Ramage's Devil (18 page)

To make an enormous dog-leg course to call at Plymouth to get provisions, men and water would wreck everything because it would probably mean that a couple of frigates would be sent in his place, and a vital week lost—at least a week; more if there was bad weather. It would take a couple of days to convince the port admiral at Plymouth of the importance of such a rescue and pass a message to the Admiralty (though with the new telegraph, Plymouth could send a signal to London and get a reply in a few hours), then watering and provisioning the frigates would take another day or so … By the time they were clear of the Chops of the Channel (and perhaps driven back by a westerly storm or gale)
L'Espoir
would be a third of the way to Cayenne; a third of the way to the Île du Diable. At this moment, though, the
Murex
brig was only a matter of hours behind her. Yet without enough men to do any good and perhaps short of provisions and water. But no more than fifty miles … If
L'Espoir
had careless or apathetic officers of the deck, poorly set sails and inattentive men at the wheel, plus the feeling that once clear of Brest they were safe from the Royal Navy, the smaller
Murex,
sailed hard, would be able to make up the gap.

“I'm going below for half an hour,” he told Swan. “Report when you can see Ushant.”

Sarah was awake, unused to the swinging cot, which was little more than a large hammock with a shallow, open-topped frame fitted in it, like a box in a net bag.

“I preferred going to and from India,” she said teasingly. “A proper bed is more comfortable.”

“You wait until there's rough weather. Going to windward in a blow and that cot will swing comfortably, while a fixed bed tosses you out.”

“How do I get out of it, anyway?”

“You don't; you're marooned!”

“Do you want to get some sleep?” she offered, sitting up with her tawny hair tousled, naked because she had only the clothes she had worn in the fishing-boat. The lantern light seemed to gild her and he turned away quickly, reassuring her and telling her to stay in the cot. Stay in the cot, he thought to himself, or the captain will not concentrate on his charts …

He put the lantern on the hook in the beam just forward of the desk. The charts were rolled and stowed vertically in a rack fitted on one side of the desk. Checking what charts were there meant removing each one and partly unrolling it. He sat at the desk and made a start. English Channel, western section, including the Scilly Islands; English Channel, eastern section, including the mouth of the Thames and the Medway. North Sea … in four sections. Ireland, the southern half. The Channel Islands. St Malo to Ouessant (the French spelling and the detail showed it was probably copied from a captured one). Ushant to Brest and south to Douarnenez … Those were probably the charts for her last patrol … Half a dozen more left. North Atlantic, southern section …

Ramage unrolled it. It covered from the south-western corner of Spain to the eastern side of the West Indian islands, and down to the Equator, yet giving very little detail of the South American coast. There was Trinidad—which anyway could be identified by its shape. No reference to Cayenne, though; it must be about there, just a kink in the ink line of the coast, north of Brazil.

He looked at the remaining charts. A French one of the islands of St Barthélemy, St Martin (with the southern half owned by the Dutch and given its Dutch name, St Maarten), Anguilla and well to the north, just a speck, Sombrero. Then another two of the group just to the southward, Nevis and St Christopher. And two more, St Eustatius and Saba. A detailed chart of Plymouth … and Falmouth … and, finally, the Texel, showing the northwestern corner of the Netherlands.

All in all, Ramage thought wryly, he was no better off than he would be with a blank sheet of paper and his memory; in fact he was going to have to draw up a chart or two for himself. For the moment, though, he had to try to put himself in the French captain's place.

When sailing from Europe to the West Indies or the northern part of South America, the trick was to pick up the Trade winds as soon as possible without getting becalmed in the Doldrums. Which meant sailing where you could be reasonably sure of finding steady winds. Every captain and every master had his own invisible signpost in the Atlantic; a sign which said “Turn south-west here; this is where the north-east Trade winds begin.”

For Ramage it was 25° North latitude, 25° West longitude. And—he took a pencil from the desk drawer and a crumpled sheet of paper which he smoothed out enough to make it usable.

