by Dudley Pope
“What now, then?” Southwick asked. “I see you’ve decided to head out to sea again.”
Ramage nodded casually. He could afford to be casual now he knew what to do. The Governor’s nephew had not given him the new idea, but it had come as he watched the beads of perspiration forming on the young man’s upper lip, almost as if the sheer terror it revealed had been the source of inspiration.
“Yes, we stay out of sight for today; then we sail up to Santa Cruz tomorrow and have a good look.”
“Had you any particular time in mind, sir?” Southwick asked sarcastically.
“Yes, towards dusk. It’ll be cooler then. I don’t want to put you to any effort during the heat of the day.”
Southwick gave a grin which revealed his relief. The Captain was functioning again; he had a plan at last. Southwick did not care what it was; the mere fact that it existed was enough. Well, he had to admit that he was a little curious, but obviously it had something to do with the Santa Barbara. Or maybe using the Captain-General’s nephew as a hostage? Or both; the Santa Barbara to go in with a flag of truce to negotiate an exchange of the Jocasta for the nephew. That did not sound too likely: no Captain-General would dare agree to such an exchange.
Southwick heard himself asking diffidently: “You have a plan, sir?”
“No,” Ramage said, “just an idea. The Santa Barbara was on a two-week cruise against smugglers. She’s due back in Santa Cruz by tomorrow night.”
He went to his desk and took the Spanish signal book from a drawer. He opened it at a page and showed it to Southwick. “Here are their signal flags, all carefully coloured by some loving hand. They use the same sort of numerary system, one to nine, and nought. And three substitute flags—these here. Give the sailmaker three men. I want him to make a complete set of flags and have them ready by tonight. We’ll have to go up within hailing distance of Wagstaffe and get the dimensions. I want them to be the same size as those in the Santa Barbara.”
“Any special orders for me, sir?” Aitken asked hopefully, still ruffled that Wagstaffe had been put in command of the Santa Barbara.
Ramage thought for a moment. “Make sure we have the second copy of our own signal book ready, and check through the Santa Barbara’s charts. Make up a portfolio—borrow duplicates from Southwick, or make copies. And the spare set of our own signal flags—have them ready too.”
At first Aitken was delighted to have some task obviously associated with whatever idea the Captain had in mind; then he realized that “we” could also mean the Calypso. But why a second set of charts? Either the Captain was teasing them or whatever he had in his mind was exactly what he had said, just an idea.
“And cutlasses and pikes,” Ramage added. “Get the grindstones up on deck and sharpen everything. But keep an eye on the men—we want some metal left.”
“Aye, aye, sir.” Aitken waited in case there were more orders, but Ramage had nothing more to say.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
JACKSON LED his men round the deck, pointing here and there, and Stafford and Rossi spattered small pieces of slush—the thick greyish fat that the cook skimmed from the top of the water after boiling salt meat—and smeared it into the wood with their feet. The American then sprinkled sand. They had already covered half the decks.
“What a game this is,” Stafford grumbled. “It’ll take weeks to get these decks clean again. An’ the brasswork—just look at it. Amazin’ wot a few hours’ soaking with salt water can do.” He stopped for a moment and pointed to the bosun and his mates. “Look! Cuttin’ off lengths of old rope and fraying the ends into cow’s tails!”
He shrugged his shoulders and resumed his scuffing of the specks of slush, but all three men stopped a few minutes later at the sight of the cook, a bucket in his hand, following Southwick.
“A few drops here,” the Master said, and the cook dipped his hand into the bucket and then spattered blood over the deck by the break of the gangway on the starboard side.
“‘Ere! Whose blood is that?” exclaimed a startled Stafford. “They just kill one of the officers’ sheeps,” said Rossi cheerfully.
As the cook followed Southwick, pouring a mugful here, spattering with his hand there, one of the bosun’s mates walked past with a length of rope and tucked it round a belaying pin at the mainmast, careful that the frayed end hung down. He walked back a few paces, inspected it and then went back and slid the frayed rope across the deck with his foot to dirty it. Jackson gestured aft as the cook passed him: “Look, it’s drying fast. Soon loses that nice rich red!”
