Ramage's Challenge r-15 Read online

  "Ah yes, I remember, it's hung where we hang the game ..."

  "That," Aitken said solemnly, "might be more of a reflection on your father than on the artist, surely sir?"

  As soon as he heard that the selected men were dressing up in their uniforms, Rossi requested to see the captain. Aitken had told him he would not be going on this expedition and then listened patiently to the Italian's protests. Normally he would have said that the first lieutenant's word was final, but because the Italian was so distressed at being left behind, he mentioned it to Ramage.

  "But what good could he do if he came?" Ramage asked. "His arm is in a sling, and a mile or so's marching up a steep hill over a rocky track will just about finish him off. We'd end up carrying him."

  Aitken, however, was having second thoughts. "Perhaps it depends on what he's supposed to do, sir. Did you take him to Pitigliano because he's Italian and speaks the language, or because he's quick with a pistol and sword?"

  "Obviously because he speaks Italian: we have scores of men quick with guns and cutlasses."

  "In that case, sir, I suggest we take him. We only need his tongue. If the marching shakes him up too much, he can always wait beside the track until we come back, but if he endures to Castello, we can use him."

  "You're afraid that if you leave him on board he's going to put the Evil Eye on you," Ramage said amiably. "All right, he can come. But I've been thinking about Orsini, Rossi and myself leading the column. When we went to Pitigliano, the chances were that we'd have to bluff our way past Italians first. Here we're more likely to bump first into the French. No Italian is likely to challenge us down here at the harbour or on the road up to Castello."

  Aitken agreed, knowing that in any case he was one of the "hostages" in the middle. "I suggest two men, sir: Gilbert and Louis. Better to have two men answering questions - preferably at once - to create confusion?"

  "Very well," Ramage said. "Tell Rossi to dress himself up. I see the boats are ready." He pulled on the strange jacket, that of a captain in the Duke of Tuscany's army (the King of Etruria's, he corrected himself), and tugged at his sword belt. "Let the men start boarding. The boats' crews know they are to return to the ship the moment we have landed?"

  "Yes, sir," Aitken said patiently, "everyone has had his instructions - I'm just going to tell Gilbert and Louis of the change."

  As the first lieutenant went down to the maindeck, Ramage sighed. There were a dozen possible islands to the north and south which could be used as a prison for the hostages, but really none seemed very likely. Giglio - well, it was a possibility, even if a remote one. He had pointed out the new flagpole to Southwick and Atiken because it was necessary to keep their spirits up. Now was not the time for them to realize the hopelessness of the search. That damned frigate could have taken the hostages anywhere; she could have gone round the foot of Italy and across to the Morea: there were hundreds of islands in the Ionian Sea that were suitable (if rather parched: many of them had little or no rain in the summer).

  In fact (the most chilling thought of all) the frigate might have taken them up to Toulon. Even Bonaparte would not expect his hostages to march hundreds of miles back into France, but if a French frigate was also due to go to Toulon for, say, a refit, she could take the hostages with her. So at this moment, while the Calypso's motley force climbed down into the boats to assault Giglio - a tiny island which was less than a fly-speck on a chart of the Mediterranean - the hostages could be prisoners in the great citadel at Toulon. By now they could, for that matter, be sitting in carts (or even carriages, if Bonaparte acted on some whim) on their way from Toulon to Paris.

  Paris? Yes, there Bonaparte could use them in some charade or other. Perhaps he might want to parade some of the English nobility as prisoners through the streets to show the sturdy French republicans how right they had been to strap down their own aristocracy on Dr Guillotine's infernal machines.

  That was almost ten years ago. The guillotine blades had not been used much in the past few years: indeed, most of the recent victims had been French revolutionaries disagreeing with Bonaparte. He shook his head to clear away the pictures flashing across his imagination like those of the new magic lanterns being advertised in the Morning Post and The Times. Giglio, he told himself: we march up to the top of the hill, and we'll probably march down again, tired and no better informed about the hostages, but we've no choice.

