by Dudley Pope
“Well?” the Admiral snapped. “What about my letter?”
“It’s in my pocket, sir,” Ramage said innocently.
“Indeed? Ramage, I don’t give a damn where it is: you know what I mean!”
Now for the bargaining, Ramage told himself, suddenly realizing that, irrationally, he now wanted the job of solving the mystery of the vanishing Post Office packets.
“Lord Spencer mentions ‘widest latitude and suitable cooperation … ,’ sir.”
“Well?” the Admiral growled suspiciously. “It doesn’t mean giving you a ship o’ the line and half a dozen frigates, you know.”
Ramage was thankful for the Admiral’s angry exaggeration, since it made his next request sound trivial. “Although obviously I don’t know how the investigation will proceed, sir, I’d like to count on having some of my officers and men.”
“What officers and men?” Sir Pilcher snapped. “You don’t have a ship now.”
“Some of those who were with me in the Triton, sir.”
“They’ve already gone to the Arrogant. She’s very short.”
“I’d need only a dozen or so.”
“Oh, very well.”
“When does the Arrogant sail, sir?”
“Not for a week or so. Give me a list and I’ll warn Captain Napier.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“So you’ll do your best to catch these beggars?”
Sir Pilcher was suddenly anxious, almost pleading, as if he’d taken off a grim mask he’d worn for bargaining. Ramage was immediately puzzled again, and felt a chill of fear. Had he fallen into some trap? At first the Admiral had seemed disappointed that he’d declined the job; then the moment Ramage discovered that Lord Spencer had recommended him, the Admiral had apparently contradicted himself by making it abundantly clear he would have chosen another officer. Now, he was anxious for Ramage to succeed.
To give himself time to think, Ramage took his hat from his lap, carefully placed it on the chair beside him, and then tugged at his coat, as though feeling too hot. Quickly he tried to think of all Sir Pilcher’s possible motives, but only two factors stood out.
First, it’s an almost impossible job, and for all his protest that “my choice does differ,” Sir Pilcher obviously wants to avoid giving it to one of his favourites, who would then be saddled with failure. Second, the wily old man can see in the uncertain mist of the future an angry Cabinet blaming the Admiralty for the failure, and an equally angry Admiralty blaming Sir Pilcher.
While the Admiral would not be able to avoid all the blame, Ramage realized Sir Pilcher was neatly covering himself: he had just told Ramage—and presumably would hint at it in a subsequent despatch to Lord Spencer—that he personally would have chosen someone else, but since the First Lord had suggested Ramage, he had felt himself bound to accept the recommendation. That left the Admiral in a happy position whether Ramage eventually reported success or failure.
Oh yes, he thought wryly, in a way it is a trap; but the job presented a challenge he found himself increasingly reluctant to ignore.
“I don’t know about ‘catch them,’ sir,” he said warily. “I can’t do much with a dozen men and no ship. Your letter mentions only ‘inquiry,’ though I noticed Lord Spencer refers to ‘halting’ the losses.”
“But I haven’t a suitable ship to give you, blast it,” Sir Pilcher protested, the earlier querulous note creeping back into his voice. “Absolutely nothing. If I had, you’d be welcome to her. You need something as slippery as these packets—or as slippery as they’re supposed to be.”
Now Sir Pilcher was speaking the truth: there was no suitable ship on the station. At least, since Ramage had not the faintest idea what he was going to do, he did not know what type of ship he would need: fast and lightly-armed or slower and heavily-armed.
“Very well, sir. If you’ll excuse me, I’ll start off by seeing what I can find out from the Postmaster.”
Sir Pilcher did not bother to hide his relief.
“Fine, my boy, fine. You have a splendid opportunity to distinguish yourself; quite splendid. Every one of my lieutenants will envy you,” he said heartily, confirming Ramage’s suspicions. “If you can put a stop to all this wretched business, the Cabinet will hear about you, I assure you.”
And if I don’t, Ramage thought sourly, they’ll still hear about me.
