"Obviously because he speaks Italian: we have scores of men quick with guns and cutlasses."

"In that case, sir, I suggest we take him. We only need his tongue. If the marching shakes him up too much, he can always wait beside the track until we come back, but if he endures to Castello, we can use him."

"You're afraid that if you leave him on board he's going to put the Evil Eye on you," Ramage said amiably. "All right, he can come. But I've been thinking about Orsini, Rossi and myself leading the column. When we went to Pitigliano, the chances were that we'd have to bluff our way past Italians first. Here we're more likely to bump first into the French. No Italian is likely to challenge us down here at the harbour or on the road up to Castello."

Aitken agreed, knowing that in any case he was one of the "hostages" in the middle. "I suggest two men, sir: Gilbert and Louis. Better to have two men answering questions - preferably at once - to create confusion?"

"Very well," Ramage said. "Tell Rossi to dress himself up. I see the boats are ready." He pulled on the strange jacket, that of a captain in the Duke of Tuscany's army (the King of Etruria's, he corrected himself), and tugged at his sword belt. "Let the men start boarding. The boats' crews know they are to return to the ship the moment we have landed?"

"Yes, sir," Aitken said patiently, "everyone has had his instructions - I'm just going to tell Gilbert and Louis of the change."

As the first lieutenant went down to the maindeck, Ramage sighed. There were a dozen possible islands to the north and south which could be used as a prison for the hostages, but really none seemed very likely. Giglio - well, it was a possibility, even if a remote one. He had pointed out the new flagpole to Southwick and Atiken because it was necessary to keep their spirits up. Now was not the time for them to realize the hopelessness of the search. That damned frigate could have taken the hostages anywhere; she could have gone round the foot of Italy and across to the Morea: there were hundreds of islands in the Ionian Sea that were suitable (if rather parched: many of them had little or no rain in the summer).

In fact (the most chilling thought of all) the frigate might have taken them up to Toulon. Even Bonaparte would not expect his hostages to march hundreds of miles back into France, but if a French frigate was also due to go to Toulon for, say, a refit, she could take the hostages with her. So at this moment, while the Calypso's motley force climbed down into the boats to assault Giglio - a tiny island which was less than a fly-speck on a chart of the Mediterranean - the hostages could be prisoners in the great citadel at Toulon. By now they could, for that matter, be sitting in carts (or even carriages, if Bonaparte acted on some whim) on their way from Toulon to Paris.

Paris? Yes, there Bonaparte could use them in some charade or other. Perhaps he might want to parade some of the English nobility as prisoners through the streets to show the sturdy French republicans how right they had been to strap down their own aristocracy on Dr Guillotine's infernal machines.

That was almost ten years ago. The guillotine blades had not been used much in the past few years: indeed, most of the recent victims had been French revolutionaries disagreeing with Bonaparte. He shook his head to clear away the pictures flashing across his imagination like those of the new magic lanterns being advertised in the Morning Post and The Times. Giglio, he told himself: we march up to the top of the hill, and we'll probably march down again, tired and no better informed about the hostages, but we've no choice.

"I'm sorry, gentlemen, I looked everywhere in the Mediterranean but couldn't find them . . ." His report to Their Lordships would be written in more formal phrases, but that would be the sense of it. Sitting in the Board Room in Whitehall, even looking at the chart of the Mediterranean pulled open from one of the rollers over the fireplace, the inland sea would not seem so big. But it was nearly as far from the Levant to Gibraltar as it was from Plymouth in England to Plymouth Rock in America . . . Giglio (pronounced Jeelyo) would hardly show, and it was a name he was beginning to hate, along with Montecristo, Pianosa and Capraia.

"I'm coming," he called as he saw Southwick waving to him. Tradition - the senior officer was the last man to board a boat, and the first to disembark. The King of Etruria's uniform, he thought as he walked over to the break in the bulwark, hitching his sword round, is quite unsuitable for sea service.

There was the circular watch tower (almost obligatory along this coast) at the far end of the village and a score of houses lining a narrow stretch of sandy beach with a dozen or more small fishing boats hauled up on it, and a surprisingly large church a hundred yards inland. At the back of the beach a few posts, each as high as a man, were joined by fishing nets hanging in bulky loops. Drying - or waiting to be repaired. Yes, he saw two men and a woman (dressed in black except for a once white scarf over her grey hair) who, from the darting movements of their hands, were busy mending.

A third man stood at the doorway of the nearest house. Was he particularly interested in the two approaching boats?

Ramage guessed not: had he thought they might want to buy fish, he would have made the effort to walk the thirty yards to the water's edge. Nor did the net menders look round. They would have seen the boats leave the Calypso, so those swiftly moving hands made one thing quite clear: the French were not popular among Giglio's sturdy islanders. Perhaps the French pressed Italians into the Navy. Did they hate the French or, like many other islanders, just hate (and fear) everyone not born within their shores?

It does not matter why, Ramage told himself; it only matters that they do not like the French. If there is shooting, then these people will not help them. Nor will they spy for them. Perhaps there will be one man in a hundred, the usual informer and opportunist who curries favour with the French, but he will be the village outcast, safe enough while the French remain but who knows his life will not be worth afiasco of vinegar the day the French leave.

The seaman at the cutter's tiller ran the bow up on the beach within thirty yards of the net menders and unshipped the rudder, but even when they heard the stem scraping the sand and the oars splash as the men gave a last thrust to wedge the boat firmly to let the landing party jump on shore without getting wet (and in lightening the boat make it easy for the oarsmen to get it afloat again), neither the two men nor the woman turned.

The jolly-boat arrived a few feet away and within five minutes the motley column was drawn up on the sand with the two boats pulling back to the Calypso. Four yelping dogs, one chasing the other, came racing round the last house in the row, saw the column of men, turned and ran away again. A donkey tied outside a front door of the last house brayed impatiently and was answered by another in the hills above the village. Impatiently? Was a somaro ever impatient? Bored, perhaps, or hungry.

Orsini muttered to Ramage in Italian: "It's hard to believe the French are up there, isn't it, sir?"

"Don't judge by these people," Ramage said grimly. "These poor beggars, and their father and grandfathers and the rest of them going back five centuries have seen many an enemy of one sort or another land on this beach. Saraceni, Aragonesi, Francesi, Inglesi. . . and none of them came to buy fish. Rape, rob, pillage or just destroy ... no wonder they hate the sight of a stranger."

"Would it be worth it if I...?" Orsini ventured.

Ramage stared at him. "From Castello (which Southwick tells me is fifteen hundred feet high) you can almost see Volterra, or the mountains round it, anyway. But just think: to these people you're just as much a straniero as any of the rest. You may speak Italian but to them you have a strange accent: strange enough, probably, to make them more suspicious of you than if you were a Frenchman . . ."