Ramage's Challenge r-15

by Dudley Pope

  "Don't keep on blaming yourself, sir," Southwick said, realizing the mood: when the captain's deep-set brown eyes became unfocused, the normally hard line of the jaw was slack, the skin was taut over that slightly hooked nose, the hands were clasped behind the back, knuckles white - then Captain Ramage's thoughts were hundreds of miles away, reliving some episode concerning her Ladyship or the Marchesa. It was understandable, but all the worry in the world would not restore either of them. And at this moment it was better for the captain to worry about those extraordinary orders from the Admiralty.

  Southwick considered they were extraordinary orders. Parole was a touchy business. British officers held as prisoners of war in France (and French officer prisoners in England) were usually offered parole, which meant giving your word of honour that you would not escape. In return, you were allowed either to lodge (at your own expense!) close by, or be allowed out from the actual prison each day.

  The Admiralty viewed parole very seriously - as far as British officers were concerned. If a British officer gave the French his parole and in return received a degree of liberty, then woe betide him if he used the opportunity to escape and reach England.

  Almost the first question asked an escaped British naval officer on reaching England was whether he had given his parole. If he had, then he was sent back to France, where he would have to wait his turn to be exchanged in the normal way for a French officer held prisoner in England.

  It occurred to Southwick that Bonaparte must laugh at the quaint and punctilious British, because no one had ever heard of the French sending back a French officer who had broken his parole and escaped.

  By the same token, he thought contemptuously, as far as he knew no British consul ever considered that a Briton abroad could be right in an argument with foreign authority (unless, of course, the person involved could influence the consul's career). By and large - according to Mr Ramage - all Britons should avoid British consulates or embassies if they ever needed help: the hirelings of His Majesty's Secretary of State for the Foreign Department were chosen for their vapidity and their dancing and conversational skills, not their brains (which, if discovered Mr Ramage maintained, could wreck a diplomat's career).

  So what happens, Southwick wondered, if we get to Pitigliano and find that two admirals, three generals, four colonels and five peers of the realm have given their parole? It is all very well for the Admiralty to say they must be left behind, but what happens when these people's friends hear about it in England? Once again the government would be looking for a scapegoat, since no government could be wrong, and no politician would ever risk losing a vote . . .

  "Who else is to blame if not me?" Ramage asked quietly, seeming to have come back from a long journey.

  Southwick's sniff implied that the answer was so obvious he was having difficulty in remaining patient. "Sir, have you ever considered the answer you'd get if you asked either lady if given the opportunity she'd change anything?"

  "That's absurd," Ramage snapped. "No one chooses death."

  Southwick gave a shrug sufficiently violent to be obvious in spite of the newly tarred oilskins encasing him. "Supposing you'd been killed rescuing Lady Sarah in the Murex, or the Marchesa in that affair with the Post Office packet - would you have changed anything that went earlier?"

  "That's not at all the same thing," Ramage said angrily. "I was doing my duty. If I am killed in the process, that's too bad."

  "And that's just what both ladies would say. The Marchesa felt it her duty to go back to her people in the Kingdom of Volterra, even though you and your father warned her of the risks from Bonaparte's police. Lady Sarah was, I'm absolutely sure, proud of having helped you capture the Murex and escape from Brest: that was her duty - to her husband and to her country. Noblesse oblige, they call it, sir."

  "You talk up a gale of wind," Ramage said bitterly, "but it doesn't bring 'em back."

  Southwick looked at him squarely, the grandfather talking to his grandson. "Nor does moping."

  Finally Ramage nodded. He glanced across at the feathers on one of the windvanes. "If those men are steering the right course, the wind is starting to veer."

  CHAPTER FOUR

  A steady céruse gave the Calypso a brisk beat up to Cape Carbonara, the south-eastern tip of Sardinia, and then once round it the frigate was able to ease sheets and steer northward along its east coast, ignoring the watch towers perched on the cliffs.

