The Ramage Touch

by Dudley Pope

  The senior of these Englishmen was obviously the eldest, the fellow with the black hair and penetrating eyes and slightly hooked nose. He looked like an aristo and now that he was not acting as a gipsy he had the bearing of one. He could not hide it. With those high cheekbones, too, he was a handsome fellow; the women would have fallen for him if he had been going to live past tomorrow, or the next day. He imagined a Navy hangman’s noose round the fellow’s neck, taking the whole weight of the body. Not as spectacular as a guillotine because you did not get that satisfying hiss and thud of the heavy blade running down the slide and lopping off the head, with the explosive spurt of blood and the thump of the head falling into the basket. Still, hanging from the yardarm was probably slower…

  ‘You – where you come from?’

  ‘England.’

  ‘Oui, I know, but now, before…before you here?’

  The damned man just shrugged his shoulders and repeated what he had answered twenty times before. ‘From the hills.’

  ‘You are spy.’

  ‘I am not.’ He said it very firmly. ‘What is there to spy on?’

  ‘Troops, the defences of Italy, the ships in the ports…’

  ‘So, now I know that French officers are living at an inn in Orbetello. There are some rowing boats with fishing nets in the lagoon. It looks as though there will be a good crop of grapes. Last year’s wine should be good, too. To whom could I sell that intelligence, m’sieur?’

  ‘You may find other information.’

  ‘What is there to discover? That the French have invaded Italy? That is old information – several years old. That they hold Corsica or Elba? All that is old. That there are French soldiers in Orbetello?’ Ramage shrugged his shoulders as best he could with the ropes holding him tightly to the chair. ‘I think anyone sitting in London with a map of Italy could guess where French troops were stationed.’

  ‘Ships then.’

  Again the Englishman shrugged his shoulders. ‘There are only a certain number of ports, m’sieur. I can tell you there are French warships in Genoa, Leghorn, Civita Vecchia, Bastia and Ajaccio. You can tell me that there are British warships in Plymouth, Portsmouth, Dover, Sheerness and Harwich. You can also tell me there are British troops in those places. It is obvious. Ports have ships – and they have to be protected by garrisons. I can go on – Toulon, Barcelona, Cartagena, Cadiz, Ferrol, Rochefort, Brest…all contain French warships, and troops. I haven’t been to any of them – but it is obvious.’

  The devil of it is, the major thought, the thrice-damned Englishman is right. Spies were bound to be trying to find out information for their masters, and what information could they find along this coast that would be of the slightest interest to the English? Obviously there were garrisons at various towns and, as the Englishman had pointed out, any fool with a map would know where they would be. Any port of a decent size would hold warships. So…

  Nevertheless, here were three spies. What the devil could he do with them? There was no point in getting the two sentries to knock them about – these men were not clods; any information they had would be extracted only by trapping them with words.

  He took out his watch. In five hours the regiment was due to move to Porto Ercole. By then the colonel would probably still be in a drunken stupor, but it was no good starting two hours late because, faced with the wrath of a senior officer for arriving late, the colonel would have no scruple in denying he had given the order the previous night. To be fair, the old fellow often said things when he was drunk that he did not remember next morning when he was what passed for sober. Most of the time this was just as well.

  Obviously there was nothing more that needed to be done at once: the spies had been caught, and they could be taken out to the frigates, interrogated again, then tried and executed. In the meantime he could get some sleep and this jail could hold the three men until they were transferred to the baggage train. They could spend the rest of the night in those chairs, securely tied up – there was no point in risking them escaping. He gave orders to the guards and said to Ramage: ‘I leave you for the night. Do not try to escape – the guards have orders to shoot. Later we find out what you are doing.’

  The guards changed hourly and noisily, each couple bringing a new candle with them so that they could change the one in the lantern. Ramage talked to Martin and Orsini, after making as sure as he could that neither guard spoke English. There was little to talk about and neither youngster seemed very worried because, Ramage realized just as he was feeling sick with despair, they endowed him with magic powers which would ensure their escape.

