by Dudley Pope
The man had gone rigid for a moment, a movement which brought another stab of pain to his leg, but he slowly relaxed when he realized that there were many ways by which Ramage could have learned his name and rank.
‘I can walk slowly,’ Poitier said, sitting up in the swinging cot and putting his right leg on the deck as he looked round for something to grip. Ramage held out a hand and a moment later, with a deep grunt, Poitier was standing beside him. He was not as tall as Ramage remembered, and there was the smell of rum on his breath, but he was sober enough.
‘Your surgeon,’ he muttered, ‘he did a fine job. Just cuts, from splinters. No permanent damage – if I understood his French correctly.’
Ramage stood back as the man hobbled from the cabin, glanced at the seaman stretched on the table and murmured a few words of encouragement, and then made his way up the companionway, able to walk more easily than Ramage expected because the kneecap had not been damaged.
Ramage led the way to his cabin, then stood back at the top of the companionway, noting Poitier’s obvious familiarity with this type of ship: the duck of the head at the fifth step of the companionway to avoid a deck beam, sharp turn aft at the bottom to enter the captain’s cabin, the nod to the Marine sentry who came to attention and was obviously about to challenge Poitier until he saw Ramage following.
Inside the cabin, Ramage twisted the armchair round until it faced the desk and gestured towards it. Poitier sat down carefully, as though expecting it to be some trick chair with arms that would seize him, and then he sighed as it gave him relief from the pain in his leg. Ramage tossed his hat on to the settee and sat in the straight-backed chair at the desk. He took a key from his pocket, opened the lower drawer and took out the documents, putting them squarely in front of him on the desk.
‘Admiral,’ he said quietly, ‘I must congratulate you on your recent promotion–’
Poitier inclined his head in acknowledgment. This too was information the Englishman had obviously obtained from some of the men.
‘–which I imagine you never expected. You are a Breton, no?’
Poitier nodded. ‘You speak very good French, Captain. Fluent, in fact. I would have–’ he paused for a moment, his eyes searching Ramage’s face warily. ‘Do you come from Paris? Are you a royalist?’
Ramage shook his head. ‘You flatter me. No, I am English. I must apologize for not introducing myself: my name is Ramage, Nicholas Ramage.’ He pronounced the name in the French way, and Poitier seemed to freeze.
‘Lord Ramage?’ he asked, seeming breathless, his hands grasping the arms of the chair as though he expected to be tipped out of it at any moment.
‘Yes – why? Is my reputation so bad?’
Admiral Poitier shook his head. ‘Not bad in that sense…’
‘What sense?’ Ramage asked, curious but at the same time flattered that the French in Toulon had even heard of him, let alone given him an assessment.
‘Well, talk from the West Indies…that you abandoned drowning men after sinking their ships – that sort of thing.’
Ramage thought back over several years in the Caribbean; he remembered the trouble and risks he had taken to rescue the survivors – scores, indeed hundreds of them – in the action in which he had captured the Calypso. Risks, because the rescued were so numerous they could have seized the ship from the rescuers, and that had led to a warning from his own admiral. In crossing the Atlantic the story had undergone a radical change…
He looked directly at Admiral Poitier. ‘Do you believe such stories now?’
Poitier shook his head vigorously. ‘I do not believe them now and I did not really believe them then. You understand that newspapers like Le Moniteur have to print stories of British atrocities.’ He gave a short, dry laugh. ‘Now I think about it, I should really have been able to say: “Yes, Captain Lord Ramage?” when you came down to me in the cabin and addressed me as “Admiral Poitier”. The attack on Porto Ercole, the sinking of one of my frigates using one of my own bomb ketches…yes, it has the Ramage touch.’
‘You flatter me,’ Ramage said, thinking that Admiral Poitier’s compliment meant a good deal more than the grudging treatment he had recently received from the commander-in-chief on the Jamaica Station. ‘However…’ he said, his tone changing to indicate that the conversation was now taking a different turn, ‘I believe you were engaged upon “a special service”, with your frigates and the bomb ketches.’
