by Dudley Pope
Yet if he was honest, his main concern was that the Jason business was so unusual and complex that Rear-Admiral Tewtin was not the man to deal with it: this was something for Their Lordships at the Admiralty, and the Judge Advocate’s department.
And he was involved in it only because he – well, first he had got married, then he and Sarah had had to escape from Bonaparte, and all that had led to him crossing the Atlantic to Devil’s Island, to rescue Jean-Jacques, the Count of Rennes. In turn he had brought two French prizes into Barbados…and been stuck with the job of escorting this convoy back to England. But why – why, why – had the Jason chosen to interfere with his convoy? Why could she not have gone on to Britain, where her orders sent her?
He answered the Marine sentry’s call and Southwick came into the cabin. Ramage waved him to a chair, and the master threw his hat on to the settee.
“I’ve been reading the Articles of War again, sir.”
“They don’t help,” Ramage said, “unless you want to get into more of a muddle.”
“But there must be something we can do, sir.”
“There isn’t,” Ramage said shortly. “Not so long ago, while I was escaping from the French at Brest, none of you could do anything about a drunken captain sent to the Calypso. Their Lordships in their wisdom have drawn up the Articles of War on the assumption that a captain can do no wrong.”
“A surgeon can have him replaced on medical grounds,” Southwick offered hopefully but without much conviction.
“Oh yes. What do you suggest Bowen diagnoses in Captain Shirley’s case? That the black coat proves he has a poor tailor? That a bulge in his right shoe shows he has a bunion? The fellow doesn’t drink, doesn’t smoke (or even chew tobacco in secret), he doesn’t swear or keep a mistress on board. He seems identical with dozens of other post-captains, except perhaps he reads his Bible more frequently.”
“Those officers,” Southwick said. “Apart from Price…”
“Apart from the master they seem a weak-kneed crowd,” Ramage said. “I wouldn’t want to go into action with them, especially Ridley, who is a fool as well. But apart from keeping their mouths tight shut, they haven’t done anything to harm us. Indeed, keeping their mouths shut isn’t harming us; it’s just puzzling.”
“It’s not my place to say this, sir, and I’m presuming on the years–”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Ramage said impatiently, “out with it!”
“Well, sir, are you sure of your ground in putting Captain Shirley under an arrest? You were just saying about the Articles of War.”
“What gave you the impression that Captain Shirley is under an arrest?” Ramage asked innocently. “I’ve no grounds for arresting him. No authority, rather. I may have, but I can’t find any backing in the Articles of War or the Admiralty Instructions.”
Southwick frowned, the wrinkles on his brow like a much folded leather pouch. “But when you spoke to him in his cabin and left Wagstaffe there, I thought you said…”
“I know you did, and so did Aitken and so did Wagstaffe. More important, so did Captain Shirley. You all expected me to arrest him – and so you heard words I didn’t actually say.”
Southwick was by now grinning broadly. “Well, as long as Captain Shirley and that sorry collection of commission and warrant officers accepted it, and continue to do so until we reach Plymouth, we’ll have no complaint.”
“No, we just have to hope for an understanding port admiral at Plymouth. Once we have the convoy safely dispersed, everything should be all right.”
“But if he talks to the wrong people in Plymouth?” Southwick asked.
“Half-pay for my officers, if they are lucky.”
“But what about you, sir?”
“Best for you not to think about it.”
Southwick shook his head and picked up his hat. “You said the Jason’s station is a cable off our larboard beam?”
“She’d better stay a cable to leeward of us, unless she gets a signal to the contrary. Wagstaffe understands.”
“Yes, I had a word with him before he went across. It was a good idea putting him in command. It’d be risky with Aitken.”
“Yes, Aitken is too near being made post: if there’s trouble, it could count against him.”
“If there’s trouble it’ll count against you,” Southwick said gloomily.
Ramage shrugged his shoulders. “If I am dismissed from the Service, I’ve plenty to keep me occupied, but it’s Aitken’s whole life. Though thanks to prize money, I doubt if he depends on his pay.”
“Pay! Thanks to you no one in the Calypso now depends on his pay, even allowing for the villainy of the prize agents.”
Ramage grinned at Southwick’s forthright statement. “Still, I expect Aitken would like to get his flag eventually, so that when he retires to his estate in the Highlands, it’ll be as Rear-Admiral Aitken. Perhaps even Vice-Admiral, with a knighthood.”
“Could be,” Southwick agreed. “He would if it just depended on merit. This stepping into dead men’s shoes is no good. Promotion by seniority is just an insurance policy for the dullards. If you live long enough you’re bound to end up the most senior admiral in the Navy.”
“Providing you make that first jump on to the Post List,” Ramage pointed out. “Unless he is a post-captain, he doesn’t even put a foot on the bottom rung…”
“That’s understood, sir. Don’t forget he’s already refused one chance. Admittedly that was because he reckoned he wasn’t ready, and would learn a lot more by staying with you.”
