Ramage & the Guillotine

by Dudley Pope

  Ramage, equally startled, signalled reassuringly to the American and looked at the man, his face unsmiling and questioning.

  “You remember me, sir?” the man said almost slyly, keeping his voice low so that only Ramage and his group could hear him. “I served with you in the Triton.”

  Ramage gestured to him to sit down and said icily, “You did too, by Jove. Dyson, isn’t it?”

  “Slushy Dyson, sir, an’ I want ter say I’m sorry, an’ thank you fer puttin’ me on board the Rover.”

  “Two dozen lashes, I seem to remember,” Ramage said, his voice still cold. “I logged it as drunkenness, I believe, not mutiny.”

  “Yes, sir; I deserved to ‘ave been ‘anged, an’ I know it. Lucky you was the capting, sir; anyone else would’ve made sure I was strung up by the neck from the foreyardarm.”

  Ramage began to realize that Dyson’s appearance might not be a matter of chance: at first he had thought that the seaman’s ‘You remember me, sir? I served with you in the Triton,” had been an extraordinary coincidence—the normal thing for the man to say, and not the password arranged with Simpson. Now Ramage remembered Dyson’s reassuring comment to Jackson, “It’s all right, I’m expected.” Had Dyson come from Simpson? One thing seemed certain: Dyson was no longer in the King’s service!

  “So when I transferred you to the Rover, I suppose you deserted. Are you marked ‘run’ in her books?”

  He watched Dyson shaking his head half-heartedly and noted that Jackson, Stafford and Rossi were staring at the man with curiosity: their wary suspicion had vanished. Yet but for these very men, Slushy Dyson, cook’s mate, would have led a mutiny in the Triton within hours of her sailing from Portsmouth for the West Indies. Dyson was not exaggerating when he said he deserved to have been hanged, and his gratitude at being let off with a couple of dozen lashes and transferred to another ship was genuine enough. If the Admiralty ever found out all the details, Ramage himself would probably be court-martialled as well, for failing to bring Dyson to trial. But he was curious to know why Dyson, having been in the shadow of the noose very briefly on board the Triton, should have deserted so that he was now in it permanently. His life was in perpetual jeopardy if he was now a deserter; his liberty was in perpetual jeopardy if he was now a smuggler.

  Ramage decided that this must be Simpson’s emissary and said: “As I gather we are going to be—er, shipmates again, Dyson, you’d better tell us all about it, and clear the air.”

  The bar was almost dark now and Dyson waited while the innkeeper put candles on the tables where customers were sitting. The innkeeper was used to sailors and did not try to press them into ordering more drinks: he knew they would shout loud enough when they were thirsty and were likely to turn truculent if they suspected they were being forced. The candle on Ramage’s table flickered in the faint draught from the door, and Dyson’s narrow, shifty face seemed even more haggard than Ramage remembered it nearly two years ago. Every wrinkle was shadowed by the weak flame, the eyes were still as shifty, and the ears oddly pointed, almost fox-like.

  “‘Twas all right in the Rover, sir,” he said softly, his eyes dropped and yet apparently focused on a distant object, “an’ I reckoned you had told her Captain all about it.”

  “No,” Ramage interrupted, “he was told you’d been flogged for drunkenness.”

  “Oh,” Dyson said, obviously absorbing the information. “Well, in Portsmouth I was sent to a ship of the line. “Me fellows saw the scars on m’ back from the cat-o’-nine-tails, and one of the bosun’s mates got it in fer me. Seemed to guess what really happened, but I don’t know ‘ow ‘e could. Well, I couldn’t move without gettin’ a floggin’. Case o’ give a dog a bad name, I reckon. That cat would ‘ave killed me if I ‘adn’t run, sir, and that’s the bleedin’ truth.”

  And Ramage believed him: he had heard at least one captain declare that flogging ruined a good man and made a bad man like Dyson much worse. But at the time there had been no choice: Dyson had quite deliberately planned a mutiny, and a couple of dozen lashes was an almost derisory punishment: a court martial would have hanged him or given him five hundred lashes—which would probably have killed him before they were all administered. Dyson’s life had in fact been saved because Ramage’s orders were to carry urgent despatches to the fleet off Brest and to the West Indies: there was no time to land him, let alone wait for several days for a court martial.

