The Countess shook her head disapprovingly. 'Gianna, I know you want to go back to Volterra, but don't let us fall into a trap just because we want peace.'
'No, Bonaparte would not be offering terms unless it was to his advantage to end the war,' Nicholas said.
At that moment the Earl came into the room: a tall, still slim man with silvery white hair and the same thin, almost beak-like nose and high cheekbones of his son. Gianna looked from Nicholas to his father. Yes, she thought, that is how Nicholas will be in thirty years' time. For the first time since she had met him, she felt she could think of him in old age: until now he had been at sea, being wounded regularly once a year, being in action at least once a month ... Peace would mean he could resign his commission and live in London and Cornwall.
And now, also for the first time, she could picture him growing old without her beside him. Until recently, she always thought of their lives after the war as being lived together, but now, after the years she had lived here in England, mostly at St Kew, she accepted that it was impossible. Noblesse oblige. It was a phrase, but for the two of them it was a code, a law - and for her a sentence of eventual banishment.
In the first couple of years, when she thought of little else than Nicholas and returning to rule her kingdom of Volterra the moment Bonaparte's troops were driven out, she had ignored religion. Yet she was Catholic and Nicholas was Protestant. Marriage would force Nicholas to agree that their children would be Catholic, and in turn that would mean one of the oldest earldoms in Britain would become Catholic the moment Nicholas died after inheriting from his father.
The twelfth Earl of Blazey a Catholic... For the first year or two in England she could see no difficulty about such an old Protestant earldom changing its religion to Rome, but eventually she had come to understand that Britain was built on Protestant foundations, and to ask Nicholas (who would be the eleventh earl when he inherited from his father) to sacrifice the earldom - for that was how it would be regarded - was something that an enemy might do, but not the woman who loved him.
Her other plans - she saw now they were but dreams - were equally impractical, because of that same phrase. Her idea that Nicholas would resign his commission after the war and come to Volterra as her husband was hopeless, and Nicholas himself had made that clear. Volterra, still turbulent after years of French occupation and no doubt still affected by the talk of French revolutionaries, would be in no mood to accept a straniero as their ruler's husband; not even one who spoke Italian as well as any of them and who had rescued their ruler from Bonaparte's troops. A foreigner was someone from the next state; to some people a man from the next town. She thought that Nicholas might have in mind that she would hand over the kingdom to her heir, her nephew Paolo Orsini, at present serving as a midshipman in Nicholas's own ship but - as she had finally been forced to admit to herself - there were at least two things preventing that. First, Volterra, once liberated, would need a firm ruler for the early years of peace, someone who understood the complicated relations, friendships and enmities of the leading families. Paolo knew nothing of all this, and might well fall victim to an assassin. And secondly, his life was now the sea: it was unlikely he would exchange the Royal Navy for the falsehoods and sycophancy that made up life at Court.
Paolo was a new generation: he had never lived in an atmosphere of noblesse oblige so he would sacrifice nothing for it. For her and Nicholas it was as much a part of life as breathing and, she realized with something approaching bitterness, comparable with breathing: it was always there, unobtrusive, noticeable only when you thought of it, but an essential part of life itself.
Her other dream, after recognizing that the people of Volterra would not accept Nicholas as her husband, was to have Nicholas sent there as His Britannic Majesty's Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary. The ruler could summon the British Ambassador as frequently as she wished. Yet she knew that neither she nor Nicholas could accept such a relationship.
This was all in the past and in the future . . . Miserably, knowing she would eventually have to sacrifice her first and probably only real love, she wrenched herself back to the present. She watched Nicholas talking with his mother. The suntan was wearing off, and his brown eyes were just as deeply sunk beneath eyebrows that were like tiny overhanging cliffs, but the lines were going: years of squinting in tropical and Mediterranean sun, and commanding one of the King's ships in actions that usually resulted in a long dispatch in the London Gazette, had left pencil-thin lines on his brow, round his eyes and beside his nose, but they were disappearing as he relaxed here in Palace Street. Nor did he have the worry of the ship: the Calypso was having an extensive refit in drydock at Chatham, and from what he and his father could find out at the Admiralty, he would stay in command when she was commissioned again. Unless . . . unless a peace treaty was signed.
Then, she gathered, at least three-quarters of the King's ships would be paid off; the Royal Navy would be reduced to a peacetime size. Admirals, captains, lieutenants - there would be dozens to spare. Nicholas might resign his commission because the routine of commanding a ship in peacetime would be too boring for him after the past years of continuous excitement and action.
Yet Nicholas's mother and father seemed almost hostile to the proposal of peace. No, Gianna corrected herself, not to peace itself but to dealing with Bonaparte. Well, no Tuscan trusted a Corsican, and if she was honest and dispassionate about it she did not trust Bonaparte either: he was the general who led the French army which invaded Volterra. Yet ironically but for Bonaparte she would never have met Nicholas, whose frigate had been sent to rescue her by Sir John Jervis (as he then was, but now Admiral the Earl St Vincent, First Lord of the Admiralty in the present government). So but for Bonaparte - and St Vincent - they would never have met and fallen in love.
Dreamily she returned to the Palace at Volterra: she pictured herself in the great state room, sitting in the chair reputed to be eight hundred years old. The big double doors would be flung open, His Britannic Majesty's envoy would be announced, and Nicholas in full diplomatic uniform would march in to present his credentials. Both of them would be hard put to keep straight faces . . .
