Ramage's Trial r-14

by Dudley Pope

  "I understand that, sir," Southwick said, looking round to make sure no one else could hear them, "but I was thinking of Their Lordships."

  "What about Their Lordships?"

  "These damned shipowners have a lot of influence, sir. If we left one of their ships behind and they complained to Their Lordships . . . why, they could even cast you in damages. You personally, sir. If a shipowner cast you in damages in the High Court, and Their Lordships then decided you should face a court-martial under one of the Articles of War ..."

  "I'd be in a pickle," Ramage admitted ruefully. "But I'll have some witnesses in my favour - the Count of Rennes, which means the interest of the Prince of Wales, and Mr Yorke and the master of the Emerald."

  "Mr Yorke, yes, and all the King's officers in the convoy, but beyond that, remember the old saying, 'Put not thy trust in princes'."

  "We could trust the Count."

  "Ah, yes, more than most men - particularly since he owes you his life. But," Southwick said carefully, "I had in mind some of his friends in England: those who'd mistake the Board of Admiralty for another kind of gaming table."

  Ramage nodded because the old master's warning made a great deal of sense. Fame was a high place surrounded with traps set by jealous men. Without intending or wishing it. Ramage had become one of the Royal Navy's most famous frigate captains, not a role he had sought or particularly wanted but one which was the result of many actions, many desperate fights, many prizes taken, many of his own men killed or wounded and more of the enemy. He had taken many chances too, and occasionally disobeyed orders deliberately, but for the good of the King's service. And he always had loyal shipmates like Southwick, and seamen as brave and faithful as Jackson, Stafford and Rossi.

  Yet Southwick was thinking beyond all this: his memory was going back to Ramage's childhood, when his father the Earl of Blazey was one of the youngest and certainly the most brilliant admirals in the Navy and who had been serving a government that needed a scapegoat for having sent out too small a fleet against the French and too late to do any good. Their scapegoat had been Admiral the Earl of Blazey, and his subsequent trial had split the Navy and the country.

  "Let's hope the mules behave themselves," Ramage said, and Southwick nodded: he had understood all the unspoken additional qualifications, ranging from Sarah to Sidney Yorke's support and the bad luck which put at least one Beatrice in the convoy. Another half a dozen Beatrices would most probably turn up in the next week. It was remarkable how these ships generally needed extra canvas and cordage before the weather turned bad as they reached the more northern latitudes . . .

  Yes, the convoy was in good shape, the box of ships sailing along easily to the northwest to skirt Bermuda, the wind steady from the southeast, with L'Espoir out ahead, La Robuste tacking and wearing along the western edge, and to windward, placing her astern of the convoy, the Calypso under easy sail, in a good position to hurry down to the convoy in an emergency - and swoop on any merchantman showing signs of furling her wings for the night.

  It was time for the watch to change. In a few minutes Southwick would be relieved by Kenton. Over in the Emerald, hidden from the Calypso by the rest of the ships in the convoy, Sidney Yorke and Alexis would probably be drinking tea and talking of - what? Their forebears in Barbados and Jamaica? He shrugged and wished Sarah's face would come clearly in his memory.

  Sidney Yorke spread some soft butter over the slice of bread on his plate, and nodded towards the jam dish. Alexis pushed it towards him and said: "If only this weather would last all the way to England."

  "We'd take a year to get there!"

  "I don't think I'd mind. London is so boring . . ."

  "Really boring - for a beautiful young woman like you?" Yorke asked with mild sarcasm. "Think what it must be like for a plain young woman!"

  "It's much easier," Alexis said unexpectedly, "if you're plain and your father is only moderately wealthy, then you can dance and talk vapid nonsense. But if Nature made you beautiful and you happen to have a fair competence, as everyone seems to know I have, every man in the room, whether a pimply youth or some jaded old roué, is chasing after you."

  "Beauty and the beasts," Yorke teased.

  "Yes," Alexis said crossly, "and even when you are there they ogle me and whisper suggestions."

  "You never tell me!"

  "I should think not! If you knew what some of them said, you'd call them out, even tho' duelling is forbidden now."

