Again St Brieuc nodded. "The men tried and wronged the father; now they attack the son. But - Audentis Fortunas iuvat!"

'"Fortune is ally to the brave' - let's hope so, eh?" Yorke said.

Ramage laughed. "More Virgil?"

"Yes," said St Brieuc. "But come, Mr Yorke. If his lordship is to sing for his supper, I think you ought to give him at least a hint that you do have supper to offer him! What about the champagne?"

Ramage was hot when he sat down at the desk in his tiny cabin on board the Triton later that day. He was pleasantly drowsy from the champagne Yorke had produced and pleasantly bloated from a superb meal cooked by the French chef in the St Brieuc entourage.

The perspiration soaking his clothes and trickling down his face was not entirely due to the sun heating his box of a cabin. Warmth came in waves, as if a furnace door was opened, when he thought about the past couple of hours on board the Topaz-He was flushed with embarrassment for his behaviour.

My only excuse, he thought to himself, is that it's been months since I talked to intelligent and sophisticated people. And they are the first people outside the Service or the family with whom I've ever discussed the Goddard business. And, dammit, I feel all the better for it. Indiscreet I may have been, and Goddard and his cronies would call it disloyal, but somehow the idea of Goddard setting a trap for me doesn't seem so frightening now and I don't feel so damned lonely. There's nothing Yorke or the Frenchman can do; there's nothing anyone can do, short of wafting Goddard off to the Indian Ocean. He and Croucher have a free hand but maybe I can survive by staying wide awake...

On board the Topaz, because of an encouraging word from St Brieuc, a puzzled lift of Maxine's eyebrows, a polite question from St Cast and a blunt question from Yorke, I talked and talked. I told them about the rescue of Gianna, the trial at Bastia, losing the Kathleen cutter, the battle of Cape St Vincent and capturing the St Lucia privateers. I also amused them with tales about Goddard and Croucher...

Come to think of it, he mused, I don't feel as embarrassed as I should. In fact I feel curiously free: the sensation of being trapped, so strong at the conference and almost crushing later at that bizarre interview with Goddard, has gone completely. I have got my confidence back and feel positively jaunty. Somehow they all seemed to understand much more than I'd expected, and Maxine seemed to grasp how lonely it was being on a distant station at the mercy of a vindictive admiral...

Ramage shook his head; Maxine with her exciting body and delicious accent wasn't a convoy plan, and he had a convoy plan to draw up. He put the instructions and orders to one side, with the list of the forty-nine merchantmen on top, cleaned the point of his pen, unscrewed the cap of the inkwell and then scratched his chin with the feather of the quill.

The convoy comprised forty-nine ships; they were to sail in seven columns of seven. He smoothed out a clean sheet of paper and drew seven evenly spaced dots in a line across the top. These were the ships leading the seven columns. Beneath each dot he added six more, one below the other, until he had drawn a square full of dots, seven along each edge - and seven horizontally, vertically and diagonally. A pity seven's not my lucky number, he thought inconsequentially. Six letters in Maxine's name and in his surname. Fascinating - and probably forty-nine dots make a magic square, and if you keep on making the knight's move starting from one particular dot, the track you make spells out your sweetheart's name.

Not many captains bother to draw convoy plans; but not many captains have an admiral watching every move for a mistake and probably working out ambiguous orders and complicated manoeuvres to make sure a mistake occurs. Having a clear plan showing every ship in the convoy by name and pendant number was good insurance. A sudden order from the flagship would not mean rushing to look up written lists and wasting time.

Most shipowners had no imagination, to judge by the names on the list. They seemed to favour the husband-and-wife tombstone names. The William and Grace, the Benjamin and Mary... Might be worth suggesting that Yorke use Samson and Delilah.

 Dip and scratch, dip and scratch ... The names of the seven leading ships were in place. The champagne was no help; nor was Maxine's face smiling up from the paper. In the tropical heat and the privacy of the Topaz's saloon she'd worn a dress of thin lacy white silk. The new French fashion had its advantages: without corsets you could at least see a woman's natural shape, and the clinging silk had cupped Maxine's breasts as if ... he jabbed the pen in the ink and looked at the next name on the list of ships.

The present system of numbering for small convoys had been invented by his father, he remembered sourly. The left-hand column was led by No. 11, with 12, 13 and 14 and so on following astern, while the second column was led by 21, the third by 31 and so on right across to 71, which led the seventh column, and down to 77, which was the seventh (and last) ship in the seventh column. The advantage of the system was the ease of finding a ship: number 45 was the fifth in the fourth column; 72 was the second in the seventh column.

Round the box of ships were the escorts. No point in marking in their positions since the Admiral hadn't given any indication of what he intended and they would probably change frequently, governed by the direction of the wind. Obviously Goddard would keep the frigates up to windward, ready to run down and drive off enemy ships or investigate strange sail. He expected to see Goddard's flagship in the middle of the convoy, but no number was allocated to the Lion. Apparently she'd stayed outside the convoy all the way from England, instead of being in the middle as a focal point. Was Goddard afraid of the indignity of having his flagship rammed by a merchantman in the middle of the night? It was a reasonable fear.

Yorke must be regarded as a steady captain: the Topaz was No. 71, leading the seventh column. On a voyage like this, where the wind would probably be from the east or north-east - providing the Trades stayed constant - the seventh column would also be the one to windward. This meant the Topaz would be the pivot, and providing she and the ships in her column kept their positions, there was a good chance the rest of the convoy would too. As the Marines and soldiers termed it, the Topaz would be the right marker; the ships leading the other columns would keep in position on her larboard side, each two cables' distance - four hundred yards - apart; each ship would be a cable astern of her next ahead - in theory, anyway.

In practice, Ramage thought savagely, the frigates and the Triton and Lark will be dashing back and forth like snapping sheepdogs trying to keep the flock together. The merchantmen would scatter, not giving a damn for orders, and apparently oblivious that the convoy's safety lay in concentrating, so that the escorts could protect them from enemy ships lurking on the edge of the horizon, just far enough away to be safe from the guarding shepherds, just close enough to dash in and carry off a sheep that strayed in the night...

It's bad enough for any man-o'-war's captain to have to escort a convoy, Ramage thought, but when people like Goddard and Croucher are in charge it savours of the "cruel and unnatural punishments" forbidden by the Regulations and Instructions ...

He filled in the other names on his plan. They were an odd collection; proof, if any was needed, that Britain was short of ships and shipowners were sending anything that would float to sea. Some of the ships would stay in Jamaica for the hurricane season, so the convoy's arrival at Kingston would be the signal for ships of war to lower their boats and send lieutenants and boarding parties off to the merchantmen to press as many seamen as possible.