  Dyson was a bad man; even in time of peace he would always have been on the run from the law, a clumsy pickpocket, a noisy cutpurse, a highwayman whose horse always went lame or whose pistols misfired … War had only hastened the process of dissolution.

  Meanwhile they had to work with Dyson—and Dyson had to work with the three seamen who had forced a confession out of him, and the officer who had ordered his flogging. He was ideally placed, Ramage thought uncomfortably, to get his revenge by betraying them all in France.

  “Who chose you to help us?” Ramage asked curiously.

  Dyson glanced round to make sure no one else was within earshot. “The leader of the Folkestone and Dover smacks—the contraband smacks, you understand?—had a chat with three or four of us skippers. Didn’t say your name, o’ course, ‘cos he didn’t know it, but when he said the password—mentioning the Triton—I straight away thought of you, sir. An’—well, I volunteered because I—well, you treated me all right, sir, an’ I thought if I could ‘elp you … I guessed it was summat unusual, so …”

  Surprisingly, Ramage believed him: the story was so improbable that it had to be true. “I understand, Dyson. We’ll forget the past now because we’ve got a busy future ahead of us.”

  He called for more beer, and was thankful that Dyson’s story ruled out Simpson having had a direct hand in the seaman’s choice. The man living in the shadow of Studfall Castle would have been capable of arranging it as a veiled threat: reminding Ramage that he was at the mercy of a former mutineer.

  “Well, when do we sail, Dyson?”

  “You’d better call me Slushy, sir, while we’re in ‘ere, just in case one of the local lads ‘ears us. Sounds less formal, like,” he explained apologetically.

  Ramage nodded. “Very well. How about your crew?”

  Dyson looked up quickly. “I ‘aven’t signed on a crew apart from two of me regulars”—he managed to avoid saying “sir”—“cos they said you ‘ad three men. I—” he looked nervously at the three seamen, as though uncertain how they would react to what he was about to say, “I sort of ‘oped it’d be these three, and the five of us is enough for the smack, wot wiv the other two …” He stopped, confused and glanced round the bar, noting the group of seamen drinking at the far end. “Mebbe we’d better get on board the smack where we can talk wivart whisperin’.”

  It was difficult to distinguish the shape of the smack in the darkness, except that Ramage saw she had a squarish transom which made her look more French than English. But as he hauled himself on board from the heavy rowing boat he could see she was strongly rigged: the lanyards were freshly tarred, and the shrouds were hemp. Expensive stuff for a smack; at least if she had been a smack whose catch came in nets, not casks.

  The name carved into the wood across the transom was Marie, with “Dover” in smaller letters on a board beneath: small enough to be almost indistinguishable.

  Dyson muttered sheepishly, “Welcome on board, sir,” and led the way to the little cuddy, climbing down the hatch and hanging the lantern he had been carrying on a hook screwed into the beam over a small table.

  Crouching because there was little more than sitting headroom, Dyson squeezed to one side of the companion ladder so that Ramage, Stafford, Rossi and Jackson could pass him and sit on the U-shaped seat built round the two sides and the forward end of the table. As soon as they were seated, Dyson leaned back, sitting partly on one of the companion ladder steps, his head at the same level as the others.

  The wind was from the south-west, pushing just enough swell into the inner harbour t
o make the Marie roll at her mooring. The lantern swung on the hook, sending shadows dancing round the cuddy, but its long handle and the low head-room meant the flame dazzled Ramage, sitting at the forward side of the table, and prevented him from seeing Dyson’s face. The suspicion that the seaman had deliberately placed him at a disadvantage vanished when Dyson reached over with an oath and put the lantern on another hook on a beam farther aft. “Let’s all shift round a bit so’s I can sit here at the table; that bleedin’ lantern’s blindin’ me.”

  There was just enough room for him to squeeze on to the seat next to Jackson, with Rossi and Stafford facing him and Ramage to his right, as though at the head of the table. Dyson sat for a minute or two alone with his thoughts while the other four men wriggled themselves into comfortable positions.

  Two years—it wasn’t a long time, really, but a lot had happened in Dyson’s life. Two years ago he had existed only as an entry in the Muster Book of His Majesty’s brig Triton. All that the Navy wanted to know about him had been written in one cryptic line under several headings: Albert Dyson; born Lydd, Kent; age on entry 28; rating, cook’s mate; pressed; served in the brig fourteen months before being discharged to the Rover.

