The Ramage Touch (8 page)

‘Citizen Michelet reeks of fresh wine; in fact the front of his shirt is still damp from where he spilled it.’

Again, Renouf was puzzled because the Captain’s voice was a straightforward observation and gave no indication of his view of Michelet’s absurd behaviour. The Captain was in fact talking to Michelet through him, as though Michelet when drunk spoke a foreign language only understood by Renouf, who was expected to translate.

‘Has the lieutenant brought his orders?’

Renouf relayed the question by repeating it and hurried across the cabin to collect them as Michelet wrested them from his pocket.

The strange captain opened both sheets; glanced over them to make sure they were the same as the others, and handed them to Renouf, who went back to return them to Michelet and made sure he accidentally stood on the man’s foot, hoping the sharp pain would help sober him, but Michelet swore violently, and there was little doubt that the Captain saw what had happened. Nor did the episode help sober up Michelet, who now he was sitting properly in a chair looked pop-eyed, like a freshly-landed cod.

‘When was the lieutenant last drunk while in command of the
Brutus
?’

What a question, Renouf thought, as he tried to think of an answer. Michelet was very drunk at least every other day, fine weather or foul, and slightly drunk all the time, and of course a captain was always in command of his ship, unless he was away on leave or official business. Because they had left Brest four months ago, Michelet must have been drunk one hundred and twenty times, if not more, because anniversaries of great victories, birthdays and even landfalls were good enough reasons for him to have extra celebrations. The worst of it was he forced some of his officers and petty officers to join him. One petty officer who came from Caen (which, being the centre of Calvados, meant the man was hardly a stranger to liquor) had finally gone off his head, leaping over the side one night screaming that the guns had broken loose and were running after him. That had been hushed up and described in the log as an accident in which the petty officer had been killed by a fall down a hatchway.

‘I don’t know, sir – I’ve never been on board his ship.’

‘But you are his senior officer; the two ketches form a squadron.’

‘Yes, Citizen, but…’ he could not think of a ‘but’ and realized that Michelet’s head was drooping; his chin was resting on his chest and he was dribbling, his whole body shaken every minute or two by a prodigious hiccup.

There was no point in trying to save Michelet now; anyone who was not only fool enough to come on board a senior officer’s ship drunk but then allowed himself to fall asleep (or drop into a drunken stupor) while being questioned deserved whatever punishment came his way. But in all honesty it might have been me, Renouf thought.

Now the Captain was looking at Renouf as though he could read his thoughts and it was like staring at the muzzles of two cannon. That fool Michelet had scuttled the pair of them. If the Captain started questioning
Fructidor
’s men about their commanding officer there were two or three who would be only too willing to exaggerate and say Renouf drank too much, just because he had flogged them a few times. No doubt the same went for Michelet.

‘Neither of you will be drinking wine again for a long time…’

He will have to court-martial us, and no court has yet sentenced a man not to drink, Renouf thought.

‘…because of course you are now both prisoners of war.’

What was that? Renouf repeated the sentence to himself. It had been spoken clearly enough. The accent was indeed Parisian – ‘because of course you are now both prisoners of war’.

‘
Prisoners
, Citizen? How can we be
prisoners
?’

‘This is a British ship of war.’

A joke! Not a very good one, but now was the time to laugh, and he had to laugh for Michelet as well. The Captain was not laughing. Not even smiling. In fact he looked serious and might even be sneering.

Now he was calling an order. Was it in English?
Mon Dieu
, it sounded like it! Renouf had heard English spoken by fishermen before the war. Through the door came the sentry, holding a cutlass and a pistol. Not a French design of pistol. And the man was gesturing that he should go to the door.

‘This man is going to take you up on deck so that you can see this ship is flying British colours…’

‘But, Citizen…Citizen, she is a French frigate! I recognize the class!’

‘She
was
, until the British captured her in the West Indies. She is now the
Calypso
, one of His Britannic Majesty’s frigates,’

‘But…but…I can’t believe it!’

‘I commanded the ship that captured her, but just go up on deck with this Marine sentry. If you don’t believe the evidence of our colours, you are free to speak to any man you see.’

