Ramage and the Freebooters

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Both the coachman and the soldier in the blue and gold uniform of the Grenada Volunteers sitting in front with a musket, eventually protested as Ramage cursed and swore as he goaded them to go faster. The road up to Government House was steep; but Ramage had almost lost control of himself in a turbulent mixture of rage mingled with disbelief at what now seemed all to obvious.

Finally, with the horses' flanks running with sweat and their mouths flecked with white, the carriage swung up the driveway to Government House and even before the footmen had time to open the door and unfold the ladder Ramage had jumped down and was running up the wide stone steps.

The two soldiers on guard at the big doors hesitated, unsure whether to challenge or salute the naval officer running towards them,, one hand clutching his sword scabbard and the other his hat, and finally saluted.

Catching sight of the butler as he entered the house, Ramage called to him to find the Governor urgently, and when the man walked ponderously towards him with a pompous request to state his business, he received an angry retort from Ramage that he didn't discuss the King's business with butlers and to take him to the Governor at once.

But the clatter of galloping hooves, carriage wheels and pounding feet had brought Sir Jason into the hall, and hearing the last of the exchange he called to Ramage and together they went back into the study.

'My apologies, your Excellency, but there's some urgency in all this!'

'Oh indeed?' Sir Jason said coldly. 'I must admit I'm not used to people bursting into Government House, especially without an appointment.'

Nettled, Ramage snapped rudely: 'Fedon was not so punctilious.'

'Don't be insolent, Ramage: I shall report this to the Admiral.'

Ramage was far too angry—with himself more than the Governor—to care what was reported, although he admitted Sir Jason was justified in being surprised at his hurried arrival. But (had he not been a colonial governor) that alone should have warned him of an emergency.

'What you report, and to whom, is your affair, your Excellency. I have come to warn you that you're probably employing someone who's also a spy, and the schooner that sailed last night is likely to be in the hands of the privateers within the next few hours.'

'But—but this is preposterous! Do something, man! You must stop it being captured! Why, I shall------'

'If I could fly through the upper regions with the speed of a bird, I could possibly save her. Since I can't, she'll be captured... sir.'

'And what's this outrageous nonsense about me employing a spy? That's tantamount to accusing me of being a traitor and-----'

'I said "You are probably employing someone who is also a spy", your Excellency: I don't suggest you know this person's a spy.'

'Well, thank you for that qualification,' Sir Jason growled. 'What am I supposed to do about it?"

'Nothing, unless you wish,' Ramage said quickly, seizing his opportunity. 'I'd prefer to deal with it myself—with your permission, of course.'

The, Governor had clearly lost control of the situation and was only too willing to agree, though still anxiously clinging to the outward trapping of authority. 'Very well, you have my permission; but I hold you responsible.'

Ramage couldn't be bothered to ask for what he was being held responsible. Instead he said: 'Where is Miss de Giraud?'

'In her room—she has a migraine, though I can't see what she has to do with all this.'

'Very well: I wish to be taken to her room at once. I have to talk to her alone, though if your Excellency wishes to accompany me and make sure this meets with her ap proval...?'

'Dammit!' expostulated Sir Jason, 'this is most irregular! Prying into the private quarters of my staff? I simply------'

'The consequences of your refusing, sir, are much graver than you can possibly guess.'

Ramage had tried to sound pontifical and was pleased with the result 'Oh very well, come along then. I don't approve, though. I'm acting under protest—remember that, Ramage.'

'I'll remember, sir,' Ramage said, taking little care to keep the ambiguity out of his voice.

She was sitting in a wicker armchair when they entered the room and wearing a severely-cut lime-green dress, her face pale. Ramage watched her closely as she looked up at Sir Jason, who stammered out an embarrassed, vague explanation for their visit. She was holding what looked like a religious book and her hand was trembling. Her eyes were slightly red, as though very recently she had been crying, and Ramage wondered the reason.

'Of course I have no objection to his Lordship asking me questions, Sir Jason,' she said easily. 'I'm flattered that he's interested in any answers I could give. So far he has only asked me to dance with him.'

Her smile was genuine but Ramage suspected it took more effort than it should and Sir Jason, who had obviously expected to find her indignant, stood nonplussed.

'Perhaps you could spare me ten minutes in your study later, Sir Jason?' Ramage asked.

'Oh yes, by all means. Oh indeed, any time.'

He backed out of the room and shut the door. Ramage walked over to the window and looked out. A tiny humming-bird hovered almost motionless before the bell-shaped blossom of a golden alamanda, the sun catching its dark green plumage.

Ramage could hear Sir Jason's footsteps receding down the corridor, and he waited two or three minutes, still watching the humming-bird and irrelevantly noting he'd never really appreciated the beauty of the blossom.

Slowly he turned and faced her, deliberately keeping his back to the light so that his face was in shadow.

'You came in a hurry, Nicholas. I heard you swearing from half-way up the hill. You shouldn't make horses gallop in this heat—it's cruel. Is there some sudden emergency?'

