by Dudley Pope
Garlin coughed, as if he realized that Ramage’s attention was wandering. “The accused admits that in the absence of his foreman it is impossible to prove his innocence as far as entering the room of the Lieutenant is concerned—” he waited, as if expecting an interruption from Ramage, but none came. “The prosecution has proved the charges concerning the passport and travel documents, so the accused can only ask for the court’s clemency. As to the third charge, the accused can only state that, since the seal on the Admiral’s despatch was intact when it arrived in Paris, obviously he did not open it.”
Ramage looked up and stared at the judge, who looked back at him with unblinking eyes and said: “The court will adjourn until tomorrow morning to consider the verdict.”
Ramage stood up and bowed. “I assume it is customary to consider an accused man’s guilt without hearing his defence.”
“The court has just heard your defence,” the judge said. “It was very ably stated by Citoyen Garlin.”
“Citoyen Garlin made an interesting statement,” Ramage said contemptuously. “He was obviously speaking for himself, since what he said had nothing to do with my case and was certainly made without consultation with me.”
“The court is satisfied,” the judge said, unperturbed, and signalled to the guards, each of whom took an arm and swung Ramage round and marched him out. Before the door shut behind him, Ramage heard the three men laughing among themselves.
Ramage woke next morning with a curious sense of relief: Wednesday had arrived at long last, the day by which Louis and the rest of them should be safely out of the way. Now he could seize the first opportunity to escape that offered itself. That opportunity could only arise outside the cell, or at least at a time when the door was open. He had already missed his first chance—he had been sound asleep when the jailer slid the breakfast tray on to the floor.
He rubbed his chin: four days’ growth and it was beginning to feel like a scrubbing brush: all appeals for water to wash in had been brushed aside and he felt filthy. He ate the food and left the tray beside the cot: that meant the jailer had to open the door wide enough to shout at him to bring the tray to the doorway. That might lead to something …
He was still daydreaming, imagining Lord Nelson in his cabin reading the copy of Admiral Bruix’s report, when suddenly the bolts slammed back and the door was flung open. One guard came in and covered him with the pistol while two more once again locked irons on to his wrists. They were the same guards as the day before but, Ramage noted sourly, they were now clean-shaven and their uniforms were much smarter, as though it was Sunday. They waited a minute or two and then called down the corridor. A fourth man appeared, holding a musket. “We’re ready,” one of them said and, preceded by the musket, Ramage was marched out of the cell.
After going along the corridors and past the room where his so-called trial had been held, Ramage was surprised to see that they had reached the front door of the police station. As a sentry swung the doors open to allow them through, Ramage looked right across the square to the guillotine. Suddenly he was frightened. Would they continue marching to the guillotine platform? Was that why the court had laughed?
The idea was so strong in Ramage’s mind that he was startled when one of the guards bumped into him and then swung him round, so that they marched to the left, along the side of the square. He just had time to see the word MAIRIE carved in the keystone of the doorway of the next building before he was bundled inside and along a corridor.
The building smelled musty, and he was just cursing that any attempt to bolt from his guards while in the street outside would have resulted in a pistol ball between the shoulder blades when he realized that he could hear the distant murmur of many voices. Suddenly the leading guard with the musket stopped and flung open a door.
The murmur became louder, and then he was being marched into a large hall in which a hundred or more people sat on forms. Like the audience at a theatre, they were all facing a raised platform where three men—the trio who had formed yesterday’s tribunal—sat at a table covered by a large but faded Tricolour. In front of the table was a box on which a raggedly dressed, unshaven man was balanced, his hands manacled, a gendarme at either side.
Ramage’s escort jerked him to a stop and, as he realized that he had been brought to some sort of ceremony, the man on the box, with a suddenness which took the gendarmes by surprise, knelt with his manacled hands held upwards in a gesture of supplication, and almost immediately began a terrible wail.
As the audience began to jeer, the judge in the centre of the trio at the table made a contemptuous gesture of dismissal, and the guard on either side of the prisoner tugged at his arms.
“Mercy!” the man shrieked. “In the name of God, mercy—my wife—”
“You appeal to God, do you!” the judge bellowed angrily. “Very well, let’s see if He shows you mercy, because no traitor deserves any from the Republic!”
The man, knees sagging and barely able to support himself, was dragged out through a door on the far side of the hall. Ramage was just bracing himself to be marched to the box when he saw another prisoner, who had been kept against the wall farther down the hall, being pushed towards the table.
The man was so frightened that, unbalanced by having his hands manacled, the gendarmes had to hoist him up and then hold him in position.
“Jean-Baptiste le Brun!” the judge thundered, and Ramage watched the audience. Most of them were grinning, teeth bared and sitting forward on their forms. All of them were enjoying it—with the exception of a white-faced woman sitting near the back: she was now standing, tears streaming down her face, gripping her hands and moving her head from side to side.
“The court has heard the charges against you, and your defence, and the sentence of this court is—death.”
The audience waited a moment—to Ramage it seemed they wanted the man to scream, or collapse—and when they saw him turn to get down from the box they lost interest and began gossiping. The wretched man had disappointed them; Ramage sensed that if there were many more performances like that they would leave and go to the nearest café.
