Ramage and the Renegades r-12

by Dudley Pope

  Hammocks were lashed and stowed; the ship's company had eaten breakfast; Ramage had carried out the usual Sunday morning inspection of ship and men. The smell of paint was at last disappearing. Ordering the wind sails to be rigged had helped - the tall cylinders of canvas, the tops open and winged and used in the Tropics to funnel a breeze down the hatches, had forced a strong draught through the ship which had made men shiver, but it had cleared the air.

  Finally the order was given 'Rig Church'. Long wooden forms, used by the men to sit at the tables on the lowerdeck, were brought up to the quarterdeck, a chair was carried up from Ramage's cabin and put in front. A large Union flag was draped over the binnacle box, which was to serve as the altar. The quartermaster would not be able to look at the compass until the service was over.

  Down in his cabin Ramage changed his shoes - his steward always had his newest pair, fitted with the heavy silver buckles, ready for the Sunday service. Ramage wondered where they spent the rest of the week. He stood still while the steward fitted the sword belt, and then slipped the sword into the frog. Just as he was looking round for his hymn book and prayer book, the Marine sentry reported the first lieutenant's approach.

  Aitken came into the cabin. 'All ready for you, sir. The chaplain is holding a bundle of papers as thick as a pound loaf. I hope they aren't the notes for his sermon.'

  'You haven't forgotten what I said?'

  'No, sir,' Aitken said with a grin. 'And the wind is freshening.'

  Ramage walked across the deck and sat down in his chair, facing aft. The chaplain stood immediately behind the binnacle, just in front of the two men at the wheel. The Marines under Renwick were drawn up across the after end of the quarterdeck; most of the ship's company were sitting on the forms. As usual Catholics sat among the Church of England men; Methodists sat near the front and John Smith the Second stood to one side with his fiddle. The ship's officers sat on a form to one side. Ramage thought that at a time when a prime minister had resigned because he disagreed with the King over religion, it would do them all good to see practical religion functioning in a ship of war. Most captains knew that sailors liked a good sing; two hundred voices seizing on to a rousing hymn, with John Smith's fiddle to help them along, did the men good. More important, as far as the Navy was concerned, the way men sang hymns told an intelligent captain if he had a happy or a discontented ship's company.

  Stokes, watching Ramage sit down, clasped his hands as if in prayer, but there was something odd about the man. His surplice was not only creased but filthy: not the smears of some recent encounter with a dirty object but the greyness of grime: it had not been washed for months. And the man was standing strangely. The Calypso, on the starboard tack, was rolling with a slightly larger dip to larboard. Men standing on deck were tensing and flexing their knees to remain upright, but Stokes had the wrong rhythm: he was like a single stalk of corn that moved against the wind while all the others bowed away from it.

  Ramage glanced across at Southwick, who was watching the chaplain closely, but none of the lieutenants had noticed anything. The man's voice was blurred but punctuated by the hiss of passing swell waves, the creak of yards overhead, and the thud and flap of a sail momentarily losing the wind and then filling again with a thump that jerked sheet and brace.

  Stokes announced a hymn, John Smith tucked his fiddle under his chin and poised the bow. Stokes lifted a hand, John Smith scratched the opening bars and the ship's company, standing and swaying with the roll like the field of corn Ramage had pictured, bellowed away happily. Most of them knew the entire hymn by heart, and Stokes was beating time with his left hand. Not the time for the hymn and its music, Ramage noted; rather as though he was a tallyman counting as sheep ran through a gate.

  There was still a little warmth in the sun but measurable only because of the chill when the increasing number of clouds hid it. The sea was a darker blue now as the Calypso approached the Chops of the Channel and deeper sea. The ship's company was going to be lucky this year: there would be no winter for them. With more than a hint of autumn in England, they would within hours be turning south, towards the Tropic of Cancer and the Equator, before stopping just short of the Tropic of Capricorn. Ramage doubted if many of the men had ever crossed the Equator. As far as he was concerned, the ship could not get back to the Tropics fast enough. Admittedly he had returned to England after several months in the Mediterranean, but after the Tropics, the Mediterranean seemed a wretched climate: scorching hot and windless in summer, without the constant cooling breeze of the trade winds, and bitterly cold in winter, though never a Spaniard, Frenchman or Italian would admit it, building his house as though there was always sun, and the bitter wind of winter did not blow through, chilling marble floors so that, even as far south as Rome, men and women hobbled about like lame ducks, almost crippled by chilblains. The trade winds made the West Indies as near Paradise as Ramage could imagine; and providing one avoided yellow fever which killed, and rum, which wounded first. . .

