Ramage's Signal (27 page)

“Signal from the
Golondrina,
sir,” a seaman called down.

Cursing, Southwick grabbed his hat and sword and hurried up the ladder.

“French flags, sir, I've worked it out as being this one.” He pointed to it in the signal book. “I don't understand the lingo, sir, but the book mentions
‘charpentier.'
Perhaps it means send over the carpenter and his mates?”

Southwick nodded, and said: “Just acknowledge it.” He did not need to know French to understand the message: it was a code arranged by Mr Ramage so that he and the other boarding parties could use the French system to send signals to the
Calypso
which, read by any other of the French ships, would seem innocent enough.

So Mr Ramage had secured the
Golondrina
and would be leaving young Kenton in command with his party while he took the Spanish crew on shore in the gig. He opened his telescope and a few moments later saw the gig appear round the stern of the Spanish ship, followed by the green cutter. He had to admit that Mr Ramage was right; with so many of the
Calypso
's boats rowing round apparently at random it all seemed quite natural and no one would notice. The mixture of French uniforms and old clothes, for example, was typically the way the French would do it, so that the gig making for the beach with ten or more Spaniards from the
Golondrina
looked no different from when she first went alongside with a boarding-party from the
Calypso.
The substitution of Spaniards for boarding-party was not noticeable.

The
Golondrina
would have been no problem because, of course, Mr Ramage spoke Spanish, but what about Aitken with the
Sarazine?
Still, the muzzle of a pistol pointing at you had a language all of its own.

He saw a movement of colour just as the seaman spoke: the same signal was being hoisted from the
Sarazine
and the launch was leaving her and rowing steadily along the coast: obviously Aitken had ordered his prisoners to be landed a long way from the
Golondrina
people.

Martin steered the red cutter another point to starboard. The brig
Bergère
had now anchored and he could distinguish the master, a fat man wearing a beret and looking as though he would be more at home sitting under an old plane tree in the
place
of a small town in the south of France, and the mate, a lanky man in a red shirt. He had counted nine seamen and petty officers, only one more than Orsini had noted, so the boy had done a good job.

He saw that both the
Golondrina
and
Sarazine
were flying the signal, so Mr Aitken and Kenton had taken their prizes.

It was easy enough to see that the
Bergère
brig had been built in England and, remembering what he had learned all the time he had been growing up as the son of the master shipwright at Chatham Dockyard, he guessed from her sheer and the shape of her stern that she had been built on the south coast not too far from Portsmouth. At Bursledon perhaps, or even East Cowes. Getting on for three hundred tons and down on her marks—he could see that she was pierced for six guns and carried them, nine-pounders from the look of it. According to Orsini her holds were full of carriages for land guns, harnesses, hides and a ground tier of guns to mount on the carriages.

There were fewer Frenchmen on deck now: with the anchor down and sails furled (bundled up, to his way of thinking) they probably thought their day's work was over.

“Stand by, men, I'm going alongside now.”

He pushed the tiller over with his shoulder as he crouched for a moment to check that his pistols were held tightly by the belt-hooks.

One of his seamen was standing up in the bow, holding a boat-hook horizontally across his chest. No one in the
Bergère
showed the slightest interest; in fact the red cutter was now so close that a man in the brig would have to stand on the bulwark and peer down to see her.

He could scramble up the side—none of the other ships would see—or go on board in a dignified fashion, followed by his men and pretending until the last moment to be French. Mr Ramage had said they should get as far as possible with bluff, and from the indifference of the men in the
Bergère,
Martin was sure he and half a dozen men could get to the wheel without being challenged.

Then the cutter was alongside, the men using the oars without orders and then boating them, while the seamen forward hooked on to an eyebolt with the boat-hook. A second seaman climbed up the ship's side in a leisurely fashion with the painter while a third went up with the stern-fast. Martin, mouth dry, his heart seeming to skid over cobblestones rather than beat regularly, jammed his hat (according to the label inside it belonged to someone called Pierre Duhamel, now prisoner in the
Calypso
) firmly on his head and climbed up the side battens.

