The Ramage Touch

by Dudley Pope

  ‘I can’t see them getting under way at daylight, sir,’ the master said cheerfully. ‘Their heads will be throbbing so badly they’ll think it’s drums beating to quarters! Shall we send away our boarders?’

  Ramage had been considering it carefully. He pictured Renwick and his Marines trying to force twenty or thirty drunken Frenchmen to wake up, stand upright, and then climb down into a boat to be ferried over to the Calypso as prisoners. It would be like trying to shovel up smoke.

  ‘No. I think we’ll wait for the Frenchmen to wake up. They’ll have such bad headaches, they’ll think they’ve been wounded. Trying to get them under control now means sobering ‘em up…they’ll be falling over like skittles. A really drunken one may want to fight. They’ll wake up eventually and find a French frigate between them.’

  Aitken gave a dry laugh. ‘Aye – the Calypso looks French enough and they won’t be able to see the name on the transom anyway. I’ll tell the men not to shout, so the Frenchmen won’t hear any English.’

  Ramage nodded when asked if the men should stay at general quarters, with permission to sleep beside the guns.

  At number six gun on the starboard side, sitting down on the deck below the level of the bulwark and with his back resting against the carriage, a Cockney seaman, Will Stafford, was finding a ready audience for his stories about three people, Captain Lord Ramage, the Marchesa di Volterra, and her nephew, Paolo Orsini, serving as a midshipman in the Calypso.

  ‘Yers,’ he said with an airy wave of an arm towards the north-east, ‘all that land over there belongs to the Marchesa, and if she don’t ’ave no sons, then ’er nevvy, Mr Orsini, inherits the lot. When we get it back from Bonaparte, o’ course.’

  ‘What akshully ’appened, Staff?’ enquired one of the seamen who knew something of the legend but realized he now had a chance of hearing the true story from Stafford. If not the true story, then one which would pass for true once the trimmings had been removed, like pulling off the outer leaves of a cabbage.

  ‘With the Marchesa? Oh, we rescued ’er,’ the Cockney said matter-of-factly. ‘Jackson, the Capting, a few others and me. This ‘ere Bonaparte was marching ‘is army down Italy and the Marchesa – she rules this state of Volterra, yer know – she an’ some uvvers was escaping. Our frigate was sent to rescue ’er, got sunk by a French ship o’ the line, and Mr Ramage – he was the only orficer left alive – took us in one of the boats to finish the job. Rescue the Marchesa, I mean.’

  ‘Is it true she’s very beautiful?’

  ‘My oath,’ Stafford exclaimed, and for a moment it seemed he might be at a loss for words, but he managed to get a grip on himself. ‘Well, she’s about five feet ’igh, long black ’air, the air of an empress when she feels like it, she teases everybody, always seems to be laughing and her face – well, it ain’t beautiful like they ’ave in paintings; it’s – well, she’s all that a woman should be only she’s the only one I’ve ever seen who akshully is.’

  ‘Where’s she now, then? Where’d you take her after you rescued her in the boat?’

  ‘Oh, all that’s too long a story for now, but she’s living with the Capting’s family in Cornwall.’

  ‘’E’s supposed to be in love with ’er, ain’t ’e?’ another seaman asked.

  ‘’E is,’ Stafford said firmly. ‘’E don’t seem ter be doin’ much abart it yet, but–’ he lowered his voice and tapped his nose with his index finger ‘–there’s problems. One is she’s a Catholic, I think. The other is ’is father, the admiral. ’E’s the Earl of Blazey, and when ’e dies the Capting inherits the title and a big estate.’

  ‘What’s that got to do wiv ’im marrying this Marchesa?’ the seaman persisted.

  ‘I dunno,’ Stafford admitted frankly, lost in the aristocracy of Volterra and of the United Kingdom. ‘All I know is, if it was me I wouldn’t ’esitate. She still remembers us – whenever she writes to the Capting, she mentions me an’ Rossi, an’ Jackson an’ Mr Southwick. Funny, she speaks ever so good English but she can’t get ’is name right; “Souswick” it was at the start and “Souswick” it remains.’

  ‘Where did all this rescuing ’appen, then?’

