the invasion plan.