  "Why don't you find yourself a nice husband," Yorke said banteringly. "Then he can protect you from the pimply youths and jaded roués."

  "Oh yes, one looks around and finds 'nice husbands' are thick on the ground, like ripe apples after a thunderstorm. I notice you're still a bachelor and certainly you rarely approve of anyone I happen to talk to for more than four minutes."

  "Well, you do seem to choose the most extraordinary men. No chins, noses like beaks, ears like mug handles, wispy moustaches and with 'fortune-hunter' embroidered all over their elegant coats."

  "Dear brother," Alexis said patiently, "you don't understand and you never listen. I've met only one real man in the last two or three years. One."

  "Why didn't you marry him, then?"

  "He didn't ask me," she said, blushing in spite of herself.

  "Oh? So being rich and beautiful isn't enough, eh?"

  "He was already married," she said bitterly, and as Yorke went on to tease her she burst into tears and, gathering up her skirt with one hand and trying to hide her face with the other, she ran from the cabin.

  Yorke sighed and cursed his crude tongue: the girl was probably frightened to death of ending her days as a spinster, surrounded by lapdogs of all varieties and visited daily by a fawning parson hoping to be remembered in her will. . . Alexis who, even though she was his sister and he was prejudiced, was among the half dozen women he had ever met who combined beauty, elegance and wit with a natural warmth that prevented her being distant and forbidding.

  But who was this man? Yorke was curious, but searching his memory he could not remember seeing her with any particularly outstanding married man. In the last two or three years, she had said. Well, he had not been away very often, so who the devil could it be? He knew of only one man he'd care to have as a brother-in-law. Anyway, he would have to go and make his peace with her.

  She had been badly upset when she saw the Kingsnorth plantation and the old house as they had passed the northwestern corner of Barbados: she had wept when he told her what he could remember of Ned Yorke, their great-great-great-great-uncle, who had been driven from his estate by Cromwell's Roundheads, and she had wanted to know more - with what seemed to him to be a fierce longing - of the French woman who had escaped with him to become his wife and their distant aunt. That was the trouble, sailing the turbulent islands, be they British, French, Danish. Swedish or Dutch: there were too many Yorke family memories entwined in their violent history. In fact, what few people seemed to realize was that the history of the West Indies was simply the combined history of settler families, be they English, Scots, Welsh, Irish, Dutch, French, Danish, Swedish . . . yes, and Spanish and Portuguese, of course; the other half of the coin, as it were.

  At that moment the door of the saloon opened and Alexis, now dry-eyed, came in and said briefly: "I'm sorry; I made a fool of myself."

  He wanted to ask her about the man, but he knew her too well: he was sure her tears were at least partly caused by vexation with herself for having said so much.

  "Let's go up on deck," he said. "It's going to be a glorious sunset, and we can watch Nicholas chasing up anyone starting to dawdle."

  "His ship is so far astern it's impossible to see her - will she stay there the whole voyage?"

  "No, probably not. The escorts usually shift about according to the wind direction. The Calypso will probably always stay to windward - as you can see, we have a quartering wind, but as it hauls round I expect you'll find the Calypso closer to us."

  "We might invit
e him to dinner - on a calm day, of course."

  "Indeed, we shall. And he'll invite us back, and you'll see what it's like for a young lady to be controlling her skirts while she's being hoisted on board one of the King's ships."

  "Hoisted? What, like a bullock, slung over a strop?"

  "No, no! The Royal Navy are very polite where women are concerned. Instead of the strap under the belly they use for a bullock, they lower a small seat, like the one for a child's swing. You climb into it and settle your skirts and arrange a brave smile on your face, and they hoist you right up into the air out of the boat on to the deck, where - if you are beautiful or important enough - the captain and all the officers are waiting to salute you and kiss your hand. A glimpse of an ankle as you alight from the chair and they are your slaves for - well, until the next beautiful ankle comes on board, which is unlikely to be within the next five years if they're on a foreign station!"

  "Why don't we have such a chair in the Emerald?"

  "We probably have, but we usually have the gangway rigged. You'd sooner walk up a gangway, I know."

  She smiled. "It depends on the naval officers," she said.

  A few moments later she asked: "What shall we have for dinner?"

