Ramage And The Drum Beat (31 page)

Turning away quickly, not wanting to see Southwick’s face, he looked back at the Captain. After wearing round, she’d come back through the line astern of the Diadem and ahead of the Excellent. Then (alone and, he guessed, not only without orders but in defiance of them) the Commodore would steer for the leading – nearest, anyway – Spaniards.

Southwick had given the necessary orders to put the Kathleen about on the other tack before fully realizing the significance of what Ramage was planning to do. Once he did understand he felt humbled that someone young enough to be his son could make such a decision with no apparent fear or doubt. He was pacing up and down with the same relaxed, almost cat-like walk as if he was on watch, and occasionally he rubbed that scar.

Without thinking, Southwick spontaneously strode up to Ramage, looked at him directly with his bloodshot eyes, and said softly with a mixture of pride, affection and admiration: ‘If you could have lived long enough, you’d have been as great an admiral as your father.’

With that he turned and began bellowing orders which steadied the Kathleen on her new course with Cordoba’s leading ships approaching broad on her larboard bow, the British line stretching away on her larboard quarter, and the Captain just passing clear of the Excellent’s bow and breaking away from the line.

There was nothing more to do for a few minutes and Ramage leaned back against the taffrail looking for the hundredth time at Cordoba’s ships. Only then did he picture the physical results of his decision, and as he did so the real fear came.

It came slowly, like autumn mist rising almost imperceptibly in a valley; it went through his body like fine rain soaking into a cotton shirt. And Ramage felt he had two selves. One was a physical body whose strength had suddenly vanished, whose hands trembled, whose knees had no muscles, whose stomach was a sponge slopping with cold water, whose vision sharpened to make colours brighter, outlines harder, details which normally passed unnoticed show up almost stark. The other self was remote, aloof from his body, aghast at what was to be done, appalled that he had planned it, yet knowing full well he had ordered it and coldly determined to see to its execution.

And then he remembered watching the Commodore and realizing the little man often had the same look in his eye that Southwick had when he was in a killing mood. And he remembered wondering then whether he could himself kill a man in cold blood. Well, the wondering was over. Now he knew he could kill sixty men in cold blood, sixty of his own men, not the enemy, and the realization made him want to vomit.

He found himself looking at a coil of rope: fear made him see it with such clarity that he might never have seen rope before in his life. Every inch or so was flecked with a coloured yarn – ‘The Rogue’s Yarn’, a strand put in when the rope was made up in the Royal dockyards, so if it was stolen it would always be recognizable as Navy Board property. Had he – and Southwick, and Commodore Nelson, and perhaps half the commission and warrant officers in the Fleet – a Rogue’s Yarn woven into their souls that set them apart from other people, that let them kill their own men and the enemy without compunction?

Yet when he looked again at the Spanish ships and knew he had less than half an hour to live, the fear ebbed away as silently as it had come. Slowly he realized fear came only when death was a matter of chance, a possibility (or even probability) yet beyond a man’s certain knowledge or control. But now, because he knew for certain he’d be killed as a result of his own deliberate decision – thus removing the element of chance – he accepted its inevitability and unexpectedly found an inner peace and, more important, an outward calm.

Or was it really just cold-bloodedness? Perhaps – it was hard to distinguish.

Jackson had saved his life – and despite his loyalty and bravery, Jackson must die. Southwick, who cheerfully obeyed every order from someone a third of his age (and a tenth of his experience, for that matter) had been told a few moments ago that he was in fact sentenced to death – and merely expressed genuine regret that Lieutenant Ramage would not live out the day because otherwise he’d have become as great an admiral as his father. Poor father – John Uglow Ramage, tenth Earl of Blazey, Admiral of the White, would also be the last earl: his only son was also his only male heir, so one of the oldest earldoms in the kingdom would become extinct. Poor mother, for that matter. He closed his eyes for a moment and pictured Gianna but opened them almost at once: if anyone could make him change his mind…

