Ramage (7 page)

Anyway, Ramage told himself, it’s time we were under way: the seamen have had enough rest. Those in authority can always put a subordinate in the wrong: that’s an indisputable fact and it’s no good brooding over it.

‘Let me have the charts, Jackson.’ The American handed over the canvas bag, and Ramage selected one from the roll which covered the area from the Vada Rocks, off Livorno – or Leghorn as the British insisted on calling it – to Civita Vecchia. Before looking at it he glanced at the Master’s log and found it had been filled in up to six o’clock that evening, when the last entry gave a bearing and distance of the peak of Monte Argentario and the north end of the island of Giglio and added: ‘Enemy sail in sight to north-west.’

Ramage unrolled the chart, folded it on his knee, and pulled the throwing knife from its sheath inside the top of his boot, using the blade to measure the distance from Monte Argentario at 6 p.m., taking it off the latitude scale at the side of the chart. He then twisted the knife round so he could use the blade to transfer the bearing from the compass rose.

He then pricked a point on the chart. That was the 6 p.m. position of the
Sibella
. After estimating the course she’d steered and the distance covered until the French boarded, he pricked the chart once again. That was where she had sunk. Then he made a third mark – their present position, as accurately as guesswork based on experience could permit.

Where did it put them? Roughly midway between the Argentario promontory and the island of Giglio. The channel between the two – he used the knife to measure it approximately – is twelve miles wide. So they were about six miles from Capo d’Uomo, the high cliff where one of Argentario’s mountainous ridges meets the sea.

Ironic, he thought, that we’ve been rowing north-westward, away from Capalbio and the refugees, for the past half-hour.

The chart showed that to reach the Tower at Capalbio they must first round the southern end of Argentario, which is almost an island joined to the mainland by two causeways. Odd how on the chart Argentario looked like a fat bat hanging upside down from a beam, with its two legs forming the causeways and the beam the mainland. The Tower is on the coast about five miles south of where the southern causeway meets the mainland, with the village of Capalbio on a hill five or six miles inland.

Well, it’s more than fifteen miles, and without knowing the coast it will be impossible to find the Tower before daylight. That means we must hide somewhere before daylight. But where? The south-eastern side of Argentario is too risky: Port’ Ercole, just round the corner, would have plenty of fishing boats coming and going. No, we’ll have to keep clear of Argentario and spend daylight on Friday hiding at Giannutri, another small island athwart the channel to the south-east. From there, on Friday night, we can reach the Formiche di Burano, a tiny reef only a few feet high and offshore of Capalbio. From our present position to Giannutri is…about seven miles: we can hide near Punta Secca.

He saw they would have to cover twelve miles on Friday night to reach the Formiche, and another three to the Tower. But in the meantime he would have a chance to study the mainland through his glass.

That meant he had Friday night to find the refugees; they would have to stay in hiding Saturday and sail from Capalbio on Saturday night…

‘Bosun, Carpenter’s Mate, Wilson – come on board!’

A sandy beach at Capalbio – that would mean hauling the boat up. Only the gig would be light enough to be hauled on shore by its crew. Six men to row, plus Jackson and himself, for the trip to Capalbio. Then half a dozen refugees. Fourteen in the gig for the return journey…it would be overloaded only if they ran into bad weather, since it could carry sixteen when used for cutting out expeditions. But he had no choice: the boat would have to be hauled up and hidden: finding the Italians might take time – he dare not gamble on landing, finding them and getting to sea again the same night.

The Bosun hauled the cutter up to the launch’s transom and scrambled on board, followed by the Carpenter’s Mate and Wilson. As the three men sat waiting in the darkness, Ramage would have given a lot to know their thoughts.

‘I’ve opened the Captain’s orders and propose carrying them out…’

He tended to have difficulty in pronouncing the letter ‘r’ when he became excited: the faint hint of ‘pwopose’ warned him to keep calm.

‘I shall take Jackson and six men in the gig. Bosun, you’ll transfer to the launch, and Wilson can take over your cutter.

