Ramage At Trafalgar Read online

  Copyright & Information

  Ramage At Trafalgar

  First published in 1986

  Copyright: Kay Pope; House of Stratus 1986-2010

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  The right of Dudley Pope to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

  This edition published in 2010 by House of Stratus, an imprint of

  Stratus Books Ltd., Lisandra House, Fore Street, Looe,

  Cornwall, PL13 1AD, UK.

  Typeset by House of Stratus.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.

  EAN ISBN Edition

  1842324756 9781842324752 Print

  0755124340 9780755124343 Pdf

  0755124510 9780755124510 Mobi

  0755124685 9780755124688 Epub

  This is a fictional work and all characters are drawn from the author’s imagination.

  Any resemblance or similarities to persons either living or dead are entirely coincidental.

  www.houseofstratus.com

  About the Author

  Dudley Bernard Egerton Pope was born in Ashford, Kent on 29 December 1925. When at the tender age of fourteen World War II broke out and Dudley attempted to join the Home Guard by concealing his age. At sixteen, once again using a ruse, he joined the merchant navy a year early, signing papers as a cadet with the Silver Line. They sailed between Liverpool and West Africa, carrying groundnut oil.

  Before long, his ship was torpedoed in the Atlantic and a few survivors, including Dudley, spent two weeks in a lifeboat prior to being rescued. His injuries were severe and because of them he was invalided out of the merchant service and refused entry into the Royal Navy when officially called up for active service aged eighteen.

  Turning to journalism, he set about ‘getting on with the rest of his life’, as the Naval Review Board had advised him. He graduated to being Naval and Defence correspondent with the London Evening News in 1944. The call of the sea, however, was never far away and by the late 1940’s he had managed to acquire his first boat. In it, he took part in cross-channel races and also sailed off to Denmark, where he created something of a stir, his being one of the first yachts to visit the country since the war.

  In 1953 he met Kay, whom he married in 1954, and together they formed a lifelong partnership in pursuit of scholarly adventure on the sea. From 1959 they were based in Porto Santo Stefano in Italy for a few years, wintering on land and living aboard during the summer. They traded up boats wherever possible, so as to provide more living space, and Kay Pope states:

  ‘In September 1963, we returned to England where we had bought the 53 foot cutter Golden Dragon and moved on board where she lay on the east coast. In July 1965, we cruised down the coasts of Spain and Portugal, to Gibraltar, and then to the Canary Islands. Early November of the same year we then sailed across the Atlantic to Barbados and Grenada, where we stayed three years.

  Our daughter, Victoria was 4 months old when we left the UK and 10 months when we arrived in Barbados. In April 1968, we moved on board ‘Ramage’ in St Thomas, US Virgin Islands and lost our mainmast off St Croix, when attempting to return to Grenada.’

  The couple spent the next nine years cruising between the British Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico, before going to Antigua in 1977 and finally St.Martin in 1979.

  The sea was clearly in Pope’s blood, his family having originated in Padstow, Cornwall and later owning a shipyard in Plymouth. His great-grandfather had actually preceded him to the West Indies when in 1823, after a spell in Canada, he went to St.Vincent as a Methodist missionary, before returning to the family business in Devon.

  In later life, Dudley Pope was forced to move ashore because of vertigo and other difficulties caused by injuries sustained during the war. He died in St.Martin in 1997, where Kay now lives. Their daughter, Victoria, has in turn inherited a love of the sea and lives on a sloop, as well as practising her father’s initial profession of journalism.

  As an experienced seaman, talented journalist and historian, it was a natural progression for Pope to write authoritative accounts of naval battles and his first book, Flag 4: The Battle of Coastal Forces in the Mediterranean, was published in 1954. This was followed in 1956 by the Battle of the River Plate, which remains the most accurate and meticulously researched account of this first turning point for Britain in World War II. Many more followed, including the biography of Sir Henry Morgan, (Harry Morgan’s Way) which has one won wide acclaim as being both scholarly and thoroughly readable. It portrays the history of Britain’s early Caribbean settlement and describes the Buccaneer’s bases and refuges, the way they lived, their ships and the raids they made on the coast of central America and the Spain Main, including the sack of Panama.

  Recognising Pope’s talent and eye for detail, C.S. Forrester (the creator of the Hornblower Series) encouraged him to try his hand at fiction. The result, in 1965, was the appearance of the first of the Ramage novels, followed by a further seventeen culminating with Ramage and the Dido which was published in 1989. These follow the career and exploits of a young naval officer, Nicholas Ramage, who was clearly named after Pope’s yacht. He also published the ‘Ned Yorke’ series of novels, which commences as would be expected in the Caribbean, in the seventeenth century, but culminates in ‘Convoy’ and ‘Decoy’ with a Ned Yorke of the same family many generations on fighting the Battle of the Atlantic.

  All of Dudley Pope’s works are renowned for their level of detail and accuracy, as well as managing to bring to the modern reader an authentic feeling of the atmosphere of the times in which they are set.

