The Ramage Touch r-10

by Dudley Pope

  As the others scrambled over the tailboard and dropped to the ground, Ramage leaned over and put the pistol in a fold of a kitbag an inch or two from the sleeping sentry's hand. Then he jumped down, found that his muscles were still bunched up, saw Martin, Paolo, Rossi and Jackson scrambling down from the front of the cart, and joined them as they ran towards the nearest pine trees. Once hidden by the trunks, they watched the wagon jogging along the track towards Argentario.

  "Those two soldiers are in for an unhappy week or two," Jackson said. "It'll be bad enough for them when they wake up and find the empty chairs, but you can just imagine what the sergeant and then the major will say."

  "That damned major," Martin said as he extracted the pistols and knives from his canvas vest. "He's going to want to shoot them."

  "Rather shoot them than us," Paolo said, his voice showing that he had seriously considered the point. "Now what do we do, sir?"

  Ramage looked towards Jackson and Rossi. "First, thank these two for disobeying orders," he said with a grin. "Then we'll get some rest."

  The Italian guerrilla group had been told that the rescue had been achieved without a blow struck and Ramage had formally thanked them. The five men had then walked towards Argentario, keeping to the beach on the seaward side of the causeway, while half a dozen partisans shadowed the wagon. The cliffs forming the north side of the entrance to Porto Ercole prevented Ramage from seeing into the harbour over to his left, although he could distinguish the frigates' masts and yards sticking up like trees stripped by winter and canted by sudden storms.

  The way some of the yards were a-cock-bill and others were braced up as near the fore-and-aft line as possible, showed that the hulls of the ships, with their sterns secured to the small quay and anchors out ahead, were almost touching each other; so close that only bracing the yards of one sharp up stopped them locking with those of the next ship.

  Ramage found himself trying to picture the harbour as a seagull would see it. A 36-gun French frigate is about 145 feet long on the gun deck, with a beam of 38 feet, making a total of 5,500 square feet. Times three for the three frigates made 16,500 plus the distance between them, say 120 feet by ten feet, twice . . . That made nearly 19,000 square feet - compared with the top of a cask, it was a good target for a mortar . . .

  "The punt used by the innkeeper's boy is hauled out and hidden among some bushes on the lagoon side of this causeway where it meets Argentario," Jackson said, pointing over to the right. "He left it there, sir, in case we wanted to pole across the lagoon to the other causeway . . ."

  Ramage's orders to Aitken were to send the cutter to the spot on the northern causeway where they had originally landed as soon as it was dark. If no one arrived by midnight, then Aitken would, in official parlance, "proceed at once in execution of orders already received". In the meantime, Ramage thought it unlikely that many French troops would be available to make much of a search for the escaped British prisoners, for the simple reason that they would be busy loading guns, horses, ammunition, provisions and themselves on board the three frigates. Navy and army officers being the prickly men they were, there would be many arguments: majors and colonels, angry that their own thoroughbred horses were treated in the same way as baggage-train horses, would scream at ship's officers as strops were put under the frightened horses' bellies ready to hoist them on board; ship's officers would scream back, telling the soldiers to attend to military affairs and leave ship's affairs to ... and so it would go on.

  Ramage was sleepy, and so were the rest of the men; they all seemed thankful when he slowed down as they half walked and half paddled through the sand at the water's edge to avoid leaving footprints, and finally found a stretch of hard sand up the slight rise to the line of the pine trees, where the fallen spiny leaves of past years made the sand firmer.

  They were now at a safe distance from where they had quit the wagon, Ramage considered, and they were in sight of Porto Ercole in case something unexpected happened. It was just the place for them to catch up with the sleep they had all missed the previous night. If they started moving towards the other causeway by five o'clock, using the punt to cross the lagoon, they would have plenty of time, and by then they would be refreshed. He brought the group to a halt, said he would take the first watch of an hour, and told them to sleep. Recalling the wine-bloated face of the French colonel warning the major of the problems of sand in the desert, he added with a grin that left them all looking puzzled: "Don't get sand in your pistols."