  Various other reports and returns now gathering dust on the shelves of the Admiralty and the various boards which administered to the Navy’s needs recorded the rest of the brief and mundane history of Albert Dyson’s efforts towards defeating France. The slop book recorded the clothes and other items issued to him when he first joined a ship (“1 shirt, 1 frock, 1 trowsers, 1 shoes, 1 bed, 3lb tobacco,” and the prices he was charged—15s 8d for the clothing, 10s for the bed, which was of course a hammock and blanket, and 4s 9d for tobacco). He appeared once in the Triton’s log and in her Captain’s journal: in the “Remarks” column, next to the time, distance sailed, speed and wind direction, was noted the fact that Albert Dyson had been given two dozen lashes for drunkenness. But Albert Dyson’s name appeared most frequently in the Surgeon’s daily journal, not because he was ever really sick but because he was imaginative enough to invent aches and pains which at first had led the Surgeon to allow him a day in his hammock from time to time. This had continued until Ramage’s predecessor as Captain of the Triton became exasperated and suggested to the Surgeon that a few tots of castor oil might well bring about a miraculous and permanent cure of all the cook’s mate’s varied ailments. The Surgeon’s journal eventually recorded—if only by the subsequent absence of Dyson’s name—the Captain’s diagnostic skill.

  As he sat in the Marie’s cuddy, Dyson for once found himself tense but not nervous. Normally the two went together because tension was caused by the fact he was usually engaged in some illegal act, and the nervousness came naturally since he knew the penalty. Experience had taught all the Dyson family that only quick wits, a smooth tongue and very careful planning could keep their bodies clear of gibbets and outside prison walls.

  Albert Dyson had been eleven years old when the uncle after whom he was named was marched off to Maidstone Assizes, charged with sheep-stealing, and finally hanged. Albert’s father had discovered that his brother was caught only because he had been almost blind drunk as he hurried a dozen stolen ewes over a narrow bridge across one of the Marsh dykes—indeed, it seemed more likely he followed rather than guided them. A pony and trap rattling towards him from the other direction had scattered the startled sheep, and an enraged Uncle Albert had whacked the pony across the rump as it passed and hurled a shower of abuse at the farmer driving it before realizing that the man was the rightful owner of the sheep and a magistrate driving to Romney to sit at the brewster sessions.

  All that could have been put down to bad luck, but the Dysons had never been able to live down what followed: the farmer had eventually managed to quieten the horse after a mile’s wild gallop, turned the trap on the narrow Marsh lane, and went back to the bridge to find Uncle Albert sitting on its low wall tippling from a bottle of contraband brandy and by then oblivious of what had just happened. The wrathful farmer was met with a splendidly vacant grin and an invitation to share the brandy, to which he had responded by shoving Uncle Albert over the wall and into the dyke and nearly drowning him.

  Thus Uncle Albert had brought shame to the Dysons. His brother was so angry and disillusioned at having named his eldest son after such a man (and virtually apprenticed the boy to him) that young Albert was then unofficially apprenticed to a highwayman who worked the road from Ashford to Folkestone. Albert, who acted as lookout, had been present but managed to escape, when his wrong identification led to the highwayman holding up a carriage containing five Army officers instead of the carriage transporting the Bishop of Dover. Expecting to find a cringing prelate with proffered purse, the highwayman was cut down by a fusillade of pistol shots, the Bishop’s carriage arriving in time for him to mutter a perfunctory prayer as the highwayman departed this life and young Albert, watching horrified from behind the hedge down the road, departed hurriedly for home.

  By now young Albert was twelve, and he spent the next few years picking pockets, starting off by sampling the visitors to Ashford market on Tuesdays, Canterbury market on Wednesdays and Maidstone on Fridays. That produced next to nothing, since the farmers and their wives were not given to carrying much money, so he started working the fairs, where the visitors were more bent on pleasure than business, but the travelling and the need to watch the calendar proved too much. After all these years he could remember the dates.

  The year began with Maidstone on the 13th January and Faversham on the 25th, then came a long wait for Great Chart on the 25th March and Biddenden on 1st April (better than Deal and Lamberhurst, which fell on the same day). Another long wait for Charing on 1st May (with the choice of Wittersham and Wingham the same day), Hamstreet or Winchelsea on the 14th, Benenden the next day, Ashford two days after that, and then nothing until Cranbrook on the 30th. And so it went on throughout the year. The life was feast or famine: either so many fairs on the same day or so close he could not visit them all even by riding half the night, or weeks with nothing except weekly markets which yielded very little.

