by Dudley Pope
She shook her head again. “No, it is much more beautiful.”
“A miniature of me.”
She laughed so loudly her mother looked shocked and her father delighted. St Brieuc glanced at Ramage, as if encouraging him to go on making her laugh; she needed to laugh much more.
“That would be ‘a pearl beyond price’—isn’t that how you say it? No, it is a sea shell.”
She waved the flame helmet which Yorke had cleaned and polished.
“It is wonderful—look, if I hold it to my ear I can hear the sea!”
Ramage froze for a moment, and then reached out for it.
“Give it to me please,” he said harshly.
He put the open part of the shell to his ear and sure enough there was a hollow noise, like breakers on a distant beach. Even as he listened, he saw the startled look on Yorke’s face give way to deep thought and that in turn was replaced by an almost disbelieving grin.
Before either of them could say anything, St Brieuc whispered, “That’s it. ‘The sound of the sea …’”
Then Maxine, who had been startled by Ramage snatching the shell from her, gave a quick curtsey and said, “A shell without price, anyway!”
They all laughed and for several minutes they chattered excitedly, passing the shell from one to another. As they talked Ramage kept trying to fit this particular shell into the hunt for the treasure.
St Brieuc put it into words, saying in his quick yet authoritative voice: “We must not forget this is only one shell. I presume that there are thousands more in the sea.”
And they all looked crestfallen.
“We’re letting the treasure hunt get on our nerves,” Ramage said. “I am, anyway.”
“Me too!” Yorke said. “I have to admit it’s exciting. Even if we find nothing, I’ve enjoyed it so far. What small boy hasn’t played pirates and searched for treasure?”
“Quite,” Ramage agreed, “but at the same time I’d like to be one of the few adults who actually found it!” As he spoke he saw Maxine watching him speculatively, as though weighing him up. Their eyes met and Ramage wondered, yet again, what her husband was like.
Within a week of the landing from the rafts, life on Snake Island had settled into a pleasant routine. The seamen of both ships enjoyed the treasure hunt—they were so eager to join one of the digging teams that Southwick grumbled that if there had been any miscreants he’d have made them part of the raft’s crew.
After a day’s digging, several of the men spent an hour or two each evening tidying up the ground round the houses. They cleared out some of the shrubs to give more space to the frangipani, now coming towards the end of its blossom, and a dozen other and smaller flowering trees, shrubs and bushes. They had made crude tables and forms and set them under the shade of a big flamboyant which towered over them like a scarlet umbrella. The paths leading from house to house had been lined with small rocks which had been painted white. Slowly San Ildefonso was being transformed into a neat hamlet.
Ramage saw that the men, starved for years of the sight and sound of life on land, were making up for it by getting the feel of the soil; watching and helping it to produce beauty. Southwick, in his quiet, fatherly way, was helping them. Appleby was told to bring over paint, nails, a few planks of timber chopped from bulwarks, so the men could make more furniture.
Much to Bowen’s delight, St Cast had proved to be a fine chess player, and Appleby brought the Surgeon’s chess-set back from the wreck so the two could play a few games each evening.
The St Brieucs had settled into life in the tiny village of San Ildefonso as if they were in a comfortable château on the banks of the Loire. Early in the morning, before the sun was too hot, or in the late afternoon, he saw all three of them walking slowly along one of the beaches of the great inland bay as if they were inspecting their estates. They were enchanted by the flocks of small white egrets which flew out every evening, to sleep on a small cay in the centre of the bay, and came back with descriptions of strange birds and butterflies, chameleons and insects.
Ramage intended to let Appleby make two more raft trips to the wrecks. After that they’d have more than enough provisions. The idea of putting partly filled casks over the side and letting them float ashore had been highly successful. The cooper had also taken the opportunity of cleaning water casks and floating them over empty, and now they were stored by the well, ready to be filled when the supply ship arrived. Ramage was determined they should not be short of water and provisions on the voyage to Jamaica.
