by Dudley Pope
“Barges carrying 4,320 men and intended to sail in two divisions. Each barge to carry 50 cavalry, 25 infantry, 3 officers and 2 non-combatants, and a cargo of 27 muskets, 20 bayonets, 200 tools, 1,200 cartridges, 1,500 rations of biscuit, 500 of oats and 500 of bran, 50 horses, 60 saddles and 6 sheep.
“Ordered—54. Launched—23. Of these there were sufficient masts, spars, cordage and sails to complete and commission only 11. Under construction—5 (all less than half completed). Deficit—26.
“Sloops, forming the Second Flotilla, each with a pinnace in company, and carrying a total for the Second Flotilla of 35,964. Each sloop to carry 3 officers of a company, 91 officers and men, 2 officers of a battalion staff, 1 officer of the general staff, 3 gunners, 3 wagoners, 8 surgeons. The cargo to comprise 27 muskets, 20 bayonets, 27 pioneers’ tools, 1,200 flints, 12,000 cartridges, 1,200 rations of biscuit, 150 pints of brandy and 4 sheep.
“Ordered—324. Launched—109. Of these, only 69 could be commissioned. Under construction—15 (of which four are more than half completed). Deficit—200.
“Gunboats, to form the Third Flotilla, each with a pinnace in company and carrying 130 men for a total of 56,160 (including 3,456 surgeons). Each gunboat to be armed with one 24-pounder gun and also to carry 1 piece of field artillery and the same cargo as sloops, plus 2 horses, 10 bushels of oats and bran, and 200 rounds of shot.
“Ordered—432. Launched—73. Of these, only 19 have been commissioned. Still under construction—14 (of which 12 are more than half completed). Deficit—345.
“Caiques, forming the Fourth Flotilla. To carry a total of 2,160 men with 216,000 cartridges, 21,600 rations of biscuit, 1,080 rations of brandy and 108 sheep.
“Required—540. Requisitioned, commandeered or captured—127. (Note: only 63 of these have arrived at Boulogne, Calais, Étaples, St Valery or Wimereux. Another 11 have reached Le Havre and Cherbourg. The remaining 53 are in various ports between Antwerp and St Jean de Luz awaiting safe convoy.) Deficit—413.
“Corvettes, forming the Fifth Flotilla, each carrying 40 men for a total of 3,240. These to carry the same cargo as gunboats but no artillery or ammunition.
“Ordered—81. Launched—10. (Note: 27 old corvettes have been refitted but none is less than 25 years old.) Deficit—44.
“Fishing boats, forming the Sixth Flotilla, and to carry 2,160 horses and riders, with a double supply of horses and riders.
“Required—108. Requisitioned, commandeered or captured—108.
“Fishing boats of six different types to form the Transport Flotilla, and intended to carry 3 million cartridges, 1,208 horses, 3,560 officers and men, 1,760 canteen women, and a considerable quantity of other military stores too numerous to list here.
“Required—464. Requisitioned, commandeered or captured: 276. Deficit—188.
“Another Flotilla comprising 100 to 150 large, armed fishing boats have yet to be found,” Bruix wrote. “These are intended to carry 200 horses, 1,000 men, 10,000 rations of biscuit, 10,000 rations each of brandy, oats and bran, and 200 sheep.”
From the preceding figures, Bruix noted, it will be seen the number of men that the vessels ordered or required can carry, 110,324, is less than the required strength of the Army of Invasion (working on a total of 113,474, comprising 76,798 infantrymen, 11,640 cavalry, 3,780 artillerymen, 3,780 wagoners and 17,476 non-combatants), but it is anticipated that each vessel will be able to carry an extra dozen or so men.
“The search still goes on in all ports from Antwerp to St Jean de Luz,” the Admiral added, “for 300 merchant ships of less than seven feet draught and each of which can carry 100 men. Although there had been some success in finding a number, several of these have since been captured by British cruisers and privateers while making for Boulogne.”
Bruix concluded with what Ramage read as a plea to Forfait to make it clear to the First Consul that he had done the best he could with the money, men and materials available, and he continued to doubt the wisdom of trying to make seaworthy those craft built for similar projects in the 1760s: they required a disproportionate amount of men and materials—particularly men, since only skilled shipwrights could be used for that type of work.
