Ramage & the Renegades (35 page)

All very convincing, he told himself, and now you can think of very little else but a woman you have only known for eighteen hours and will never see again.

He slid down from the gun and, clasping his hands behind his back, walked towards the fo'c's'le. Well, in at least one way Sarah had done him a good turn: she had, quite unwittingly, forced him to think clearly about Gianna, and the thinking about her had brought the knowledge that his feelings for her had changed. Not died, but changed. He now accepted, too, that since the walls of religion and their inheritances would keep them apart, there was no question of him going to his grave a bachelor because his love was forever out of reach. St Kew needed a landlord and his parents deserved a grandson.

Noblesse oblige
again, of course! He had not thought of the phrase for years, but now Sarah had mentioned it in another context, did he want to be the eleventh and last Earl of Blazey, after his father died? It was one of the oldest earldoms in the kingdom. He was an only child and by not marrying and not having a son, did he want to see the end of it?

He turned and made his way aft. It would soon be time for him to start off alone for the
Heliotrope,
the rest of the men following later. They had prepared the raft, and Ramage pulled his stock from his pocket. It was dry now. Jackson was waiting with the cutlass and knife. The wind dropping had left a warm night, and as the excitement of the second stage of the operation began to seep through him, the uniform felt particularly hot and oppressive. He felt an irrational hatred for it—irrational because she had made it clear it had not belonged to anyone she loved. He stopped for a moment. Loved now, but could it have been someone she
had
loved?

The devil take it; he would never see her again. Jackson stepped forward and helped him out of the jacket, and then he sat on the breech of a gun to pull off the rest of his clothes.

Over in the
Amethyst,
Aitken would be preparing. The second stage … and if it was successful the third stage would be the last one. It was, he reflected, an odd way to survey an island.

H
E came out of the blackness as though swimming up from a great depth and heard Jackson and Rossi talking in a jumble of words before sinking back again. The next time he surfaced, quietly and smoothly like a dolphin, he knew that he was cold and wet, and he could hear Sarah's voice. The third time, when he managed to stay with them longer, he realized that he was lying on the deck of a ship, soaking wet and with a dull, pounding pain in his left arm, close to where the scar was still white from the musket ball which hit him at Curaçao.

“Nicholas,” she was saying, her voice urgent. “Can you hear me? Nicholas … Nicholas!”

He thought he was answering but everything seemed so far away. He shouted and his voice came out as a whisper, and he wished the pain in his arm would stop. “Yes … yes.” That seemed about all he wanted to say. Quite why he was lying flat on his back, this awful pain in his arm, feeling that he was going to vomit any moment, and with something soft against his face, soft and warm, and moving slightly all the time, he did not know. Now someone was approaching with a lantern …

The light showed that he was lying by the mainmast of the
Earl of Dodsworth
and his head was cradled in a woman's arms. But he had swum away from the East Indiaman hours ago and boarded the
Heliotrope
alone.

What was happening in the
Heliotrope?
All those passengers, two of them children. He had explained what they were to do in French, and then the
Calypso
's boarding party had arrived. Yes, now he remembered that a privateersman had woken and roused the rest and there had been a desperate fight in that small cabin …

“Jackson! Jackson!” he shouted, and she heard him whispering, his teeth chattering with the violence of the shivering.

“He wants you,” she said to the American, the wetness of his hair soaking through her frock and chilling her breasts. While the American and the Italian continued tying the bandage round his arm, his face was as white as a sheet in the lanternlight: the cheekbones stuck out like elbows, the skin of his face stretched taut as though all the blood and much of the flesh had drained away in the sea while the men towed the raft with him lashed to it.

He was dying, of that she was sure, and her last words to him had been unpleasant; she had turned her back on him and walked away when all she wanted to do was kiss him and have him hold her. Now they had brought him back to die in her arms.

“Sir, it's Jackson.” The American crouched over him, his ears close to Nicholas's mouth. Sarah listened intently. Some last message for the Marchesa? No, he would give that to the young count. But she must not have these bitter thoughts now; if he died, two women would have loved him.

