Ramage and the drum beat

CHAPTER TWENTY

By now the Kathleen was in position astern of the Excellent and at the end of the British line, the puppy following the huntsmen. From ahead the continuous rumble of broadsides, and the Kathleens watched the Blenheim brace her yards round and tack in the wake of the Culloden. Ten minutes past noon and the Culloden was doing her best to catch up with the rearmost Spanish ship.

Almost weeping with frustration, Ramage glared at the mass of ships forming the van of Cordoba's division: an almost solid wedge, the San Nicolas still leading, with at least seven more ships in a tightly-packed group tucked in astern, two and three abreast, the rest scattered astern along the bulging line.

'One thing about it,' Southwick commented, 'they sail like haystacks drifting to windward...'

'Flagship sir,' said Jackson, 'number forty. "To pass through the enemy's line".'

Fifteen minutes past noon. So Sir John intended the Culloden to try to cut through Cordoba's line, splitting it in two.

'He'll never do it,' Southwick said quietly. 'We'll never catch up with 'em in this wind. And only the Culloden and Blenheim have tacked - thirteen more to go!'

With maddening slowness, the Prince George, Orion and Irresistible came round one after the other in the light breeze, and then as the Colossus began turning her foretopgallant mast bent in the middle and began to fall - so slowly, so gracefully, that it took a moment for Ramage to realize it had been shot away, bringing with it the foretopmast. Then the foreyard and foretopsail yard slewed to one side and fell to the deck, a confused jumble of wood, cordage and sails, leaving her unable to tack. Her captain obviously decided to wear round to get out of the way of those astern because almost at once Ramage could see through the telescope that her mizzen topsail was beginning to shiver.

'Wind's backing a bit sir,' Southwick reported. 'Due west now.'

And it was falling even lighter. Ramage doubted if the British ships were making much more than a knot. But even allowing for the lack of wind, he was surprised at the slow pace of battle. Action between single ships - his only experience so far - was much faster, more clear cut: the difference between a game of draughts, perhaps (with the two players able to move in only one of two directions) and chess, where concentrating on the diagonal moves of the bishop, for instance, left you open to the dangerous jinking hop of the knight's move. And at the moment Sir John was playing chess with more than half the board covered with smoke.

Fifteen minutes to one o'clock. His feet ached; he felt sick with hunger. And, like the warning of violent toothache to come, was the nagging question of why Cordoba was now steering to the north-west. It was taking him away from his lee division and, more important, away from Cadiz. It was a ruse: he was sure of that. The San Nicholas and Santisima Trinidad and the rest of the van would soon be abeam. But more important was that the Culloden, Blenheim and Prince George still had not caught up with the rearmost Spanish ships.

For ten minutes he paced up and down the starboard side, rubbing the scar on his forehead from time to time. His pistols - he'd found the box and his clothes still in the breadroom where he'd bundled them as the Kathleen was captured - were tucked in his belt and made his ribs ache. He pulled them out and gave them to Jackson. Not wanting to talk to Southwick, he sent him below for a quick meal and was grateful when the steward brought up some cold chicken, which he ate with his fingers as he walked.

Slowly Cordoba's van ships drew abeam and farther away. It was nearly one o'clock and the Victory, next in line after the damaged Colossus, still had not tacked - the Colossus was probably in her way - but the Culloden seemed to be gaining a little on the Spanish rear ships and drawing well ahead of the Blenheim.

The steward came with a bowl of water and a napkin, and Ramage rinsed his greasy fingers. Pointless, perhaps, since he might be a pulpy mass of flesh and blood before the hands of the clock reached the next hour. What made him think of that? He shivered and tried to thrust aside his earlier wild idea, assuring himself that of all the ships in the British Fleet, the Kathleen was the safest: none of the Spaniards would attack her.

As he wiped his hands and gave the napkin to the steward he glanced over the man's shoulder and his stomach shrivelled.

Instead of the Santisima Trinidad, San Nicolas andthe rest of the leaders being almost broadside on, he found himself staring at their starboard bows: in the few moments he had been occupied washing his hands they had put their helms up, turning towards the Kathleen and obviously intending to pass very close round the end of the British line, probably raking the Excellent (and the Kathleen too, since she'd be in the line of fire) in the process.

