by Dudley Pope
Everything here revolved round Ramage, but what was his future? Witty, charming, impatient, brave to the point of foolhardiness, and almost damnably handsome. With his family’s wealth and position, Ramage could live an enjoyable life in England but like his father and grandfather, he had gone to sea. After what had happened to the old Earl, any sane youngster would have resigned his commission. For him the dangers to his life came as much from men like Goddard as from hurricanes or battles. He must really love the sea because—
A seaman yelled and Yorke pulled himself together and glanced across at Ramage. He was standing transfixed, his mouth open and his eyes out of focus …
Like Yorke, Ramage’s thoughts had been far from Punta Tamarindo.
“Flame helmet, sir!” Jackson called briskly. “Same depth as the last one and pointing in the same direction.”
Yorke joined Ramage where Jackson was bent over with the lantern.
Ramage pointed. “Spaced the same distance apart. Two paces. And …”
He gestured along the first trench, and then from the first shell in the second trench to where they now stood.
“The third shell should be here …”
He walked two paces.
“Jackson!”
The American grabbed a shovel and began scooping the earth away in layers, careful not to disturb a shell if he came across it.
After a few minutes he suddenly stopped, dropped the shovel and began scooping with his hands. He glanced up.
“It’s here, sir.”
The silence was frightening. Yorke had the feeling that every man believed for the first time that he was standing inches from a fortune.
Ramage signalled to the Marines to go over to the tree.
“Jackson, Stafford,” he said as he joined the Marines. “I want you Marines facing outwards, kneeling and ready to fire, and beyond the light of the lantern. Your job is to guard us against an attack by outsiders. Keep absolutely quiet and don’t look back at the lantern, because you’ll lose your night vision. Get your backs against bushes or a big rock, otherwise you’ll be silhouetted against the lantern. Challenge twice, then fire if you get no reply. Any questions? Carry on.”
Ramage took his pistols and gave them to Jackson, and said quietly: “I’ll be occupied with this digging. Stand beyond this tree, and cover us. I can’t think any one of the men will be silly, but if there’s treasure, the sight of gold can upset a man. Hide yourself somewhere within range. No need for anyone to know where you are. Mind the Marines, though …”
With that, Ramage said to Yorke: “Any suggestions where we dig now?”
Yorke looked bewildered. “Along the present trench—or, rather, continue the same line, I imagine.”
“Perhaps,” Ramage said softly, and Yorke thought almost triumphantly, “but I like triangles—they have three sides! Project the line of the first three shells and then the line of these three and you have two sides of an isosceles triangle. Almost two sides, rather. Look”—he swept with his hand—”how about that for the apex?” He was pointing to a spot five feet from the trunk of the tree.
Without waiting for an answer he walked to the spot, sighting along both trenches. He ground a heel in the earth and then beckoned to the nearest seamen.
“Dig here. A big hole. Pitch the earth well clear.”
To Yorke, he said: “I’m going to make a guess, which is a silly thing to do at this stage.”
Yorke waited, and when Ramage said nothing, prompted him. “Well? Why not turn it into a bet—then one of us stands to win something!”
“I was hoping you’d say that. Let’s bet on the age of this tree.
“Fifty years,” Yorke said promptly, “And fifty guineas backs my guess.”
“Ah,” Ramage said. “Can I bet that it’s more than a hundred—or more exactly, dates from when the treasure was buried?”
“Done,” Yorke said.
Ramage was reminded of quiet days at home in Cornwall, watching a dog digging at a rabbit burrow. The determined dog panting with excitement; the earth flying up between its back legs. Already the hole had taken shape; already the excavated earth was making small heaps.
He walked over to the diggers. The hole was now in shadow and two feet deep. He could see wooden veins which were the roots of the tree, and hear the occasional thud and judder of a spade bouncing off a thicker root.