‘Of course not,’ Poitier said slowly, as if considering each word. ‘Just a routine cruise.’
‘With bomb ketches?’
‘I met them by chance.’
‘But three frigates and two bomb ketches – an unusual squadron to be cruising in the Mediterranean, you must admit. What targets are there for bomb ketches? With few ships of my own country – this one is almost an exception – in the Mediterranean, is not a squadron of three frigates rather large?’
Poitier could not see that the documents on the desk came from his own cabin in the Furet, Ramage realized. Most British naval officers would know that such grey-tinted paper would not be used by the Admiralty or commanders-in-chief, but, after years of war, a Frenchman would have forgotten that really white paper still existed.
‘Admiral,’ Ramage began, tapping the small pile of documents, ‘I have been–’
He heard someone clattering down the companionway and now the sentry knocking on the door interrupted him. ‘Captain, sir: Mr Aitken would like to see you.’
‘Send him in.’
Aitken had a broad grin on his face and Ramage realized that the Scot was a handsome fellow, a fact which was usually disguised by his sombre expression.
Noting Poitier’s presence, the first-lieutenant said: ‘May I report to you privately, sir?’
Damn! Ramage had spent some time leading up to the right moment – creating it, in fact – when he would confront Poitier and force the secret of the expedition out of him. Now Aitken had arrived at the wrong moment. Yet Aitken would not have intruded unless…Ramage picked up his hat and followed the Scotsman from the cabin, telling the sentry to latch back the door and keep an eye on the prisoner.
Halfway up the companionway Ramage hissed up at Aitken: ‘What’s happened?’
‘That xebec, sir: Wagstaffe sent it: Orsini’s brought news of what happened at Porto Ercole.’
Ramage stopped climbing. ‘What happened that we don’t know about?’
‘Well, nothing really important, sir,’ Aitken said lamely. ‘I just thought–’
‘Very well, tell Orsini to wait: I want half an hour with this French officer…’
Aitken acknowledged the order and Ramage went down the companionway, apologized to a startled Poitier for the interruption, and sat down at his desk after dropping his hat on the settee once again.
‘We were discussing your orders,’ he reminded Poitier, ‘and you claimed you were on a routine cruise.’
‘Yes,’ Poitier said, obviously becoming bored, as well as tired and shaky from his leg wound. ‘A routine cruise. We’d sighted nothing; we needed wood and water…’
‘Why choose Porto Ercole and not a large port like Leghorn?’
‘Light winds,’ Poitier said smoothly. ‘It would have taken days–’
‘But you arrived off Argentario from the direction of Leghorn,’ Ramage interrupted. ‘I saw you.’
‘That is true,’ Poitier admitted. ‘I like Porto Ercole. The wine, plenty of wild boar from the Maremma, as much fresh water and wood as we need…’ The Frenchman’s voice had a confidential note, as though he was confessing to Ramage that he had a weakness for roast boar.
Ramage nodded understandingly but then the Frenchman saw his eyes narrow, the skin over his cheeks and nose tautening, and his left hand slap down three or four times on some papers, the heavy signet ring on the little finger banging on the desk top.
‘Admiral, you were engaged in some secret operation. I want to know what it was.’
Poitier held o
ut his hands, palms upwards. ‘Yes, I admit it, of course. The bomb ketches give that way. The details I do not know: they were secret, you understand – probably only the Minister of Marine and a few others would know the details. Nothing was in writing – except for assembling some of the ships. Only the senior army commanders and the admirals received verbal orders about the destination. You do the same in England.’
Ramage did not bother to contradict him; there was no point in telling him that the details of most secret operations were usually the talk of fashionable London drawing rooms for days and weeks beforehand. The idea of a secret operation being mounted from Britain was almost ludicrous, unless only one or two ships were involved.
‘Nevertheless, because your role in this operation is now over, Admiral, I should be interested to know what it was.’
