“We continue to live between hope and dread:” she says, “the news varies every day. We are expecting help from Russia: if it comes it will be of the greatest service to us. The English render us the greatest services. Were it not for them both Sicilies would be democratised, I should be dead of grief or drowned in the sea, or else, with my dear family, imprisoned in a castle by our rebellious subjects. You can read in the gazettes, without my naming them to you, how many ungrateful subjects we have. It suffices to tell you that in their writings and their ingratitude they have surpassed their foster-mother France, but with us the classes are different. Here it is the class which has the most to lose which is the most violent; nobles, bishops, monks, ordinary lawyers, but not the high magistracy, nor the people. The latter are loyal, and show it on every occasion.... My dear children have behaved like angels in all our unfortunate circumstances. They suffer every kind of privation they did not know before, without complaining, out of love for me, so that I may notice nothing. They are always good-humoured, though they have no amusements.” While Troubridge was clearing the way for the return of the royal exiles to Naples, Nelson received the startling intelligence that the Brest fleet of nineteen sail-of-the-line had not only escaped but had been seen off Oporto making for the Mediterranean. So far as it went, the news was correct enough, but the French ships numbered twenty-five instead of nineteen. Nelson’s despondency and ill-health vanished; he lost not an instant in making his arrangements. Troubridge was recalled from Naples, and the “band of brothers” were ordered to join Rear-Admiral Duckworth off Port Mahon, Nelson’s belief being that the first item on the French naval programme was the recovery of Minorca. Shortly afterwards he came to think that Sicily was the object of the enemy, whereupon he cancelled his former instructions and made the island of Maritimo the _rendez-vous_. This station he reached on the 23rd May with seven ships, which he hoped to bring up to sixteen, Duckworth having decided to wait for Lord St Vincent and not to reinforce Nelson. Ball, who had been ordered to abandon the blockade of Malta, had not arrived, and the delay filled the Admiral with anxiety. “I can only have two queries about him--either that he has gone round to Messina, imagining that the French Fleet were close to him, or he is taken. Thus situated,” he writes to Lord St Vincent, “I have only to remain on the north side of Maritimo, to keep covering Palermo, which shall be protected to the last, and to wait intelligence or orders for regulating my further proceedings. “Your Lordship,” he adds, “may depend that the Squadron under my command shall never fall into the hands of the Enemy; and before we are destroyed, I have little doubt but the Enemy will have their wings so completely clipped that they may be easily overtaken.”