Ramage's Signal (10 page)

“Yes, sir, and they don't seem to hurry, do they?”

“Just as well,” Ramage said, and called up to Paolo: “Hoist your red flag and watch for Le Chesne to answer.”

A full five minutes elapsed before an exasperated Paolo shouted: “They're answering now; they've just hoisted a yellow.”

“Lower yours,” Ramage said, and to Jackson he said: “Have you the correct halyard for ‘C?'” Then, before Jackson had time to answer he shouted to Orsini: “Did Aspet's shutters open simultaneously when there was more than one?”

“It varied, sir. A very slack crowd over there.”

Maybe so, Ramage thought, but Foix is not suddenly going to become the fastest station in the whole chain. He walked back a few paces and joined Rennick, looking up at the shutters.

“Very well, let's have ‘C.'”

The shutter slid up and opened at the bottom right-hand corner.

“Now ‘I.'”

Ramage noticed that the pattern for “I” was the opposite of “F”—the top one and the upper of the two on the left.

Jackson and his team had just finished
“vaisseaux”
when Ramage looked at his watch.

“Slow down, you're sending twice as fast as Aspet.”

The American laughed at some comment from Stafford. “I was just telling Staff, sir, that this is a good way to teach him how to spell, and he was saying it was too fast.”

Ramage took a small book from the leather pouch and handed it to Rennick. “Give that to Orsini when he's finished: that's his signal log. All messages to be signed and the time of receipt and sending noted down. And make sure he records whether the signal is going east or west.”

With that he looked round to see Aitken coming up to the mound, having just finished his inspection of the camp. Although Ramage did not know whether the seamen and Marines would be occupying them for a few hours, days or weeks, he wanted to examine the huts and, confident that Paolo and Jackson would be able to transmit the message, walked with Aitken towards the nearest hut, the most westerly, and the nearest to where the gig had landed.

Almost at once he noticed a well-cultivated garden, fifteen yards square and with a big cask at one corner and a watering can beside it. Some vegetable that Ramage did not recognize was growing in neat rows.

“The Lieutenant said they provided everything for themselves except dried goods,” Ramage commented. “They must enjoy gardening.”

“There are four plots like this, sir,” Aitken said. “And the well is thirty or forty yards along the track past the guardhouse. Three cows live in a fenced-in meadow along with the powder magazine.”

Ramage was not sure whether Aitken saw any irony in that. It was not that the Scot lacked a sense of humour; rather that it took a lot to surprise him.

By now they had reached the first hut, walking along a roughly paved path, and Aitken held open the door. The building, the lower half stone and the upper wood, but substantial and cool, held six beds. This must be the quarters of the signalmen. There was a locker beside each bed, and Ramage remembered the French Lieutenant saying that the chief signal-man kept the station's telescope under lock and key.

He glanced at the windows and door to determine which was the coolest bed, looked at the padlock on its locker and then noted that none of the other lockers could be secured.

He saw Aitken was wearing a cutlass. “Prise off the door, please,” he said, and the startled Scot slid the blade into the gap on the hinge side of the door while Ramage held the locker steady between his knees. The door flung open with a crash and Ramage, without looking down, said: “Take out the telescope. If it's better than the one Orsini has, let him have it.”

Aitken grinned as he examined the glass. “You'd make a good magician, sir.” He noted the tripod fitting, pulled out the tubes, adjusted the focus by looking out through the door and up at Orsini perched on his platform, and then slid them shut with a snap. “It's a very good glass; much better than the one the boy has.”

He tucked it under his arm as Ramage finished inspecting the room. The beds were strong but crude, the mattresses were stuffed with straw, and there was a table and two long forms.

“I was thinking about these gardens, sir,” Aitken said cautiously.

“You feel like an hour's weeding?” Ramage joked.

“No, sir, but if we're not staying long we might as well collect the fresh vegetables, and milk the cows, and if we're staying a mite longer, it'd be worth watering the plants.”

