Ramage's Trial (9 page)

“Yes – tell me, Mr Orsini, have you seen if any of the merchant ships have made me a signal?”

“Why yes, sir: I've just seen that one of them, the
Beatrice
, has a wheft flying at her foretopmasthead: I assume she wishes to communicate with you, sir.”

“Very well, acknowledge it. If I remember rightly, hoisting a blue, white and red at the mizentopmasthead merely says: ‘The Commander of the convoy sees the signal that is made to him'.”

“Yes, sir, it doesn't specify which signal or who is making it,” Paolo said, enjoying the game.

Ramage nodded and then, still looking through his glass, he groaned. “That horse won't start – the
Beatrice
is hoisting out a boat. We'll have the master on board in a few minutes with a list of requests…”

“'Bout time for the next gun, sir,” Aitken reminded him, overhearing the conversation with Orsini and looking across at the
Beatrice
, a ship which was of no colour: her paint was worn off the hull by the combined attacks of sea and sea air, time and the wind. Time had turned the bare wood grey, so that she looked as if she had been built of driftwood. “The boat they've just hoisted out doesn't look as though she'll swim this far!” Aitken added.

And Ramage saw that the first couple of men who had climbed down into the boat were now busy bailing: obviously the planking of the boat, stowed on deck without a cover to protect the wood from the scorching sun, had split as the wood shrunk: “shakes”, like the wrinkles on an old man's neck, would let the water leak through. It would take hours of soaking for the wood to swell up and staunch the leaks enough for the boat to be usable. Stowing the boat with water in it would have saved them a lot of trouble because the rolling of the ship would have kept the water swilling round.

“Very well, Mr Aitken, the last signal!”

The first lieutenant, after checking with Southwick that the anchor was off the ground, gave the order for the topsails to be sheeted home, and another gun to be fired. That was the final order to get the convoy under way and given in the
SIGNALS and INSTRUCTIONS
as
To Weigh, the outward
and leeward ships first
.

“Let's get out to seaward of them,” Ramage said. “If we stay here, one of them is sure to hit us.”

“The
Beatrice
, sir,” Orsini reminded him.

“You are the Keeper of the Captain's Conscience, eh?” Ramage teased him. “They've signalled that they want to communicate – and we're waiting for them.”

“She's in sight of the flagship, sir,” Paolo pointed out.

Indeed, the
Queen
was perfectly placed to see all that was going on, and if the
Calypso
left the anchorage without attending to the blasted
Beatrice
there would be plenty of sycophantic lieutenants on board the flagship only too anxious to make sure that the admiral was kept well informed.

He was going to have to do something about the damned ship sooner or later, but in the meantime it would not hurt to scare the
Beatrice
's master. “We'll circle the anchorage a few times while these mules get under way,” he told Aitken. “Once we've got the leaders of the columns in position, Orsini can take a boat over to the
Beatrice
. I'm more concerned with seeing how these two frigates are handled…They'll all be nervous for the first few days, let alone the first few hours.”

And he had made a few more hours slide by without thinking of Sarah. Plenty of work, plenty of bustle, plenty of alarms and emergencies…It was a good theory, but in practice it was going to be days and weeks and perhaps months of boredom, watching these mules making no attempt to keep position and knowing there was nothing he could do about it, except tow one or two – and leave some behind if necessary.

 

Ramage had chosen a convoy formation which gave him a broad front: the seventy-two ships were formed up in eight columns, each of nine ships. There were almost endless variations – some commanders preferred a long thin column of ships, claiming it was easier to control them. That might be so, but it was almost impossible to defend them: even a single privateer, let alone a couple of enemy frigates, could cut the convoy in half.

Having the ships advancing in a broad box-shaped formation meant that escorts could patrol ahead and astern, whence attacks were most likely to come, and since the box had narrower sides there was less room for a stray privateer to sneak in. But the real advantage, from Ramage's point of view, was that the mules had less chance to dally and drop astern.

