by Dudley Pope
Yorke sauntered over and fell into step beside him.
“Feels good, doesn’t it?”
Aye,” Ramage said, motioning Yorke to follow him down to the cabin, “I was never a good passenger.”
“Nor me,” Yorke said ruefully.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean it like that!”
“I know you didn’t; it just reminded me. Anyway, you’ve already got her looking more like a ship.”
Ramage led the way into the cabin, acknowledging the salute of the seaman on guard at the door, and waved Yorke to a seat. “By sunset tomorrow these packetsmen are going to wish they’d never been born!”
“Oho! What other little treats have you got in store?”
“Four hours’ drill at the guns, for a start. And an hour’s sail drill. More if they don’t look lively!”
“Is it worth it? I mean,” Yorke said hurriedly, “you gave them a good run at the guns today and we’ll be in Plymouth before you can get a polish on them. If we sight any ships with designs on our virtue, presumably we’ll make a bolt for it.”
“We most certainly will. No, I’m going to work these packetsmen until they nearly drop simply because it’s the only way to punish them.”
“Why not leave it to the courts?” Yorke said mildly.
“Courts?” Ramage snorted. “These scoundrels will never be hauled before a court! And if they were, how can we prove what we’ve seen with our own eyes? Their word against ours, and a smart lawyer would probably convince a judge that we never saw anything; that we are just nasty troublemakers perjuring ourselves.”
“But they’ll certainly be arrested, won’t they?”
Ramage shook his head. “I can’t see it. The Post Office—the Government, rather—are going to handle everything very discreetly, and to a politician ‘discreetly’ is a polite word for ‘secretly.’”
“Oh come now!” Yorke chided. “I know you’ve said all this before. But …”
“All right, m’lad. Who has the power in the City of London? Who really has their hands on the purse strings?”
“The merchants and the bankers, I suppose.”
“Exactly. And of all the merchants, the ones with the loudest voices are the—”
“The West India merchants,” Yorke interrupted. “All right I take the point.”
“Very well, they’re the most powerful—and they’ve lost the most because the West Indies packets were vanishing. In fact I’m damned certain it’s only their pressure that eventually forced the Government to do something drastic.
“You see, it’d be one thing for the Post Office to report in vague terms in about three months’ time that losses have stopped. But it’d be something quite different if the Postmaster-General suddenly announced in Parliament that he’d just discovered the heavy loss of packets had been caused by the treachery and greed of their commanders and crews.
“I can just imagine the overwhelming vote of confidence the Government would fail to get in Parliament! And I can see the Lord Mayor of London leading his cronies in a brisk trot to Downing Street armed with nasty threats. Consols would come down with a crash—and from what I’ve always heard, the moment they drop ten points or so the ministers start emptying their desk drawers, ready to hand over to their successors.”
“So you think these jokers”—Yorke waved a hand to indicate the packetsmen on deck above with scrubbing brushes and buckets of water—”won’t be popped on the scales of Justice?”
“No—but by the time I’ve finished with ‘em I hope they’d sooner have taken their chance in a court. In my crude way I don’t see why they should escape any sort of punishment.”
“Bit hard on your fellows, though.”
Ramage shook his head. “Oh no—they’d be doing it anyway in a ship o’ war. You saw them just now; they simply show how fast a thing can be done, then they watch the packetsmen working at it until they can do it as quickly.”
“That seems fair,” Yorke conceded.
“It’s not intended to be fair,” Ramage said sourly. “Don’t labour the point or I might keep them at it for ten hours a day. Anyway, weary men are less likely to cause trouble!”
The sentry’s voice interrupted. “The Marchesa’s coming, sir!”
Ramage grinned at Yorke. “The Marines would go mad if they heard that. Still, the poor fellow has been told he’s to guard us—from each other, too!”
There was a knock at the door and Gianna walked in. “It’s so dark in here, Nicholas. Oh, Mr Yorke—am I interrupting an important conversation?”