  He stopped daydreaming as Stokes announced his text for the day. It was, he said, from Romans, chapter fourteen, verse eight: 'If the trumpet give an uncertain sound, who shall prepare himself to the battle?'

  A curious text. In fact twenty or thirty seamen were openly laughing: whatever else they might consider the captain lacked, Ramage guessed it was not an uncertain sound when the time came to prepare for battle. That was assuming that Stokes had the sense to preach a sermon remembering he was talking to seamen, to whom 'battle' meant 'battle' and not some philosophical state of readiness.

  Stokes began talking rapidly, like a nervous child reciting something in front of grownups, something little understood so that all the pauses for breath came at the wrong time and punctuation was ignored.

  Southwick glanced across at Ramage: a look that said, without equivocation: 'I told you so.'

  Well, the man was half drunk; Ramage was prepared to admit that, but he was also prepared to overlook it on this occasion, because a new chaplain could be forgiven for being nervous when conducting his first service.

  Out of habit, Ramage glanced at his watch and slipped it back into his fob pocket. The wind was holding from the northwest; almost a soldier's wind to round Ushant and stand across the Bay of Biscay, heading for the Spanish Finisterre. It was going to take months to get used to the idea that every ship sighted was a friend. For so many years the lookout's hail of a sail in sight was the beginning of a sequence which involved identification and then, if French, chase and battle and, if British, the challenge and exchange of the private signals for the day and hoisting of the three-figure pendant numbers by which each ship in the King's service could be identified by name.

  Stokes was not only gabbling but he was doing it in a monotone. Ramage concentrated on listening to the words. After what seemed an hour, he looked again at his watch. Stokes had been talking for five minutes, and he kept referring to 'whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth', as though that was his text. Ramage again concentrated. Certainly there was no reference to trumpets giving uncertain sounds or anyone preparing for battle, but there was a great deal about punishing only those one loved; that one demanded higher standards from loved ones, and chastened them if they fell below them.

  As Ramage reached for his watch again, he realized what had happened: Stokes was quoting from one of the two dozen sermons he had bought. Because the captain had forbidden him to use them, he had learned one by rote, or near enough, so he would seem to be speaking without notes and apparently directly from the heart. The only trouble was that he was preaching the sermon he had learned, but he had announced the text from another - presumably the next on the pile.

  The watch showed the man had been talking for ten minutes. Ramage saw Aitken was also holding his watch and looking across at him.

  Ramage stood up. 'Mr Aitken, I'll trouble you to take a reef in the foretopsail!'

  The first lieutenant leapt up, shouting: 'Topmen, look alive you topmen! Afterguard lay aft - come on, f
o'c'slemen, I don't see you moving!'

  Southwick leapt up and jammed his hat on his head. 'Clear the binnacle,' he roared, 'get that flag off so we can get a sight of the compass!'

  'Watch your heading!' Jackson shouted at the men at the wheel, unceremoniously pushing the chaplain to one side and helping to increase the confusion. He had more than a suspicion of what was going on, having seen the exchange of glances between the captain and first lieutenant. 'Damnation, you're a full point off course!' He winked at the men before they had time to heave on the spokes of the wheel.

  Renwick had been too far aft to see what was going on and had never listened to a sermon in his life, having in childhood perfected the art of sleeping while looking awake, but he realized that pandemonium was required, and instead of marching his men forward and dismissing them on the gangway, he shouted: 'Marines - at the double, fall out!' Three dozen Marines in heavy boots suddenly began running forward in a cloud of white pipeclay which their movement crumbled off their crossbelts.