She gave a start as the Earl clinked the heavy crystal stopper back into the sherry decanter, walked with his glass to a chair and sat down carefully.
'Hood sends his regards, m'dear,' he said to his wife. 'Terrible attack of gout; he can't bear anyone within ten feet of him - afraid they'll bump his leg. We were almost hailing each other across the room!'
'I think Gianna is anxious to know if you heard any news of Bonaparte's - er, offer.'
'Yes, I did,' the Admiral said grimly. 'Too much. Hawkesbury called in while Hood and I were talking, and told us about it. The negotiations are nearly complete; Hawkesbury sees this fellow Otto for three or four hours a day and dispatches go off to Paris daily - apparently we have Revenue cutters waiting in Dover and they deliver Otto's diplomatic bag in Calais and bring back Bonaparte's instructions.'
Ramage said: 'Did you discover anything about the terms, father?'
The old man was silent for a moment, lost in thought. In memories, Ramage guessed. Thousands of British men had been killed, dozens of ships sunk, countless women widowed and children orphaned. Now the present politicians were likely to make all these sacrifices worthless in their scramble for peace: they would accept any terms Bonaparte cared to offer because they knew a peace treaty meant votes, just as the previous government had squandered thousands of soldiers and not a few sailors through sickness to capture worthless West Indian spice islands because 'victories' were always worth a Parliamentary cheer. Few members of Parliament realized that most such islands were only a quarter the size of a county like Kent. Few would remember that Bonaparte controlled everything that mattered, from the shores of the North Sea to the banks of the Mediterranean, including Spain, Italy and Egypt. Except for a naval base like Jamaica, the West Indian islands were irrelevant.
The Earl glanced up at Nicholas. Two scars on one side of his brow, another the size of a coin on his head - the hair there was growing back white - and a stiff left arm: wounds inflicted in the West Indies, Mediterranean and Atlantic. Nicholas and Lord Nelson had disobeyed Sir John Jervis's orders at the Battle of Cape St Vincent and in doing so had turned a miserable defeat into enough of a victory to earn Jervis an earldom, so that Earl St Vincent was now First Lord of the Admiralty. St Vincent was a fine administrator who had, by accident, won an undeserved reputation as a tactician. Had he ever forgiven that glorious act of disobedience by a young lieutenant called Ramage, which was spotted and backed by an almost unknown commodore in a seventy-four called Nelson? Now Jervis was Earl St Vincent; without those two he would still be Jervis, and few would have sympathized had he been put on the beach to draw halfpay for the rest of his life.
'Yes, and by the time the treaty is ratified I suspect we'll have surrendered every acre of land we've taken except Ceylon and Trinidad, and we may have forced Bonaparte to leave Egypt.'
'And Italy?' Gianna said.
The Earl shook his head, as though trying to drive away his irritation. 'Bonaparte has made offers on behalf of France, Sweden, Denmark and Holland. The negotiations concern only territory belonging to Britain or those countries. There has been no mention of Tuscany, Piedmont, the Papal States . . . Nor does Hawkesbury see how we can do anything about them - I asked him.'
'He's a weak man,' Gianna commented.
'He's a politician,' the Earl said contemptuously. 'No votes come from Italy for Addington and his cronies, but the House of Commons will give them three cheers for Ceylon and Trinidad...'
'When will the details be made public - officially, I mean?' Ramage asked.
The Earl shrugged his shoulders. 'When Bonaparte, or this fellow Otto, say so. Officially Addington and Hawkesbury deny any negotiations are going on. That's where Otto is so useful: he's been the official French representative in London since the exchange of prisoners started, so no one takes any notice of his comings and goings.'
'Gianna's dressmaker,' the Countess said firmly. 'We can do more good by visiting her than talking about the tidbits that Bonaparte tosses to us.'
With that the two women left the room to put on outdoor clothes. Even though a watery sun made faint shadows, the chill of autumn was in the air.
The Earl sipped his sherry. 'A sad business. Hood agrees with me that we are giving up just as the tide is turning in our favour.'
Nicholas said: 'Yes, the French are desperately short of wood, rope and canvas for their ships. Our blockade is really hurting them. I'd have thought that's why Bonaparte's offering terms: he wants a year or so of peace to restock his larder. Then he'll go to war again, knowing we'll have paid off most of our ships and disbanded our regiments. Once the men have disappeared the pressgangs will never find them again.'
His father put down his glass. 'Hood made the same points: he too reckons Bonaparte wants a rest, and lost his temper with Hawkesbury over the policy. But Jenks is only a politician, and for people like him no policy need cover more than the next division in the House of Commons. The frontiers of the world are bounded by the walls of the 'Ayes' and 'Noes' lobbies.'
'Will the King agree, though?'
'They'll persuade him Britain is going bankrupt. It probably is, but better bankruptcy than Bonaparte!'
He held his sherry up to the light coming through the window. 'When will the dockyard be finished with the Calypso?'
'Another three or four weeks. It'd be longer, but my fourth lieutenant's father is the Master Shipwright.'
'At Chatham? Hmm, used to be a fellow called Martin. Very good. One of the very few honest men in all the King's dockyards.'
'It must be the same man: his son is William Martin, known to his friends as 'Blower'.'
' 'Blower'? What an extraordinary nickname!'
'He plays a flute.'
