The Ramage Touch

by Dudley Pope

  At the present rate of progress the galliots, bomb ketches, call ’em what you will, would not get to Argentario until after nightfall, and then only abreast the northern end. They would have to go almost three-quarters of the way round the coast before arriving at Porto Ercole – by then it would be almost dawn. The French in the frigates would have had a good night’s sleep; the men in the bombs and the Calypso would have spent a restless night trying to catch every whiffle and back eddy of wind to get round Argentario. Spaccabellezze, Spadino, Vongher, Bocca d’Inferno, Argentario itself – the names of the peaks came back to him without any effort, and each of them would affect the wind. If the wind was light north or east, those peaks cast a windless shadow well ashore. With luck there would be an offshore wind for the night, enough to let them creep round. Apart from hitting the cliffs themselves, at least there was nothing to run into: just the rock of Argentarola sticking up like a tooth beyond Cala Grande, but they would not be that close inshore.

  Three fully-manned French frigates versus two tiny bomb ketches and a single frigate, her ship’s company depleted by two prize crews and the Marines needed to guard forty prisoners. Their Lordships at the Admiralty would regard the odds as about even…Given surprise as an ally, this was probably true. Surprise. You suddenly leapt out of the hedge and said ‘Boh!’ Or you surfaced from the deep like a whale and blew a great fountain of water.

  He did not turn at the next walk forward; instead he went to the quarterdeck rail and looked ahead at the two bomb ketches rolling along like plump wives on their way to the market, and at Argentario beyond, a mountainous, sprawling island with rounded peaks and laced with narrow valleys still in shadow, although it was nearly noon. In the West Indies one could stand upright and throw no shadow because the sun was directly overhead, but Italy was too far north for that, and the shadows of trees and valleys gave more emphasis to the landscape. He broke his own rule and leaned his elbows on the rail, but resting your head on your hands really did not help concentration – at least it seemed silly to think it did.

  It was all a gamble, a double gamble rather, or it would be if he tried it. He had to gamble everything, first on the wind not dropping away any more, and then on it not turning south – a headwind would stop everything. He did not have to gamble that the wind would turn east, although it would help if it did. Surprise, he also had to stake everything on surprise…

  He turned to the quartermaster. ‘Pass the word for my steward, please.’

  The sound of his voice seemed to break a spell: Southwick swung round to face him from his position by the binnacle; Aitken, just about to go down the ladder to the main deck, stopped expectantly. He turned and walked back to Ramage who said: ‘I need a dozen steady men. Not topmen. Six for the Brutus and six for the Fructidor.

  ‘We’ll put them on board just before sunset. Tell the gunner to give them an hour or two of instruction about mortars. I know they’ve probably never seen one, but he can explain the theory, and take them through the loading procedure.’

  Aitken hesitated a moment and Ramage guessed that, like Southwick, the first-lieutenant was curious why the Captain had passed the word for his steward. They probably assumed that whatever the reason it was part of putting more men on board the bombs. Well, the pair of them were going to be disappointed.

  He looked up and found Silkin waiting. His steward could be profoundly irritating, but he did his job well. Too well, which was why he was irritating: half the time he verged on fussiness.

  Ramage shook his head. ‘Belay that call, Silkin,’ he said. ‘I’ve changed my mind.’

  Southwick looked at Aitken with raised eyebrows. The Scotsman began to go down the ladder, deliberately not walking quietly. There’s plenty of time, Ramage thought; if I explain everything now, I might have to change it all later on because something else unexpected occurs – like the three frigates.

  An hour later, as Ramage watched over the larboard side, making a mental journey through the Tuscan countryside, spotting and identifying various hill towns as the Calypso sailed southwards like a great sheepdog patiently driving two tiny, fat and very slow lambs, a question came to his mind. At first it was like a small patch of mist forming on an autumn evening in a little valley. Then it thickened and expanded to the size of a fog bank.