  ‘Why, just down the coast ’ere a few miles. There’s a big sort of island – well, it’s not a real island, ’cos a couple o’ causeways join it to the mainland – but just beyond, on the coast, there’s a tower. We picked ’er up there.’

  ‘So yer been along this bit o’ the coast. But what are we doin’ ’ere, Staff? Ain’t many o’ our ships around, not from wot they said in Gibraltar…’

  ‘Why, the Capting knows this coast like the back of ’is’ and,’ Stafford said contemptuously, baffled that anyone could be stupid enough to ask such a question, but unable to deal with two aitches in succession. ‘’E speaks the lingo, and that’s why we got these orders,’ he added mysteriously.

  ‘Wot orders, Staff?’ At that moment Rossi joined the group, just in time to hear Stafford’s answer.

  ‘My oath, you chaps don’t know nothink. Our orders are to capture or sink every French or Spanish ship we find. We got to make a bleedin’ nuisance o’ ourselves, like a fox in an ’en run.’

  ‘Well, we’ve ’ad it quiet enough all the way up from the Gut,’ another seaman said. ‘We seemed to be keeping away from the Spanish coast to avoid trouble, not make it.’

  ‘Ah, that’s just it,’ Stafford said triumphantly, accidentally guessing that it had been part of Ramage’s orders. ‘We got to get well into the Mediterranington afore we start cutting up rough. That way it takes longer for the Frogs and the Dons to get the glad news and send ships from Cartagena and Toulon, and it gives us more time to break the crockery.’

  ‘I say, Staff,’ said a timid voice, ‘do they ’ave poisonous snakes ’ere?’

  ‘Snakes?’ Stafford exclaimed scornfully but stumped for a moment. ‘Why, they ’ave ’em ten feet long. Not all of them are poisonous,’ he added reassuringly. ‘Some just bite and crush the bone.’

  ‘Accidente!’ Rossi commented calmly, ‘what a liar you are, Staff. If only you sing like you tell stories – ah, the opera we should have. La Scala would be the nothing by comparison!’

  ‘La Scala?’ Stafford asked suspiciously.

  ‘An opera house in Milan,’ Rossi explained. ‘They sing there.’

  ‘Yus, they do in opera ’ouses in England, too,’ Stafford said sarcastically.

  ‘Belay all that talking,’ a boatswain’s mate growled, his interest now waning, ‘you’re at general quarters.’

  An hour later, with the Calypso lying to her anchor cable and occasionally swinging gently in unison with the vessel on each side as the breeze changed direction slightly, Ramage stood on the quarterdeck alone with his thoughts, the ship’s officers purposely keeping clear of him and the men lying beside the carronades remaining silent.

  The Calypso seemed to envelop him: the decks beneath his feet, the masts overhead, the guns loaded and with scores of men waiting beside them. The ship was silent and there was no movement, yet it needed only one shout from him and thirty-six guns and the carronades would be blasting the darkness.

  It was all here, he marvelled; the contradictions of peace and war. The moonlight sparkled like idly tossed diamonds as a wave curled up lazily on the sandy beach; the cone-shaped peak of Peroni stood a thousand feet high like a Tuscan symbol, and farther round and twice as high, one segment dark in the moon shadow, was Ballone and beyond was Alma, within a few feet of the same height. And forming the background were the Appennines. He was back in Italy and it seemed as unreal as a dream.

  As they approached the anchored vessels Southwick had murmured, ‘It was somewhere near here that you rescued the Marchesa, wasn’t it, sir?’ and he had grunted a bare acknowledgment. But of course it was nearby; just a score miles or so along the coast.

  Southwick, like the rest of them – Stafford, Rossi and Jackson – was always waiting to hear that he and Gianna had become engaged. They did not know enough to
realize that the answer was obvious: Gianna, Marchesa di Volterra, was the rightful ruler of the kingdom of Volterra. When this long and damnable war ended and the French were driven out of Italy, she would return to rule her people. How would they feel if she came back married to a straniero? Curious that in Italian the nearest word one could get to ‘foreigner’ was ‘stranger’. To an Italian a straniero was anyone who came from somewhere else – another village, another province, another country: someone who was not of the same place as the speaker and, by inference, not to be trusted.