Then there was Stafford, the Cockney locksmith who’d prefer to watch the guillotine blade drop, should he ever be strapped down on ‘The Widow’, instead of being blindfolded. Bridewell Lane wouldn’t see him again. Then the rest of those with him at Cartagena – Fuller of the fishing line; the young Genovesi, Rossi; the cheery coloured seaman Maxton; and Sven Jensen… And the Kathleen herself; she lived, had a will of her own, had peculiar little quirks her captain had to understand and pander to, who responded with all her wooden soul when sailed properly, but became dead in the water the moment anyone ignored for a moment the precise set of her sails or used her helm with a hard hand. Matchwood – he was consigning her to matchwood, shattered flotsam to be cast up piece by piece at the whim of wind and current for month after month and probably year after year along the Portuguese, Spanish and African coasts. Men speaking many languages would seize those pieces of her timbers and carry them home to burn on their fires or patch their homes and never know whence they came.

He found his eyes fixed on a few square inches of deck planking at his feet: he saw each hard ridge of grain standing proud above the tiny valleys where the softer wood between had been scrubbed away over the years by countless seamen. He saw the grain, the knots, the very texture of the wood with a new clarity, as though for all his life without realizing it he’d been looking through a steamed up glass window which had been suddenly and unexpectedly wiped clear. He saw the wrinkling of his soft black leather boots marked as white lines where salt had dried in the creases. He felt the downdraught of the mainsail and glanced up to realize he’d never before really seen the texture of the sail. Nor, as he looked over the larboard bow, the gentle pyramiding of the sea. Nor the deadliness of a group of five or six enemy sail of the line, one of them the largest ship in the world, the biggest thing the hand of man had ever created to float on the sea, and intended only to kill.

The sight brought him back to the immediate present and the limited future. The Kathleen was close enough now for the hulls of Cordoba’s leading ships to be outlined above the line of the horizon, and for a moment their size and slow progress took Ramage back to a childhood episode: crouching muddy, nervous and excited in the rushes at the side of a lake, his eyes only a few inches above the water, watching swans returning to their nests nearby with their cygnets: rounded, majestic, splendid in their graceful movements, yet each with hard, wicked and spiteful eyes, ready to savage anything in their path – particularly a small boy lurking in the rushes.

The San Nicolas was still leading, forming the sharp end of the wedge with the Salvador del Mundo on her larboard quarter and, beyond, the San Josef. On the nearest side of the wedge the Santísima Trinidad was on the San Nicolas’ starboard quarter, with the San Isidro astern of her. The San Nicolas was the key, and he was thankful, although she was an 84-gun ship, she was next but smallest of the five.

He felt inside his shirt for Gianna’s signet ring, ripped it from the ribbon on which it hung, and slipped it on to the little finger of his left hand. It fitted perfectly since it was a man’s ring and Gianna normally wore it on her middle finger. Curious, he thought, that a family heirloom of the Volterras, handed down from generation to generation, should leave its Tuscan home to spend the rest of Eternity with him at the bottom of the ocean eleven leagues south-west of Cape St Vincent. She was and would be with him in spirit: thank God not in the flesh.

Gloomy, morbid thoughts but excusable. He almost laughed at the thought that he was really solemnly apologizing to himself. When Southwick had walked away from Ramage he’d wished he’d shaken him by the hand. He couldn’t because the ship’s company would have seen and guessed it was a farewell. It wouldn’t have made them do their jobs unwillingly, but his years at sea had taught Southwick that men fought like demons when there was a chance of survival, but a condemned man rarely if ever tried to fight his way off the scaffold. A man tended to bow to the inevitable – which, he chuckled to himself, was inevitable.

The Master, giving his orders through force of habit, had time to reflect that secretly he’d always dreaded the time when he’d be too old to go to sea. He hated houses, hated gardens, hated even more the thought he’d end his days anchored to one particular house and one particular garden, and would only leave it when he was carried off in a plain deal box (he’d specified that in his will; the usual expensive coffin with bronze fittings was a sinful waste of good wood, metal and money).

After taking up some bearings on the San Nicolas he’d deliberately stayed near the mast. Mr Ramage was leaning back against the taffrail with that look in his eyes that told Southwick he was taking a last look far beyond the horizon into a world of his own. Probably thinking of the Marchesa. Aye, they’d have made a handsome couple, he thought sadly. Now it’d be left to some young fop to lead her to the altar.

