Ramage & the Rebels Page 6

  A man living in Jamaica and returning there after a visit to England was writing an angry letter to his agent in London. He was probably a planter, so they would know him in Port Royal. For some reason the agent had not made sure that the furniture, cases of wine and boxes of crockery bought in London had reached the Tranquil before she sailed, and the letter told him in no uncertain terms what a stupid fellow he was. By now the goods would either be in another ship or still in a warehouse in London, but had the agent been sharper they would have sunk in the Tranquil—not that it mattered now, with the owner dead. Ramage copied his name and the name and address of the agent on to his list.

  Another letter written by a woman. She was rejoining her husband in Jamaica after a visit to England, and she was writing to her mother in Lincolnshire—was it Louth? Her writing was not easy to read. She too described the voyage from London out to Nevis, and told her mother how she was excited at the prospect of seeing her husband and children again, and she wondered if she had been wise to be away so long—eighteen months. But she was glad to be back in the warm weather again—she apologized to her mother but, she admitted, Lincolnshire was cold and damp. Then Ramage realized the woman had written the last few lines only an hour or so ago: a ship had just come in sight, she had written, and was heading towards them. The Captain was afraid it was a privateer … The Captain was sure it was; he could see the Spanish flag … The Spaniard had fired some shots across their bow and they were stopping and she was, she told her mother, praying for their deliverance. The name of the Spanish ship, the Captain said, was the Nuestra Señora de Antigua … a gentle name, she wrote, and in an hour or two she would complete the letter and tell her mother what had happened. And there the letter ended. But the woman had perhaps not died in vain: the Nuestra Señora de Antigua, and, Ramage vowed, God help her if she was ever sighted by a ship of the Royal Navy.

  Ramage found that the letters written by the men were impersonal; they were names and addresses to be added to the list. But the women—they were describing new sights and ventures to distant loved ones, and although Ramage was hard put to avoid feeling he was prying, as he read the written words he felt he was getting to know the writers. And then, as he held the letters, each so vital, each describing minutes in the writer’s life and looking forward to future events, like seeing children, arriving in Jamaica, noting how much newly planted flowering trees and shrubs had grown, once again came the shock of knowing that each writer had ceased to exist; that now each was only someone’s memory.

  He thought for a moment, chill striking his whole body, that Gianna could well have been in that ship; a passenger for Jamaica. She could have decided on an impulse to sail from England to join him, knowing that she would arrive almost as soon as a letter warning that she was on her way. His father and mother would try to dissuade her; but for too many years the Marchesa di Volterra had ruled her own little country among the Tuscan hills, had too many servants running around after her, too many ministers deferring to her, to hesitate when she wanted to do something.

  Her little kingdom had been overrun by Napoleon and she had fled to England, and there she lived in Cornwall, with his parents, old friends of her family, and they were treating her like a daughter. A somewhat wild and impetuous daughter, fiery tempered and yet gifted with a generous nature and, most important, a sense of humour. That the young Marchesa and their son had fallen in love they regarded as the most natural thing in the world, a fitting and suitable arrangement.

  Ramage knew that his father had spent too many years at sea to see anything particularly romantic in the fact that Ramage had rescued the Marchesa from the Tuscan beaches as French cavalry had hunted her: Admiral the Earl of Blazey knew his son had his duty to do, and naturally expected him to do it. That the Marchesa had turned out to be a tiny, black-haired beauty then barely twenty years old and not an ancient and gnarled tyrant was—well, the old Earl had shrugged his shoulders and made no comment, recalling Gianna’s mother, whom he had been expecting, not knowing that she had recently died.

  Ramage tried to stop his imagination plunging on. Gianna could have been one of these bodies in the Tranquil, and because neither Baker nor Kenton had ever seen her, the first he would have known would be reading a letter if she had written one, and if Baker or Kenton had been able to find it.

  Paolo would have been one of the boarding party had Ramage not forgotten him. Gianna’s nephew, whom she had bullied Ramage into taking to sea with him … Paolo Orsini, the heir to the kingdom of Volterra, until Gianna married and had children of her own. Young Paolo would have found his aunt—how ridiculous referring to her as the boy’s aunt; she was only five or six years older—among the pile of corpses.

  Steady, Ramage told himself, bundling up the letters, and realizing that Jackson would have recognized her, this way lies madness: this was how young captains, isolated by the routine and tradition of command, became eccentric, even mad: they sat alone and in their cabins, brooded, thinking this and fearing that, playing the eternal game of “if.” “If this had happened, that would have been avoided … if I had done this …” The worst of the “if” game was, of course, that it was very easy for a captain to lose confidence in himself: as he read his orders he could, without much difficulty, consider them far more difficult to carry out than they were, and then he would find himself wondering what would happen “if” he failed.

  The next stage after that was wondering “if” he would succeed, and once he stepped into that quicksand he was lost; he would fail no matter what happened. That was the one lesson that Ramage had learned about command, dating back to the time when Commodore Nelson—as he then was—first gave him command of the little Kathleen cutter and put Southwick in as Master.

