Ramage's Signal Read online

  “Four inches,” he said to himself. “That means the fuse goes in eight inches. So a foot to spare were just right.”

  He moved so that he was astride another barrel.

  “Let’s ‘ave the maul, ‘Arry.”

  Again he began tapping to lift the bung of the new barrel, at the same time blowing gently to disperse any grains that came out with the copper-sheathed bung. Quickly he pulled it out, wiped off any traces of powder, and passed it and the maul to Wells.

  “Three inches,” he announced after putting his finger into the bunghole. He saw Ramage still watching him. “The French contractors seem ‘onest enough, sir: they don’t sell short measure.”

  “There are no contractors,” Ramage said. “Like our Board of Ordnance, they make their own.”

  “Supposed to be poor stuff though, ain’t it, sir?”

  “Yes—but don’t get careless! It burns all right, but not as evenly as ours. That means if you fire five rounds from the same gun at the same elevation you’ll get first grazes at five different places.”

  “Well, we won’t have to bother here,” Stafford grunted as he slid carefully across to the third barrel and called for the maul.

  Ramage walked aft to find Jackson turning the wheel one way and then the other. “Just testing the wheel ropes, sir. Six turns from hard over to hard over.”

  “You might look at the rudder-head and tiller, in case of rot …”

  “Done that already, sir,” Jackson said. “By the way, the three axes are ready on the foredeck beside the cable.”

  Slight movements in the rigging caught Ramage’s eye, and he saw four grapnels spinning slightly in the breeze like dead carrion crows suspended outside a gamekeeper’s lodge. The three men were now working out on the end of the foreyard, rigging the remaining grapnels.

  Ramage walked forward to where the second anchor was stowed in its chocks. It was well lashed in its place so that a heavy sea should not dislodge it. Yet if the brig and the 74 collided, one of the flukes might well embed itself in the planking of the Frenchman’s hull, a stroke of luck one could not rely on but might encourage. He told a seaman to collect an axe from the foredeck and cut some of the anchor lashings. He waited until the man returned and described which to cut, not wanting to see the anchor suddenly drop over the side, because its cable was stowed below.

  He walked aft to the lantern, looked at his watch again and saw they should soon get under way.

  “Six minutes to go!” he bellowed so that all the men could hear.

  At the hatchway he saw that Stafford and Wells had removed five bungs, and that one thin black line, a fuse, already led from the deck outside the coaming, over the top and down into the hold to the bung-hole of a barrel, where it disappeared like an escaping snake. Stafford would have pushed the fuse well down into the powder, using precisely the extra foot of length, and it was held in place by an encircling collar of cloth pushed down round it, holding it steady in the centre of the bung-hole.

  A Marine was now standing by the coaming: his job was to make sure no one accidentally touched a fuse so that its other end was pulled out of a barrel.

  Yet it was all too obvious!

  As Ramage stood there looking at the hatch he put himself in the place of a French officer jumping down on to the Merle’s deck from the 74 and seeing five sparkling and sizzling fuses leading down into a partly-open hold. In that moment he would know the Merle was not a fire-ship about to burst into flames and that he risked nothing if he snatched out those burning fuses and tossed them over the side.

  He waited as Wells, under Stafford’s direction, draped one more length of fuse over the edge of the coaming, then a third, fourth and finally the fifth. After a few moments, Stafford and Wells climbed out of the hold. Stafford, mopping his face, saw Ramage and said: “It’s remarkable ‘ot down there, sir.”

  “Come over here—now take a good look at it,” Ramage said without comment.

  “Yus, I see what you mean, sir: the first Frog on board is going ter see fuses and guess …”

  “Throw one of those hatch boards over the side, put down two again—leaving the gap against the coaming—and then pull the canvas cover back in place across the hatch, putting a roll in the edge so that it doesn’t touch the fuses. Then I doubt if anyone jumping on board would spot anything in the excitement—the fuses should have burnt enough that they’d have gone under the canvas and out of sight.”

  “Come on, ‘Arry,” Stafford said, “but be very, very careful wiv those two planks.”

  Ramage looked again at his watch.

