Ramage's Signal (3 page)

“Aye aye, sir,” Aitken said gloomily. “I'll use this slate,” he said to Southwick. “You'll have to get another one.” With that he took his telescope and the slate and made for the ratlines to begin the long hand-over-hand climb to the main-topmasthead.

While Southwick, who was officer of the deck, alternately picked up his telescope, put it down to mark the slate, then used his quadrant to measure horizontal angles between the tower and huts, and the vertical angle made by the tower, Ramage nodded to Rennick, indicating that he should join him at the taffrail.

The Marine officer, round faced and red complexioned, was one of the most popular in the ship: his sergeant, two corporals and 34 men jumped high when he said jump, but they liked him and were proud of him. Rennick exercised them relentlessly but—and Ramage had watched carefully—they did not resent it: they were as keen as Rennick to beat the seamen's times for loading and running out a twelve-pounder gun, and at the moment a Marine crew held the record for loading, running out and firing a carronade on the new slides. The Wednesday competition, as it was called, was one of the
Calypso
's most popular events—the three carronades on the larboard side manned by Marines competing against the three on the starboard side by seamen, with all of them working to Southwick's whistle and timed by his watch.

Rennick waited for Ramage to speak, but the Marine's eyes were on the distant tower, watching it as a hunter might study a sparsely-covered valley separating him from a fine deer.

“Twenty-five men as garrison, a night attack from boats, no one must escape to raise the alarm, and preferably no muskets or pistols used in case some casual eye spots a flash. Well?”

Rennick paused a few moments before answering. “If we wait until they're all turned in and there's only a sentry awake, sir, I could do it with my men alone. But if the alarm was raised and it's a straight attack at darkness—well, I'd like a second boat with a boarding party. Prisoners?”

“If possible. And I want an attack without the alarm being raised.”

Rennick nodded. “There's no moon. The thing most likely to raise the alarm would be the keel of the boat grating on the beach.”

“It's sand here, not pebbles,” Ramage said, “and the boat party can drop a kedge and ease themselves in.”

“A nice run on shore for my lads, sir,” Rennick said cheerfully, “and—”

“There are a few conditions,” Ramage said warningly. “They might change your views. First every book, log, letter—every sheet of paper in those huts must be seized intact. Once the French realize they're being attacked, they might try to destroy signal books and logs. Secondly, I might decide at the last moment that our party will stay on to occupy the semaphore station for a few days. That means they might have to defend it. Thirdly, I shall be coming along too.”

“Aye aye, sir,” Rennick said, grinning at Ramage's last few words.

By now seamen were stopping to gossip with one another, pointing at the distant tower and, without knowing what it was, guessing it now held some special significance for the
Calypso,
although obviously puzzled because the frigate was holding her course and already the tower was drawing aft along the starboard quarter.

William Stafford, a Cockney able seaman working abreast the foremast, waved his hand, dismissing the whole thing. “It's very windy ‘ere; comes roarin' acrorst that plain from the mountings. They put up the wall to protect the ‘uts.”

The Italian seaman, Alberto Rossi, laughed derisively. “Is a good idea, Staff, but the
torre
is not between the huts and the plain. Is to one side.”

“And it's made of wood; I heard Mr Aitken say so,” Jackson added.

“Well, it's tall enough, Jacko,” Stafford persisted.

“It has shutters that open and close like windows,” Jackson said. “Used for semaphore. I heard them say that, too.” As the Captain's coxswain and an American who had served in the Royal Navy for years, even though he had a Protection in his seabag declaring his nationality that would secure his freedom whenever he presented it to an American consul, he was treated as the leader of a small group of seamen who had served with the Captain since he was a junior lieutenant.

“What good are windows?” Rossi demanded.

“How the devil do I know,” Jackson said amiably, keeping an eye on the bosun, who would be along in a few minutes to inspect the brasswork which he was polishing with brickdust. “I've never seen one of those things before.”

“Seems funny, just one put up on this bit o' the coast,” Stafford said. “What's semifour mean, anyway?”