Renouf heard the Captain give a quick order to the man, who took him by the arm after stuffing the pistol back in his belt, and led him out through the door and up the companionway. On deck the sun was just warming the planking and Renouf glanced aft, by now knowing what he would see. There were the British colours, the cloth barely moving in the early morning breeze. He looked across at each bomb ketch in turn and saw that they had not noticed the colours. The fools! Then he realized that although the frigate’s port lids were not triced up, all the frigate’s guns were manned. One broadside would destroy the
Fructidor
, the other broadside would reduce the
Brutus
to kindling.

This aristo of the Royal Navy had brought the
Calypso
into the bay in the darkness, anchored so that his ship was perfectly positioned between the two ketches, and then patiently waited for the Frenchmen to wake up. Renouf suddenly felt cold as he turned and walked back down to the cabin, followed by the sentry. This captain was a cool one. He must have confidence and a droll sense of humour. But if he intended to kill them all, obviously he would have fired broadsides at first light. Then, as Renouf went back to his chair and sat down again and looked up at the Englishman, he was not so sure.

He suddenly remembered why the name Ramage had seemed vaguely familiar. He had been thinking that he knew it from some French circumstance, but now he remembered the Royal Navy captain who had started off by rescuing that Italian woman aristo from somewhere close to here, and later in the West Indies had completely destroyed the convoy intended to relieve Fort de France, in Martinique.

Now it was coming back to him like a flood tide: that was where Ramage had captured this very frigate. Four frigates had been escorting the convoy and Ramage sank two and captured two. The cabin began to move in the most curious way, as though it was swaying, and then it went blurred, as though he was looking at it under water, and then night suddenly fell.

‘Sentry!’ Ramage called, ‘this blessed Frenchman’s just fainted. Get him out of here.’

Ramage walked round the
Dix-Huit de Fructidor
with Aitken and was impressed by what he saw. The ketch was about sixty feet long with both masts set well aft. The mainmast was almost amidships, the mizenmast halfway between it and the taffrail. Just forward of each mast, though, there was a circular hatchway, looking like an enormous cartwheel lying flat on the deck and inset several inches. On top of this, instead of spokes and an axle, there was a thick circular wooden disc, or bed, and on this bed was mounted a large mortar. The circular bed revolved on the hatchway, or wheel, so that the mortar could be trained all round the compass.

In fact great care had to be taken to make sure that a mortar shell did not damage any rigging or the masts, so that effectively each could be trained through about 130 degrees on either side – from twenty degrees ahead to 150 degrees on the quarter. Then neither the mortar shell itself nor the muzzle flash would do any damage.

Aitken pointed at the bed on which the mortar revolved. ‘They must turn it with handspikes when they want to train it round.’

Ramage saw that the bed was constructed differently from the usual type built into a British bomb ketch because the French constructors had to adapt the already completed hull of a merchant ship. Ramage looked at the paint on the woodwork and said: ‘It’s more likely that they lock the mortar on a bearing, probably forty-five degrees, and then to train it they turn the whole ship by putting a spring on the cable. That would be a more accurate way of aiming the gun. I wonder if this one has ever been fired in anger?’

The first-lieutenant shook his head doubtfully. ‘I can’t remember ever hearing of the French using bomb ketches – not in this way, anyway. This would be the first time. Interesting things, aren’t they, sir?’ he commented. ‘Must be the very devil to elevate a mortar accurately.’

‘You don’t. It’s like hitting a ball with a stick. You can hit it hard from underneath so that it goes high in the air but no great distance, or you can hit it on the side so it flies lower and flatter but covers the same horizontal distance. In each case you usually correct your aim with the second shot. It’s the same with a mortar. You train the gun in the right direction with the spring on the cable – at a fort, for instance. Then, with the barrel pointing on the bearing of the fort you have to hurl the shell over the walls and into the middle. You do that by increasing or decreasing the amount of powder used to launch the shell. Like a child’s peashooter, in fact. A boy points the peashooter in the general direction of his target and controls the parabola of the pea by blowing harder or softer.’

‘So the most important items on board a bomb ketch are a good telescope to spot the fall of the shell and a large scoop to measure the powder,’ Aitken said with a grin. ‘As we have a bring-’em-near and scoops to spare it seems a pity that we have to scuttle these two vessels, sir.’

