Ramage's Signal (22 page)

He lapsed into French. “You new allies are the sharpshooters. Try and pick off the magpies and jackdaws on the quarterdeck, particularly anyone that looks like an officer.”

He looked at the
Magpie
and realized that the new sound of popping was musket fire from the Arabs swarming out along the
Magpie
's bowsprit and, he noted, getting in each other's way. She was less than a hundred yards astern and spray was slicing up from her bow as she raced up to the
Passe Partout.

“One last thing,” Ramage shouted, “and make sure you translate this, Orsini: don't waste a single shot. Aim and fire. If you can't aim properly, wait for a target to present itself.”

The
Calypso
had tacked again, weaving in and out of the ships of the convoy. Neither Aitken nor Southwick would ever guess what he was originally going to try to do with that damned convoy, and if they had any sense they would grab the
Sarazine
and
Golondrina
and make for Gibraltar.

Southwick would eventually visit Gianna, of course, and he would tell her what little he had seen of the last few minutes of her sweetheart and her heir, and Jackson, Rossi and Stafford. She would mourn but she would be proud, even if the Admiralty made a fuss about him leaving the ship.

He mopped his face with his handkerchief, not because he was dripping with perspiration but because he wanted to wipe away the black thoughts. And, being human, he could be permitted some black thoughts when nine Britons and six Frenchmen in a tiny tartane found themselves about to be boarded by a schooner crowded with a couple of hundred Algerine pirates, whose shrill shouts and screams he could now hear, a noise of wild animals—how he imagined wolves chased their quarry.

He looked around the
Passe Partout.
The six swivels were loaded; men stood at them with linstocks round which were wound smoking slowmatch. The Frenchmen were settling themselves down in comfortable corners with their muskets, arranging powder, shot and rammers to hand.

Chesneau, having talked to each of his men, was now waddling aft to join Ramage and Rossi right aft. He jerked his thumb over his shoulder at the
Magpie.
“The owners of that schooner allow the captain even less paint than mine do for the
Passe Partout!
”

“I don't think they've had her long,” Ramage said. “You see she has damage down the larboard side? I think that was done when they captured her from the British.”

Chesneau shivered. “I hope your countrymen had quick deaths; otherwise they are still chained in the galleys.”

“You do not have the build for rowing,” Ramage said, “so perhaps we had better not be captured.”

“I would kiss the Pope's ring and never dodge another tax to avoid that,” Chesneau said, “but our fate is only a couple of ship's lengths astern now.”

“Yes,” Ramage said, looking round at Rossi, who was watching the leech of the
Passe Partout
's sail, a cheerful grin on his face as Stafford shouted some teasing obscenity at him.

“You are very calm, M'sieu Ramage; you even smile.”

“I'm smiling because I am about to do something of which I do not entirely approve, M'sieu Chesneau.”

“Indeed? You've left it late in life to acquire a new bad habit!” The
Magpie
was perhaps forty yards astern now and the black marks appearing in the
Passe Partout
's sail were being made by musket balls.

“It may not be a bad habit; it's just one I avoid as much as possible.”

“You intrigue me. What are you going to do, M'sieu Ramage?”

“Gamble, M'sieu Chesneau:
Les jeux sont faits!
”

A
DMITTEDLY it was a bet for which he would be hard put to find a taker, whether among the bookies on New-market Heath or the pallid gamblers at White's or Brooks's or Boodle's. He was betting the life of the fifteen motley crew of the
Passe Partout
on a single chance: that the couple of hundred or so Algerines who had captured the
Magpie
only a few weeks ago were still bewildered; that the towering masts and running and standing rigging of a gaff-rigged topsail schooner was such a complex mass of spars and rope, to men used to simple lateen sails hoisted on stubby masts, that they were certainly unused to it and probably still nervous.