The slaves had proved a cheerful crowd of men, and most evenings they sang the songs of Africa or danced round a fire, to the delight of the seamen, who were soon learning the steps of the dances and joining in with clumsy enthusiasm.
It amused everyone to refer to Ramage as “The Governor.” St Brieuc quietly promoted the idea and it certainly made things a lot easier for Ramage. He was the youngest of them all, except for Maxine, but as Governor he could give orders without affecting the social side of their lives together.
Ramage was talking to Jackson one morning when the American asked: “Did the fisherman make a good job of the necklaces?”
“Excellent. They were a great success.”
“That Tamarind Point business was a big disappointment, sir.” Ramage nodded. “Tamarinds and flame helmets—I don’t care if I never see any more!”
“Flame helmets, sir?” Jackson asked. “What are they?”
Ramage described the shell to the American.
“I remember it now, sir.”
“Yes, if only there’d been three of them,” Ramage said absentmindedly as he recalled Maxine’s “I can hear the sea,” and their brief excitement.
“There were, sir,” Jackson said. “Three of them in a straight line. Mr Yorke picked up the nearest one. Didn’t you see the others?”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
IT PROMISED to be a very long night. Taking a party of seamen to Punta Tamarindo to dig by the light of lanterns might attract the attention of the local folk and, for the moment, the less they knew the better. They knew the English dug trenches in daylight, but this was merely copying the Spanish. To dig by lantern light might suggest urgency …
The heat in Ramage’s room was stifling. The wind had dropped with the sun and the offshore breeze had not materialized to make the night pleasantly cool. It had become the sort of tropical night that was a test of endurance. Ramage forgot nature’s glorious riot of colours, the startling flowers, the scarlet of the flamboyants and the exciting blue of the sea. He even forgot the temperature during the day, when the breeze and the shade made it perfect.
In the misery of a windless night in the hurricane season, he hankered for the cold nights of the northern latitudes. Chilblains and colds, the sniffing and sneezing, the layer upon layer of clothing needed to keep not just warm but to avoid being frozen, were overlooked and he realized for the first time just how much life in the Tropics was governed by the wind. The thermometer could be showing eighty degrees and it could be two o’clock in the afternoon. If the Trade winds were blowing, the temperature was ideal. With no wind eighty degrees became uncomfortable: clothing was soaked with perspiration and energy destroyed by heat and humidity.
There was a gentle tap at the door and Ramage reached down for the pistol by his bed.
“Who’s there?” he whispered loudly.
“It’s Yorke.”
“Come in,” Ramage said and added as he saw the door open into the starlit room, “What’s the matter, can’t you sleep?”
“No—I keep on hearing the sound of the sea in that damned helmet shell. You know, I don’t enjoy these waiting games; I’m far too impatient!”
“Nor do I,” Ramage confessed. “I’m just lying here waiting for the hands of my watch to get moving.”
“What time do we start off for Punta Tamarindo?”
“Five o’clock. Takes about an hour to get there. I want people to think we are just digging trenches somewhere els
e for a change.”
“Who knows,” Yorke said lightly, “that may be all we are doing.”
“It probably is. Best to think of it that way.”
“Why don’t we go and dig?” Yorke said impulsively. “Just a few of us. We needn’t make any noise, and Punta Tamarindo must be one of the most isolated places in the Caribbean anyway.”
Ramage swung his legs off the bed and began dressing without a word.
Within fifteen minutes, having left a disapproving Southwick in command at the village, Ramage and Yorke were leading a party of ten seamen and four Marines along the track round the edge of the great inland bay. They cut through a long valley almost to the coast on the north side of the island before swinging in a half circle to skirt a ridge of three high hills that separated Bahia Tamarindo from the rest of the island.
The seamen, far from truculent at being roused out after a day’s digging, were excited; but for the need for some secrecy, Ramage guessed, they’d have been singing like a party of Cornish miners on their way to the local fair.
