by Dudley Pope
‘What now, sir?’
Again Ramage shrugged his shoulders. ‘There’s only prayer left,’ he said sourly.
At that moment Southwick saw him stiffen, as if stabbed in the back. He began rubbing the scar on his brow, swung round and walked aft to the taffrail. The Master watched closely, having made no secret that he was worried about the Admiral’s orders: it was obvious to him – though Mr Ramage made light of it – that the Admiral had chosen the Triton’s captain as the scapegoat. And, Southwick brooded to himself, the Ramage family have already suffered enough from the time the government of the day used the old Earl as their scapegoat.
Southwick had lived too many years to expect justice or fair play; he’d long ago asked only that the injustices and unfairness in Service and political life should be kept within reasonable bounds. Yet to be fair to the Admiral, the two frigate captains who’d already failed to find the privateers were probably men he’d had with him since they were lieutenants: he owed them some loyalty.
When faced with an apparently impossible task maybe it was only natural to shield them by passing it on to someone to whom he owed no loyalty – Mr Ramage. Although it was bad luck for Mr Ramage, the fact was he had been lucky recently inasmuch as he’d gained a loyal ally in Commodore Nelson who, judging from his performance so far, would go a long way in the Service – if he didn’t fall foul of the Admiralty through not obeying the exact wording of some order or another.
At that moment Ramage came back to Southwick. The expression on his face was an odd mixture of anger, embarrassment and happy surprise: like a child who’d been given an unjustified beating one moment and an unexpected present the next.
‘I’m beginning to think we’re tackling this from the wrong end,’ he said quietly.
‘How so, sir?’
‘Well, we’ve been trying to find the privateers’ base. But since there’s never any sign of them at sea, obviously they don’t patrol looking for schooners…’
Southwick looked puzzled. ‘Then how do they find ’em?’
‘They must know exactly when and where to look.’
‘I don’t follow you, sir.’
‘Oh, wake up, Southwick: they must get secret information. If they don’t go and search, then they must know that a schooner will pass a certain headland at a certain time, so they can be there to meet her in the dark. Minimum distance to sail, and a certain interception: that’s why no one’s ever seen them.’
‘By Jove!’ Southwick exclaimed. ‘That is the only answer! And it means there’s a spy at work in Grenada! But’ – he paused, forehead wrinkled, nose twitching like a rabbit’s – ‘but they sail from Grenada in darkness: it’s 160 miles to Martinique and 115 miles to St Lucia. How the devil can a spy get the information to ’em quickly enough? Why – beggin’ your pardon, sir – it’s almost impossible.’
‘But it happens, Southwick; obviously it happens. I’m dam’ sure that’s how they do it. And because the privateers guess we’d think it’s impossible, they succeed. Surprise, Mr Southwick: do the unexpected and you’ll nearly always win, whatever the odds.’
Southwick had heard that often enough from his captain, and seen him put it into practice. ‘Was that why you left the master’s mate and some men at Carriacou – so they might spot how the news is passed?’
Yet again Ramage shrugged his shoulders. ‘Yes and no – I’d a feeling we could do with some eyes we could trust keeping a watch from somewhere along the route, and Appleby can get down to us in a local cutter in five or six hours…’
‘If he can keep his men sober.’
‘I warned them what’d happen if they so much as touched a drop of liquor…’
‘Aye, but whatever you threaten seamen think it’s worth it.’
‘Well, Appleby’ll stay sober; and he has enough guineas in his pocket to hire the cutter’s crew as well.’
Sir Jason Fisher, the Governor of Grenada, represented a new type of colonial administrator, but Ramage was far from sure he was any improvement on the old. Sir Jason came from humble origins – that much was obvious from his every action, from every sentence he spoke, from every thought he ever expressed in his whining Midland accent.
