Ramage & the Guillotine

by Dudley Pope

  “And the sailing date … ?” Ramage asked cautiously.

  “The chances of your discovering that are slight, even if Bonaparte knows it, which I doubt very much. We can be certain of one thing, though: the French won’t risk having the troops and horses on board for more than 24 hours before sailing. Most of those vessels are anchored in such exposed places that the soldiers will become seasick within fifteen minutes.”

  The Admiral stood up. “You can stay here and go through those papers. Put them in the portfolio when you’ve finished and return them to the Board Secretary. I’m going down to Dover now, and you can report to me there tomorrow evening. Is there anything you want to mention now that won’t wait until then?”

  Ramage nodded hurriedly, since he had been wondering how he could raise the point. “Men, sir. At the moment I don’t know how I’ll be handling all this, but—”

  “But by chance,” Nelson interrupted, “you happen to know the ships in which some of those scoundrels from your last ship are now serving …”

  Ramage grinned. “Purely by chance, sir!”

  “Very well, I’ll speak to the First Lord, and you can leave a list with the Board Secretary when you give him the portfolio. No more than a dozen, and I don’t know what the deuce you need them for.”

  He had written the names of the three men he wanted before he realized that only one of them was British. The first man was Thomas Jackson, the American who had served as his coxswain in all the ships he had commanded. “All” included the Kathleen cutter, which he lost at the Battle of Cape St Vincent, the Triton brig, which he lost after a hurricane in the Caribbean, and more recently the Lady Arabella brig. The second name was the Briton, Will Stafford, a Cockney who had been a locksmith and burglar before being swept up by a press-gang. His former trade might come in useful. The third man was an Italian, Alberto Rossi, whose presence in France would not arouse suspicion.

  He put the list to one side and began reading through the notes he had made while going through the dozens of pages taken from various issues of Le Moniteur. “Two negatives make a positive,” Lord Nelson had said, and a pattern was certainly emerging. The Sussex coast was mentioned 23 times as a destination for the invasion and Kent only thrice; each time it was a passing reference to the white cliffs of the South Foreland at Dover. Essex was mentioned nineteen times, Ipswich seven and Colchester nine. London was never named, except for one reference to Napoleon holding a victory parade in St James’s Park.

  Providing it was not all a wild coincidence, there was someone on the staff of Le Moniteur whose job was to make the British believe that the French would land on the Sussex coast—using the vessels at Calais, Boulogne and nearby ports—and in Essex, using those at Ostend and Dunkirk. He was doing his best to make the British think there was no interest in landing on the Kentish beaches, and that London would not be the main objective.

  Ramage shrugged his shoulders: Lord Nelson could draw what conclusions he liked, once he had the facts. He arranged the pages in sequence and found himself trying to look at it through the eyes of Admiral Bruix and Marshal Soult, who were in command of the French Invasion forces. Did Bruix know the English coast well? Had Soult ever visited England? Well, they had advisers, that was certain enough.

  Forget visits and forget advisers: Lieutenant Nicholas Ramage is now a French admiral whose sole concern is to get at least 100,000 troops on shore and ready to fight. Where would be the best spot to land them?

  Romney Marsh: somewhere along the dozen miles of flat coast between Dymchurch and Dungeness!

  He reached for his pen and began writing:

  “1 Landing troops from flat-bottomed barges requires (ideally) a smooth, sand or pebble beach. The barges should arrive near high water so they dry out as the tide falls and their cargo can be unloaded on to the beach.

  2 The beach should not have off-lying rocks or sandbanks on which barges could strand themselves, but must be reasonably well sheltered from prevailing westerly winds.

  3 The countryside inshore of the beaches must be reasonably flat so that large numbers of cavalry and troops can deploy immediately.

  4 The beaches must be readily identifiable from seaward because navigation in the barges will vary from poor to nonexistent.

  5 The stretch of coast from Dungeness to Dymchurch, about eight miles, fulfils all these requirements, and barges would need only to steer for the southernmost piece of land (Dungeness itself).

  6 It also provides the shortest practical sea crossing for the Boulogne ships and adds only a small distance for those from Calais.”

  He put down the pen and read over what he had written. As far as he was concerned, if the French troops managed to land, they would march first towards London. They would cross Romney Marsh, that strange, secretive part of Kent, absolutely flat for miles, much of it below sea-level and only saved from flooding by the sea wall, and laced with more canals and drainage ditches than there were hedgerows. They would find scattered hamlets built round squat, square-towered churches, and peopled by the dour Marsh folk, men who smuggled, fished, bred sheep and kept their own counsel. They would find few trees on the Marsh and those there were bent by the wind. The Marsh had precious little but mutton for an invader to plunder …

  He put his notes in his pocket and replaced the papers in the portfolio. A day spent shut up in an airless room, poring over Le Moniteur’s fine print, had left him with a headache and, for that matter, an empty feeling in his stomach as he contemplated the enormity of the task ahead. The whole thing seemed absurd until one realized that the Admiralty had no choice: their only chance of discovering the answers in good time was by sending a man to Boulogne, the port which was obviously the French headquarters. The Admiralty had nothing to lose and everything to gain; the man had nothing to gain and his life to lose. They needed to send that man at once, so although they might just have the man—fluent in French, with plenty of experience of working in France as an agent—obviously if he was not available they had to pick the least unsuitable man, and he happened to be called Ramage. The devil take the Duchess of Manston, he thought sourly; but for her damned ball I’d still be down at St Kew, out of sight and probably out of mind as far as the Admiralty, Lord Nelson and French invasion plans are concerned …

