Ramage & the Rebels (9 page)

But he had felt very strongly this sense of—well, what? That the quarterdeck had grown chillier, like walking into the crypt of a church. That he had seen the whole episode before, although it was no stronger than a distant memory or a half-remembered dream. Yet he had known before it happened that Baker would produce a bundle of letters; he knew how the Captain would take them and walk over to the companion-way and down the steps, hunched as though the letters brought him bad news, instead of having been written by people of whom they had never heard.

That seaman Jackson, the Captain's coxswain, he was just walking round as though bewildered, stunned almost, refusing to help Stafford finish cutting up a new pair of trousers. Rossi, too, the third one of that curious trinity, was sitting on his own, his thoughts miles away. Yet of all the men in the ship those two must have seen the most violence and bloodshed. What had upset them could not have been these senseless murders in the
Tranquil.
It was something else, as though a hand had reached out of the past and touched them on the shoulder.

The first time he had ever had this sensation of a touch from the past was when he was perhaps eleven or twelve years old and had walked from his home in Dunkeld down the steep hill towards the village.

It was a late autumn day with the last of the sun turning the leaves of the great beeches into burnished copper, and he had gone through the gate to the ruined cathedral. It was a stone skeleton; only the walls stood; the roof had long since gone. Yet it was easy to picture the fine stone building in its glory, men and women and children singing hymns, their voices echoing under the vaulted roof. The service would end and they would be blessed, and slowly they would go to their homes, pausing perhaps at the main door to talk for a few minutes, to exchange family news and to gossip perhaps, but feeling spiritually refreshed by the service.

Round the cathedral, lining the paths, were graves and the entrances to vaults; carved marble, stained by age, mottled by lichen, recording a couple of hundred years and more of the story of the people of Dunkeld, and the people walking to the gate would be passing the last resting places of their parents, grandparents, great-grandparents … As a young boy on that autumn evening he had sensed all this and had in his imagination seen people dressed in clothes he did not recognize, and which he later discovered were the fashions of past centuries.

Between those earlier centuries and the time he stood there as a boy, the cathedral had been burned; the pews and the beams had gone up in flames and the roof had collapsed. No one had tried to repair it; moss and lichen grew in the stones, the grass spread over the tombs. It was something about which his mother would never speak. But as he stood there and thought about it the atmosphere had grown chilly. Not cold and not frightening, even though he had been only a boy. Just enough for him to realize he was experiencing something he would never be able to describe or explain. Indeed, he had never spoken of it.

Now the
Calypso
had changed. It was probably his imagination, but as he sat here looking at the Captain, he knew that around Jackson and Rossi and the Captain there was—well, an aura almost, as though they had stepped from the past.

Yet it was all absurd: the
Calypso
was a frigate built only five years ago in a French shipyard, captured only a few weeks ago by Mr Ramage, and Jackson was an American seaman who had volunteered to serve in the Royal Navy and Rossi was a Genoese—what did he call himself? a Genovesi?—and that was that. He, James Aitken, a lieutenant in the Royal Navy and the
Calypso
's First Lieutenant, was rambling amidst superstition like an ancient widowed crone outside her croft high in the Perthshire hills, weaving with gnarled hands and prattling through toothless gums and staring about her with fading eyes, living in a world of vague memories and dreams of what might have been.

Yet here was the Captain referring to “something unusual in all this” and looking as if he had just seen a ghost.

It was nothing to do with Aitken, but it had happened as the young Scot had entered the cabin: Ramage had had this overpowering sense that he knew what Aitken was going to say. Earlier he had found himself giving orders as though repeating the words from a play or something said in a dream. Southwick had been puzzled because he had not gone on board the
Tranquil,
and even Ramage had been surprised to hear himself telling Jackson he was not going.

While Baker and Kenton had been on board her, somehow he had known what they were seeing; he had known that women had been murdered. But he had dismissed all that as something he did not understand; he had given his orders, come down to his cabin and gone through the letters, and had thought of Gianna, and all the time he had pushed aside this—this what?