According to Colonel Wilson, who made no secret that he detested him, as a young man Sir Jason had been lucky to get a clerkship in ‘John Company’, and he’d worked hard and made the best of it. Like many a clever lad in the Honourable East India Company service, he’d received an excellent training, and he’d soon left it to begin his own business, so that twenty years in India changed him from a clever but impoverished and timid clerk into a rich nabob, able to retire to England at forty-four.
But Ramage guessed that the riches he’d acquired through trade had brought Sir Jason problems he’d never thought of when he’d started to accumulate his money. He was wealthy, yes; but he had no social position. Very rich nabobs returning to England with their fortunes could usually buy their way to an Irish peerage and then by sheer persistence (and a judicious marriage into an aristocratic but impoverished family who needed money sufficiently to overcome any distaste for wealth obtained through ‘trade’) finally become tolerated – though never accepted – by Society.
All this Sir Jason obviously had only discovered when he arrived back in England. And at the same time he’d also discovered that although he was rich, he was not rich enough. His wealth would, with some ‘interest’, buy him a seat in the Commons but the House of Lords would forever be beyond his grasp; even an Irish peerage was beyond his purse since the competition from other, richer nabobs was too great.
But Fisher had been shrewd; he’d recognized the problem and thought he’d found a way round it – a ‘wise’ marriage. Finding what to him was an aristocratic (but impoverished) family, he married the younger daughter, reversing the usual procedure by himself providing a ‘dowry’ in the form of a handsome settlement on his prospective father-in-law.
Unfortunately, the marriage did not open the doors to London Society; his knocks went unheeded because, as he soon discovered, his bride’s family, though certainly impoverished, was by no means aristocratic.
To his dismay, he had found (and Wilson chortled as he told Ramage, who listened only because of the insight it gave him into the mind of the man he had to deal with at Government House) that in London baronet fathers-in-law were as common as coal-pits in Lancashire.
However, his father-in-law was married to the cousin of a marquis who controlled several Parliamentary boroughs, and the marquis, a kindly man, thought poor Jason deserved some reward for marrying a very distant member of the family who’d hitherto been considered unmarriageable, doomed to a nagging spinsterhood and a perpetual trial to her relatives.
And what better reward than to procure poor Jason a knighthood and give him one of the boroughs, so that he could also call himself a Member of Parliament? It mattered little to the marquis who actually walked into the voting lobbies in the Commons, providing he walked into the one that cast the vote the way the marquis wanted.
Two years of marriage, two years of voting in the Commons as the marquis dictated, two years of snubs as he persisted in trying to become ‘accepted’ socially had finally opened Jason’s eyes, but not before it had embittered his wife, who’d shared his ambitions.
But, Wilson continued, the man with brains enough to make a small fortune in India had eventually realized what many others in a like situation discovered at about the same stage in their lives: if London Society was powerful, proud and impregnable – rating the eldest son of a cousin of an earl higher than a knight with a quarter of a million in the Funds who’d been ‘in trade’ – why not look elsewhere: for a smaller society where a nabob knight married to the distant relative of a marquis would count for something?
So Sir Jason had asked for, and the marquis had secured for him, the Governorship of Grenada. At this point Wilson had become scornful – the wretched Sir Jason had, of course, made another mistake: most governors came out to the
islands for a few months during the dry season and were careful to leave the actual work to a deputy.
But the indomitable Sir Jason had come out (with embittered wife, servants terrified of sickness, many tons of furniture to feed the termites and a vast amount of enthusiasm) in the next available ship – and stayed ever since.
Ramage, weary of the gossip, only partly listened to the rest of the tale: in nearly two years Sir Jason had established something approaching a Florentine court: he expected (and received) the obeisance of the Lieutenant Govenor, Chief Justice, Attorney General, Solicitor General, Provost Marshal, Judge of the Vice Admiralty Court and various other functionaries, right down to the Fort Adjutant and Barrackmaster, the Chaplain and the Collector of Customs.