  Some of the many compliments paid by reviewers about Dudley Pope’s work:

  ‘Expert knowledge of naval history’- Guardian

  “An author who really knows Nelson’s navy” - Observer

  ‘The best of Hornblower’s successors’ - Sunday Times

  ‘All the verve and expertise of Forrester’ - Observer

  Dedication

  For the Glass family,

  - with memories of Italy.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  In this novel culminating at Trafalgar, all the facts concerning Nelson and the Battle are true: only the events surrounding Ramage are fiction. Of all the ships in the Battle only the Victory remains.

  Dudley Pope

  Yacht Ramage

  French Antilles

  Maps

  Cadiz - General

  Cadiz - Detail

  Chapter One

  The lawyer took the parchment from his worn leather case, carefully smoothed it out flat on the table and perched a pair of spectacles on his bulbous nose. “Your uncle’s will is quite straightforward, My Lord,” he assured Ramage. “In fact I drew it up for him myself after his wife – your aunt, of course – died so unexpectedly last winter.”

  Ramage nodded and glanced across the table at Sarah. The lawyer was a chubby little man with a red face, a redness caused by sun and wind rather than too much port, yet his air of being a prosperous farmer was curiously at odds with his irritatingly precise manner. He had placed the will squarely in front of him on the dining room table, which was serving as a desk, and taken great care to make sure the lower edge of the page was lying parallel with the side of the table. There is no way of hurrying this man, Ramage was trying to tell Sarah.

  There was a curious air of unreality about the whol
e affair. The last time Ramage had sat at this table his uncle, Rufus Treffry, had been alive and well: alert and brisk of manner, he had seemed good for another twenty years. His aunt (his father’s sister) seemed if anything younger.

  Now both were lying side by side in the Treffry family vault at Saltwood Church, a few miles away, and the new owner of Treffry Hall and the several hundred acres belonging to it was Captain Lord Ramage of the Royal Navy…

  “May I ask, My Lord, if you have made up your mind what you are going to do with the property?”

  Property? A lawyer’s word for what all his life he had thought of and referred to as “Uncle Rufus’ place”: an imposing, four-square brick house on the high land at Aldington overlooking the great flat sweep of Romney Marsh, with the Channel a blue line in the distance sweeping round to Dungeness, the point of land marking the south-eastern corner of Kent (and, for that matter, England too).

  “I haven’t thought about it,” Ramage said. “I don’t know the details of the bequest,” he pointed out, nodding at the parchment. “I don’t know whether or not my uncle made any provision for the servants, but they are certainly my responsibility now.”

  Uncle Rufus’ butler, for instance. Raven was a sinister-looking man because of a long, wide scar across his left cheek, the result (as the man had explained to Ramage years earlier) of a misunderstanding with a Revenue officer – a polite way of admitting that he had been caught smuggling. But Raven, the perfect servant in the dining room yet equally able to make sure that the horse brought to the front door was glistening of coat and shiny of harness, had been an important part of Ramage’s childhood (some of which had been spent in Italy). Staying with Uncle Rufus had meant exciting hours spent along the banks of sunken lanes with Raven, handling (and being nipped by) his ferrets, pegging nets over rabbit holes, or quietly skirting the edge of one of the woods, being taught how to stalk pheasant holding one of Uncle Rufus’ second-best fowling pieces (were all those splendid guns included in the will?). And learning to ride – Raven had all the standards and sharp language of an Army riding master, and the fact that Ramage was now a good rider (though not an enthusiastic horseman) was entirely due to Raven.

  Ferreting and rabbiting, shooting rocketing pheasants, riding a horse over the Downs or leaping the dykes and ditches that laced the Marsh, brushing horses’ coats and polishing harness, hearing stories of Marsh smugglers and tales of strings of packhorses making their way in the moonlight from the sandy beaches off Romney and Camber and “the Ness” slung with barrels of smuggled brandy for the squire and lace for his lady…that was Raven. What were Raven’s links with the smugglers? Ramage’s concern was only curiosity; like most of the people living along the coasts of Kent and Sussex, he saw smugglers and smuggling as a part of life. Sensible folk looked the other way, and only a fool paid customs duty and excise on his liquor.

  “Ah, yes,” the lawyer said, “the staff are mentioned in the will.”

  “We would be interested in the details,” Sarah said unexpectedly and the lawyer, unused to women (even the daughter of the Marquis of Rockley) taking an active role, looked startled.

  “Yes, indeed, My Lady. Should I begin reading?”

  “Unless you would like more tea?” She gestured towards the large silver urn that Raven had left at the end of the table. “Or perhaps something stronger?”

  “Oh My Lady, no thank-you: never before noon, and rarely even then. My wife, you see. A very strong-minded woman, and if she smells liquor on my breath too early in the day, she thinks I will be damned.”

  “You will, too,” Sarah said and then looked despairingly at her husband when she saw the little lawyer had taken her remark seriously. But at least he was now holding up the will with one hand and adjusting his spectacles with the other.

  The man coughed twice, as though it was part of a ritual before reading a will, and then put the will down again. He looked up at Ramage.