  The bosun's mates were soon busy, repeating orders after the piercing trill of their calls. Topmen leapt over forms, knocking several over as they ran to the shrouds.

  The Reverend Percival Stokes, unsure what was happening, wisely crouched down behind the binnacle, reminding Southwick of a frightened whippet cowering behind its kennel. Beside him a seaman was calmly folding the big Union flag, careful to line up the previous creases.

  By now Ramage, still standing beside his chair, looked over the starboard quarter and then up at the sky. 'What do you think, Mr Southwick? That squall will pass us to windward, eh?'

  'You're probably right, sir. By a mile, I think.'

  'At least a mile. Mr Aitken! Belay that last pipe! Get these forms stowed below, and then you can pipe "Hands to dinner".' With that Ramage strode to the companionway and went down to his cabin, and Stokes finally bobbed up in the sudden silence, lifted his surplice and scurried below.

  Ten minutes later, after Ramage had passed the word for them, Aitken and Southwick reported to his cabin. In answer to Ramage's wave, Southwick subsided into the single armchair with the contented groan of a man whose back ached and Aitken sat on the settee, very upright at first until he realized this was to be an informal visit, when he leaned back.

  'Drunk and a filthy surplice,' Ramage said.

  'And smelling like an overworked dray horse, sir,' Aitken added. 'The gunroom reeks like a stable.'

  'Did either of you notice anything about the sermon?'

  'He's learned it by rote,' Aitken said quickly. 'If he'd had to stop, I'll bet he couldn't have got started again.'

  'Aye, and the sermon had precious little to do with the text he announced,' Southwick added. 'He said it was about the trumpet giving an uncertain sound, but even tho' I'm a free thinker I'd have sworn it should have been that line about "whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth". I know it well; my father always quoted it, nigh on sixty years ago, when he laid on half a dozen across my buttocks with his belt. I always waited for his trousers to fall down. They never did.'

  Both Southwick and Aitken watched Ramage. Southwick had served under him for many years, starting the day the young lieutenant was given his first command, the Kathleen cutter, by Commodore Nelson. What always struck him was that as an inexperienced young lieutenant or one of the best frigate captains in the Navy today, even though in terms of seniority his name was almost at the bottom of the post list, Mr Ramage was never indecisive. He collected all the facts, seemed to shake them up in a dice cup, and throw the answer across the green baize table. So far it had always been the right answer, with the result that his officers and ship's company had suffered few casualties in battle and collected a good deal of prize money.

  Southwick had been surprised, when news reached Chatham Dockyard that the Treaty had been signed and Britain was at peace with France, that at least a quarter of the ship's company had not asked for their discharge. Ships would be paying off by the dozen, and the seamen who had served with Mr Ramage could go home to a tidy pile of money; enough to set up a small business, open a shop in their village, pay for a small house.

  While the captain was in London on leave some had even come to Southwick to discuss it, and as soon as he was back on board many of them had asked to see Mr Ramage, and Southwick knew they were just making sure the master's advice was sound. Both master and captain, however, had said the same thing: that they thought the peace would be brief and the men risked being hauled back by the pressgang in a year's time . . . Neither he nor the captain had said, in as many words, that there would be no chance of them serving together again. For all that, each man had apparently weighed it up for himself: on one side a year's leave with money to spend, but ending up fighting another war in another ship, and on the other the wish to serve under Captain Ramage and his officers and with the same ship mates, but at the cost of a year's liberty.

  Southwick disliked tale-bearing and he hated sycophants, but he was in some respects a jealous man: he was jealous of anything concerning his ship and anything concerning his captain. Jealous or, some might say, protective. He had been thinking about Percy Stokes for some time and this morning's service had decided him.

  'There are one or two things about Stokes, sir. He's been selling liquor to his servant. Brandy and gin. The servant has been buying it for a crowd of drinkers on the lowerdeck. He's tried to borrow money from Orsini and Kenton, against IOUs. Fortunately neither of them have any left.'