  What a brief and inglorious sally into enemy territory it had all been! He had left his ship and her two prizes; he had landed on French-occupied soil for what had seemed at the time the best of reasons – to find out the destination of a possible French army and fleet; he had been captured within three or four hours; he and two of his officers were to be executed within a few hours more.

  The Admiralty…the devil take Their Lordships. Gianna was about to lose the man she loved, and the nephew who was her heir. Of course she could fall in love again, and would, too, and produce her own heir. He shrugged his shoulders, feeling slightly silly at making such an obvious gesture while lashed to a chair in Orbetello’s jail, and told himself that as far as the kingdom of Volterra was concerned, all that had happened was that the clock had stopped for a while. And for Britain? That was more serious. Their Lordships, and therefore the British government, would have no warning that the French were not only planning a new attack by land, but were busy assembling an army and a fleet, and that the target for the new attack was in the eastern Mediterranean. Ramage realized that it would be many weeks after the attack had been made that the British would learn about it, because they had effectively evacuated their ships from the Mediterranean.

  Egypt or the Levant – that was where the attack was to be made. He was sure of that because of the drunken colonel’s diatribe against sand. It would be another attack on Egypt, to make up for Bonaparte’s defeat at the hands of Nelson and General Abercromby, or it could be an attack in the Acre area, for example, because it was the British defence of Acre that prevented Bonaparte’s move northward. In either case, Egypt or the Levant, the French were using Crete as a base, and that plus the impending attack was all that the Admiralty needed to know.

  Ironically, he had found the probable answers, Egypt or the Levant, within a very short time – but as the French major must have realized, information is useless to a spy if he cannot pass it on to those who can use it. Nevertheless, he had been criminally stupid in bringing Paolo along; Rossi would have been just as useful…and it was doubtful if he had really needed Martin.

  He should have no sympathy for Rossi and Jackson, but he was grateful for their misguided attempt to help and worried about them. It seemed inevitable that they too should be captured. Well, Aitken had his orders, so he knew what to do if the Captain had not returned by midnight. He would be in command of quite a little squadron, and he would behave in the same way and have the same responsibilities as if Ramage had died on board from wounds or illness. The Royal Navy was organized on the axiom that no man was indispensable…

  Someone hammered on the door and a moment later a key turned from the outside. As it was flung open, Ramage saw several soldiers waiting in the passage. One of them said to the guards: ‘Take the prisoners out: we are about to march.’

  ‘Are we to shoot them here in the square?’ a guard asked in a matter-of-fact voice.

  ‘No, the Navy will do that in Porto Ercole, so the sergeant says. They are to go ahead of the baggage train.’ As he spoke, Ramage could hear the clippety-clop of a horse’s hooves and the heavy rumble of wheels rolling over cobbles as a cart approached the town hall.

  ‘Do we keep them tied up?’ the guard asked.

  ‘Leave them as they are; we’ll load them on to the cart secured to the chairs. We don’t have time to waste undoing these ropes and then tying
them up again, and the mayor won’t mind us taking three of his chairs.’

  The other guards sniggered and the rest of the soldiers crowded into the room, Ramage felt himself tilting backwards as three men picked up the chair to which he was bound and carried him out through the door. They hurried along the corridor, up the short flight of steps and along to the front door of the town hall, cursing as they banged elbows on the walls in the near-darkness and barked shins on the legs of the chair. Finally they had the chair tilted back so that Ramage was lying almost horizontally and was able to see another group of men behind carrying Martin and his chair, while more sturdy curses in English from beyond showed that Paolo had not been left behind. Ramage hoped that the French soldiers would not suddenly drop Paolo’s chair, or bump him so painfully that he let fly a broadside of French or Italian oaths…

  Outside, a chilly greyness over the far end of the square showed that dawn was approaching. Two unshaven soldiers with battered and sooty lanterns lit up a baggage wagon; about eighteen feet long with four wheels, the front pair smaller than the rear, it had a single horse pulling it, a wretched-looking animal whose ribs showed up as black stripes of shadow, its back a steep valley between neck and rump. A canvas hood protected the wagon from rain, a grotesque and tattered bonnet in the dim lantern light.