They reached Punta Tamarindo in little more than an hour, and leaving the seamen and Marines waiting twenty yards back, Ramage took Yorke and Jackson to the casuarina tree.
Jackson, carrying the lantern, quickly found the shells.
“There’s one, sir, and there’s the other. That’s where yours was lying. You can see the impression in the earth—it’s deep. Wonder there wasn’t a scorpion under it.”
Three flame helmets in a row. All with the pointed end facing inland, towards the root of the tree, and the round top towards the sea.
“If you were using them to show a direction,” Yorke said, “I assume you’d point them that way.” He pointed towards the tree.
A tree and three shells in line, each shell two paces—he stepped it out—from the next one, the shells pointing in the same direction.
You see the three
and hear the sea …
Which three? The three headlands or the three shells? In a logical sequence, one would need to see the three headlands, and then “hear the sea” in the shells. But the poem certainly did not sound like that …
… and remember me.
Then three by three
beneath the tree.
“Three by three” must refer to the shells, and the one in the first line meant the headlands. But, he thought, exasperated by the whimsicality of the poem, what do the last two lines mean?
Three by three … well, the first three must be the line of shells. But what other symbol of three showed where to dig?
“Well,” Yorke said impatiently, “have you made up your mind where to dig?”
Ramage swallowed hard to avoid making a brief and bitter reply. Yorke’s tone implied it was only Ramage’s tardiness that kept the men’s spades from the treasure.
“Yes,” he said, “and you have the honour of digging the first spadeful.”
“Oh thanks!” Yorke said, his old enthusiasm bubbling again. “Hey! Stafford! Bring me your spade!”
Yorke spat on his hands with a flourish. “I’m never sure what that does, but all the best labourers do it. Now,” he said, “where do we start?”
“I’ve no ideas,” Ramage said. “We’ve got to start somewhere!”
Yorke looked around at the area lit by the lantern. “It’d take a few days to clear the soil here to the depth of a man …”
“I know; that’s why I was hoping we’d get another clue ‘Three by three …’”
“Three paces from the shells?” Yorke said hopefully.
“Which way, and measured from which shell?”
“Yes,” Yorke said. “It doesn’t sound like our piratical poet to leave it so vague.”
Ramage gestured to Jackson. “Start the men digging a narrow trench along here.” He indicated a line through the shells. “Two feet deep.”
To Yorke he said, “We have to move the shells. We’d better set up some sticks showing where they were.”
Within fifteen minutes the seamen were digging vigorously, and from the intersection of lines of sticks stuck into the ground at the edge of the light thrown by the lantern, it was easy to see where all three shells had been.
Within an hour the seamen had cleared a trench some eighteen feet long from the tree to well beyond where Yorke’s shell had been placed. There was just earth and small stones—the soil, heavy and red, was spread thinly over the rocky island.
As the men stood back from the trench Yorke said: “How about making a geometric pattern?”
“Why not?” Ramage said. “It’s a matter of chance. We’ll start with a line perpendicular to this trench. Jackson! Same length, which means nine feet either side of this point, where we found the first shell, making a cross.”
Yorke gestured to the perspiring men, faces shiny in the dim light of the lantern, their bodies making grotesque shadows. “The grave-digger scene in Hamlet,” he said. “‘Alas poor Yorick …’”
“How old d’you think that tree is?” Ramage asked suddenly.
“No idea. A casuarina, isn’t it? Use them out here to shelter houses from the wind—plant a row of them. That means they grow quickly, like firs. A hundred years? No more.”
“That means the tree probably has nothing to do with all this.”
“Almost certainly. Why?” Yorke asked.
“I’ve been wondering about these shells. After all, anyone could kick them around, and that would spoil the whole thing.”
“I wonder when anyone last stood here?”
“I agree, but how could a pirate be sure that bushes would not grow here and hide the shells?”
“Don’t forget he was trying to hide his treasure,” Yorke said.
“Yes, but I wonder why?”