“Looks like a slaughterhouse!” the cook said nervously. “There’ll be a lot of scrubbing to do when all this is over!”
By now the purser had come on deck, followed by seamen carrying bundles of shirts and trousers. “Ah, come on cookie,” Southwick said. “We’ve got to do this next job very carefully!”
The seamen began spreading the clothes on the deck and the cook, holding his bucket carefully against the rolling of the ship, began sprinkling them with blood.
“Wipe your hand on some of them,” Southwick instructed. “Not too much, make it look realistic. Now, how many shirts are there? Only 25? Come on, Mr Purser, we need another couple o’ dozen!”
The purser went below again with his men, muttering under his breath, and as Ramage walked up to inspect the work Southwick said: “The purser’s wondering how he’ll be able to sell these as new!”
“He won’t—you’ll list them as destroyed in action!”
“Ah,” Southwick said. “I’ll tell him that.” Action—he guessed that the Calypso was supposed to have been in a fight with the Santa Barbara. Was Wagstaffe to fake some damage to the brig as well?
Ramage continued his inspection, walking slowly round the deck, hands clasped behind his back. By now the bosun’s mates had fitted more tails of frayed rope and Jackson’s men had almost completed their task of making the decks look filthy. Aitken came from forward after supervising the seamen sprinkling more salt water on the brasswork.
“I never thought to see this, sir,” Aitken said cheerfully. “The Captain, First Lieutenant and Master of one of the King’s ships doing their best to make her look like a hulk!”
“Like a neglected slaughterhouse,” Ramage commented. “Give the grease a few hours to soak into the wood, and time for that blood to darken …”
The First Lieutenant paused for a few moments, hoping Ramage would say more, but he continued walking forward and Aitken called to the seaman with the bucket of salt water: “The brass rods protecting the glass in the Captain’s skylight: go up to the quarterdeck and douse them again.”
He looked round the ship, proud of the morning’s work yet dismayed and appalled by it. In the days since the Calypso left Antigua, he had kept the ship’s company busy holystoning, scrubbing and polishing, making up for a year’s neglect by the French. The metal surface of most of the brasswork was now smooth enough to take an easy polish with the brickdust; the last dirt had been scrubbed and holystoned from the grain of the deck planking and the last grease stain removed. Now—in a couple of hours—it had been transformed so that even the French would be impressed. All the ship lacked, he thought sourly, was the reek of garlic and the stench of unpumped bilges and you’d think she was back in French hands.
Captain Ramage had specified exactly what he wanted: dirty decks, gritty with sand, ropes with cow’s tails, unpolished brass-work, bits of food lying around in the scuppers, bloodstained decks … Well, he had it now; the Calypso looked like a ship which had fought a desperate battle, lacking only damage by round shot.
There had not been a word of explanation: Captain Ramage had said nothing to Southwick—who, as far as Aitken was concerned, seemed to have been born without any curiosity at all.
Not a word to his First Lieutenant, not a comment to Baker or Kenton. Of course he did not expect the captain to confide in third and fourth lieutenants, but a passing comment might have revealed more of what he had in mind.
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There was enough heat in the sun now to speed up the work: the water dried almost immediately on the brasswork, leaving a fine crust of sparkling salt crystals; the drops and blobs of blood were turning a rusty brown and he wished he was over in the Santa Barbara, still a mile ahead. The peak of Pico de Santa Fé was gradually lifting on the larboard bow, but high clouds inland drifted across to hide the tip from time to time. If he was over in the Santa Barbara it would be up to Wagstaffe to reduce the Calypso to a shambles …
The dirt, the frayed ropes’ ends, the dulled brasswork offended him. His mother had been a great one for the scrubbing brush, whether it was cleaning the grey stone floor of the kitchen or the backs of her young sons standing shivering in the high-walled yard as they were doused with buckets of water for their weekly bath. The kitchen table, the bread board, occasionally the carpet—all were scrubbed with a cheerfulness belying the effort needed.