  “Four minutes to go,” he shouted. “Topmen aloft, axemen to the foredeck, helmsman to the wheel, grapnel men to the sheets and braces!”

  He wondered if anyone else had ever given such a bizarre series of orders. He watched the men moving about, sure-footed as cats and as shadowy in the moonlight.

  “Two minutes to go. Topmen, are you ready?”

  There were shouts aloft from both masts.

  “Axemen, are you ready?”

  Three yells came aft from the foredeck.

  “Grapnel men, are sheets and braces sorted out?”

  Laughs and shouts gave him the answer.

  He went back to the hatch and was startled by the change: it would take a very careful examination to reveal that anything had been done to the hold since it was stowed in France or Spain; five thin lines hung down a few inches, but in the darkness no one would notice them; the hatch looked battened down, ready for sea.

  “Excellent, Stafford and Wells. You’d both make good smugglers!”

  “Excise men, sir,” protested Stafford. “Always on the side of the law, we are.”

  Jackson was waiting by the wheel and Ramage looked yet again at his watch.

  “One minute to go … Stand by, axemen. Right, cut the cable!”

  A series of thuds as the blades bit through the rope, a hiss of the cable snaking out the hawse and a splash as it dropped into the sea told him the Merle was adrift.

  “Foretopmen—lay out—let fall!”

  The fore-topsail tumbled down, the moon now high and bright enough to give the sail some colour.

  Slowly he went through the sequence of orders that set the brig’s topsails and then the courses; orders that were adapted to the few men available. Jackson at the wheel needed no orders; he had already noted the approximate position of the French 74, although she was now too far away to see and had probably furled all her sails so that she did not show up against the hills and cliffs.

  Ramage went aft to the taffrail and looked down at the cutter. The boat-keeper was asleep, lying curled up in the sternsheets. The painter was hanging clear, free of kinks, and Ramage decided to leave him, telling Jackson to give the man a hail once they neared the enemy.

  Inshore, lit up by the moon, Ramage could see the Muscade under way on a parallel course and imagined Southwick looking across to make sure the Merle was all right.

  Jackson said quietly: “It’s made Mr Southwick ten years younger, sir.”

  “Has it really?” Ramage was startled at the remark because he had been so busy during the last hour on board the Calypso that, although he had been giving orders to Southwick—not many, because they were not necessary—he had not had time to notice his appearance.

  “You know how it does, once he knows he’s going to be able to get into a fight, sir,” Jackson reminded him.

  “But this isn’t going to be a fight,” Ramage said, finding himself puzzled again. “As I told you all before we left the Calypso, if the French capture us they’ll treat the brigs as fire-ships and hang us all.”

  “Yes, sir,” Jackson said in the stolid way that seamen had perfected over the centuries when they answered officers who clearly did not understand the situation.

  The men at the sheets and braces had the sails properly trimmed, the topmen were down on deck and the axemen were hoisting the headsails. Soon they too were sheeted home, and the only man doing any work on board
the Merle was Jackson, who turned the wheel occasionally a spoke one way and then another as he watched the luffs of the sails.

  “Harvest moon,” Jackson noted laconically, nodding his head to the east, where the full moon was now a golden disc well clear of the hills.

  “Yes, the seasons race by. We’re getting old, Jackson!”

  “I was fighting the British afore you were born, sir,” Jackson said dryly.

  “If you live to a real ripe old age,” Ramage said with affected seriousness, “you can come and work for me: I’ll find you a simple job on the estate—like sawing up the big logs for winter.”

  “How many fireplaces would that be, sir?”

  “Only a dozen or two, and the kitchens,” Ramage said.

  “So I can look forward to an interesting and restful old age.”

  “Yes,” Ramage said, “we both can. You can vary the length of the logs and I’ll measure them. We need to stay alive, that’s all.”

  “I’ll tell Stafford that if he turns up at the gates of Blazey Hall when he’s seventy he might get a job, too.”

  “As long as he brings his own saw.”

  “Perhaps Rossi could start younger,” Jackson said, his face expressionless. “The Marchesa might like to hear him singing and cursing in Italian from time to time.”

