Because of light winds and brief thunderstorms the Kathleen had covered only four hundred miles in the past eight days - an average of a couple of knots, less than the pace of a child dawdling to school. It was more than eleven hundred miles from Bastia to Gibraltar, and he was only too conscious of the phrase 'with all possible despatch' in the Commodore's orders.
An occasionally outraged growl from behind him told Ramage that Henry Southwick, the elderly and usually almost offensively cheerful Master and his second-in-command, was making a last-minute search before reporting the ship and ship's company ready for inspection. With a Master like Southwick the Sunday inspection was merely a routine; Ramage knew not a speck of the brickdust used to polish brasswork, nor a grain of sand lurking in the scuppers after the deck had been holystoned and washed down with a head pump would escape his eye. The cook's coppers would be shining and each mess's bread barge, platters and mugs would be spotless and its pudding cloth scrubbed. Every man was already shaved and rigged out in clean shirt and trousers ... Yet for all that Southwick would soon ask permission to muster the ship's company. Then, after the inspection, all hands would be ordered aft for Divine Service, which Ramage would have to conduct himself.
The thought made him self-conscious; he would be taking it for only the sixth time in his life, since he'd commanded the Kathleen for precisely forty-two days and still found it hard to believe that almost the last entry in the cutter's muster book said, 'Lieutenant Nicholas Ramage ... as per commission dated 19th September 1796 ...' The sixth Sunday - and he remembered that under the Regulations and instructions, the captain had to read the thirty-six Articles of War to the ship's company once a month. Since it could replace a sermon he might as well read them today because the sun was shining, and next Sunday it might be pouring with rain and blowing a gale of wind.
After three years of war all but the most stupid seamen knew by heart the Articles' forthright exhortations warning everyone in the Fleet, from admirals to boys, of the perils and punishment for the sins of treason, mutiny, blasphemy, cowardice and drunkenness; and they knew in particular the thirty-sixth, nicknamed 'The Captain's Cloak', which was so phrased that it enabled a captain to word a charge to cover any other villainy that the wit and ingenuity of errant seamen might devise. Still, as long as they could then bellow a few hymns to the fearful tunes John Smith the Second scraped on his fiddle, the men would listen patiently enough. After that they'd be piped to dinner and those off watch would spend the rest of the afternoon skylarking, dancing, mending clothes and, Ramage thought gloomily, before sundown - unless they were an exemplary ship's company - one or two who had hoarded their grog or won extra tots from their messmates, would be brought before him blind drunk...
The Marchesa di Volterra stood under the skylight of the captain's cabin, which was hers for the voyage, twisting the looking glass in her hand first one way and then the other to make sure no stray locks of hair had escaped from the chignon that she had spent the last ten minutes trying to tie. Her arms ached. She was hot, and for the first time since the Royal Navy, in the shape of Ramage, had rescued her and her cousin from the mainland as they fled before Bonaparte's cavalry, she wished herself back in her palace at Volterra, where her merest frown would bring a dozen maids running.
For the first time in her seventeen years of life (nearly eighteen, she remembered proudly) she really wanted to make herself look beautiful to please a particular man, and she was having to do it in a tiny cabin without a maid, a wardrobe, or jewellery. How did Nicholas ever manage to live in such a cabin? She was much smaller - his chin rested on her head when she stood close - yet the ceiling, or whatever Nicholas called it, was so low that even now she had to stoop to hold the looking glass high enough. Impatiently she flung the glass into the swinging cot and sat down in the single chair in front of the desk which served as a dressing table. Accidente! What was the use? If only her hair was blonde! Everyone had black hair, and she wanted to look different. Did he like high cheekbones? Hers were much too high. And the mouth - hers was too big, and she wished the lips were thinner. And her eyes were too large and brown when she preferred blue or grey-green, like a cat's. And why was her nose small and slightly hooked, when she wanted a straight one? And her complexion was shaming - the sun had tanned it gold so that she looked like a peasant girl instead of the woman who ruled a city and a kingdom (even if the kingdom was small the city was big). She ruled twenty thousand people, she thought bitterly, and not one of them was here now to help her dress her hair - except her cousin, Antonio, and he'd only laugh and tease.
Well, Antonio could laugh, but he must help. When she called, a heavily built man with a short, squarely trimmed black beard came into the cabin, shoulders hunched to avoid bumping his head on the low beams.
'Well, well! And whose garden party is my beautiful cousin gracing with her presence today?'
'There's only one, my dear Antonio. Hasn't Lieutenant Ramage invited the elegant Count Pitti? Everyone will be there - Nicholas makes them put on their best clothes and sing hymns. Perhaps he'll flog some of them with a cat of seven tails just to amuse you.'
'Cat o' nine tails,' Count Pitti corrected in English.
'Nine then. Antonio, help me tidy my hair.'
'It doesn't need it. You're beautiful and you know it and if you want compliments...'
'Will you help me tidy my hair?'
'You love him very deeply, don't you?'
The question was sudden and unexpected but she neither blushed nor glanced away. Instead she looked directly at him, and said with awe, almost fear, in her voice, 'I didn't know it was possible. I was a child before I met him; he's made me feel a woman. And he - he's a man, Antonio; everything a man should be. I know only one other man like him.'
'And he is?'
'You, my dear cousin. One day a woman will feel for you as I do for him.'
'I hope so,' he said soberly, 'though I won't deserve it. But you have known him - three weeks, a month?'
'Does that matter?'
'No - but never forget you met him in romantic circumstances. It's the stuff of story books - the dashing young naval officer sweeping in from the sea to rescue the beautiful Marchesa from beneath the feet of Napoleon's cavalry and ...’
'I know. I've thought all about that. But I've also seen him dirty and stinking and exhausted, seen him fighting Napoleon's cavalrymen with only a knife, seen him unjustly court-martialled on a trumped-up charge of cowardice ... Is this the stuff of story books as well?'
Pitti shook his head. 'No, but when you're parted? When he's at sea for months, perhaps years, what then? You've never had patience, Gianna. Since you inherited Volterra you've been able to have everything you wanted - at once.'
'That's true,' she admitted. 'But they were material things: jewels, gay balls, excitement. I think perhaps I wanted all that so urgently because I hadn't met him. When you've no one to love, to confide in - to live for, in fact - you get bored; you need entertaining. When there's no sun, you need many candles everywhere.'