Once down from the box the man braced himself, shaking off the hands of the gendarmes. Then he stopped and turned to the crowd and waved to the weeping woman. It was a poignant gesture; all a condemned man could say to the woman he loved. Ramage knew it was all he would want to signal to Gianna if she was there. And perhaps he would wave to her when his time came; it would puzzle all the ghouls—there would be scores of people round the platform of the guillotine—and they would glance over their shoulders to see who he was waving at, never guessing that she was on the other side of the Channel.
The gendarmes were pushing him now, and he braced himself and strode down towards the box, at the last moment walking a little faster than the guards so that he could jump on to the box without their help.
He held the judge’s eyes and the man’s lips curled into a sneer.
“Gianfranco di Stefano,” he said softly, as though savouring the words, “the court has heard the charges against you, and your defence—” he lingered over the words, as if to provoke an outburst from Ramage, “and the sentence of this court is—death.”
Still Ramage held the man’s eyes, thinking to himself: so this is what it is like … far less frightening than staring into the muzzles of the enemy’s guns.
A moment before the guards tugged at his arms, he jumped sideways and down, turned to the door and walked out, shoulders back, head erect, not too quickly, but just fast enough for his guards, all of whom were short men, to have to scurry to keep up with him.
As the door was shut behind him he realized that there had been no jeering. He almost laughed when he reflected that every one of them in that hall, judge, prosecutor, defence counsel and audience, had been cheated: they thought they had sentenced to death an Italian shipbuilder (indeed, the audience did not know even that much: to them a man with an Italian name had been sentenced to deat
h), whereas in fact they had caught a British naval officer, who, despite the affidavit from their own Ministry of Marine that the seal on Admiral Bruix’s despatch was untouched, had read the despatch and passed the information it contained to Lord Nelson.
There seemed to be a certain cachet about being condemned to death. For a start, two guards now brought each meal, one covering him with a pistol while the other carried the tray. It was as though they too knew that the only way of getting out of the cell was by overpowering a guard. Yet they put the tray down carefully, instead of giving it the bang that spilled the soup.
The improvement did not spread to the Hotel de la Poste: on the contrary, the landlord obviously took the view that selling good food to a condemned man was a wicked waste, and Ramage found himself eating little more than kitchen scraps.
There was a subtle change in the cell, too: previously it was just the cell in which he was locked; now it was a condemned cell. He told himself the cell had not changed; only his attitude to it had altered. Maybe that was so—being sentenced to death certainly required some adjustment on the part of the condemned man. Apart from anything else, he thought grimly, unless he found a way of escaping within a few hours, he was measuring time with a clock rather than a calendar.
The more he thought about it, the more he realized that certain quaint phrases took on a fresh significance. “Composing himself for death,” for instance: in England priests and parsons were nearly always on hand to help a dying man to do that. Previously he had never quite understood what it entailed, but now that he had nothing else to think about, it made more sense.
An old man would naturally be more composed. His active life was past, and the physical restrictions of age plus the knowledge that no matter what he did, life held no more challenges (at least, no more challenges to which he could respond), probably meant that he could resign himself to the inevitability of death. If it was preceded by a long or painful illness, or perhaps poverty or loneliness, it might even come as a relief.
But a young man faced death with so much of life to lose—he had to fight not just the fear of the unknown (everyone faced that, no matter what their age!) but the feeling of being cheated out of so many years, so many experiences, so many sights. Looking back on the various times he had previously faced death, there was a consistent pattern: on each occasion there had been very little time to think about being killed. The longest period when he had been convinced he would die had been the dozen or so hours in the middle of the hurricane with the Triton brig, but the raw power of the hurricane, the shrieking wind which numbed the brain, the sheer weariness, had meant that he gave little thought to what death really was; he thought of it as the next huge wave, or the next increase in the strength of the wind.
Death had a different face when you were going into action: it was a sudden threat—usually the guns were firing within less than an hour of the first hint of battle, and you were so damned busy that it was only during those awful moments as the enemy came in range and you found yourself staring at the muzzles of his guns that fear suddenly reminded you of death. Then the muzzles would give that dull red wink and spout smoke, and there was no more time to think; all your efforts went into handling the ship well. When the battle was over, relief at still being alive brushed aside the thought of death.
Sitting in a condemned cell made a man realize that most people’s attitude towards bravery was entirely wrong: to them heroes were men who climbed on board an enemy ship, cutlass in hand, and slashed and sliced their way to victory, or led a cavalry charge, or at least did something active to defeat an enemy. But really (in Ramage’s experience, anyway) apart from a few moments’ doubts and fear right at the beginning, once it all started you were carried along by an almost hysterical exhilaration and the knowledge that if you stopped to think you would probably be killed.
No matter how many times you gave the order to fire, or raced across an enemy’s deck like a run-amok butcher in a slaughterhouse, you learned nothing about facing death that was of the slightest help in a condemned cell. Death might come at the end of a year’s painful sickness or it might come as the red-eyed wink of a gun muzzle, but the sick man would no more recognize the death dealt out by the gun than the fighting man would recognize the drawn-out death from sickness. The label on the bottle might be the same but the contents were different.
