Ramage's Signal (5 page)

“Ah, you consider this a good occasion to give the Marchesa's presents an airing?”

“Yes, sir,” Jackson said firmly. “Knowing her, I reckon the next time she sees you she's going to want to know how many Frogs you've spitted with the sword and shot with the pistols, and, beggin' your pardon, sir, you ain't much of a hand at telling lies. Leastways, not to the Marchesa.”

“You flatter me,” Ramage said ironically, but Southwick, who had overheard the conversation and knew Gianna almost as well as Jackson, said firmly: “He's right, sir. The Marchesa's bound to want to know, and she'll be hurt if you tell her a tale.”

“So you think tonight's attack is going to be a peaceful affair?” Ramage teased Southwick. “That's why you haven't been trying to persuade me to let you go?”

“No, sir,” Southwick answered promptly. “At my age I don't fancy traipsing over miles of sand and maquis. It's my feet that aren't willing! Find us a French frigate to board, and I'll be an eager volunteer. But this walking round the countryside …”

As soon as the American was out of earshot, Southwick commented: “I wonder how many times he's prepared your sword and pistols? A few dozen, I reckon.”

With the shadows lengthening across the deck, Ramage watched as Kenton and Martin stood in the two cutters, checking their contents before they were hoisted out. Earlier he had seen Jackson—who as captain's coxswain was responsible for the gig—going over the various items with Paolo. The boy had taken the task very seriously and Jackson, several inches taller, had bent to listen to him. Jackson had checked the gig, or whatever boat the Captain was going to use, hundreds of times before in previous years and could do it blindfolded, but he had the patience and, Ramage guessed, the affection, to go over it with Paolo as though this was the first time.

The wind was still light and it was time to be heading back for the coast. No one with a spyglass would be able to see that a frigate was steering the opposite course. Nor would they notice her later heave-to and hoist out boats, to be towed astern …

William Martin suddenly realized that it was two months to the day since the port admiral at Gibraltar had given him orders to join the
Calypso,
newly arrived from the West Indies. He was, the admiral said, replacing a fourth lieutenant who had quit in Gibraltar after being appointed to her in Jamaica, because the original second lieutenant had been killed in action (and the Captain wounded), so the other lieutenants had moved up a place—Wagstaffe went from third to second, Kenton moved up to third and a new man had been sent over as fourth.

The new man must have had fancy ideas. Martin had since gathered that he was a favourite of the commander-in-chief at Jamaica, and after the spaciousness of a 74-gun ship of the line he probably found a frigate small. Martin also suspected that Wagstaffe, now away taking to Gibraltar the French frigate they had captured, and Kenton, had taken a dislike to the new Lieutenant. They were an easygoing pair, Wagstaffe lanky and viewing life outside the ship as a humorous affair, while Kenton, small and red-haired, his face always red and peeling from sunburn, took very little interest in anything happening beyond the ship but had Wagstaffe's same amused attitude towards naval life. This occasionally shocked Martin, to whom the volume of Regulations and Instructions, and the slim copy of the Articles of War, were like a Bible.

Anyway, the pair of them had been very good to William Martin, the new Fourth Lieutenant replacing the fellow who quit, and he was lucky they and the Captain (and the First Lieutenant) liked his flute and encouraged him to play it. Certainly the ship's company enjoyed it, and John Smith the Second, who had been the ship's fiddler for years, was thankful not to have to fetch out his fiddle when the men wanted to dance to the tune of some forebitters or old favourites from one of Thomas Gay's operas, which Martin enjoyed playing of an evening.

Martin took a cutlass from the pile now lying on the deck by the grindstone and tested its edge. It had been well sharpened. Occasionally a careless man holding the blade to the stone would burr over the edge but, judging by the way this one was done, the man might well have been an itinerant knife grinder before being swept up by a press-gang. “Knives to grind, scissors to mend!” Martin could remember the tinkers walking the streets of Rochester and Chatham, their grindstone fitted to a wheel-barrow, their jug of water to whet the stone, and their cry, many of them with the addition of “Pots to mend! Put a sharp on y' scissors, ladies!”