  Those first orders from the Commodore had been desperate enough, but looking back on them Ramage realized that, young and inexperienced as he was, he had not really thought of failure. There hadn’t been time enough to consider it. The important thing was to avoid brooding. Keep your mind occupied—it could be a thick head from drinking too much wine at a reception the night before, or perhaps you were too preoccupied because the ship’s company was badly trained—it could be any one of a hundred things, but you were too busy to think of failure, and often because of that you succeeded. Or perhaps you failed, but failed because success was impossible, not because you had gone into battle defeated by your own dark thoughts and lack of confidence.

  At that moment Ramage acknowledged yet again how much he owed to Southwick. The old man had served with him for years, always the same, always cheerful, yet always grumbling. Cheerfully grumbling about the ship’s company, whichever the ship and however well trained the men, but treating them all like unruly but much loved sons. And, of course, it was not just Southwick: there were those scoundrels Jackson, Stafford and Rossi.

  Defeat, failure, even difficulties were hard to consider for long with those men around. Jackson, for example, an American who had an American Protection in his pocket and need only get word to an American consul to secure his discharge from the Royal Navy—but instead he was the Captain’s coxswain, a man who had saved Gianna’s life once and Ramage’s many times. Rossi, the plump and cheerful man from Genoa whose English was good and whose past in Genoa was a matter of conjecture. Rossi was a volunteer, and with Genoa under Napoleon’s occupation Rossi was happy enough in the Royal Navy, where he was paid for killing the Frenchmen he hated. And Stafford, the third of the men always mentioned by Gianna in her letters. Stafford had, like Jackson and Rossi, helped rescue Gianna. He made no secret that before the press-gang swept him into the Navy, when he had lived in Bridewell Lane in the city of London, and after having been apprenticed to a locksmith, he rarely went to work on the lock of a door with the owner’s knowledge.

  The three men argued interminably, although they never quarrelled; they had—Ramage thought for a moment—yes, they had been in the frigate that sank in battle as they went to fetch Gianna, and had helped row the boat used
to rescue her. They had been in the Kathleen when she was smashed to driftwood by the Spanish three-decker at the Battle of Cape St Vincent. They had been with him in the Triton brig when he had taken command to find most of the original crew had mutinied, and they had been in her through the hurricane which tore out her masts and tossed her up on a reef near Puerto Rico. They had been with him in the Post Office packet brig when they were trying to discover why the mails were vanishing. They had been … and so it went on, and probably would go on.

  Now, to their delight, they had on board the Marchesa’s nephew (or, as Stafford had proudly announced to the rest of the ship’s company when he first heard about it, “the Marcheezer’s nevvy”) and it had been tacitly accepted that they kept an eye on him. Jackson had already saved the boy’s life once when they boarded an enemy ship a few weeks ago with Paolo wielding a cutlass in one hand and a midshipman’s dirk in the other.

  Supposing the boy was killed—how would he ever tell Gianna? Then he checked himself: these thoughts were merely a variation on the game of “if”—”If Paolo was killed …” Paolo was lively, energetic, eager to learn, scared of nothing, and appalling at mathematics. As Gianna had said, in the argument which had finally persuaded Ramage, if the boy survived a few years as a midshipman and later a lieutenant in the Royal Navy, he would have learned lessons which would stand him in good stead if he should ever have to rule Volterra when the French had been driven out: he would understand men, and how to govern them, and that was all (whether midshipman in a frigate or ruler of Volterra) he needed to know to survive.

  Ramage called to the Marine sentry to pass the word for his clerk, and as soon as the report and the list of names and addresses were handed over to the man for fair copies to be made, Ramage sent for Aitken. The First Lieutenant was second in command of the ship; it was very easy to forget (or, more honestly, it was a thought that few captains cared to dwell upon) that Aitken would be in command if anything happened to the Captain, and captains were as likely to perish from yellow fever or round shot as any man on board …

  The Captain was brooding, there was no doubt about that. Aitken sensed it the moment he stepped into the cabin and sat on the settee in response to the Captain’s gesture. The deep-set eyes seemed positively sunken, yet one didn’t need the second sight to guess why the Captain was in this mood. There were plenty of men in the Highlands who still brooded over the rapine and pillaging of their villages half a century earlier, when they were still bairns, so it was hardly surprising to find a man like Mr Ramage brooding over that bloody murder in the Tranquil only an hour or so ago.

  Now Mr Ramage was staring at him, as though he was a stranger.

  “Do the ship’s company know what happened in the Tranquil?”

  It was a puzzling question; there was no way it could have been kept secret, even if it was necessary. “Yes, sir, they all know.”

  “And what are their feelings?”

  “Violent, sir, particularly because of the women. We might …”

  “Might what, Aitken?”

  “We might have difficulty controlling them if we find a privateer, sir. If we board one, I mean.”

  But instead of getting angry and saying the officers should be able to control their men, Mr Ramage was just nodding; not in agreement but in the way old men nodded their heads when told interesting news.

  Aitken was thankful for this opportunity to discuss it. “I was going to mention it to you, sir: perhaps you’d care to talk to the ship’s company; to warn them against running amok when we start finding these privateers.”

