by Dudley Pope
“The Admiral’s staff,” the innkeeper corrected him. “Twice a week he rides into the hotel yard—on Saturday night as he goes to Paris, and on Tuesday night as he returns with orders and despatches for Citizen Bruix from the First Consul. It all seems very romantic to a young girl, I suppose.”
“It would be a good match,” Ramage said, knowing that would provoke the Corporal into more confidences.
The Frenchman shook his head sadly. “It might seem like it to you, because you are looking at it as a carpenter; but you have to consider it from the point of view of a man of property: a man like my brother—or me, come to that. She’s his only child, you see, so what happens when he’s gone? None of us live for ever. But a lieutenant’s wife—will a naval man settle down to an innkeeper’s life after the war?”
Ramage nodded his head vigorously, not liking the sad note creeping in to the Corporal’s voice, which was already slurring as the new wine added its weight to that drunk before Ramage and his men arrived at the Chapeau Rouge. “After all, you’ve settled down as an innkeeper after a military life.”
The flattery was so gross that for a moment Ramage thought he had overdone it, but the Corporal screwed up his eyes, as if examining the statement and liking what he saw. “That is true,” he admitted judiciously, “and I don’t want you to think I’m against the young man. He is a smart fellow. Five years ago he was a haberdasher’s assistant. He joined the Navy—and now look at him. Why, in a year or two who knows—he might be given the command of a sloop-of-war; a frigate, even.”
“He’ll end up an admiral, you’ll see,” Ramage whispered in a suitably awed voice. “An admiral, think of that!”
“Not a chance,” the Corporal said firmly, “the war won’t last long enough. It takes time to become an admiral; another seven or eight years, I should judge, and the war will be over this time next year, you’ll see.”
“Still, he has an interesting job now—and exciting, too: just imagine, galloping to Paris with urgent despatches; sleeping with a pistol in his hand to guard them safely I expect …”
The Corporal laughed condescendingly. “Not as romantic as that, I can assure you. Sleeping with a pistol in his hand—why, he would probably blow his foot off in his sleep! That’s the thing you people don’t understand. When you are handling secret despatches all the time—as this young man is—you get used to it. Like you carpenters starting off with a plain plank of wood. Why, my brother says the Lieutenant has even left the satchel behind on the dinner table—how about that, eh?” He nudged Ramage across the table. “Mind you, my brother is a responsible innkeeper, and seeing the young man was lifting his glass a bit freely—it’s a fault he has, I have to admit—he kept an eye on the satchel. After all, the First Consul’s secret documents have to be safeguarded.”
“Indeed they do,” Ramage said. “What about another bottle?”
Ramage was weary, jubilant but just sober when he finally returned to the room to find Jackson still awake but the other two snoring stertorously. After assuring Ramage that the passports and travel documents were safely hidden under the bolster, Jackson waited to see if he was going to hear an account of the talk with the Corporal. Ramage thought about it for several minutes and decided that their situation was precarious enough for the American, as the second-in-command of the little expedition, to need to know all the details, so that he could take over if necessary.
Keeping his voice down to a whisper, Ramage quickly outlined the orders he had received from Lord Nelson and the procedure he intended to adopt to get reports back to England.
“I’m hoping we’ll get all the information at the same time, so we can all go together; but if not, then one of you will sail as necessary with Louis and Dyson in the Marie here, meet the Folkestone Marie—she’ll be going to the rendezvous every night from tomorrow night onwards, Dyson was bright enough to arrange that—and return with her to Folkestone. Each report must then be taken at once to Dover Castle, so that it can be forwarded immediately to Lord Nelson.”
Ramage paused to rest his throat: whispering was extraordinarily tiring, and he wondered if he would end up with a sore throat.
“Now we get to this innkeeper. He wants us to call him The Corporal by the way: it seems he was once in Boney’s Army, and lost the leg in Spain. He has a brother who owns an inn at Amiens called the Hotel de la Poste—remember that name. The brother’s name is Jobert. Now, the French Admiral in charge of the invasion flotillas along this coast—and that includes construction—is called Bruix. Every Friday night Bruix writes a report on the state of the invasion flotilla, including new construction, and sends it to Bonaparte’s headquarters in Paris first thing on Saturday morning.