“I've no idea,” Ramage said, but went to the door, followed by Aitken, and pointed up to wispy clouds which were beginning to come in from the north-east. “I have a feeling the
mistral
will be blowing in a few hours, and all this low land over there to the north-west isn't going to give the
Calypso
a scrap of shelter.”

“I'd spotted the clouds but that's the first sign of a
mistral
I've ever seen,” Aitken said. “It's a strong wind, isn't it?”

“Too strong for us to stay at anchor in here. Well, let's finish our inspection.”

The next hut, the southernmost on the headland, was twice as large and had twelve beds, table, forms and a single chair at the head of the table.

“For the sergeant, no doubt,” Aitken said, pointing to the chair. “And you'll notice the wine, sir …” he nodded towards a demijohn of red wine in one corner.

“Are the other huts—er, similarly equipped?”

Aitken nodded gravely.

“Well, have them all taken to the signalmen's hut. Orsini can issue the men their ration and be responsible for the rest.”

The two men went on to inspect the cookhouse, which was surprisingly clean and, compared with a ship's galley, very well equipped: copper saucepans, well polished, hung on hooks from the wall, several different types of carving knives were in a rack over a heavy, wooden table, the top of which was several inches thick, and along one wall were demijohns of olive oil.

“They have plenty of hens running among the cattle,” Aitken said, “and they probably had boiled or roast chicken yesterday.” He pointed at a large box half full of feathers. “Looks as though the cook wants to make a feather mattress.”

“For the Lieutenant,” Ramage said, remembering how thin he was and thinking of bony hips trying to get comfortable on a straw mattress.

At the magazine, a low, stone building little more than a large chest with a door big enough for a man to crawl through and then squat down inside, Aitken produced a heavy key to open the padlock. “Watch out for scorpions if you go in, sir: there's one under every stone, and the floor is made of loose pebbles.”

“Much powder?”

“Just enough for the sentries' muskets. Rennick worked out there was enough for each of the Frenchmen to have fired twenty rounds.”

“If we're going to stay a while we'll need to bring over more powder,” Ramage said, half to himself. Aitken glanced at him, hoping to get some clue to the Captain's intentions.

Ramage sat on top of the magazine for a few minutes, facing eastward with the beach and sea a few yards away, the guardhouse thirty yards behind him and the well twenty yards farther along the track. The cows gave discontented moos and Ramage, noticing the swollen udders, said suddenly: “See if we have any men who can milk cows. These poor beasts haven't been milked since yesterday.”

“Well, I can, sir,” Aitken said.

“No doubt,” Ramage answered amiably, “but it's hardly the job for the first lieutenant of one of the King's ships. Ask Jackson; he's bound to know someone.”

As Aitken walked away towards the signal tower, Ramage added: “Make sure they scour out the milking pails. Boil up some water if necessary—I see there's stacks of firewood at the back of the kitchen.”

The waves were becoming larger and the time between them breaking on the beach longer; the wisps of cloud of a quarter of an hour ago were already collecting like pieces of wool, and by noon the sky would be overcast. Unmilked cows behind him, he thought, semaphore stations to left and right, quite apart from the one here on the Foix peninsula, and the
Calypso
swinging quietly at anchor. And in the drawer of his desk Admiralty orders to capture, sink or destroy as many enemy ships as he could.

He had been lucky off the Italian coast, meeting three French frigates, but this swing westward along the French coast towards Spain had, so far, been disastrous. His strongest card, of course, gave him a weak hand for most of the game: the fact that the
Calypso
was a former French frigate with a distinctive sheer, and still using the original French sails with their very recognizable cut, meant she could cruise along the coast flying French colours, a perfectly legitimate
ruse de guerre,
which she would drop and hoist British colours before opening fire. So—and he was quite sure of this, particularly after questioning the French Lieutenant—the French had no idea that a British frigate was patrolling the coast.