  Yorke looked puzzled. "When?"

  "Oh wake up. Why, when we have Captain Ramage for dinner."

  "We'll have to invite some of his officers as well, so we'll kill a sheep."

  She had already produced a tiny notebook from a pocket in her dress. "Whom shall we invite, apart from Captain Ramage?"

  "For Heaven's sake call him Nicholas. It's embarrassing when you are so formal with my best friend!"

  "But I've only just met him," she protested. "He's not my best friend!"

  "If anything happened to me, you'd find he was," Yorke said quietly.

  "Well," she said cheerfully, "he's good company, so why not stay alive and let's all be friends. Now, who else are we inviting - that delightful Mr Southwick, for one."

  "And the nephew - Paolo Orsini. He is a nice lad and I know Nicholas is very fond of him."

  "He speaks excellent English. Who is he exactly? Is he really related to Captain Ramage - to Nicholas?"

  "Dear me, that's a bit of a long story. Once upon a time," he said, dropping his voice as though beginning a fairy story, "there was a handsome young lieutenant in the Royal Navy who landed from an open boat on the coast of Tuscany and rescued a beautiful young marchesa from under the very feet of Bonaparte's cavalry."

  Alexis nodded. "That sounds a very romantic story - but I'm sure it doesn't finish there, does it? All proper fairy stories have a happy ending."

  "We don't know yet if this one has: it's still happening. Anyway, Nicholas rescued her with some of his men, fellows like Jackson and Stafford, who came on board the other day with the lieutenant who brought a message."

  "Then what happened? Didn't I hear that she came back to England? I seem to remember her family were old friends of the Ramages - or perhaps her mother was."

  "Yes, her mother. The Marchesa is the ruler of Volterra, so you can see Bonaparte was angry that she slipped through his fingers."

  "Sidney, come on!" Alexis said firmly, "you can't leave the story there."

  "Well, that's more or less all there is to it. Everyone thought Gianna and Nicholas would get married - until they realized the religious problems, she being Catholic."

  "Were they in love?" Alexis asked casually.

  "Blessed if I know. He didn't talk about her much when we were together in that Post Office packet - yet she was waiting for him when we arrived in Lisbon."

  "But he eventually married someone else ..."

  "Yes, very recently."

  "But why is the story of the Marchesa unfinished?"

  "Well, it seems she was very anxious to get back to her people in Volterra. It's not a large country but as soon as Bonaparte signed the Treaty of Amiens she decided to go back."

  "She trusted that dreadful man?"

  "Don't forget that most of the British government did, too. Addington and his half-witted friends thought they had pulled off a great coup, whereas they were falling into Bonaparte's trap. But with the Marchesa, I think it was a sense of duty."

  "Why didn't Captain Ramage dissuade her?"

  Yorke stifled a smile: the "Nicholas" quickly reverted to a formal "Captain Ramage" when Alexis disapproved of something. "He told me that he and his parents spent days trying to warn her that she might fall into the hands of Bonaparte's secret police."

  "Yet she went ..."

  "Yes, and during the Peace the Admiralty sent Nicholas with the Calypso on a long surveying voyage down to Brazil, and there he met his wife."

  "She is Brazilian?"

  "No," Yorke explained patiently. "I'm not sure of the details - damnation, I've only had time to speak to him a couple of times. Her ship was captured and he rescued her and her parents."

  "He seems to make a habit of rescuing beautiful damsels in distress."

  "Yes, doesn't he," Yorke said, ignoring the sarcasm. "Very lucky for the damsels, wouldn't you say? Saved the Marchesa from Bonaparte's assassins, and Sarah (that's his wife) from a crowd of half-breed pirates."

  "All right, all right," she said, "I was just being catty. If he wasn't married I'd sit on a rock and imitate a Siren ..."

  "But the Sirens lured poor sailors to their doom," Yorke protested.

  "So they did," Alexis said drily and with a straight face.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Shortly after dawn next morning Ramage stood at the forward end of the quarterdeck staring into the greyness, although his thoughts were several thousands of miles away. He heard the traditional hail from the lookouts on deck at six different positions round the ship, "See a grey goose at a mile" - the signal for a couple of men to go aloft, one to the foremasthead and the other to the mainmast, and watch the horizon.