“In other words,” Ramage said slowly, “all the information the Admiralty needs might be contained in that one report. It could be this week’s, last month’s—but the information it contains would take us six months to discover on our own.”
He could feel Jackson’s body tensing as he grasped the significance of what Ramage was saying.
“The link between the Corporal’s brother in Amiens and Admiral Bruix is a young Lieutenant who rides to Paris, leaving Boulogne early on Saturday and arriving in Paris on Sunday night—”
“And spending Saturday night at the Hotel de la Poste,” Jackson whispered.
“Not only that, but he drinks too much, left the leather despatch case behind on the dining-room table at least once, and is much enamoured of the innkeeper’s daughter.”
“Does he spend the night with her?” Jackson asked bluntly.
“I doubt it; in fact the worthy innkeeper and his wife probably lock her bedroom door. They are considering him as a husband for the girl, and as she’s the only child that means they are deciding whether or not he is worthy of inheriting the Hotel de la Poste when they die: probably in lieu of a dowry, knowing how canny their sort of folk can be.”
Jackson was silent for a moment, and then whispered cautiously: “If we could get our hands on the bag …”
“We’d find it locked. Only two keys—Admiral Bruix has one; the other is kept at Bonaparte’s headquarters.”
“But a leather bag,” Jackson said longingly. “I can just see Staff’s face. He’s brought a set of picks with him, and those leather bags never have much of a lock on them …”
“Surprising how useful it is to have a locksmith in one’s crew,” Ramage mused, “and particularly one trained to work in the dark … Still, what bothers me is that it all looks a little too easy at the moment.”
“Well sir,” Jackson whispered cheerily, “over the past two or three years we’ve had our share of jobs that looked impossible from the start, but we managed them.”
“That’s what I mean,” Ramage said, unable to keep the sharpness out of his voice. “The difference is that this looks so easy at the beginning that we can be sure it’ll turn out to be difficult.”
“Ah, you’re looking at it from halfway through, sir,” Jackson pointed out. “We’re already in France and halfway through carrying out the orders. I doubt if you thought they were so easy when Lord Nelson gave them to you.”
Ramage recalled the three meetings—in the library at the Duchess of Manston’s, in that miserable room at the Admiralty with the green-painted walls, and in that cellar-like room in Dover Castle. Jackson was right; at the time they seemed the most impossible orders he had ever heard of, let alone received.
“I see what you mean, but don’t let’s get too confident, Jackson. And we need some sleep too.”
CHAPTER NINE
RAMAGE woke next morning with a start but knew he had not been roused by the daylight trying to penetrate the dirty window panes. Approaching footsteps—the heavy tread of boots on wooden planks; the measured steps of a man climbing stairs, not the thud-and-click of the Corporal and his wooden leg. He sensed that Jackson was already awake and looked round at the two men in the other bed. Both of them were watching him over the top of the blanket, waiting for a word
or gesture.
“If he’s coming here, we bluff! Pretend to be sleepy,” he whispered.
The man reached the top of the stairs and marched along the corridor. Ramage remembered two other doors, but the man was not interested in them and, even though he was waiting for it, the sudden heavy banging on the door made Ramage jump.
“Open the door! Police!”
Ramage forced himself to wait. One gendarme. Surely there would be two if it was trouble? But they might be intelligent enough to have surrounded the inn, or more could be waiting at the bottom of the stairs. Again there was a banging on the door and an impatient order to open it. Ramage forced a noisy yawn and, in the French heavily laced with Italian that he had used the night before, called out: “Who is that making so much noise? Is breakfast ready?”
“Police,” the man called, “open the door!”
“Open it yourself,” Ramage said in a surly voice, “I am still waking up.”
