Ramage's Signal Read online

  Selected Historical Fiction Published by McBooks Press

  BY ALEXANDER KENT

  The Complete Midshipman Bolitho

  Stand Into Danger

  In Gallant Company

  Sloop of War

  To Glory We Steer

  Command a King’s Ship

  Passage to Mutiny

  With All Despatch

  Form Line of Battle!

  Enemy in Sight!

  The Flag Captain

  Signal–Close Action!

  The Inshore Squadron

  A Tradition of Victory

  Success to the Brave

  Colours Aloft!

  Honour This Day

  The Only Victor

  Beyond the Reef

  The Darkening Sea

  For My Country’s Freedom

  Cross of St George

  Sword of Honour

  Second to None

  Relentless Pursuit

  Man of War

  Heart of Oak

  BY PHILIP MCCUTCHAN

  Halfhyde at the Bight of Benin

  Halfhyde’s Island

  Halfhyde and the

  Guns of Arrest

  Halfhyde to the Narrows

  Halfhyde for the Queen

  Halfhyde Ordered South

  Halfhyde on Zanatu

  BY JAN NEEDLE

  A Fine Boy for Killing

  The Wicked Trade

  The Spithead Nymph

  BY JAMES L. NELSON

  The Only Life That Mattered

  BY JAMES DUFFY

  Sand of the Arena

  The Fight for Rome

  BY DEWEY LAMBDIN

  The French Admiral

  The Gun Ketch

  A King’s Commander

  Jester’s Fortune

  BY BROOS CAMPBELL

  No Quarter

  The War of Knives

  BY DUDLEY POPE

  Ramage

  Ramage & The Drumbeat

  Ramage & The Freebooters

  Governor Ramage R.N.

  Ramage’s Prize

  Ramage & The Guillotine

  Ramage’s Diamond

  Ramage’s Mutiny

  Ramage & The Rebels

  The Ramage Touch

  Ramage’s Signal

  Ramage & The Renegades

  Ramage’s Devil

  Ramage’s Trial

  Ramage’s Challenge

  Ramage at Trafalgar

  Ramage & The Saracens

  Ramage & The Dido

  BY FREDERICK MARRYAT

  Frank Mildmay or The Naval Officer

  Mr Midshipman Easy

  Newton Forster or The Merchant Service

  Snarleyyow or The Dog Fiend

  BY V.A. STUART

  Victors and Lords

  The Sepoy Mutiny

  Massacre at Cawnpore

  The Cannons of Lucknow

  The Heroic Garrison

  The Valiant Sailors

  The Brave Captains

  Hazard’s Command

  Hazard of Huntress

  Hazard in Circassia

  Victory at Sebastopol

  Guns to the Far East

  Escape from Hell

  BY JULIAN STOCKWIN

  Mutiny

  Quarterdeck

  Tenacious

  Command

  The Admiral’s Daughter

  BY JOHN BIGGINS

  A Sailor of Austria

  The Emperor’s

  Coloured Coat

  The Two-Headed Eagle

  Tomorrow the World

  BY ALEXANDER FULLERTON

  Storm Force to Narvik

  Last Lift from Crete

  All the Drowning Seas

  A Share of Honour

  The Torch Bearers

  The Gatecrashers

  BY C.N. PARKINSON

  The Guernseyman

  Devil to Pay

  The Fireship

  Touch and Go

  So Near So Far

  Dead Reckoning

  The Life and Times of Horatio Hornblower

  BY DOUGLAS REEMAN

  Badge of Glory

  First to Land

  The Horizon

  Dust on the Sea

  Knife Edge

  Twelve Seconds to Live

  Battlecruiser

  The White Guns

  A Prayer for the Ship

  For Valour

  BY DAVID DONACHIE

  The Devil’s Own Luck

  The Dying Trade

  A Hanging Matter

  An Element of Chance

  The Scent of Betrayal

  A Game of Bones

  BY DOUGLAS W. JACOBSON

  Night of Flames

  Published by McBooks Press 2001

  Copyright © 1980 by Dudley Pope

  First published in the United Kingdom in 1980 by

  The Alison Press/Martin Secker & Warburg Limited

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without the written permission of the publisher. Requests for such permissions should be addressed to McBooks Press, Inc.,

  ID Booth Building, 520 North Meadow St., Ithaca, NY 14850.