  Because she was French built, the Calypso would almost certainly be identified as a French national ship by the thickheaded lookouts, and in any case to most of them ships with more than one mast were the same. A single frigate was therefore unlikely to cause an alarm: her very course and obvious destination - Leghorn or Genoa on the mainland, Porto Vecchio or Bastia in Corsica - made it obvious that her voyage was routine.

  With the sky clearing and the Calypso's bow not shouldering up spray, the frigate now looked more like a laundry than a ship o' war. Ramage had given permission for lines to be rigged so the men could hang up their wet clothes. The sailmaker had carefully unrolled a bolt of canvas, one end of which had been soaked by a random deck leak, and draped it across three guns because, left in its rack, the cloth would breed mildew on a hot day.

  Ramage had read the Admiralty's secret orders once again, reflected on parole, which had concerned Southwick (and realized that if all the prisoners had given their parole none could be rescued and the Calypsos would have risked their lives for nothing), and then settled down with pen and paper for some mapmaking.

  Pitigliano. Yes, it was easy to sketch a map from memory showing the section of the Italian mainland between the coast and Pitigliano, and the towns (most of them really large villages) between: Manciano, with the turning north to Saturnia and its sulphur baths (much favoured by the Romans, and the Etruscans before them), and which might have given its name to Saturnalia; and Osteria and Farnese and Valentano to the south. And then, he remembered, Marsiliana, Sgrillozzo and la Sgrilla, hamlets on the road before one reached Manciano.

  Scale, that was the problem: he was trying to remember how many miles it had been from Orbetello on the coast to Manciano, and then on to Pitigliano, while on a boyhood journey to Orvieto. His strongest memories were white dust and thirst. . . Still, Pitigliano was about thirty miles south of Monte Amiata, which was by far the highest mountain around, and perhaps a dozen miles from the foothills of Mount Elmo, so in daylight there were some unmistakable reference points.

  No problem, signore - except that Pitigliano must also be about thirty miles from the coast... miles covered presumably by French mounted patrols as well as gendarmes and Italian farmers and villagers who might consider it wiser to help the French (who, after all, had been in occupation for several years) rather than a crowd of passing Englishmen who had done nothing to help them ...

  But in what disguise would the Calypsos be? A troupe of buskers, tumbling to the tunes of "Blower" Martin's flute? The problem comprised two halves - going and coming back. Going, they would be a group of the Calypso's officers and ship's company, in some sort of disguise. Coming back (assuming parole had caused no problems) the Calypsos would be escorting freed hostages of unknown rank, age and physical condition. How could they be disguised? A crowd of widows going to early mass, rigged out in black?

  The captain of the Calypso frigate might grumble that the Admiralty was picking on him, but in fairness to Their Lordships (how one hated being fair to the Board) he was an obvious choice. He spoke fluent Italian, thanks to a childhood spent in Italy. And he knew much of Tuscany quite well - not that Their Lordships would consider that: as far as they were concerned Pitigliano could be anywhere between Genoa and Venice, Milan and Naples or Bergamo and Bari. Ramage spoke Italian and knew the coast: that was all that mattered. Oh yes, and he had on board as a midshipman the nephew of that Marchesa who was the ruler of Volterra - the one who is missing . . . Ramage could picture the conversation round the long table in the boardroom: St Vincent nodding to
save words, Captain Markham (who had intervened on the Board's behalf at that travesty of a court-martial), another one or two members of the Board to make up a quorum, and Evan Nepean, the Board secretary, busy taking the minutes.

  Two Italian speakers: that would settle it. But, Ramage realized, he was in a better position than the Board knew because, thanks to them helping to get the Murex out of Brest, he had on board four French seamen: four royalists who, until a few months ago, had lived in France and knew a good deal about the way the new regime conducted its affairs. And of course there was Rossi, the Genovese seaman. Rossi's life as a youngster in Genoa had taught him the same skill with a dagger that the Cockney Stafford had learned with a set of pick-locks.

  And there was Hill. A couple of days ago the new lieutenant had made a pun in French to Orsini. Ramage, happening to overhear it, discovered that Hill's mother was French, a royalist who had married a London banker many years ago but who had absolutely no ability to learn English. This resulted in the house being staffed with French servants (refugees once the war had started) and Hill being bilingual from the time he started to talk.