“Wha' happened?”

Jackson knew what his Captain wanted to know. “We saved the hostages, sir. The guards in the cabin were roused. One caught you with a cutlass as you spitted a man going for Spurgeon with a knife.”

“Di' we lose anyone?”

“Spurgeon, sir. The privateersman stabbed him the same moment the other one slashed you with his cutlass.”

“Wha'm I doing here?”

“Now, sir,” Jackson said soothingly, “you rest now. The
Lynx
heard nothing. Mr Martin's in command in the
Heliotrope
and Mr Aitken's taken the
Friesland.
”

The American straightened himself and shouted aft: “Look alive with those blankets! Sorry, ma'am,” he said to Sarah, “but the Captain's mortal cold.”

It was no good her explaining to this seaman that the passengers were so bewildered as to be almost helpless; that being seized by privateersmen in the first place had been a great shock; being suddenly rescued in the middle of the night was a second one; and now, having the man they regarded as their saviour dragged bleeding and unconscious up the side of the ship must seem like the end of the world to them.

God, he was shivering so violently. Now he was whispering again, every word taking so much effort. He reached out and tugged Jackson's shirt as he bent down to help Rossi with the bandage, which was a strip torn from a sheet.

“
Calypso
… I must get to the
Calypso
…”

“Yes, sir, as soon as we can. Three of the men have swum over to fetch Mr Bowen and a boat.”

“Jackson, why bring me here?”

She realized that the American knew it was pointless to give soothing answers. “You'd have bled to death a long time a'fore we reached her, sir. We started off for her but we couldn't swim fast enough towing the raft, and when you kept on bleeding in spite of the bandages and tourniquet, we reckoned we needed somewhere quick with dry bandages and a lantern.”

“Nicholas,” she said, “they're trying to make you a hot drink, but they're frightened the glow of the galley stove might be seen from the
Lynx.
Will you sip this brandy?”

“Come on, sir,” Jackson said and uncapped a flat silver flask. Finally he said: “It's no good, ma'am. I know what he's like from other times. He hates spirits.”

“Other times?” she whispered.

“We really thought we'd lost him the last time, didn't we, Rossi?”

“
Mamma mia,
when we blew up that Dutch frigate, I thought we were all loosed.”

“Lost,” Jackson corrected from habit, and said to Sarah, “He'll be all right soon, ma'am; you wait until Mr Bowen arrives.”

“Who is he?”

“Our surgeon. Ah, about time!” he growled as two men arrived with blankets. “We only needed two or three! Here, take that end and we'll slide one under him and use it to lift him.”

“Where are you going to take him?” she asked anxiously.

“Nowhere, ma'am. If you'll fold those other blankets into a mattress. Keep out a couple to go over him. Then we can lift him on to it.”

Reluctantly, like a woman having a suckling child taken away from her, she lowered his head and helped Rossi cradle the wounded arm.

“He's so cold,” she said to no one in particular.

“Ma'am,” Jackson said, “if you'd just walk away for a minute or two …”

“Why?” Her voice was harsh.

“Oh … I just want to—well, remove his wet clothes!”

She leaned over, saw the pin shining in the lanternlight among the folds of silk, and pulled it out, and then unwrapped the stock. The triangle of curly black hair glistened and the men gently lifted the blanket. She held the stock for a moment. There was not a hint of warmth in the silk; it was as though it had been a corpse's loincloth.

Once he was lowered on to the makeshift mattress she took one and then the other blanket and covered him, leaving the left arm outside so that they could keep an eye on it. Already blood was seeping through the bandage, a spreading black stain in the candlelight. His eyes were closed, his breathing shallow. She had earlier watched the rise and fall of his ribs and any moment expected it to stop, as if the effort was too much.

The loss of blood and the shadows thrown by the lantern emphasized his features. His nose was thin and slightly curved, like a beak, and the bone made a white ridge. The cheekbones frightened her; it was almost as if parchment covered a skull. Above his right eye there were two scars on the brow, thin, white bars on the skin, which itself seemed almost grey. The eyes, closed now, were sunk even deeper under heavy brows. His hair, wet and tangled, looked like a clump of seaweed tossed carelessly on a beach by a wave.