Then they were down to three feet and the roots were thicker and closer, springy and harder to cut. They were going to need axes—and daylight. He gave the orders to stop digging and picked three men to go back to the village for axes, first calling to the Marine sentries to let them pass.
“We’ve lost a lot of sleep,” Ramage commented to Yorke, “but so far we haven’t got anything except experience.”
Yorke did not reply. He was feeling depressed. The prospect of digging under the tree seemed hopeless. Although he would never have said anything to Ramage, he began to think the treasure hunt was over. It had been great fun and a test of their wits, but somewhere a series of coincidences had entered into the game.
One of the seamen who had not yet scrambled out of the hole gave an excited yelp and lifted something up. As the dim yellow light of the lantern shone on it, the rest of the men gave a groan in which there was disappointment and superstitious fear mixed in equal proportions.
Ramage took it from the man, looked at it, and said casually: “A human femur—the thigh bone. You’ll probably find the rest of the skeleton there.”
He walked to one side and put the bone down carefully.
“Put the rest here when you find them. We’ll rebury them later.”
He turned away. He had carried his disappointment off well. Yorke would probably guess at it, but not the men, not even Jackson.
After all this work, they had found a grave. Presumably it was the grave of some pirate leader—someone famous enough to have his grave on an almost deserted island marked for posterity with a tree, sea shells and a poem.
Everyone—himself included—had assumed that whatever was buried was treasure. Plates of solid gold, and cups and chalices; thick and heavy bracelets of silver inlaid with gems … No one had thought of bare bones. Yet the poem could just as easily be an epitaph
… and remember me
… beneath the tree.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
EVERYONE at the camp was very sympathetic and understanding; infuriatingly so in fact. What annoyed Ramage was that everyone had pretended to be surprised. Ramage was sure that—with the exception of Maxine—they had thought all along that he was on a wild goose chase, but encouraged him out of politeness. Metaphorically patting him on the shoulder as he tried, and now patting him on the head as he failed.
He sat in his room, his journal open in front of him, his body rigid with tension. It was unlikely any of them would have got any of the treasure anyway, so why had he become so obsessed with that damned poem that he slipped back into the world of an excitable schoolboy? He felt humiliated.
There was a knock at the door and at his call, Maxine entered.
“Nicholas,” she said hesitantly, “my father—”
“Wants to see me?” Ramage was already on his feet and moving towards the door.
“Non!” she said, smiling and gesturing him to sit down again. “My father knows I am visiting you.”
“Oh,” Ramage said lamely. He always found it embarrassing when a woman visitor indicated that her reputation would—or would not—be compromised by being alone with him. “You are a welcome visitor.”
He escorted her to the only other chair in the room and she sat with a movement which was both feline and regal; a movement that transformed this shabby, hot and dusty room into an elegant salon.
As soon as he sat down she looked directly at him, making no attempt to disguise the fact that he attracted her. She was deliberately setting aside the fact that she was a young married woman, that her husband was thousands of miles away, and that she was alone in a room wit
h a young man. She was conveying frankly and with superb taste, that she knew she was a beautiful woman attractive to men, and surely he knew he was attractive to women, so why did not they accept the facts without gaucheness.
“You are very upset,” she said.
He shrugged his shoulders. “Disappointed, perhaps. Natural enough, surely?”
“Yes, very natural, mais—that is not all you feel …”
She spoke quietly, but with certainty, choosing her words carefully and concentrating on her accent. She was not anticipating that he would tell her she was wrong, and, he realized, he was not going to.
“Not finding a king’s ransom in treasure when you thought you were standing on top of it …” he said lamely.
“You feel you’ve failed.”
“And I have too!”
She sighed. “You men! You are more frightened of the word ‘failure’ than of all the devils in hell!”
“Failure is more apparent,” he said dryly.
“But it is not failure! If you had orders from your Admiral to find the treasure and you could not find it, that would be failure only if it was known for certain the treasure was there.”