They had sighted several small coasting vessels which he could have sunk: xebecs with their gull-wing rig, tartanes with the lateen sail, heavily-laden galliots carrying wine or olive oil, even caiques that came round with cargoes from the Adriatic and Aegean to ports like Marseilles. Small—fifty or a hundred tons of cargo at the most and five men in the crew. Far too small to waste his men by putting prize crews on board, and far too insignificant to sink and reveal his disguised presence to the French authorities. A couple of good plump merchantmen (though preferably a convoy) would be worth it; he could strike and then make off to some other part of the Mediterranean. But one could not lure fat merchantmen over the horizon with the same tricks that caught hens pecking and scratching in dried grass, or brought the cows to the post where the French soldiers moored them for milking.

The second part of his idea, which had fluttered across his mind like a scorched moth when he decided to seize the semaphore tower, now seemed much less absurd. Admittedly it could be wrecked by sharp-eyed and suspicious signalmen at the Le Chesne station, but would men who had already spent a year on this job be sharp-eyed or suspicious? It took Paolo long enough to rouse them this morning.

Yes, the idea might well work. Paolo's French was quite good enough. With bad weather coming up, the
Calypso
was going to have to sail for a while, but who could he leave in command at Foix? Aitken was competent enough, but it was taking an unnecessary risk to leave there the man who would command the
Calypso
should anything happen to her Captain.

Kenton? The acting Second Lieutenant was reliable enough, but did he have that—well, the sudden capacity to spot an unexpected opportunity and exploit it? He was brave and loyal but, Ramage finally decided, not the man to deal with something that was just as likely to gallop up the track from the village, as appear on the Aspet or Le Chesne semaphore towers.

Martin—the Fourth, now acting Third Lieutenant. He had made good use of Paolo in the affair of the bomb ketches. Whomever Ramage chose had to work well with Paolo because, in an emergency, it might well be Paolo's fluent French and illfitting French uniform that kept up a deception that would pull them through. Well, that settled it; young “Blower” Martin would have the job.

Aitken was walking back towards him with three seamen, one of whom was coming from the direction of the kitchen holding a pail in each hand. Although Ramage had never noticed it on board, all three had the walk of men used to uneven ground; they walked looking ahead while Aitken, for instance, kept his eyes down, knowing an anthill could twist his ankle.

“What should they do with the milk, sir?”

“Share it out among the men—use it for cooking if any of them has the skill. They could make a fine omelette if they found out where the hens are laying.”

The three men grinned and one went over to the milking post, where there was a halter. “We'll manage somehow, sir,” he said with a broad grin. “This is like home to me.”

S
OUTHWICK was apologetic when he met Ramage at the entry port. “I had the two cutters hoisted in, sir, because they'd finished taking over provisions and those bundles of French uniforms, and I don't like the look of this sky.”

“Neither do I,” Ramage said briskly. “Send Martin down to my cabin. I want ten minutes with him, and then the gig can run him on shore and come straight back. Then hoist it in and prepare to weigh.”

“Aye aye, sir,” Southwick said. And, Ramage thought, that brief conversation told a bystander more about Southwick than a full-length portrait in oils by Lemuel Abbott and two columns of biographical notes in the
Naval Chronicle—
or even three pages, which they had recently devoted to an utterly undeserving, time-serving but very senior admiral just returned home with a pocket full of prize-money after a couple of years as the commander-in-chief of a very lucrative station abroad. Southwick was a fine seaman, ready to act as he thought fit if his commanding officer was not on board and, for that matter, far from nervous about disagreeing (as discreetly as a shire horse attempting a quadrille) if he thought his captain wrong.

Martin came into Ramage's cabin like a guilty schoolboy expecting a birching from his headmaster.

“What have you been up to?” Ramage asked.

“Why, nothing, sir,” a flustered Martin answered.

“Don't look so guilty, then. Now, yes or no, and be honest: with this
mistral
coming up, the
Calypso
has to sail and may be away three or four days. Can you go on shore and take command of the seamen manning the semaphore station and run it?”

“And Marines, sir?”

“Rennick will carry out your orders, but he will handle his Marines in the normal way. Otherwise,” Ramage added coldly, not wanting to influence the youth's judgement, “you'll be responsible for every man, seaman or Marine.”