And then as Aitken had come through the doorway he had remembered a story his father had told him. He must have been very young at the time, and Father was telling him something of the Ramage family; how one day, when he was grown up, he would become the Earl of Blazey in place of his father.

At first he had not understood; then he had realized his father was saying that when an earl died his eldest son became the next earl; that his father was the tenth Earl, and he had succeeded
his
father, Ramage's grandfather, who was the ninth Earl and who in turn had succeeded the eighth Earl, who was Ramage's great-grandfather.

It was great-grandfather, Charles Uglow Ramage, the eighth Earl of Blazey, about whom his father had told him the story. He could not remember many of the details—he had been so young that the story had little more significance than so many of the tales that his mother or father told him before he went to sleep at night.

But great-grandfather Charles, the second son, had been in Barbados during the Civil War, a Royalist, and for reasons which Ramage could no longer remember he had later fled the island and headed for Jamaica in the ship the family owned and which was used for supplying the plantation there. And something had happened which caused great-grandpa to become a buccaneer; he had hated the Spanish so bitterly that for years he harried the Main and the Spanish privateers—just as his great-grandson was doing now, only as a King's officer.

Ramage could remember faintly that there was some story of a privateer, perhaps more than one—indeed there must have been many of them at one time or another—but the details had gone, lost in childish memories of stories about pixies and gnomes and fairies with magic wands.

Had great-grandfather found a similar massacre? In his voyaging in the Caribbean—they called it the North Sea then, and the Pacific was the South Sea, and men were still alive who remembered Drake fighting the Spanish Armada as it came up the Channel—had he experienced something which made him so hate the Spanish that for the rest of his life he fought them?

Then he remembered the set of silver candlesticks used at dinner at home, three-branched, candelabra, five of them but usually only two used unless there were many guests. Those candelabra had been part of the ransom paid after a raid on some town or other along the Main. There were several things—the candelabra, the smaller set of silver plate which was not used now because cleaning and polishing was wearing away the intricate design, said to be Moorish, those long-barrelled matchlock pistols and arquebuses which lined one of the halls, some of the armour, richly-chased corselets and helmets—all had been acquired by the eighth Earl during his buccaneering days.

Of course the word buccaneer was used now to mean someone akin to pirate, although in great-grandfather's day it was generally someone who, before there was a proper Navy, held a commission from the King or a governor allowing him (encouraging him, in fact, because the expense was entirely his) to wage war against the enemy. Drake, Ralegh, Hawkins—buccaneers all.

Aitken was looking at him, apparently puzzled. What had he just said? The First Lieutenant had been about to leave the cabin and he had gestured to him to wait, and he had said something, as an explanation. But now he could not remember what it was, so it could not have been important.

“Boarders,” he said for the sake of saying something. “Exercise the boarders as much as you can. Get the grindstone up on deck and make sure the cutlasses are honed and the boarding-pikes sharp. And boats, we must exercise hoisting out boats …”

“You had mentioned that, sir,” Aitken said patiently.

“Oh yes,” Ramage said, “so I did. Very well, I think that's all for now.”

Aitken stood up slowly, hoping the Captain would resume what he had started to say, but he had a faraway look in his eyes, and Aitken knew this was not the time to fetch him back from wherever his memories had taken him.

T
HE darkness immediately before dawn was depressing, chilly and damp, and Ramage pulled his boat-cloak round him, hating the way the wool smelled because the salt soaked into it had absorbed the humid night air. In three or four hours the scorching sun would make him envy the seamen wearing only light shirts and thin trousers. But now, as they all waited for dawn, it seemed as cold as the English Channel. It wasn't, of course; he was now so accustomed to the Tropics that any time the temperature dropped below what would be a scorching day in England he felt frozen.