“No,” Yorke said quickly, “but I have a very important and urgent job.”
When he saw Ramage’s eyebrows raised questioningly he pointed to the lantern clipped to the bulkhead over the desk. “I was going to get that lit—we can’t let such beauty blossom in darkness.”
“Nicholas is not as beautiful as all that,” she said with a straight face. “Come, sit down again; the captain’s cabin in the twilight is so cosy. That saloon—horrible! Like some cheap inn! Now tell me what you two did in the West Indies.”
“Nothing much,” Yorke said warily. “Deuced hot, of course.”
“Too hot to flirt with beautiful women?”
“Oh, much too hot,” Yorke said emphatically.
“That is not what I hear,” Gianna said. “The rustling palm trees, the perfume of frangipani, an enormous moon … is that not romantic, Mr Yorke?”
“Indeed it is. But you can’t hear the palms rustling for the buzz of mosquitoes, and you can’t stand still long enough to look at the moon for the itching of their bites. Even if you could, you’d be eaten alive by sandflies—’No-see-’ems’ they’re called in some of the islands—and their bites are like red-hot needles jabbed in you.”
Yorke hoped she was convinced, and looking at her and listening to her talking in that delightfully accented voice that one heard with the loins rather than the ears, he suddenly remembered the many occasions back in the Caribbean when Ramage had not heard him say something. He would give a start and Yorke had guessed he’d suddenly come back from wherever his thoughts had been. For a moment he would look confused; then he’d seem embarrassed. Now Yorke realized what iron control Ramage had. In the isolation of the West Indies, it was a rare man who could have resisted the urge to ease the loneliness by talking of the woman he loved so desperately and who was nearly five thousand miles away. Yet until he met her, the only things Yorke knew about her had been the few admiring anecdotes which Southwick had related like an adoring grandfather describing his favourite grandchild.
Yorke had often heard men describing beautiful women, but when he’d eventually met the women he’d been disappointed. Sometimes a woman’s beauty matched the words used to describe her, but usually she proved to be as characterless as a piece of statuary.
In a bitter way—just jealousy, if he was honest with himself—Yorke had pieced together Southwick’s occasional descriptions and pictured a beautiful shrew: a young woman who used her beauty to mesmerize men and her power as the ruler of a small state to bully them. Wilful, making everyone rush round for the sake of a whim, sulky when thwarted … The moment he had heard she was coming back with them in the Arabella, Yorke admitted to himself he half thought of moving over to the Princess Louise.
But how wrong he had been: she was all Southwick had said, and more. More because Southwick could not appreciate her love of music, the breadth of her reading, the subtlety of a patrician mind completely free of the restraints normally ingrained in women.
Would Ramage ever be able to marry her? Perhaps not. If she was ever to return to rule Volterra a foreign husband might be too much for those Tuscans to accept. Religion—would that be an obstacle? Ramage a Protestant, and Gianna presumably a Roman Catholic? Obviously they would be the main problems. Apart from that, everything was in his favour: heir to one of the oldest earldoms in the country, he spoke perfect Italian, and from all accounts understood the Italians as well as a non-Italian ever could.
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Yet would she be allowed to marry the man she loved? Would she be forced—for political or dynastic reasons—to marry some dreary and corpulent ruler of a neighbouring state? If that ever happened Yorke pitied the poor fellow! How could he compete with the memories she would have of the handsome young Englishman who rescued her from Napoleon’s cavalry and took her away in his ship …
“A penny for your thoughts, Mr Yorke …”
Now he was daydreaming about her!
“I was thinking about your secret admirers, ma’am.”
“And who are they?” she demanded.
“All the former Tritons on board this ship who served in the Kathleen, and the worthy Captain Wilson, Much and Bowen …”
“So few?” she teased.
“I’m not including myself because I don’t—with the Captain’s permission—have to keep it a secret.”
Ramage wagged a warning finger. “If you think flattery will get you an extra dance, you’re wasting your time.”