She slapped her hand on to her knee for emphasis. “It isn’t failure if there is no treasure. If someone told you to fly up to the moon on the back of a goose, the fact that you could not would not be failure!”
“Yes, but it’s different for—”
There was a loud, rapid knocking on the door.
“Come in!” Ramage snapped, annoyed at the interruption.
An excited Jackson stepped inside the door, but the moment he saw Maxine he stopped in embarrassment.
“Sorry, sir—”
“Carry on, Jackson.”
“It’s about the digging, sir …”
“Go on—there’s no need for secrecy.”
“Well, sir—” Jackson broke off, and Ramage saw it was not because of Maxine. Something disagreeable had happened, that much was clear from the American’s slightly sheepish manner. But something else had happened, too, which had brought him hurrying back from Punta Tamarindo, where he, and half a dozen seamen were supposed to be filling in the trenches.
Ramage began tapping the table with his fingers, and Jackson started again.
“After you left with Mr Yorke, sir, we got to thinking about the skeleton, sir.”
“Come on, Jackson, out with it, do you want me to wheedle every word out of you?”
“The skeleton was neither right under the tree nor clear to one side, sir.”
“I can’t see—” Ramage’s voice broke off, because suddenly he could see that the position of the skeleton was odd. If the tree marked the grave, it should have been directly over the body, but it was to one side, four feet down, and only the side roots had grown through it. The tree had been planted—or the seed began growing—after the body was buried. Did it matter? But Jackson had not finished.
“Stafford and me tried to work out why. We couldn’t think of anything, so after you’d gone we decided to do some more digging. The rest of the lads were keen, sir.”
“Where did you dig?”
“All round the tree, sir, in a big circle and we found lots more skeletons.”
“Did you, by Jove!”
“Yes, sir, eight so far and still more coming up.”
Maxine sighed. Ramage glanced at her and saw she was as white as a sheet. In a moment he was at her side, holding her against him by the shoulders.
“Breathe deeply,” he said quietly. “I’m sorry, we are crude oafs.”
“Non,” she whispered, “it’s not the talk of bodies and skeletons; I just started thinking of … things. I’m all right now.”
Ramage gestured to Jackson to leave the room and as the door closed he turned to Maxine and took her in his arms. It began, he realized later, as a gesture to reassure her; but she closed her eyes and raised her lips and a moment later they were clinging to each other as desperately as if they were drowning.
“Oh, Nicholas,” she whispered, what seemed an age later, “I’ve wanted to kiss you for so long …”
“We must be careful—people will …”
“I don’t care,” she said. “And my father and mother have guessed already.”
Ramage thought of her husband. Had she forgotten? And what did her parents think, now they had guessed? They could hardly approve of their married daughter having an affair with a lieutenant in the Royal Navy.
“Kiss me again,” she whispered, “and then you must go to Jackson. But, my darling, don’t let this treasure hunt dominate your life.”
He held her tightly. “I’ve found my treasure!”
“It took you long enough,” she said.
An hour later Ramage and Yorke were standing on the edge of a large semi-circular hole, the tree forming the centre of the radii. The skeletons had not been moved; the seamen had simply started digging again to the side as soon as they had found one and cleared away the earth.
“Look, sir,” Jackson said as he jumped into the hole and moved from one skeleton to another, pointing. The top of each skull was badly damaged.
“A shot in the back of the head,” Ramage said.
“Yes, sir. And their arms are together.”
“Hands tied behind them, shot in the back of the head, and pitched into a big open grave,” Ramage said.
“That’s what we thought,” Jackson said. “But we can’t understand why, sir.”
Ramage began thinking aloud for Yorke’s benefit.
“A mass execution, but who were the victims? Perhaps pirates, if one band attacked another, or if the members of a band quarrelled? Or a party of slaves who were killed to ensure the secrecy of some work they’d been doing?”
“Slaves,” Yorke said, as if to himself. “Made to dig their own grave.”
