Ramage and the Freebooters

by Dudley Pope

‘The consequences of your refusing, sir, are much graver than you can possibly guess.’

  Ramage had tried to sound pontifical and was pleased with the result.

  ‘Oh very well, come along then. I don’t approve, though. I’m acting under protest – remember that, Ramage.’

  ‘I’ll remember, sir,’ Ramage said, taking little care to keep the ambiguity out of his voice.

  She was sitting in a wicker armchair when they entered the room and wearing a severely cut lime-green dress, her face pale. Ramage watched her closely as she looked up at Sir Jason, who stammered out an embarrassed, vague explanation for their visit. She was holding what looked like a religious book and her hand was trembling. Her eyes were slightly red, as though very recently she had been crying, and Ramage wondered the reason.

  ‘Of course I have no objection to His Lordship asking me questions, Sir Jason,’ she said easily. ‘I’m flattered that he’s interested in any answers I could give. So far he has only asked me to dance with him.’

  Her smile was genuine but Ramage suspected it took more effort than it should and Sir Jason, who had obviously expected to find her indignant, stood nonplussed.

  ‘Perhaps you could spare me ten minutes in your study later, Sir Jason?’ Ramage asked.

  ‘Oh yes, by all means. Oh indeed, any time.’

  He backed out of the room and shut the door. Ramage walked over to the window and looked out. A tiny humming-bird hovered almost motionless before the bell-shaped blossom of a golden alamanda, the sun catching its dark green plumage.

  Ramage could hear Sir Jason’s footsteps receding down the corridor, and he waited two or three minutes, still watching the humming-bird and irrelevantly noting he’d never really appreciated the beauty of the blossom.

  Slowly he turned and faced her, deliberately keeping his back to the light so that his face was in shadow.

  ‘You came in a hurry, Nicholas. I heard you swearing from half-way up the hill. You shouldn’t make horses gallop in this heat – it’s cruel. Is there some sudden emergency?’

  ‘No,’ Ramage said casually. ‘But it’s sometimes useful to let people think you usually ride slowly. Then they’re more likely to be surprised when you suddenly gallop.’

  She smiled and shook her head. ‘I’m afraid the significance of that profound remark is beyond the comprehension of a mere woman!’

  Ramage smiled back reassuringly, hating his necessary hypocrisy.

  ‘The Governor says you have a migraine. Isn’t a darkened room the treatment for that?’

  ‘Yes, but don’t tell the Governor; otherwise he won’t believe my excuse for not working today. The truth is I found last night’s ball rather exhausting. Obviously you didn’t!’

  Although there was a wealth of meaning in the last two sentences there was neither coyness nor modesty; just a plain statement. For a moment Ramage was uncertain if she was genuinely and naturally resuming their strange and briefly passionate relationship where it had left off only a few hours earlier. But the hand holding the book was still trembling – why didn’t she have the sense to put it in her lap? – and her upper lip and brow were now covered with fine beads of perspiration, yet the room was cool.

  ‘Exhausting? No, not at all. Enlightening, though.’

  She glanced up suddenly, looking him straight in the eye. Although there was no embarrassment, Ramage thought he detected fear. Yet he wasn’t sure because she was unlike any woman he’d ever met. To her, he suspected, the normal usages of polite conversation, the white lies and gentle hypocrisies of society, were foreign or abhorrent. Or maybe she was just brazen; a consummate actress. It was one or the other; there was no middle path.

  She said quietly, ‘Nicholas, say what you have to say, because remarks like that are wounding, and you’re watching me like a tiger.’

  For a moment her eyes seemed to – he turned back to the window, deeply puzzled. ‘Wounding,’ she’d said. He gripped the sill and stared at the blossom without seeing it. The anger and bitterness which had exploded inside him like a volcano in Colonel Wilson’s office had suddenly gone. On the one hand he was thankful because now he was thinking more clearly; but on the other hand he realized it was making his task harder.

  Although certain his suspicions were well-grounded, he now wondered if it was as straightforward as he’d thought. He sensed some powerful, complicated reason behind it all; something as weird as voodoo and equally inexplicable.