  Cover painting by Paul Wright.

  The paperback edition of this title was cataloged as:

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Pope, Dudley.

  Ramage’s signal / by Dudley Pope.

  p. cm. — (Lord Ramage novels ; no. 11)

  ISBN 1-59013-008-1 (alk. paper)

  1. Ramage, Nicholas (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Great Britain—History, Naval—19th century—Fiction. 3. Great Britain. Royal Navy—Officers—Fiction. 4. Napoleonic Wars, 1800–1815—Fiction. I. Title

  PR6066.O5 R38 2001

  823’.914—dc21

  2001026696

  The e-book versions of this title have the following ISBNs: Kindle 978-1-59013-555-6, ePub 978-1-59013-556-3, and PDF 978-1-59013-557-0

  www.mcbooks.com

  For Ian Spencer

  CHAPTER ONE

  ON THE starboard beam the shoreline just three miles away was a gleaming band of sand shimmering in the heat. Beyond it the land, scorched brown by the summer sun, sloped up only a few feet to join the broad, flat ribbon of the plain which seemed to have been carefully placed by nature to prevent Languedoc sliding into the Mediterranean. Farther inland, like haze in the afterglow of sunset, a low line of ridged and dimpled purple hills were slowly turning deep mauve to reveal the beginning of the mass of mountains running north to the Loire Valley, one hundred and fifty miles beyond. Ahead of the ship the same purple, more boldly brushed, showed the lofty Pyrenees finally tumbling into the sea, a jagged line from Collioure on the French side of the frontier to the whitish cliffs of Cabo Lladró on the Spanish.

  Ramage was surprised that despite the scorching strength of the noon sun the colours were not harsh; an artist would probably choose watercolours in preference to oils—except, ironically, for the water itself, which was a strong blue. But the heat … there was barely enough breeze to give the Calypso steerage-way and from time to time the wind collapsed the slight curves of her sails with a flap like a rheumatic washerwoman folding damp sheets.

  Although standing under the quarterdeck blue-and-white-striped awning—which stopped him being cooled by an occasional downdraught from the mainsail—Ramage found the sun’s glare dazzling because the wavelets reflected it everywhere, like the diamond-shaped pendants of a chandelier, and the muscles controlling his eyebrows ached from squinting. The planking of the deck was scorching, so his feet were swollen from the heat and tight in his shoes. He longed for the West Indies: the Tropi
cs were hotter—but they had the regular cooling Trade winds.

  He realized he was dozing although standing up, a trick learned by most midshipmen, when he heard Southwick, the Master, bellowing aloft in reply to a lookout’s hail, and roused himself sufficiently to listen to the report—not that it would be anything interesting: this part of the French coast was typically “in between,” one of those tedious stretches of uninteresting land on the way to somewhere else.

  “The village on the beam, sir: there’s a sort of tall framework tower at the western end, an’ begging yer pardon, sir, it’s movin’.”

  “The tower or the village?” demanded the practical Master, who was already looking round for his telescope.

  “The tower, sir. There! It’s—well sir, it looks as though it’s winking!”

  The disbelief in the seaman’s voice, as though he was reporting a ghost, made Ramage snatch up his own telescope, pull out the two brass tubes until the eyepiece end lined up with a mark filed on the second, and steady the glass by leaning his elbows on the quarterdeck rail. With so little wind and sea the ship was not rolling and using a glass needed no feat of balancing.

  There, encircled by the lens, was the tower. And close to it four or five new wooden buildings which seemed to be more than huts but less than regular barracks. This was what the lookout meant by “the village,” and the tower did appear to be winking. He gripped the telescope firmly and stared harder. Or blinking.