He stood close to Rossi and gave his instructions. The tip of the
Magpie
's flying jib-boom was less than forty yards astern; the musket balls were beginning to rattle and Jackson, having been warned by Ramage, was waiting the signal to fire his swivels into the screaming and gibbering mass of Arabs on the
Magpie
's bow while Orsini held back his Frenchmen.

“This ship,” Ramage said to Chesneau in a conversational tone, “she handles easily?”

“Like a dancer,” the fat man said. He was pale now and perspiring but Ramage sensed it was due to more of a feeling of helplessness than fear.

Thirty yards to the tip of the
Magpie
's jib-boom, and it would be only a matter of moments before some of the Passe Partouts were hit by musket balls.

Ramage pointed at Jackson. “Fire, when you're ready!”

He pointed at Orsini and repeated the order.

The guns thundered out at twenty yards: by the time the smoke cleared it was ten yards, the great jib-boom high above them.

Then he turned to Rossi. “Round we go!” and with that helped the Italian push the big tiller over to larboard so that the
Passe Partout
suddenly turned to starboard, jinking right across the
Magpie
's bow and missing the jib-boom by only a yard or so. Chesneau, the moment he saw what they were doing, jumped over to add his weight to the leverage on the rudder and as Ramage tried to look over his shoulder at the
Magpie,
he saw the great schooner with its towering masts and topmasts already passing astern, at right angles to the
Passe Partout
's course. As her quarterdeck raced by, the tartane's swivels were grunting again and spurting smoke, slamming three-pounder round shot across her decks while the unhurried firing of muskets showed that the Frenchmen were picking their targets.

The
Passe Partout
's sheets were eased as Martin hurried his men to trim the sail on the new course, with the wind now broad on the larboard quarter.

Ramage stood back from the tiller, saw the lateen sail bellying nicely, noticed that Jackson's swivel gunners were already sponging and ramming, and saw the Frenchmen hurriedly reloading their muskets as they scrambled into positions from which they could fire at the
Magpie
when she turned after them.

The schooner herself, Ramage then realized, had been taken completely by surprise: not one of her broadside guns had fired as she raced across the
Passe Partout
's stern—yet she should have given the tartane a devastating raking broadside: that had seemed to Ramage his greatest danger when he weighed up the idea several minutes ago.

But now the schooner was beginning to turn; already her masts were separating as she turned to starboard to wear round after the
Passe Partout,
but even as she turned Ramage felt something clutch at his heart, because she was a beautiful vessel.

The wheel had obviously been put over and the great ship was turning on her heel, the big booms slamming over from the starboard side to the larboard as she began to come round after the tartane and her stern passed through the eye of the wind.

But in their excitement the Algerines had not cast off the running backstays; the booms had swung across only a short distance before jamming hard up against them, and the ship continued turning so the wind filling the sails exerted enormous pressure on the booms and through the booms on to the running backstays.

Ramage looked aloft. From the running backstays the pressure was, of course, spreading to the masts, to which the stays were secured, and he could now see that her rigging was slack—or, rather, the result of months of scorching sun drying and stretching it and rain shrinking it. The Algerines, he was sure, had not set up the rigging from the day they captured her.

The fools had gybed her all standing, the fear of all seamen in fore-and-aft rigged vessels, and suddenly the ship seemed to vanish. One moment the sails were there, great billowing masses of canvas distorted by the hard lines of the ropes into which they were being pressed, and the next moment they had disappeared. Instead there was a long, low hulk wallowing in the water, covered with canvas like a shroud, which was rapidly darkening as water soaked into it.

Ramage was puzzled as to why he had been so surprised, because the
Magpie
had done just what he had hoped: that was why he had taken the
Passe Partout
across her bow. He hoped that the Algerines, unused to the
Magpie
's complex rig, would have become so excited in their chase of the tartane that when the
Passe Partout
suddenly jinked across her bow like a hare being chased by hounds they would spin the wheel over and forget to let go the running backstays on one side and take them up on the other.

“Accidente!”
Rossi said. “The Algerine could do with you as their admiral, sir, just to teach them how to sail our ships!”