For the last few seconds, as his head appeared over the level of the deck at the entry port, he looked round the
Bergère
and saw the fat man in the beret standing right aft and unaware that there was a boat alongside. Catching sight of Martin he gave a cheerful wave and bellowed for the mate, whose red shirt Martin could see on the foredeck.

Martin waved back and walked to the centreline to leave room for his boarding-party, who were following him. As soon as the bosun's mate who was his second-in-command arrived beside him, Martin said casually: “Everyone except the captain is forward. Secure them—watch the man in a red shirt, he's the mate.”

With that Martin strolled aft in what he felt was a casual manner, hoping the captain would watch him, not the boarding-party going forward.

The Frenchman looked puzzled and called something to Martin, who grinned and waved reassuringly, increasing his pace. A few moments later there was a yell from forward and Martin guessed it was the red-shirted mate.

Three quick strides brought him up to the master with a pistol in his right hand. He stopped and pulled the hammer back with his thumb, the click seeming to sound like a small hammer on an anvil.

He then repeated, parrot-fashion, the French phrase that Mr Ramage had made him learn, which told the master that his ship was now a British prize and any attempt to raise an alarm would mean death. To emphasize
“mort”
Martin jammed the pistol in the man's stomach, and as he bent forward in an instinctive reaction, Martin could not resist the schoolboy gesture of pulling the floppy beret down so that it covered the man's eyes, the band jamming across his nose.

With the captain momentarily blinded, Martin spun round to look forward in time to see the French mate collapsing into the arms of one of his own men, having just been punched in the stomach by the
Calypso
's burliest boarder. The rest of the French promptly raised their arms in surrender and were told by the bosun's mate, using sign language, to go down into the cutter.

Martin, wanting to keep him occupied until all the men were in the cutter, pushed the French captain so that he lost his balance and fell over. At that moment one of the Calypsos, who had climbed up on to the bulwarks, called out. “The gig's coming, sir, with the Captain!”

Martin waved an acknowledgement: it was part of the plan that the gig or red cutter would help convoy the boats taking crews to the beach. As soon as Martin saw the red-shirted man helped down into the cutter, he jerked the captain's beret upwards—and saw why the man wore it: he was completely bald. The Frenchman blinked in the sudden light, looked round for his men and saw Martin pointing to the entry port. He walked over to it, watched by the wary bosun's mate with a cocked pistol, and Martin jumped up on to the bulwarks.

Ramage saw him almost immediately, waved as if congratulating him, and then pointed aloft. For a moment Martin was puzzled. Then he remembered.

“Bosun's mate, hoist the signal.”

He now had his command. Yes, he had commanded the
Passe Partout
for a few hours but, much as he enjoyed having Orsini with him, it was not quite the same. Now he commanded a brig of three hundred tons, worth hundreds of pounds in prize-money.

Rennick was still circling with the pinnace, waiting for the
Matilda
to anchor while the bosun with the jolly-boat edged over towards the
Rosette
schooner, which had anchored and whose crew would, in a few minutes, be busy furling the sails and unlikely to take much notice of a frigate's boat coming alongside.

B
Y SIX o'clock in the evening fifteen ships and the
Calypso
frigate were at anchor in the Golfo di Palmas, and unknown to eight of them, the masters, mates and ships' companies of the other seven, with the Foix garrison, were tramping over the Sardinian hills in the dry, dusty heat, looking in vain for a town or village which could understand their French and Spanish, give them drink, food and shelter, and help them raise the alarm. Instead, the people assumed they were bandits and opened fire with fowling pieces, unleashed their dogs and bawled threats in Italian.

The
Sarazine,
the largest of the merchant ships, was providing comfortable quarters for Aitken: her master's cabin was bigger than the coach on board the
Calypso—
the captain's day cabin, bed place and dining cabin—and the Scotsman, whose own quarters in the frigate comprised a box eight feet long and seven wide, felt almost guilty at the luxuriousness of it.