  He heard Southwick’s puzzled grunts and a moment later an exclamation from the Scots First Lieutenant, Aitken. “If there were hills and trees I’d say it was an enormous, great hide for shooting deer,” Aitken murmured as though talking to himself, “but here, where it’s more like a desert …”

  As the Calypso moved slowly along the coast the tower’s angle changed, and Ramage suddenly realized that what at first seemed to be a square, wooden tower was simply a large rectangle of wood perhaps forty feet high, like a door without a frame or wall, its edge at right angles to the sea. As you approached you saw one side as a rectangle and assumed it was a cube. As you came abreast of it, all you saw was something that looked like a pine tree stripped of its branches, and as you passed and looked back you saw the other side of the rectangle.

  It was a rectangle which looked like a section of a chess board and in which, even as he watched, one or two squares winked or blinked—or just moved.

  Then he realized that it must be one of the new French semaphore towers, and at this very moment it was passing a message along the coast. But which way? The nearest village to this tower was Foix. But where were the other towers? The Calypso must have passed several, but unless the angle was right the lookouts would have seen them end-on—and this coast was littered with the bare trunks of pine trees which had died among the sand dunes, killed by harsh winds or goats or rats gnawing the bark.

  Southwick and Aitken had both given up looking at the tower and were watching him, puzzled.

  “It’s one of the new semaphore towers,” Ramage explained. “The winking is the shutters opening and closing as they pass a message.”

  “What are they signalling, I wonder,” Aitken mused.

  “It shows either that they must have a powerful glass and can see our colours, or they recognize a French ship,” Southwick commented.

  “More important, no general warning has been passed to them—or any French forces—to watch for a French frigate captured by the British,” Ramage said.

  “They might be passing the warning now,” Southwick said with a chuckle that set his bulging stomach trembling and was a sign that he hoped action was on its way. “Telling someone else along the coast that they’ve sighted us.”

  “How far could you distinguish the pattern of those squares if you had a powerful glass on a tripod and good light?” Ramage asked Aitken, who put his telescope back to his eye.

  “I reckon it’s two miles away now, sir. I can just see the wavelets on the beach. Ah—there’s a man walking, so the shutters are about six feet square. Say a dozen miles, sir.”

  “Well, I doubt if they’re warning anyone about us,” Ramage said briskly, “because we must have passed several of these towers already without recognizing them, and each would have seen us and could have reported it.”

  “Perhaps this one is just reporting that we’re passing now?” Aitken ventured.

  Ramage shook his head. “What are we making? Perhaps two knots. We’ve been in sight—close enough for them to identify us as a frigate—for more than an hour. They’d have passed such a message a long time ago.”

  “They’ve stopped signalling now,” Aitken said. “Two men are walking away from the base of the tower, making for a hut. Ah, now there’s a third who seems to have come down a ladder from the top of the tower.”

  “Where are they going?” Ramage asked sharply. “Note which hut.”

  “The third man is carrying something rather carefully.”

  “A telescope?”

  “Yes, sir, it could be.”

  “He was probably watching the next tower acknowledging each word of the signal.”

  “Ah, I can see a little platform on top,” Aitken said. “The ladder goes up to it. Even has an awning. Trust the French. A shelf for a flask of wine, too, I’ll be bound.”

  From the tone of Aitken’s voice, with its soft Perthshire accent, it was hard to know whether the sin was in the luxury of the awning, the drinking of wine, or being French. Ramage finally decided it was probably all three.

  “Two are going to the first hut on the west side of the headland and which has a flagpole outside; one—the man with the telescope—is going to the next farther inland, probably reporting to the garrison commander. Now another man has just walked round the base of the tower and gone to the third on the east side. The fourth and fifth huts are the same size. There’s a sixth, much smaller and with a chimney. Probably the kitchen.”

  Ramage looked through his telescope. Each hut could accommodate at least a dozen men. What size would the garrison be? Three men were needed to pass a signal, so a signal watch would comprise three men. They would be on duty only during daylight, which in summer lasted about sixteen hours. Four hours on and four off meant two watches a day for six men. Plus a cook. Plus sentries—two on duty at any one time throughout the twenty-four hours. Two hours on and six off. Eight men.