Poitier eased his wounded leg and nodded. ‘Yes, I suppose there can be no harm in telling you: the seamen in all three frigates knew – the regular ship gossip, of course. We were to embark cavalry, infantry and artillery at Porto Ercole and carry them elsewhere. We were doing that when my – when your,’ he corrected himself, ‘bomb ketches attacked.’
‘Where were you to transport them?’
Poitier shrugged his shoulders most convincingly. ‘I do not know: I was expecting a messenger hourly from the Minister in Paris with further orders. He had not arrived when you attacked.’
Ramage saw that the Frenchman had been quick with his story and it was convincing enough for Poitier to be able to keep to it. The messenger from Paris…delayed as the frigates prepared to sail…so likely, so readily understood by an enemy officer. Poitier might be feeling weary and his leg might hurt, but he was thinking quickly and clearly. Very well, the pressure must be applied; another turn taken up on the rack.
Ramage said quickly but firmly, his fingers tapping on the papers as though it was a nervous habit: ‘I must know your ultimate destination, Admiral. It affects the safety of my country and the lives of my countrymen.’
‘I am sorry I cannot help you, Lord Ramage,’ Poitier said regretfully. ‘I am a prisoner and no further use to my own country, but I was told so little.’
The Frenchman had changed in the last few minutes – from the time that Aitken had come in. His complexion was less grey, his face less lined, and he was sitting upright in the chair now, as though this was his cabin and Ramage merely a tiresome visitor. Ramage felt instinctively that the longer he kept the admiral sitting there in the armchair the less chance he had of wringing any secrets out of him. The Frenchman’s confidence had imperceptibly returned. Now was the time for gentle threats – and perhaps some that were not so gentle.
‘I have no wish to be burdened with so many prisoners,’ Ramage said conversationally, ‘so I am proposing to land all of you at Porto Ercole, providing each of you signs the usual agreement not to serve again until regularly exchanged. You agree to that?’
Poitier nodded eagerly, wincing as the movement jerked his leg. ‘Yes, of course. It is generous of you. You can go into Porto Ercole under a flag of truce.’
‘Very well, we shall do that. However, there is one small question. Small for me,’ he said, tapping the papers again, ‘but of more consequence for you.’
Poitier looked at him warily. ‘What is it? I’ve agreed to the exchange – which takes nearly three hundred prisoners off your hands. They could rise and take your ship.’
‘They could not,’ Ramage said shortly. ‘We rescued them from drowning, but any sign that they are not suitably grateful means that they get a whiff of canister shot fired into the middle of them. No, I was thinking of your own particular position.’
‘My own position? Well, if I sign an exchange agreement, presumably you will put me on shore with the rest. You will have my parole.’
‘Yes,’ Ramage said carefully, ‘and at the moment, only two people know that you did not dispose of your most secret papers – you, and me.’
Poitier went white, making a curious grasping movement with his hands, as though afraid he would fall from the chair. ‘What…what do you mean?’
‘If your Minister of Marine and Colonies knew that you had not destroyed these papers – even though the Furet had been overtaken by an enemy ship, had hauled down her colours and was sinking – I think we know what would happen to you. You recognize them’ – he held them up and when he had put them down he reached for the box and held it up ‘–and the weighted box? Bottom right-hand drawer of your desk?’
When Poitier made no answer Ramage said: ‘The guillotine, I imagine.’
Poitier nodded dumbly. ‘Yes, they would suspect a plot. Collusion, in fact. My family in Britanny would be punished. Our land would be confiscated. There would be no end to it.’
‘Exactly,’ Ramage said, hating what he was having to do but knowing that he had no choice. ‘That young lieutenant of yours knows nothing and suspects nothing. I presume the captain disposed of his papers?’
‘I don’t know,’ Poitier admitted. ‘I did not see him, but anyway it hardly matters now – he is dead and the ship is sunk and obviously you do not have them. Had I seen him throwing them over the side it would have reminded me, but the ship was beginning to sink so fast and you were so close in our wake…we were concerned–’
‘With staying alive,’ Ramage interrupted with deliberate cruelty, trying to make it easier for Poitier to agree to what he was about to propose. ‘A broadside pour l’honneur du pavillon and then a hurried surrender.’