For a moment he felt a nostalgia for the Medway, where he had spent his childhood and where even now his father was master shipwright at the Chatham Dockyard. The saltings, the acres of reeking mud exposed at low tide; the sea kale, the footprints of gulls and waders in the mud, the keen east winds of January which they said blew all the way from Russia … it was a long distance from here to the Medway. Perhaps two thousand miles, and certainly another lifetime. He found it hard to imagine a young William Martin who rowed on the muddy river in the little skiff that he had built himself. In fact his life seemed to have begun just two months ago, when the Port Admiral had said to him: “I'm sending you over to serve under Captain Ramage. By Christmas you'll be dead or a hero, but if you see the New Year in, you'll have learned enough from him to stand a good chance of being made a post captain by the time you are thirty.”

Well, the Port Admiral seemed to be right—Captain Ramage's first foray into the Mediterranean with the
Calypso
had resulted in blowing up one French frigate, sinking a second and capturing a third, which was the one that Wagstaffe was now sailing to Gibraltar. All three frigates had, by chance, been sister ships of the
Calypso,
which in turn Mr Ramage had himself captured in a battle in the West Indies.

But right now Martin had to admit, as he selected two pistols from a couple of dozen in a skip beside the cutlasses and snapped them to make sure the flints were giving strong sparks, the idea of the forthcoming attack on the semaphore station seemed dull stuff. As dull, he thought, as “blackstrap.” Ever since he first went to sea as a midshipman there had been a romantic ring to the phrase “being blackstrapped,” which was seaman's slang for being sent to the Mediterranean.

No one was very sure how the phrase originated. Blackstrap Bay was on the east side of Europa Point, Gibraltar, and any ship becalmed as she entered the Strait bound for Gibraltar was almost invariably swept past into the Mediterranean by the eastgoing current, and that was called “being blackstrapped” because even with all the boats out towing, the men would be lucky if they managed to work the ship crabwise into Blackstrap Bay and anchor to wait for a fair wind.

To the seamen, however, blackstrap really meant only one thing. It was common for the seaman's daily allowance of one gallon of beer (small beer, admittedly, something just stronger than water but guaranteed not to go bad so quickly) to be replaced by something else when the ship was serving on different stations. In American waters, for instance, he was given a gallon of spruce beer, if it could be obtained. (Martin, to whom it tasted like a vile medicine, was thankful when the purser failed to get any.) In the West Indies it was nearly always half a pint of rum, which was popular as long as it was Jamaican or Barbadian. There was a peculiar rum distilled in Antigua and some other islands which seamen swore would serve better as horse liniment. Even Will Stafford, who would normally happily drink anything, reckoned it “a sovereign cure for a sprain or rheumaticks.” Anyway, the regulations said that “In the Streights” one pint of wine was to be issued in place of one gallon of beer.

The wine, usually a rough red that often had much in common with vinegar, was known throughout the Navy as “blackstrap.” Still he was thankful that wine-for-beer was the only “exchange of provisions of one species for another,” as it was known, practised in the Mediterranean. He had heard the West Indies was the worst station—rice for oatmeal, oil for butter and two pounds of Cheshire cheese for three of Suffolk.

In the meantime, there was the immediate question of the semaphore station and he was commanding the red cutter and carrying half the Marines, while Kenton was taking the other half in the green.

They would be landing on a sandy beach and with no swell out here, it was unlikely there would be any in the bay; just small wind waves. Very well, the cutter drew three feet eight inches forward, so he must make sure that if the Marines had to wade, their powder and flints would be slung on their shoulders to stay dry. Normally they could jump from the stem into shallow water, but there were usually one or two clumsy oafs with three left feet who fell.

Paolo Orsini was standing only a few feet from Martin. The lad brought up in the home of Chatham Dockyard's master shipwright and now the acting Third Lieutenant of the
Calypso
(at least until Wagstaffe returned with his prize crew), and the young Midshipman raised in the
palazzo
at Volterra and, until the Marchesa married and had a son, the heir to the kingdom, were already firm friends.