  CHAPTER FOUR

  AS the carriage stopped at the top of Wrotham Hill to let / the coachman push a metal shoe under each of the rear wheels, so that the drag would prevent the carriage careering down out of control, Ramage walked round to stretch his legs. Almost the whole of the Weald of Kent was laid out before him, the hop fields, meadows and orchards fading into the distance in geometric patterns that were softly-coloured exercises in perspective. The clouds threw fast-moving shadows which, from this height, reminded him of wind shadows across a green sea, with the red-brick hop kilns and their stubby wooden spires looking like buoys marking roads and byways.

  So far the war against France, fought for almost a dozen years, had left no marks or scars on the countryside of England. Prices were much higher in the shops and markets, and there was hardly a village which did not boast a son or husband away in the Army or at sea in one of the King’s ships. But unlike the Low Countries, Spain and Italy, there were no ruined or burned-out houses, no empty hamlets and fields overgrown because people had fled or been killed or left impoverished by Bonaparte’s invading troops, who reckoned to live off the land.

  “Living off the land” was a polite way of describing how an army looted its way across a continent, stealing food for its stomach and valuables for its pockets. A hundredweight sack of grain, a pair of silver candlesticks from the church altar, a peasant’s store of wine which was maturing before being sold in the autumn to pay all his bills, a woman’s honour and her man’s life if he tried to defend it—Bonaparte’s Army took it all and thought nothing of it because it was done in the name of Liberié, Egalité et Fraternité. Ramage shivered when he thought of the Invasion Flotilla preparing for sea in Calais and Boulog
ne within sight of the English coast.

  The coachman called and Ramage walked back to the carriage, reluctant to climb inside and settle back on the seat whose padding exuded a damp and musty smell with every movement he made. As the horses moved, the metal shoes began to grate and occasionally screech as one or other dragged over a sharp stone. The second coachman, now sitting behind ready to lean on the brake lever, shouted across the roof to the man at the reins.

  How did the Men of Kent and the Kentish Men—the former living on the east side of the Stour, the latter to the west—regard the prospect of Boney coming? The innkeepers and potmen and porters on the road up to London from Cornwall seemed blissfully unaware or blithely unconcerned, and he guessed that most of the folk on the 65 miles of road from London to Dover had the same attitude. He was well over a quarter of the way to Dover and had yet to hear Bonaparte’s name mentioned, and so far not a sign of soldier or volunteer on sentry duty; not an Army camp or field headquarters.

  The journey was tedious enough, but everything about it felt unreal. At first he thought it was the effect of having spent so much time at sea: the rolling green countryside made such a contrast that it seemed separated from him by a pane of glass. But as the carriage arrived at the bottom of Wrotham Hill without mishap and the metal shoes were removed and hooked up under the axle, and the horses whipped up so that the carriage soon reached Maidstone, he began to have second thoughts.

  By the time they arrived at Lenham, where the horses changed once again, he was feeling sleepy and numbed—the result of such an early start from Charing Cross and the drumming of the wheels—but still trying to analyse his feelings. Finally, when the carriage stopped for fifteen minutes at Ashford, giving him time to eat a hurried cold meat pie at the Saracen’s Head while the coachmen changed horses in the yard, he realized that he had not felt the unreality on the journey up from Cornwall: he first sensed it, he now remembered sheepishly, after the carriage left Charing Cross and clattered out of London on the Dover road.

  Again the coachman was calling and Ramage, after paying his bill, had hardly settled comfortably in his seat before the carriage had left Willesborough behind and the horses were alternately galloping down one long hill and struggling up the next as the road rose and fell through Mersham, Brabourne, Smeeth and Sellindge. The hop fields were becoming scattered now; more frequently sheep were grazing and bare patches of soil sometimes showed whitish-grey chalk streaks, reminding him that the road ran parallel to the North Downs a few miles away on his left and which would reach the sea at the South Foreland between Folk-stone and Dover.

  The explanation floated into his mind in the same insidious and invisible manner that the musty smell of the carriage upholstery entered his nostrils. The sense of foreboding, that he was being carried along helplessly in a strange current whose direction he could not begin to guess, had really started when he finally digested the orders and information given him by Lord Nelson. At first the prospect of landing in France had been exciting and not a little frightening, but the more he had thought about it the more it seemed an ominous journey into a long, dark tunnel.

  His body gave a spasmodic twitch of annoyance as he sat up squarely, irritated that he had taken so long to understand. Not a dozen men in the whole of Britain knew that Bonaparte finally had a huge army ready which, given the order to sail, could leave every house in these hamlets a smoking ruin, and the fields—where sheep and cattle now grazed or men with weather-beaten faces were swinging scythes and sickles—littered with corpses of cavalry and infantry. The body of a burly Gascon from a régiment of Chasseurs who had fought the length of Italy and Spain could be lying beside a weaver in the Brabourne Volunteers who had been called to arms only a few hours earlier and killed by one of the first few shots he’d ever heard fired in anger.