“Semaphore,” Jackson corrected. “I'm not sure. Something to do with signalling, I think.”

“Don't see no flags,” Stafford persisted.

“That's the reason for the shutters, I expect,” Jackson said. “Opening some, closing others—that'd make patterns meaning different things.”

“Semaphore: it is from the Greek,” a young midshipman said in near perfect English. “It means—well,
sema
is ‘a sign,' and
phero
‘to bear.' A sign-bearer.”

“Oh,” Stafford said, “I thought it was the number four. Like four shutters, or somefing. I say, Mr Orsini, ‘ow many languages do you talk?”

“Well, I had to learn Latin and Greek. Italian is my native language and anyway is very like Latin. Spanish—that's like Italian too, and French.”

“And English,” Stafford added. “That makes six!”

The young midshipman, fourteen years old but tall, with straight black hair, a sallow skin and hooked nose, flushed with embarrassment.

“It is not as you think. My tutor, he made me study Latin, Greek, French, but at home we speak—we used to speak,” he corrected himself, “English and Spanish. I have Spanish relatives,” he said.

“And the Marchesa?” Jackson asked. “She speaks them too?”

Paolo Orsini nodded matter-of-factly. “Her French is better than mine. She hated the French ambassador.”

The three seamen waited expectantly, but Orsini obviously did not consider any further explanation necessary.

“Hated him, sir?” Jackson ventured.

“Oh, not just one but all of them. The last one sent by Louis XVI, and then the two from the Directory. The first of them she declared
persona non grata—
some affair of him stealing Court cutlery at one of her receptions—and his replacement was, how do you say, a boor.”

“Yes, they're all boars and should be kept in sties,” Stafford said sympathetically, “but why did it make your aunt improve her French?”

“Oh yes,” Orsini said, pausing a moment as he worked out Stafford's error, “my aunt occasionally had to talk to the French ambassador, and in the world of diplomacy the language is French. She did not want to give him the satisfaction of hearing her make a mistake.”

“Cor, French eh?” exclaimed Stafford. “It oughta be English. Lot of double meanings, that's all French is.”

“That's why governments use it,” Jackson said. “Now look sharp, ‘cos here comes the bosun.”

P
AOLO ORSINI had come off watch. He could now be in his berth sleeping, but it was a glorious day and because this was a part of the coast he had never seen before he had come up on deck to look. And he had listened to the talk of the tower with fascination. Semaphore!

He was very familiar with the thick-walled towers built two hundred years ago by the Spaniards along the Tuscan coast and many other places. They were signal towers and watch towers, some round, some square, each within sight of another, so that a fire of brushwood—usually from olive trees which burned readily and with intense flames—lit in a brazier on top would be seen in a moment; within twenty minutes a warning could be passed a hundred miles along a coast. They were admittedly just towers, with walls ten feet thick. These semaphore towers that the Captain had been discussing with the First Lieutenant and Southwick were something quite different.

What exactly
was
“semaphore?” He knew the Greek derivation but had no idea what use the French were making of it. At that moment he heard his name being hailed from the quarter-deck rail and saw that the First Lieutenant was down from aloft.
Accidente,
he had no hat, his shirt was grubby, his breeches stained by that oaf of a boy spilling the apology for stew that had masqueraded as a meal. But it was the First Lieutenant hailing, and he had only slightly more patience than the Captain.

There were times, he thought crossly, as he made for the quarterdeck ladder, when he could not understand why his aunt had fallen in love with Captain Ramage. Then, to be fair, when he recalled seeing her in some of her regal rages in the palace at Volterra, he could not understand why Captain Ramage had fallen in love with her. Anyway, with her now a refugee from her kingdom of Volterra and living in England with the Captain's parents, at least
she
had to be patient.

“Ah, Mr Orsini, how kind of you to come along.”

“Aye aye, sir.” It was best to humour the Captain when he was in one of these sarcastic moods.

“Cast your eye, Mr Orsini, upon the slate which Mr Southwick is holding, and tell me what you think it represents.”

