But in what disguise would the Calypsos be? A troupe of buskers, tumbling to the tunes of "Blower" Martin's flute? The problem comprised two halves - going and coming back. Going, they would be a group of the Calypso's officers and ship's company, in some sort of disguise. Coming back (assuming parole had caused no problems) the Calypsos would be escorting freed hostages of unknown rank, age and physical condition. How could they be disguised? A crowd of widows going to early mass, rigged out in black?

The captain of the Calypso frigate might grumble that the Admiralty was picking on him, but in fairness to Their Lordships (how one hated being fair to the Board) he was an obvious choice. He spoke fluent Italian, thanks to a childhood spent in Italy. And he knew much of Tuscany quite well - not that Their Lordships would consider that: as far as they were concerned Pitigliano could be anywhere between Genoa and Venice, Milan and Naples or Bergamo and Bari. Ramage spoke Italian and knew the coast: that was all that mattered. Oh yes, and he had on board as a midshipman the nephew of that Marchesa who was the ruler of Volterra - the one who is missing . . . Ramage could picture the conversation round the long table in the boardroom: St Vincent nodding to save words, Captain Markham (who had intervened on the Board's behalf at that travesty of a court-martial), another one or two members of the Board to make up a quorum, and Evan Nepean, the Board secretary, busy taking the minutes.

Two Italian speakers: that would settle it. But, Ramage realized, he was in a better position than the Board knew because, thanks to them helping to get the Murex out of Brest, he had on board four French seamen: four royalists who, until a few months ago, had lived in France and knew a good deal about the way the new regime conducted its affairs. And of course there was Rossi, the Genovese seaman. Rossi's life as a youngster in Genoa had taught him the same skill with a dagger that the Cockney Stafford had learned with a set of pick-locks.

And there was Hill. A couple of days ago the new lieutenant had made a pun in French to Orsini. Ramage, happening to overhear it, discovered that Hill's mother was French, a royalist who had married a London banker many years ago but who had absolutely no ability to learn English. This resulted in the house being staffed with French servants (refugees once the war had started) and Hill being bilingual from the time he started to talk.

What a happy little party they would make, Ramage thought sourly: Gilbert and his Frenchmen led by Hill and singing Ça Ira; Paolo (who in fact was developing a healthy baritone) and Rossi singing a rousing duet from an Italian opera; and he and Jackson humming some old English sea chanty, and all of them coughing from the white dust covering the flat rock forming the roads, slapping mosquitoes and cursing their sore and swollen feet.

Life on board one of the King's ships was no training for marching over rough tracks - or, come to that, well-made roads. Running barefoot on wooden decks was one thing; marching to Pitigliano was another, especially since most of the men owned only light shoes. The Marines had boots, but they spoke neither French nor Spanish. Some of them had such local accents, Ramage remembered, that only their proud parents would claim they spoke English . . .

Tongues and feet: they were the first considerations. Who could speak what language, and who could be fitted with boots from the purser's store on board, even if it eventually meant borrowing from the Marines. Borrowing from the Marines would, of course, mean that the Marine lieutenant, Rennick, would want to join in. He was a brave and competent officer, but his life had necessarily been governed by the drill book, so that now he lacked the flexibility of the sea officers who had to handle the ship amid sudden squalls, sails blowing out, or the thousand and one emergencies which gave no warning, no time to look up any answers in a notebook.

None of which answered the question of how to get to Pitigliano - and how, once there, to get in touch with the British hostages. Nor how (if they had not given their parole) to rescue the hostages and get them on board the Calypso. That, my friend, is why orders can be written in a paragraph, but the subsequent report of proceedings, describing how the orders were carried out, usually takes several pages.

Pitigliano . . . Manciano . . . Saturnia . . . All small but interesting places he had once dreamed of visiting again with Sarah when Bonaparte had been defeated and a lasting peace signed. And, assuming that Gianna had survived, they would visit her in Volterra, the old city with its scores of towers lying just to the north.

Yes, in his daydreaming (while they were still honeymooning in France, before the war started again) he had taken Sarah on his own Grand Tour of Italy. Not the usual one, when most of the time was spent looking at painting and sculpture in Milan, Florence, Siena and Venice, and in Rome visiting all the Romans one could not avoid but whose conversation would be limited to social gossip and the same vapid comments that Romans had been making for centuries about paintings, and the activities of cicisbeos. No, he wanted had wanted, he corrected himself) to show Sarah the Italy that ranged from the glorious palace at Caserta (splendid to look at from the outside but bare and cavernous inside) to the so-called beehive houses of Friuli. To so many English people Italy, after the Grand Tour, was simply the jumbled memories of social visits and picture frames.

He unrolled a map of southern Tuscany. It covered from Cecina on the coast, eastwards across to Siena and ended with Arezzo forming the top right-hand corner. Then it ran south to include Perugia, passing just east of Orvieto and then down to the border with Lazio. It followed the border westward, skirting Lake Bolsena, arriving back at the coast between Montalto di Castro and Capalbio. There was a lookout tower at Montalto and, he remembered vividly, the next one north: the Torre di Buranaccio. Several lifetimes ago (or so it seemed) he had landed there with Jackson to rescue a group of Italian aristocrats escaping just ahead of Bonaparte's advancing troops. One of them was supposed to be the aged Marchesa di Volterra, by chance an old friend of his parents. Damnation, what misunderstandings had arisen when it transpired that the Marchesa was in fact young and beautiful (and wilful, too!), the daughter of the one they had expected.

Somehow the Torre di Buranaccio (where at one point in the misunderstanding she had presented a pistol at him and was quite prepared to fire it) was a beginning. It had brought him to the notice of Nelson, then of course only a commodore, and Lord St Vincent (then only Sir John Jervis, since the battle for which he received his earldom and title - and in which Commodore Nelson and Lieutenant Ramage had played an exciting part - had not yet taken place).

Maps, he reminded himself firmly and stared down at the one spread on the desk, weighted down to stop it rolling up again. So there it was, a slightly skewed square of land with the small lump of Argentario hanging off the left-hand corner. Argentario was a diamond-shaped, mountainous island joined to the mainland by two causeways. Between them on the mainland was the small fortified town of Orbetello but, more important, the northern causeway joined the mainland just opposite where the track to Pitigliano turned inland from the Via Aurelia, which ran along the coast only a few yards inland and along which so many Roman armies had marched to and from Rome.

So follow that track from the Via Aurelia. After a couple of miles it went through the first village, which was not as big as its name, la Barca del Grazi, and whose sole importance seemed to be that it was a fork where another track branched left to many more hill towns forming a chain round the foot of Monte Amiata. Damnation, it was hard to follow the track without traipsing off along the side roads of boyhood memories, when he and his mother and a couple of coachmen (there were plenty of bandits across the Maremma, and highwaymen lurked near inns favoured by wealthy travellers) explored Tuscany. They had stayed at most of the hill towns where the inns were so small that often mother and son occupied the only available rooms and the two coachmen had to lodge with friends of the innkeeper. And a church built after 1300 was regarded as recent.