  Aitken nodded in agreement. 'I'd heard about Kenton, but not Orsini. The liquor is a bad business: we'll be finding seamen drunk on duty in a day or so. Even the best men don't seem able to control themselves while there's another tot left in a bottle.'

  Ramage listened to the two men and considered what they had reported. He guessed that both men had deliberated for several hours before saying anything and, but for the ludicrous service half an hour ago, might well have tried to deal with the chaplain in their own manner. 'Pass the word for the wretched fellow - and stay here: I'll need witnesses for what I may have to do.'

  Stokes arrived still wearing his surplice but almost glassy-eyed: he had obviously been drinking again, but he was nervous, his tongue wetting his protruding teeth like a scullery maid washing a draining board.

  Ramage remained sitting beside his desk, the chair sideways so that his right arm rested on the polished top. He inspected Stokes once again, the eyes, the face, the grubby surplice - and the hands, clasped in front of him like an unctuous prelate or a nervous beggar. He thought for a moment of the Chaplain General interviewing Stokes. It must have been a rare event; clerics had never pounded on his door. The Horse Guards was a more popular port of call; for a cleric the mess of a fashionable regiment seemed to Ramage infinitely preferable to the gunroom or wardroom of a ship of war. The only advantage of serving in one of the King's ships was that it took a man out of the country. Ramage suddenly stared at Stokes. If he was wrong, the Chaplain General's protest to the First Lord would be vociferous, querulous and acidulous. The First Lord would be his usual cryptic self: he would simply order a court martial to be held on Captain the Lord Ramage.

  'Ah, Mr Stokes, when you were last here, you said you had never before been in one of the King's ships.'

  'That is correct, sir.'

  'But the sea is not unfamiliar to you?'

  'Oh yes, indeed, sir; I'm a complete stranger to the sea.'

  'To the North Sea?' Ramage asked casually. 'To the Irish Sea? To the Marshalsea?'

  The knuckles of Stokes's clasped hands turned white; the man shut his eyes and began to sway, but he was forgetting the height of the beams, and when he raised his head he immediately cracked his brow. His body jerked as though someone had hit him with a cudgel and slowly, like a sack of grain emptying, he subsided to the deck in a faint.

  None of the three men moved, but Southwick gave one of his disapproving sniffs. 'The Marshalsea - aye, he looks the sort of fellow that's cruised in that jail more than once!'

>   'Did he escape or was he released?' Aitken mused. 'Or has he been there before and knew his creditors were about to send him back?'

  'He's bolting from his creditors,' Ramage said. 'He's been there before and wasn't risking another visit. Probably so much in debt he knew that once inside he'd never get out again.'

  The Marshalsea Prison was unlike the Bridewell. Thieves, rogues, murderers and vagabonds sentenced by the courts were sent to the Bridewell. But the Marshalsea was reserved for debtors. A creditor could apply for a court order which, if granted, locked a debtor in the Marshalsea and kept him there until the debt was paid.

  'It's the drink,' Aitken said, his voice sombre. 'I'm sure his thirst overtook his pocket. But how did he persuade the Admiralty? Is his warrant forged?'

  'No, I'm sure it's genuine enough, though I haven't inspected it,' Ramage said. 'I'm equally sure he's not a clerk in holy orders - he seemed to be conducting the service as if by rote, and we know about his sermons - ah, he's recovering: now he can tell us himself!'

  Slowly Stokes sat up, a puzzled expression on his face. His head was obviously spinning from the fall; Ramage had the impression it was spinning the other way from the drink.

  'I must have fainted,' he mumbled. 'It's the rolling.'

  'I should stay there,' Ramage said. 'Not so far to fall. Now, you were going to tell us about your cruise in the Marshalsea.'

  'I don't know what you mean, sir. This is an insult to a man of the cloth - I shall protest to the Chaplain General!'

  'We shall not be seeing England again for half a year or more, so your complaint will have to wait. In the meantime, tell me how you obtained a warrant.'

  Stokes swallowed and his tongue slid from side to side over the front of his teeth, but his lips were too dry and they stuck on them, giving him a curious, rabbit-like appearance which contrasted with the ferret-like shape of the face.