by Dudley Pope
“Exactly. He knew, and it was common gossip. Mind you, no one else knew just how bad it was.”
“But why is Admiral Davis worried?”
“Because none of this evidence about Wallis came out in the other trials.”
“A question of Sir Hyde’s seniority, I suppose,” Ramage mused.
“Precisely. Sir Hyde is nearly at the top of the flag list and Admiral Davis is near the bottom … Sir Hyde will probably protest to their Lordships the moment he hears. He’ll claim that Admiral Davis did it deliberately; that the court’s questioning was intended to discredit him. He’s a touchy sort of man, always looking for insults.”
“But Admiral Davis wasn’t responsible!” Ramage protested. “We asked the questions!”
“Don’t worry,” Edwards said. “Our Admiral doesn’t lack courage. Anyway, none of this helps you with Santa Cruz—but you realize what bringing the Jocasta back here would mean?”
Ramage grinned because Edwards was being perfectly frank now. “That Admiral Davis wouldn’t have to worry overly about the effect of those minutes on their Lordships.” When Edwards nodded, Ramage could not help adding bitterly: “And Captain Eames would have nothing more to worry about, either.”
Edwards inspected his fingernails for several moments. “Quite obviously I could never make any comment about a fellow officer serving on this station, but you are free to draw any conclusions you like. However, it would be unfortunate for all concerned,” he said quietly, looking directly at Ramage, “if a second attempt failed.”
In other words, Ramage knew, Edwards was just repeating the gentle warning. Eames had already established that it was quite impossible to carry out the Admiralty’s order to cut out the Jocasta, but another captain had to be saddled with the failure: Admiral Davis was protecting his favourite frigate captain.
But why pick on me? Ramage thought to himself. He had made the Admiral several thousand pounds richer from prize-money, thanks to the captures off Martinique. Yet to be fair to the Admiral (however reluctantly), he had been picked because he was the newest arrival; someone to whom the Admiral owed no patronage or loyalty. Davis was shrewd enough to know that Ramage’s stock would be high at the Admiralty once their Lordships heard about the Martinique affair, and if the next report they received told them that Ramage had failed at Santa Cruz, perhaps it would balance out.
“You realize what else bringing back the Jocasta would mean?” Captain Edwards asked, and Ramage sensed he had guessed his thoughts.
“Glory for everyone,” he said sourly, and then added quickly as the thought had just struck him: “It would also make Eames look a fool.”
Edwards nodded and then said: “That possibility hasn’t yet occurred to the Admiral.”
So Edwards had no time for Eames! “But has it occurred to Eames?” Ramage asked.
“No, nor will it. He’ll be only too glad that you now have the job. It’s a curious situation,” Edwards said. “You’ll have to make the best of it. If you succeed—and I’m not flattering you when I say if anyone can, it’s you—you’ll have a patron for life in the Admiral. And me, too, if I ever reach a position where I can do you a service. Now, you realize this conversation hasn’t taken place. I’ve behaved most improperly as the Admiral’s flag captain; you’ve said things that are best left unsaid. And I hope the air is a lot clearer! I’ll leave you to go through those minutes. A copy of our trial minutes is on the top.”
With that he left the cabin and Ramage started reading. Out of curiosity he began with the minutes of the trial completed yesterday.
“At a court martial, held on board His Majesty’s ship Invincible in English Harbour, Antigua … the fourteenth of June and held by one adjournment the fifteenth of June … Present, Herbert Edwards, esquire, commanding officer of His Majesty’s ship Invincible and second-in-command of His Majesty’s ships and vessels upon the Windward and Leeward Islands station, president, and Captains J. Marden, E. Teal, J. Banks, N. Ramage …”
The first time he had ever been a member of a court martial, his name was on a document which concluded: “… the said Albert Summers, Henry Perry and Henry Harris, to be hanged by their necks until they are dead, at the yardarms of His Majesty’s ship Invincible, and at such time as the Commander-in-Chief shall direct.”