“A dance?” Gianna asked. “With whom is Mr Yorke going to dance—and when?”
“In a weak moment, when the chances of us getting back to England seemed very remote,” Ramage explained, “I told him I would give a ball in your honour and let him have one dance.”
“Hmm, you’ll be charging people soon. A guinea to dance with the crazy Italian lady,” she said with a sniff. “Mr Yorke, I shall give a ball—and you can be my partner as often as you wish. But you must both excuse me now; I must see how Rossi is getting on with our dinner. He’s having trouble with that wretched seaman, Nicholas.”
“I’m not surprised. Two cooks in one kitchen!”
“Cook!” she exclaimed crossly. “That other man is an assassin!”
With that she left the cabin and the two men sat in almost complete darkness. It was not classical beauty, Yorke mused; it was a great deal more than that. Classical beauty tended to be cold. Her mouth was too wide and her lips too warm, if you measured her by those standards. Her eyes too large—and too lively. Her skin was golden, not the alabaster white and pink that classical beauty dictated. Yet if she walked on to the floor at one of the Prince of Wales’s famous grand balls, every woman present would demand to know who she was, and hate her for being there!
“You’ll have dinner with us?” Ramage asked.
“No, I’ll eat in the saloon with the others. The Captain of one of the King’s ships dines alone—unless there is a charming passenger on board. You don’t need a chaperone for your first evening together!”
The excitement of her first day at sea had left Gianna tired, and as soon as dinner was finished and Rossi had cleared the table she had smiled ruefully at Ramage and said she was going to bed. Ramage took her to her cabin and then went up on deck to have a chat with Southwick, who was on watch.
The Portuguese coast was now a thin black line low and vague on the dark eastern horizon. Ramage had decided quite deliberately not to beat far out into the Atlantic; instead he planned to clear Cabo Finisterra by only a few miles, even though the Spanish bases of Coruña and Ferrol were just a short distance round the Cape to the eastward. British frigates—if not a sizeable squadron—were keeping a close watch on them even as the Arabella stretched along the coast, and the packet would probably be safer close in.
After a glance at the slate recording the Arabella’s recent courses and speeds, Ramage looked at the two helmsmen, their faces lit faintly by the light in the binnacle box, nodded to Southwick and went below to his cabin again. The Master had been given his night orders, which he would later pass on to Much: orders which covered any likely eventuality. A major wind shift or change in its strength, sighting another vessel, doubt concerning the ship’s position—any of these circumstances and many more would result in the Captain being called.
In the meantime Ramage was now feeling sleepy and decided he might well spend an hour or two beginning a draft of his report to the Admiralty. He took the lantern from the centre of the cabin’s forward bulkhead, where it lit up the table, and hooked it on the bracket on the starboard side of the bulkhead, so that he would see to work at the desk.
For the next hour he wrote and crossed out, tore up complete pages and started again. The Arabella was rolling; not heavily, just enough to make it necessary to wedge the inkwell. He was thankful the desk had been built athwartships against the bulkhead, so that he faced forward: it made it less tiring than if he had to face outboard.
The sentry tapped on the door and said quietly, to avoid rousing the occupants of the other cabins, “Mr Yorke, sir.”
Ramage glanced up as the door to his left opened in response to his reply.
“Want a game of chess?” he asked mockingly.
“Don’t you start,” Yorke said wearily. “I’ve been fighting off Bowen for hours. He seems to think that Southwick standing a watch is a deliberate plot on your part to keep him away from the chessboard.”
“I doubt if Southwick minds,” Ramage said, getting up from the desk and going to sit in a chair by the table on the other side of the cabin.
“Don’t be too sure,” Yorke said sitting in a chair beyond. “Your Master is getting the disease. He beat Bowen in three consecutive games just before we left Lisbon.”
“Oh? I didn’t hear about that!”
“I’m not surprised: Bowen was too startled, and Southwick couldn’t believe it himself. I think Bowen was getting careless.”
“If you’d like a drink …” Ramage gestured to the locker in which bottles sat in racks.
