Ramage & the Renegades

by Dudley Pope

  “No reason why one should, come to think of it, sir; each ship must have plenty of water and provisions. Any trouble with hostages, and the privateersmen would be going over to the Lynx.”

  “Ah, what eyes and brains lost to the Revenue Service,” Ramage teased.

  Southwick sniffed contemptuously. “My big mistake, sir, was not joining the smugglers when I was a boy. I’d be retired now with a big mansion, a stable of horses, two carriages …”

  Aitken came up and saluted. “The swimmers, sir. They’re ready for inspection, and the carpenter and his mates have nearly finished the first raft. Would you care to look at it before they put the last nails on the decking and start on the second?”

  The raft looked in fact like a large toboggan with wide and deep runners. On the front of what would be the section on which a person would sit to slide on snow was an eyebolt, with another at the back.

  “I want a couple of fathoms of line on each eyebolt, and secure line along the sides, so that men can hold on.”

  “How many men, sir?”

  Ramage shrugged his shoulders. He looked at the raft and said: “She won’t take more than six holding on each side, plus one forward and one astern. That’ll make fourteen, and should be enough. Put a batten each side on the decking, Carpenter, here and there, so that something put on top won’t roll off.”

  He left the raft and walked along the line of men drawn up on the larboard gangway. They represented the Calypso’s best swimmers, and he jumped on to the breech of a gun. “Gather round,” he said. “This is what you’ll be training to do in the next few days.”

  Four days later, as he listened to the splashing of a couple of dozen men swimming beside the ship, out of sight of the privateersmen, Ramage sat at his desk staring at several sheets of paper held down by a large polished pebble.

  His life at the moment seemed divided into halves. One was Gianna, the other was the problem of the Lynx and her prizes.

  Since leaving the house in Palace Street and joining the Calypso at Chatham, he had tried to avoid thinking of her. He realized now that he had in fact tried deliberately to destroy every memory of her, particularly of their first meeting, in the darkness and mystery of the Torre di Buranaccio, and the desperation he felt holding her in an open boat knowing she had a musket ball in her shoulder and fearing she would die before he could find a surgeon … So many memories, some of danger, some of peace. When she came out to Lisbon to see him and the way she had the ambassador, Hookham Frere, dancing a jig in an effort to please her, and quiet days at St Kew when they had walked together over the Cornish moors or rode as far as Roughtor and Brown Willie, the distant peaks which looked as though they had been dropped by a giant … When her eyes glinted and she became imperious, the Marchesa breaking through, revealing a childhood spent in the palace at Volterra with dozens of servants and an early adulthood surrounded by ministers, the ruler of her own state, Volterra. He remembered the walled city of Volterra with its dozens of towers, tall, very narrow rectangles rising high like tree trunks.

  Was she safely there, consulting with her ministers, restoring order and without French troops? Had the French removed their guillotines and rusty iron Trees of Liberty? Was she ruling wisely and patiently, realizing that forgiving and forgetting might be a wiser policy than judging and revenging? Or was she dead, an assassin’s victim?

  Because he had previously refused to think about it, chasing away the random thoughts that leapt at him from dark corners of his mind before he went to sleep, or when he woke at night, his head a turmoil and his muscles knotted, he found that new fears for Gianna had spawned and demanded his consideration.

  He tried to fight them off by imagining what had happened to her from the time she had boarded the Dover packet with the Herveys. They would have arrived in Calais and presented their passports, duly signed by Hawkesbury and probably, because Jenks was a fool, countersigned by Otto. The Herveys’ carriages would have been loaded with their baggage, and knowing both the Herveys and Gianna, he could imagine just how many trunks would be involved. Then they would have set off along the Paris road, probably intending to spend the first night of the journey at Amiens.

  They would be little prepared for what they saw: Bonaparte’s secret police, the near-starvation, the nearness of the guillotine, the sheer lack of an occasional coat of paint on houses—all had combined to give French towns the appearance of places that have been stripped by locusts, or at least occupied by an enemy army. In fact France’s own army had taken so heavy a toll of able-bodied men that the inhabitants of towns and cities were mainly women—many in the eternal black of mourning—and old men. There would be many cripples, too; men who had lost a leg or an arm in battle or even in the ice and snow of the Alps or Apennines.