  He shrugged his shoulders and was once again thankful that he was the only passenger in the coach. The sighs and shrugs and grunts that he had been giving as he struggled to sort out his thoughts would have alarmed even the most phlegmatic traveller—and probably reduced a woman to hysteria.

  He dozed off but was awoken almost immediately by shouting and the carriage coming to a stop. Thinking it might be a highwayman he looked sleepily through the window and saw they were on the high ridge above Saltwood. He opened the door and scrambled out, suddenly conscious that his whole body ached because rarely-used muscles were tired from bracing him against the swaying carriage. Just along the road several men were grouped round a capsized cart: a wheel had come off, spilling a whole load of cordwood. The men had to shift the cart before clearing a pathway through the logs, and Ramage cursed at the delay: already his mouth was dry and dusty—the snack at Ashford had done little more than emphasize his hunger.

  The coachman, cooling down after delivering himself of a stream of blasphemy at the delay, had retired to his seat and was holding a bottle to his lips with an assurance born of long practice. The second coachman joined him and waited patiently for his turn.

  Saltwood! Ramage suddenly remembered why the name was familiar. Some 600 years ago, four knights had slept the night in the little castle which he could just see through the trees below. Then they had ridden on to Canterbury to find the Archbishop, Thomas A. Becket, and cut him down with their swords.

  Daydreaming as he waited, Ramage pictured them galloping up the hill from the castle, the early sun sparkling on their light chain-mail. The quartet would carefully pace their horses to pick up Stone Street, the old Roman road running northwards in an absolutely straight line for ten miles before curving to the right to join Watling Street for the last mile or two into Canterbury itself. Surely there would have been pages and attendants for knights so close to the King that they heard his angry, “Who will free me of this turbulent priest?” The history books were as silent on the point as they would be in a couple of hundred years’ time about the British agent in Paris who was at this moment working in Bonaparte’s headquarters. Yet people remembered the four knights long after they could recall the name of the King (was it Henry II?) and the reason why Becket had so enraged him that his life was forfeit.

  A shrill whistle indicated that the men had cleared enough for the carriage to pass, and Ramage climbed in and sat back, feeling sleepier than if he had stood watch for a whole night. He woke with a start as the carriage suddenly swung to the right, and stared blearily out of the window to see the sun had almost set and they were now running down into the town of Dover, nestling in a valley below Dover Castle, the massive and menacing great citadel of grey stone standing four-square and high on the side of the Downs, its guns protecting the town and covering the harbour. Covering the seaward end of the Roman road known as Watling Street, in fact: the Romans were probably the first to make use of Dover as a haven, and they had built their road straight to London, nearly seventy miles with only a few small bends, and the surface still good today—except where local folk had stolen the small, rectangular stone blocks to build their own homes.

  As the carriage clattered down the steep hill Ramage found himself thinking more about the Romans. They would have sailed for England from France using landing places which eventually became Calais and Boulogne, Naples and Wimereux, the very ports in which Bonaparte’s invasion flotilla was now assembling.

  They would have landed within a few hundred yards of where Dover now stood, pitched their tents for the night, and then marched off up Watling Street. Over the years Dover—they called it Dubris—became so important that they built a stone pharos, on top of which they burned bonfires at night, and which was still standing, the oldest lighthouse in the country. Claudius’s invasion in AD 43, and William the Conqueror’s in 1066 … Well, the country was better prepared now to resist whatever Bonaparte would attempt.

  Arriving at the castle that evening, Ramage found Lord Nelson in high spirits and surrounded by young post-captains and lieutenants. This bore out all the stories he had heard about his Lordship doing everything he could to promote the careers o
f deserving young officers.

  The Admiral’s temporary office was sparse and windowless, the walls whitewashed and the only furniture a long, deal table, half a dozen chairs and two forms. Light from two lanterns was reinforced by candles stuck in the necks of empty bottles, and Ramage saw that his Lordship was bent over a chart of the Strait of Dover. He glanced up and smiled when Ramage was announced and gestured to the chair opposite him across the table.

  “Ah, Mr Ramage—come and meet these gentlemen!”

  He obviously had an affection for them: as he introduced each one, Lord Nelson made a little joke about some aspect of the man’s personality. One otherwise meek and mild-looking captain whose name Ramage did not recognize suddenly gave an almost Satanic grin when his Lordship said, “He’s almost as bad as you, Ramage, when it comes to stretching or even disobeying orders. Still, he’s been as lucky as you have—so far.” With that the grin vanished and the Captain and Ramage avoided each other’s eyes: the Admiral’s warning was unmistakable.

  With the introductions completed, Nelson eyed the canvas pouch that Ramage was carrying. “You’ve brought your notes, I hope?” When Ramage nodded, the Admiral said: “These officers form part of my Squadron, and they’ll be interested to hear what you learned from the latest issues of Le Moniteur. There’s no need to discuss your orders, though,” he added quickly.