  Or was that what he hoped? Was that what he wanted to be told because he’d fallen in love with her? He brushed the idea away impatiently: of course he had! Of course that’s what he’d hoped to hear! That’s why he’d been so angry. Why, he thought bitterly, he’d behaved like a cuckolded husband confronting the unfaithful wife. And he wasn’t even married.

  He glared at his knuckles, which were white from his grip on the window sill. Admitting it all to himself seemed to make it easier: at least he now admitted he’d fallen in love with her, and warned himself of the danger that private emotions would interfere – were interfering, up to this moment – with his duties.

  And still were: there was no point in glossing over it. What did he do now? How was he going to get from her the secret of the drums? Bully her, reduce her to tears, frighten her into revealing everything she knew and had done? Or did he try – well almost seduce her, using her feeling for him (if she had any: he was sure she had – but she might be a superb actress) to get the information he wanted?

  He turned to find her weeping silently, sobs shaking her whole body. He took a step to hold her, then drew back. Trying to push his emotions to one side he told himself coldly that first he needed to know if she was genuine or just acting a part. And he needed to know for two reasons – because he was in Grenada on the King’s business, and because – well, because he’d fallen in love with her.

  But where to begin? Are you a spy? Do you love me? If a spy, why? If you love me – damnation! Ridiculous questions – yet he had to know the answers.

  She looked up at him and whispered: ‘Ask the questions!’

  He found he could say nothing, and after a few moments she said: ‘You’re afraid to hear the answers.’

  He nodded dumbly.

  Still speaking quietly but with what Ramage was startled to realize was bitterness and contempt for herself in her voice, she pleaded: ‘Oh for the love of God ask! If only I’d had the strength this morning I would never have heard them!’

  ‘What do you mean, “strength”?’

  She shook her head despairingly.

  ‘I’ve spent the morning trying to find the courage to end my life – and I couldn’t. Now you know why I must hear the questions: that they come from your lips is probably part of my punishment.’

  Although almost numbed by her words, Ramage knew she’d already told him all but the details: she was the spy, she was not a consummate actress – and perhaps she did love him.

  He knelt beside her, took one of her hands in his and, cursing the banality of the phrase, said: ‘Tell me what happened.’

  ‘No! Just ask questions!’

  Her vehemence startled him, but she avoided his eyes.

  ‘How can I? I don’t know where to begin.’

  ‘Oh please don’t make me sound as if I was confessing everything to a priest. Just ask questions – then perhaps you’ll begin to understand.’ But she shook her head as she added, ‘No, you can never do that.’

  By now Ramage knew that question-and-answer was the only way and he remained kneeling. It’d be easier for her to answer if he wasn’t towering over her, and he had no doubt now that everything she would say would be the truth.

  ‘Claire, if I must ask questions, the first one is obvious: did you hear me tell the Governor last night that the schooner could sail at ten o’clock?’

  ‘Yes,’ she whispered. ‘I heard.’

  ‘It was about eight o’clock, wasn’t it?’

  ‘I don’t know – I suppose it must have been.’

 
; ‘While I was talking with Sir Jason and Colonel Wilson, you left the balcony…’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you went away to pass on that information to someone?’

  ‘Yes,’ she whispered.

  ‘And then the tom-tom signalled it to the north?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What did the tom-tom say – just that the schooner would sail that night?’

  ‘Yes – that it would sail about two hours later.’

  ‘To whom did you pass the information?’

  Suddenly he felt her body go rigid: the hand he was holding tensed. The room seemed cold, as though an invisible fog had swirled in through the window. It wasn’t the question: it was something else. He felt his senses sharpening: colours were brighter, he heard noises more sharply.

  Someone had come into the room: someone of whom she was terrified. Someone who would kill them both to keep the secret.

  Ramage’s mind started racing and to gain the vital few moments he needed he said, with studied casualness, trying hard to keep his voice at the same pitch: ‘Leave that for a moment – a more important question is do you think the schooner has already been captured?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Her voice was almost a sob: the tips of her fingers moved slightly in his hand as if trying to warn him of the other person’s presence.