  The question was obvious and simple. So obvious and so simple that he had completely overlooked it. He had walked right up to it and still not seen it. He had discovered that two French frigates were due in Porto Ercole to embark cavalry, foot soldiers and artillery, and then escort the two bomb ketches to Crete. He had been bright enough thus far to wonder why the French thought it necessary to escort the bomb ketches when they knew that the Royal Navy had long since been forced out of the Mediterranean. He had even speculated that the French were frightened that the bomb ketches might be attacked by the Algerine pirates, still occasionally raiding the Italian coasts. He had even – at this point he cursed his own stupidity – wondered if the two bomb ketches were going to Crete to serve as the defences of an anchorage, to save the French building a fort. Then three frigates had come in sight, not two, and he had become absorbed with wondering why there was the extra one.

  No, he told himself bitterly, there was not even that excuse. He was lying to himself, like an errant schoolboy trying to avoid half a dozen with the birch by telling a string of lies. There was no excuse. Within moments of reading Renouf’s orders telling him to make for Crete he had wondered if the bomb ketches were intended to join a French fleet assembling there. He had even speculated to Southwick that the French fleet and troops might be preparing for a new attack somewhere; a piece of speculation which had drawn from Southwick the sour memory that they had missed the Battle of Aboukir Bay, when Nelson had smashed a French fleet and wrecked Bonaparte’s first attack on Egypt.

  There he had left it: he had not taken the obvious extra step; the one that would have led him to the next question – the final, main, obvious and vital question which the Admiralty must have answered as soon as possible: exactly where is the French fleet bound?

  If they intended an invasion of the Morea, Egypt or the eastern end of the Mediterranean, then Britain was going to have to scrape together a fleet from somewhere, and an army, to drive them out again.

  That was the question. What about the answer? It could be anything. The French might be doing just what he had thought of first – using the bomb ketches as defences for an anchorage. The transfer of the bomb ketches might be some whim of a Minister of Marine, and the cavalry and troops being carried by the once two, now probably three frigates, might be a routine replacement. The lack of British ships of war made supplying garrisons by sea easy for the French. Troops died of diseases, and so did horses. The transfer of artillery might also be routine; the garrison did not have any guns, and the lack might now be being made up. Finally the frigates, bombs and troops might be part of some massive operation planned by Bonaparte in complete secrecy.

  Ramage had a simple choice: he could act on the assumption that it was a normal change-of-garrison operation, and proceed to do what he could to destroy or capture the frigates. That was just the sort of thing his orders expected him to do. Or he could try to find out whether they were joining a fleet, and its destination, and then sink or capture the frigates.

  Renouf knew nothing more than that he was to go to Crete; Ramage was sure of that. If he knew nothing more, then that drunken sot who had been commanding the Brutus would be equally ignorant. It was clear that when the original orders were drawn up for the two bomb ketches while they were still in Brest, it was intended that they should go up to Toulon to get more provisions and water.

  That was odd, he thought suddenly, because it added many hundreds of miles to the voyage when they were in fact passing large Spanish naval bases like Cartagena, where they could water and provision. Perhaps the French guessed that the Spanish were so short of everything that a couple of French bomb ketches would get little more than derisory rema
rks about their odd rig if they visited a Spanish port and asked for stores.

  By the time the bombs arrived in Toulon something had happened to make it necessary to give them an escort – not all the way from Toulon to Crete; only from just north of Rome. Was that significant? Probably not; the troops, cavalry and artillery the frigates were to carry to Crete were probably doing garrison duty in Tuscany preventing the sporadic attacks by Italian partisans, and it had dawned on the French that they were not vitally needed in Italy. Perhaps France was so short of men that, for a great operation to be mounted from Crete, soldiers had to be collected from every possible place.

  Whichever it was, it fitted – either harbour defence by the bomb ketches and garrison replacement by the troops sailing in the frigates, or preparations for a great invasion, using Crete as the assembly point.

