Ramage & the Guillotine 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

  War of Knives

  Peter Wicked

  BY DOUGLAS W. JACOBSON

  Night of Flames

  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

  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

  Kydd

  Artemis

  Seaflower

  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

  So Near So Far

  Dead Reckoning

  The Life and Times of Horatio Hornblower

  BY DOUGLAS REEMAN

  The Horizon

  Dust on the Sea

  Knife Edge

  Twelve Seconds to Live

  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

  On a Making Tide

  Tested by Fate

  Breaking the Line

  Published by McBooks Press 2000

  Copyright © 1975 by The Ramage Company Limited

  First published in the United Kingdom in 1975 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 trade paperback edition of this title was cataloged as: Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Pope, Dudley.

  Ramage & the guillotine / by Dudley Pope.

  p. cm. — (Lord Ramage novels ; no. 6)

  ISBN 0-935526-81-1 (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 R25 2000

  823’.914—dc21

  00-058627

  The e-book versions of this title have the following ISBNs: Kindle 978-1-59013-525-9, ePub 978-1-59013-526-6, and PDF 978-1-59013-527-3

  www.mcbooks.com

  CHAPTER ONE

  RAMAGE reached across the breakfast table for the silver bell, shook it and waited. After more than a year at sea in one of the King’s ships (when meals were usually dreaded as unimaginative variations on a theme of salt beef or salt pork, and bread was a polite name for hard biscuit that an honest baker would disown and a potter would proclaim a credit to his oven) his stomach still rebelled at the rich fare that old Mrs Hanson insisted on providing for every meal, including breakfast.

  She had been the family cook and housekeeper at the London house for as long as Ramage could remember, and her short-sighted husband was the butler, a timid and wispy-haired man whose life seemed to be a sheepish hunt for his mislaid spectacles.

  Mrs Hanson firmly believed that all sailors, be they admirals or seamen, lowly lieutenants like Ramage or portly masters, were deliberately underfed by a scheming Admiralty which calculated the scale of rations on the principle that fighting cocks were starved for hours before being put into the cockpit to battle for their lives. It seemed to Ramage that whenever he came up to London on leave she was determined to cram enough food into him to last another year at sea.

  “You rang, my Lord?”

  Ramage glanced up to find Hanson waiting expectantly, his spectacles slowly sliding down his stub of a nose. “Ah—please thank Mrs Hanson for an excellent breakfast.”

  “But you’ve hardly touched the cold tongue, sir,” Hanson protested plaintively. “And the oysters—you haven’t eaten a single one!”

  “Hanson,” Ramage said sternly, knowing that to the butler he was still a small boy, to be humoured, but made t
o eat every scrap of food on his plate, “you should remember I’ve always hated oysters; the mere thought of them makes me queasy.”

  The butler shook his head sadly. “Mrs Hanson will be upset; sets great store by oysters, she does; reckons they build you up. A score for breakfast, she says, and you’ll never come to no ‘arm for the rest of the day.”

  “Just look at me,” Ramage said patiently. “Do you think I’m fading away?”

  “Bit on the lean side, my Lord,” Hanson said warily, remembering how sun-tanned his Lordship had been when he first arrived back from the West indies. “Your face is paler, too. My wife commented on it yesterday.”

  “Remind Mrs Hanson that suntan doesn’t last for ever.”

  “Well, it’s been raining hard,” Hanson said lamely as he began to clear away the plates, “an’ it’ll rain again before the day’s out.”

  “I’m sure it will,” Ramage said soothingly. “is anyone else in the family up and about yet?”

  “Your father and mother, sir, and hot water has been sent up for the Marchesa, so she’ll be down presently.”

  Ramage sniffed doubtfully. “Very well—please fetch me a newspaper.”

  “The Morning Post or The Times, sir?”

  “I’ll have plenty of time to read both before the Marchesa is ready.”