Ramage drew a line and then signed his name. Then he put down the pen and screwed the top on the inkwell. He gave a sigh of relief and looked at his watch. It had taken 25 minutes. “Here, you’d better seal this and take it to Louis’s room. I hope he remembered to get a fresh loaf!”
“He did, sir, an’ he told me he’d slit it ready for up to six sheets of paper. You’ve only used—” Stafford flicked through the pages, “three. I’ll seal them first.” He folded them and ran his thumb nail along the creases to flatten them. Picking up a stick of red wax he glanced at Ramage’s signet ring. “Want ter use the seal, sir?”
Ramage shook his head. “Too risky—if that was intercepted and I was caught …”
As soon as the blobs of wax sealed Ramage’s letter, Stafford left the room in his usual silent manner, returning to say that it was secure in the loaf.
“Want ter glance at any of these, sir?” He gestured towards the remaining letters.
“No—we’ve done enough for tonight. Just seal up the Admiral’s despatch and get that satchel back under the Lieutenant’s bed, so we can get to sleep!”
The job was nearly done. Almost unbelievably, they had succeeded. It remained only for Stafford to reheat the spatula and fix the seal, put all the correspondence back in the satchel, and return it. Ramage decided to lie on his bed to savour the feeling of relief: Stafford needed no help, and Ramage was beginning to feel weak from relaxation of tension and almost unbelievably tired.
The bed creaked, and as he stretched out he realized just how weary he was. Stafford was humming quietly to himself and Ramage watched the shadow of the Cockney’s head dancing across the ceiling.
“That’s it, me beauty,” Stafford muttered and blew vigorously. “Ah—just as good as the horiginal. In yer go.” Ramage was reminded of a poacher talking to his ferret. There was a click as he turned the lock on the satchel. “Right, that’s that, sir; I’ll be off darn the corridor.”
Ramage murmured contentedly. Drowsily he wondered if Louis was winning at cards. Tomorrow morning, in a few hours’ time, all three of them would be in a carriage rattling along the road to Boulogne, with the report preceding them, safe from interception should they be captured. Jackson and Rossi would be waiting at Boulogne with the Marie and Dyson. Curious that a scoundrel like Dyson should eventually do something that made up for all his past crimes. Dare he tell Lord Nelson all about him, so that Dyson would not go through the rest of his life a wanted man? Plenty of time to think about that later; now it was good to sleep knowing that the work was done, and it only remained to escape …
A woman’s shrill scream went through him like a dagger. She screamed again and again in desperate fear; then he heard her running along the corridor and down the stairs, still screaming as she went. The landlord’s daughter?
He leapt out of bed and grabbed Stafford’s spatula, the stick of wax and the remaining bundle of picklocks. Where could he hide them? The screaming had stopped but he could hear thumping below, as though men were coming up the stairs. Stafford had not come back and it was difficult to know what had happened.
Hurriedly he tossed the picklocks, wax and spatula up on top of the canopy over the bed, then dragged off his clothes and pulled on his nightshirt, blew out the candle and hurried to the door, waiting a few seconds before opening it as the first of the men ran past.
It was the Lieutenant with a lantern, followed by Louis and then the landlord.
“What’s happening?” Ramage asked sleepily and with suitable nervousness.
“Burglars!” the landlord said, using Ramage’s appearance to leave the other two men to run into the Lieutenant’s room. “My daughter found them and raised the alarm!”
“What was she doing up here?”
“She had written a billet doux
for the Lieutenant and crept up to put it under his pillow, I think. Then she saw all these men. Half a dozen or more, she says …”
Ramage murmured sympathetic noises as he listened. A few moments later the Lieutenant strode out, chest puffed with importance. “There is no one there—and the despatches are safe—” he waved the satchel he was holding. “The window is wide open—the villains escaped. Landlord! Fetch the gendarmes—we must start a search for them. Six men!”
The landlord scurried down the stairs.
“Did you see anything, M’sieur?” the Lieutenant asked Ramage.