The door swung open and a gendarme, one arm protruding from under the cape drawn round him against the early morning chill, slouched into the room. He flung the cape back over his shoulders, like a bird settling its wings, and rubbed a hand over the stubble along the side of his jaw, the rasping reminding Ramage of a holystone sliding along a dry deck.
“Out of bed!” he ordered, “and show me your passports and lodging passes!”
Knowing the other three would be watching him for a lead, Ramage slowly got up, mumbling to himself in Italian, and Rossi followed, muttering a stream of Italian which more than made up for the silence of the other two. Ramage fished around under the mattress and Jackson, guessing what was needed, pulled the documents from under his side of the mattress and gave them to Ramage.
Handing the four passports to the gendarme, Ramage waited for him to read the details, but instead the man barked: “Lodging tickets!”
Ramage shook his head dumbly. “What are lodging tickets?”
“No lodging tickets?” the gendarme repeated incredulously. “But you must have them! Why …”
They could knock him out and tie him up and leave him gagged under the bed. Providing he had been alone, they might be able to escape through the window—although Ramage realized that he had no idea what was outside: perhaps a yard with a high wall. Blast Louis for forgetting lodging passes: here they were, trapped and about to be arrested as spies, all because Louis had forgotten lodging passes. But—up to a point—time was on their side; a little judicious stupidity on his part might result in the gendarme revealing whether or not he was alone.
“Do not talk to me of lodging tickets,” Ramage said with a sudden show of anger. “You tell that captain in Genoa!”
“What captain in Genoa?” the gendarme said warily, startled by the outburst.
“Captain or colonel, I don’t know which,” Ramage said, taking advantage of the effect the rank had on the gendarme. “Many promises he made when he gave us the passports and travel documents. ‘Plenty of work and good pay for carpenters,’ he said.” Ramage mimicked the precise voice of someone in authority. “‘Just take your tools there and turn the wood shavings into soldi!’ So we walk and get rides in farm carts—mostly we walk—1,500 kilometres, no less. And when we arrive in Boulogne, what happens? Ah, you see what happens; the first night we get a decent bed to rest our weary bodies, along comes a gendarme. Bang, bang on the door. ‘Open!’ he shouts. ‘Where are your lodging tickets?’ he shouts. A fine welcome that is for honest Italians who come to help fight the English but—”
“But for free lodgings you need lodging tickets,” the gendarme interrupted, trying to quieten Ramage, who had raised his voice to the pitch of a querulous washerwoman. “You are con-scripts—so you must—”
“Conscripts!” Ramage almost shrieked, and lapsed into a stream of Italian to give himself time to think, afraid that his French had become too fluent. “Conscripts, are we? Ah, I see now, it is all a trick! That Colonel—I thought he was a general—was no more than a recruiting sergeant, eh? All his soft talk about skilled carpenters—and we are skilled, I might tell you; you should see the furniture my brother and I have made. Why, when my brother’s daughter (she is my niece, you understand) married the son of Giacomo Benetti, you should see the tables and chairs we made for her dot; even my brother’s wife, for all her airs—she’s no better than us, but she walks with her nose high, like this—well, even she had to admit, they would have looked well in the Pitti Palace—”
He broke off, afraid he would burst out laughing, and hoping the gendarme would recover quickly from the outburst and say something, but the man just rubbed his jaw rhythmically and stared.
“What have you to say to that?” Ramage said, his voice full of indignation.
“You mean you are not conscripts?” the gendarme asked anxiously.
“Read the documents,” Ramage said with a great show of patience. “Just read them. A man who can make furniture fit for the Pitti Palace taken up as a conscript? Why, even my brother’s wife would—”
“Give me time to read,” the gendarme said hastily, obviously alarmed at the idea of hearing more of the niece’s dot. He sat down on the edge of the bed, gripping the papers as though fearful they might be snatched away. Finally he let go with one hand and began following the writing with a forefinger, the nail of which was bitten almost to the quick. For more than five minutes he worked his way through every line of all eight documents. When he had finished he carefully folded the papers, stood up and gave them back to Ramage.