‘It was not like that,’ Poitier protested. ‘We had to bear up to slow the ship – her speed was ripping away the planks…’
Ramage shrugged. ‘You will have to convince your minister about that, not me. But the affair of the secret papers – that is the thing which could send you to the guillotine.’
‘Will send me to the guillotine,’ Poitier said.
‘Yes, if it becomes known in Paris I am sure it will.’
Poitier glanced up at the word ‘if’, caught Ramage’s eye and said frankly: ‘You are offering me some kind of exchange? What can I bargain with?’
‘You can have all these papers–’ Ramage pushed them towards him across the top of the desk ‘–in exchange for one piece of information. Once I have it, you will be free to go out to the quarter gallery and throw them over the side. Or you can put them in your pocket.’
‘What piece of information?’ Poitier blurted out.
‘What is that “special service”?’
Poitier’s head dropped and his eyes closed. For a moment Ramage thought he had fainted. With a great effort he pulled himself together, sat upright and, looking directly at Ramage, said: ‘There is no “special service” now. I doubt if you will believe me but it has been cancelled. One of the minister’s aides came to tell me, and the fleet–’ he broke off, as if deciding to keep the rest secret.
Ramage pulled the documents back across the desk and began straightening them up, so that their top edges were level. ‘I think you had better prepare yourself for the guillotine, Admiral. I’m sorry.’
Poitier looked Ramage straight in the eye. ‘There is no reason why you should believe me, but I hope you will listen for a moment. The “special service” is cancelled – not just postponed but cancelled – so I suppose there is nothing treasonable in my telling you about it.
‘A fleet was being assembled in Toulon and Cartagena – there were to be several Spanish ships of the line accompanying us, but no Spanish troops – with transports. Troops were collecting from all over France, but to make up the required strength it was decided to use some forces from the Army of Italy – the men I was to collect at Porto Ercole. They were stationed at various places in the local province – at Grosseto, I think the town was called.
‘As you have read in those letters, I was to sail from Toulon with three frigates, meet two bomb ketches at Porto Ercole, embark all these soldiers, and then sail for the rendezvous with the fleet.’
Ramage held up his hand. ‘Where was
the rendezvous?’
‘At Candia. The fleet was to have sailed for Crete soon after me, although it was due to arrive there first, because I was expected to lose time embarking the troops at Porto Ercole – the army,’ he said without malice, ‘is rarely punctual.’
He paused for a moment, as though collecting his thoughts. Or, Ramage realized, hurriedly making up more of a story, or ornamenting it. Up to now the story rang true though: certainly it seemed likely, and it was borne out by the letters.
‘Where was I? Oh yes, the rendezvous at Candia. That was arranged, and according to the orders I had already received my three frigates provisioned and watered in Toulon for three months. You understand that provisions are difficult to obtain in France these days, and I had a struggle to get even a small amount of cordage and canvas to have as a reserve. I still had to get the extra month’s provisions for the troops we were to embark in Porto Ercole.
‘Then the minister’s aide arrived in Porto Ercole yesterday, while we were loading troops, with the news that the whole operation had been cancelled. The admiral was told that half his ships of the line (five out of eleven) were to be laid up in ordinary, and all the seamen from those five ships with less than a year’s experience at sea were to be handed over to the army.
‘The orders for myself were that I should pick up the troops in Porto Ercole as arranged, and proceed to Candia. There I was to land the troops, who were to take up garrison duties in the island. The two bomb ketches were to remain there to give some protection to what is otherwise a poorly defended anchorage. Having escorted the bomb ketches and disem-barked the troops, I was to return to Toulon with the frigates.’
Ramage asked: ‘Where was the fleet to land this army?’
Poitier paused for a good minute, obviously weighing up his answer. Finally he said: ‘I cannot tell you. You could guess. There is only one place for which Bonaparte might again consider risking an army and a fleet.’
Again? Ramage realized that Poitier wanted him to guess. ‘Egypt? Where he’s already lost an army and a fleet?’