The Ramage Touch Read online

  ‘Blower’ Martin had since proved to be a very capable and popular young officer: his nickname was intended to tease because he could make a flute do almost everything except actually talk, and many an evening as the Calypso struggled eastward along the Spanish coast against light headwinds young Martin had started playing with perhaps a couple of people listening, and ended up with nearly every off-watch seaman in the ship squatting nearby, perched on guns or just lying back on the deck planking. Sometimes they danced, applauding themselves between tunes.

  Thin-faced with wavy brown hair, slightly built and nervous and jerky in manner, Martin seemed out of place in uniform – until you watched him on deck. His eyes were never still. They would run along the horizon, up to the luffs of the topsails, along sheets and braces, to the compass card…the restless eyes of a true seaman, someone unlikely ever to be caught by a white squall, a badly trimmed sail, a stuck compass card, or an enemy ship sneaking over the horizon. Now, after not more than a few days, he had his own command for a day or so.

  Like Paolo, he had to make the best of a prize at anchor, but that would be exciting enough. Ramage recalled the first time he had ever been sent off in command of a prize as a young midshipman. For a few hours he felt the greatest sense of freedom that he could ever remember – but the feeling had lasted only until sunset. Then the prospect of a long, dark night had brought doubts and fears…confidence had vanished, black clouds on the horizon looked like the outriders of the most terrible storm, the sea had suddenly become vast and the prize had shrunk. His confidence returned with daylight, and he found he had learned his first real lesson in leadership – that it was a lonely business, but no more difficult in the dark.

  Lonely, but exhilarating: here he was sitting in an armchair in the coach of a frigate he had captured and now commanded, and he was back in the Mediterranean with the kind of orders he had always dreamed of getting. They said, in effect, that for four months you sail round the Mediterranean and sink, burn or destroy everything that presents itself…

  An idea flitted across his mind and he took out his keys as he went to the desk and removed the canvas bag in the locked drawer. The neck of the bag had several brass grommets worked into it, so that the line passing through them could close it up. Inside was a small ingot of lead weighing three or four pounds – enough to sink the bag and its contents if it was thrown over the side in an emergency. Some captains preferred a wooden box suitably weighted and drilled with holes, but he liked a bag: it was easier to throw and more certain to sink. There was the story of a captain who threw the box containing all his secret papers into the sea but forgot to lock it so that the lid popped open when the lead weight sank it just as the enemy boarding party approached. The signal book, the private signals for three months and his order book had all floated to the surface, where they were fished out by the French. The captain had been court-martialled as soon as the French exchanged him, and dismissed the service. The Admiralty did not give you a second chance where secret papers were concerned…

  He took out his orders and read them again. They had been worded very carefully by Their Lordships, who knew only too well that most officers went over them searching for loopholes which would give an excuse for doing either more or less than was written. Ramage considered that there were two aspects to a set of orders – the wording and the spirit. You could ignore the precise wording and act in the spirit, though if you failed you were court-martialled on the precise wording. He ran a finger along the appropriate lines…yes, these orders had a loophole.

  An appropriate word, loophole: it meant the slot or loop in the wall of a fortress through which you could fire down at the enemy, whether using a bow and arrow or a musket. Or, in this case, a bomb ketch. The orders had a loophole big enough for two bomb ketches to sail through because Their Lordships referred only to ‘the enemy’ without specifying (as they usually did) ‘enemy ships and vessels’. He folded the single sheet, slid it back into the canvas bag, pulled the drawstring tight, replaced the bag in the drawer and turned the key.

  ‘Pass the word for Mr Aitken,’ he called to the sentry. It was time for the Calypso to sail under French colours again – or at least stay at anchor under them. There was time for them all to learn more about firing mortars. French shells, French powder…plenty of target practice at no expense to Their Lordships; the gunner would have no forms to fill in though this would not stop the miserable wretch grumbling; he grumbled in the same way that a damaged cask dripped…There were no villages within ten miles of this stretch of beach; the nearest French were probably at the little fort of La Rocchette – if they bothered to garrison it. There might be a few Italian fishermen or hunters in the area, but whoever they were, French or Italians, they would not become alarmed at seeing ships with French flags firing on to deserted beaches in what was obviously target practice. A passing cavalry might pause and watch the fall of shot, and no doubt comment on the Navy’s skill with mortars, or lack of it.

