Ramage's Signal (20 page)

Hurriedly thanking the seaman in French and noting he was not armed, and dodging more men dropping from the
Calypso
's deck, Ramage hurried aft to the big ornate tiller where the man who was obviously the master stood looking up at the
Calypso
's quarterdeck towering over him.

“Bear away gently, we're all on board!” Ramage called, anxious that the upper end of the lateen yard should not catch in the
Calypso
's rigging.

“As you say!” the master replied cheerfully, patting his enormous stomach and leaning against the tiller. “Fed up with the Navy's food, are you?”

“Urgent work,” Ramage said, noticing there were still only four men on deck—the portly master, the helmsman who until a few minutes ago had been at the tiller, the man amidships who had lifted him to his feet, and the one who helped Baxter.

And now, as the
Passe Partout
curved away from the
Calypso,
Ramage saw his heavily-armed boarding-party was standing along the tartane's side deck looking very sheepish. Martin was beside Orsini, who by now was having an amiable conversation with the two French seamen amidships. They obviously believed that the eight men who had just jumped down from the frigate were, like themselves, true upholders of the Republic, “One and Indivisible.”

As the turn showed the frigate's transom and her name painted on the scroll, Ramage realized for the first time exactly what he had done on the spur of the moment: he had quit the King's ship that he commanded and on a whim was now a supernumerary on board a French tartane. A French tartane which was about to become a British prize under the command of Lt William Martin, Royal Navy, known to his intimates as “Blower” and who had, without a doubt, hidden his flute somewhere among the prize crew's gear.

Well, neither Martin nor Orsini seemed to want to strain the good relations they were establishing with the two enemy seamen, but the
Passe Partout
had an urgent appointment with the
Magpie
on the far side of the convoy, so Ramage turned aft again, walked up the rising deck to the plump master and said, unable to keep the apologetic note out of his voice, as though he was a well-dressed bandit forced to reveal his true identity and rob the host who had just given him a fine dinner: “
M'sieu
—consider yourself and your men my prisoners; this ship is now a prize to His Britannic Majesty's frigate the
Calypso.
”

The fat man looked startled, then began roaring with laughter. Keeping one eye on the
Calypso
as the tartane caught a good puff of wind and heeled as she increased speed, he slapped the helmsman on the back and said: “Well, that's one way of asking for a bottle of wine! Take the tiller and keep her on that course, Alfonse, while I get some up. And then
m'sieu
can tell me what he wants of us.”

Ramage, realizing he was unarmed and dressed like a Frenchman, knew that only a flourished pistol would convince this jolly fellow that his ship was now captured. He turned and shouted forward in English: “Martin! Come aft with Jackson and send Orsini below to secure the other prisoners!”

Looking back at the master again Ramage saw he had gone white; his face was sagging and his brow speckling with perspiration. The welcoming grin had vanished; in its place was raw fear.

Ramage held up a reassuring hand. “There need be no bloodshed; we are British. I am a British officer.”

The French master gestured helplessly at the convoy and then at the
Calypso.
“She has the French flag,” he protested weakly. “This is a French convoy.”

The flag: that was a mistake. A genuine one, but if the Admiralty heard about it they would not like it. It was a legitimate
ruse de guerre
to fly the enemy's flag providing that before opening fire you dropped it and hoisted your own. Well, on the other hand the
Calypso
had not opened fire and had not threatened to and, Ramage thought angrily, becoming furious with himself for bothering, this fellow General Bonaparte had not been fussy about protocol when he suddenly attacked half the countries in Europe, the Kingdom of Volterra included, without reason, pretext or warning.

“I am sorry,” Ramage said. “We will take over your ship peacefully and providing you do not try to resist, no one will be hurt.”

By now several men were walking aft from the fo'c's'le, all obviously just awakened, and followed by Martin's men.

“Tell them,” Ramage told the master, “tell them no harm will come to them unless they try to retake the ship. Where is your arms chest?”

The master pointed down the companion-way near his feet. “In my cabin. Six muskets and six pistols.”