  What a happy little party they would make, Ramage thought sourly: Gilbert and his Frenchmen led by Hill and singing Ça Ira; Paolo (who in fact was developing a healthy baritone) and Rossi singing a rousing duet from an Italian opera; and he and Jackson humming some old English sea chanty, and all of them coughing from the white dust covering the flat rock forming the roads, slapping mosquitoes and cursing their sore and swollen feet.

  Life on board one of the King's ships was no training for marching over rough tracks - or, come to that, well-made roads. Running barefoot on wooden decks was one thing; marching to Pitigliano was another, especially since most of the men owned only light shoes. The Marines had boots, but they spoke neither French nor Spanish. Some of them had such local accents, Ramage remembered, that only their proud parents would claim they spoke English . . .

  Tongues and feet: they were the first considerations. Who could speak what language, and who could be fitted with boots from the purser's store on board, even if it eventually meant borrowing from the Marines. Borrowing from the Marines would, of course, mean that the Marine lieutenant, Rennick, would want to join in. He was a brave and competent officer, but his life had necessarily been governed by the drill book, so that now he lacked the flexibility of the sea officers who had to handle the ship amid sudden squalls, sails blowing out, or the thousand and one emergencies which gave no warning, no time to look up any answers in a notebook.

  None of which answered the question of how to get to Pitigliano - and how, once there, to get in touch with the British hostages. Nor how (if they had not given their parole) to rescue the hostages and get them on board the Calypso. That, my friend, is why orders can be written in a paragraph, but the subsequent report of proceedings, describing how the orders were carried out, usually takes several pages.

  Pitigliano . . . Manciano . . . Saturnia . . . All small but interesting places he had once dreamed of visiting again with Sarah when Bonaparte had been defeated and a lasting peace signed. And, assuming that Gianna had survived, they would visit her in Volterra, the old city with its scores of towers lying just to the north.

  Yes, in his daydreaming (while they were still honeymooning in France, before the war started again) he had taken Sarah on his own Grand Tour of Italy. Not the usual one, when most of the time was spent looking at painting and sculpture in Milan, Florence, Siena and Venice, and in Rome visiting all the Romans one could not avoid but whose conversation would be limited to social gossip and the same vapid comments that Romans had been making for centuries about paintings, and the activities of cicisbeos. No, he wanted had wanted, he corrected himself) to show Sarah the Italy that ranged from the glorious palace at Caserta (splendid to look at from the outside but bare and cavernous inside) to the so-called beehive houses of Friuli. To so many English people Italy, after the Grand Tour, was simply the jumbled memories of social visits and picture frames.

  He unrolled a map of southern Tuscany. It covered from Cecina on the coast, eastwards across to Siena and ended with Arezzo forming the top right-hand corner. Then it ran south to include Perugia, passing just east of Orvieto and then down to the border with Lazio. It followed the border westward, skirting Lake Bolsena, arriving back at the coast between Montalto di Castro and Capalbio. There was a lookout tower at Montalto and, he remembered vividly, the next one north: the Torre di Buranaccio. Several lifetimes ago (or so it seemed) he had landed there with Jackson to rescue a group of Italian aristocrats escaping just ahead of Bonaparte's advancing troops. One of them was supposed to be the aged Marchesa di Volterra, by chance an old friend of his parents. Damnation, what misunderstandings had arisen when it transpired that the Marchesa was in fact young and beautiful (and wilful, too!), the daughter of the one they had expected.

  Somehow the Torre di Buranaccio (where at one point in the misunderstanding she had presented a pistol at him and was quite prepared to fire it) was a beginning. It had brought him to the notice of Nelson, then of course only a commodore, and Lord St Vincent (then only Sir John Jervis, since the battle for which he received his earldom and title - and in which Commodore Nelson and Lieutenant Ramage had played an exciting part - had not yet taken place).