  Because Admiral Clinton would be continuing a tight blockade of Brest, and there had been no frigate flying into Barbados with a warning that the French Mediterranean fleet had left Toulon and broken through the Gut into the Atlantic, the Royal Navy for the time being could take one thing for granted: that the chances were that any squadron or fleet of ships they sighted would be friendly, although single ships could be privateers.

  Anyway, the Calypso's eyes could now see a good deal further and almost every minute, as the sun, although still hidden, came up the eastern side of the earth heading for the horizon, the circle of visibility widened. After spending a moonless night unable to see more than a couple of hundred yards (the advantage of a tropical night was the clarity of the stars, which made their own light) the lookouts would soon be able to see to the horizon; from a height of eye of one hundred feet, they could see a distance of ten miles, and a ship beyond that would be visible the moment the tips of her masts began to rise over the far side of the horizon.

  The officer of the deck, the small and red-haired third lieutenant Kenton, whose heavily freckled face was continually peeling because of the sun, came up to Ramage and formally reported that the lookouts were aloft.

  Kenton waited for the next step in the routine by which one of the King's ships greeted a new day at sea in wartime. At the moment, every one of the Calypso's 12-pounder guns and six carronades were ready to fire: the ship was at general quarters, the way every King's ship met the dawn at sea, ready to defend herself or attack.

  Ramage took one last look round the horizon (almost a formality, since Kenton's telescope would have spotted even a distant gull perched on a bottle).

  "Very well, stand down from general quarters." Kenton saluted and then turned away, grasping the japanned speaking trumpet. The son of a half-pay captain, he had inherited all his father's seagoing characteristics except a stentorian voice. Kenton's shouted orders needed the help of the speaking trumpet to lob his voice as far as the fo'c'sle.

  The men ran in the guns and secured them, covered the flintlocks with aprons, small canvas hoods that tied down securely
to protect the flint and mechanism from salt spray, put pistols and muskets back into the deck lockers, slipped the ash staves of the long boarding pikes into the racks round each mast, and then made their way below.

  Ramage saw the fourth lieutenant coming up the quarterdeck ladder to relieve Kenton. Young Martin was, with Kenton, the newest of the Calypso's lieutenants but at twenty-three or four - Ramage could not remember which - Martin had already experienced as much action as most officers saw in a lifetime. The son of the master shipwright at the Chatham Dockyard, Martin was known throughout the ship as "Blower", an improbable nickname used openly by his fellow officers and discreetly by the rest of the ship's company and bestowed out of admiration, because Lieutenant William Martin was a superb flautist. He played the wooden tube as though it was a part of his own body: the sheer pleasure that it and music gave him found an echo among the men, who did not care whether he was playing an obscure piece of baroque music or one of the traditional forebitters, used when the men were heaving at the capstan, bringing the anchor home.

  Ramage watched the two young lieutenants: Kenton reporting the course and any orders from the captain that remained unexecuted (there was none), plus any unusual occurrences, thus carrying out the captain's standing orders for handing over the deck. The two lieutenants now faced forward, and Ramage guessed they were discussing the convoy. Yes, there were still seventy-two ships, and considering all things they were in reasonable formation. For that Ramage knew he could thank a night of steady southeasterly winds and probably the impression he had made at the convoy conference. But steady winds and past impressions did not last; one should never trust the weather or one's memory . . .

  A convoy under way with dawn breaking is always an impressive sight, and he continued looking at the ships. The increasing pinkness now spreading over the eastern horizon like a water-colour wash gave the flax of the merchant ships' sails a warmth which was gently shaded by the curve into which the wind pressed them. Yet it was hard to believe the ships were more than toys being pulled by unseen strings across a village pond: at this distance each seemed much too small to be carrying hundreds of tons of valuable cargo in her hold. For all that, cargoes from the West Indies were smelly rather than exotic, he reminded himself, mostly molasses and hides . . . Sometimes there were more aromatic spices such as nutmeg, but molasses were a touchy cargo, liable to absorb the smell of anything else stowed near it.