The Admiral stood up. “Now, I have your final orders here ready—just give me a moment to sign and date them.” He waddled to the desk, scribbled and then handed them to Ramage. “You’d better glance through them before you leave.”
Ramage read the few lines.
“You are hereby required and directed to inquire fully into the recent heavy losses among Post Office packet vessels between the West Indies and the United Kingdom, the details of which you have already been apprised, and having determined beyond any manner of doubt the reason for these losses, and if possible halted them, you are at once to deliver a written report, to me if the conclusion of your inquiries is reached within the limits of this station, or to my Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty if in Home or distant waters …”
CHAPTER THREE
BEFORE seeing the Deputy Postmaster-General, Ramage went to Government House to call on the Governor’s secretary in his large and immaculately tidy office. Thankful to be sitting down in a cool and friendly room, Ramage chatted for a few minutes, politely refused a rum punch and then asked if he could borrow a copy of the Royal Kalendar for ten minutes.
The secretary was a few years older than Ramage and obviously assumed that any visitor had a favour to ask of the Governor. He looked relieved when he gave Ramage the small, thick volume. “Want to see how your name is rising up the Navy List?” he asked jovially.
Ramage laughed. “Progress is so slow that I need look only once a year!”
The Kalendar listed nearly everyone employed in Government offices at home and abroad, and gave many other details ranging from the ships of war in commission to the names of the staff of the City of London Lying-in Hospital. The information about the General Post Office (ranging from the fact it was “Erected by Act of Parliament, 27 December 1660, Lombard Street” to a list of nearly two hundred offices open for the delivery and collection of the Penny Post) covered eight pages.
Ramage saw that the political leadership was divided between two Joint Postmasters-General, Lord Auckland and Lord Gower, each of whom received a salary of £5,000 a year. The Secretary, Francis Freeling, received £500 a year—hardly overpaid. Except, he noticed in another section, Freeling was also the “Principal and Resident Surveyor,” at £700 a year, which gave him a total of more than that received by an admiral …
He ran a finger down the rest of the names and was surprised at the number and variety of jobs listed. They ranged from the receiver general to the superintendent and surveyor of mail-coaches; from the Postmaster-General’s chamber-keeper to the deliverer of letters to the House of Commons (at 6s 8d a day—presumably he starved when the House was not in session).
The Post Office, in effect, was split into two sections, the Inland Letter Office and the Foreign Letter Office. The former employed four dozen sorters and more than a hundred letter-carriers (at 14s a week), but was far less complex than the Foreign Letter Office, whose comptroller was paid £700 a year—not much less than Sir Pilcher Skinner.
Twenty letter-carriers presumably delivered the incoming foreign mail to the Lombard Street sorters, and carried the bags of outgoing foreign mail to the various ports to be loaded on board the packets—to Falmouth for the West Indies, Lisbon and America; Weymouth for the Channel Islands; and Harwich for Hamburg.
There were five “mail ports” abroad and each had its Post Office agent (among them “J. Smith, Deputy Postmaster-General of Jamaica”), while elsewhere there were postmasters. And as he read their names, Ramage began to feel uneasy: the number of places listed brought home the enormity of the orders he had been given—from Quebec and Halifax at one end of
the Atlantic to Surinam, Demerara, Tobago and Barbados at the other; from Hamburg and Lisbon on one side of the Atlantic to New York and Jamaica on the other.
He pictured the packets sailing from Falmouth to deliver bags of outward mail at all these places and collect the inward, and realized the Cornish port was the centre of a giant cobweb, the lines reaching out thousands of miles across the Atlantic. Not straight lines, but lines gently curved as they met Trade winds, bent sharply as they rounded continents and islands, and sometimes forced back on themselves by gales and storms. Quebec, Halifax and New York were three thousand miles across the often stormy North Atlantic, much of it against strong headwinds; to Barbados was more than four thousand miles in a long dog-leg sweep past Spain and the west coast of North Africa, passing close to Madeira and the Canary Islands before picking up the North-East Trades for the long run across the Atlantic to a landfall at Barbados, with three hundred miles on to Antigua and another nine hundred to Jamaica. Another packet sailed a similar route towards Barbados before turning south-west for Demerara and Surinam, on the continent of South America.