  "I'm sorry, gentlemen, I looked everywhere in the Mediterranean but couldn't find them . . ." His report to Their Lordships would be written in more formal phrases, but that would be the sense of it. Sitting in the Board Room in Whitehall, even looking at the chart of the Mediterranean pulled open from one of the rollers over the fireplace, the inland sea would not seem so big. But it was nearly as far from the Levant to Gibraltar as it was from Plymouth in England to Plymouth Rock in America . . . Giglio (pronounced Jeelyo) would hardly show, and it was a name he was beginning to hate, along with Montecristo, Pianosa and Capraia.

  "I'm coming," he called as he saw Southwick waving to him. Tradition - the senior officer was the last man to board a boat, and the first to disembark. The King of Etruria's uniform, he thought as he walked over to the break in the bulwark, hitching his sword round, is quite unsuitable for sea service.

  There was the circular watch tower (almost obligatory along this coast) at the far end of the village and a score of houses lining a narrow stretch of sandy beach with a dozen or more small fishing boats hauled up on it, and a surprisingly large church a hundred yards inland. At the back of the beach a few posts, each as high as a man, were joined by fishing nets hanging in bulky loops. Drying - or waiting to be repaired. Yes, he saw two men and a woman (dressed in black except for a once white scarf over her grey hair) who, from the darting movements of their hands, were busy mending.

  A third man stood at the doorway of the nearest house. Was he particularly interested in the two approaching boats?

  Ramage guessed not: had he thought they might want to buy fish, he would have made the effort to walk the thirty yards to the water's edge. Nor did the net menders look round. They would have seen the boats leave the Calypso, so those swiftly moving hands made one thing quite clear: the French were not popular among Giglio's sturdy islanders. Perhaps the French pressed Italians into the Navy. Did they hate the French or, like many other islanders, just hate (and fear) everyone not born within their shores?

  It does not matter why, Ramage told himself; it only matters that they do not like the French. If there is shooting, then these people will not help them. Nor will they spy for them. Perhaps there will be one man in a hundred, the usual informer and opportunist who curries favour with the French, but he will be the village outcast, safe enough while the French remain but who knows his life will not be worth afiasco of vinegar the day the French leave.

  The seaman at the cutter's tiller ran the bow up on the beach within thirty yards of the net menders and unshipped the rudder, but even when they heard the stem scraping the sand and the oars splash as the men gave a last thrust to wedge the boat firmly to let the landing party jump on shore without getting wet (and in lightening the boat make it easy for the oarsmen to get it afloat again), neither the two men nor the woman turned.

  The jolly-boat arrived a few feet away and within five minutes the motley column was drawn up on the sand with the two boats pulling back to the Calypso. Four yelping dogs, one chasing the other, came racing round the last house in the row, saw the column of men, turned and ran away again. A donkey tied outside a front door of the last house brayed impatiently and was answered by another in the hills above the village. Impatiently? Was a somaro ever impatient? Bored, perhaps, or hungry.

  Orsini muttered to Ramage in Italian: "It's hard to believe the French are up there, isn't it, sir?"

  "Don't judge by these people," Ramage said grimly. "These poor beggars, and their father and grandfathers and the rest of them going back five centuries have seen many an enemy of one sort or another land
on this beach. Saraceni, Aragonesi, Francesi, Inglesi. . . and none of them came to buy fish. Rape, rob, pillage or just destroy ... no wonder they hate the sight of a stranger."

  "Would it be worth it if I...?" Orsini ventured.

  Ramage stared at him. "From Castello (which Southwick tells me is fifteen hundred feet high) you can almost see Volterra, or the mountains round it, anyway. But just think: to these people you're just as much a straniero as any of the rest. You may speak Italian but to them you have a strange accent: strange enough, probably, to make them more suspicious of you than if you were a Frenchman . . ."

  Orsini gave an involuntary shiver. "There's not much advantage in being an Italian these days."

  Ramage shrugged his shoulders and said with deliberate harshness: "It is no advantage - in the Mediterranean, anyway - being anything but French. We'll change that eventually, but it'll take time. Until then, people like these fishermen are going to snub you. Be thankful it's only a snub: it could be a pistol ball in the back."

