As the French frigate raced towards them from the west and the Calypso came thundering along from the north, the men grouped round Kenton and Orsini at the mainmast.

"Yer know wot?" demanded Stafford, and when no one answered he continued: "It's like standing at a crossroads, wiv a highwayman galloping towards you from one direction, and a cavalryman coming along another to rescue you."

"What about the other two roads?" Rossi asked. "The difference is you can't escape up the other ones."

"That's true," Stafford said philosophically. "In fact I'm a beautiful woman tied to the tree, and there's my true love on his white 'orse -" he pointed towards the Calypso "- and there's the 'orrible villain wot wants to kidnap me."

As he pointed at the French frigate Orsini said, in the deepest voice he could produce: "I'm afraid the 'orrible villain is going to get you first."

"Yus," Stafford agreed equably. "I shall give an 'orrible girlish scream, wave to my distant lover (that's Mr Ramage, of course) and get swep' orf to a fate worse than death. I can't akshully imagine a fate worse than death, but that's wot they always say."

Orsini produced his pistol and said firmly: "I shall fire at the frigate just as she hits us, or opens fire." With that he cocked the pistol and Jackson leapt to one side. "Steady on, sir," he exclaimed nervously. "You'll kill someone if you're not careful."

The American began to laugh when he realized the significance of what he had said. "Well, I'm sure none of us is in any hurry, sir." Then he added, after looking at the two approaching frigates: "This is such a good race I don't want to miss any of it."

"Nah," said the irrepressible Stafford, "it's the first time you've ever been a prize, I'll bet. If this was Newmarket 'eath, I'd say you'd be worth your weight in guineas."

Paolo was rather angry. Not entirely angry, but he knew that if he was still living in the palace at Volterra he would be curt with the servants. Not an angriness of the fegato, or in other words induced by the liver, just anger that, having unexpectedly blown up one enemy frigate, they were about to be blown up by another.

The English had a phrase for it, "tit for tat", but the English were hopelessly impractical about this sort of thing. He had been surprised to find out from the Captain that the English regarded Machiavelli as "rather a scoundrel", and tended to get sentimental about their enemies after they had won a victory. If the French won this war, then they would set up guillotines in every town in Britain, and execute anyone who had two pennies to rub together on the grounds that he was an aristo. If the English won, or rather when they won, they would probably dance in the streets with the French and tell them how naughty it was of them to have executed their royal family.

Surprising how time slowed down at moments like this, Paolo thought to himself: the enemy is steering straight for us at six knots or more and fear slows things down so that you can have quite complicated thoughts. Still, as the frigate got closer the thoughts became less complicated. Aunt Gianna would be proud of the way he had died. But she would probably never know, because the Captain would not have seen that it was a shell from the Fructidor's mortar that blew up the other French frigate.

He wished, as he stood under the hot Italian sun, that he had studied mathematics more carefully with Mr Southwick, who was such a patient man. It was a pity Mr Southwick did not have a son, because he would make a wonderful father - or grandfather rather. Anyway one could only hope that he knew that Paolo Orsini was grateful.

The Captain was just a few hundred yards away: he would be standing at the quarterdeck rail, his deepset brown eyes sunk even deeper, the skin of his face taut, almost tight over the high cheekbones, his nose like an eagle's beak (though not so curved, of course) as though he was about to peck. His voice would be calm and he would be calm. He would tell Aunt Gianna what had happened - at least, as much as he knew of it.

Who would rule Volterra after Aunt Gianna died? Would she marry the Captain and have a son who would become the ruler? He hoped so. A boy who had Aunt Gianna for a mother and the Captain for a father would grow up a man among men and fit to rule.

He turned, intending to shake hands with the rest of the men, starting off with Kenton, but he stumbled over the thick rope of the spring. As he regained his balance he looked at the French frigate. Her masts now beginning to tower high so that all the mountains beyond were lower. Then he looked at the Calypso. Her masts were lower, too, which meant that she was just that much farther away. Not much in it - he knew that from his very recent experience of measuring the heights of masts with the quadrant.

"Can't be a hundred yards in it," Kenton murmured. "I think now is the time to say goodbye, so thanks men, at least we took a French frigate with us. But we've run out of surprises . . ."

The spring. Paolo looked at the pile of rope. Twenty fathoms or more of it, more than a hundred feet. The spring was holding the Fructidor well over to the north-east of where her anchor was lying; holding her so that the wind, instead of blowing from the bow, was almost on the starboard beam.

He turned to Kenton, after a quick glance at the French frigate, which was now steering almost directly at them, making sure that, when she turned, her broadside would be fired at less than fifty yards' range.

"If we let the spring go, we'll swing right across the Frenchman's bow," Paolo said calmly, but louder than he had intended. "Either he'll ram us or have to bear away suddenly. If he has to bear away his gunners are likely to miss because she'll be swinging . . ."

But Kenton was no longer standing there: with a bellow of "Quick, men!" he had leapt at the spring and begun flinging the turns off the kevel. Jackson was the first to react, and within moments the rope, like a coiled snake, was free and beginning to race out of the gunport, with Jackson bellowing at them to kick and pull out the kinks and bights in case it all twisted into a tangled mess and jammed in the port.

Paolo stood up and looked across at the Calypso and then at the Feniglia beyond her. For several moments the Fructidor's bow remained steady, as though the ship had run aground; then he thought he detected a slight movement just as he heard a splash when the last of the spring slid into the water. It was too slight and too slow; he could already hear the thunder and hiss of the French frigate's bow wave and the occasional thump as a sail flapped.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Ramage knew that not only had he made a grave mistake but he had probably killed Paolo, Kenton, Jackson, Rossi and Stafford, and the rest of the men whose names he could not for the moment remember. He had probably killed them all because he must have measured the distance from the harbour entrance to the Feniglia and back wrongly. He was unlikely to have done that, he decided, so he must have relied too much on a chart which he knew could not be accurate to a few hundred yards. Not accurate for longer distances like those, although it would be accurate enough in giving the width between the headlands forming the harbour, or the length of Isolotto . . .

He should have allowed for chart errors of up to a cable. Two hundred yards would have been enough; two hundred yards would mean that at this moment the Calypso would be between that damned French frigate and the Fructidor. Not just between them, but forcing the Frenchman to turn away and fight, ship to ship. The fight would have been the fairest ever fought in the Mediterranean, or anywhere else for that matter, because they were identical ships.