  They would see—particularly in Amiens, where he had once been imprisoned and threatened with it—the Widow set up in most squares. The guillotine had become part of every French square; La Veuve dans la place, usually set up high on a platform so the crowds could watch the spectacle, a wicker basket to catch the head …

  This the Herveys and Gianna would see—well, not the basket and not the darkened bloodstains, which the rains would have washed away, nor the heavy blade of the guillotine, which was removed by the executioner when not required, so the edge could be sharpened again and greased well to protect it against rust. They would see the gaunt, wooden framework and probably sigh that it had ever been used. It was all over now, they would say, the Treaty had been signed, the war was over. Would Hervey himself, or Gianna, realize that La Veuve had nothing to do with the war and with the Treaty; that it was used by the French government of the day against the French people?

  Anyway, eventually they would arrive in Paris, and there they, along with all foreigners, would have to register their presence and their address at the Prefecture. So if they were waiting for her, Bonaparte’s secret police did not have to look for the Marchesa di Volterra; she would come to them … Leaving the safety of England, she would have walked like the fly into the parlour of the spider Bonaparte. And all, he thought bitterly, in the completely mistaken idea that she was doing it for the good of Volterra.

  What good was she to Volterra if she was lodged in a French jail? What influence could she have on Bonaparte when he had her behind a locked door? She argued, of course, that while in England she had no influence on Bonaparte, and both Ramage and his father had immediately pointed out that while she was free she had an influence on Bonaparte: he always knew that the rightful ruler of Volterra was waiting patiently to return; that his French regime there were simply puppets.

  There was only one way that Bonaparte could destroy the Kingdom of Volterra, and that would be by destroying its rightful ruler, and Ramage found he had crushed the quill pen with which he had been tapping the pile of papers representing the other half of his problem.

  Destroy … another word for murder. And murder was another word for what? Not the guillotine, that would be too public. “The garotte—did Bonaparte’s police favour the Spanish garotte for simple killings of women? Or perhaps just a pistol shot in the head. God help him, he was considering the fate of the woman he had loved. Yes, he had to admit now it was in the past tense. Had loved but still respected, like a favourite sister. Yet now was hardly the time to think about it any further. He had to keep the door shut in his mind, otherwise dreadful thoughts sneaked out. Gianna dead, murdered on Bonaparte’s orders; Gianna locked in a cell, wasting away in darkness and subsisting only on sparse prison fare, and no one knowing what had become of her, outside the upper circle of Bonaparte’s police …

  Deliberately he picked up the top pages. They were the reports of four days’ watch on the prizes, four pages for each of the five ships. He selected another quill, found it had been cut to give too broad a tip, and took a knife from a drawer in the desk and cut it again. He then found the ink, removed the cap, found a blank sheet of paper, and on the left side wrote down the names of the five ships. To the
right of the names he drew four more columns, and at the top of them he wrote, in sequence, “Passengers,” “Guards,” “Crew,” “Flag.”

  Starting with the Earl of Dodsworth, he saw that each day Bowen had reported seeing sixteen passengers (eight women and eight men) and he filled in the first column. Eight guards—he saw the same eight men each day, so it was reasonable to suppose they were the only eight on board, and that filled in the next column.

  Southwick’s four daily reports on the Amethyst and the Friesland showed the same consistency. Yorke’s ship—Ramage found himself picturing the young shipowner as he read the name—had three women and seven men on board as hostages, and four guards. Southwick noted that on the second day he had seen only three guards, but the fourth man, easily recognizable by his red hair, reappeared next day and was there on the fourth day. Ramage filled in the appropriate columns, and then worked through the Heliotrope and Commerce, slowly filling in the columns.

  Then he drew a line across the bottom and filled in the totals: exactly forty passengers (seventeen women, twenty-one men and two children), and twenty-four guards.