Now Ramage had two alternatives: either he managed to escape, or one morning soon they would march him across the place to the guillotine. It was only a hundred yards, but would it seem a long walk or a short one? He found he was far from sure. How did a man who had only a few more minutes to live measure distance? The question had a horrible fascination, and the more he considered it the less sure he was. Knowing that the walk from the police station door to the guillotine was the last he would make, the condemned man (Ramage carefully avoided identifying himself with the victim; he would have escaped by then) might find it all too short: walking a mile might give him time to compose himself. On the other hand, walking a hundred yards to meet the executioner might seem an enormous distance; the condemned man might well prefer to walk out through the cell door and meet him three paces down the corridor, and get it over quickly.
He suddenly stood up to shake off the thoughts: in an hour or so—if he was not very careful—he would be screaming and hammering at that damned door.
Instead he thought of Louis and Stafford and hoped that they were safe. At least they had not been caught—he was sure of that, since the prosecutor would have been quick to confront him with either of them. For Louis, death at the guillotine might well be something of a release: it had claimed his family, and looking back on the brief time he had known the man, Ramage thought that he was lost, a ship without sails or compass, a man deprived of any purpose in life except revenge. The Cockney Stafford would meet death with the same jauntiness that he had faced life. If they caught Stafford, Ramage only wanted to say one thing to him—it was bad luck that led to their discovery. Even when warned that Admiral Bruix’s despatch might have been opened, the Ministry officials in Paris had found nothing wrong with the seal. Stafford would want to know that.
What about Jackson, Rossi and Slushy Dyson? If Jackson had received the despatch for Lord Nelson, only death would prevent the three men from delivering it. Curious that he was sure that even if Dyson was the only survivor he would still do his best, as though it would give him some sort of absolution for having planned a mutiny and then deserted.
He finally thought of Gianna, though he had been trying to keep her out of his mind. As there seemed little future for the two of them, why not think of the past? Be thankful for what had been, rather than bitter at the thought of what might have been. For her sake, it would have been better if she had never met him—she might be left to live her life long after his head dropped into that damned basket, and it was always worse for those left behind.
She loved him—there was no doubt about that. Yet even if he lived, their future might not lie together. Everyone avoided facing up to it—his own fault, since he dodged it as a topic of conversation—but there were many obstacles in the way of them getting married. For a start, as ruler of the state of Volterra she had to be prepared for her return after Bonaparte’s troops had been driven out. She would probably find chaos there, with bitter quarrels between those who had collaborated with Bonaparte and those who had not. It would require real statesmanship to resolve those quarrels between leading families. Was Gianna capable of managing it? He was doubtful: she was too headstrong, too impatient, and perhaps even too demanding. She saw things in black and white rather than in shades of grey, and she would find it hard to understand why people had collaborated with Bonaparte, assuming that it was to gain some advantage, whereas Ramage knew that in at least some instances it would have been from an instinct for survival.
Anyway, whatever happened and whatever the problems, it would be of no help for her to arrive back in Volterra with a foreigner for a husband. Not that the
word “foreigner” existed in the Italian language, but for a citizen of the state of Volterra a straniero, a stranger, was someone who came from somewhere else, be it Venice, England or the land of the Laps.
It was all very sad and all very interesting, and it helped to pass away the time, but it had no relevance for Lieutenant Ramage. By the time the watch in his pocket had run down, he would either have escaped or he would be dead. Curious that they had forgotten to search him. He decided that if he could not escape, the last thing he would do before they marched out of the cell to the place (call it the guillotine, he told himself; using euphemisms does not help) would be to stamp on his watch, just to avoid a gendarme stealing it from his corpse.
He was just going to sit down on the cot again when he heard the key turn and the bolts being slid back, and a moment later the door swung open and the prosecutor came in, preceded by a guard holding a pistol.
“Prisoner di Stefano …” Houdan paused, obviously to give the maximum effect to whatever he was going to say.
“Prisoner Houdan,” Ramage said sarcastically.
The effect on the Frenchman was remarkable. Instead of his face flushing with anger, it went pale, and the muscles pulled down the corners of his mouth. “Why do you call me that?” he demanded tightly.
Ramage shrugged his shoulders. “You are as much a prisoner as I …”
“Don’t be absurd! Why, within four or five hours you will be marched to the guillotine!”
Ramage was surprised at the way he was able to nod so casually, as though Houdan was relaying old news. “Yes, I go in a few hours, and you? You’ll follow—in a few weeks, or a few months; even in a year or two. But you’ll follow, Prisoner Houdan …” He was delighted at the way he had pitched his voice: no lamenting priest could have spoken more dolefully.
Certainly it was having an effect on Houdan who, instead of hitting him, whispered: “Why do you say that?”
“The swing of the pendulum, my friend; at the moment it is swung all the way over to your side, and you and your friends just snap your fingers and send your enemies to the guillotine. But one day the pendulum will swing back the other way. All the relatives and friends of those you have murdered have been waiting patiently, and they’ll snap their fingers, and then you and your friends will know what it is like to swing over on the bascule and lie there staring into the basket.”