“Carpenters, eh? There is plenty of work for you here, helping to build the flotilla.” He looked round at the other three men and, as if anxious to reassert his authority, said sternly: “See you don’t get drunk. The wine of France is very strong; not like that coloured water you get in foreign places.”
“You need not worry,” Ramage assured him. “I am their foreman; I’m a father to them. An uncle, at least. I bring them all this way. When they are sick I nurse them; when they are weary—”
“Quite so,” the gendarme said, “and make sure they work hard in the shipyard.” With that he turned on his heel and walked out, slamming the door behind him. Ramage signalled for silence and listened to his footsteps as he went down the stairs.
“As soon as we have had something to eat,” Ramage said heavily, “we’ll have a look at the docks and the shipyards.”
By noon they had the layout of the port firmly fixed in their minds and were due to meet Louis at a café near their hotel, a rendezvous they had arranged by walking purposefully past the Marie, their carpenter’s tools over their shoulders and, with no strangers within earshot, calling to the Frenchman.
More important than the layout of the port was the size of the Invasion Flotilla. At first Ramage had been appalled by the number of vessels: those he had seen when he sailed in with the Marie only half-filled the outer harbour, but all the inner docks and muddy banks of the river Liane were crowded with a wide variety of craft. The largest were prames, obviously designed as barges to carry troops and cavalry but, as Jackson commented, looking little more than lighters rigged with inadequate masts, and obviously incapable of going to windward. Any progress they made would only be running almost dead before the wind.
All four men had estimated separately how many soldiers or cavalry the prames could carry and agreed on two hundred infantry with arms and baggage, or fifty horses and cavalrymen and a platoon of infantry, with all their rations, ammunition and forage.
There were sixteen prames altogether, though many were not rigged, and 41 sloops, which were smaller and more weatherly, and would be crowded with a hundred men and their supplies and weapons. The most numerous vessels were the gunboats, 61 of them, but less than a score had masts and mounted the 24-pounder gun for which each of them was pierced. Like the sloops, they could probably carry a hundred men with stores and ammunition. There were fifteen large river barges, normally towed by horses. Presumably they were to be towed over by frigates.
One dock w
as filled with a variety of different craft: more than a hundred caiques (which could carry less than fifty men and were more suitable for carrying cattle or horses); thirty or so corvettes carrying about the same; and more than half a dozen different types of fishing-boat, their varied shapes showing they had come from such widely spaced ports as those on the shallow north coast of Holland, with its treacherous sandbanks, to the Breton coast, where fishing was in deep water with rough Atlantic seas. The hatches of the fishing-boats were so small and smelly—Ramage could detect the stench from five hundred yards to leeward of the nearest one—that they could not be used for troops, who would be seasick long before the craft cast off from the dock, let alone reached a mile offshore. The largest of them looked capable of carrying twenty horses with saddles, while the smallest might manage five. But alone in the flotilla, the fishing-boats could go to sea in almost any weather and be sure of reaching their destination.
It was curious how hard it was to relate totals written on paper with what you saw afloat: walking round the quays, it seemed Bonaparte had assembled a large flotilla, with the whole port seemingly full. Then when you wrote down the totals for the various types on a sheet of paper, it reduced in size. But this was only the Boulogne section: there would be many more in Calais, and perhaps as many again in all the small fishing ports. And he had no idea yet how many more were building—not just here in Boulogne, but at the other shipyards up and down the coast.
As they walked to the café, Ramage recalled the phrase Louis had used when he pointed out the first of the vessels—Bonaparte’s flotilla de grande Espèce, which was certainly a grand enough title. They reached the café and found a few workmen at one table, noisily drinking onion soup and pausing only to break pieces from small loaves of black bread. Ramage sat down at the largest empty table and gestured to the others to leave a chair for Louis. One look at the patron showed why Louis had chosen this particular café: unwashed, unshaven, the man was grossly fat, with the slack face and bloodshot eyes of a perpetual drunkard, and when he lurched over to take Ramage’s order of soup for all of them he obviously did not trust his own eyes to focus.