Ramage felt he was looking down on the chess-board and could see the next half dozen moves with unnatural clarity: unless Sir John signalled at once for the eight ships forming the rear of the British line to tack together and head them off, there was nothing to stop Cordoba's ships running down to join his other six ships to leeward as soon as they rounded the Excellent's stern, and with his fleet united once again, Cordoba could then resume his dash for the safety of Cadiz. And the banks of smoke were certainly hiding the whole manoeuvre from the Victory.

Ramage snapped: 'My compliments to Mr. Southwick: would he come on deck at once. Quartermaster, edge us up to windward but I don't want it to be too noticeable.'

The idea - fantasy, almost - was gripping him more strongly. Was this how a man worked himself up before committing suicide? The thought made him feel dizzy.

Jackson saw him rubbing his brow and looking anxiously at the ships ahead, and guessing he was looking for signals from the Commodore, from Admiral Thompson in the Britannia, or Sir John in the Victory, the American watched carefully with his telescope. And almost at once a string of flags fluttered from the flagship.

'Minerve's pendant, sir, and' - Jackson glanced at the signal book, - 'and the Colossus's, "To take in tow".'

Ramage, who had instinctively walked towards Jackson in anticipation of the order 'Tack together', spun on his heel to hide his anger and disappointment and looked yet again at Cordoba's leading ships. They now had the wind about three points abaft the beam - almost their fastest point of sailing.

Southwick clattered up the companionway, his sword scabbard clanking, and even before Ramage turned to speak, exclaimed, 'There! They're doing it! I knew they would!'

He looked ahead, saw the Victory and the eight ships astern of her still had not tacked, and added viciously: 'Nothing can stop those fish-eaters unless we all tack together! So help me, that I should live to see the day! Just look at them - coming down like a flock of sheep and not even a dog to give 'em a fright by barking! Why, if that leading ship yawed a couple of times at least half a dozen of 'em would run aboard each other!'

Ramage clenched his fists. The idea, plan, fantasy, dream - he wasn't sure what to call it - was becoming clearer: the significance of Cordoba's move and its danger to the British fleet was making him think so fast he was momentarily surprised when he looked up to find the Kathleen and Cordoba's van still sailing on their respective courses. Nothing had happened - except in his imagination: he was still alive - yet in his imagination, he had, a few seconds earlier, died along with every man on board the cutter.

Perhaps through the smoke the Victory's next astern had glimpsed Cordoba's change of course; perhaps even now Commodore Nelson was trying to signal to the Victory. But the facts were clear enough: Sir John was in grave danger of being defeated by smoke, the light wind - and time. Whatever he might order to be done now, it would still take time for ships to move from position A to position B. And Ramage knew he had to face up to one other unpleasant - and for himself probably fatal - fact: that there was only one chance of giving Sir John time. Yet ... he turned violently and he paced up and down, watched by Southwick and Jackson.

His face was drained of blood, leaving the tanned flesh yellow: concentration and the horror of his knowledge made him clench his teeth so the jawbone was a hard white line, the muscles tight knots beneath the skin. His eyes were no longer deep set but sunken, as though he was in the last stages of a grave illness. Both Southwick and Jackson knew their captain was alone in some private and desperate hell, and they felt empty and angry at their inability to help him.

Ramage felt the fingers of his right hand almost breaking as he squeezed some small object and, coming back from a long way off, tried to focus his eyes on it: Gianna's ring, still on the ribbon round his neck. He thrust it back inside bis shirt and as though waking from a dream realized the gulls were still mewing in the Kathleen's wake; the guns were still rumbling ahead; a weak sun was doing its best to shine through the haze; and several of the ship's company were still laughing and joking. And Southwick was standing in front of him, pointing, a puzzled look on his face.

The Captain had begun turning to larboard out of the line and away from the enemy. There was not one signal flag flying. It was as if she was out of control - except her sails were being trimmed. And she kept turning.

'She's leaving the line and wearing round!' Southwick exclaimed incredulously. Ramage realized at once the Commodore's intention. But the Captain was a mile farther away than the Kathleen: a mile she'd take twenty minutes to cover. And unless Cordoba's leading ships could be delayed for twenty minutes, she'd arrive too late.

The fantasy which had become an idea now became a necessity if the Commodore was to succeed, and Ramage felt fear. Swiftly he sketched on the pad, did some calculations in his head, and then turned to Southwick. He could not look the old man in the eye as he said in a strangled voice barely recognizable as his own: 'Mr. Southwick, I'll trouble you to tack the ship and steer to intercept the San Nicolas.'

