by Dudley Pope
“Nice enough,” Stevens said cautiously. “Me and the builders are having a falling out, though—a little matter of some bad wood they slipped in while I was a prisoner.” He finished the rum in his glass and glanced up at Ramage. “No need to mention that to anyone, mind you, else the Inspector at Falmouth will want me to start rebuilding the ship.”
“Nothing serious, then,” Ramage said casually.
“No, just a bit o’ soft wood here and there in the counter,” Stevens said equally casually but putting down his glass in a way that showed that was all he had to say on the subject.
“You’ve managed to keep the same ship’s company through all this?”
“Almost. Fred Much is still the mate, and Farrell’s the Surgeon. Same Master, but he stayed behind sick for this voyage, and the same bosun. A few of the seamen shift about.”
“You’re lucky to be exchanged all together,” Ramage commented. “And so quickly.”
“Aye. Reckon the Frenchies know we b’aint fighting men; not like you Navy fellows.”
“You were homeward-bound both times?”
Stevens nodded. “‘Bout four hundred miles out.”
“How do they treat prisoners?”
“Mustn’t grumble. Never got beyond Verdun—that’s the big prison depot. Let out on parole. Lodged with the same family both times.”
“Most of the packetsmen get sent to Verdun?” Ramage asked.
Stevens nodded. With a curious mixture of pride and apology he said, “Fact is, packetsmen get special treatment. Verdun’s got plenty of prisoners from merchant ships who’ve been there three or four years. Plenty of packetsmen, too; I met five other commanders, the last time. We were all exchanged together.”
“Do you have to pay the French a ransom?”
Stevens shook his head, then said, “Leastways, the commanders don’t. Maybe the Post Office does, though I never heard tell of it.”
Ramage felt cramp beginning in one leg but the second box prevented him from straightening out. Stevens jumped up immediately. “Here, let me shift it out of your road.”
As he rubbed the knotted muscles, Ramage noticed that the second box was heavier than the first, and Stevens grunted as he pushed and tugged at it.
“A few presents for the folk at home,” he explained as they both sat down. “And something for the troachers, too.”
“Troachers?”
“You a Cornishman and you don’t know troachers?” Stevens was laughing but as if to avoid more questioning he picked up Ramage’s half-empty glass. “This is looking a bit stretched; I’ll freshen the nip.” From then on, Stevens talked only of the Caribbean, and Ramage knew the evening would yield little else of interest.
In the saloon, Bowen had finally persuaded the Arabella’s Surgeon, Farrell, to play chess. Yorke and Southwick sat round the table watching as the two men placed the pieces on the board. After five moves it was obvious that Bowen had at last found an opponent worthy of him.
“You play often?” Bowen asked.
Farrell shook his head. “Last time was in prison.”
“Prison?” exclaimed Southwick before he could stop himself.
“Oh—a French one!” Farrell said. “As a prisoner of war. I was out on parole, really.”
“What’s it like?” Yorke asked sympathetically. “Being a prisoner, I mean.”
Farrell moved a pawn before answering.
“Depends which depot they take you to. Some are worse than others. I’ve been lucky.”
“How long before you were exchanged?”
“Six weeks the first time, nine the next.”
“Oh—you’ve been taken twice?”
“Yes—with Captain Stevens both times.”
“Were the casualties heavy when the privateers attacked?” Bowen said with apparently clinical interest.
Farrell shook his head. “It’s your move,” he said pointedly. “We’ve got weeks to talk and weeks to play chess. Let’s not be doing both at once.”
Late that night, sitting on their bunks in the darkness, Ramage and Yorke compared notes. When Ramage said that Stevens had been captured twice, Yorke commented, “The Surgeon was with him. I don’t think there were many casualties either time. Farrell dodged the question when Bowen asked him.”
“I’m beginning to think the story is the same for all the packets—capture, exchange, new ship … Lucky that the French exchange the whole ship’s company, instead of a few men at a time.”
“Is that usual?” Yorke asked.