So much for the routes. He found his interest quickening as he came to the ships themselves. The Kalendar gave a list of “His Majesty’s packet boats, with their stations,” and beside each one was the name of her commander. There were twelve packets given for “W. India and America,” but seventeen commanders were listed. Five had blanks against their names—had their packets been captured? But, Ramage groaned inwardly, some of the packet people had let their patriotism swamp their imagination—one packet on the Lisbon and three more on the Hamburg route were named Prince of Wales, and two called King George were listed under Hamburg. The only way of distinguishing them was by the names of their commanders.
Finally, reluctant to leave the coolness of the secretary’s office to go out into the scorching sun and noisy, dusty streets for his visit to the Deputy Postmaster-General, Ramage turned over another page and glanced at the “Postage of simple letters in British pence.” From Falmouth to any port in North America or the West Indies cost twelve pence, plus the inland postage to Falmouth. Thus a letter from London to New York or Jamaica cost eight pence to Falmouth and another twelve pence to cross the Atlantic. Sending a letter between the West Indies and North America—a part of the way round the edge of the spider’s web, as it were—cost four pence.
Well, anything more he was to learn about the Post Office would have to come from Mr Smith. He gave the Kalendar back to the Governor’s secretary, once again refused a rum punch, borrowed a pencil and some paper to make some calculations and left, tucking the papers in his pocket.
The Deputy Postmaster-General of Jamaica was a man with a mania for tidiness. Although the enormous outer office looked like a cross between a counting house and a warehouse, with sorters working on the local mail at a long bench along one wall and the canvas mailbags hanging from hooks along another, Mr Smith’s own room was as neat as a column of printed figures.
He worked at a large, square, mahogany table on top of which smooth pebbles held down piles of papers whose edges fluttered in the breeze coming through the jalousie at either end of the room. The piles were spaced out with geometric precision, as if the pebbles were chess men.
On top of each pile under the weight was a neatly written label indicating what it contained, and a scrutiny of the labels showed the scope of Mr Smith’s work. The largest pile was marked “Inward packets—lost,” and next to it was “Outward packets—lost.” Another large pile contained “Complaints—from committee of West India merchants,” and next to it, “Complaints—from private citizens.” Yet another said simply, “From Lombard Street, miscellaneous.” Directly in front of him was a small pile which said: “From Lord Auckland.”
In contrast to the neatness of his table-top, Smith was a large, gangling man with heavy features and large hands seemingly too clumsy to handle papers: they were, in size, the hands of a labourer. Yet Smith not only had one of the most coveted jobs in Jamaica—in peacetime, anyway—but he did it supremely well. He had it and, despite the influence and patronage of other claimants, held it because without him the Post Office’s foreign section in Jamaica became chaos.
Unmarried, and with a widowed sister in Cumberland as his only relative, he lived for the mails. Until recently his life had had a series of fortnightly peaks. Every two weeks—in normal times—the packet arrived and he went on board to meet the commander, inspect the sealed bags of incoming mail, sign for them and supervise their removal on shore to his office before arranging for the outgoing mail to be brought out and stowed on board.
He was meticulous in having the mail sorted quickly—and equally meticulous in refusing to allow anyone but Post Office employees to be in the sorting-room while it was being done. The early days when impatient folk protested that his predecessor always allowed them to wait there for it were now long past.
He was equally meticulous in having the commander to dinner on the night the packet arrived. Although in any case he enjoyed the company of the lively Falmouth men, the long chats over glasses of rum punch after the meal also meant that he kept himself well informed about everyday events in England. Also the commanders had few problems, whether concerning their youngest sons, maiden aunts or their ships, that they did not discuss with him. Over the years he had become a distant uncle to most of the sons and daughters of the commanders, and his ambition when he retired was to live in Falmouth and enjoy the company of the large and closely knit “packet families.”