‘It does,’ Ramage said thoughtfully, ‘but a bomb ketch’s drawback is that it’s not much use for anything else. These two go to windward like haystacks. They’d never keep us in sight for more than six hours, let alone stay in company, and we have a long way to go.’

Still, it shocked Aitken’s thrifty soul to scuttle or burn two well-built ships. There was no chance of treating them as prizes – with Malta in French hands the nearest prize court was in Gibraltar, a thousand miles away, and both vessels would be recaptured long before reaching it because the Mediterranean was now swarming with French and Spanish ships.

‘’Tis a pity we can’t use them to bombard somewhere,’ Aitken said almost fretfully. ‘Anyway, could we not have some practice, sir? I’ve never seen one o’ these shells burst. I think it’s knowledge I ought to have,’ he added hopefully. ‘And the men, too.’

‘It’s knowledge you ought to have already,’ Ramage said with mock severity, having served in a bomb ketch for a brief three months when a young midshipman, although she had never fired a shot.

‘I know, sir,’ Aitken said contritely. ‘I was hoping that…’

‘You’re like a child with a new toy,’ Ramage said amiably, going to the ship’s side and gesturing to Aitken to climb down into the waiting cutter so that they could return to the
Calypso
. One of the few advantages of being the senior officer was that you were the last to enter and the first to leave a boat, and as he had always been impatient, he welcomed promotion.

Back in his cabin and sprawled in the one comfortable chair, his sword and hat tossed on the settee, Ramage quietly and amiably cursed Aitken. The Scot was a fine seaman, extremely brave, with a whimsical sense of humour and an extraordinary devotion to Ramage which had recently led him to decline the command of a frigate (and thus promotion to the post list) so that he could stay as the first-lieutenant of the
Calypso
. But this product of Perth – of Dunkeld, anyway, which was just to the north, alongside the Tay – had unintentionally jabbed a finger on a tender spot.

Since he had ordered the Marine sentry to drag Renouf away after he had fainted, Ramage had been trying to make up his mind about the two bomb ketches. Having read the French orders, he now knew what they were supposed to be doing, and all the Frenchmen were on board the
Calypso
, guarded by Marines. Even the
Brutus
’s commanding officer had eventually been sobered up with the help of several buckets of sea water hurled by a couple of gleeful British seamen.

The French plans could be wrecked by burning or scuttling the ketches, but for the moment young Paolo was temporarily in command of the
Fructidor
, striding up and down the tiny quarterdeck in his second-best uniform, dirk hanging at his waist, telescope tucked under his arm, and trying to keep his prize crew of half a dozen men busy coiling ropes and swabbing the decks. Aitken had forbidden him to start the men scrubbing and holystoning, though the planking was as stained as the floor of a bankrupt wine shop.

The
Calypso
’s new fourth-lieutenant, William Martin, was temporarily prizemaster of the
Brutus
, and he too had been dissuaded from setting his men to work to remove a year or two’s grease and wine stains. Ramage thought that Martin was settling in well – apart from his confounded flute. It was hardly surprising that his nickname was ‘blower’; he must have lungs like a blacksmith’s bellows.

‘Blower’ Martin had joined the ship at Gibraltar, replacing a bag o’ wind called Benn who had taken only the voyage from Jamaica to the Rock to decide that the
Calypso
was not for him. It was not really the poor fellow’s fault…Benn, something of a sea lawyer, had been one of the admiral’s favourites in Jamaica, and being promoted from a midshipman in the flagship to fourth-lieutenant (and no one’s favourite) in a frigate had been a shock.

Ramage still missed Baker. When they had captured the island of Curaçao he had a good set of officers: William Aitken was first-lieutenant, Baker second, Wagstaffe third and young Kenton fourth, with Renwick commanding the Marine detachment. Considering that the
Calypso
herself had not been engaged, but only a boarding party, the casualties had been heavy – himself bowled over with a musket ball in the left forearm and a scalp wound, Renwick with a ball in the right shoulder, and Baker killed outright. So Aitken had remained first-lieutenant, he had made Wagstaffe second, Kenton third, and this elegant young nincompoop Benn had been sent across from the
Queen
by the commander-in-chief as the new fourth. He was, he made it quite clear to all and sundry, one of Admiral Foxe-Foote’s favourites.