The First Lieutenant, Lieutenant of Marines, Master and Captain: four pairs of eyes were watching him as he tried to make sense out of the small squares and lines marked on the slate. It looked like a maze. A puzzle. A diagram—yes, but of what?

“Come now, Mr Orsini, time flies, and your hesitation hardly flatters the person who drew the diagram.”

That was the First Lieutenant, who had been at the main-topmasthead. Ah! That was the clue.

“Il semaforo, commandante!”

Ramage said: “Be more exact.”

“That French camp, sir: the huts are here”—he indicated the five rectangles—”and this line is the wall.”

“The wall?
Il muro?
Do you know what
un semaforo
is?”

Sheepishly Paolo shook his head. “No, sir, I was guessing.”

“Well, it's like patterns on playing cards: each has a separate meaning. With that kind”—he nodded towards the tower, now well past on the starboard quarter—”there are a series of white shutters, like windows. You open some and close others so you make patterns, like rearranging the black and white squares on a chess board, and someone at a distance using a telescope can ‘read' it and understand your message. Of course, he has to have the same signal book as you, giving him the key to the meanings.”

“Yes, sir.” It was so obvious; he should have guessed. But where was the next tower? And the last one? How far could they see from one tower to another? Where did a message come from, and go to? And why was the
Calypso
not attacking this tower? Surely tearing down one tower would have the same effect as cutting a signal halyard?

Paolo realized that in the last few moments all the ship's officers had arrived on the quarterdeck, and it gave him some satisfaction that Kenton, the Second Lieutenant, and Martin, the Third, were even more puzzled than he had been.

“Mr Southwick will take over as officer of the deck; the rest of you come down to my cabin. Bring the slate.”

As soon as he was sitting at his desk, with his officers perched on the settee and Aitken occupying the only armchair, Ramage said: “You've been bored since we captured the bomb ketches, and have to stand an extra watch while Wagstaffe takes our frigate prize to Gibraltar. I'm sorry I couldn't keep the bomb ketches as toys for you, but you saw how slow they were, so there was no choice but to scuttle them.”

“That seemed to change our luck, sir,” Aitken said ruefully.

“Yes. Here we are with orders to attack anything we can find, no British admiral within a thousand miles, and all we see are a few small coasting vessels carrying grain, almonds, rice, casks of wine, olive oil, salt fish and meat. Nothing worth sending in as a prize.”

“So that was why you decided to leave the Italian coast and try the coasts of France and Spain, sir?” Aitken asked.

“Yes. What advantage have we, Martin?”

He liked springing questions on his younger officers; it made sure they stayed awake, and, more important, kept them thinking ahead.

“Well, sir, the
Calypso
being French-built and still using French-cut sails, it means we can keep close in with the coast and the Frogs think she's one of theirs.”

“And the disadvantage?”

Martin looked puzzled but Orsini asked permission to speak, and said: “It isn't worth sinking these little tartanes and xebecs because that would reveal we are a sheep in wolf's—no, I mean wolf in a sheepskin.”

“Exactly,” Ramage said, “but as Mr Aitken will probably agree, although we have no choice, it's an appalling waste of the kind of orders we dream about.”

“Aye, in a day or so I'll be suggesting we sail into Toulon and attack the French fleet.”

Ramage nodded. “In the meantime we might attack this semaphore station.”

Aitken, still holding the slate, slowly uncrossed his legs and said warily, knowing by now to be watchful of his Captain when he was in a bantering mood: “I've been thinking about that, sir.”

“Go on,” Ramage said, sensing the First Lieutenant's unease.

“Well, sir, doesn't the same thing apply? I mean, we're leaving the small coasting vessels alone in the hope of finding better prizes, but knocking down a semaphore tower—well, it …”

“It raises the alarm without giving us a decent reward,” Ramage finished the sentence for him.

“Yes, sir.”

“But, my dear Aitken, we need neither knock down the tower nor raise the alarm. Why, in half an hour we'll be out of sight from the tower, even if anyone is watching us, which I doubt.”