The great rolling hills of Perthshire seemed a million miles away; the village of Dunkeld on a hot summer’s day was colder than the chilliest night in these latitudes. The people of Dunkeld would never believe him if he said that for much of the day men never stood still on deck if they could avoid it because the wood was too hot underfoot; that a man off watch who stretched out on the deck for a nap was liable to wake up to find his shirt striped with pitch from the caulking. They would nod politely when he told them this accounted for the seamen’s phrase “taking a caulk,” meaning having a nap. They would be equally polite when he said that the sun heated metal so that it became uncomfortably hot to touch. They would nod politely, but they would not believe a word of it. Likewise it would be just as hard describing snow or frost to people born in the Tropics.
Ramage walked back to the quarterdeck and stood at the rail looking forward over the ship. It all looked unreal. Although he had given the orders which had transformed the Calypso, he seemed remote from it. The dirty bloodstained deck, the frayed ropes—she lacked shot holes and splintered woodwork, otherwise anyone would think she had been in battle and then left to drift for a week or two.
What was he really trying to do? The problem was that he was far from sure, but was risking everything on it. What was “it”? His own questions made him impatient, because they only underlined that he was grasping at straws. The straw, for example, that led to the order to make the Calypso look like a hulk. Now Southwick and Aitken waited confidently for the next orders, for the next stage in the plan to be revealed to them.
The only difficulty was that there was no next stage. I’ve used my ration, he thought ruefully, and it isn’t enough. I have a dirty, bloodstained ship and an appointment at dusk off Santa Cruz, and that’s all. A little picture was trying to intrude into his mind with the tenacity of a woodpecker; a picture which, if studied carefully, might yield a plan. “Might”—a longer word than “if,” but no more certain …
In an hour or two, after the men had finished their dinner, Wagstaffe expected to come on board the Calypso to receive his orders. Captain Ramage could hardly greet him with: “I’m most apologetic for bringing you over to no purpose, Wagstaffe, but I have no orders for you because I have no ideas.”
The picture seemed a little clearer now, as though the lines and colours had grown stronger at the thought of apologizing to Wagstaffe. Yet the problem was not the clarity, it was the absurdity. The picture represented a plan whose success was enormously dependent on luck and even more on the Spanish. He would need to keep his plans flexible, and if he was to achieve surprise he had to be careful not to be surprised himself.
The first surprise was that he seemed to have turned a picture into a plan, and even as he stood there, too stupid to move over a few feet out of the sun and into the shade, he was adopting the plan and dividing it up between the two ships …
How the situation would appeal to Gianna’s sense of humour. Young Paolo had entered into the spirit of it too, as though adding his quota to the confusion while acting as an agent for his aunt—a word Ramage had always associated with old ladies and white hair, bony fingers, sharp knuckles and watery eyes! Gianna was an aunt with raven hair, an oval-shaped face, high cheekbones, eyes that laughed—or, when she was angry, stabbed. Aunt Gianna was slim with an imperious body and jutting breasts that made the ship and the sea fade as he thought about them.
He pushed these thoughts to the back of his mind. Lopez and the Spanish prisoners could be a problem. The lieutenant had been bubbling with indignation and protests because the three of them were not allowed on deck for some exercise, but Ramage could imagine the expression on Lopez’s face if he saw the ship now. All the prisoners, officers and seamen alike, had to remain in ignorance of what was going on, and they would have to be told that they might get their throats cut if they made any noise—an idle threat they would readily believe.
He went down to his cabin and spent half an hour poring over the Santa Cruz chart. The port was about thirty miles away now and the west-going current seemed to be less than a knot. The wind had been steady from the east for the past two days, strong enough to overcome any land or sea breeze and likely to hold all the way to the coast. The entrance channel to Santa Cruz ran almost south-east and north-west, and any ship trying to enter it now would probably have to be towed in by boats. Pico de Santa Fé would be deflecting the wind down on to the lagoon and port so that it funnelled through the channel and out between the headlands on each side of the entrance, Punta Reina and Morro Colorado.
He rolled up the chart and put it back in the rack. And that, he told himself sheepishly, is how battles are won or lost: the crazy picture trying to lodge in his imagination had now changed into Captain Ramage’s plan. Not a bad plan, come to think of it, but not a good one either. A good one left nothing—or very little, anyway—to chance.