‘Bosun, you’ll be in command of the three boats.’

Damned difficult giving orders to men in the dark when you couldn’t see their faces.

‘You will take them to Bastia, in Corsica.’

‘But it’s–’

‘A long way: over seventy miles, but it’s the nearest place where you’ll find any British ships, and as you know the Corsican coast, you won’t get lost. Take the muster book and master’s log. When you arrive, report to the senior British naval officer, giving him a full account of what has happened and – now listen carefully, this is most important – ask him to communicate to Sir John Jervis at once that Lieutenant Ramage is proceeding in execution of Sir John’s orders concerning the
Sibella
. Also request him to send a ship to rendezvous with me five miles off the north end of Giglio at dawn on Sunday and, if I’m not there, again at dawn on Monday.

‘If you are unlucky enough to get caught by the French on the way, throw the log over the side, and at all costs convince them you are the only survivors from the
Sibella
. Don’t mention me or the gig. Now–’

Swiftly he settled the details of the courses the Bosun was to steer. He remembered to ask if any of the boats had wine on board and found the Carpenter’s Mate’s boat had a barrel, which he was ordered to empty over the side. His protests were met with a curt, ‘Can you guarantee to control a couple of dozen drunken men?’

After telling the Bosun to send the six best men over to the gig, Ramage shook hands with the three men in the darkness, and prepared to scramble over the boats to join his latest command. This, he thought to himself, must be a record – to have held the command of a frigate, a launch, and finally a gig, all in the space of an hour.

Just before ordering the other three boats away, Ramage remembered to gather them round and, to back up the Bosun’s authority, warned all the seamen that they were still governed by the Articles of War. They listened in silence broken only by the slapping of the water against the sides of the boats and the occasional scraping as one or other of the boats fended off.

Then, to Ramage’s surprise, just as he was about to tell the Bosun to carry on, one of the seamen called out in a low voice, ‘Three cheers for ’is Lordship – ’ip, ’ip…ooray!’ The men had kept their voices low; yet he sensed the emotion in their voices. He was so startled – both by the unexpected cheers and the significant use of his title – that he was groping for a suitable reply when several of the men called across, ‘Good luck, sir!’ which allowed him to respond with a gruff, ‘Thank you, lads: now bend your backs; you’ve a long way to go.’

With that he sat down in the stern sheets, took the tiller and waited for the other boats to get clear before setting the gig’s crew to work at the oars.

Glancing over towards Argentario he saw a faint, silvery glow below the horizon which was just beginning to dim some of the stars: the moon was rising behind the mountains, and a few minutes later he could distinguish the faces of the men sitting on the nearest thwarts, and noticed they were shiny with perspiration.

Well, he told himself, there are fewer worries in commanding a gig twenty-four feet long and weighing about thirteen hundredweight than a frigate of 150 feet displacing nearly seven hundred tons: less comfortable though, he thought, easing himself round so that the transom knee did not dig into his hip.

As the moon, a great oyster-pink orb, rose from behind Argentario it sharpened the silhouetted peaks of the mountains. They were, he mused, comfortable mountains with the peaks and ridges well rounded, compared with the jagged, tooth-edged Alps: more like gargantuan ant-hills. But as the moon climbed higher, shortening the shadows, the silhouette faded, and the whole of Argentario was tinted in a warm, silvery-pink light. A silver light on Monte Argentario… Why was it named the Silver Mountain? Was silver ever mined there? Surely not. Perhaps the wind ruffling the leaves of the olive trees made it look silvery in daylight – he remembered noticing their foliage sometimes gave that effect to a hillside.

Now he could see all the men in the gig and recognized them as topmen: the Bosun had given him the survivors of the finest seamen in the
Sibella
: the men who reefed or furled aloft high up and out on the yards.

In the moonlight, unshaven and raggedly dressed, they looked more like the crew of a privateer’s boat than King’s men, and privateersmen were as bad as pirates – worse, in fact, since they usually served on a shares-in-the-prize basis, which made them much more cruel and daring than pirates, whose rewards depended on the whim of their captain.