  The young Scot sensed the Captain’s interest was flagging, and was then not sure whether to be shocked or relieved when Ramage said: “I propose giving no particular orders if we board a privateer called the Nuestra Señora de Antigua, Mr Aitken. We board other privateers in the normal way and I shall expect that strict attention will be paid to discipline.”

  “Aye aye, sir. But no mercy for the Nuestra Señora de Antigua. Is she the one that …”

  “Yes, she’s named in a letter. The last line or two was written as she came close.”

  Aitken reached for his hat and was about to leave the cabin, but the Captain waved him to remain seated, and said quietly: “I think you too sense there’s something unusual in all this.”

  He did too: he had felt it first when Baker and Kenton came back on board. He and Southwick had already guessed what the two lieutenants were likely to find (not the murdered women, of course) so they were not surprised. But with the return of the lieutenants, Aitken had become aware of a curious atmosphere on board. In a way it centred round the Captain, yet Jackson and Rossi seemed affected. Not Stafford, and not Southwick: neither was an imaginative man; one could not imagine them having the second sight.

  But he had felt very strongly this sense of—well, what? That the quarterdeck had grown chillier, like walking into the crypt of a church. That he had seen the whole episode before, although it was no stronger than a distant memory or a half-remembered dream. Yet he had known before it happened that Baker would produce a bundle of letters; he knew how the Captain would take them and walk over to the companion-way and down the steps, hunched as though the letters brought him bad news, instead of having been written by people of whom they had never heard.

  That seaman Jackson, the Captain’s coxswain, he was just walking round as though bewildered, stunned almost, refusing to help Stafford finish cutting up a new pair of trousers. Rossi, too, the third one of that curious trinity, was sitting on his own, his thoughts miles away. Yet of all the men in the ship those two must have seen the most violence and bloodshed. What had upset them could not have been these senseless murders in the Tranquil. It was something else, as though a hand had reached out of the past and touched them on the shoulder.

  The first time he had ever had this sensation of a touch from the past was when he was perhaps eleven or twelve years old and had walked from his home in Dunkeld down the steep hill towards the village.

  It was a late autumn day with the last of the sun turning the leaves of the great beeches into burnished copper, and he had gone through the gate to the ruined cathedral. It was a stone skeleton; only the walls stood; the roof had long since gone. Yet it was easy to picture the fine stone building in its glory, men and women and children singing hymns, their voices echoing under the vaulted roof. The service would end and they would be blessed, and slowly they would go to their homes, pausing perhaps at the main door to talk for a few minutes, to exchange family news and to gossip perhaps, but feeling spiritually refreshed by the service.

  Round the cathedral, lining the paths, were graves and the entrances to vaults; carved marble, stained by age, mottled by lichen, recording a couple of hundred years and more of the story of the people of Dunkeld, and the people walking to the gate would be passing the last resting places of their parents, grandparents, great-grandparents … As a young boy on that autumn evening he had sensed all this and had in his imagination seen people dressed in clothes he did not recognize, and which he later discovered were the fashions of past centuries.

  Between those earlier centuries and the time he stood there as a boy, the cathedral had been burned; the pews and the beams had gone up in flames and the roof had collapsed. No one had tried to repair it; moss and lichen grew in the stones, the grass spread over the tombs. It was something about which his mother would never speak. But as he stood there and thought about it the atmosphere had grown chilly. Not cold and not frightening, even though he had been only a boy. Just enough for him to realize he was experiencing something he would never be able to describe or explain. Indeed, he had never spoken of it.

  Now the Calypso had changed. It was probably his imagination, but as he sat here looking at the Captain, he knew that around Jackson and Rossi and the Captain there was—well, an aura almost, as though they had stepped from the past.

  Yet it was all absurd: the Calypso was a frigate built only five years ago in a French shipyard, captu
red only a few weeks ago by Mr Ramage, and Jackson was an American seaman who had volunteered to serve in the Royal Navy and Rossi was a Genoese—what did he call himself? a Genovesi?—and that was that. He, James Aitken, a lieutenant in the Royal Navy and the Calypso’s First Lieutenant, was rambling amidst superstition like an ancient widowed crone outside her croft high in the Perthshire hills, weaving with gnarled hands and prattling through toothless gums and staring about her with fading eyes, living in a world of vague memories and dreams of what might have been.

  Yet here was the Captain referring to “something unusual in all this” and looking as if he had just seen a ghost.

  It was nothing to do with Aitken, but it had happened as the young Scot had entered the cabin: Ramage had had this overpowering sense that he knew what Aitken was going to say. Earlier he had found himself giving orders as though repeating the words from a play or something said in a dream. Southwick had been puzzled because he had not gone on board the Tranquil, and even Ramage had been surprised to hear himself telling Jackson he was not going.

  While Baker and Kenton had been on board her, somehow he had known what they were seeing; he had known that women had been murdered. But he had dismissed all that as something he did not understand; he had given his orders, come down to his cabin and gone through the letters, and had thought of Gianna, and all the time he had pushed aside this—this what?

  And then as Aitken had come through the doorway he had remembered a story his father had told him. He must have been very young at the time, and Father was telling him something of the Ramage family; how one day, when he was grown up, he would become the Earl of Blazey in place of his father.