Turning away quickly, not wanting to see Southwick's face, he looked back at the Captain. After wearing round, she'd come back through the line astern of the Diadem and ahead of the Excellent. Then (alone and, he guessed, not only without orders but in defiance of them) the Commodore would steer for the leading - nearest, anyway - Spaniards.

Southwick had given the necessary orders to put the Kathleen about on the other tack before fully realizing the significance of what Ramage was planning to do. Once he did understand he felt humbled that someone young enough to be his son could make such a decision with no apparent fear or doubt. He was pacing up and down with the same relaxed, almost cat-like walk as if he was on watch, and occasionally he rubbed that scar.

Without thinking, Southwick spontaneously strode up to Ramage, looked at him directly with his bloodshot eyes, and said softly with a mixture of pride, affection and admiration: 'If you could have lived long enough, you'd have been as great an admiral as your father.'

With that he turned and began bellowing orders which steadied the Kathleen on her new course with Cordoba's leading ships approaching broad on her larboard bow, the British line stretching away on her larboard quarter, and the Captain just passing clear of the Excellent’s bow and breaking away from the line.

There was nothing more to do for a few minutes and Ramage leaned back against the taffrail looking for the hundredth time at Cordoba's ships. Only then did he picture the physical results of his decision, and as he did so the real fear came.

It came slowly, like autumn mist rising almost imperceptibly in a valley; it went through his body like fine rain soaking into a cotton shirt. And Ramage felt he had two selves. One was a physical body whose strength had suddenly vanished, whose hands trembled, whose knees had no muscles, whose stomach was a sponge slopping with cold water, whose vision sharpened to make colours brighter, outlines harder, details which normally passed unnoticed show up almost stark. The other self was remote, aloof from his body, aghast at what was to be done, appalled that he had planned it, yet knowing full well he had ordered it and coldly determined to see to its execution.

And then he remembered watching the Commodore and realizing the little man often had the same look in his eye that Southwick had when he was in a killing mood. And he remembered wondering then whether he could himself kill a man in cold blood. Well, the wondering was over. Now he knew he could kill sixty men in cold blood, sixty of his own men, not the enemy, and the realization made him want to vomit.

He found himself looking at a coil of rope: fear made him see it with such clarity that he might never have seen rope before in his life. Every inch or so was flecked with a coloured yarn - 'The Rogue's Yarn', a strand put in when the rope was made up in the Royal dockyards, so if it was stolen it would always be recognizable as Navy Board property. Had he - and Southwick, and Commodore Nelson, and perhaps half the commission and warrant officers in the Fleet - a Rogue's Yarn woven into their souls that set them apart from other people, that let them kill their own men and the enemy without compunction?

Yet when he looked again at the Spanish ships and knew he had less than half an hour to live, the fear ebbed away as silently as it had come. Slowly he realized fear came only when death was a matter of chance, a possibility (or even probability) yet beyond a man's certain, knowledge or control. But now, because he knew for certain he'd be killed as a result of his own deliberate decision - thus removing the element of chance - he accepted its inevitability and unexpectedly found an inner peace and, more important, an outward calm.

Or was it really just cold-bloodedness? Perhaps - it was hard to distinguish.

Jackson had saved his life - and despite his loyalty and bravery, Jackson must die. Southwick, who cheerfully obeyed every order from someone a third of his age (and a tenth of his experience, for that matter) had been told a few moments ago that he was in fact sentenced to death – and merely expressed genuine regret that Lieutenant Ramage would not live out the day because otherwise he'd have become as great an admiral as his father. Poor father – John Uglow Ramage, tenth Earl of Blazey, Admiral of the White, would also be the last earl: his only son was also his only male heir, so one of the oldest earldoms in the kingdom would become extinct. Poor mother, for that matter. He closed his eyes for a moment and pictured Gianna but opened them almost at once: if anyone could make him change his mind...

Then there was Stafford, the Cockney locksmith who'd prefer to watch the guillotine blade drop, should he ever be strapped down on 'The Widow', instead of being blindfolded. Bridewell Lane wouldn't see him again. Then the rest of those with him at Cartagena - Fuller of the fishing line; the young Genovesi, Rossi; the cheery coloured seaman Maxton; and Sven Jensen ... And the Kathleen herself; she lived, had a will of her own, had peculiar little quirks her captain had to understand and pander to, who responded with all her wooden soul when sailed properly, but became dead in the water the moment anyone ignored for a moment the precise set of her sails or used her helm with a hard hand. Matchwood - he was consigning her to matchwood, shattered flotsam to be cast up piece by piece at the whim of wind and current for month after month and probably year after year along the Portuguese, Spanish and African coasts. Men speaking many languages would seize those pieces of her timbers and carry them home to burn on their fires or patch their homes and never know whence they came.