“And powder and shot for those swivels?”

“There is a small locker at the forward side of my cabin. A half-cask of powder and a net of shot, and powder and shot for the small arms. Wads, too.”

Ramage nodded as he counted up the Frenchmen. Paolo had been right: only six, and that included the cook. And the lateen rig was so simple that they needed no more. But for the moment only Paolo, Rossi and Jackson understood the working of the lateen rig.

The sun was scorching. For a few minutes the big lateen sail gave some shade on one side; then the
Passe Partout
had to tack again, zigzagging through the convoy as Ramage watched for the slightest shift in wind direction that might give the
Passe Partout
an advantage in the struggle to beat up to the
Magpie.

The privateer was a puzzle. Ramage had expected her to swoop on the rear ships, the ones right at the stern of the convoy and therefore dead to windward of the
Calypso,
but the schooner was simply tacking back and forth across the wake of the convoy, as if biding her time.

Had her master a better plan? Ramage thought for a few moments, putting himself in the position of the master of the British privateer suddenly coming across a French convoy escorted by one frigate. He would go for the biggest ship, but she was the
Sarazine
and the nearest to the frigate.

Very well, he would wait for darkness. Work his way round the convoy—not difficult with a following wind—and sneak in quietly to board in the darkness, having the
Sarazine
captured and sailing out of the convoy before the
Calypso
could do anything. If the frigate tried to recapture the
Sarazine,
then the
Magpie
would board another merchantman, put a prize crew on board and sail her out of the convoy. Ramage knew that if he commanded the
Magpie
he would try for three prizes and hope to get away with two, expecting the third to be recaptured by the frigate.

In the meantime the
Passe Partout
had to work her way up to windward and get close enough to the
Magpie
to establish communication. But how? At the moment the schooner was staying far enough astern of the convoy for the
Passe Partout,
if she could only get close enough to the
Magpie,
to hoist a white flag without any of the French ships seeing it. Would the
Magpie
think it a trap? Hardly, because there was no way a little tartane in open water in bright sunshine could trap a heavily-armed privateer schooner. A pity merchant ships and privateers did not have the Navy's numerary code, because then Ramage could hoist a series of numbers which the
Magpie
could read out of the signal book as a message.

Again he nodded to Rossi, who had spent the last quarter of an hour at the helm; again the Italian leaned against the tiller; again the
Passe Partout
's bow swung across the horizon, to put the wind on the other side and bring the lateen yard slamming across as she tacked.

Martin, Orsini and Jackson were busy with the swivels. They had found ten round shot for each of them and a copper-lined half-cask of powder in the locker forward of the master's cabin filled with cartridges. The wads were damp, so Martin had spread them out in the sun to dry before loading the guns. Several pieces of slowmatch were also hanging up to dry like lengths of stiff line—the guns were fired by slowmatch wound round lin-stocks; not for them the complication (and expense!) of flintlocks. Nor, from what Martin reported, the luxury of clean barrels: the bores of all of them were rusted, and they had trouble unblocking the touch-hole of the forward one on the starboard side.

By now there were only two merchant ships in the convoy remaining between the
Passe Partout
and the
Magpie
schooner. Scared of the killer in their wake, they had set every stitch of canvas; and Ramage used the tartane's master's telescope to satisfy his curiosity. The topgallants of both merchant ships had lines of mildew on them, especially in bands where the wide canvas gaskets had held them furled against the yard, with every shower or downpour keeping that strip of canvas wetter for longer.

The next tack took the tartane close to the last ship, and Ramage could see two or three men aft watching, one holding a telescope and no doubt curious why a tartane should be making for the schooner. The fact that their escorting frigate was staying to leeward at the head of the convoy might be something of a surprise but more likely it was providing an incentive for the ship to catch up with the
Sarazine.
Anyway, they would have seen the tartane go up to the frigate.

Ramage carefully watched the
Magpie,
estimated her speed, assumed she would hold the course that was now taking her diagonally across the stern of the convoy to the south-west, and tacked the
Passe Partout
again.