  Lieutenant William Martin was just twenty-three years old, celebrating his birthday on the day he joined the Calypso. He celebrated it quietly, keeping the fact to himself, because no one in his right mind joining a new ship as the most junior lieutenant would announce it was his birthday; that would be asking for everything in the history of gunroom practical jokes to be played on him.

  Twenty-three. Eight years at sea as a captain’s servant, then midshipman, and then he had passed for lieutenant. Not a brilliant pass (not that they gave marks) but he was one of only three that passed out of the nine hopefuls presenting themselves at Gibraltar to the specially convened board of four captains. All four captains knew his father; all would no doubt be taking their ships into Chatham at some time or another, requiring work done in the dockyard. All would no doubt expect favours from his father as a result of passing his son.

  All four, William Martin thought with satisfaction, would be disappointed, because he had not told his father their names. He was not ungrateful, but when he discovered from the other midshipmen the kind of questions they had been asked and the answers they had given, he knew he would have passed whether or not he was the son of the master shipwright at Chatham. None of the captains had offered him a berth as a lieutenant, so he owed them nothing. He had had to wait another three years, serving as a master’s mate, until the Calypso gave him a chance and now he was serving with Mr Ramage he was prepared to admit the wait had been worth it. They had not done anything very much up to now, but the gunroom gossip was that Mr Ramage’s orders were to make as much trouble in the Mediterranean as possible in four months, which was like giving a bull his own china shop.

  Peter Kenton, the third-lieutenant, although a year younger had served with Mr Ramage in the West Indies and just about worshipped him. So did Wagstaffe, the second. Mr Aitken was remote and did not mix much and certainly rarely revealed his feelings unless he was angry. But it was obvious that he respected the Captain, and Mr Aitken was the kind of man that most people in turn respected. Yet Mr Ramage was hot-tempered, impatient, had a caustic tongue, and obviously did not stand fools gladly. The lads told some remarkable stories about Admiral Foxe-Foote, the commander-in-chief at Jamaica and a fool among fools.

  Apparently Mr Ramage had rescued an Italian marchesa from somewhere nearby, and Paolo Orsini, the Calypso’s only midshipman, was her nephew. Well, Orsini was a bright and eager youngster. Some of the men who had helped rescue her were still serving with Mr Ramage and, according to Southwick (who also knew her), these seamen had formed themselves into a special guard, without Mr Ramage knowing it, and now they also kept an eye on young Orsini, half because they knew how upset the Marchesa would be if anything happened to the boy, but also because they seemed to regard the Captain, the Marchesa and Orsini as a family to which they owed their loyalty. It sounded a bit like some Caesar with a – what was it called, he had learned it at school? Praetorian guard? Something like that.

  It was all a long way from Rochester. This stretch of Tus
can coast was beautiful, with the big rounded hills becoming more pointed and mountainous as they went farther inland. He had grown up amid the flat marshy land on either side of the River Medway; he had been a boy of the saltings, trapping wild duck over the marshes and bringing home sea kale which they were thankful to boil as vegetables, because there was never enough money in a family that included three brothers and four sisters.

  His father had let him roam in the dockyard; he had watched many a 74-gun ship grow from a baulk of timber until it was a great thing of beauty and menace sliding down the ways to the cheers of hundreds of people, launched with a bottle of port wine. Frigates, sloops – aye, even some bomb ketches – had been built and launched at Chatham, but no launching had excited him more than that of the Bellerophon. There was, of course, a 74-gun ship called the Bellerophon, better known to her men as the Billy Ruff’n, but his Bellerophon had been seven feet long, a cross between a punt and a skiff. He had made her from scraps of timber and copper rivets and roves which he had cadged from the shipwrights.