  But, Dyson recalled without bitterness, it was growing up that had done him in as a “dip.” He had been small and skinny for his age and no one noticed him at work in a crowd, and he was agile enough to dip his hand into a pocket or pouch without much risk. A night ride from one fair to another, or sleeping under a hayrick or in a barn, did not matter until he was old enough to shave. Then, and he was the first to admit it, a couple of days’ growth of beard on his face made him look just what he was, and if he was also a bit red-eyed from drinking and wenching and lack of sleep—well, the sight of him made wise men keep their hands on their guineas and mothers call their children and clutch their purses …

  His last year had been a disaster when his father worked out the tally. It was the year the damned spavined horse broke a fetlock and had to be shot, miles away from anywhere so he could not even sell the flesh and had to walk eleven miles with the saddle over his shoulders, and he had “lifted” under twenty guineas from seventeen fixed fairs. Then Dad, who had long since given up trying to keep a calendar on the moveable fairs, swearing one needed to be a parson to do it properly, got in with Mr Simpson up at Studfall, and young Albert had become a fisherman. Not a fisherman who caught fish, but a fisherman who went out in a boat with nets and lines and hooks and bait, in case a Revenue cutter became nosey, and who came back long after dark … Bottle fishing, some folk called it, even though the haul was in casks.

  For a few years the Dyson family flourished, thanks to Albert. Everyone was proud of Young Albert—until one rainy night he and five others in the boat stepped ashore at Camber to land some casks and the pile of rocks at the back of the beach turned out to be Customs men crouching down, waiting for them. Five years in gaol, the judge had said, or they could walk out of court, with a Navy press-gang waiting in the road.

  After a month in a receiving ship, a hulk at Sheerness, and six months
in a ship of the line, Albert had decided that the galley was the safest and warmest place in any ship, and got himself rated cook’s mate. Everyone sneered at the job, which meant keeping the galley fire stoked or clear of ashes, and cleaning and polishing the big copper kettles, but there was money in it. When the great chunks of salt pork or salt beef were boiled in the kettles, gobs of fat (known as slush) floated to the surface, and the cook’s mate skimmed it off and put it to one side. Later he sold it illicitly to the seamen, who spread it on the biscuit which passed for bread. The slush not only softened it, if it had grown hard, or bound it together if it had begun to crumble, and suffocated the weevils, but it gave Slushy Dyson his nickname and put money in his pocket.

  Slushy Dyson knew better than most men that all good things come to an end, whether because of the drunken carelessness of an Uncle Albert, the thoughtless dating of fixed fairs, the sprouting of the whiskers of adolescence or the mischance of the ship of the line in which he was serving being paid off, resulting in the transfer of Albert Dyson, cook’s mate, to the Triton brig where he had less than sixty customers for his slush, instead of 500 or so. It hit a man cruel hard, that sort of luck; indeed there were times when Slushy almost gave up hope. In the end he had realized that this run of bad luck, extending over several years, was the best thing that had ever happened to him. Just before Mr Ramage came on board to take command and sail for the West Indies, the whole of the Fleet at Portsmouth had mutinied. Albert Dyson had been caught organizing a mutiny on board the first night out of Portsmouth. The three seamen now sitting round the table had captured him but he had got away with a couple of dozen lashes, been transferred to an inward bound ship, and had later been able to desert.

  Three years at sea in the King’s ships had taught him a lot. When he had called on Mr Simpson at Studfall and told him the tale, he had been welcomed back into the Trade. Within a couple of months a clerk at the Navy Office had passed the word to Mr Simpson that the Two-monthly Book from Dyson’s last ship—which was a copy of the Muster Books—had been received, and one letter against the name of Albert Dyson had been carefully erased and two others written in. The changes were simple: originally the letter “R,” for “Run,” the Navy’s word for deserting, and the date, had been written in the appropriate column. The clerk had carefully changed “R” to “D.D.,” which was the only legal way of leaving the King’s service apart from being so badly wounded or permanently sick as to be no use on board a ship. The record therefore showed that Albert Dyson, cook’s mate, had died on the date shown, and been “Discharged Dead.”