  The wagon was stowed with crates and kitbags but a space the width of the wagon and about three feet long had been left at the rear end. The soldiers heaved the chair up and another man waiting inside helped them tilt it over the tailboard. A moment later Ramage found himself sitting upright in the back while more soldiers lifted Martin’s chair. Finally, when the three chairs were in the wagon, the waiting soldier checked the ropes binding them and then climbed up on top of the casks and kitbags so that he could watch his prisoners. A lantern was handed up to him and, at a shout from the sergeant, the driver cracked his whip and the horse lurched forward, its harness rattling.

  Ramage then saw men on horseback riding into the piazza, their plumed shakos showing that they were officers obviously waiting for the colonel and the major to appear so that they could start off for Porto Ercole. Where were the men and guns? Ramage guessed they must be camped along the via Aurelia and were yet to have their first taste of the sand on the causeway.

  By the time the wagon reached the via Aurelia and turned right along it, Ramage could distinguish the features of the guard and Martin and Paolo.

  ‘It’s cold,’ the boy said, ‘but at least the mosquitoes haven’t woken up.’

  ‘Yet,’ Martin said, ‘and we’re still alive. I’ve even got my flute, but the damned thing has slipped down so the ropes are trying to shove it through my ribs.’

  ‘Is everything else all right under your shirt?’ Ramage recalled the sailmaker making the waistcoat with the vertical pockets, and cursed himself for not insisting on flaps being added which could be buttoned down.

  ‘Yes, sir. I’m sorry about…’

  ‘It wasn’t your fault. Never trust inn tables.’

  A sudden noise like a bull being strangled startled them, and a few moments later a peasant jogged past on his braying donkey, sitting astride the animal with his feet nearly touching the ground. The trees recently planted at even spaces along each side of the road to provide shade for marching troops were growing well and proving useful for the landless owners of livestock: several dozen goats had been tethered to various trees and, as was always the way with goats, most of them had gone round and round until their ropes were wound up so short that they could hardly move. As it grew lighter the guard opened the door of the lantern and blew out the candle, and the smell of the smouldering wick caught the backs of their throats.

  A pair of oxen pulling a wide-wheeled cart passed going the other way and Ramage saw how each animal leaned inwards, towards the single pole between them that acted as the shaft. It was said that from the time an animal first pulled a cart and was put, say, in the right-hand position it always had to be on that side because it became used to working with an inward list. The useless information one acquires, Ramage thought sourly just as the wagon swung round to the right, rattling and bumping as it left the via Aurelia and started down the track leading to the Pineta di Feniglia, the southern causeway which ended in Argentario just short of Porto Ercole.

  Looking eastward, Ramage could see that the first rays of the sun, which was still below the eastern horizon, were just catching the top of Monte Amiata and, a few minutes later, Monte Labbro, lower and nearer. There was very little cloud; it was, as Martin remarked with irritating cheerfulness, going to be a scorching day.

  The track dipped downhill for a few hundred yards and as the wheels went silent Ramage knew they had reached the sand. There was an occasional shudder as a wheel hit an old tree stump. Then, as the upper tip of the sun lifted above the distant mountains and a ray shone into the wagon, Ramage glanced across at the soldier sitting among the kitbags and guarding the three Britons. He had leaned back and slipped slightly so that he was cradled between the bags; his mouth was open, his unshaven face greasy with perspiration, and he was quite clearly sound asleep. Ramage was not sure when the man had dropped off, but had been expecting him to forbid them to talk. Then he remembered that the man had been both clumsy and silent when the prisoners were hoisted on board: he was still partly drunk from the night before.

  The horse ambled on; there was no cracking of the whip or cursing, and it was obvious that the driver was in no hurry to arrive at Porto Ercole: being a good soldier he knew that it was better to travel than arrive: the arrival of the baggage wagon only meant that the baggage had to be unloaded, and although he might not have to hoist out crates or toss down kitbags, he would have to rub down the horse and feed and water it, and, judging by the squeaking, put some tallow on the axletrees.