Martin, knowing Paolo would be in the gig with the Captain, said quietly: “Remember the gig draws three feet eight inches forward. That's when you'll ground on the sand and the boat might start broaching.”

“Thanks, Blower,” Paolo murmured. “If anyone asked I'd have had to guess, and I'd have said five feet …”

With that he snapped the pistol he was holding yet again and cursed the flint, using colourful Italian blasphemy for the weakness of its spark, and tossed the pistol back into the skip and chose another.

“Have you seen the Captain's pair of pistols?” he asked conversationally.

“No, the last time I saw him at general quarters—after he sank that frigate—he was wearing a pair of Sea Service, like the rest of us.”

“He prefers them,” Paolo said confidingly, “but tonight he's wearing a matched pair given him by my aunt. Hexagonal barrels, and made by Mansfield in Bond Street. Almost like duelling pistols.”

“What's he do, then, tuck them in his belt or put them in his pockets?”

“No, they've been specially fitted with belt-hooks.”

“I'd be afraid of losing ‘em,” Martin said. “After all, once you've fired ‘em you usually throw them!” He slipped the wide leather cutlass-belt diagonally over his shoulder and slid the cutlass into the frog. He would have to wait to load the pistol; the Captain was very fussy about having powder on deck.

Paolo's thoughts had been running parallel to Martin's, and neither realized that both Kenton and Aitken felt the same—that they were going to a great deal of trouble to capture what Paolo privately regarded as a thin wooden wall and a few hen houses. The wooden wall looked as though it was supposed to protect the hen houses from the wind, in the same way that many farm houses in Italy were protected by rows of cypress trees which broke the force of the strongest winds.

But the Captain, Paolo mused, had behaved rather curiously when giving his orders for the attack: they must not damage the wall or the hen houses and were to seize all papers and books; particularly they were to ensure that the French did not set fire to anything. They must avoid using pistols as much as possible—unless they saw a man trying to burn anything.

Paolo noted that although Mr Southwick had not been in the cabin when the Captain gave his orders—he had been officer of the deck—he had quite cheerfully helped prepare the ship, refusing to go below to rest when his watch finished, even though he would be up all night. Nor, for that matter, had Mr Rennick shown any reluctance or boredom; in fact he seemed as alert and excited as the night he led the Marines in the attack on that castle at Santa Cruz, on the Spanish Main.

The Midshipman put the cutlass-belt over his head, selected a cutlass and put it in the frog, and then slid the hook of a pistol into his waistbelt. He could feel his dirk slapping against his buttock; a comforting reminder of his favourite weapon.

Jackson came up to him. “Mr Orsini—you're in the gig. Can I leave the grapnel to you?”

Orsini nodded eagerly and Jackson said: “I'll give you the word when to drop it over the stern, but the main thing is not to let the coil of line get twisted up: it's got to run free, otherwise it'll fetch us up short or you'll lose the coil.”

“I understand, Jacko.”

“And if you'll forgive me reminding you, sir, lower the grapnel slowly until you feel it on the bottom and then keep a steady pull on the line as you pay it out, to make sure the grapnel stays dug in. Otherwise it'll try and skate across the bottom if there's hard sand.”

“Yes, Jacko.”

“And don't forget to make up the line on the cleat once we're beached.”

“No, Jacko,” Paolo said patiently, with just enough edge in his voice to remind the American that he had done this sort of thing several times before.

“I know, sir,” Jackson said, having earlier detected the resentment in the boy's voice, “but we don't want mistakes tonight.”

“What is so special about tonight?” Paolo made little attempt to hide his contempt for the landing.

“Any action is special, sir,” Jackson said quietly. “You're more likely to get killed if you're careless, and you're more likely to be careless if you think something's unimportant.”

“Quite true,” Paolo admitted, “but attacking hen houses!”

“They're barracks, sir,” Jackson said sharply, “with thirty or forty French soldiers in them. Each man has a musket and probably a pistol. That's a hundred lead shot, any one of which can drag your anchors for the next world. And thirty or forty swords slicing you up like a leg of salt pork … Anyway,” he said in a voice which clinched any argument, “the Captain sets a lot of store by us capturing it.”