Yorke shook his head. “No, I want to sleep lightly tonight.”
When Ramage raised his eyebrows questioningly, Yorke said: “The packetsmen … I don’t trust that bosun an inch.”
“I imagine he’s borne that cross since he was a baby and first reached out of the crib to pick his father’s pocket,” Ramage said dryly.
Yorke glanced at Ramage’s desk, on which there were several sheets of paper, and the open inkwell. “I shouldn’t be interrupting you.”
“Plenty of time for that: I was starting a draft of my report to the First Lord.”
“I saw Much tickling his chin with a quill.”
“I’ve told him to write a report to me, so I can enclose it.”
“He seems to have as much enthusiasm for quill-pushing as you,” Yorke commented, picking up one of the two pistols lying on the settee. “I see you don’t follow your own instructions, Captain. This isn’t loaded! Mine are loaded and ready!”
Ramage pointed to the box on the settee. “There’s powder, wads and shot …”
“Armourer—that’s the only job I haven’t had since I’ve been with you,” Yorke said caustically. “I’d make a good armourer, you know,” he confided. “I love guns. Not as instruments to kill”—he snapped the lock a couple of times to check the spark from the flint—”but just for good craftsmanship. Not one of these Sea Service pistols, of course; but a pair of good duelling pistols by someone like Henry Nock.”
He took the powder flask, slid back the rammer and methodically loaded the gun.
“I feel the same way.” Ramage said. “A gun is inert; just a piece of metal with a flint and some wood attached to it. By itself it can’t move or kill anything: it can’t do a damned thing unless someone picks it up.”
“Ah—an interesting point,” Yorke commented, beginning to load the second pistol. “Who is the killer—the gun that fires the shot or the man who squeezes the trigger?”
Ramage sat back in his chair and crossed his legs. “That’s a fatuous point which isn’t worth mentioning, my friend, let alone discussing. No—” He stopped and listened for a moment. The rudder still creaked as the wheel turned a spoke or two this way or that, keeping the ship on course: he could picture the quartermaster checking by the dim light at the compass and muttering something to the men at the wheel. The lookouts were watching in the darkness, and Southwick would be strolling up and down. He had heard the sentry outside the cabin cough once or twice. A sai
l occasionally flapped as the packet pitched and momentarily spilled the wind. The hull creaked as all hulls did. He was not sure what he had heard: perhaps only a distant seagull giving a squawk of alarm as it sighted the ship.
“No,” he continued, idly taking one of the pistols, while the light from the lantern threw the shadow across the cabin, “just take this as an example. Old ladies and parsons regard them as inventions of the Devil: evil contrivances which kill men. Yet it’s the man that’s evil, not the gun. A gun is no—”
That noise again, and a slight thump which could have been a piece of wreckage bumping the hull, and from the way Yorke glanced towards the door Ramage knew he’d heard it too. When he raised his eyebrows questioningly Yorke turned down the comers of his mouth, shrugging his shoulders. Then a plank creaked.
There were many beams and planks, lodging knees and hanging knees, frames and stringers creaking in the ship at this very moment, but only one particular plank creaked like that.
A butt in one of the planks in the corridor had sprung close to Ramage’s door—he remembered stubbing his toe on it and cursing violently, startling the sentry. And as he stood there, his toes tingling with pain, he had pushed down on the plank and it had creaked: a high-pitched creak—more like the squeak of a loose plank in a staircase than the usual deeper creaking made by the ship, which by comparison was a series of groans. He had intended to have the carpenter’s mate put in a couple of fastenings to secure it.
Surely the plank would creak like that only if someone stood on it? But the sentry would see anyone there, unless he was leaning with his right shoulder against the bulkhead, facing to starboard. Still, it could be the sentry himself, or Bowen or Wilson going on deck for some fresh air. Ramage knew he was getting jumpy and leaned over to put the pistol back on the settee. At that moment he heard a soft grunt and a gentle thud.