“Oh—being pursued … or used this island as a base, then suddenly his ship’s destroyed—a hurricane for instance … Marooned here and dying of starvation—or even old age. Buries his treasure and before he dies he carves the poem somewhere …”
Ramage nodded. “That sounds quite possible. Henry Morgan was around here a hundred years ago. ‘The Brethren of the Coast’—wasn’t that his gang?”
“Yes. He was Governor of Jamaica, too, wasn’t he?”
“I think so. Still, Jamaica was remote then. I suspect that in those days the Governor wasn’t quite the law-abiding person we think of now!”
“A shell!”
The yell came from a seaman, and Ramage bellowed: “Don’t touch it!”
Jackson seized the lantern and ran to where the man was working at the landward end of the trench.
“I didn’t pick it up, Jacko,” the man said excitedly. “Look, there it is!”
Jackson crouched down with the lantern and Ramage could see it clearly. It was a flame helmet, and it pointed directly at the tree.
Ramage looked at Yorke. “Geometry!” he said, “or trigonometry. Or just a man that liked patterns!”
“The direction it’s pointing,” Yorke said. “It must be significant!”
“Jackson—a new trench,” Ramage snapped. “Start here and go in a straight line to the foot of the tree. With a bit of luck you’ll find more shells.”
He turned to face the seamen. “File past in a moment and look at this shell. As you dig a new trench from here to the tree look for more shells. Try not to dislodge one if you find it. Or if you can’t stop yourself in time, see which way the sharp end is pointing.”
Like a bunch of small boys let loose on a row of ripe strawberry plants, the seamen marked out a straight line and began digging again.
“I begin to have a faint hope,” Ramage said quietly to Yorke, his words hidden from the men by the noise of their cheerful chattering.
“When I find I might be within a few feet of a million pounds in treasure trove,” Yorke said, “I have no difficulty in fanning faint hope into a roaring furnace!”
The two men stood, each wrapped in his thoughts, each glancing from one seaman to another, each willing one of the men t
o leap up with an excited shout.
He’s a cool one, Yorke thought to himself as he watched Ramage, who was blinking occasionally, his face a sharp profile against the lantern light beyond. In the past couple of weeks he’s fought off a French privateer that damn nearly captured the Topaz, survived a hurricane and become the ruler of a small island. The curious thing is that whatever he’s doing, he looks as though he’s completely at home and perfectly accustomed to it. Bringing the Triton alongside the privateer, handling the brig in the hurricane, having rafts made ready when both ships hit the reef, taking over on the island, acting as jailer for the Spaniards, a graceful host to the St Brieuc party, managing the seamen from both ships—and a congenial friend to Yorke himself. It was an impressive list.
As leader of a treasure hunt, he had imagination, patience and determination and behaved as though his profession in life was hunting for treasure….
One of the reasons why Yorke enjoyed being with Ramage was that his sense of humour seemed to expand and grow sharper the more serious the situation. Perhaps when everything was going perfectly, with no problems or crises on the horizon, Ramage might become a humourless and boring companion.
Probably not boring, because he had that essential curiosity—almost nosiness—about life and everything that comprised it that always made him stimulating company. Flame helmet shells, odd and archaic—almost bizarre—words in English and Spanish that he delighted in using not to show off but because he assumed everyone else would share his delight in them; information about local customs, picked up on his travels.
He seemed to Yorke a lonely man. Lonely on board, of course, because the maintenance of discipline required all captains to be lonely, but probably lonely in his private life as well, if only because the chances of finding people who understood his complex personality were slim.
Yorke had the feeling that the St Brieucs wished Ramage was their son, or perhaps their son-in-law. They often spoke of Maxine’s husband, but casually, as one might refer to a favourite horse. A bond of the physical body, not the soul. Maxine never mentioned him at all. She might be breaking her heart over his absence, or it might not be as unwelcome an absence as her husband might hope. Had Maxine fallen in love with Ramage? He felt a twinge of jealousy but did not know the answer.