With the convoy now formed up and heading northwards along the west coast of Barbados, the sun dipping low on the larboard beam, Ramage was weary but satisfied: getting under way could have been a lot worse. Even the abominable
Beatrice
was in position after Paolo had taken over half a dozen men to help the fools to weigh their anchor. Because of some tedious dispute about pay owing to some of her men, four of her six seamen had deserted last night in Barbados, swearing they would kill the master rather than sail with him again (and Paolo reported that he would not blame them). Four men short meant they could not turn the windlass to weigh the anchor, hence the wheft at the foretopmasthead.

As every drill sergeant knew, the most important man on a parade was the “right marker”, the man against whom all the other files positioned themselves. Ramage realized how lucky he was in having Yorke and the
Emerald
as his right marker. But by giving Yorke the position of leading ship in the starboard column (and thus the pivot on which most convoy movements would be made) he had put the
Emerald
in the most vulnerable position of all if the French attacked with a squadron. However, in war there was always risk, and Yorke would be the last to complain. Yet he was not thinking of Sidney Yorke: if he was honest with himself, Ramage was worrying about Sarah, who had been caught up in the war by accident: she had gone off on a peacetime honeymoon with her new husband and the war had started again to wrench her away. To what, he dare not think.

At least the two former prize frigates were turning out well. John Mead, the young lieutenant just made post and given command of
L'Espoir
, seemed a good shiphandler and had imagination. The sail handling was taking too long, but obviously during the next few days Mead would have his men working against a watch. Sail handling was second nature with most captains; but less popular was gunnery exercise. Guns firing meant scorched paint. There was always a spurt of flame upwards from the touch-hole and there was the muzzle blast, a mixture of smoke, unburnt powder and powdered rust from the shot. No matter how carefully shot was hammered and given a coat of blacking, there were always rust scales, and gunnery exercises (or a bout of action) always left the first lieutenant's scrubbed and holystoned decks stained and greasy – and badly marked by the wooden trucks of the carriages. There was no way that four wheels supporting a gun weighing a ton and a half being flung back in recoil were going to avoid scarring the deck planking, even if it was already grooved from previous years. Carpenters could plane and seamen scrub with holystones, but the marks were there, like cart tracks on a country lane, and a couple of hours' shooting worked the soot and rust powder well into the grain so that it looked like a chimney sweep's neck. Anyway, that was the problem for
L'Espoir'
s new captain: Ramage's only concern was that he carried out gunnery exercises.

Summers, commanding
La Robuste
, was a completely different man: where Mead was lively and talkative, full of ideas which Ramage noticed he sometimes expressed without sufficient thought, Summers was dour; he gave the impression of never speaking a word (expelling it, almost) without chewing it ten or twenty times. It was not the hesitation preceding deep thought, of that Ramage was sure; the dourness came from a brain which turned over slowly, like a roasting pig revolving on a spit. Would Summers be as slow in reacting to an emergency – when a privateer rushed out of the darkness to cut off one of the convoy? Why had the admiral put Summers in command of
La
Robuste
? If he had been an unsatisfactory first lieutenant in one of Tewtin's ships, it was of course a convenient way of getting rid of him. It wasted an opportunity to promote a favourite, but there must be times for flag officers when the need to get rid of a really incompetent (or irritating) subordinate overcame the demands of favouritism.

Summers, then, was the question mark; the convoy was sufficiently large and the escort of three frigates (one,
L'Espoir
, armed
en flûte
, so that virtually she carried no guns) was pathetically small: it averaged out at twenty-four merchant ships for each frigate. The escort was just large enough for Tewtin to avoid criticism from the Admiralty – unless it was heavily attacked and suffered disastrous losses. In that case Tewtin would probably be agile enough to make sure all the blame rested on the shoulders of the convoy commander…after all, admirals could not be everywhere, and had to rely on subordinates…

Still, it was a beautiful evening and Barbados was drawing astern on the starboard quarter, or rather the
Calypso
and the convoy appeared to be stationary on the sea, like small ornaments on a polished table, while the island itself seemed to be moving slowly away, distance softening the low outlines and turning the pale greys into misty and distant blues that would challenge a water-colourist.