That lad – Southwick found it easy to obey his orders yet think of him as a lad – had been born with all the advantages possible: son of an admiral, heir to an earldom, clever (except in mathematics, which he freely admitted), humorous and with this extraordinary and quite indefinable ability to lead men. With only a few years at sea, barely past his twenty-first birthday (if in fact he’d yet reached it) he’d inherited his father’s enemies in the Service and so far had beaten them.

So far – and this was as far as the lad would go. Now he was going to sacrifice his life (to the King’s enemies, anyway) in a manoeuvre which would probably fail – through no fault of his – and almost certainly not be appreciated, except by his father and the Commodore. Courage, Southwick thought as he bellowed through his black japanned speaking trumpet at a skylarking sailor, was an inadequate word to describe what’s needed to sentence yourself to death.

Jackson fingered the two pistols Mr Ramage had given him and wondered whether to continue holding them or just put them down somewhere. They wouldn’t be needed now – and he’d known that long before Mr Ramage had yanked them out of the band of his breeches and started drawing on a pad of paper.

The American had begun to guess how it would all end when Mr Ramage interrupted old Southwick’s meal, and knew for certain a moment later when the quartermaster was told to edge up to windward. Jackson was surprised how long it took old Southwick to hoist in what Mr Ramage intended to do. Jackson supposed it was because Southwick was old; too set in his ways – which was why he was still Master of a ship as small as the Kathleen – to anticipate someone might do the unexpected. And Jackson realized he’d learned that lesson from Mr Ramage. ‘Surprise, Jackson – that’s how you win battles,’ he’d once said. ‘If you can’t surprise the enemy by stealth, you can always surprise him in front of his very eyes simply by doing something completely unexpected!’

Well, old ‘Blaze-away’s’ son practised what he preached, though this’d be the last time. Jackson felt no regrets as he looked at Cordoba’s ships with the knowledge they would probably kill him and the rest of the Kathleens within the hour. He’d felt no regrets the day he left Charleston as a boy in a schooner trading to the West Indies; no regrets as the coast of South Carolina had finally dipped astern below the horizon. That was nearly twenty-five years ago, and he could still picture it. No regrets either, when he’d been pressed into the Royal Navy, despite his American citizenship. And he knew that given the chance of going back now and steering a different course so that he wouldn’t risk dying this Valentine’s Day, he wouldn’t change anything.

Ramage’s feet now ached so much they throbbed and his boots seemed a size too small. The night of fog left him tired, his eyes strained and burning as though the eyelids were dusted with fine sand. At sea the emergencies nearly always came when you were physically at the end of the rope, rarely when you were fresh. He was so tired everything around him had an air of unreality. He felt he was using the Kathleen as a hideous mask to frighten the Spanish. Or – and the thought almost made him giggle – like a frightened little man using stilts to make himself ten feet tall. He thought how in a thick mist the boulders on the Cornish moors looked grotesque and huge, yet in sunshine seemed rounded and small. Mist…grotesque and huge… The words seemed to echo as he repeated them. Mist, fog – smoke! Even the sail of the line looked grotesque (and still did) with banks of smoke from the guns drifting over them – particularly the Culloden when the wind blew the smoke of her own guns back on board until the draught down the hatchways made it stream out of the ports again. But the Kathleen’s guns couldn’t make enough smoke.

Then he remembered himself as a young midshipman, one of a group secretly burning wet gunpowder to smoke out the rats and cockroaches in their berth. (It had resulted in them all being mastheaded because they’d forgotten the smell of the smoke would drift, and a Marine sentry had promptly raised the alarm of fire.) The idea grew in his mind. But how to make a screen of smoke large enough to hide the Kathleen, using only wet powder? Perhaps the braziers used to dry and air below deck? Light them, toss in some chunks of pitch and then wet powder? It might work with the braziers up on the weather side so the wind blew the smoke across the ship. Anyway it’d probably puzzle the Spaniards long enough to make them hold their fire for a few minutes – and that alone made it worth trying.

And need all the men die? There might be a chance for some of them. Piles of lashed-up hammocks on deck – they’d float and support men. So would all the spare wood the carpenter’s mate had stowed below. The lashings of the spare gaff stowed alongside the mast must be cut so it would float clear. He called Southwick and Edwards, the gunner’s mate, and gave them their instructions.