According to the copied French chart, St Louis church in the centre of Brest, just north of the château, was 48° 23' 22” North, 4° 29' 27” West. That, within a mile, was where
L'Espoir
had sailed from, and she was bound first to the magic spot, 25° North, 25° West. Which … was … about … yes, roughly seventeen hundred miles to the south-south-west.

Then, from the magic point it was to Cayenne … about … another two thousand miles, steering south-west-by-west. Say four thousand miles altogether, and let no one think that steering south-west-by-west from the magic point would bring him or his ship to Cayenne: he would probably start running out of the Trades by the time he reached 12° North; from then on he would be trying to fight his way south against a foul current which ran north-west along the coast of Brazil. Caught in the right place, it helped; but if the wind played about, whiffling round the compass (which it could do in those latitudes) then the current would sweep the helpless ship up towards the islands—towards Barbados, for example, where the British commander-in-chief was probably lying at anchor in Carlisle Bay.

Ramage looked at his brief calculations again and then screwed them up.

Sarah asked: “When do you think we shall be in Plymouth if this weather holds, dearest?”

“In about three months.”

“No, seriously. Our families will be worrying.”

“I expect the Rockleys will be worrying about you, but mine will make a wrong guess and give a sigh of relief that I am safely locked up in a French prison while they will expect you to be lodging with a respectable French family.”

“Is that how it would have been, normally?”

He shrugged his shoulders. “I should think so. Anyway, my parents will not be worrying, and I'm sure as soon as they get the word they will be calling on your people.”

“But we'll be back in London before then, won't we?”

He was sure she suspected the idea that was popping in and out of his mind like an importunate beggar.

She said, in a flat voice: “It would be madness to go after
L'Espoir.
You'll lose the
Murex
and everyone on board. A scout's job is to raise the alarm, dearest. Losing everything won't help Jean-Jacques, but getting help will …”

He nodded and was startled when she said: “You took so long to make up your mind.”

She was making it easier for him, and he took the opportunity as gracefully as possible. “I needed to give it a lot of thought.”

She sat up in the cot, swung her legs out on to the deck and holding one end firmly stood up. She walked over to him and, standing to one side, gently held his head against her naked body. “You had two choices, dearest, Cayenne or Plymouth. Two choices. But you know as well as I do there was really only one that you could take.”

“Yes, but …”

“But in the same circumstances another captain would have had only one choice: he would have gone to Plymouth!”

He nuzzled against her, his unshaven face rasping slightly on her warm skin, his chin pressing gently against her breasts. “I suppose most other captains wouldn't have to choose because they do not usually meet people like Jean-Jacques.”

R
AMAGE had just gone on deck after Swan called that they could now sight Ushant, and the deck lookouts had been sent aloft when both men heard the hail.

“Deck here!”

“Foremast lookout, sir: sail ho! Two sail!”

“Where away?”

“Two points on the starboard bow, sir, frigates I reckon.” “Very well, keep a sharp lookout.”

Swan turned to Ramage, saw that he was already looking over the bow, and heard him cursing. “Those blasted mutineers—I wish they'd left us the bring-'em-near. Even a nightglass!”

“They must have spotted us ten minutes ago, probably more. They'll recognize the rig …”

“And guess we're the
Murex
—perhaps sailing under the French flag?”

Ramage shook his head. News did not travel that fast. “I doubt if the Admiralty yet know anything about the mutiny. In a day or two they'll read about it in the
Moniteur:
half a page of French bombast about oppressed English seamen fighting for their
liberté, fraternité
and
égalité.
”

“Yes,” Swan said bitterly, “at the price of treason and making sure that fifteen of their shipmates go into a French prison.”

“That's what is meant by
fraternité,
” Ramage said laconically.

“That western-most frigate has tacked,” commented Phillips, who had come on deck when he heard the hail.

“And the other one is bearing away a point or so,” Ramage noted. “They're taking no chances. If we try to make a bolt for it, one can catch us to windward and the other to leeward.”

“But they recognize our rig,” Swan protested. “The French don't have any brigs like this one!”

“They had one briefly, until last night,” Ramage said. “Remember, in wartime all sails are hostile until they prove themselves otherwise. I presume we still have a set of signal flags.”