What was Sidney Yorke (and his sister Alexis, for that matter) thinking about as they passed this northwestern coast of Barbados? It was out here, in the time of Cromwell, that one of Yorke's Royalist forebears had to escape from the island just a few yards ahead of the Roundheads and, according to Sidney, taking with him a French mistress, wife of some besotted Roundhead planter. He must ask Yorke to tell the story of that particular forebear, because he ended up in Jamaica as the leader of the Buccaneers, and the estates he then acquired now belonged to the Yorkes, though Ramage was far from sure that it was Sidney Yorke's branch of the family. It must be strange, though, looking across at an island and knowing that one and a half centuries ago, or whenever it was, all that parcel of land belonged to your family and, but for Cromwell's antics, would now belong to you.

Ramage realized that Southwick was standing nearby, obviously anxious to say something but unwilling to interrupt. Southwick always knew when he was away in another country and often another century.

“Ah, Southwick, this is probably the last time we'll ever see these mules in such good order!”

Southwick laughed and dismissed them with a wave of his hand. “I was watching those masters at the conference: that question you put Mr Yorke up to asking had an effect! You looked so fierce that every one of them could see the
Calypso
towing them under. Worth five dozen warning shots, that bit o' play-acting.”

“I hope no one got the wrong idea,” Ramage said. “I'll tow when needed, but I'll also leave 'em behind if they keep dropping astern at night.”

“I heard you threaten that, sir, but you wouldn't really, would you?” Southwick's doubt was quite clear.

“They'll get a couple of warnings, maybe three, but after that I'm not keeping the convoy jilling around until after noon. Otherwise it means we get only six hours or so's sailing out of twenty-four. We have to heave-to at daylight, say five thirty am, and the mule finally gets into position by noon. By six or seven o'clock at night he's reefing or furling again and snugging down for the night – and we've had the pleasure of his company for six or seven hours, making perhaps five knots. So in the twenty-four hours the convoy's covered thirty-five or forty miles, plus a bit for current if we're lucky. Remember, Southwick, we've got to sail 3,500 miles before we reach the Chops of the Channel. Does a hundred-day passage appeal to you? I'm damned if any of these mules are going to make me wait a hundred days for news of my wife.”

“I understand that, sir,” Southwick said, looking round to make sure no one else could hear them, “but I was thinking of Their Lordships.”

“
What
about Their Lordships?”

“These damned shipowners have a lot of influence, sir. If we left one of their ships behind and they complained to Their Lordships…why, they could even cast you in damages. You personally, sir. If a shipowner cast you in damages in the High Court, and Their Lordships then decided you should face a court-martial under one of the Articles of War…”

“I'd be in a pickle,” Ramage admitted ruefully. “But I'll have some witnesses in my favour – the Count of Rennes, which means the interest of the Prince of Wales, and Mr Yorke and the master of the
Emerald
.”

“Mr Yorke, yes, and all the King's officers in the convoy, but beyond that, remember the old saying, ‘Put not thy trust in princes'.”

“We could trust the Count.”

“Ah, yes, more than most men – particularly since he owes you his life. But,” Southwick said carefully, “I had in mind some of his friends in England: those who'd mistake the Board of Admiralty for another kind of gaming table.”

Ramage nodded because the old master's warning made a great deal of sense. Fame was a high place surrounded with traps set by jealous men. Without intending or wishing it, Ramage had become one of the Royal Navy's most famous frigate captains, not a role he had sought or particularly wanted but one which was the result of many actions, many desperate fights, many prizes taken, many of his own men killed or wounded and more of the enemy. He had taken many chances too, and occasionally disobeyed orders deliberately, but for the good of the King's service. And he always had loyal shipmates like Southwick, and seamen as brave and faithful as Jackson, Stafford and Rossi.