“Nothing—I heard screaming. It woke me up.”
Louis said, “M’sieur still looks half asleep, for all that!”
Ramage took the hint. He rubbed his eyes. “I am, too. Did they get away with anything valuable?”
“Nothing that I can see,” the Lieutenant said complacently. He held up the satchel. “This is all that matters. That is still firmly locked, as you can see—” he tugged at the flap. “The only keys that will open it are in Boulogne and in Paris. The Admiral’s despatches to the Minister of Marine.”
“Do you think the burglars were after that?” Louis asked innocently.
The Lieutenant shook his head vigorously. “Not a chance. Who could know that I carry despatches? And anyway, the satchel is always concealed. I rely on your discretion, gentlemen,” he said confidentially.
“Just common thieves,” Louis said. “They probably looked through the window and saw we were playing cards. Why,” he exclaimed, “they’d have seen me, too! Here, lend me your lantern, I must see if I’ve been robbed!”
Louis fiddled with the key for a few moments—Ramage remembered he had left the door unlocked and obviously wanted to conceal the fact from the Lieutenant—swung the door open and went inside.
“Everything is all right,” he said when he emerged. “They must have decided to search your room first. They recognized you as a man of substance,” he added slyly.
“You are winning at cards,” the Lieutenant grumbled. “Second time running. A month’s pay you’ve taken off me so far—”
He broke off. Strange voices were coming up the stairs and Ramage saw two gendarmes, each with a lantern. They clumped along the corridor and stopped.
“Which of you is the Italian, di Stefano?”
Ramage stepped forward, puzzled.
“Get dressed,” one of the gendarmes snapped, “you are under arrest.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
THE police headquarters were on the south side of the square, looking out across the pavé to the guillotine under the plane trees on the far side. The two gendarmes pushed Ramage through the open door with a series of oaths and one of them kept him covered with a pistol while the other went along a corridor and knocked on a door. A minute or two later he called and the man with the pistol gestured to Ramage to follow.
Sitting at the desk in the middle of the room was a man in an officer’s uniform whose thin face was heavily lined. Every few moments his right eye suddenly closed momentarily, as though he was winking, followed by a spasmodic jerk of his right shoulder. For a moment Ramage was reminded of a puppet, some of whose strings were broken.
The man pulled his lips back, as though about to bite something juicy, and exposing a mouthful of yellowed teeth. “Passport,” he hissed.
Ramage dug into his coat pocket and then handed it over.
“Gianfranco di Stefano, eh? You speak French? You are Italian?”
Ramage nodded.
“What are you doing in Amiens?”
“Travelling to Paris. I was taken ill.”
One of the gendarmes whispered to the officer.
“Paris? You were travelling to Boulogne. You have a carriage ordered for tomorrow. You and two other men.”
“I have been to Boulogne and was going back to Paris when I was taken ill,” Ramage explained with a nervousness far from feigned. “Before I recovered, word came from Boulogne that there was still some unfinished business there and asking me to return.”
“What business? Who asked you?”
Ramage guessed that he was trapped if this man was thorough. He could bluff it out for a few days, but the moment the police checked with the Port Captain in Boulogne, they would find out that there was no such person as Signor di Stefano; that his documents were genuine but the blank spaces had been filled in with a false name. And then the fun would start: they would set to work on him to find out what it was all about. “Set to work”—he was avoiding using the word “torture,” but that was what he meant.
“I have nothing to say,” Ramage said crossly. “Why am I under arrest?”
He had to keep his mouth shut for long enough for Louis to get the despatch to Boulogne, and be sure the Marie had sailed for the rendezvous. Once he could be sure that the despatches were in Lord Nelson’s hands, his job was done. Then he could talk as freely as he wanted—making sure not to incriminate Louis and his comrades—or remain silent. The final result was likely to be the same: he would swing over on the bascule and the executioner would let the blade drop. Le Moniteur would probably print some florid announcement that an English spy had been executed at Amiens (or an Italian one, if he stayed silent), and eventually someone in the Admiralty in London might connect the execution with the fact that Lieutenant Ramage had disappeared after sending a final report from Amiens …
“You have nothing to say, eh? Well, I have,” the officer said. “You are under arrest because your man—your foreman, I believe?—was seen by the daughter of the landlord in the room of another guest. An officer of the Republic,” he added ominously.