He’d also been rewarded with the undying hatred of those who, on receiving their appointments in London, had promptly appointed deputies who had gone out to Grenada (at half the salary) to carry out the actual work while they themselves stayed in London, using the remaining half of their salaries to supplement their incomes.
But Sir Jason had put a stop to that – the same ship that brought him to Grenada took back to London stern warnings to the absentees that in time of war all office-holders should be in the island, not their deputies. When one or two of them had not even bothered to reply to his peremptory letters, he had written directly to the Secretary of State who – according to Wilson – quickly weighed up which could make the most trouble, opted for Sir Jason and bundled the errant office-holders off to the island.
But poor Sir Jason (by this stage in Wilson’s narrative Ramage was more than sorry for the Governor): after six months he had finally realized that not only did Grenada ‘society’ rate somewhere around the level occupied by butlers and valets in less fashionable London houses, but it was about as intelligent, interesting and vicious. His wife, who had spotted that within a fortnight of arriving, now reminded him of it daily.
The widespread revolt in the island before Sir Jason arrived, from March 1795 until March 1796, when the Frenchman Fédon led the slaves in a bloody insurrection, had only served to magnify Sir Jason’s inadequacies as a Governor, whatever his skill as a man of business, and was one of the reasons why Wilson had been installed as military commander with – as he pointed out with some bitterness – the usual instructions from the government which gave him all the responsibility for the island’s defence but no powers to carry it out.
Since the Governor’s mistakes and vacillations had not brought any reprimands from London, Sir Jason regarded Wilson not as the military commander but as the man responsible for seeing that all the troops were smartly turned out in the Governor’s honour on every possible occasion. In fact the soldiers were known locally as ‘Fisher’s Fusiliers’.
‘No manoeuvres allowed,’ Wilson commented sourly. ‘Governor’s orders, of course, in case they get their uniforms torn. The damned men haven’t marched five miles in the past twelve months – except to parade at the Governor’s receptions.’
Out of all this, Ramage was interested in two facts: first, that Sir Jason’s social uncertainty had turned him into such a snob that (according to Wilson) his constant companion was the Royal Kalender, with the pages containing the arms and mottoes of the peers of the realm, family names and heirs, almost worn out during the time he’d taken to learn them all by heart. And secondly, with this overbearing snobbishness went a querulousness which sprang from his complete lack of understanding of the functions of a governor.
A formidable combination.
And a moment later Wilson bore out Ramage’s fears, complaining it was impossible to get Sir Jason to make any of the major decisions which only the Governor could make.
Through fear of making the wrong decision (which he hid by a pretended disdain of what he preferred to label as mundane matters beneath his notice) he made none. The result of such inaction, Wilson said bitterly, was often worse than a wrong decision…
Wilson had begun his story about Sir Jason in the carriage taking them both up to Government House; but the latter part had been continued in one of the Governor’s drawing-rooms with Ramage standing at the window and looking down at the harbour and lagoon below. Ramage glanced at his watch and then at Wilson slumped in an archair puffing a second cigar.
Within minutes of the Triton anchoring off St George Ramage had gone on shore and up to Fort George to see Wilson who, in the four days that Ramage had been away, had obviously undergone a considerable change of heart.
Where Ramage had originally met rudeness, he now found genuine politeness; in place of an arbitrary ‘You’ll-do-as-I-say’ manner he found a man anxious to hear his views, ideas and plans. And after hearing Ramage’s theory that a spy was at work in Grenada he spent five minutes pacing up and down his office, heels grinding on the stone floor as he turned, and using language generally monopolized by cavalry officers’ grooms in the privacy of the stables.
To Ramage’s surprise he discovered – when Wilson stopped because the effort made him too hot and breathless – that the object of the Colonel’s wrath was not the privateers but Sir Jason Fisher.
The reason was even more surprising – after the Triton sailed Sir Jason had become even more querulous (hitherto regarded as impossible) when he discovered that apart from failing to call on him, Ramage had sailed for Martinique, leaving orders endorsed by Wilson that the laden schooners waiting in the harbour were not to sail until the Triton returned.
