He told Jackson to hail the five with the speaking trumpet, and picked another half dozen from those at the guns. As soon as they were all grouped round him he gave them their orders.

'It'll be out of the frying pan into the fire,' he concluded as he dismissed them, but he noticed they walked with jaunty strides, obviously delighted at having been chosen. The poor fools, he thought. Yet perhaps they weren't - he was honest enough to admit he was glad he was going to lead them because he'd no wish to stay in the frying pan.

'Do we stand a chance, sir?' Jackson asked quietly.

'Of telling our grandchildren about it? No, none. Of doing the job - yes. At least an even chance.'

Jackson nodded. 'I'm glad she isn't, for her own sake, but the Marchesa'd like to be with us, sir, and Count Pitti.'

'Yes,' Ramage said shortly,, instinctively feeling the signet ring with his thumb. He had to say it to someone, if only to - well, he felt an aching guilt towards his Kathleens.

'Jackson, if there was any other way' - he glanced back at the British line, but except for the Captain steering towards them, it was sailing on, drawing away, although a couple more of the leading ships had tacked - 'I'd try it but there isn't...'

'We know, sir, but none of the lads'd change places with anyone walking down St. James's.'

Ramage looked at his watch. They'd tacked only a few minutes ago. It seemed an hour. His mind was racing and the men were working fast: already the braziers were being hoisted up on deck, and there was a stack of hammocks round the forehatch with others being arranged in piles along the centreline.

The secret papers: he'd forgotten to get a lead-lined box made. He'd use a canvas bag and a roundshot. Jackson would have to put the signal book in at the last moment and then throw the bag over the side. Down in his cabin once again he glanced round as he put the papers in the bag. Few cabins in a ship of war could have such memories for a captain. He shut the top drawer and opened the second. Gianna's silk scarf was lying there where he'd put it when he came back on board, neatly folded. He picked it up, intending to tie it round his waist, then decided neither smartness nor the custom of the service was important now and knotted it round his neck, tucking the ends under his stock. If he'd brought her any happiness, then now he was going to bring her an equal amount of grief.

Then he was back on deck, looking at the San Nicolas. As she and the rest of the leading ships drew nearer he saw they were farther apart than he first thought.

'The right ship's leading 'em, sir,' commented Jackson as Ramage drew yet another plan showing the position of the ships, this time to help him calculate the best angle of approach.

'Right ship?'

'Haven't you noticed, sir? She's named after the same saint as you!'

The San Nicolas - no, he hadn't realized it and said with a grin, 'Since she's leading this undignified rush for Cadiz, Jackson, I'll trouble you not to mention it!'

Jackson laughed. 'Well, sir, let's hope he decides to look after you and not the Dons!'

The San Nicolas, Ramage reflected: an 84-gun ship of about two thousand tons compared with the Kathleen's 160 tons. Why, the Spanish ship's masts and yards alone would weigh as much as the whole of the Kathleen, while the nose on the figure head of St. Nicolas must be about thirty feet above the waterline. The jibboom end would be all of sixty-five feet high - and that was the height of the Kathleen's mast ... Oh, the devil take it, he told himself angrily, guessing dimensions won't make the San Nicolas an inch smaller or the Kathleen an inch larger.

'Any signals to the Captain from the Victory, Jackson?'

'Can't see the Victory for smoke, sir; but nothing hoisted in the Captain: no acknowledgments: just her colours.'

Southwick said, 'Captain Collingwood won't leave the Commodore unsupported for long, orders or no orders. We'll soon see the Excellent following the Captain.'

'I hope so.'

'Did you expect the Captain to quit the line, sir?'

'Yes. At least, I hoped she would!'

'But the Commodore left it a bit late,' ventured Southwick.

Ramage shrugged his shoulders with feigned indifference.

'Late for us; but he's probably just got time to head them off - particularly if we can cause a delay. He won't have time to get in among the leaders, though.'

'He'll go for the Santisima Trinidad?'

Ramage nodded. He knew instinctively that if there was any choice that the Commodore would tackle the largest ship in the world, and by chance she was to leeward of the rest and so nearest to the Captain.

Then Ramage looked at the Spanish ships, at the Captain, at the British line and at the sketches on his pad, and suddenly he knew his plan was not only futile but absurd. Despite what he'd just said to Southwick he knew that even if the Kathleen did manage to delay the Spanish van for fifteen or twenty minutes, the chances of the Captain catching up were slender. But, more important, even if she did she wouldn't be able to head off all those ships: each one of them had a heavier broadside: all of them would rake her time and again before her own broadsides would bear. And he knew that even now he could wear round the Kathleen on some pretext or other and return to her proper position, astern of the Excellent. But he was still looking at his sketch of the Kathleen superimposed on the San Nicolas when he realized that, despite what the pencil lines told him, he had to go on because if he turned back now, for the rest of his life he'd never be sure whether it was logic or fear that made him give up.

Once he'd decided to go on he was angry with himself for the alternate bouts of fear and calm, confidence and uncertainty. And then he also realized that although the Commodore might have had similar doubts (though hardly similar fears) he'd nevertheless quit the line and was going to try, and that was all that mattered. If the Kathleen could give him an extra fifteen or twenty minutes, they might make all the difference between complete failure and a partial success ...

And he must put a term to idle thoughts and daydreams: the San Nicolas was coming up fast, and there was no room for mistakes. Edwards had the braziers ready, lashings holding the four legs of each one against the ship's roll, and they were half full of old shavings and scraps of wood and chunks of pitch, a few screws of paper tucked in the bottom ready for lighting.

Ramage's dozen men were arming themselves with a variety of weapons. Jackson had a cutlass in his hand and a butcher's cleaver - presumably borrowed or stolen from the cook's mate - swinging at his belt from a line through the hole in the wooden handle. Stafford had cut down the haft of a boarding pike so that he had in effect a three-sided dagger blade on a three-foot handle, and he was practising swinging a cutlass with his right hand and lunging the pike with the left. He'd arrived at the old main-gauche, Ramage realized, without ever having seen the shadier side of knightly combat. Maxton, the coloured seaman, had a cutlass in each hand and was slashing at an imaginary enemy with such fast inward swings that Southwick commented to Ramage, 'He could cut a man into four slices before anyone saw him move.'

'He was born with a machete in his hand,' Ramage replied, remembering Maxton's comment at Cartagena. 'He learned to swing a blade cutting down sugar cane.'

Still the San Nicolas ploughed on. The nearer she came the less graceful she appeared: the cutwater could not soften the bulging bow, the bow wave was no longer a feather of white but a mass of water being shoved out of the way by the brute force of a ponderous hull. Her sails were no longer shapely curves but overstretched, overpatched and badly-setting. The beautiful lady in the distance was proving on closer inspection to be a raddled woman of the streets.