  The sun had dipped behind Argentario, lighting up the northern slopes of the mountain, when Paolo woke them all with the announcement that it was five o'clock, an accuracy of which he could be certain because Ramage, having hidden his watch in one of his long socks before he had been captured and searched, had lost nothing of value to the French soldiers.

  They all went to the water's edge and rinsed their faces in the sea.

  "Ho fame," Rossi grumbled.

  "We're all hungry," Ramage said sourly. "You could have snared a few rabbits while we were sleeping."

  "Or even gone round to the cantina in Porto Ercole," Paolo added, "and brought back wine, bread, meat. . ."

  "I might also have been captured and brought back a French patrol. . . sir," an exasperated Rossi answered.

  "Providing the lad left lines and hooks on board, you can all fish as we pole across the lagoon in that punt," Ramage said.

  "There'll be hooks," Jackson said confidently. "Fishing is all they use boats for on the lagoon. It's only five or six feet deep."

  There were in fact three fishing lines and, as Rossi and Jackson poled, leaving on the right the town of Orbetello, a group of buildings hidden behind a high defensive wall and poking out into the lagoon like a mailed fist, Ramage, Martin and Orsini trolled the lines. There were some tiny scraps of fish, baked hard by the sun and the relic of a fishing expedition several days before, and, using them as bait, they caught nothing, Rossi declaring that the lake was only good for eels and every fool knew that dentice was the only fish worth catching.

  Ramage just had a chance to see where they should land on the northern causeway when darkness fell, and by then several other punts were round them, most of them being poled by one man with another sitting in the stern handling the line. The punts had started coming out from Orbetello at dusk, as though the men, finishing with their usual jobs, liked to spend an hour or two trying their luck with fishhooks before going home to supper.

  The five men hauled up the punt and crossed the causeway to the seaward side where half an hour later, as they waited amid the whine of mosquitoes and the continual buzz of cicadas, they saw the black outline of a boat rowing in fast from the north.

  "Give them a quiet hail," Ramage told Jackson. "I wonder if they really expect to find us here?"

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Ramage paced up and down the Calypso's quarterdeck in the darkness, nervous, irritated and uncertain of himself. Small waves lapped against the ship's side as she swung slowly in the wind, her anchor cable creaking at the hawse. Overhead the rigging and yards were a black lattice-work against the stars while to the westward the last of the lamps in Santo Stefano went out. An occasional pinpoint of light, like a firefly close to the water, showed that a fisherman was at work, hoping that his lantern would lure fish into his net or close enough to be speared by his long trident.

  Aitken had reported that no interest had been shown in the three ships during the day. With three frigates arriving in the harbour at Porto Ercole unexpected by the Italians, the equally unexpected arrival of another frigate and two bomb ketches off Santo Stefano was unlikely to raise an eyebrow whether Italian or French. Southwick pointed out that not even one boat had come over with local whores, a sure sign of the unpopularity of the French.

  Ramage picked up the nightglass and looked over towards the north-west corner of Argentario, where he could just make out the extreme end, Punta Lividonia, and as he watched - with the image turned upside-down by the glass
, so that it was as if he was standing on his head - he saw a small black shape moving along the horizon, slowly merging with the Point and then vanishing. The Fructidor had weathered the Point, following the Brutus, and was now easing sheets as she found a soldier's wind to carry her down the west side of Argentario and which would, if it held, let her later stretch comfortably round to anchor off Porto Ercole.

  Argentarola was the only obstruction they might hit, a tooth of a rock jutting up a few hundred yards offshore past the second sizeable headland beyond Lividonia, and Jackson and Stafford remembered it well enough to be able to help Kenton if he was at all uncertain. No moon yet, but the sky was cloudless and the stars were bright enough to show up the land. Bright enough but insipid compared with the Tropics, Ramage thought.