  His father and the shipwrights had prepared a surprise for him: they had taken over one of the vacant building slips, carried the skiff to it overnight and fitted it on to a small, weighted carriage which, when a line was jerked, would run down into the water and launch the skiff. One Saturday morning at the midday break he launched the Bellerophon, tossing a tankard of good Kentish ale over her bow as he named her, and going red with embarrassment as she slid down the ways and the shipwrights gave him and the skiff each three cheers and a tiger. And then, with the Bellerophon floating in the water, he had suddenly realized that his father was still standing there with his men and they were all grinning. It was then he remembered he had built the boat but forgotten to make oars.

  Then, from behind a nearby shed, a shipwright had brought a pair of oars and given them to his father, who had presented them to him amid even more cheers. They were beautiful oars, made from ash and perfectly balanced, with strips of copper sheathing protecting the tips of the blades. With that he had rowed round to Hoo, thankful that it was nearly high water so that he could get the skiff up to the stretch of gritty beach in front of their house – at low water several hundred yards of smelly mud separated them from the river – and his mother, admiring the boat, had agreed that next day he could miss church and take half a loaf and a piece of cheese and row down the river towards Sheerness.

  His eldest brother, in a burst of enthusiasm, had said he could borrow his gun and have some heavy shot so that he could try for a duck or two. Early on Sunday, the Medway still misty and the sun not yet up, he had rowed out, passing the old and new ships of the line, frigates and transports lying on moorings, and the ancient forts of red brick and of grey stone. He had planned to start off just before the top of the tide and carry the ebb all the way, resting to eat his bread and cheese at slack water, and start back with the first of the flood. And that was what he had done. He had rowed along the high-banked channels of the saltings and often let the ebb drift the boat along – so that it slowly grounded a few yards from some ducks dabbling away, tails in the air, in their eternal hunt for food. Slowly he had collected his trophies – the banks seemed to muffle the heavy blam of the gun firing, so that within fifteen minutes or so ducks had settled again. By the time the flood took him back to Hoo he had seven plump duck lying on the bottom boards, and a heap of fresh sea kale to go with them. His eldest brother’s only comment as he took the gun back was that he might have plucked the birds while he waited for the tide to turn…

  Although he had enjoyed rowing his skiff, he had found equal pleasure in going over the slight rise of hill to Hoo church on a Thursday afternoon to hear the organist practising for the Sunday service: there he had discovered his love for music. The organist, at first surprised and then pleased to find the young boy always sitting quietly at the back of the church, had taught him to read music and, guessing he would go to sea as soon as he was old enough, suggested that the flute was the instrument for him to learn. They had discussed the violin – but varying climates and long voyages, humidity and high temperatures would warp the wood and snap the strings, and he would never be able to carry enough as spares. The flute was small, easily carried, durable and, more important, it made pleasing music. So he had learned the flute and he had gone to sea…and here he was standing on the quarterdeck of a French bomb ketch, a commission officer by the age of twenty-three.

  More important was the fact that he was one of Captain Ramage’s officers. Few captains had had more of their actions described in the London Gazette, and in his imagination Martin saw himself back in the old house at Hoo, his father listening to his exploits, and he would be able to say casually, for the benefit of his brothers, and with an airy wave of the hand: ‘But you probably read about that in the Gazette…’

  Martin glanced round the Brutus’s deck and saw that his half-dozen men had done everything possible to tidy up the ketch, given that the first-lieutenant had forbidden any scrubbing or polishing of the corroded brasswork with brick dust. That was a clear indication that Captain Ramage intended to scuttle or burn both ships, and although it was disappointing for a young lieutenant who could reasonably have expected to be given the command if the Brutus was being sent back to Gibraltar as a prize, it made sense. There were so many French ships about these days that they would be lucky to cover five hundred miles before being captured…