One of the men on the nearest thwart naked from the waist up, a rag round his brow to stop the perspiration running into his eyes, and his hair tied in a pigtail, still had his face begrimed with smoke from the guns. Why the devil didn’t I tell them to put some hammocks in the boats? thought Ramage: even though they are tanned, a day half stripped under a hot sun will scorch their skin and exhaust them more than a spell at the oars, apart from an increasing thirst.

That man rowing stroke – wasn’t his face streaked with blood?

‘You – stroke! Have you been hurt?’

‘It’s nothing, sir: just a cut on the forehead. Why, is me face bloody?’

‘Looks it from here.’

They were an extraordinary bunch: give them the slightest opportunity to shirk a job and they’ll seize it, he thought. Give the majority of them a chance to desert and they will, even though they risk death, or the certainty of a flogging round the fleet. But in battle they are new men: the shirker, the drunkard, the fool – all become fighting demons. In an emergency each has the strength of two men. Even now, after half a day’s bitter battle, they’ll haul on their oars, if necessary, until they drop from exhaustion. Yet if there was a cask of wine in the boat and he went to sleep, he’d find them all blind drunk when he woke.

They were like children in many ways, and even though several of the Sibellas were old enough to be his father, he was always conscious of their basic simplicity: their sudden childlike enthusiasms, waywardness, lack of responsibility and unpredictability.

Dreaming again, Ramage… He decided to let them rest while he gave them a word or two about their task.

‘Well, men, you may be curious to know where we are going – if you haven’t already heard at the scuttle butt…’

This raised a laugh: many an officer first heard details of his captain’s secret orders by way of the scuttle butt, which was the tub of water placed on deck, guarded by a Marine sentry, and from which the men could drink at set times during the day. There the day’s gossip was exchanged, and although the route the news travelled from the cabin to the scuttle butt was often devious, the news itself was nearly always accurate. A captain’s steward’s eyes and ears rarely missed anything, and a lowly captain’s writer – virtually a clerk – became someone of importance among his shipmates only if he had some information to pass on.

‘In case you haven’t, I’ll tell you as much as I can. There are half a dozen Italian refugees – important people: important enough for the Admiral to risk a frigate – to be rescued from the mainland. That was the job the
Sibella
started. Well, we’ve got to finish it.

‘We’ll get as close as we can to this place tonight, but we daren’t risk being seen in daylight, so we’ll have to hide and finish the trip tomorrow night. Now you know about as much as I do.’

‘A question, sir?’

‘Yes.’

‘’Ow far’s this Bonaparte chap got down this way? Who owns this bit o’ the coast, sir?’

‘Bonaparte occupied Leghorn a couple of months ago. Leghorn’s a free port, but that bit of the coast and almost as far down as here belongs to the Grand Duke of Tuscany, and he’s signed a pact with Napoleon.

‘But all along the coast there are enclaves – little countries, as it were – belonging to other people: Piombino, for instance, opposite Elba, belongs to the Buoncampagno family. Half of Elba and a narrow strip of the coast running south as far as here, and including Argentario, which you can see over there, belong to the King of Naples and Sicily.’

‘Whose side is he on, sir?’

‘He was on ours, but he’s ceased hostilities.’

‘Surrendered, sir? Why the French ain’t reached Naples or Sicily, yet!’

‘No, but the King’s afraid they’ll march on Naples, I suppose. Anyway, just beyond Argentario is the town of Orbetello and that’s the capital of the King’s enclave here. I’m not sure how far south it stretches. Southward of that the land belongs to the Pope.’

‘’Ow about ’im, sir?’ asked the seaman with the bloodstained face. ‘Is ’e on our side?’

‘Well, he’s signed an armistice with Bonaparte and shut his ports to British ships.’

‘Looks as though we ain’t got many friends round these parts, do it,’ one of the seamen commented to no one in particular.