  Gianna did not accept the existence of these difficulties, of course; Volterra would accept him because, Mama mia, he would be the husband of the Marchesa…There were religious difficulties as well, but…

  He shivered because that part of his personal future was uncertain; possibly insoluble. Anyway, for the moment he was within yards of his second home.

  Second? Where was his first? Presumably England in general and Cornwall in particular. Yet if he was honest with himself – and being anchored like this in the lee of Punta Ala, having just nosed round Elba, was as good a time as any to be that – he was slowly becoming a man without a real home.

  St Kew, the village forming the family estate in Cornwall, had been owned by the Ramages for five or six centuries, but for many generations the successive heads of the family had spent more time abroad than at home, usually on the King’s business. His own father used to be away at sea for three or four years at a stretch, latterly as the commander-in-chief on various distant stations. Now Admiral the Earl of Blazey spent all his time in retirement at St Kew, happily being the squire, and also the Lord-Lieutenant of Cornwall and Custos Rotulorum.

  Meanwhile his son stayed at sea, still one of the youngest and nearly the most junior of the captains on the post list. He had not seen the latest Navy List, but presumably a few more lieutenants had recently made the leap to the post list, and because a captain’s seniority dated from the time of his appointment, there would now be some names below his, so that they pushed him higher (slightly higher, and very slowly!). The two most important things speeding your move up the ladder of seniority were captains going off at the top of the list on promotion to admirals, some dying, and more lieutenants being ‘made post’ below you.

  Ramage suddenly felt guilty about Paolo, whom he could see going quietly from gun to gun, checking that all was well. He had a cutlass in a belt over his shoulder, and his dirk at his belt, a weapon he loved to use as a main-gauche. The boy must be fourteen years old now, and it was a couple of years since he had finally managed to get away from Volterra, escape through Naples and then reach a British ship of war. The voyage to England to join his aunt had decided the boy that he wanted to serve in the Royal Navy. Ramage could recall the arguments only too well: Gianna had simply announced that Paolo would serve with Nicholas. Because Captain Ramage was allowed to take up to six ‘young gentlemen’ to sea with him as midshipmen, it was simple, she said; Paulo would be one of the six. Except, of course, that Captain Ramage did not like having too many midshipmen on board, and certainly did not want to be responsible for the safety in battle of the young nephew of the woman he loved.

  Still, it was useless talking to either aunt or nephew about danger; both had already faced death several times and, as far as he could make out, and he had watched Gianna on a couple of occasions, they greeted it with an airy wave of the hand. So the boy had gone to sea and it seemed to work; Paolo had already been in three or four actions against the French where the only thing that saved his life was the quickness of his own cutlass or the dirk, and once Thomas Jackson had saved him from a French sword.

  His use of the dirk as a main-gauche had started many of the seamen practising it – probably inspired by Will Stafford who, first hearing the phrase and not realizing it was French for ‘left hand’, had asked: ‘What is a mango?’ thinking, no doubt, that it was another variety of the fruit. After that Ramage had often seen seamen, a long piece of wood in the right hand as a cutlass and a short piece in the left representing the dagger, practising fencing, each trying to use the cutlass to swing his opponent round and leave his right side open, so that a dagger held in the left hand could be plunged in. The main-gauche was generally regarded by the British as not the sort of thing a gentleman would use. However, the Italian fencing master who had begun teaching young Paolo just as soon as he had learned to walk without staggering, was obviously a more practical man who considered that if relations had become so bad that men fought with swords, the object was to kill the adversary and stay alive oneself, and a main-gauche could often be an ace of trumps.

  Ramage had been so wrapped up in his own thoughts when he first saw the Italian mainland once again the previous day, a distant blue-grey hint on the horizon, that he had not given a moment’s thought to Paolo, who was seeing his homeland for the first time in several years and with the knowledge that it was still occupied by the enemy. Even the most optimistic of men could not guess when the French army would be driven out of Italy. Bonaparte occupied Europe from the North Sea to the Mediterranean, and, apart from occasional defeats at sea, seemed invincible. Paolo had borrowed a telescope, looked for two or three minutes, commented to Alberto Rossi that he had never previously seen Tuscany from seaward, and handed back the telescope. Unfeeling, self-controlled or indifferent? Ramage did not know.