  But most important: in four days, no boats had visited the prizes. No one had come round from the Lynx; no men from one prize had visited another. It would be such a normal and commonplace thing for them to do so that obviously Tomás or Hart had forbidden it.

  Southwick’s estimates of the sizes of the ships’ companies of the five prizes before they were taken agreed with his own and showed there should be ninety-five or a hundred British, Dutch and French ships’ officers and men held prisoner in what Wagstaffe had called an amphitheatre on shore.

  The John Company ship, apart from being the most valuable, was physically the nearest: the Earl of Dodsworth was anchored about two hundred yards away. Close enough, he noted ruefully, for him to see that at least four of the women were young, two were elderly, and two had been impossible to guess at because they wore large, flopping hats, presumably to keep the sun off their faces.

  The problem, he thought to himself, was going to be keeping the hostages out of the way when the fighting started.

  He unrolled the first rough draft chart of the bay. There was the outline of the shore, from the headland forming the southern side to the other peninsula forming the northern. From each of the two rocks being used as starting points, a series of straight lines radiated out to seaward; they represented the compass courses steered by the soundings boat, and along the lines, at ten yard intervals, were written numbers, some with a large figure followed by a small one. The larger figure represented fathoms, the smaller feet. Also marked in were the positions of the five prizes, the Lynx and the Calypso. The nearest sounding to the Lynx was four fathoms and three feet, or 27 feet. The inner bay itself. Ramage noted, was quite shallow; none of the soundings showed more than forty feet, although many more runs were needed before the boat had got out as far as a line joining the two headlands.

  The big reef to larboard was a long and slightly crescent-shaped sausage, lying east-west and almost cutting the bay in two, with all the ships anchored in the southern half. The reef, made up of rock and staghorn coral—so named because it grew up from the bottom like the horns of a stag, flattening out near the surface—varied from a couple of feet over the coral to two fathoms over the rock. Martin had marked each end with a dan buoy, and once the sun was up it was easy to see the brown patches formed by the staghorn.

  Ramage then unrolled the rough map showing the small section of the island surveyed so far. Williams and White had, at his suggestion, begun by concentrating on a broad band between the landing beach and signal hill. This included the approaches to the amphitheatre, where the crews of the prizes were kept prisoner, and the two sources of fresh water.

  Finally there was Wagstaffe’s report on the “forum” and on the Lynx. Jebediah Hart and the small grey-haired Frenchman had been on shore once in the only boat to leave the Lynx in four days. Their boat had been pulled upon the beach and the two men had climbed up to the “forum,” stayed half an hour and then gone back to the ship. A routine visit, it seemed to Wagstaffe; they did not take provisions or water, so presumably the camp was adequately supplied.

  He tidied the papers and rolled up the chart and the map. There, reduced to words and lines on paper, were all the facts he needed to carry out his next task, yet nothing there provided an answer to the most important question of all, one that was screaming in his brain like a descant sung by a mad chorus in an empty cathedral: how to keep the hostages out of harm’s way when the fighting started.

  He had worked out the general plan, and he was certain that he had reduced chance to the minimum. He could only attack two ships a night: it would be too exhausting for the swimmers to try more. Tired men made mistakes, and he had to be sure that the risk he took was reasonably small. By seizing the Earl of Dodsworth and the Amethyst on the first night and the Heliotrope and Friesland on the second, he was releasing the majority of prisoners first. The risk was simply that privateersmen from the Lynx might come to the Earl of Dodsworth or the Amethyst on the second day, before the other two ships could be secured. The Commerce could be left: she had no passengers, and the four privateersmen on board her were obviously little more than shipkeepers.

  How to warn the hostages … Confound it, as far as the Earl of Dodsworth and Amethyst were concerned it was already too late: he had set the time for the attacks at 3 A.M., a time when he reckoned the privateersmen on guard would most likely be all asleep, and there was no way of getting a warning to the two ships.