  Ramage thought it curious that the man in point had cracked that whip amid a shower of curses every fifty yards or so along the via Aurelia, and for the first few hundred yards along this track. Now, as they reached the sand, he had stopped. Perhaps he too had dropped off to sleep.

  Jackson’s head suddenly appeared above the tailboard, the sandy hair soaked with perspiration. The American was holding a cocked pistol.

  ‘Morning, sir, where’s your guard?’ he asked quietly, loping along to keep up with the cart.

  A dumbfounded Ramage nodded with his head towards the sleeping man and a few moments later Jackson vaulted over the tailboard into the wagon, reached across the kitbags and gently removed a pistol from the Frenchman’s hand without waking him. He gave a sniff and showed Ramage the empty wine flask that had been in the guard’s other hand.

  ‘You must find that chair uncomfortable, sir,’ Jackson said conversationally as he took out a long-bladed knife and began cutting the rope.

  ‘A little,’ Ramage said. ‘We’re glad to see you: we’ve all been sitting like this for the last six or seven hours.’

  As the last piece of rope dropped free and he tried to stand up, Ramage felt as though every bone in his body had been hammered with a caulker’s maul and every sinew overstret-ched by an inch. It must have felt like this when the Inquisition unwound the rack to give the heretic a chance to confess.

  Ramage sat down on the chair again, afraid he would topple over, and tentatively wriggled his left arm. He moved it up and down until the worst of the pain had stopped and then tried the right arm. Then he moved his left ankle in a circular movement and gently bent down to massage his shin. Finally he was able to stand up without too much pain as Paolo copied him and Jackson cut through the last of Martin’s bonds. The three men thanked him through their groans.

  ‘Sorry we weren’t here sooner, sir,’ Jackson said apologeti-cally as he slipped his knife back into its sheath on his belt. We came as soon as we heard.’

  ‘Where’s Rossi, then?’

  ‘Driving the horse with one hand and propping up the driver with the other – he’s asleep too. Horse seems to know the way, which is just as well ’cos Rossi’s
better with a tiller than reins.’

  ‘But how the devil did you know that–’

  ‘That innkeeper in Orbetello, sir. He saw what happened – accidentally caused it, so he said – and guessed you were British. He and his brother belong to a sort of partisan group that fights the French when it gets the chance. Anyway, his brother owns the cantina in Porto Ercole. Rossi had already made friends with him, so that when the other brother sent word from Orbetello, we were warned. His son, a young lad of eight or nine, paddled across the lagoon with a duck punt and then ran the rest of the way. We knew the troops were due to arrive in Porto Ercole today to board the frigates, and this is the only way from Orbetello, along the Feniglia, so we waited here as a sort of ambush, because we guessed they’d have to use a cart to move you.’

  ‘But just two of you – supposing the French had sent a platoon to guard us?’

  Jackson grinned and pointed forward along the track. ‘There’s twenty or so of the cantina fellow’s cronies waiting up there, where the pine trees come in very close to the track, like the neck of a funnel. They’re armed with a weird collection of weapons – muskets that must have been intended for the Armada, billhooks, scythes, a butcher has the big knife he uses to cut up oxen…They’re all waiting. Rossi’ll give them a wave in time, so they’ll know everything’s all right. Now, if you’ll excuse me, sir, I think we’d better wake the driver and stow him in here with his mate. We can use these scraps of rope to tie them up.’

  Ramage held up a hand. ‘Wait a moment. If the French find our guards tied up, they’ll know we were rescued, which means they’ll start searching for the partisans and probably taking hostages. Innocent people will get shot in reprisal. We must make it look as though we escaped on our own.’ He thought quickly for a few moments. ‘Here,’ he said to Jackson, ‘take Martin and lodge the driver so that he stays asleep without falling off the cart. Don’t wake him up. Paolo! Put that pistol back in the hand of that guard, but be careful with it.’