  Hanson smiled happily, nodding his head at some private thought as he went to the door. “A lovely lady,” he murmured to himself, “and her a foreigner, too …”

  Ramage grinned self-consciously and then felt foolish; praise for Gianna was not flattery for him! Still, Hanson’s innocent remark emphasized that now was not the best of times to be a foreigner in England—in Great Britain and Ireland, he corrected himself. The Act of union had become law while he was commanding the Triton brig in the West indies, and recently he had been trying to break himself of the habit—which infuriated the Scots and Welsh—of saying England when he meant Britain. The trouble was that foreigners always refer to “you English,” not “you British.”

  He took the newspapers from the silver tray Hanson was holding and shook his head at the discreet, “Would you prefer to sit in the drawing-room, sir … ?”

  His eye caught a name in the first item on the front page of the Morning Post:

  “The public will learn with great satisfaction that LORD NELSON, the hero of Copenhagen and the Nile, will soon leave Town on a SECRET mission which will rid the country of the Corsican Tyrant’s threat of a GRAND INVASION. We understand the Admiralty is confident that his Lordship will soon send the French invasion craft now gathering in Calais and Boulogne to WATERY GRAVES.”

  Hmm … the Government must be very worried if they thought it necessary to give Lord Nelson such a job: badgering barges in the Channel ports was more of a task for young frigate captains. Still, agents might have just discovered that Bonaparte had set a date for his great attempt, though it was more likely that the Government was trying to reassure the people.

  As he read the next news item he knew it would make unwelcome reading for everyone living within twenty miles of the Kent and Sussex coasts:

  “The latest intelligences received in London report that Bonaparte has given orders for the construction of ANOTHER one hundred barges and fifty gunboats. We estimate that the fleet for the grand invasion now lying at Calais, Boulogne, Wimereux, Ambleteuse, Etaples, Havre de Grace, St Valery, Gravelines, Dunkirk and Ostend now totals more than three hundred large barges to carry men, horses, artillery and provisions, and two hundred gunboats of various sizes intended to defend the fleet and attack the stout defenders waiting on the English beaches. Construction of camps for Bonaparte’s Army of invasion proceeds quickly and our patrolling frigates daily see more tents being erected on the heights around Boulogne.”

  He pictured the frigates tacking and wearing along the French coast by day and by night, hoping to catch and destroy any enemy vessels daring to move from one port to another. The French would take full advantage of their shallow draft, keeping close in to the beach, and hoping that the frigates waiting for them like sharks would accidentally strand themselves on offlying sandbanks.

  The completed barges and gunboats were anchored off each port, exposed to gales but protected from the British frigates by batteries of guns. At low water the vessels would dry out, sitting on hard sand or shingle and protected by cavalry patrols from marauding seamen landed by boats from the frigates.

  It was a complicated cat-and-mouse game: at high water a frigate would tack back and forth close to an anchorage but beyond the range of the batteries and, when it judged the French gunners had been lulled into inactivity, suddenly swoop, hoping to fire a couple of broadsides into the anchored vessels before the French woke up and began a withering fire. But it was a dangerous game: the whole of the French coast was usually a lee shore, and a lucky shot could dismast a frigate and the wind drive her up on the beach.

  As they tacked offshore, the officers in the frigates would be balancing themselves against the roll as they trained their telescopes on the hills and dunes round the ports. They would be counting yet again the scores of tents arranged with geometric precision round flagpoles from which Tricolours fluttered. They would note new camps being set up; off many ports they would see hundreds of tethered horses scattered across the hills, and ammunition wagons, field kitchens and field guns drawn up nearby. And the men in the frigates—and brigs and cutters—knew they were watching not only for signs of reinforcements but for the first hint that the troops were preparing to board the barges for the voyage across La Manche to the beaches of Kent and Sussex.

  From what he had heard, the frigates were having very little success in their attacks: the French had so many batteries on the cliffs over the anchorages that they could keep up a lethal fire by day or night.

  Yet the French were not the only ones making preparations: a glance over the rest of the page showed that the British were busy preparing suitable reception committees. Lord Romney had just reviewed 3,000 men of the Kentish Volunteers at his estate at Maidstone; the King had reviewed 1,500 of the Surrey Volunteers on Wimbledon Common. One news item described joint manoeuvres held in the streets of London by the Loyal Hackney, Royal Westminster, Whitechapel and Shoreditch and Wapping régiments. An advertisement at the foot of the column announced that, “Members of the LONDON and WESTMINSTER VOLUNTEERS may purchase WARRANTED FIRELOCKS at £2 each at G. RIPPON’S WAREHOUSE, No. 3, Ludgate Hill. Cartouche boxes, pistols and swords may likewise be obtained.”