  So the two bomb ketches were running with a following wind round to Porto Ercole, but for the moment the Calypso remained at anchor: her part was yet to come. His plan was simpler - at least, as simple as he could make it. There was no complex timetable which would leave them all at the mercy of wind or current.

  Doubts, uncertainty . . . should he, shouldn't he . . .? Why was commanding one of the King's ships sometimes like gambling with cards or dice, an occupation which bored him? He had just discovered information about intended French troop movements which should be sent off as soon as possible to the Admiralty, or the nearest admiral with enough ships to do anything about it. Yet if he did that, the three French frigates which were due to transport a good many of those French troops, artillery and, most important, cavalry, might well escape.

  Should he bolt with the news he had, which could quite reasonably be dismissed by an admiral as wild guesses made as a result of idle gossip by a drunken French artillery colonel, or should he stay and see if he could both alter the situation and add to the information?

  He had managed to get over the time he had dreaded: sending Gianna's nephew and heir off on a dangerous operation. Up to now the boy had always been within sight. Yet, he asked himself bitterly, why should it make any difference whether he was killed by a French musket ball while close to Ramage or distant. Still, the idea that he might be killed several miles away in another ship seemed like abandoning him. Gianna would never blame him - but she would be only human if she felt that the boy might still be alive if Nicholas hadn't. . .

  The boy was now with Kenton and acting as the third lieutenant's second-in-command, which was excellent experience for a young midshipman. Jackson, Stafford and Rossi were with him as an unofficial bodyguard. No one is dead yet, he told himself sourly, not a shot has been fired. In fact all that has happened is that a French colonel drank himself into a stupor and a tired French major asked a number of aimless questions of a trio of British spies who had since vanished.

  Ramage snapped the nightglass shut, using the metallic double click to break the train of thought. He put the glass back in the binnacle box drawer. Count your blessings, he told himself: he had manoeuvred a frigate and two bomb ketches right up to the enemy's doorstep without them having the slightest suspicion; all they had seen were three gipsies . . .

  He had played his cards, rolled his dice, or done whatever gamblers did in London for the latest fashionable game of chance, and now he had to wait for several more hours to see how good his luck was. He had many faults, and impatience was one of the worst of them. The most uncomfortable anyway, because it left him pacing up and down like a caged tiger (or a sheep trapped in a pen), feeling that he could chew the end off a marlinspike or scream like the gulls that swooped astern when the Calypso was under way, hoping that the cook's mate would empty a bucket of garbage and give them a good meal which they would gulp down as they fought on the wing, snatching tasty morsels from each other's beaks.

  For the next hour, the ship slept. The ship's company, apart from half the starboard watch, were in their hammocks and the Calypso too seemed to be resting along with the frames and planks and beams whose groaning normally formed a descant to her progress through the water, with the creaking of ropes rendering through blocks and the canvas giving an occasional thump as a random puff of wind lifted a sail for a moment. The noises would return, one by one, as soon as the frigate was under way again, but now there were only the wavelets lapping at the hull as the Calypso swung to her anchor, the wind now ahead and then on one bow or the other. There was the occasional hail as the officer of the deck checked with the lookouts, more to make sure they were awake than to see if they had sighted anything.

  Very occasionally, as a small swell wave coming into the bay made the ship roll slightly, the yards overhead creaked, and it was difficult to know if it was the wood protesting faintly or the rope of the halyards.

  From time to time the two dogvanes fluttered their feathers, making no more and no less noise than one would expect from a few corks with feathers stuck in them.

  It was not often that the Calypso was so short of officers. Wagstaffe and Martin in the Brutus disposed of the second and fourth lieutenants, Kenton and Orsini in the Fructidor of the third and the midshipman. This left the frigate with her first lieutenant and her master. In fact Aitken and Southwick were only too happy to stand watch and watch about because they anticipated their four hours on and four hours off ending in a brisk frigate action.