Baker was the officer of the deck; every ten minutes he called to the six lookouts posted round the ship, one at each bow, one amidships and one on each quarter. He called to them individually and received the same answer, that nothing was in sight, but this constant hailing was not because Baker was nervous or there was any particular danger: it was one way of ensuring the lookouts stayed awake. Staring into the darkness was peculiarly tiring; it was fatally easy to drop off to sleep, even though standing up. And sleeping on duty was a serious crime; not the mere fact of dozing but because in those minutes (even moments) of sleep an enemy could close in or a rocky shoal come into sight. One dozing man could lose the ship and kill every one of his shipmates.

Ramage accepted that lookouts might doze; his own days as a midshipman were not far behind him, and he could remember the tricks he had been reduced to as he tried to stay awake. Wetting your eyelids and facing the wind—that revived you for a few minutes, but never for long enough. Rocking back and forth on heels and toes, shaking the head like a wet dog, flexing the knees, knuckling the eyes and brow … But best of all was the officer of the deck checking every man every ten minutes, and that was in his night orders. Perhaps other captains ordered it, although he had never been lucky enough to serve with one. But never in the years he commanded a ship had he needed to flog a man for sleeping on duty.

He imagined the earth slowly turning towards the sun, bringing dawn to start the day here, bringing twilight to end the day there, somewhere at the far end of the Mediterranean. In Cornwall, dawn had arrived four hours ago; by now it would be broad daylight with St Kew bustling: breakfast would be over and what would Gianna and his parents be doing? The old Admiral would probably be astride a horse, cantering out to inspect a field of growing wheat or call on a sick tenant; his mother would be deciding the day's menus. Gianna—perhaps Gianna would be writing to him, another page in the long letters they wrote like diary entries.

The sun already shining over England (or hiding behind cloud) was lifting across the Atlantic and it would soon be here. The theory was interesting and there was no doubt—unless the world stood still—that it would occur in practice but, Ramage thought crossly, for the moment it was damned dark and damned cold here, just north of the Dutch island, with a ten-knot breeze and all plain sail set and, from the sound of it, the drummer buckling on his instrument to beat to quarters. Every ship of the Navy in wartime met the dawn with its men at general quarters; the ever-widening circle of daylight could reveal an empty horizon, but it could also reveal an enemy ship, even a fleet, within gunshot.

He listened to the ship noises, so much a part of life that normally one did not notice them: the creak of the great yards overhead and the occasional flap of a sail, like a deep sneeze; the rumble of the barrel of the wheel as the men turned the spokes and the tiller ropes tightened or slackened, pulling the tiller below deck one way or the other, transmitting direction to the rudder to keep the ship on course and make that distant, ugly noise as gudgeons and pintles grated against each other, the metal lubricated only by the sea.

There was the creaking of the ship herself as she rolled and as the swell waves moved under her: creaks caused by slight movements of planking, of futtocks, of keel and keelson. Here, right aft, the intricate framing of the transom made more noise than in a British frigate, presumably because of some difference between British and French shipbuilding practice. The brief but deep noise of the trucks of the guns moving an inch, the distance the rope stretched when the ship rolled heavily. The lighter creak of rope shrouds stretching under strain, a curious noise which Ramage always thought rheumatism would make if it had a noise of its own. The animal squeak of the sheaves of blocks as rope rendered through them; blocks that the boatswain and his mates had missed greasing when they went round with the tallow bucket, although with all the hundreds of blocks in use it was a never-ending job.

The hiss of the sea, of the white horses riding crests, was more pronounced in the darkness; occasionally there was a thump and splash as the bow caught an odd wave and sliced off the top in a shower of spray; sometimes a sudden movement in the sky as a seabird wheeled in the darkness, probably startled as it slept on the surface of the water. Sometimes sudden slight flappings on the deck showed flying fish had landed on board and the officer of the deck usually gave permission to a lookout to grab them and put them in the fish bucket kept by the main-mast for the purpose.