“Yes, but now he’s learned all he can from me. He’s ready for the Post List, and I don’t want anything like this–” he gestured in the direction of the Jason, “–getting in the way. Now, leave me to write up my journal. Between now and the time we reach the Chops of the Channel, I have to write a full report on all this business…”
“Aye, and if you’ll allow me to stick an oar in, sir, you’d be well advised to get signed reports from the Calypso’s officers, and perhaps some of the senior petty officers.”
“You are gloomy,” Ramage commented.
“I just wonder who this Captain Shirley has for friends. As I see it, his friends are going to be our enemies, if all this business comes to trial.”
Southwick was right, of course: whatever happened, it was all bound to come to a trial which would clear or condemn Shirley. It could even turn into a situation where clearing Shirley meant condemning Ramage…All the Calypsos were certain that Shirley was mad. Perhaps not permanently, but at least temporarily. Touched by the sun, perhaps. Anyway, Bowen was going to examine him tomorrow and would write a report, but all that would not stop Shirley getting a fair trial.
It was more likely, Ramage thought ironically, to bring odium and attacks down on the head of Captain Ramage, if Shirley had friends in high places and money to pay off the press and get lampoons and pamphlets sold in the streets. Ramage knew how vicious were the attacks made on his own father, when the Earl of Blazey was made the government’s scapegoat for sending a fleet too weak and too late to deal with a French attack on the West Indies. And most shameful of all (perhaps the most shameful episode in recent British political history) there was the Byng affair: there a not-very-bright but honourable admiral had been accused of cowardice and shot to disguise the vacillating weakness and stupidity of the First Lord, Anson, and the prime minister, the Duke of Newcastle.
Stupidity? No, it was the very essence of politics: viciousness, self-interest, hunger for power and cowardice. In the case of Admiral Byng the whole crowd of them, the Duke of Newcastle, the Earl of Hardwicke (and his son-in-law Anson) and most of the rest of the party were trying to cling to power in Parliament, and they were quite prepared to murder Byng (judicially, of course: why use a stiletto when you have the law to do it?). Byng was executed and they kept power. Byng, Ramage reflected, lost his life, but the government under Newcastle and the Admiralty under Anson lost their honour (without realizing what it was).
Captain Shirley had never seen such grim-faced men sitting round his dining table, and he seemed more puzzled than alarmed. Both Wagstaffe and Aitken held pens and had to share the same inkwell as they wrote down the questions, and Shirley’s answers, making him slow down or repeat an answer. The demands for repetition were frequent because many of Shirley’s answers were difficult to credit.
The Jason was rolling her way along, astern of the convoy, in good weather. Wagstaffe had the big awning stretched over the quarterdeck and the captain’s coach, cabin and sleeping place were cool. Ramage had thought deeply about making Shirley move down into one of the officer’s cabins in the gunroom but had finally decided to leave him in his quarters and instead put Wagstaffe in the first lieutenant’s cabin, making all the lieutenants shift round one.
As soon as Ramage had come on board and Wagstaffe had the frigate under way again (at the speed the convoy was making good, nothing was lost by heaving-to the frigate to avoid getting soaked by spray which would be thrown up if the ship had to tow the Calypso’s boat alongside), Shirley – still in his long black coat – had walked over and greeted Ramage.
“Ah, my dear Ramage, how thoughtful of you to pay us a call,” he had said in a completely sincere voice, rubbing his hands as though washing them. “Can I persuade you to dine with me this time? No – then a cup of green tea, or a glass of something stronger?”
The man had been genuinely upset when Ramage refused, and again Ramage was reminded of an anxious parson who felt he was being rebuffed by his patron.
Even now, sitting round the dining table, Ramage at the head, Shirley to his left and with Aitken and Wagstaffe on his right, facing Shirley, the man exuded sincerity. Sincerity? Well, again and again Ramage was reminded of the last occasion he had met the Archbishop of Canterbury, who proved to be a most unctuous individual exuding the secretive bonhomie expected of the doorman at one of the better houses of pleasure in Westminster.
Ramage tapped the table to emphasize what he was going to say.
“Captain Shirley, for the eleventh time I must ask you why you raked the Calypso although she was displaying British colours and her pendant numbers, and was flying the correct challenge?”
“My dear Ramage, why should the Jason fire at the Calypso?”
“Don’t dodge the question,” Ramage snapped. “I am asking you.”
“On what authority, pray?”
Ramage waited until Aitken and Wagstaffe had finished writing. It gave him time to think, although God knew he had already given the subject enough thought.
“On the authority of a captain of one of the King’s ships trying to discover the reason for a traitorous and treasonable attack by another of the King’s ships.”
“But no one attacked you, treasonably or traitorously. Ask my officers. Ask my men. You have done so once already, but you have my permission to ask them again.”
This man was so calm and cool. Both Wagstaffe and Aitken were perspiring – although that could be from the effort of writing fast and concentrating. But this man Shirley – there was not even a single bead of perspiration on his brow. A belly of pork! Ramage suddenly realized that the man’s complexion, dead white and only wrinkled by lines running from each side of his nostrils to the corners of his mouth, reminded him of a familiar sight in a pork butcher’s shop. The man’s baldness heightened the effect: not only was the skull utterly hairless, but Ramage was sure (probably because of some illness, malaria, perhaps) no hair grew on the man at all. Did he have to shave? There was none of the shadow on his face that most men had by late afternoon (and even earlier in the Tropics, where the heat made hair grow faster).