“Yes, sir,” Swan said and took the hint. “I'll have our pendant numbers bent on ready.”

“Deck there!” Once again the lookout was shouting from the masthead, the pitch of his voice rising with excitement.

“Deck here,” Swan called back.

“More sail, sir, just beyond those frigates. Must be a couple of dozen, I reckon, and some of them 74s and bigger.”

“Count ‘em, blast it!” Swan shouted. “Divide ‘em up and count ‘em.”

Ramage counted the days since the declaration of war. Yes, it might be. Indeed, if there were ships of the line it had to be, so there would be an admiral, which meant so much explaining to be done; so much persuading to be done.

“Deck there, foremasthead here … I'm counting as we lift up on the swell waves, sir … Looks like at least six o' the line—one of ‘em bigger'n a 74 and seven frigates, including the first two.”

“Very well,” Swan said. “Report if you sight more.” He turned to Ramage. “Well, sir, can't be French and I don't think they're Spanish.”

“No, it'll be the Channel Fleet coming out to blockade Brest again … Well, they've had eighteen months' rest, but winter will soon be here.”

Phillips gave a dry laugh. “The equinoctial gales will be along … then they'll dream of being ‘Close up with the Black Rocks with an easterly wind'!”

Both Ramage and Swan laughed, but both were thankful they were not serving in the blockading fleet. The Black Rocks … The description really stood for the twenty-five or thirty miles from the island of Ushant in the north to the Île de Sein in the south and, covering the entrance to Brest rather than the Rocks themselves, must make up the most iron-bound coast in the world: for almost every day of the year it was a lee shore wide open to the full fury of the Atlantic.

Yet by a quirk of nature the ships of the Royal Navy, forced to blockade Brest, were fortunate. The French fleet could leave Brest only with an easterly wind. A strong wind with much west in it left them unable to beat out of the Gullet and meant that they were also blockaded by nature.

The blockading British fleet's line-of-battle ships could stay twenty, thirty or even forty miles out to sea, so that they had plenty of room when the westerly Atlantic gales turned into storms lasting a week … A captain with his ship under storm canvas could pull down his newly-tarred sou'wester and curse that he had ever chosen the navy, but apart from keeping station on the admiral if possible (it never was in a full storm) it was more miserable than dangerous.

As a precaution a line of frigates, each within sight of the other, linked the fleet with the French coast. But with west in the wind the admiral could be sure that nature was his ally, keeping the French penned in. France was in fact unlucky because the perfidious English had along their Channel coast large and sheltered harbours which they could enter whatever the weather—Plymouth, Dartmouth, Falmouth, Portsmouth and the area inside the Isle of Wight, Dover and the Thames estuary.

The French were plagued with much higher tides and all their main Channel harbours—Calais, Havre de Grâce, Cherbourg and Boulogne—were artificial. The first of any size which was natural was Brest—which, as the Admiralty stated it—was “outside Channel limits.”

So a west wind kept the French penned in; but the situation changed immediately the wind-vane on the church of St Louis de Brest swung round: an east wind tried to blow the blockading Royal Navy out to sea and gave the French a fair wind for slipping out of the Gullet while the blockaders beat back again to close the door.

Indeed, as Ramage knew from experience, that is why the blockading fleet had the frigates—as soon as the wind turned east the British frigates moved close up to the Black Rocks: close in with the Black Rocks, a couple of miles seaward of Pointe St Mathieu. They were, he reflected, a suitable name for rocks when you were commanding a frigate on a dark night in an easterly gale and peering with salt-sore and weary eyes for a sight of the white collars of breaking seas that would enable you to give hasty helm and sail orders to save the ship.

“Close up with the Black Rocks with an easterly wind”—words written on most midshipmen's hearts, and worthy of being carved on many a captain's tombstone, Ramage thought wryly. Still, it was worse for the admirals—they might have to spend a couple of years out here, shifting their flag from ship to ship while captains and seamen had a brief rest when they returned to Plymouth for water, provisions or repairs. The wear and tear on masts, spars and cordage keeping a close blockade off somewhere like Brest was beyond belief.