He found his eyes fixed on a few square inches of deck planking at his feet: he saw each hard ridge of grain standing proud above the tiny valleys where the softer wood between had been scrubbed away over the years by countless seamen. He saw the grain, the knots, the very texture of the wood with a new clarity, as though for all his life without realizing it he'd been looking through a steamed-up glass window which had been suddenly and unexpectedly wiped clear. He saw the wrinkling of his soft black leather boots marked as white lines where salt had dried in the creases. He felt the downdraught of the mainsail and glanced up to realize he'd never before really seen the texture of the sail. Nor, as he looked over the larboard bow, the gentle pyramiding of the sea. Nor the deadliness of a group of five or six enemy sail of the line, one of them the largest ship in the world, the biggest thing the hand of man had ever created to float on the sea, and intended only to kill.

The sight brought him back to the immediate present and the limited future. The Kathleen was close enough now for the hulls of Cordoba's leading ships to be outlined above the line of the horizon, and for a moment their size and slow progress took Ramage back to a childhood episode: crouching muddy, nervous and excited in the rushes at the side of a lake, his eyes only a few inches above the water, watching swans returning to their nests near by with their cygnets: rounded, majestic, splendid in their graceful movements, yet each with hard, wicked and spiteful eyes, ready to savage anything in their path - particularly a small boy lurking in the rushes.

The San Nicolas was still leading, forming the sharp end of the wedge with the Salvador del Mundo on her larboard quarter and, beyond, the San Josef. On the nearest side of the wedge the Santisima Trinidad was on the San Nicolas's starboard quarter, with the San Isidro astern of her. The San Nicolas was the key, and he was thankful, although she was an 84-gun ship, she was next but smallest of the five.

He felt inside his shirt for Gianna's signet ring, ripped it from the ribbon on which it hung, and slipped it on to the little finger of his left hand. It fitted perfectly since it was a man's ring and Gianna normally wore it on her middle finger. Curious, he thought, that a family heirloom of the Volterras, handed down from generation to generation, should leave its Tuscan home to spend the rest of Eternity with him at the bottom of the ocean eleven leagues southwest of Cape St. Vincent. She was and would be with him in spirit: thank God not in the flesh.

Gloomy, morbid thoughts but excusable. He almost laughed at the thought that he was really solemnly apologizing to himself. When Southwick had walked away from Ramage he'd wished he'd shaken him by the hand. He couldn't because the ship's company would have seen and guessed it was a farewell. It wouldn't have made them do their jobs unwillingly, but his years at sea had taught Southwick that men fought like demons when there was a chance of survival, but a condemned man rarely if ever tried to fight his way off the scaffold. A man tended to bow to the inevitable - which, he chuckled to himself, was inevitable.

The Master, giving his orders through force of habit, had time to reflect that secretly he'd always dreaded the time when he'd be too old to go to sea. He hated houses, hated gardens, hated even more the thought he'd end his days anchored to one particular house and one particular garden, and would only leave it when he was carried off in a plain deal box (he'd specified that in his will: the usual expensive coffin with bronze fittings was a sinful waste of good wood, metal and money).

After taking up some bearings on the San Nicolas he'd deliberately stayed near the mast. Mr. Ramage was leaning back against the taffrail with that look in his eyes that told Southwick he was taking a last look far beyond the horizon into a world of his own. Probably thinking of the Marchesa. Aye, they'd have made a handsome couple, he thought sadly. Now it'd be left to some young fop to lead her to the altar.

That lad - Southwick found it easy to obey his orders yet think of him as a lad - had been born with all the advantages possible: son of an admiral, heir to an earldom, clever (except in mathematics, which he freely admitted), humorous and with this extraordinary and quite indefinable ability to lead men. With only a few years at sea, barely past his twenty-first birthday (if in fact he'd yet reached it) he'd inherited his father's enemies in the Service and so far had beaten them.

So far - and this was as far as the lad would go. Now he was going to sacrifice his life (to the King's enemies, anyway) in a manoeuvre which would probably fail - through no fault of his - and almost certainly not be appreciated, except by his father and the Commodore. Courage, Southwick thought as he bellowed through his black japanned speaking trumpet at a skylarking sailor, was an inadequate word to describe what's needed to sentence yourself to death.