  Well, the two boarding parties were now well trained: every one of them could swim a mile and at the end of it silently board a ship by shinning up the anchor cable if a rope ladder had not been left hanging over the side. At the moment all four ships had ladders down their sides: obviously the privateersmen were confident they had nothing to fear. However, a plan to board could not be based on the chance of a rope ladder, or the hope that no sentry would be waiting at the top.

  He would be leading the Earl of Dodsworth party with Martin and Orsini; Aitken would be tackling the Amethyst with Kenton. That left Wagstaffe and Southwick in the Calypso, and both men had protested violently at being left out of the rescue. Finally Ramage had pointed out that if anything went wrong, it would be up to the two men to get the Calypso out of the bay and back to England …

  There was in fact one way of warning the hostages, he realized, and shivered with a fear which was not only for his own life but, in the case of the Earl of Dodsworth, for the lives of eight women and eight men hostages. And how would Aitken react?

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  SILKIN gave a sniff which, registering disapproval, would have outdone anything Southwick could have produced. Ramage was standing naked in the middle of his cabin, trying to arrange an old stock as a loincloth. “It’s no good, the damned thing keeps slipping!” he grumbled.

  “Breeches, sir, or even these trousers I bought from the purser: they will answer the purpose admirably.”

  “Silkin, I have a good half a mile to swim, and I’m not going to be weighed down by heavy clothes.”

  “These trousers, sir, they’re not really heavy. Just nankeen, they are. Just enough for the purposes of modesty.”

  “The devil take modesty,” Ramage snapped. “I’m not anticipating parading in front of the women passengers. I’d go naked but for the fact that it would remind an enemy that the quickest way of disabling a man is to kick him in the groin.”

  “What are the seamen wearing, sir?”

  “I don’t know, but they don’t have such vivid imaginations as I do. Here, this stock is fine now. Give me a big pin. Ah, that’s it. Now, that belt. Slide the frog round, so that it’s in the small of my back.”

  The sailmaker had been busy adapting cutlass-belts which were normally worn slung over one shoulder; the swimmers had demanded a way of keeping the cutlass from getting between their legs as they swam, and the best he could do was devise a waistbelt stit
ched to the shoulder belt which kept the cutlass to one side. Ramage had not liked it; instead he was just using a waistbelt but fitting it much higher, under his armpits, so that as he swam horizontally the cutlass blade lay along his back, the point on his buttocks. He preferred this method to the other because, with the blade to a man’s left, it could cause trouble if he swam to the left or the right.

  “What’s the time?”

  Silkin picked up Ramage’s breeches and took the watch from the fob pocket. “Just ten minutes past two o’clock, sir.”

  “Good, time I was off. Quickly, that knife and sheath. Now, strap it round my right shin.” Ramage put his foot up on a chair. “Tighter … that’s fine. Now take the line at the bottom of the sheath—yes, it goes round my ankle.”

  With the sheath knife secured on the side of his right shin, the cutlass slapping against his back, and dressed only in the stock round his hips, Ramage felt more than faintly ridiculous, but no one was going to see him for some time …

  He met Aitken and Southwick at the top of the companion-way. Aitken was naked to the waist and wearing seaman’s trousers, a cutlass-belt across his shoulder.

  “You look like an Indian, sir,” Southwick said cheerfully. “I half expected you to try to sell us mangoes.”

  “I’m off to demonstrate the Indian rope trick,” Ramage said. “Well, Aitken, do you still feel as confident?”

  “No, sir,” the Scotsman said bluntly. “I didn’t feel confident when you first mentioned it, but as I don’t feel any less so now, we needn’t worry.”

  Ramage took his hand in the darkness and shook it. “I’ll give you a wave when we take our exercise in the morning!” With that he went to the entry port, acknowledged the murmured good wishes of the small groups of men waiting there, and reached out for one of the two man-ropes hanging down into the water.

  As soon as he grasped them, two seamen held them away from the hull, and two more scrambled down the side battens to hold them out farther down, where they would otherwise touch because the hull curved outwards in the almost exaggerated tumblehome.