His closeness to the commanders, and his meticulous habits, meant that at this moment his world was chaos: Smith was now a man with a job but almost no work. There were no bags of foreign mail to be officially sealed and labelled—no one was writing letters to England now, not until the Kingston Chronicle announced that a packet had at last arrived. And then, Smith thought gloomily, everyone possessed of pen and paper will write a score of letters and the commander will start complaining about the bulk …
Still, Lord Auckland in a letter sent by the Hydra—instinctively he tapped the paperweight holding it down—had written reassuringly. It was not normally Lombard Street’s policy to get involved with other Government departments—they were usually so lamentably disorganized—but from what he could see (reading between the lines, anyway) the Cabinet had decided that action over the heavy loss of packets was now up to the Admiralty. He was pleased and flattered to note that Lombard Street had seen (at last) that Jamaica was the real centre of the Foreign Mails on this side of the Atlantic, despite the claims of that damned agent in New York. Obviously the Admiralty agreed, but anyway Lord Auckland assured him that Sir Pilcher Skinner had been given orders to put one of his best officers in charge of a complete investigation.
Smith moved a paperweight half an inch to stop a particularly thin sheet from flapping too irritatingly in the breeze. Well, Sir Pilcher was a meticulous man, and the Deputy Postmaster knew he could rely on his choice of officer. There were two 74-gun ships in the harbour, each commanded by a senior captain. Presumably one of them would be given the job, and there were plenty of frigates. For the first time in weeks, Smith began to nourish a hope that his orderly world would return …
Smith took out his watch. He’d wait another hour before leaving for lunch, although for all the good he was doing sitting here he might just as well have accepted Mrs Warner’s invitation to her picnic. He admitted she frightened him a little. Although she was quite one of the most comely widows in Kingston, her constant invitations were embarrassing: people gossiped and chattered and all took it for granted that even a well-chaperoned young widow had only marriage in mind if she entertained a bachelor to dinner more than a couple of times in the year.
Someone was knocking at the open door, and he glanced up to see a young naval officer standing there. Ah, news from Sir Pilcher! That was the advantage of being a commander-in-chief; you had plenty of young fellows to run errands for you.
“Mr Smith?”
&nbs
p; The Postmaster nodded.
“My name is Ramage. Sir Pilcher sent me.”
Again the Postmaster nodded affably, waiting for him to deliver the letter, or whatever it was from the Admiral.
“About the packets,” the Lieutenant said, coming right into the room.
This was rather irregular: Sir Pilcher was not the man to send verbal messages.
“What about the packets, pray?”
“Sir Pilcher said you could tell me about them. You have a letter from him, I believe?”
“No. At least, telling me what?”
“That I would be calling on you.”
“Wait a moment.”
Smith waved Ramage to a chair and bellowed: “Dent! Come here, Dent!”
A moment later an elderly clerk appeared at the door.
“Are there any letters for me?”
“Only this one, sir,” Dent said, holding it up nervously.
“Give it to me! When did it arrive?”
“A couple of hours ago, sir; came by messenger.”
“Then why the devil—oh, go away!”
Smith looked across at Ramage. “I’m sorry. It’s from Sir Pilcher—give me a moment to read it.”
He looked at the right-hand corner of the table for a paperknife, extricated it from under a pile, and opened the letter with the precision of a surgeon. He read it twice, folded it again and reached out, his hand hovering between the labels “Outward packets—lost” and “Inward packets—lost.” Finally he tucked it temporarily under “Lord Auckland,” mentally noting that he would write a fresh label later.
He thought for a moment, and then looked up at the Lieutenant. He’s only a youngster, he thought crossly; obviously one of Sir Pilcher’s favourites. There’s no disguising that the Admiral’s one major fault is pushing his favourites and giving them quick promotion. It wouldn’t matter if half of them weren’t young ninnies. This one doesn’t look as much of a ninny as the usual run, but a lieutenant! Damnation, with the foreign mails at stake a rear-admiral would not be too much, even if his only task was to ask questions.