Jackson fingered the two pistols Mr. Ramage had given him and wondered whether to continue holding them or just put them down somewhere. They wouldn't be needed now - and he'd known that long before Mr. Ramage had yanked them out of the band of his breeches and started drawing on a pad of paper.

The American had begun to guess how it would all end when Mr. Ramage interrupted old Southwick's meal, and knew for certain a moment later when the quartermaster was told to edge up to windward. Jackson was surprised how long it took old Southwick to hoist in that Mr. Ramage intended to do. Jackson supposed it was because Southwick was old; too set in his ways - which was why he was still Master of a ship as small as the Kathleen - to anticipate someone might do the unexpected. And Jackson realized he'd learned that lesson from Mr. Ramage. 'Surprise, Jackson - that's how you win battles,' he'd once said. 'If you can't surprise the enemy by stealth, you can always surprise him in front of his very eyes simply by doing something completely unexpected!'

Well, old 'Blaze-away's' son practised what he preached, though this'd be the last time. Jackson felt no regrets as he looked at Cordoba's ships with the knowledge they would probably kill him and the rest of the Kathleens within the hour. He'd felt no regrets the day he left Charleston as a boy in a schooner trading to the West Indies; no regrets as the coast of South Carolina had finally dipped astern below the horizon. That was nearly twenty-five years ago, and he could still picture it. No regrets either, when he'd been pressed into the Royal Navy, despite his American citizenship. And he knew that given the chance of going back now and steering a different course so that he wouldn't risk dying this Valentine's Day, he wouldn't change anything.

Ramage's feet now ached so much they throbbed and his boots seemed a size too small. The night of fog left him tired, his eyes strained and burning as though the eyelids were dusted with fine sand. At sea the emergencies nearly always came when you were physically at the end of the rope, rarely when you were fresh. He was so tired everything around him had an air of unreality. He felt he was using the Kathleen as a hideous mask to frighten the Spanish. Or - and the thought almost made his giggle - like a frightened little man using stilts to make himself ten feet tall. He thought how in a thick mist the boulders on the Cornish moors looked grotesque and huge, yet in sunshine seemed rounded and small. Mist... grotesque and huge... The words seemed to echo as he repeated them. Mist, fog - smoke! Even the sail of the line looked grotesque (and still did) with banks of smoke from the guns drifting over them -particularly the Culloden when the wind blew the smoke of her own guns back on board until the draught down the hatchways made it stream out of the ports again. But the Kathleen's guns couldn't make enough smoke.

Then he remembered himself as a young midshipman, one of a group secretly burning wet gunpowder to smoke out the rats and cockroaches in their berth. (It had resulted in them all being mastheaded because they'd forgotten the smell of the smoke would drift, and a Marine sentry had promptly raised the alarm of fire.) The idea grew in his mind. But how to make a screen of smoke large enough to hide the Kathleen, using only wet powder? Perhaps the braziers used to dry and air below deck? Light them, toss in some chunks of pitch and then wet powder? It might work with the braziers up on the weather side so the wind blew the smoke across the ship. Anyway it'd probably puzzle the Spaniards long enough to make them hold their fire for a few minutes - and that alone made it worth trying.

And need all the men die? There might be a chance for some of them. Piles of lashed-up hammocks on deck - they'd float and support men. So would all the spare wood the carpenter's mate had stowed below. The lashings of the spare gaff stowed alongside the mast must be cut so it would float clear. He called Southwick and Edwards, the gunner's mate, and gave them their instructions.

Then, as the details of his plan gradually took shape, he realized he wanted a dozen men who were nimble, good with cutlasses, and who'd fight until they were cut or shot down. Who should he choose? Out of the whole ship's company it was only a question of eliminating the less nimble since everyone met the other requirements. Well, it boiled down to choosing a dozen men to die with him, so first he decided on Jackson and the five who'd been with him at Cartagena.

He told Jackson to hail the five with the speaking trumpet, and picked another half dozen from those at the guns. As soon as they were all grouped round him he gave them their orders.

'It'll be out of the frying pan into the fire,' he concluded as he dismissed them, but he noticed they walked with jaunty strides, obviously delighted at having been chosen. The poor fools, he thought. Yet perhaps they weren't - he was honest enough to admit he was glad he was going to lead them because he'd no wish to stay in the frying pan.