Wagstaffe would be ordered on board to get his instructions after dinner, and at the same time he would explain everything to the rest of the officers. Then he would muster the ship’s company aft and tell them. Not that anyone would need much explanation. Once you knew the basic idea, the rest was obvious.
After a dinner of mutton, he thought gloomily. It was a pity they had had to kill another sheep so soon, but they had needed the bucket of blood. Apart from cutting the Captain-General’s nephew’s throat, the sheep was the only source of supply. Antigua sheep must lead hard lives; the meat from the last one was the toughest he had tasted for a long time.
He took out the Spanish signal book to compare it with the one used by the Royal Navy. The Spaniards must find it hard to communicate at sea; there were no more than fifty signals listed in this one, compared with nearly four hundred in the Calypso’s book. Number 7 was a useful one: “Keep in close order.” He made a note of it, cursing while he retrieved a pencil which rolled off the desk as the ship gave an unexpectedly heavy roll. Number 33: “Lead the Fleet”; then 41: “Anchor”; and 48: “Keep in the Admiral’s wake.” Finally he noted number 50: “The signal not understood although the flag can be distinguished.”
He put the signal book back in the drawer. By now the Spanish lookouts in the Castillo San Antonio and in El Pilar, the fort on the west side of the entrance to Santa Cruz, would be watching for the Santa Barbara. They would have been told she was due back from her two-week patrol and they would not get excited when they saw her. Like lookouts and politicians the world over, they would see what they expected to see.
Ramage’s steward knocked on the door and came into the cabin to see if the Captain was ready for dinner, the main meal of the day. “That lamb’s roasted up a treat, sir.”
“Lamb?” Ramage exclaimed sourly. “That was a very ancient sheep. Did the officers want to buy some of it?”
“Well, no sir; they said they was off mutton for a while, and I’d best salt the rest of it.”
“They’re wise—and tactful. That sheep had the muscles of a mountain goat and not a spare ounce of flesh on it.”
“The sweet potatoes, sir,” the steward said soothingly, “they’re
nice and fresh. An’ a bottle of wine to celebrate?”
Ramage stared at him suspiciously. “Celebrate what?”
“Why, sir, that we’re almost in sight of Santa Cruz.”
“Did you think we wouldn’t find it?”
“Oh, no, sir,” the steward said hurriedly, disconcerted by Ramage’s surly tone. “All the men are excited, and what with the ship all of a mess I thought perhaps—”
“You know I never drink at sea.”
“Yes, sir, but I thought this once—”
“Jepson, stop thinking for a day or two, and if you’re a wise man, I’d sharpen the knives so that the meat seems less tough.” He glanced up at the clock on the bulkhead. “All right, you can serve now.”
While the Calypso rounded up and hove-to for Wagstaffe to come on board from the Santa Barbara, Ramage sat at his desk writing his Journal. Nine columns had to be filled in, beginning with the date (“Year, month and week day”), and giving wind direction, courses steered, miles covered, the latitude and longitude at noon, and ending with a wide column headed “Remarkable observations and accidents.”
The ship’s log, more usually called the Master’s log, normally gave a more complete picture of the ship’s activities, and Ramage copied the details into his Journal. Under “Remarks,” Southwick had listed the morning’s activities—”Ship’s company employed dirtying decks, making bloodstains, taking the shine off brasswork.”
In the “Remarkable observations” column of his Journal, Ramage wrote the brief note: “Ship’s company employed changing character of ship. Santa Barbara in company.” The latitude—a few miles short of eleven degrees north—was the furthest south he had ever been; only a few hundred miles short of the Equator.
He put his Journal away, closed Southwick’s log, and took out a fresh sheet of paper. He glanced at the small pile in his drawer, saw the last number and wrote “19” at the top of the page. His letter to Gianna—it could not be posted until he returned to Antigua—was getting long, but he tried to write a few sentences each day so that what she received was more of a diary than a letter, and he knew she read extracts to his father and mother. He liked writing it because it helped sort out his thoughts and ideas, and talking to Gianna through his pen eased the loneliness forced on the captain of one of the King’s ships; the man who at sea commanded all that he surveyed, but who also lived in almost monastic seclusion.