Many men had been killed in the past because he had given the orders which took his ship into action; many of the enemy were dead because of his orders to open fire; he had killed men himself with pistol and sword; but all of that was in the heat of battle with the knowledge that it was “kill or be killed.” This was so cold-blooded. Yet, as Southwick had said this morning before he left the Calypso: “Don’t take on so: they knew that if they murdered they risked being stabbed with a Bridport dagger …” That was true enough, and it was a case where the slang was appropriate. The Navy’s tribute to the Dorset town of Bridport which made such fine-quality hemp rope was to make “a Bridport dagger” another phrase for the hangman’s noose.
Ramage picked up the minutes of the Barbados trial of Jocasta mutineers. It told him only what the accused men did; there was no hint of why. Nor did it mention any details that might help him off Santa Cruz. There was a mutiny, and the witness deposed that A did this and B did that and C did the other. No mention that some officers had survived and then been murdered by Harris. Ramage picked up the next set, from Jamaica, and they told the same scanty story: enough evidence to convict the accused—more than enough, there was no question of that—but no hint that the frigate was sailing in limbo and manned by seamen who felt themselves doomed at the hands of a mad captain.
Was Wallis really mad? Madness seemed remote, sitting in Edwards’s neat cabin on board the Invincible in English Harbour, but how had it been on board Wallis’s frigate? Did it give him pleasure to flog men, or did he genuinely think everyone on board, officers, Marines and seamen, was plotting against him? Either way he must have been mad: no sane man enjoyed ordering a flogging. Ramage put down the last of the minutes under a heavy paperweight. He had wasted half an hour and learned nothing from them. Or, rather, he had learned there was nothing to be learned, except that, however convincing the minutes of a court martial might seem, they were unlikely to give even a hint of the real problem …
Ten minutes later he was down in the perpetual gloom of the lower deck where the three condemned men were secured, their wrists in irons and each of them sitting on the deck with his ankles secured by another set of irons, the bar of which went through a ringbolt in the planking. Three Marines guarded them, and Ramage told the lieutenant who had escorted him to tell them to stand back out of earshot.
He knelt on one knee beside Summers. “You recognize me, Summers?”
“Indeed I do, sir, you saved my life once.”
For a moment Ramage, more than conscious that he was one of the five judges who had condemned the three prisoners to death, thought Summers was making a bitter joke; but the man was grinning and he meant it seriously. Ramage stared at him, trying to recall the face, knowing that for two days he had watched those features to see what they might reveal by a passing expression.
“I don’t recall you, Summers; I’m sorry.” It seemed right to apologize to a condemned seaman but—“The Belette, sir: I was one of an ‘undred men and we was only on board your Kathleen for a few hours. I been telling me mates about it but they don’t believe me. Nah then,” he said happily, twisting to face Perry and Harris, “‘ere’s the gennelman himself and he can put me right if I tell a lie!”
With that he took a deep breath and launched off on his story: “There was the Belette up on the rocks under a cliff on the coast of Corsica and we’d all climbed on shore and taken over an empty castle—well, a big lookout tower—and barred it against the Frenchies when they arrived.
“Problem though, for Captain Ramage—he was a l’tenant then—is how he rescues us with his little cutter. Well, ‘e gets up to all sorts of tricks and we bolt down the cliff, back on the wreck, and step
on board the cutter like she was the Gosport Ferry, ‘cos Mr Ramage has laid her alongside the wreck and is waiting for us, with the Frenchies blazing away from the top of the cliff like madmen! There, that’s ‘ow it was, wasn’t it, sir?”
Ramage nodded, his thoughts in a whirl as memories of that desperate hour or two—carrying out his first orders in his first command—came swirling in. Southwick had been there, and Jackson, and … so many. And among the hundred or so Belettes who swarmed on board and were taken down to Bastia had been Summers, not even a face in the crowd, and years later chance had put Summers on board the Jocasta …
“Yes, that’s what happened, Summers.”
Perry and Harris were clearly impressed, but Ramage suddenly wanted to get up on deck again, into the sunshine. Down here, where they needed lanterns, the darkness and the humid heat, the occasional clank of the men’s irons—yes, this was the final stages of justice, but it was hateful.
“Summers and you, Perry and Harris, I need your help—”
“O’ course, sir!” Summers said eagerly, “just—”
“I have to cut out the Jocasta.”