  The day's rest under the pine trees had been very refreshing although it was a strange sensation sleeping amid so much noise. Several years at sea, with only an occasional night spent on shore, left you ill equipped on arriving in Italy for the continuous and rapid buzz of the cicadas which seemed to be hiding by the score in every tree, for the monotonous 'kwark' of some strange bird that regularly, at one-minute intervals, managed to keep up his doleful commentary all through the day, and for the wild boar that grunted and scratched their way busily through the trees, cracking dried branches underfoot and, as far as Ramage could make out, never going round a thicket of bushes if they could blunder through. Ramage had discovered that after he had gone to sleep, the particular man on watch had roused the others more than fifteen times during the day, uncertain whether it was wild boar or a French patrol approaching them through the undergrowth. There had even been the rapid tapping of a woodpecker, quite apart from the buzz, hum and whine of various flying insects, most of which left determined bites and itches, and the tiny varieties of ants, some of which seemed to wield red-hot pokers.

  He decided as he began pacing the deck again that there was nothing, judging from the brief stay in the Pineta di Feniglia, that made him want to change a seagoing life for that of a gipsy, hunter or even a landowner: he remembered how, in a house, whether a casetta or a palazzo, there were the mosquitoes and even more vicious but much tinier flying insects called the papatacci, which stung like the jabs of sail needles, as well as ants that invaded furniture. Worse, if you owned a house, was the death-watch beetle that methodically clicked its way (as though its teeth were loose) through the beams and other woodwork, turning the strongest oak to powder and tunnels. Compared with all these land noises, the creaks and groans of a ship under way was faint and agreeable music . . .

  He pulled his boatcloak round his shoulders. Timing . . . minutes, perhaps even seconds, would make all the difference between a sufficient, in other words, moderate, success and a disastrous failure. Once again he seemed to be risking too much for too small a prize. Only an ass put down a single stake of a hundred guineas for a nine-to-one chance of winning a single guinea. He seemed to have read somewhere, or heard a seasoned gambler say, that the prize should match the stake and the risk. He supposed some people did in fact find themselves in a position where they could put down a stake on the green baize table with a decent chance of winning a reasonable prize at reasonable odds, and he envied them; but that must be what made a man a professional gambler - a person who would only bet if the odds were right. How nice it must be to have a choice: yes, I will bet now; no, I'll stay out of the game and come in again when the odds seem more favourable.

  Ramage never seemed to have that choic
e; he had to put down his stake and watch the dice roll to a stop, or the card turn over, even when the odds against him were absurdly high. Yet he ought not to grumble; he certainly ought not pity himself, as he was doing at the moment, because in the past he had won when the odds simply did not exist; when there had seemed absolutely no way of winning. In other words, he had been lucky. Gamblers who relied too often on their luck instead of calculating the odds usually ended up ruined; captains of ships of war who relied on luck to bring victory instead of careful planning usually ended up dead, taking many of their ship's company with them.

  Steady, he told himself. He had made a plan and worked out the odds, and the odds seemed no worse than usual, perhaps even better. The only luck he needed (the element of chance that was bound to enter into even the best of plans) was that the wind should not drop. The direction mattered little; it just had to blow, anything from a gentle breeze to half a gale ... a tramontana from across the mountains to the north, a lebeccio from the west, bringing rain, a sirocco from the south, hot and searing with thick cloud, shredding nerves and nearly always lasting three days, or a maestrale from the north-west - just let there not be a calm, which stopped any movement. With the settled conditions at the moment, a clear sky, the stars sparkling, a nip in the air, and the hint of dew, with only the very slightest occasional swell wave, there could be calm an hour after sunrise. The usual sea breeze that set in about ten o'clock in the morning might decide to have a rest for the day . . .

  A bulky shadow loomed up beside him and Ramage recognized Southwick.

  "Just that one fishing boat still working over towards Talamone, sir. Everyone else seems to have gone to bed."

  "Very wise," Ramage said cheerfully. "There isn't much to stay up for, unless you're one of the King's officers."