  Ramage moved slightly as if his right leg was cramped from kneeling, and apparently absent-mindedly rubbed the shin muscle – at the same time managing to flick up the strap over the top of the throwing-knife nestling in its sheath inside the boot.

  He tried to sense exactly where the person was standing as he asked: ‘Will the next schooner be captured if I let it sail?’

  ‘I expect so.’ Then, as he gently squeezed her fingers to show he’d understood her signal, she added, ‘I’m certain.’

  ‘So there’s nothing we can do to save the first one? Think carefully before you answer.’

  There was the edge of a shadow to his left: the shadow of the top of the man’s head. Ramage’s back was square to the door and the sun was shining in from the window to his left, so the man must be standing almost directly behind him. And there was a draught blowing through the room. The man had come through the door – that accounted for the sudden chill a minute or two ago; and it meant whoever it was probably had a right to be in Government House.

  ‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘It has already–’

  Ramage was on his feet like a spring uncoiling, throwing-knife in his hand, and facing the man. Sir Jason’s butler was holding a pistol in his hand, aiming it at Ramage’s stomach.

  Surprise – create surprise! The words hammered in Ramage’s brain. But how? Then without consciously thinking, he said, as if in a casual reproof: ‘I didn’t hear you knock.’

  For a moment the butler was startled. Obviously he’d been expecting either an attack or angry shouts; but his natural politeness made him begin to reply automatically with an apologetic: ‘Well, sir–’

  ‘Close the door!’

  The hand holding the pistol moved indecisively – and the muzzle swung a few degrees.

  At the same instant Ramage’s right hand jerked up and forward, there was a flash of metal and the man spun round with a stifled grunt of pain.

  The pistol dropped to the ground and, even as the man’s left hand clutched the black-hilted knife sticking in his right shoulder, Ramage leapt, knocking him flat on his back and jumping down astride his chest.

  In the same movement he’d wrenched the knife from the man’s shoulder and now held the point in one hand, the hilt in the other. As he called to Claire to pick up the pistol he pushed the blade down horizontally across the man’s throat.

  ‘Don’t move!’ he snarled. ‘Before you die you can answer some questions!’

  ‘But I’m bleeding to death!’ the man croaked. ‘My shoulder – for pity’s sake, sir – oh for pity’s sake–’

  ‘I don’t give a damn whether you live or die,’ Ramage hissed. ‘I know all I need to know, but you can fill in some details.’

  Suddenly the man gave a convulsive heave up with his stomach in an attempt to pitch Ramage forward over his head. The jerk was so unexpected that Ramage, almost losing his balance, had to press down to avoid being flung on his face, his whole weight coming on to his hands.

  A hissing and gurgling as he regained his balance astride the man made him look down. The knife had cut the man’s throat; even as he watched a bright red river of blood pumped in an ever-widening pool across the polished wooden blocks of the floor.

  Ramage felt no regret; instead, as the pumping and the stertorous breathing stopped, he simply thought bitterly to himself that he didn’t know all he needed to know; that many details had to be filled in.

  He stood up and turned to Claire. Still clutching the pistol, she had fainted.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  More than an hour later a carriage drew away from Government House and headed down the hill. A large trunk on the rack behind contained the body of the butler, while Ramage and Colonel Wilson sat inside, hot and exhausted.

  Neither man spoke until the carriage arrived at Fort George, the trunk had been unloaded and taken to the magazine, and they were both sitting in Wilson’s office.

  Only then did the Colonel – who, since he’d arrived at Government House after an urgent message from Ramage, had simply done what the lieutenant told him – ask his first question.

  ‘Why didn’t we leave a guard over the dam’ woman, Ramage? She could be up to some more mischief this very minute!’

  ‘It isn’t necessary, sir: she was being blackmailed. The butler was our man.’

  ‘But there must be others: what happens when they find he’s missing?’