  Every hamlet and town in the south-eastern corner of England must be swarming with patriotic citizens clutching ancient fowling pieces or newly-purchased muskets or, perhaps, only scythes or sickles, and eyeing strangers with suspicion since they expected to find Frenchmen lurking behind each hedge and thicket. Every poacher in the Weald of Kent and on Romney Marsh and Pevensey Level now had a perfect excuse for the magistrates when found on the squire’s land with a fowling piece under his arm (though he would still be hard pressed to explain away a ferret in his pocket and nets over his shoulder).

  For a moment Ramage imagined Gianna on one of her wild rides over the countryside suddenly reining her horse as a group of Volunteers emerged from a hedgerow, muskets at the ready, and Gianna explaining in her exuberant English that she simply enjoyed riding alone. Rustics, unable to distinguish an italian accent from a French, and full of the wild stories the newspapers had been printing about Bonaparte’s secret hot-air balloons and rafts driven by windmills, might think she was Bonaparte’s modern equivalent of Joan of Arc, riding through the countryside intent on rousing innocent folk into bloody riot and vicious rebellion …

  He turned the page to skim through the rest of the news. A gale of wind had put four ships ashore at Plymouth, scattering the fishing fleet just returning to harbour, and knocking down trees and chimney pots. A “new stein is to be built at Brighton, with the Duke of Marlborough and others patronizing the undertaking.” The King would not after all be attending the ball being
given tonight by the Duchess of Manston, because the Queen was still indisposed and remaining at Windsor. That would disappoint Gianna.

  There was a section he would point out to Gianna. Headed “The Fashionable World,” it began by announcing that, “The female fashion is every day encroaching on the male costume.” The article explained that with dozens of volunteer units being formed all over the country and their officers designing the uniforms as well as buying the necessary muskets, powder and shot, it was inevitable that “the ladies would soon follow the fashion.”

  Ramage smiled to himself at the descriptions that followed. The fashionable colours for the Summer of 1801 were purple, puce, yellow and scarlet, and beads and feathers were becoming popular along with spangled nets for the hair. Morning hats and bonnets of velvet, plain and trimmed, “are among the latest inventions.”

  Walking and full dress for ladies, the Morning Post assured its readers, were in two styles. one was of yellow muslin trimmed with black ribbon and tassels and full epaulets; the other a round dress of white muslin with a spencer of scarlet satin trimmed with black lace, and topped by a small, round hat with a deep veil.

  Certainly the military influence was obvious, Ramage thought sourly; he could just imagine all the general officers wearing small, round hats with deep veils and scarlet spencers as they reported to the Duke of York at the Horse Guards. (Now he came to think about it, why were those short jackets named after the man who had just resigned as First Lord of the Admiralty?) Complexions would be puce, and a general liverishness would probably turn the whites of their eyes to the fashionable shade of yellow. Gianna would find the prospect as amusing as he did. He pulled out his watch—nine o’clock. Well, no elegant young lady could take less than an hour over her toilet …

  He turned to the back page, which was mostly advertisements. The first was intriguing. “Two hundred guineas will be paid for a commission appointing an ensign to one of His Majesty’s régiments (an old-fashioned régiment) now serving in the East or West Indies.” Obviously some poor fellow was trying to escape a fate in England that he considered worse than the prospect of death in the Indies from any one of a dozen vile tropical diseases. The vengeance of a jilted woman? The threats of his creditors? Ramage shrugged his shoulders: from what he had recently seen in the West Indies, the poor fellow would be wiser to stay in England—better the devil you know …

  The next advertisement claimed that the new magic lanterns were “a pleasing family amusement … They are complete in boxes, each lantern with twelve glass slides, on which are finely painted about sixty grotesque figures which, by reflection, are magnified from a miniature to as large as nature, according to the size of the lanterns.”