"Philip II put the Duke of Medina Sidonia in command of the vast Armada he sent against England in 1588, but Drake and gales did for the poor old duke, who knew nothing of the sea and was a coward anyway," Southwick explained.

"This was probably all the duke's land, then," Paolo commented.

"Exactly," Ramage said. "This small section of the Spanish coast, from Sanlúcar southwards, is really Spain's history squeezed into a few miles. The duke led the Armada and was beaten, the plate fleets arriving with the gold and silver later stopped, Spain went broke and has never recovered . . . It's all here. And Medina Sidonia's estates are just inland.

"So now study the chart," Ramage continued. "Get a glass and watch for the towers. If you know which is which you'll know exactly where we are: they're like beacons all the way along this coast."

For the next couple of hours Paolo alternately bent over the chart and then scowled at the coastline through the telescope, occasionally scribbling a name and time on the slate kept in the drawer of the binnacle box, and careful to add a brief description of each one - the captain was sure to read the daily journal which all midshipmen were required to keep and which was supposed to form a diary of the voyage, noting particularly anything of navigational interest and importance.

Well, Paolo thought, we passed Cabo Roche a couple of miles back, so that castle must be the Castillo de Sancti Petri. The Medina Sidonia sugarloaf came next, and then the village of Conil, built on a hill sloping back from the coast and easily seen in the glare of the afternoon sun because most of the buildings were white. A cluster of spinning windmills on top of a nearby hill looked in the distance like a bunch of flowers. Inland the bulky Monte de Patria was spotted by a series of towers - Torre La Atalaya, followed by the square-shaped Castilobo, which was hard to see because its grey stone blended with the land behind. Then on a small headland was Nueva, a round tower standing out among the rocks.

As the Calypso sailed south-east along a flat stretch of the coast which ran for five or six miles, blurred by the haze thrown up as the Atlantic slapped the beaches but backed by the line of mountains, blue-grey in the distance, Paolo studied what seemed to be a small island lying just off the coast.

Yet the chart did not show an island and, puzzled, he was just examining it with the glass for what seemed to be the tenth time when Ramage walked over. "You look worried."

"That island, sir," he said, gesturing over the larboard bow. "It isn't on the chart!"

"Perhaps it isn't an island . . ."

"But. . ." Paolo guessed the comment was a hint.

"If you went aloft with the bring-'em-near, the extra height would show that your 'island' is a headland, the end of a long and low sandy spit. Look inland - that flat-topped high ridge running back to the mountains is the Altos de Meca, so . . ."

"So that's Cabo Trafalgar, sir!" Paolo exclaimed, the relief very apparent in his voice.

"Exactly, and remember if you pass this way again close inshore, that from the north (and the south, of course) it does look like an island." Ramage bent over the chart. "Yes, there's a veryprominent round tower at the seaward end of the Altos de Meca. Not surprisingly it's called the Torre de Meca."

"Trafalgar doesn't seem a very Spanish name," Paolo commented, "especially compared with the towers."

"It's not, and although the English call it TrafALgar with the emphasis on the second syllable, it should be on the third, TrafalGAR, because it's taken from the Moorish name."

"What was its original name, then, sir?"

"Original name? Well, the Romans were probably the first to name it - from memory something like Promontorium Junonis. Then the Moors called it Taraf el gar, which means (so Mr Southwick tells me) 'the promontory of caves'."

"Are there caves there, sir?"

"Presumably - I've never visited the place. By the way, the chart shows a reef just south of it, the Arrecife de Canaveral, quite apart from these reefs further offshore. Remember that, if you're ever leading a shore party from the south!"

"With all these towers and forts, I'd sooner stay at sea," Paolo said with a grin. "The next tower is only three miles south-east of the cape, Torre del Tajo."

"No, I don't think we shall be visiting Spain on this voyage," Ramage said, and then remembered that until they were off Gibraltar and he could open the sealed orders, he did not know. At that moment the sails began to flap, and as Ramage swung round to glare at the quartermaster, he saw that the telltales were hanging down: the thin lines on which were threaded corks into which feathers had been stuck, showed that the wind was dying. Damnation, this wasn't the pleasantest of places to be becalmed.

By dawn the fitful wind was just beginning to freshen and the Calypso, like every one of the King's ships at sea in wartime, greeted the first light of the new day with her ship's company at general quarters: guns loaded and run out, Marines, with their muskets, ready for any enemy emerging from the night.

Ramage stood alone in the darkness at the forward end of the quarterdeck beside the rail, almost overwhelmed with memories.

Entering the Strait (particularly at daybreak) was an exciting experience: it beat the first sighting of the flat eastern coast of Barbados after crossing the Atlantic: it even beat seeing the Lizard again after a couple of years away from England. It was hard to know why the Strait of Gibraltar was different except that there was always the air of mystery. Yes, even now he could hear the distant bray of a donkey away over on the larboard bow - probably its protest at being whacked into activity by its peasant owner. And the smell of pines and woodsmoke and spices borne out to sea by the whiffles of chilly wind tumbling down the mountains and cliffs.

As the sun rose slowly ready to peer over the mountainous eastern horizon, he could just make out the dark bulk of Spain. There were many more towers along this coast, black fingers jutting up from rocky hilltops. Were the Spanish sentries asleep? Would they soon be passing the word that a British frigate was passing southwards into The Gut? Did they care?

He seemed to have spent all his life in the Mediterranean or the West Indies. He recalled those years ago when he had been the junior lieutenant in a frigate and had ended up, after a disastrous brush with a French ship of the line, as senior surviving officer. He had gone on to rescue Gianna - then known to him as just a name on a list, the Marchesa di Volterra - from (quite literally) under the hooves of Bonaparte's cavalry.

He shook his head, as if trying to rid himself of the idea that in the end it had all proved a waste of time and the wheel had turned a circle: Gianna was even now either dead, a victim of Bonaparte's secret police, or a prisoner. Young Paolo, her nephew, who was now standing down there beside his division of guns, was the only sign that Gianna had ever been part of Ramage's life, and there were even times when his memory refused to summon up her face.

The junior lieutenant had rescued her; the junior post-captain commanding a frigate had lost her. Was she dead? If so, then Paolo inherited Volterra, the tiny kingdom in Tuscany which she had ruled and which had been invaded by Bonaparte's Army of Italy.

The Marchesa di Volterra had been (is, he corrected himself hurriedly) tiny, beautiful, imperious, tender, hot-tempered, autocratic and a dozen other contradictory things. He had loved her (and, he knew, she had loved him), and the years she had lived as a refugee with his mother and father, either down inCornwall on the St Kew estate or in London, had been happy, except for the powerful sense of duty and obligation she had always felt for her people in Volterra.