Chesneau simply shook him by the hand. “We are your prisoners again,
m'sieu.
Our freedom was brief—thanks to you.”

Ramage grinned, and then noticed that they were rapidly drawing away from the dismasted
Magpie.

“Perhaps your men would be kind enough to lower the sail: it will take my men another five miles' sailing to find out how it is done!”

Chesneau barked out orders and the Frenchmen, putting down their muskets and pistols and grinning cheerfully, hurried to the halyard and vangs.

Ramage caught Jackson's eye and pointed to the muskets, and within a minute Baxter and Johnson were collecting up the small arms and taking them aft to the little cabin.

Lying stopped half a mile to leeward of the
Magpie,
the
Passe Partout
looked as innocent as a vessel waiting in a calm and giving her men an hour or two to try their luck with fishhooks.

Ramage and Martin watched the hulk of the
Magpie.
It was, Martin commented, hard to see the wreck for the Algerines: the ship looked more like a floating log covered with busy ants. Already they had cut away the sails to clear the after part of the ship, and now they were chopping at the shrouds holding the broken masts alongside the ship.

“They're in a panic,” Ramage said, “and either they do not have an effective captain or he was killed.”

“Certainly Jackson's swivels were quite effective—he found a few bags of musket balls and used them instead of round shot.”

Ramage turned to Martin in surprise. “That was smart of him. Where were they?”

“Actually the French master mentioned them to Orsini: he thought they'd be more useful than round shot. Jackson managed to get twenty-five into each swivel.”

“One hundred and fifty musket balls in every broadside! Did he …”

“Yes, sir: as the
Magpie
went across our stern, they managed to fire each swivel at her quarterdeck.”

That was typically Jackson: he did not bother his Captain with the question of whether or not to substitute musket balls for round shot because he knew the answer and just went ahead and did it. And as a result it was unlikely that a man had been left alive abaft the
Magpie
's mainmast.

“There go the remains of her mainmast and the topmast,” Martin commented.

“And the main boom and gaff,” Ramage said as he watched the spars float away.

“Now they're chopping like madmen to get the foremast clear.”

“Yes,” Ramage said cheerfully, “and very soon someone over there is going to realize they have nothing left with which to jury-rig her.”

Martin gave a boyish chuckle. The main boom could have been hoisted on shears and used as a jury mainmast, and the gaff could have made an emergency foremast. “They must have spare sails stowed below, but I can see the deck's swept clean—yes, look over there, sir,” he said pointing to the east. “All that floating wreckage must be her smashed boats and the spare booms stowed alongside them.”

“Well, they've a long row ahead of them,” Ramage said sourly, and Martin stared at him.

“We don't … ?”

Ramage shook his head. “Here, take the glass and give me an estimate of how many men you think there are still alive on board.”

Martin balanced himself, adjusted the focus of the glass and began counting in fives and had reached a hundred in less than half a minute. The next hundred took longer, and after two hundred and fifty he was counting in pairs.

Finally he gave the glass back to Ramage. “Three hundred and seventy at least. Round the wheel the bodies are almost piled up.”

“And the actual complement of the
Calypso?
” Ramage asked, to ram the point home.

“Two hundred and twenty.”

“And we have forty French prisoners from the semaphore station.”

“I see what you mean, sir.”

“No, you are just doing sums, two hundred and twenty of us against three hundred and seventy Algerines and 48 French. You don't realize that every one of those Algerines regards you and me—in other words people who don't worship their god—as infidels. When they capture an infidel they kill him or make him a slave. They do not surrender to infidels; they'd sooner die, which is why you can never capture an Algerine. If they're outnumbered, they'll blow the ship up or fight to the last man.”

“So we leave them?”

“We leave them,” Ramage said. “If they'd caught us, by now they would be flaying us, or using us as live targets for their muskets, or chopping off limbs with those damned scimitars of theirs.”