He pictured the frigates tacking and wearing along the French coast by day and by night, hoping to catch and destroy any enemy vessels daring to move from one port to another. The French would take full advantage of their shallow draft, keeping close in to the beach, and hoping that the frigates waiting for them like sharks would accidentally strand themselves on off-lying sandbanks.
The completed barges and gunboats were anchored off each port, exposed to gales but protected from the British frigates by batteries of guns. At low water the vessels would dry out, sitting on hard sand or shingle and protected by cavalry patrols from marauding seamen landed by boats from the frigates.
It was a complicated cat-and-mouse game: at high water a frigate would tack back and forth close to an anchorage but beyond the range of the batteries and, when it judged the French gunners had been lulled into inactivity, suddenly swoop, hoping to fire a couple of broadsides into the anchored vessels before the French woke up and began a withering fire. But it was a dangerous game: the whole of the French coast was usually a lee shore, and a lucky shot could dismast a frigate and the wind drive her up on the beach.
As they tacked offshore, the officers in the frigates would be balancing themselves against the roll as they trained their telescopes on the hills and dunes round the ports. They would be counting yet again the scores of tents arranged with geometric precision round flagpoles from which Tricolours fluttered. They would note new camps being set up; off many ports they would see hundreds of tethered horses scattered across the hills, and ammunition wagons, field kitchens and field guns drawn up nearby. And the men in the frigates - and brigs and cutters - knew they were watching not only for signs of reinforcements but for the first hint that the troops were preparing to board the barges for the voyage across La Manche to the beaches of Kent and Sussex.
From what he had heard, the frigates were having very little success in their attacks: the French had so many batteries on the cliffs over the anchorages that they could keep up a lethal fire by day or night.
Yet the French were not the only ones making preparations: a glance over the rest of the page showed that the British were busy preparing suitable reception committees. Lord Romney had just reviewed 3,000 men of the Kentish Volunteers at his estate at Maidstone; the King had reviewed 1,500 of the Surrey Volunteers on Wimbledon Common. One news item described joint manoeuvres held in the streets of London by the Loyal Hackney, Royal Westminster, Whitechapel and Shoreditch and Wapping regiments. An advertisement at the foot of the column announced that, 'Members of the London and westminster volunteers may purchase warranted firelocks at 2£ each at G. rippon's warehouse, No. 3, Ludgate Hill. Cartouche boxes, pistols and swords may likewise be obtained.'
Every hamlet and town in the south-eastern corner of England must be swarming with patriotic citizens clutching ancient fowling pieces or newly-purchased muskets or, perhaps, only scythes or sickles, and eyeing strangers with suspicion since they expected to find Frenchmen lurking behind each hedge and thicket. Every poacher in the Weald of Kent and on Romney Marsh and Pevensey Level now had a perfect excuse for the magistrates when found on the squire's land with a fowling piece under his arm (though he would still be hard pressed to explain away a ferret in his pocket and nets over his shoulder).
For a moment Ramage imagined Gianna
on one of her wild rides over the countryside suddenly reining her horse as a group of Volunteers emerged from a hedgerow, muskets at the ready, and Gianna explaining in her exuberant English that she simply enjoyed riding alone. Rustics, unable to distinguish an Italian accent from a French, and full of the wild stories the newspapers had been printing about Bonaparte's secret hot-air balloons and rafts driven by windmills, might think she was Bonaparte's modern equivalent of Joan of Arc, riding through the countryside intent on rousing innocent folk into bloody riot and vicious rebellion ...
He turned the page to skim through the rest of the news. A gale of wind had put four ships ashore at Plymouth, scattering the fishing fleet just returning to harbour, and knocking down trees and chimney pots. A 'new stein is to be built at Brighton, with the Duke of Marlborough and others patronizing the undertaking'. The King would not after all be attending the ball being given tonight by the Duchess of Manston, because the Queen was still indisposed and remaining at Windsor. That would disappoint Gianna.
There was a section he would point out to Gianna. Headed 'The Fashionable World', it began by announcing that, 'The female fashion is every day encroaching on the male costume.' The article explained that with dozens of volunteer units being formed all over the country and their officers designing the uniforms as well as buying the necessary muskets, powder and shot, it was inevitable that 'the ladies would soon follow the fashion.'