“It seems so for packetsmen. For the Navy it’s certainly different—a single British lieutenant against a French one, and so on.”
Yorke rubbed his chin miserably. “The fact is, we don’t know much more than the day we left Kingston.”
“I didn’t expect we should,” Ramage said. “We shan’t find out anything important until a privateer’s masts lift over the horizon!”
“That reminds me, I haven’t the faintest idea what the French do about exchanging passengers,” Yorke said ruefully. “I’m beginning to regret my enthusiasm: I should have sailed in the next convoy.”
“Nine weeks to wait.”
“Better wait in Kingston than a French prison.”
“Cheer up,” Ramage said. “You needn’t worry about privateers for another two or three weeks.”
“Oh!” Yorke exclaimed. “Well, you might have told me sooner: ever since we dropped the Bahamas astern I’ve been lying awake in my bunk just fretting …”
“Sorry—I’ve only just worked it out for certain.”
“Worked out what?”
“That most of the homeward-bound packets must be taken towards the end of the voyage.”
“Why so certain now? I know we suspected it, even though Lord Auckland forgot to mention it, but …”
“Both times Stevens was captured on the way back and taken to the depot at Verdun and paroled. The last time he met five other packet commanders. They all seem to end up at Verdun. If they’d been taken near the Caribbean they’d have ended up in Guadeloupe.”
Both men stretched out on their bunks, and as Ramage pulled the sheet over himself he began to feel depressed. He knew that, despite what he had told Yorke, he had been hoping to hear or see something on board the Arabella that would transform all the disconnected facts dancing around in his mind into a regular pattern, like cementing chips of coloured marble into a mosaic. Stevens’ reference to Verdun only confirmed what he had already guessed. Yet there was something odd about the way Stevens referred to being captured. Was there a hint of evasiveness? Was Stevens secretly ashamed of something and afraid that if he said too much he would reveal a guilty secret?
There was a gentle tapping at the door. Quickly he slid off the bunk and turned the handle.
“Jackson, sir,” a voice whispered.
“Come in, I’d given you up!”
A moment later the American was in the cabin, shutting the door silently behind him.
“Mr Yorke’s awake in the other bunk.”
“Evening, sir,” the American said. “Is it—?”
“Don’t worry,” Ramage assured him. “Mr Yorke and I have just been talking about it. Have you—”
“Sorry, sir, I’m really reporting that I’ve got nothing interesting to report. Just one or two odd things …”
“Out with them!”
“Well, most of the men stay in the same ship. But although each packet makes three round voyages to Jamaica in a year at the most, some of the men change ships to get in an extra voyage.”
“Why?” Ramage asked.
“Haven’t been able to find out yet, sir; the chap I talked to was very mysterious. But I’ll wager he makes a lot of money out of it.”
“Ventures,” Yorke whispered. “The more you venture, the more you gain!”
“Ventures!” Jackson repeated, clearly angry with himself. “That’s what the fellow must have meant when he said he made the extra voyage because he liked the sunshine—’it
made the money grow!’”
Slowly the Lady Arabella worked her way to the north-east. The hourglass was turned regularly, the log was hove twice a day and the ship’s speed noted along with the courses steered. Stevens made a great ritual of the noon sight—apparently he had turned it into something of a mystic rite which normally impressed the passengers. The Lady Arabella crossed the invisible line of latitude at 23 degrees 27 minutes, marking the Tropic of Cancer, the northern boundary of the Tropics, and each day the temperature continued to drop slightly.
The drop was almost imperceptible; one night Ramage, accustomed to sleeping naked on his bunk to keep cool, wished he had a sheet to cover him; a couple of nights later he used it. Five days later he thought of a blanket, and the very next night pulled it over himself for an hour or so round three o’clock in the morning. That day the heavy canvas awning which had sheltered the afterdeck from the scorching sun of the Tropics was finally taken down, rolled up and stowed below.