Rossi was quite at home with the tartane; he had commented about them twice to Ramage, indicating he had served in them during his youth, nominally spent in Genoa. He had searched the fo'c's'le and found half a
parmigiano
of an age, size and hardness, so Stafford claimed, making it suitable for repairing the stonework of St Paul's Cathedral. Certainly it withstood some violent cutlass blows from Rossi, who quickly found an axe and, later, a rasp in what was obviously the ship's tool chest.
Parmigiano,
he swore, was proof that there must be pasta somewhere in the ship and the ingredients for making some kind of sauce, and Ramage had given him fifteen minutes—until it was obvious that his skill was needed at the tiller—to find it. He had then discovered some spaghetti in a cask in the galley which, he declared, had not been completely eaten by weevils and from which he could make them a good supper. Several suppers, he had added, obviously hoping that would draw from the Captain an indication of how long they would be in the
Passe Partout.

Martin came aft to report that all six swivels could be fired and, thanks to a liberal application from the greasy slush found in the cook's slush bucket, the swivels now turned easily in the fittings in the bulwarks, and the trunnions of the guns moved freely in the swivels. There was no shot gauge to ensure that no shot was oversize or swollen by rust but it had been easy enough to try every shot in a gun: matter of rolling in the shot and then—with the muzzle inboard—tilting the barrel down so that the shot rolled out again into waiting hands. All the socket fittings for the swivels in the bulwarks looked sound enough. “The guns have just been neglected for the past year: they were originally fitted well enough,” Martin reported.

A year, Ramage thought: just a little less than the length of time the Royal Navy left the Mediterranean because of the demands for ships of war in other seas and other oceans. Clearly no Algerine pirates came far enough north to persuade this tartane's master that his swivels needed anything more than canvas covers by way of maintenance. Or, more likely, the tartane usually hugged the coast.

The schooner was still holding her course: obviously the Britons on board were either curious or uninterested in the tartane—staying on a course which would very soon have them crossing tracks could mean either.

Martin examined her with the glass, wiped the objective lens with a piece of cloth to remove specks of spray, and looked again.

“That hull hasn't seen a paintbrush for a year or two,” he commented. “And her jibs have an odd cut to them. Like flour bags, they belly so much.”

“I noticed that,” Ramage said, taking another bearing of her across the top of the
Passe Partout
's steering compass.

“And those quarter-boats—they weren't built in a British yard: look more like bananas.”

“Probably lost her own months ago and took those from an Algerine prize.”

“Still, she has British colours, so we shouldn't have any problems, sir.”

Ramage looked astern and saw that the last of the ships of the convoy were now two or three miles away, and Jackson, Orsini and Stafford were standing by the line reeved through a block at the after end of the lateen yard and used as a flag hal-yard.

He then looked across at the
Magpie
and called to Orsini, who promptly gestured to the two seamen and the French colours came down at the run. Another glance forward reassured him that on this tack the curve of the
Passe Partout
's sail made a big enough belly of canvas to hide any flags from the convoy.

As soon as the Tricolour was down and removed from the halyard, it was replaced with a flag twice as large, one which Jackson, Stafford and Rossi had hurriedly cobbled up from a bolt of canvas found in the bosun's tiny store in the fo'c's'le.

“Hoist it slowly,” Ramage said, and a large white flag—as white as sail canvas could ever be—rose to the end of the yard.

Ramage took the glass and watched the afterdeck of the
Magpie.
A white flag was accepted universally as a flag of truce, and on the matter of colours, Ramage noted, the
Magpie
's were faded. There was just enough for it to be recognizable as a Red Ensign, but—there were a lot of swarthy faces on her fo'c's'le. She must have shipped a crew from—where? And there were many more men with swarthy faces on the quarterdeck, too. Swarthy! They were Arabs! They even had the Red Ensign upside-down, something he had only just noticed because it was flapping spasmodically in the
Magpie
's soldier's wind.