“I thought she said she saw several men.” It was a glimmer of hope but no more.
“She may have done; what concerns you is that your foreman is the one she definitely recognized.”
Ramage shrugged his shoulders. “That’s what she says. I was asleep and have no idea what was going on. Was she in the room with my foreman? Did they have an assignation?”
It was a weak enough answer, but for the moment he was trying to gain time to think. Where the devil was Stafford now—obviously he had escaped out of the window, but how long could he avoid recapture? He did not speak a word of French, had no money and no map to help him get back to Boulogne. The only thing on his side was a natural Cockney shrewdness.
“What was your foreman doing?”
“Seducing her, perhaps? How should I know—I told you, I was asleep.”
Where was Louis now? Had he escaped before anyone checked up on his story that he was acting as the spy-cum-guard to the Italian travellers? Ramage could not remember seeing him from the moment the gendarmes said, “Get dressed … “ On the other hand he might still be at the hotel, pretending to be as puzzled over Stafford’s behaviour as the gendarmes. That would make sense! At the moment the only thing the gendarmes knew was that Stafford had been seen in the Lieutenant’s room. Nothing had been stolen so there was nothing to incriminate either Signor di Stefano or Louis. If Louis suddenly vanished it would be taken as proof of complicity.
In fact he and Louis would be cleared completely if the gendarmes accepted that whatever Stafford was doing had nothing to do with his employer or Louis. Let’s see what happens, Ramage thought. For the moment I remain the Italian shipbuilder outraged that he should be lodged in jail for the night … All that gaunt-faced policeman knows is that my foreman was in someone else’s room: no one has challenged my story that I was asleep at the time. With a bit of luck they’ll release me tomorrow with suitable apologies!
Ramage thought of asking to be allowed to write to his own country’s ambassador in Paris protesting at his arrest, but he remembered, just in time, that the Republic of Genoa, whence he allegedly came, was now Bonaparte’s Ligurian Republic. Then the officer, who had been staring at the top of his desk for several moments, looked up.
“If he was trying to seduce her with her consent,” he said coldly, his voice sounding to Ramage like that of ever
y outraged father or cuckolded husband, “why did she scream?”
Ramage shrugged his shoulders expressively. “How should I know? Perhaps she changed her mind.”
“She is in love with the Lieutenant,” the officer said doggedly. “It is impossible that she went to the room to meet your foreman.”
“Very well,” Ramage said in a bored voice, “she had an assignation with the Lieutenant in his room. Clearly not a very virtuous young lady, eh?”
“She did not have an assignation with the Lieutenant in his room,” the officer said angrily, his right eye winking and his shoulder jerking.
“What was she doing in the room, then? Meeting my foreman instead?”
“She had written a note for the Lieutenant and was leaving it in his room. Where is your foreman now?” Again the wink and shoulder twitch.
“I don’t know,” Ramage said impatiently. “Perhaps he has an assignation with the young lady’s mother—have you inquired?”
It must be midnight by now. Had Louis managed to get that damned loaf to the courier? If Ramage could be sure that the report—he found himself trying to avoid even thinking of the name Bruix, as if the police officer might read his thoughts—reached Jackson on board the Marie, it would make it worthwhile. What worthwhile, he found himself asking. Stop thinking in euphemisms. If I know that my copy of Vice-Admiral Bruix’s report on the state of the Flotille de Grande Espèce has reached Vice-Admiral Lord Nelson safely, then tipping over on the bascule, and staring down into the basket which will catch my head a fraction of a second after the guillotine blade lops it off, will be a little easier to bear.
It must be easier to die when you know you have achieved something. On the average, Ramage had gone into action four times a year, for the past three years, never expecting to come out of it alive. There had been a good chance that a French or Spanish roundshot would knock his head off or—involuntarily he reached up and rubbed the scars on the right side of his brow—he would be cut down by a cutlass or skewered on a boarding-pike.