  For all that, ‘either, or’ still brought the Fructidor and the Brutus to anchor off Porto Ercole with three frigates moored stern to the jetty inside the harbour embarking soldiers, frightened horses and field guns. The final question was how could Ramage discover the ultimate destination of the troops and bomb ketches?

  Within reach, there were just two people likely to be able to answer the questions: the senior of the French frigate captains, or the senior of the army officers who would be embarking. Even they might not know; in the interests of secrecy, the Ministries of Marine and of War in Paris might only have told them to go to Crete, where the general and admiral commanding the expedition would give them fresh and final orders…

  There was just a hope that at Porto Ercole the senior Navy and army officers would know that Crete was in fact their final destination and that all this was a perfectly normal operation, a rotation of the regular garrison and strengthening of the usual defences.

  Ramage eyed the mountains far inland that formed the spine of the Italian peninsula. He needed a group of men who spoke fluent Italian so that they could wander round Argentario without being bothered by the Italians, and fluent enough in French to be able to chat with senior French army or Navy officers…

  Apart from himself, only young Paolo and the seaman Rossi spoke Italian. Rossi’s native Genoa was now a French republic, so he would be shot as a traitor if he was caught. That left Ramage and Paolo. Yet the French would strap Paolo to the guillotine the moment they found they had caught not just an aristo but the heir to the kingdom of Volterra.

  A strange, high-pitched noise, musical and reedy, was coming from the Brutus; young Martin was playing his flute. It was a more musical version of the kind of flute often played by Italian shepherds. He could remember from the days when he had lived there as a boy how often, when riding across the Tuscan hills, he would gradually become aware that in the distance someone was playing what could well be Pan pipes. The music would begin almost imperceptibly, like warmth from a rising sun. Usually it turned out to be a young boy sitting in the shade of a wild olive tree, playing to himself as he kept an eye on a dozen goats and twice as many kids which played like children, chasing each other – most of them seemed to be twins: did goats never have single kids? He remembered the kids jumping into the air, all four legs stiff, and then running to their mothers and butting against the teats. It was a scene going back to Biblical times and earlier…‘Blower’ Martin, fourth-lieutenant, playing his flute with an audience of tanned and tough seamen on board a French prize was neither historic nor romantic; simply unusual. Someone ought to pass round Martin’s hat to see how much money they could collect.

  He stopped at the quarterdeck rail and held the woodwork, his body rigid. Southwick looked at him in alarm but then did not move because over the years he had seen it happen several times: that was how ideas hit the Captain. After a minute Ramage turned to him and said: ‘Make the signal for captains to come on board: I want to talk to Wagstaffe and Aitken.’

  CHAPTER NINE

  There was a faint hiss and a gentle splash as a tiny wave broke on the beach, then the cutter’s keel grated on the sand. A moment later several seamen jumped over to hold the boat so that it would not broach. Ramage leapt out in the darkness to land on the dry sand, followed by Paolo Orsini and finally Martin.

  Southwick, who had just told Ramage: ‘First time you’ve had to avoid getting your feet wet, sir!’, now said in a low voice: ‘We’ll be waiting to hear from you,’ and then gave the order for the men to push off the cutter and start rowing back to the Calypso frigate.

  While coming out and heading for the causeway, the old master had not been sure he approved of the Captain’s latest plan. As the cutter sped back towards the black shape of the Calypso, anchored in the middle of the bay formed by the mainland and the northernmost of the two causeways to Argentario, he decided it was madness.

  All three of them were bound to be caught and guillotined or shot. No one could blame the French because they were in disguise and so were acting as spies. The three of them, helped by Jackson and Aitken, had spent the last two hours making themselves look like wandering gipsies, with young Paolo laying down the law about exactly how zingari should appear. Zingari: it sounded a silly word, and it described the whole business.

  The Captain’s hair had been ruffled until it looked like a mop, then it had been made greasy and he had put on a tattered shirt belonging to one of the seamen and then something that was halfway between a kilt and breeches, a short skirt with a few odd stitches turning it into a rude apology for trousers.