  Maps, he reminded himself firmly and stared down at the one spread on the desk, weighted down to stop it rolling up again. So there it was, a slightly skewed square of land with the small lump of Argentario hanging off the left-hand corner. Argentario was a diamond-shaped, mountainous island joined to the mainland by two causeways. Between them on the mainland was the small fortified town of Orbetello but, more important, the northern causeway joined the mainland just opposite where the track to Pitigliano turned inland from the Via Aurelia, which ran along the coast only a few yards inland and along which so many Roman armies had marched to and from Rome.

  So follow that track from the Via Aurelia. After a couple of miles it went through the first village, which was not as big as its name, la Barca del Grazi, and whose sole importance seemed to be that it was a fork where another track branched left to many more hill towns forming a chain round the foot of Monte Amiata. Damnation, it was hard to follow the track without traipsing off along the side roads of boyhood memories, when he and his mother and a couple of coachmen (there were plenty of bandits across the Maremma, and highwaymen lurked near inns favoured by wealthy travellers) explored Tuscany. They had stayed at most of the hill towns where the inns were so small that often mother and son occupied the only available rooms and the two coachmen had to lodge with friends of the innkeeper. And a church built after 1300 was regarded as recent.

  So on the road to Pitigliano . . . That was the shortest and easiest approach by road and without going down to Montalto di Castro and taking the road - little more than a track - that ran along the edge of Lake Bolsena, twisting to come into Pitigliano from the east, the opposite direction, it was the only way. One could start off from Montalto di Castro and scramble across country through the corner of Lazio, but that meant risking running into marshes at the northern end of the Maremma. More important, apart from the swampiness of the marshes forming the Maremma (which extended all the way down to Rome) they were notorious for malaria: there was something in the damp air which meant that people living in the hamlets on the road to Tarquinia and then on to Rome were plagued with ague. He did not want to risk any of his men falling victims - not after years in the Tropics when he and the surgeon, Bowen, kept the Calypso free of all the diseases which so far had killed thousands more men out there than fighting the French. Very well, he told himself, you have refreshed your memory about the track to Pitigliano; now decide how you get to the track to start off and how you then proceed along it. How the Admiralty people loved that word "proceed": along with "whereas" it must be their favourite. No captain was ever ordered to "go", and no captain in his report ever "went": always "proceed" or "proceeded". Along with "prior" and a few other wor
ds which fools and lawyers used like pointing fingers because they were almost illiterate or too lazy to think, "proceeded" had a high place on the list of words Ramage would like to remove from the language.

  So, picking up where you interrupted yourself at the thought of "proceeding", consider first just how you will "proceed" along the dusty track to Pitigliano with your merry men. And, of course, when you get there, what you do about finding and rescuing the British hostages. Let us (for the moment) not bother with getting back to the coast with them: there will be time enough to consider that when you find (to your astonishment) that the plan so far has worked. Ah, yes, he thought, I must remember to start that section of my report to the Admiralty with the Board's favourite word, "whereas". Indeed, after the traditional "I have the honour to report", he would slip in a "whereas" to introduce his reference to the orders he had received.

  Ahem. He coughed in a little mime for his own benefit. We are getting ahead of ourselves; at the moment the Italian mainland is a good hundred miles away from the Calypso, and Pitigliano is another thirty miles inland . . .

  Did the French carry the important prisoners in carts or coaches, or did they have to march? And if march (which was most likely), was it all the way from France? Or were these the Britons caught when the war began again while visiting southern France, and the Grand Tour cities of Italy? That was more probable. Marching along those dusty roads . . . still, it might have been winter, when they would be ankle-deep in mud. They probably spent the night in barns, sleeping on straw. Just as unpleasant for the French guards, of course, if that was any comfort. He pictured a column of men, possibly in chains, trudging along a muddy road, with French guards, unshaven and just as muddy, trying to count them from time to time, and cursing them and telling them to hurry .. . And he also pictured men like Stafford and Southwick and Hill and Kenton and Martin, up to all sorts of tricks to make the life of the guards more miserable. With that picture in his mind he bent over the map once again. It was now obvious how to do it - wasn't it?