Kenton was counting himself equally lucky in the
Golondrina,
except for the smell of garlic. He refused to believe that the heavy smell was simply the residue over the years of masters eating garlic-treated food and breathing out garlic-laden breath: he was convinced that somewhere, having rolled under something, must be a clove which had been trodden on and squashed. He had a seaman search the cabin but without success, although the man at the end of an hour's crouching, peering and sniffing, did comment to an exasperated Kenton that: “I'm partial to a bit of garlic meself, sir, an' Watkins, what's going to be the cook, has found a great string of ‘em. If you like, sir, I can get you a fresh clove.”

In the
Bergère,
Martin was inspecting sails and rigging with the bosun's mate, making his topmen let fall one sail and check it for tears or chafe, before furling it and letting fall the next. As soon as that was finished he went to the wheel and had the bosun's mate turn it slowly while he made sure there was no wear where the ropes to the tiller went round the drum. Then together they inspected the rudder-head, tiller, wheel ropes and the relieving tackle. When they climbed back on deck the bosun's mate, Maxwell, gave a contented sigh. “Everything seems to be all right, sir, an that's just as well, because whatever Mr Ramage has got in mind, this old brig is going to have to sail faster than she's done for years!”

Martin looked at his watch. An hour to go. He could now tell the men exactly what Mr Ramage intended.

“Muster the men aft, Maxwell,” he said, “then you'll all know what Mr Ramage has in mind.”

While he waited, he saw the gig go alongside the
Passe Partout,
take off three or four men, and then row towards the other brig in the gulf, the
Caroline,
smaller than the
Bergère
but French-built.

Jackson took the gig alongside the
Passe Partout
and, while the bowman held on, scrambled up the side of the tartane to hand over sealed, written orders to Orsini.

For a few moments the midshipman thought they must mean he had lost command of the tartane, and rather than let Jackson, Rossi and Stafford and the rest of the men see his disappointment—he knew he was not far from tears—he went aft to his cabin with the unopened orders stuck carelessly in a pocket.

The moment he was in the cabin he shut the door, pulled out the folded paper, broke the seal and began reading. The orders comprised only a few lines—were similar in fact to those for the
Passe Partout—
but he read them again carefully, and then a third time. Then he sat down, angry that his hands were trembling. There was no disguising the trembling, and he knew two things were causing it. Three rather. First, the shock because he thought he was losing the tartane because the Captain was dissatisfied with him; second, excitement at his new command; and third, fear, or to call it by a less harsh name, apprehension.

Who, he wondered, would not feel apprehension in his position when ordered to take possession and then command of the
Caroline
brig? She must be all of three hundred tons. She bore the same relationship to the tartane as a ship of the line to a frigate …

He folded the orders and put them in his pocket, slipped the cutlass-belt over his shoulder and hooked two pistols into his belt. Then he held out his right hand, palm downwards, and examined it. It was no longer trembling, and he went out on deck to find Jackson talking to Rossi and Stafford.

Jackson stepped forward and handed him another letter. “The Captain said to give you this, sir, after you'd read the other one.”

Paolo grinned because there was no hiding anything from Jackson: like the Captain he seemed to be able to see through a thick plank.

He broke the seal and read the letter. He was to take Rossi with him as second-in-command. To capture the
Caroline
he would use Stafford and Jackson's boarding-party in the gig. All the ships captured so far had been taken by just boarding as though paying a friendly visit …

“You've been busy,” he said to Jackson. “We missed the fun.”

The American shook his head. “No fun, really, sir; it's been like picking ripe apples. But they tell me you ran out of wind.”

“Three hours and not a breath,” Paolo said angrily. “We've been slamming and banging a couple of miles beyond this island. Very well, now,” he pushed down on his pistols to make sure the hooks were holding, “we'll go over and take possession of our next ship.”