'Do we stand a chance, sir?' Jackson asked quietly.

'Of telling our grandchildren about it? No, none. Of doing the job - yes. At least an even chance.'

Jackson nodded. 'I'm glad she isn't, for her own sake, but the Marchesa'd like to be with us, sir, and Count Pitti.'

'Yes,' Ramage said shortly,, instinctively feeling the signet ring with his thumb. He had to say it to someone, if only to - well, he felt an aching guilt towards his Kathleens.

'Jackson, if there was any other way' - he glanced back at the British line, but except for the Captain steering towards them, it was sailing on, drawing away, although a couple more of the leading ships had tacked - 'I'd try it but there isn't...'

'We know, sir, but none of the lads'd change places with anyone walking down St. James's.'

Ramage looked at his watch. They'd tacked only a few minutes ago. It seemed an hour. His mind was racing and the men were working fast: already the braziers were being hoisted up on deck, and there was a stack of hammocks round the forehatch with others being arranged in piles along the centreline.

The secret papers: he'd forgotten to get a lead-lined box made. He'd use a canvas bag and a roundshot. Jackson would have to put the signal book in at the last moment and then throw the bag over the side. Down in his cabin once again he glanced round as he put the papers in the bag. Few cabins in a ship of war could have such memories for a captain. He shut the top drawer and opened the second. Gianna's silk scarf was lying there where he'd put it when he came back on board, neatly folded. He picked it up, intending to tie it round his waist, then decided neither smartness nor the custom of the service was important now and knotted it round his neck, tucking the ends under his stock. If he'd brought her any happiness, then now he was going to bring her an equal amount of grief.

Then he was back on deck, looking at the San Nicolas. As she and the rest of the leading ships drew nearer he saw they were farther apart than he first thought.

'The right ship's leading 'em, sir,' commented Jackson as Ramage drew yet another plan showing the position of the ships, this time to help him calculate the best angle of approach.

'Right ship?'

'Haven't you noticed, sir? She's named after the same saint as you!'

The San Nicolas - no, he hadn't realized it and said with a grin, 'Since she's leading this undignified rush for Cadiz, Jackson, I'll trouble you not to mention it!'

Jackson laughed. 'Well, sir, let's hope he decides to look after you and not the Dons!'

The San Nicolas, Ramage reflected: an 84-gun ship of about two thousand tons compared with the Kathleen's 160 tons. Why, the Spanish ship's masts and yards alone would weigh as much as the whole of the Kathleen, while the nose on the figure head of St. Nicolas must be about thirty feet above the waterline. The jibboom end would be all of sixty-five feet high - and that was the height of the Kathleen's mast ... Oh, the devil take it, he told himself angrily, guessing dimensions won't make the San Nicolas an inch smaller or the Kathleen an inch larger.

'Any signals to the Captain from the Victory, Jackson?'

'Can't see the Victory for smoke, sir; but nothing hoisted in the Captain: no acknowledgments: just her colours.'

Southwick said, 'Captain Collingwood won't leave the Commodore unsupported for long, orders or no orders. We'll soon see the Excellent following the Captain.'

'I hope so.'

'Did you expect the Captain to quit the line, sir?'

'Yes. At least, I hoped she would!'

'But the Commodore left it a bit late,' ventured Southwick.

Ramage shrugged his shoulders with feigned indifference.

'Late for us; but he's probably just got time to head them off - particularly if we can cause a delay. He won't have time to get in among the leaders, though.'

'He'll go for the Santisima Trinidad?'

Ramage nodded. He knew instinctively that if there was any choice that the Commodore would tackle the largest ship in the world, and by chance she was to leeward of the rest and so nearest to the Captain.

Then Ramage looked at the Spanish ships, at the Captain, at the British line and at the sketches on his pad, and suddenly he knew his plan was not only futile but absurd. Despite what he'd just said to Southwick he knew that even if the Kathleen did manage to delay the Spanish van for fifteen or twenty minutes, the chances of the Captain catching up were slender. But, more important, even if she did she wouldn't be able to head off all those ships: each one of them had a heavier broadside: all of them would rake her time and again before her own broadsides would bear. And he knew that even now he could wear round the Kathleen on some pretext or other and return to her proper position, astern of the Excellent. But he was still looking at his sketch of the Kathleen superimposed on the San Nicolas when he realized that, despite what the pencil lines told him, he had to go on because if he turned back now, for the rest of his life he'd never be sure whether it was logic or fear that made him give up.