Wilson was summoned to Government House where, for more than an hour, the Governor had treated Grenada’s military commander more like a barrack-room orderly.
But Wilson had refused to budge over the sailing orders: as he explained to Ramage, realizing he had not the authority himself he’d looked up the regulations and discovered that among those who had was the ‘Senior naval officer upon the Station’ and among those who had not was the Governor – for once a fortunate oversight by the constitutional lawyer who had drafted the original regulations.
When he had pointed all this out to Sir Jason, the Governor had been outraged, swearing he could overrule an admiral, let alone a lieutenant. Could, he declared wrathfully and, damnation take it, he would.
Fortunately, after Wilson had left, the man had obviously resumed his habit of avoiding decisions, so the schooners had not sailed. In the meantime Wilson had copied out the relevant section of the regulations and later handed it to Ramage.
Now, as Ramage waited with Wilson for the Governor, he began to grow impatient: Sir Jason had received them with a chilly hauteur – or what the poor fellow thought passed for it – and, as soon as they had sat down, excused himself ‘for a few minutes’ on the score of ‘having urgent work to attend to’. The only trouble was, as Wilson was quick to point out when the door dosed behind the man, that he had sounded more like a butler excusing himself for a few minutes while he refilled a coal scuttle.
Nearly thirty minutes… Ramage had a lot to do. It was now three o’clock and it would be dark in less than four hours. One more schooner had finished loading and Wilson had already warned him that Rondin was making trouble, apparently offended that Ramage had not told him he intended going up to Martinique in the Triton.
‘How long is he going to keep us waiting?’ Wilson growled.
For an answer Ramage walked across the room and tugged the red bell cord. To the devil with governors; his orders came from the Admiral and time was short enough without wasting it on the Sir Jasons of this world.
‘May I use your carriage?’ he asked the Colonel. ‘I’ll send it back as soon as it’s taken me to the Careenage.’
‘Oh, I say – you can hardly walk out on the Governor like that!’
‘Can’t I, sir! The safety of the schoo—’
He broke off as the butler knocked and entered the room. Ramage glanced questioningly at Wilson, who nodded.
‘Please have the Colonel’s carriage brought to the door.’
The butler looked startled, knowing they were waiting for the
Governor, so Ramage added, ‘At once.’
The man left the room quickly and Ramage grinned at Wilson. ‘I’ll lay a guinea to a penny the Governor’ll be here inside two minutes.’
‘Not taken.’
It was a little over two minutes before the door opened again and Sir Jason walked in. If the cartoonist Gillray had drawn a skinny, defrocked parson who’d just inherited a wardrobe of clothes from a rich uncle weighing twenty pounds more, the result would have borne a remarkable likeness to His Excellency the Governor of Grenada.
He was, Ramage reflected, a man who must drive his tailor mad because Nature obviously intended that Sir Jason’s physique should be a dreadful warning of what could happen to a man who worried continually.
And he had a most extraordinary gait, swinging his left arm in time with his left leg. Now his right hand was tucked inside his frock coat, as if to reassure himself his heart was still beating.
Surprisingly enough his face was almost plump – a lump of dough ready for baking and waiting to go into the oven – and from which protruded a thin, surprisingly pointed nose which twitched continuously and tiny, closely spaced eyes glanced about with suspicious restlessness.
At their first brief meeting half an hour ago Ramage thought that the nose twitched to the left as the eyes glanced to the right, and to the right as His Excellency looked left, but he now saw this had been sheer chance. And clearly Sir Jason was a man with few friends and an overly timid wife, because they’d all failed to warn him never to smile: when he did his narrow lips vanished, lifting like curtains to reveal a set of uneven, yellowed teeth that looked more suited to a horse trying to spit out the bit between his teeth. ‘Ah – Wilson, my Lord, I’m sorry to have kept you: I’m sure you people never appreciate how busy is the life of a Governor,’ he said.