His eyes were small but unusually widely spaced. However, the nose seemed to belong to another face altogether. This face was cadaverous, the skin tight over the bones, with no pouches beneath the eyes, no hint of middle age in jowls. No, there was not much flesh to wrinkle, apart from the lines beside the nose. But the nose!
It seemed to belong to a much bigger and heavier man; someone with Falstaffian girth and a plump face, and a great club of a nose that commanded attention like a blunderbuss when its owner aimed it. In keeping with the rest of the face it was bloodless, yet for its size one would have expected a healthy pink glow, something that would show up on a dark night.
Both Aitken and Wagstaffe had written down the answer. Ramage looked at Shirley again.
“Have you threatened any of your ship’s company so that they are frightened of answering my questions?”
“Why should I? I have nothing to hide! Ask them anything you like, my dear fellow.”
“When I asked you to smell the muzzle of that gun – number nine gun on the starboard side – you said you could smell nothing.”
“Nor could I! Just the usual blacking, of course.”
“In your opinion the gun had not been fired recently?”
“No. Nor was that just my opinion; it was the opinion of the men serving that gun.”
“But my officers and those of my men who were asked all smelled burnt powder and gave their opinion that the gun had been fired within the last half an hour.”
“Yes, they did, and most singular I found it. Had you threatened them?” Shirley asked archly.
“Why were you the only commission officer on deck when the Calypso came alongside?”
“Apart from two or three midshipmen, who were running messages, my officers have various different duties, of course! Really, Ramage, I do find some of your questions naïve.”
“Perhaps so, but why were all your officers at that moment confined to their cabins with a Marine sentry guarding the gunroom door?”
“There you are, that’s what I mean. You know as well as I do that in a frigate like the Jason or the Calypso there is always a Marine sentry at the gunroom door, just as there is one at the door to the captain’s quarters and, in hot weather, at the scuttle butt, so what is so singular about this particular sentry? What is curious is that you choose to go down to the gunroom at a time when the officers are in their cabins. I was on the quarterdeck – you saw me – and surely you agree that I am competent to handle the ship without assistance from some callow lieutenant?”
Ramage had a mental picture of the Jason racing across the Calypso’s bow, her shrouds missing the jibboom by inches, but this was not the time to thrash it out: it was not a subject that could be reduced to questions and answers even though, according to lawyers (indeed, the whole legal system), every situation must be, even when a man’s guilt, and thus his life, depended on answering yes or no to particular questions. “When did you stop beating your wife?” Everyone but lawyers and judicial authorities had heard that “Answer yes or no” joke but whether a man was on trial for murder or treason, or stealing a trinket or poaching a hare, it was “yes” or “no”.
Shirley turned and faced Ramage squarely. “Tell me, my dear fellow, are you attempting to remove me from my command? I am your senior by dozens of places on the Post List, as I am sure you are well aware.”
And that first question was the one I hoped you would not ask, Ramage thought to himself. He was now standing on the edge of the great pit dug by the Articles of War to trap scoundrels but also equally dangerous to officers trying to carry out their duties in the King’s Service.
Board him in the smoke: a good rule when you are not sure what to do next. “Don’t you think that attacking the Calypso justifies you being removed from your command?”
No sooner had Ramage asked the question than he realized he had provided a loophole, and Shirley was quick to stick his musket through and open fire.
“I keep telling you, Ramage, and so do my officers and men, that I d
id not attack the Calypso. You have questioned all of us, yet you persist in this absurd allegation.”
Ramage considered for a minute or two, considered the risk of the Jason suddenly attacking ships in the convoy or one of the other frigates, and made his decision. Shirley did not dispute that Ramage had the authority to remove him from his command if there was sufficient justification (something about which Ramage was far from certain). No. Shirley was only disputing whether or not the Jason had fired on the Calypso; whether or not, in fact, he had provided the justification.
“We do agree on this point, then,” Ramage said. “We agree that you say your ship did not fire on the Calypso, and we say she did.”
“Yes, indeed,” Shirley said, “that seems a very fair summary.”
Both Wagstaffe and Aitken wrote quickly.
Aitken pushed the paper across to Ramage with the quill resting on top. “I’ve written down your question and Captain Shirley’s answer,” he said. “There’s nothing else written there.”
Ramage immediately guessed his first lieutenant’s purpose. He took the pen, wrote in the date and headed it “On board His Majesty’s ship the Jason frigate” and, dipping the quill again, said to Shirley: “To avoid any misunderstanding later, perhaps you would care to read that and sign it?”
Shirley read it slowly, nodded as though there could never be any doubt that he would agree, and wrote his signature with a flourish. He gave the pen back to Ramage and slid the paper along the table. “Now you sign it, eh? Then there can be no question of what we disagree about.”
Although Ramage did not use his title in the Service, this sheet of paper was becoming (was already?) a legal document, so he signed simply: “Ramage”.