The only thing that did not change was the diet: the food the passengers had provided for themselves was not very varied, since there had been little time to look around, and the packet’s cook was neither skilled nor imaginative enough to do anything more than boil or roast whatever he was given. The fruit lasted well—limes and oranges were shrivelling but still yielding juice after two weeks; stalks of bananas cut at varying stages of greenness were ripening in succession.
Like the fruit, the chess contest was ripening. Playing against a tougher opponent had sharpened Bowen’s skill, and now Farrell had to fight hard for his increasingly rare victories. But more and more Bowen preferred to play against Southwick, with the result that Farrell was becoming remote. It was difficult to decide whether the passengers unconsciously edged him out of their circle or he withdrew of his own accord, but the reason was simple enough: he was an appallingly bad loser.
Each defeat at Bowen’s hand led to Farrell holding an hour’s inquest on the game: an hour spent describing and justifying, in almost excruciating detail, why he had made various moves. In the end, it seemed to Ramage, Farrell was always satisfied that he had proved he could only have lost because Bowen had been guilty of duplicity, if not of actually moving the pieces while Farrell was not looking.
The man’s behaviour was inexplicable because Ramage could not credit that anyone could take a game of chess—or any game, for that matter—so seriously. He once commented to Yorke that if one got down to Farrell’s level, the game became a business. Yorke pointed out that there Farrell had failed: from the beginning, despite cajoling and sneers, Bowen had refused to play for money. Farrell’s disappointment had been obvious—at first, anyway, until Bowen found his stride and began to win more often than he drew or lost.
For Ramage much of the tedium of the voyage was removed because it gave him a chance of making a leisurely study of the personalities of several different men—Farrell, Captain Henry Wilson, Mr Much the mate and his son Our Ned. Stevens was not worth much effort: he was a typical close man who, having made a little money, regarded the world with suspicion and divided it into two sections—the part which could make him further profit, and the part which might cost him money.
The sea, ships and seamanship had very little interest for Stevens, and far too much was left to the mate. Stevens rarely seemed to reach any decision in the instinctive way of a true seaman: when he gave the order to reef, for instance, Ramage felt that he was applying some formula, or dredging his memory for a precedent. Yorke finally summed up Stevens: “He’s a greedy man who long ago reckoned that owning and running a Post Office packet would make the most money in the shortest possible time. That’s why he’s not running a lead mine or a rope walk in Bridport.”
The mate’s son, Our Ned, was the type of young man that, if he was serving in a ship commanded by Ramage, would have been transferred at the first opportunity. He was small and slim; his face was long and narrow with the eyes close together, two small brown buttons which had a tendency to glance uneasily from side to side. Perhaps it was just the shape of his mouth, but to Ramage he always seemed to be smirking secretly when he spoke to anyone: as though he was the possessor of some secret, or the speaker was being laughed at by people standing behind him. But for all that, he was probably the most useful man in the packet’s crew. He knew nearly as much as his father—whom he treated alternately with patient affection and near-mutinous derision.
The mate was a lonely man who lived in a private world; a world limited to the hull, sails, masts and spars of the Lady Arabella and occasionally lit by Our Ned. It was hard to define the Captain’s attitude towards him—at various times Ramage had seen signs of irritation, awe, fear and respect. The mate’s attitude towards Captain Stevens was harder to discover because he spoke rarely, but both Ramage and Yorke agreed that it was based on contempt. It was as though Stevens had some guilty secret which the mate knew about, disapproved of, but could do nothing to change.
Just as the mate’s world was the ship, Captain Wilson’s world was the Army and, Ramage thought, at times just the barrack square. During every waking moment Wilson’s life was drill and manoeuvre: his every remark was littered with military expressions. For Wilson nothing turned, it wheeled; nothing was passed, it was outflanked. Distance was range; going on deck for fresh air was making a sortie. Yet the blond, moustached Captain had a clear if limited brain, even though he tended to see problems with the same deceptive clarity as the instructions in a drill book: if the enemy is behind that hill, you outflank him by this manoeuvre.