  On the other side of the Calypso, whose gunport lids were still closed and whose guns had their muzzles sealed by tompions with canvas covers, or aprons, over the flintlocks to keep out the damp of the night, the Fructidor was a ship of frustration as far as Paolo Orsini, a midshipman in the Navy of His Britannic Majesty, was concerned. His half-dozen men, working under Thomas Jackson, had sluiced the decks with the only deckwash pump in the ship, one whose leathers were shrunk and splitting from disuse and needed wiping carefully with tallow before they could be induced to suck, let alone pump. They had coiled all the falls of the halyards and then whipped some ropes’ ends. More tallow had been wiped into the pawls of the windlass; a bored William Stafford had worked a couple of Turk’s heads on the tiller using line he had found in the French bosun’s store. That was all Mr Aitken would allow; he said it was a waste of time and effort to do anything else with the ships.

  Paolo put down his telescope by the binnacle and walked to the forward mortar. It was a strange weapon – so stubby, like a cannon with most of the barrel sawn off, and the trunnions at the breech. The inside of the barrel, the bore (the first section in which the shell was slid), was like the inside of a bottle with its bottom knocked off to form the muzzle. The gunner said the gun was the equivalent of the British 10-inch sea service mortar, and certainly with a muzzle ten inches in diameter it was a formidable-looking weapon. He peered down the bore and could just see where it narrowed into the chamber at the bottom, like the neck of a bottle. That held the gunpowder charge which would launch the mortar shell into the great parabola that should end on the enemy’s head.

  The whole mortar was fitted on to something that could be mistaken for a solid cartwheel lying on its side. He had been down below and seen how this great wheel – in effect the base – was supported by underdeck stanchions which spread the weight of the mortar and the shock of its recoil over several extra floors and stringers, and the deck beams were twice as thick as normal.

  The ‘cartwheel’ had the mortar bed resting on it. This was a thick but flat rectangular wooden block with a hole in the middle of the underside. This fitted on to what would be the hub if the base had been a real wheel. A thick pintle or axle dropped down into a hole that went through the bed and into the base, so that the bed could revolve and the mortar be aimed.

  The mortar was almost obscene, Paolo thought, like a fat and short pig that could only grunt. It was a stubby cast-iron pot with short, solid trunnions sticking out sideways at the bottom which acted as the axle when the gun was elevated. The trunnions were held down by metal clamps (cal
led ‘cap squares’, although they were semi-circular) which stopped the mortar running wild when it fired.

  The piece of timber which could slide back and forth in the slot under the mortar, and which had a saucer-like depression where the underside of the mortar barrel rested, was called the bed bolster. You levered up the muzzle with handspikes until it was at the right elevation, then you pulled on the two ropes and slid the bed bolster underneath until the barrel was supported. After that he was not sure what happened, so he had borrowed the gunner’s notebook, although the handwriting was very difficult to read. He sat down on the mortar bed and concentrated.

  He had not been reading for more than ten minutes when Thomas Jackson came along and inspected the gun.

  ‘Looks as though it’d go right through the deck the first time you fired it,’ the American commented. ‘Still, there are three hundred shells for this one, and three hundred for the other–’ he gestured aft to the other mortar. ‘The French presumably had faith in it.’

  Paolo looked at the sandy-haired, thin-faced American, and his jaw dropped with dismay. ‘Do you mean you wouldn’t want to fire this if the Captain gave you permission?’

  ‘I’d sooner he gave me a direct order, sir,’ Jackson grinned, teasing the boy. ‘I’ve never had anything to do with these things. Always fired guns that shot horizontally. This is more like tossing a grenade over a wall and hoping to hit something you can’t see.’

  ‘Exactly!’ Paolo exclaimed. ‘You can’t do that with an ordinary gun. If your enemy is behind the thick walls of a castle, or on the other side of the hill, you can’t attack him with a cannon because it fires straight – more or less straight, anyway. With the mortar you can hurl shells down on him. Explosive shells.’

  ‘Yes,’ Jackson agreed as Stafford and Rossi walked up to listen to the conversation, ‘but the fuse that makes the shell explode inside the enemy’s walls might also make it burst inside the mortar before you can fire it.’