Summers’s eyes dropped and Perry exclaimed: “Gawd.” Then Summers looked directly at Ramage. “It can’t be done, sir: I swear it can’t. Not even you, sir—an’ I bin ‘earing of some of the things you’ve done since the Belette. I was in Santa Cruz two months ago, maybe more. They got three ‘undred or more soldiers on board, besides seamen.
“But, sir, that ‘arbour. It’s a cross-grained place; if the wind’ll let you sail in, you can’t get out again without towing. And t’other way about. A fort each side of the entrance and one at the far end, and their guns would smash you into so much drift-wood. The channel’s very narrow so that daylight or dark won’t make no odds: the channel ain’t more’n a hundred yards wide and the forts set back maybe fifty yards. The range—the most it’ll be is a hundred yards … Gawd,” he said, shuddering as his imagination put him in Ramage’s place.
When Ramage said nothing Summers reached up with both hands, as if pleading: “Sir, believe me. I ‘ate the Dons and I wish the Jocasta was ‘ere in English Harbour. If I could ‘elp you get her out—well, they’re tying the ‘angman’s knots in the nooses ready for us now, and I’d go feeling better if I could do something to get ‘er back, but yer can’t do it, sir; that’s why the Dons took ‘er there to fit her out.”
He paused a moment, deep in thought. “Ah! That’s it, sir. Wait for her to come out. She’s going to Havana. They’ll have ‘er ready in a few weeks, and it don’t matter how many soldiers they’ve got—that’s what most of ‘em are—you could take ‘er at sea. But to cut her out—no, sir.”
Ramage shrugged his shoulders and shifted his cramped knee. “I have my orders, Summers, so describe the harbour to me as best you can. Do you know any depths?”
“I know the channel, sir: I bin in twice. First was with a guarda costa, then they made me take the Jocasta round—they’re mortal feared of handling her, sir.”
“Could you draw me a chart?”
“O’ course, sir, if I ‘ad pencil and paper.”
An hour later Ramage went up on deck, Summers’s chart folded carefully in his pocket. The three condemned men had asked to be allowed to shake him by the hand as he left, and then he was up in the bright sunshine. Death was illness, gunshot and sword thrust. It was old age, a fall from a yardarm or a ship sinking in a hurricane. But it was also the concluding words of an Article of War or a court martial sentence. He felt dazed, dizzy with a sense of unreality, and saw that Edwards was looking at him.
“It couldn’t have been easy,” Edwards said sympathetically, “that sort of thing never is. But just remember—the Navy is bound together by discipline. That’s why we always beat the Dons: we have it, they don’t. And discipline,” he added bitterly, “means not murdering your officers …”
CHAPTER NINE
FIVE DAYS LATER the Calypso was reaching fast to the south-west and just beginning to pitch lazily as she came clear of the lee of Grenada, the southernmost of the Windward Islands. The coast of the Spanish Main was a hundred miles ahead, across the wide channel separating South America from the end of the chain of islands, and soon the frigate would be in the strong west-going current set up by the Atlantic flowing into the Caribbean.
The sun was scorching and the sea a deep yet dazzling blue, but to an untrained eye the only signs that the Calypso was a ship of war were the guns lining her sides: most of her men were sitting or lying in whatever shade they could find while aft four or five of them perched on the taffrail were juggling with fishing lines.
Because it was Sunday all the men were newly shaven with their hair tied in neat queues. This was the day when the ship’s company was mustered and the captain had the men singing some hymns and, once a month, read the Articles of War to them. The order for the afternoon—apart from the men on watch—was “make and mend,” a few hours when shirts and trousers could be patched by those energetic with needle and thread. Two men were helping each other cut out a shirt from a piece of cloth, one trying to hold the material flat on the deck while the other snipped away with scissors. Another man was whittling away at a carving of a horse, careful that the shavings fell into a piece of canvas.
Jackson, Rossi and Stafford were on the fo’c’s’le, squatting in the shade of the flying jib with their backs against the carriage of a six-pounder. Three other seamen sprawled on the deck near them and apparently asleep were in fact listening to the conversation.