  Ramage walked a few paces to one side and looked at the column, led by Gilbert and Louis in the sober uniform of the army of Revolutionary France, who were followed by Orsini and Rossi in their garish outfits. Then the hostages, with Aitken, Jackson and Stafford in the front row. All the hostages were by now apparently chained to each other: a suspicious French guard would have to tug a chain to discover that the "prisoners" were holding their manacles.

  And there, at the rear, muskets over their shoulders, pistols in their belts, and swords hanging from belts over their shoulders, were the other two Frenchmen, Auguste and Albert.

  Ramage nodded: yes, it all looked realistic enough, a few more hostages being delivered, to be added to those already (he hoped) in Castello: sign this receipt please . . .

  Except it was all a waste of time; there were no hostages in Castello; Castello had a garrison of a few French soldiers, probably the scoundrels that various company commanders had been wanting to be rid of since they first crossed the Alps . . .

  The winding track began beside the last house, and Ramage could see how it twisted and turned as it snaked the fifteen hundred feet to the top of the mountain, where the gate of Castello, a town gate in fact, waited like a dark mouth to swallow them.

  Over a hill, down into a small valley and up again ... the men whose feet had worn the track in the rock over the centuries had been concerned with finding the easiest route for themselves and their donkeys, tired from an exhausting day's labour under a scorching sun.

  A scorching sun . . . yes, the sun was already getting some heat in it. He raised his arm, saw that he had everyone's attention (so that he did not have to shout an order), and with an overhand motion started the column marching.

  Three dark-eyed, black-haired children watched from a doorway; a woman appeared at a window, moving aside the sacking that covered it. She was holding a baby, and she spat before pulling the sacking back. A black and white cat streaked across the road, chased by the same four dogs. The cat made for the nets and the old woman turned and picked up a stone, but the dogs had obviously played this game before and suffered from the woman's markmanship because they bolted back behind the houses.

  "They are poor, these people," Rossi said, as if to himself. "I've never seen a thin cat in a fishing village before . . ."

  The track led out of the little port and then passed half a dozen more small stone houses and an equal number of tiny little buildings with half-doors.

  "Mamma mia, even the donkeys live as well as the cristiani" Rossi said. "The donkey huts are as well built and roofed as the houses."

  "You've lived in a city too long," Ramage said. "If you had been a contadino instead of a ladrone in Genova, you'd know that in the country a man values his donkey as much as his wife."

  "In Volterra, more than his wife," Orsini said.

  Rossi, although not disputing Ramage's taunt, thought for a few moments. "It makes sense," he said matter-of-factly. "A wife can't carry a couple of barrels of wine, or a load of firewood."

  "No," Orsini said. "Just one barrel, or half a load of wood. And the baby slung over her shoulder, and two more clutching her skirt."

  The track started to lead up over the first hill. Castello, Ramage thought, seemed to be floating above them on great petrified waves, the rock lightly dusted with red soil. Grapevines and olive trees planted in well kept terraces grew in even lines, the olive leaves already silvery in the early sunlight. Suddenly (although the noise must have been there since daylight) he became conscious of the fast, highpitched buzzing rattle of the cicadas, and perhaps because he always associated them with the sun, he began to feel the heat through his coat.

  Who would be a soldier, with all this marching? One could join a cavalry regiment (given the choice) but horses meant aching thighs, tight breeches, and fellow officers with hearty, back-slapping manners, and anyway a horse tended to break wind at awkward moments, such as when the colonel's lady was patting it. That sort of thing, he was sure, could blight a young subaltern's career.

  So, heigh-ho for the life of a sailor. Flogging to windward through heavy seas, sheets of spray and curtains of rain, clothes never dry for a month, always eating salt tack, and the knowledge that foreign climes, so often written about ecstatically by poets, could mean the black vomit, ague, typhoid and the plague; that the thunder of broadsides, also written about by poets, could take your head off, or part you from a beloved and trusty leg. Or you could drown. There was, he reflected, a lot to be said for living the life of a landowner, riding to the hounds once a week - and having a horse refuse a hedge, so that you made the jump alone, head-first, and broke your neck. I must write about it in my Journal, Ramage thought; the happy thoughts of a post-captain marching up to Castello . . .