  In fact Paulo, almost overwhelmed with nostalgia, had been nearly in tears, but was imitating the Captain in hiding his feelings. Beyond that blue-grey blur the boy had pictured the many towers of the city of Volterra, tall, slim rectangles, and round it the cone-shaped hills with tiny towns perched on top, the dark green of the cypress trees covering the countryside, lining tracks and sheltering houses from the winds, and looking just like the broad blades of spears stuck hilt-first into the ground.

  He recalled his own room in the palace and the armoury with the splendid collection of pistols – including some of the finest examples ever made in Pistoia, only a few miles away and the town which had given the world the word ‘pistol’. It was when he commented on this recently to the Captain that Paolo had learned that the English word ‘bayonet’ probably came from the French town of Bayonne, where the short swords fixed on to muskets had first been made. The Captain had known about ‘pistol’ and ‘bayonet’ but could not tell him where the word ‘dirk’ came from, except to mutter something about Scotsmen.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Shortly after dawn Ramage was back on the quarterdeck watching the curious outline of the two French ships emerging more sharply as daylight spread across the bay. They were not Mediterranean vessels; he was sure of that. They seemed to be typical galliots of the French Channel ports – except that the mainmasts were set so far aft, and the stays from the mainmast to the stemhead, bowsprit and jib boom seemed fewer than usual but comparatively massive. Odd-looking vessels, obviously, built for a special purpose, but for what?

  He looked carefully, beginning at the bow. A comparatively short bowsprit and a long jib boom, three headsails lying in heaps at the foot of the stays, and he could just make out the upper curve of the drum of the windlass. It was a normal windlass and not a capstan, and to be expected. What was that? It looked like the rim of something canted at an angle. The muzzle of an enormous gun? A mortar perhaps? His eyes ran aft past the mainmast and there, just forward of the mizen, was another. These weird vessels were bomb ketches!

  What on earth were bomb ketches doing here, along the Italian coast? They were not properly designed bomb ketches, specially built in one of the naval yards, but merchant ship hulls which had been adapted – strengthened to take the weight of the mortars and their enormous recoil, the mainmast stepped farther aft, and the rigging simplified so that no shrouds, halyards, sheets and stays went across the fields of fire or, equally important, were close enough to the muzzle flash to catch fire.

  Southwick, freshly shaved, hat four-square on his head with wisps of white hair sticking out like hay beneath a nesting hen,
his face settled in a cheerful grin, walked up to Ramage as he stood at the binnacle and said: ‘A couple of Dunkirkers, eh?’

  ‘I don’t know about Dunkirk,’ Ramage said, ‘but built fairly close. Notice anything else?’

  Southwick took off his hat and scratched his head, a typical gesture, like someone tidying the head of a mop. His forehead wrinkled as he concentrated on looking at the ship to starboard. He took Ramage’s proffered telescope and adjusted the focus. ‘Ah,’ he said finally. A few moments later he repeated it. ‘Ah. Two mortars.’ He walked to the larboard side to look at the other ship and came back almost immediately.

  ‘Bomb ketches. Or a couple of galliots turned into bomb ketches. I wonder where they’re bound? What do the French want to pound to pieces along this coast? I thought they’d occupied most of it already.’

  Ramage shrugged. ‘We’ll soon find out.’ He tapped the French signal book lying on the top of the binnacle. ‘We’ll hoist the signal for the commanding officers to report to me on board here. They can tell us.’

  Southwick was already looking round for seamen to collect the correct French flags from the special locker when Ramage held up a restraining hand. ‘We’ll wait an hour or two for them to recover. They’ve no suspicions – they might even be alarmed at receiving orders too early!’

  ‘Where do you think they’re bound, sir?’ Southwick persisted.

  ‘Probably not Italy at all. They might be on their way to the eastern end of the Mediterranean on some wild scheme of Bonaparte’s. Don’t forget he tried to capture Egypt; in fact he’d still be there but for the Battle of Aboukir Bay.’

  Southwick pretended to shudder. ‘Don’t mention the name, sir; when I think we missed that action…’