  Ramage ignored the implication of Jackson’s remark, but it started him thinking. Stafford at the age of seventy—that would be in about forty years’ time. By then young Lord Ramage would have inherited his father’s title and be the ancient and eleventh Earl of Blazey, nearly seventy himself. Who would be the Countess of Blazey? Who would he have married? She might even be a widow by then. Or more likely Lord Ramage would, in the phrase so beloved by lawyers and biographers, have pre-deceased his father, his head long since knocked off by a round shot, and the earldom of Blazey, the second oldest in the country, would have become extinct, or been revived and given to some shoddy politician who caught the King’s fancy.

  He walked aft to throw off the gloomy thoughts, though he felt no embarrassment or irritation: standing on top of one hundred and fifty tons of gunpowder with fuses leading down into the hold, and steering for an enemy ship of the line, meant that anyone with the slightest imagination could be forgiven for a few passing reflections on mortality. Yet making a habit of reflecting on mortality was a quick way of driving a man to seek answers in the bottle. Anyway, he thought as he glanced down at the still sleeping boat-keeper, it is a glorious warm night with a steady breeze. Jackson’s harvest moon, and an unsuspecting enemy just down the coast, with Southwick and the other brig abeam. Aitken and his convoy would by now be well on their way to Gibraltar safe from interference because they were sailing under the French flag … The Calypso seemed distant, another world. Paolo would have enjoyed being on this expedition, but he was learning more in Aitken’s convoy.

  Ramage sat down on the breech of one of the two 6-pounder stern-chase guns and looked at his watch. Two hours past midnight. The wind might have freshened a little, but the brigs were slow, and if the damned jibs did not stop slatting he would drop them. They had almost a soldier’s wind so that for most of the time the headsails were blanketed by the forecourse. He knew he was now getting jumpy; when the slatting of sails irritated him, it was time to relax. He began walking forward to talk to the men.

  Stafford and ‘Arry—everyone, including Southwick and Aitken, always referred to him by that name—and the Marine guarding the ends of the fuses were sitting on the deck, their backs against the hatch coaming, and ‘Arry was just finishing some lurid story concerning another man’s wife in Scarborough: a woman, it seemed, possessed of inordinate desires and a weary and pliant husband.

  “The three of you had better repeat to me what your orders are.”

  They looked at each other and Ramage pointed to the Marine, whose style of speaking derived much from the drill sergeants under whom he had served in the past.

  “Hupon the horder ‘Light fuses!’ sir—that’ll be from you—I ‘old the lantern hopen in such a position that William Stafford, hable seaman, and ‘Arry, hordinary seaman, can happly the end of each fuse to the candle flame. I make sure each fuse is burning steady an’ when Stafford ‘as hassured ‘imself as well, we run like ‘ell to the boat, which will be halongside the larboard quarter.”

  Stafford grunted. “An’ we proceed to row like ‘ell out of range an’ back to the Calypso.”

  “You’re sure you’ve used exactly a foot of fuse in fitting each one into a barrel?” Ramage asked him.

  Stafford scrabbled about on the deck and then stood up, proffering a wooden stick with a fork cut in one end. “It’s exactly eleven inches to the cleft, sir; I cut it meself. First I measured orf a foot o’ fuse, nipped it with finger and thumb, then used this ‘ere fork in the end to ‘old a bight of fuse while I pushed it down into the barrel. It takes an inch to fit in the fork. Before I pulled the stick out I pressed the powder down ‘ard wiv my fingers, and then once the stick was out I pressed down again, so the fuse is firm in the powder. Then we wound rags round like a bandage to ‘old the fuse steady in the centre of the bung-hole.”

  The Cockney could have answered Ramage’s question with a simple “Yes sir,” but the fact that he had been sensible enough to get a stick of the right length and make a fork in the end showed that he was not blindly obeying orders.

  “That was a good idea,” Ramage said. “We need explode only one barrel to send off the rest, but with fuses to five barrels we have five insurance policies.”

  The three grapnel men were sitting by the foremast on the starboard side, their grapnels swinging and spinning at various heights above them.

  “One last check,” Ramage said. “You’ve slung the grapnels at the right heights, so tell me what you do as we go alongside our French friends.”