Once he'd decided to go on he was angry with himself for the alternate bouts of fear and calm, confidence and uncertainty. And then he also realized that although the Commodore might have had similar doubts (though hardly similar fears) he'd nevertheless quit the line and was going to try, and that was all that mattered. If the Kathleen could give him an extra fifteen or twenty minutes, they might make all the difference between complete failure and a partial success ...

And he must put a term to idle thoughts and daydreams: the San Nicolas was coming up fast, and there was no room for mistakes. Edwards had the braziers ready, lashings holding the four legs of each one against the ship's roll, and they were half full of old shavings and scraps of wood and chunks of pitch, a few screws of paper tucked in the bottom ready for lighting.

Ramage's dozen men were arming themselves with a variety of weapons. Jackson had a cutlass in his hand and a butcher's cleaver - presumably borrowed or stolen from the cook's mate - swinging at his belt from a line through the hole in the wooden handle. Stafford had cut down the haft of a boarding pike so that he had in effect a three-sided dagger blade on a three-foot handle, and he was practising swinging a cutlass with his right hand and lunging the pike with the left. He'd arrived at the old main-gauche, Ramage realized, without ever having seen the shadier side of knightly combat. Maxton, the coloured seaman, had a cutlass in each hand and was slashing at an imaginary enemy with such fast inward swings that Southwick commented to Ramage, 'He could cut a man into four slices before anyone saw him move.'

'He was born with a machete in his hand,' Ramage replied, remembering Maxton's comment at Cartagena. 'He learned to swing a blade cutting down sugar cane.'

Still the San Nicolas ploughed on. The nearer she came the less graceful she appeared: the cutwater could not soften the bulging bow, the bow wave was no longer a feather of white but a mass of water being shoved out of the way by the brute force of a ponderous hull. Her sails were no longer shapely curves but overstretched, overpatched and badly-setting. The beautiful lady in the distance was proving on closer inspection to be a raddled woman of the streets.

But there was no mistaking that raddled or not the San Nicolas had teeth: the muzzles of her guns were dozens of stubby black fingertips poking out of the ports. In a few minutes he'd be able to see details of the gilt work on her bow and figure head. She was about a mile off.

Stafford was teasing Fuller again. 'Wotcher want wiv that pike?' he demanded. 'Use a rod and a big fish 'ook, mate; yer won't need bait. Just cast yer 'ook so it 'itches in their breeches!'

Fuller grunted an oath and continued chopping the pike haft to shorten it.

'Fishes could teach you a thing or two.'

'Ho yus! Reely brainy, fish. So brainy they bite your 'ooks. Takes brains, that do.'

‘There's more brain in a cod's head than your whole body, y'clacking picklock!'

'Belay that,' Southwick interrupted. 'Keep it for the Dons.'

He then walked over to Ramage with his sword. 'Perhaps you'd care to use this, sir. It's served me well.'

It was enormous. Ramage could visualize a bearded Viking waving it with two hands as he leapt on shore from a longboat. But as he drew it from the scabbard he realized it was beautifully balanced.

'I'd appreciate it, Mr. Southwick,' he said, 'and I hope I'll put it to good use.'

The Master beamed and slipped the shoulder belt over Ramage's head.

As the San Nicolas came on, Ramage noted thankfully the rest of the leading group were instinctively closing in astern of her. And in behaving like driven cattle crowding together behind their leader to pass through a gate, they were increasing his chances of creating confusion.

'A cast of the log if you please, Mr. Southwick. Jackson, pass me my pistols. Quartermaster, what are you heading?'

Ramage wanted to know the Kathleen's exact course and speed, and after looking at the Captain he glanced at his sketch. Southwick stood beside him, studied the pencil lines and shook his head.

'The Commodore won't make it'

Ramage shrugged his shoulders again and pointed towards the British line. The Excellent had already quit the line and was following the Captain.

'Perhaps not. But we don't seem to be keeping a very sharp lookout, Mr. Southwick. I trust we haven't missed any signals?'

'Bit difficult to know where to watch,' Southwick said sourly. 'So dam' much going on!'

'You merely have to watch; I've got to think and plan as well!' flared Ramage.

'Sorry, sir.'

'So am I,' Ramage said hurriedly. 'We're all a bit jumpy. Well, I'd better say a few words to the ship's company: time's getting short. Muster 'em aft, Mr. Southwick.'