  Young Orsini had made up his own disguise and Southwick had to admit the boy did look just like one of the young scoundrels who, in any Latin seaport, marched up barefaced and demanded ‘baksheesh’ or sidled up with some vile proposition. He had not even recognized young Martin by the time Orsini and Jackson had finished with him: the Calypso’s fourth-lieutenant had been transformed into any village’s idiot, complete with a line round his waist that Mr Ramage intended to hold, so that Martin, in his role of a fool who could play a flute, could not escape.

  It was a clever idea, though, because it got over the difficulty that Martin did not speak a word of Italian: it was not unusual for an idiot to be dumb. Natural enough, too, for a gipsy idiot to be dressed absurdly, with two or three brightly-coloured shirts, tattered and torn and worn one on top of the other, and trousers so big that they were baggy round the waist and hips, making Martin look like a shapeless sack of potatoes. No one would think of searching him – which was just as well, because in a specially-made belt that the sailmaker had completed only just in time were three pistols, spare powder and shot, and three knives, their blades thinned down and sharpened on the grindstone so that, by any honest man’s standards, they were daggers of the type favoured by footpads and assassins.

  Both Mr Ramage and Orsini had watched carefully while those knives were being ground down; they had balanced them on their fingers and it had been some time before Southwick realized that they were testing them for the distribution of weight, to make sure that they could be thrown properly. Then Southwick remembered Mr Ramage’s skill at knife-throwing – a skill picked up during a childhood spent in Italy before the war. Southwick had not bothered to ask where Orsini had learned; it was obviously an aptitude that prudent Italians picked up at an early age.

  What could a trio of gipsies find out about the final destinations of these French frigates, troops and bomb ketches? Mr Ramage seemed confident enough. Certainly his Italian was fluent; Mr Orsini had told Jackson some time ago that Mr Ramage could pass for someone born in Volterra or anywhere in Tuscany, and he could imitate the accents of other states. Naples was one of the most difficult, apparently; it was the Italian equivalent of real Cockney, and they pronounced only the first half of a word.

  Something else worried Southwick: what would the senior officer of the French frigate squadron now in Porto Ercole think when he found that the two bomb ketches which should be anchored close to him at Porto Ercole were in fact on the opposite side of Argentario, off Santo Stefano? When Southwick raised the point, Mr Ramage had said he would t
hink either that the current and light wind had prevented the unwieldy vessels from getting round Argentario, which was quite likely because the mountains made wind shadows, or that Renouf had made a mistake and gone to Santo Stefano instead of Porto Ercole. Again, a likely sort of mistake for these damned Frenchmen.

  There was another possibility – that Renouf, seeing the frigates arriving early, had very sensibly gone into Santo Stefano to water and provision, leaving Porto Ercole free for the frigates and thus saving time. Actually that sounded the most likely as far as Southwick was concerned; it was a seamanlike thing to do, and there was the added advantage that even if the senior officer of the frigate squadron did not credit Renouf with that much intelligence, he might well think that the captain of the frigate with the bomb ketches would have given the order. He might even speculate, Southwick realized as the cutter was hailed from the Calypso, that the frigate also wanted water and provisions.

  The Captain had merely shrugged when Aitken asked what was to be done if the French sent out an officer in a boat to ask questions. ‘Keep a sharp lookout, and the moment you see any signs of a boat coming out, get under way…If you happen to run down the boat in the process, make a note in the log…’

  Southwick had admitted that he had no right to ask the Captain why he was risking his life and future, the life and future of the fourth-lieutenant, and the life and future of the Marchesa’s nephew (he thought it a cunning touch to bring in the family relationship), quite apart from leaving his ship under the command of her first-lieutenant. Mr Ramage had just grinned and said that only yesterday the master had complained of missing Nelson’s great victory at Aboukir Bay, and they would all look dam’ fools if they missed the chance of having their own Aboukir Bay in a month or so’s time.