  “I’m out on the foreyardarm, sir,” one man said promptly, “an’ I make sure the grapnels are swinging so they ‘ook on.”

  “And then?” prompted Ramage.

  “Well, that’s all, sir.”

  “No, it’s not, Smith, unless you want one hundred and fifty tons of powder to blow you over the moon.”

  “Oh yes,” the seaman said sheepishly, “as soon as we hear you shout ‘Abandon ship,’ or we see the grapnels are securely hooked on, we bolt for the boat, sir.”

  “Which will be … ?”

  “Larboard quarter, sir.”

  Ramage went on to find the three axemen, who were chatting with the topmen at the foot of the foremast. Having singled them out, he asked them about their remaining duties.

  O’Rorke, who despite his name and the impression it gave of an Irish giant was a small, nimble man from Boston in Lincolnshire, who had first gone to sea as a young boy in the colliers bringing coal from the northern ports down to the Thames, took a pace forward.

  “Grapnels, sir,” he said at once. “As we go alongside we try and toss extra grapnels on board. Extra to the ones rigged from the yards.”

  “Are your grapnels ready?”

  “Yes, sir, we’ve got two each; a fathom of chain and then rope on each one. The bitter end of the rope is made fast to something solid.”

  “And where have you got them?”

  “Well, two on the fo’c’s’le, sir. They’re my two, on account of me being reckoned a good thrower. Longish ropes on my grapnels so we don’t snub in the Merle’s bow too sharp. Two more by the forechains: Hurst here will be standing on the chains—”

  “No,” Ramage interrupted. “Hurst, you stay inside the ship: if we run alongside the Frenchman, you’d be crushed standing in the chains. And you, Gough,” he said to the third man, “were you going to be standing in the main chains? Well, don’t. I appreciate both of you are picking the best places, but you’ll get killed. I can’t lose two men—I want to be rowed back to the Calypso in time for a good breakfast!”

  The three men laughed and two of them excused themselves, so that they could change the positions of their grapn
els. Ramage, with a call to the topmen not to wait about once they heard “Abandon ship!” walked back to the wheel, pausing by the lantern to look at his watch. More than an hour had passed and he looked forward in alarm.

  The cliffs of the headland north of Cala Piombo showed up well, and he could just make out the Torre di Cala Piombo like a thin tree stump on the top of a round hill. A dark blob this side of it showed where the French 74 was swinging to her anchor. Waiting for a convoy? Ramage speculated. Or perhaps expecting more 74s and attendant frigates to join her. Ramage wished he had not started wondering, in case any of them began to arrive.

  The Muscade had slowly passed across the Merle’s stern so that as planned she was now on her seaward side. The French 74 would be windrode and heading westward, out of the gulf. Southwick would go alongside so that his larboard side would be against the Frenchman’s larboard, his bow towards the 74’s stern, while Ramage and the Merle would go starboard side on to her starboard. It was an elementary manoeuvre though, in battle, ships normally fought bow to bow and stern to stern.

  Ramage could now see the 74, or rather her black blur, as a more definite shape against the jagged cliffs anchored perhaps a mile from the shore and well placed in the bay so that the headlands protected her from winds and swells.

  What sort of an anchor watch would the French be keeping? With the wind light from the west and the moon still rising in the east, the Merle and Muscade had two great advantages: first, coming from the dark half of the horizon they were approaching an enemy who loomed up stark against the moon, and second they had a following wind with no worry about how the brigs would beat out again.

  The gap between the Merle and the Muscade was slowly narrowing: each ship was sailing up the side of a long, invisible triangle lying flat on the sea which had the 74 at its apex. Now they were a mile apart; soon they would be separated by only the width of the French ship.

  Stafford had both lanterns hidden abaft the mainmast so their light could not be seen from ahead, and from the sound of it was lecturing ‘Arry and the Marine about the finer points of picking locks. Having served an apprenticeship as a locksmith and been taken up by the press-gang while he was making a living at it—by working at night, Ramage understood, and without the owners of the locks knowing about it—Stafford was undoubtedly an expert.