Stafford, the Cockney locksmith swept up by the press-gang—“a good man lost to the burglin’ profession” as he often boasted—had been comparing the beauty of Spanish and Italian women with the English, more especially those from London. Rossi had been putting forward the claims of the ladies of Genoa, while Thomas Jackson, the only American on board, delivered a verdict that the women of southern Europe were usually too fat while those from the north were too thin.
“The Marchesa’s an exception,” he declared.
“She’s the loveliest lady I ever saw,” Stafford admitted. “Don’t know why the Captain don’t marry ‘er.”
“Ah, it hardly seems yesterday when we rescued her,” Jackson said nostalgically.
One of the seamen sat up. “When you what?”
“Ah, you Invincibles, you don’t know nothing,” Stafford jeered. “You mean to say you’ve never ‘eard ‘ow, Jacko rescued a queen from under the ‘ooves of Boney’s cavalry?”
With that the other two sat up. “No,” said one of them, “a real queen? Don’t believe it!”
“She’s not called a queen but she rules her own country,” Jackson said. “Volterra’s the place, in Italy. We were sent in a frigate to rescue her as Boney’s troops marched south, only we were sunk and we ended up fetching her off in a boat.”
“And she and the Captain—he was only a lieutenant then—went and fell in love,” Stafford added.
“And very nice too,” said one of the new men from the Invincible. “But like you was saying, why ain’t they got married?”
“Accidente!” Rossi exclaimed indignantly. “If I marry all the women I love, I have a hundred wives!”
“Where’s this lady now, then?” the seaman asked.
“Staying with the Captain’s family,” Jackson explained. “His father’s got a big estate down in Cornwall.”
“I pity her, then,” the seaman commented. “That Cornish lingo: I can’t never understand what they’m saying.”
“Yorkshire, that’s where you come from,” Stafford said accusingly. “An’ you talk about a lingo!”
“Lancashire,” the man replied triumphantly. “Shows how much you know!”
“You’d better be learning Spanish,” Jackson said. “We’ll need it soon, from what I hear.”
“Why we have to go an’ chase out a lot o’ murderin’ mutineers I don’t know,” Stafford grumbled.
“Aye, there’s a lot you don’t know,” the Lancashire seama
n said. “There ain’t a mutineer left on board the Jocasta; she’s full of Spaniards. Three ‘oondred or more; that was the scuttlebutt when we left the Invincible, and a narrow entrance to Santa Cruz with three forts an ‘oondreds of guns.”
“You people measure everything by the … ‘‘oondred,’” Jackson said dryly. “Mr Ramage always divides the opposition by ten …”
“Your Mr Ramage is goin’ to be the scapegoat; that’s what I ‘eard,” another seaman said. “That there Captain Eames is the Admiral’s favourite and he made a mess of it without even trying. But your chap is going to be the one that’ll be put on the beach with half-pay when the Admiralty hears he’s failed. Least-ways, that’s what I heard,” he added hurriedly. “Seems unfair but there’s no tellin’ with officers.”
“Speakin’ of officers,” one of the other seamen said, “the First Lieutenant seems all right.”
“One o’ the best,” Stafford said emphatically. “Same goes for Wagstaffe and Baker. The new Fourth Lieutenant, Kenton—don’t know about ‘im, ‘e’s only been on board a few days.”
“This little midshipman—he’s a foreigner, ain’t he?”
“Foreigner?” Rossi exclaimed. “Accidente, he’s Italian. And so am I!”
“I couldn’t have guessed,” the seaman said with a grin.
“Mr Orsini—he’s the Marchesa’s nephew,” Jackson explained. “A good lad. We’re proud of him,” he added, giving a gentle warning. “He’s a proper terror when we go into action …”
“He’ll need to be, and the rest of us.”
“Sounds to me as though you Invincibles are scared of Santa Cruz,” Stafford said.
“Aye—and rightly so. You’ll see.”
The Cockney shrugged his shoulders. “Would you attack a Spanish ship of the line wiv a cutter?”
“Course not!”
“We did,” Stafford said flatly. “Leastways, Mr Ramage did and we was on board.”
“You’re joking!”
“I ain’t—ask Jacko and Rosey.”