Ramage nodded. “It would make more sense because we’ll find at least twenty skeletons if this is a circular grave. To tie up and execute twenty pirates would probably mean at least twenty more.”
“But why do it?” Yorke said softly. “It doesn’t make sense. There’s no point in leaving a poem as a clue to a mass grave.”
Ramage stared at Yorke. Perhaps there was treasure as well as skeletons. Most people would not dig below the level of the skeletons: one glimpse of a human bone and a man would be reluctant to disturb a grave. That was why he had stopped the original digging and left the men to fill in the trenches after the first skeleton had been found.
He was reluctant to let all the old excitement well up again after his recent disappointments, but perhaps those two converging lines of shells did mark something else …
When he pointed to the spot, Yorke nodded.
“I don’t understand what the devil it’s all about,” Yorke said, “but I think we should carry on digging there.”
Ramage told Jackson to set four men to work and he and Yorke settled down to the worst wait of all.
The men had to chop more than they had to dig, and the roots of the tree snaking down into the earth were springy yet unyielding. More than an hour had passed before one of the men, digging with a pickaxe in a corner of the hole, gave a grunt and, turning slightly, struck again with the pick.
“Jacko!” he called. “Wot abaht this?”
Ramage, talking to Yorke five yards away, noticed that the man’s voice was puzzled: whatever he had found it was not a skeleton.
Jackson jumped lightly into the hole and crouched down. Ramage walked deliberately slowly towards them and heard the muttering of voices. Then Jackson leapt out of the hole, knelt before Ramage with a flourish, and opened both hands. In his palms were several coins which shone dully.
Gold doubloons, dollars, pieces of eight and reals … He rubbed a dollar to make it shine. The Spanish “cobb” of seaman’s slang and recruiting posters. He nodded and passed it to Yorke.
“Are there many?” he said in an offhand voice.
“Hundreds, sir—all spilling out of a rotted wooden b
ox.”
“I’m so glad,” he said in the same offhand voice. “You’d better send Stafford to fetch more Marines; we need a strong guard on here, and ask Mr Southwick to tell our guests we have—er, had some success.”
It was remarkable how calm you could be when you succeeded.
The next eight days were so unreal that Ramage felt he was not just dreaming, but dreaming of a dream. Most of the seamen had been moved up to Punta Tamarindo, slinging their hammocks between trees, to save the long walk every morning. Under the casuarina tree seamen dug carefully, while on the landward side of the open space the carpenter’s crew worked with saws, hammers and nails making strong crates in which to stow the treasure.
The coins were sorted into different denominations, put into canvas bags made from sail cloth—”a quarter o’ the size o’ a normal shroud” as Stafford commented—and sewn up. Each bag was then put into a wooden crate and pummelled until it took up a square shape. Then the lid of the crate was put on and nailed down securely.
Ramage limited each crate to half a hundredweight, and after the money had been checked by Southwick, the details of the contents were painted on the outside. A pair of long poles secured along the sides enabled two men to carry the crate comfortably like a stretcher, and it was taken away to be stowed. One of the houses in the village had been nicknamed “The Treasury” and was closely guarded by the Marines.
The gold and silver plate and ornaments—they ranged from dishes to candelabra—were dealt with in much the same way. They took up larger crates since they were bulkier and lighter than coins, but every item was described in an inventory kept by Southwick. When they did not know the name or purpose of a particular vessel or ornament, a small sketch was added with the main dimensions and weight.
As the totals of coin, plate, ornaments and jewellery mounted in what came to be called “The Treasure Log,” Ramage was thankful that the men still regarded the digging and packing as a great game.
He had talked to Southwick and Yorke about a potential danger: the survivors from the two ships numbered some 75 seamen, but there were only three King’s officers and a dozen Marines. If the seamen from both ships decided to keep the treasure, killing officers in their beds at night would present no problems. With the officers dead, the corporal of Marines would be a fool if he tried to stop his men joining the seamen …