Once clear of the Tropics, the Lady Arabella ran into ten days of light, variable winds in which the packet tacked and wore two or three times an hour in order to steer not just in the direction they wanted to go but to avoid heading back towards the Bahamas.
After the variables came a gale and a sudden drop in temperature. It lasted five days, and the five passengers spent most of the time in the saloon playing cards or chess, or else lying in their bunks reading, wedged in by pillows and cushions against the rolling of the ship that tried to pitch them out.
On the afternoon of the last day, as the cloud began to break up and the wind to lessen, Yorke tossed aside the book he was reading and sat up in his bunk.
“You don’t fret much about privateers these days.”
“I’m taking some leave,” Ramage said. “It expires in a couple of days’ time.”
“Why then?”
“I think we’ll find we have to start watching for privateers from then on.”
“Two days, eh?” Yorke said slowly. “Neither one nor six, but two. I admire your precision.”
Ramage grinned. “Geography. I reckon the majority of privateers from St Malo, Rochefort, Barfleur and such ports patrol no farther out than six hundred miles.”
“Why that magic figure?”
“Well, each prize they take must be sailed back to France with only a small prize crew who have to dodge British patrols—and British privateers, too. They’d be lucky to average five knots. Six hundred miles—five days’ sailing—seems far enough!”
Yorke waved a hand in agreement. “I’m glad you think like a privateersman!”
“I wish I could: our necks might depend on it!”
“They do, too. Tell me, now we’ve been on board nearly a month, d’you think this was the best way of carrying out your orders?”
Ramage made a face. He’d spent many a sleepless hour in his bunk asking himself that question. “Too early—or too late—to say. Ask me again as we pick up the mooring in Falmouth.”
“That’s how I feel,” Yorke said ruefully.
“So far,” Ramage admitted, “even if we don’t know much more than we did in Kingston, I’m still convinced the only way anyone will ever find the answer is to be on board a packet.”
“I wonder,” Yorke mused. “One privateer capturing one packet and sending her in with a prize crew—what can that really tell you? It’s happened twenty or thirty times already and the Post Office discovered no
thing!”
“If I knew, obviously I wouldn’t be here,” Ramage said briskly. “But we know what to look for and what questions to ask. The gentlemen in Lombard Street are land animals. They can only make guesses.”
“Are the French really interested in the mails?” Yorke persisted. “Are they trying to get hold of them? Cut communications, perhaps?”
“No. I’ve thought a lot about that,” Ramage said, “but the commanders all report sinking the mails before surrendering. Although I can’t imagine them saying otherwise, I believe them. If not, we get into the realms of treachery, and it’s too widespread for that. I doubt if the French have got one bag of mails so far. Anyway, if they were trying to cut communications, would they rely on privateers? I doubt it.”
“Then I can’t understand why the French bother with packets: no cargo to sell, just the hull.”
“A fine hull, though: fast and well built. Just the sort of ship to fit out in St Malo and send to sea again as a privateer!”
“Yes, but not a very profitable capture—compared with the value of cargoes. I’ve carried cargoes in the Topaz worth ten times what the ship was insured for.”
“Agreed, agreed,” Ramage said. “But you’re forgetting the most important thing: obviously a privateer takes what comes along: one day it’s a Topaz worth twenty-five thousand pounds with her cargo, the next day it’s the Lady Arabella worth—how much? Six thousand pounds?”
“You could build her for that. But, my friend, you’re also forgetting something.”
“And that is?”
“That twelve months or so ago the packet losses suddenly increased by several hundred per cent, while the losses of merchantmen stayed the same.”
Ramage shook his head. “No, I haven’t forgotten. That’s the puzzle. That’s why we’re passengers in the Lady Arabella!”
CHAPTER NINE
STAFFORD looked at the bags of spices, picked one up, shook it and then sniffed. “Nutmeg, eh? Yer mean to tell me there’s money in a bag o’ nutmegs, Wally?”
The seaman nodded. “Cost me two shilluns in the Windward Islands, they did. I’ll get five pound in Falmouth—mebbe ten if I give ‘em to the troachers.”