  The province’s Army commander would hardly have welcomed the setting up of the semaphore stations if each one needed six signalmen, eight infantrymen and a cook. And knowing how expert were soldiers (and sailors, too!) in getting authorization to have the largest complement to do the least work, there’d be a lieutenant as the commanding officer, a quartermaster and probably even a carpenter and his mate to do repairs when an extra strong gust from a mistral or Levanter blew out some panels of the semaphore shutters. At least nineteen or twenty men; more counting sergeants and corporals. It seemed absurd but, to be fair, a soldier would never understand why the official complement of the Calypso, a 32-gun frigate, was 230 men—not that she was ever lucky enough to have that many, in the same way that any battalion was usually short of men.

  Ramage looked up to find Southwick watching him, his chubby, suntanned face wrinkled in an unspoken question. The old man had taken off his hat, and his white hair, in need of a trim and soaked with perspiration, looked like a new mop just dipped in a bucket of water and shaken. Aitken had closed his telescope and was waiting too. Rennick, the Marine Lieutenant, had joined them, anxious not to miss anything.

  In the meantime the Calypso was stretching along to the westward, a few miles short of the little town of Foix, flying French colours as a legitimate ruse de guerre, and Captain the Lord Ramage had, in a lead-weighted canvas pouch in the drawer of his desk, written orders from the Admiralty suitable for one of the few King’s ships (if not the only one) left in the Mediterranean, and certainly the sort of orders that one of the most junior on the list of post captains dreamed about.

  “What now, sir
?” Southwick finally asked. He had served with Ramage for four or five years, was old enough to be his father, and had been in action with him a couple of dozen times, regarding fate as being unfair because while Captain Ramage had been wounded four or five times so far, Southwick had not received a scratch.

  “What now, Mr Southwick? Why, we just sail past, dipping our colours politely if the signal station salutes us. I trust you have a lookout watching particularly in case they extend that courtesy, and a man at the halyard?”

  Ramage turned away to hide a smile as Southwick’s face fell and the old man, utterly dumbfounded, glanced questioningly at Aitken and Rennick. Ramage went below to find his cabin reasonably cool—more than anywhere else it benefited from the quarterdeck awning—and unlocked the bottom drawer.

  He took out a canvas pouch, along the bottom of which was sewn a thick strip of lead, heavy enough to sink it if it was thrown over the side in an emergency, and which was held closed like an old woman’s purse by a heavy line passing through grommets. He undid the knot and slid out a small book, little more substantial than a pamphlet and printed on cheap, greyish paper.

  Boldly printed on the front was a bare oval with an anchor in the middle, and the words Liberté on the left and Egalité on the right. Inside the oval and surrounding the anchor was Rep. Fran. Marine. Beneath, in bolder type and also in French, were the words: Secret. The Signal Book for Ships of War, third edition.

  Ramage had often used the book since finding it on board a captured French prize a few weeks earlier, and by now knew most of the flag signals by heart. He had been puzzled by a long list of place names in the back, against each of which was a man’s name, with no rank hinting that he was, say, a garrison commander. He had recognized several of the places—they were all between Cartagena and Toulon, some six hundred miles of enemy coastline.

  Suddenly, when Southwick had named the nearest village a mile or so inland of the tower as Foix, Ramage had finally recognized it as a name on that long list. And here it was, on the next to last page of the book, in very small type, Foix … J-P Louis. So … that was the answer: the list gave the positions of all the French semaphore stations on the Mediterranean coast and, presumably, the commanding officers.

  The list began with Toulon and went westward along the coast in steps of ten or twelve miles to Cartagena, more than sixty numbered place names. Some were of ports or anchorages—Sète, Collioure (that was a tiny fishing village near Perpignan), Port Vendres, Rosas and round to Barcelona—then on through names he did not know (probably of headlands) to Tarragona, Valencia, Alicante and finally Cartagena, Spain’s greatest base in the Mediterranean.