His right hand was plucking at the blanket and trying to reach across to his left arm. Before she could move, Rossi had leaned over and with surprising gentleness put the hand back under the blanket. The lips moved and Rossi bent down and listened.

“I think he wants you, ma'am, if you're ‘Sarah.'”

She felt a surge of pleasure, then realized that this Italian seaman had probably misheard a murmured “Gianna” as “Sarah.” He was thinking of the Marchesa.

“Nicholas …”

“Sarah,” he whispered, and there was no mistaking it, “they shouldn't have brought me here.”

Misunderstanding him, she said: “Don't worry, Mr Bowen will be here at any minute. It's not a bad wound; it is just that you've lost a lot of blood.”

“No … I meant—” he seemed to lose consciousness for a moment, then she realized he had shut his eyes to fight off a wave of pain “—I'm sorry to have frightened you … but the
Lynx
is next, and then home.”

Not knowing quite what he meant, she smoothed the hair from his brow and said: “Don't worry about the
Lynx
now, all the hostages are safe.”

“Yardarm … both of them,” he murmured and seemed to lose consciousness.

“Yardarm?” she asked Jackson.

“Yes, ma'am,” the American said briskly, touching the side of his Captain's throat to check the pulse, “those privateersmen will hang from a ship's yardarm. Maybe not all of them, but the leaders. Not the
Calypso
's,” he explained. “We'll probably take ‘em back to England for trial.”

“You have to capture them first.”

“Oh, I'm sure the Captain has a plan for that.”

She wanted to shake the American. Did the fool not realize his Captain was dying? That he was slipping away from them even now, like smoke in the wind? And they could do nothing to prevent it: the great gash in his arm, now bound up and with a tourniquet above it, was not the problem. He was dying because as his men had swum with desperate haste to the
Earl of Dodsworth
with him lashed to the raft, his blood had been draining from his body with every pump of his heart. The men who had tied the first tourniquet could not see—did not think to look—that it had come undone.

As she began to weep, she understood that, such was their faith in him that a mention of the
Lynx
brought the confident comment that the Captain would have a plan … In her imagination she saw him dead, and remembered the funeral service, and the dreadful business of the body sewn up in a hammock and tipped over the side from a plank. One of the seamen had died of a fever off Capetown.

Jackson's body went taut for a moment, then he hurried to the entry port. He came back a few moments later and said: “It's the boat with Mr Bowen.”

Obviously they had faith in this man Bowen. It was a pity that the
Earl of Dodsworth
's regular surgeon was a prisoner along with the rest of the ship's officers and men in the camp on shore.

Suddenly a man appeared out of the darkness behind her and knelt beside Nicholas. A hand went down to his face and a finger pushed back an eyelid. “You still with us, sir?” The voice had a bantering note which infuriated her. Was
this
Bowen?

“I didn't cover one of their pawns,” Nicholas murmured. It was an extraordinary thing to say, but Bowen laughed and turned to the plump, elderly man now standing beside him, a man with flowing white hair and carrying a box with a rope handle.

“Put it down there, Southwick. We ought to have brought the chessboard. Now, Jackson, what happened?”

She wanted to tell him first to do something about the terrible pallor of his skin, to make him drink some brandy to stop this awful shivering.

“Cutlass slash across the upper arm, sir. We put a tourniquet on, just as you showed us years ago, and a bandage, and lowered him on the raft to tow him back to the
Calypso.
We hadn't gone above a hundred yards when Rossi reckons he'd never cover that distance alive, so we made for this ship, sir.”

“Why the devil didn't you go back to the
Heliotrope?
”

“She's French, sir. All that gabbling and panic with the passengers. They wouldn't keep out of the way once they saw Mr Ramage had been wounded—he'd spoken to all of them, o' course, when he first got on board. Oh yes, and Spurgeon was killed. It was trying to save him that led to Mr Ramage getting cut.”