  "It's quiet here, sir," Gilbert said unexpectedly, his French voice jerking at Ramage like a leash. "If there was a large garrison up there -" he nodded towards Castello, now going out of sight behind yet another hill, "- I'd expect to see a soldier coming down to buy fresh fish for the commandant, or one of the bad girls of the village returning home after a night... well, after visiting a friend up there."

  "A bit early for the trollops," Ramage commented, "and there wasn't much sign of a fish for sale back there: the fishermen did not go out last night."

  "Just as well, sir," Orsini commented. "We'd probably have run down some of those boats in the darkness!"

  "I think I preferred marching to Pitigliano," Rossi muttered to himself. "This is like climbing up the side of a mountain."

  "This is climbing up the side of a mountain," Orsini said, "but have you forgotten all those hills in Genova?"

  "I thought I had, but this is bringing back the memory."

  "Your arm - is it hurting?" Orsini asked.

  "No, it's the muscles in my legs," Rossi grumbled. "It's never like this in the Calypso . . ."

  Castello came into sight once again, but after they had marched another hundred yards along the track, winding over a ridge, it vanished as they dipped into a small valley. Now they could see the rocks and cliffs on the west side of the island, and the sea seemed a long way below them. Not as far down as Castello was up, Rossi pointed out in a complicated joke which relied more on a Genovese accent than a sense of humour.

  When they reached the top of the next ridge, from which they could see the track entering Castello in the distance as though it was a fuse leading to a powder keg, Ramage called a halt because, to a casual onlooker, it was a logical place for a rest. For the column, as Ramage walked back to tell them, it was their chance to have a good look at what they faced at Castello, whether the hostages were on the island or not.

  Aitken, after making sure that no French soldiers or contadini were watching, joined Ramage and sat down beside him.

  "Supposing the hostages aren't up there, sir?" he asked. "What do we do?"

  The eternal question. Ramage laughed and with his finger pushed a small twig in front of the black beetle which also seemed intent o
n going up to Castello. "I could hand you over to the garrison and make Kenton the first lieutenant! However, if the hostages aren't there, then we get angry with the garrison, blame the commandant of the fort at Santo Stefano for giving us wrong information, and hope the commandant here at Castello actually knows where they are. That way we'll save ourselves having to search any more. I don't particularly want to march up to every fort in the Tyrrhenian Sea. With the exception of Pianosa, which is very flat, the rest are very mountainous. Gorgona, Montecristo . . . more climbing."

  "Do you think we'll get away with it, sir? Just going up to the commandant and asking?"

  "We're not 'just asking'," Ramage said impatiently. "As far as we and the commandant are concerned, we have more hostages we were ordered to deliver to Giglio. Very well, the others are not here, and there's been the sort of mix-up made in anyone's army." Ramage held his arms out, palms uppermost, and looked despairing. "So we march back to the port. If the hostages are there, we keep quiet about our 'prisoners', and relieve the commandant. . ."

  Aitken added two more twigs to the barrier in front of the beetle. "I haven't seen a scorpion yet. What size are they, sir?"

  "About twice as long as that beetle, but not nearly as fat. You won't mistake one - long thin tail, which it arches up over its back like a dog's tail and points forward if it meets an enemy, and jaws like this -" he held up his hand, the thumb and forefinger making a half-circle. "The jaws don't hurt you -they just get a firm grip so that he can give you a jab with his tail, which looks like a bent fishing rod and has the sting in the end. Probably a couple of them under that rock - just the sort of place they like."

  "I'll leave them in peace. The gate of Castello seems to be open. And look, just a few wisps of smoke: cooking."

  "Cooking and baking," Ramage said. "Don't forget, that's more of a small walled town than a fortress. Many more local people live up there than down at the port, where we landed."