  ‘The only one that mattered was a gardener: he took the butler’s messages to the drummer.’

  ‘What about him, then?’

  ‘He won’t trouble anyone,’ Ramage said shortly.

  ‘And the drummer?’

  ‘We still have to find him. I know his name but not where he lives. He never goes near Government House, though, and won’t be expecting to hear from the gardener until the next signal’s to be passed.’

  ‘Sir Jason seemed mightily upset,’ Wilson said, not troubling to disguise the satisfaction in his voice.

  ‘Hardly surprising, sir; imagine how it’ll look in a despatch to London: the Governor’s butler a spy who was blackmailing the Governor’s wife’s secretary into betraying secrets.’

  ‘Well, I’m not going to gloss over it in my report to the Secretary at War,’ Wilson said crossly. ‘Ever since the Insurrection I’ve been convinced there’s been a leakage of information from Government House. When Sir Jason arrived I begged him to change all the servants – that damned butler particularly; I couldn’t stand him. But Sir Jason wouldn’t hear of it. In fact he thought the world of the butler.’

  ‘I wonder what else he discovered over the years and passed on to the French.’

  ‘Beggars the imagination to think of it. Must have been a rich man by now – they’ll have been paying him well.’

  Ramage shook his head. ‘He didn’t get a penny.’

  ‘What?’ Wilson almost shouted. ‘Did he – dammit, you mean to say he played traitor for nothing?’

  ‘No,’ Ramage said wearily, for the heat and excitement were taking their toll, ‘he wasn’t a traitor. No’ – he held up a hand hastily to stop Wilson, who seemed likely to explode – ‘he was a French national. French father, British mother. Spoke both languages fluently.’

  ‘How d’you know all this?’

  ‘From his daughter.’

  Ramage had optimistically hoped that in the excitement no one would ask the question, but there was no avoiding it.

  ‘Daughter? Who…’ Wilson paused as he saw the misery in Ramage’s face. ‘Oh, hmm, deuced sorry about that, m’dear fellow. I… How much does old Fishpot know about this?’

  ‘Nothing, sir. I had a long talk with Miss de
Giraud while I was waiting for you to arrive. You know as much as Sir Jason because you were there when I told him. And a little more, now.’

  ‘So you and I – and the lady – are the only ones that know?’

  Ramage nodded. ‘And now you have a duty to do, sir, so…’

  ‘Lookee young Ramage. I’ve my duty to do, yes. But answer me this honestly – as far as I can make out she was answering your questions openly when you realized that fellow had come into the room with a pistol?’

  ‘Yes – she was anxious to. She’d spent the morning trying to pluck up courage to do away with herself.’

  ‘She told you that?’ Wilson exclaimed.

  ‘Yes – you see, I’d asked her to tell me the whole story but she couldn’t bring herself to; not starting at the beginning, as it were. She wanted me to ask questions.’

  ‘Right – now you answer two questions for me. Forget any feelings you have for her – don’t get embarrassed; I envy you – and tell me if you, as a King’s officer, are certain she was telling you the truth all the time.’

  ‘Yes, and apart from that, her answers tally precisely with what we already knew.’

  ‘Very well, second question – if she hadn’t answered your questions, could you have found out about the butler and all that business?’

  Ramage shook his head.

  ‘Definitely not. After all, we only discovered about her by eliminating everyone else. But the trail would have stopped there.’

  ‘So in effect she’s turned King’s evidence: she’s helped us trap a spy?’

  Suddenly Ramage realized what the old Colonel was driving at.

  ‘Yes, and willingly.’ Then, after a moment’s thought, he added, ‘But from your point of view, sir, since you’re responsible for the internal security of the island, you mustn’t forget that if she’d committed suicide this morning…’

  ‘I’m only concerned with what she did; not what she might have done,’ Wilson said crisply. ‘By the way, what’s the Governor proposing to do?’

  ‘His last words to me, while you were seeing the trunk loaded on to the carriage,’ Ramage said dryly, ‘were that he was going to write a strongly worded protest to Admiral Robinson and the Admiralty about me.’