  “A copy of the relevant parts of the will was sent to your father to await your return to England, My Lord.”

  Ramage almost sighed aloud. How to explain to a lawyer that copies of documents mattered less than actions? That people owning large estates which had passed from father to son for generations took much for granted, so that a brief remark could describe as much as two pages of a lawyer’s writings? Ramage had never seen the copy of the will sent to his father; when he had returned from this last affair in the Mediterranean his father had said simply that Rufus had died “and of course the property goes to you”.

  The “of course” took notice that Rufus had no children and that Ramage was his only nephew; it took in what they had all known for years, that Treffry Hall would go to Ramage – who else? But all that was mixed up with things like noblesse oblige and family affairs that lawyers never really understood because they could not be written down in their curiously stilted legal language. Stilted and legal, Ramage realized, because their phrases had stood the test of probate law and litigation and there was no mistaking the meaning, but nevertheless it always sounded stilted to ears that rejoiced in the rich flow of Shakespeare.

  “Yes, so my father told me,” Ramage said, “but circumstances prevented me from reading it. So please proceed…”

  Again a deep breath, again a twitch at the spectacles, again two coughs, and the lawyer launched into the will. “I, Rufus Charles Aldington Treffry, being of sound mind…”

  Aldington? Ramage thought as the lawyer droned through the preliminary phrases, I didn’t know that was one of his names. Ramage knew the family was one of the oldest in Kent, and that Treffry Hall had a history almost as old as the county, but he had not realized that the Treffrys went so far back. One of the habits of belonging to such an old family as the Ramages was that you tended to regard almost everyone else as a parvenu! Although come to think of it, it was not part of family history that there had been any fuss when Admiral the Earl of Blazey’s young sister had become engaged to and then wed a Kentish landowner.

  Ramage was startled by a double cough and looked up to see the lawyer, spectacles now in his hand, looking at him. “We now come to the sections concerning you, My Lord,” he said apologetically, clearly having noticed that Ramage’s attention had wandered.

  “Oh, indeed. Please continue,” Ramage said, aware that Sarah was looking at him with an expression combining love and exasperation.

  First came the bequests to the staff. A tidy lump sum for Raven, another for the housekeeper, and three more to the cook, gamekeeper and head gardener, “All of whom,” the lawyer said as though an explanation was necessary, “had been in Mr Treffry’s service for many years.”

  “And all of whom have been paid regularly since then by my father until I could get back to England and take over the management of the estate,” said Ramage, irritated by the lawyer’s almost patronizing manner.

  “Oh, indeed, My Lord, and in any case I could have arranged a loan on their bequests, using the terms of the will as collateral.”

  Why is it, Ramage wondered, that just as I begin to think you are not a bad fellow after all, you make some crass remark like that?

  The man resumed reading. Treffry Hall and all its furnishings and appurtenances, outbuildings, livestock and contents, and the land comprising the estate, was left to his nephew but (so Uncle Rufus was a realist, since Nicholas Ramage was a serving officer who had nearly been killed several times already) should that nephew predecease him, Rufus Treffry then indicated who should inherit.

  Sarah went white, and for a moment Ramage thought she would faint. “But – but…he met me only once, at our wedding,” she gasped. “To leave me all this if I was widowed!”

  Ramage laughed to lighten the moment. “I shall make a point of staying alive to cheat you out of your inheritance!”

  The lawyer, missing completely the lightness of Ramage’s tone and not noticing Sarah’s shock (after all, Ramage realized, the man had drawn up the will and the terms were no surprise to him), said: “Well, My Lad
y, I expect it will all come to you anyway if anything happens to His Lordship.”

  Sarah, knowing just how many times she had already just missed being widowed since her marriage, and how many times Nicholas had nearly lost his life since she first met him, nodded politely. “I’m sure it will,” she said, trying to keep the chill from her voice. “Pray continue.”

  The lawyer was near the end of the will. Rufus Treffry had obviously been very proud of his collection of armour, and also his sporting guns, and he expressed the hope “though creating no trust in the matter” that his legatee would continue to maintain all the pieces in good condition. “In fact the butler, Raven, has looked after them for many years,” the lawyer explained, oblivious to the fact that as a boy Nicholas Ramage had delighted in helping Raven.

  Finally the lawyer took another document from his case. “The deeds to the property, My Lord.” He searched for another sheet and then handed it over. “That is just a note delineating the boundaries of your land, My Lord. You may wish to ride round the boundaries. I am sure that Raven knows them well.”

  No better than I, Ramage thought. As a boy, when he was allowed to borrow one of Uncle Rufus’ fowling pieces, it was curious how the best game always seemed to be roaming the neighbours’ fields. To a lawyer (and to an Uncle Rufus if Ramage was caught) it was poaching, but to a young boy it had been a great adventure. And now Treffry Hall and its estate was all his. His and Sarah’s. And at Chatham Dockyard his frigate was being refitted after a long period in the Mediterranean.

  Ramage was lounging in an armchair watching Sarah embroidering a cushion cover the following afternoon when Raven tapped on the door and came in with a silver salver, which he offered to Ramage.