'No,' Ramage said casually. 'But it's sometimes useful to let people think you usually ride slowly. Then they're more likely to be surprised when you suddenly gallop.'

She smiled and shook her head. 'I'm afraid the significance of that profound remark is beyond the comprehension of a mere woman!'

Ramage smiled back reassuringly, hating his necessary hypocrisy.

'The Governor says you have a migraine. Isn't a darkened room she treatment for that?'

'Yes, but don't tell the Governor; otherwise he won't believe my excuse for not working today. The truth is I found last night's ball rather exhausting. Obviously you didn't 1'

Although there was a wealth of meaning in the last two sentences there was neither coyness nor modesty; just a plain statement. For a moment Ramage was uncertain if she was genuinely and naturally resuming their strange and briefly passionate relationship where it had left off only a few hours earlier. But the hand holding the book was still trembling—why didn't she have the sense to put it in her lap?—and her upper lip and brow were now covered with fine beads of perspiration, yet the room was cool.

'Exhausting? No, not at all. Enlightening, though.'

She glanced up suddenly, looking him straight in the eye. Although there was no embarrassment, Ramage thought he detected fear. Yet he wasn't sure because she was unlike any woman he'd ever met. To her, he suspected, the normal usages of polite conversation, the white lies and gentle hypocrisies of society, were foreign or abhorrent. Or maybe she was just brazen; a consummate actress. It was one or the other; there was no middle path.

She said quietly, 'Nicholas, say what you have to say, because remarks like that are wounding, and you're watching me like a tiger.'

For a moment her eyes seemed to—he turned back to the window, deeply puzzled. 'Wounding,' she'd said. He gripped the sill and stared at the blossom without seeing it. The anger and bitterness which had exploded inside him like a volcano in Colonel Wilson's office had suddenly gone. On the one hand he was thankful because now he was thinking more dearly; but on the other hand he realized it was making his task harder.

Although certain his suspicions were well-grounded, he now wondered if it was as straightforward as he'd thought. He sensed some powerful, complicated reason behind it all; something as weird as voodoo and equally inexplicable.

Or was that what he hoped? Was that what he wanted to be told because he'd fallen in love with her? He brushed the idea away impatiently: of course he had! Of course that's what he'd hoped to hear! That's why he'd been so angry. Why, he thought bitterly, he'd behaved like a cuckolded husband confronting the unfaithful wife. And he wasn't even married.

He glared at his knuckles, which were white from his grip on the window sill. Admitting it all to himself seemed to make it easier: at least he now admitted he'd fallen in love with her, and warned himself of the danger that private emotions would interfere—were interfering, up to this moment—with his duties.

And still were: mere was no point in glossing over it What did he do now? How was he going to get from her the secret of the drums? Bully her, reduce her to tears, frighten her into revealing everything she knew and had done? Or did he try—well almost seduce her, using her feeling for him (if she had any: he was sure she had—but she might be a superb actress) to get the information he wanted?

He turned to find her weeping silently, sobs baking her whole body. He took a step to hold her, then drew back. Trying to push his emotions to one side he told himself coldly that first he needed to know if she was genuine or just acting a part. And he needed to know for two reasons— because he was in Grenada on the King's business, and because—well, because he'd fallen in love with her.

But where to begin? Are you a spy? Do you love me? If a spy, why? If you love me—damnation! Ridiculous questions—yet he had to know the answers.

She looked up at him and whispered: 'Ask the questions!'

He found he could say nothing, and after a few moments she said: 'You're afraid to hear the answers.'

He nodded dumbly.

Still speaking quietly but with what Ramage was startled to realize was bitterness and contempt for herself in her voice, she pleaded: 'Oh for the love of God ask 1 If only I'd had the strength this morning I would never have heard them!'

'What do you mean, "strength"?'

She shook her head despairingly.

'I've spent the morning trying to find the courage to end my life—and I couldn't. Now you know why I must hear the questions: that they come from your lips is probably part of my punishment.'

Although almost numbed by her words, Ramage knew she'd already told him all but the details: she was the spy, she was not a consummate actress—and perhaps she did love him.

He knelt beside her, took one of her hands in his and, cursing the banality of the phrase, said: 'Tell me what happened.'

'No! Just ask questions!'

Her vehemence startled him, but she avoided his eyes.

'How can I? I don't know where to begin.'

'Oh please don't make me sound as if I was confessing everything to a priest. Just ask questions—then perhaps you'll begin to understand.' But she shook her head as she added. 'No, you can never do that.'

By now Ramage knew that question-and-answer was the only way and he remained kneeling. It'd be easier for her to answer if he wasn't towering over her, and he had no doubt now that everything she would say would be the truth.

'Claire, if I must ask questions, the first one is obvious: did you hear me tell the Governor last night that the schooner could sail at ten o'clock?'

'Yes,' she whispered. 'I heard.'

'It was about eight o'clock, wasn't it?'

'I don't know—I suppose it must have been.'

'While I was talking with Sir Jason and Colonel Wilson, you left the balcony...'

'Yes.'

'And you went away to pass on that information to someone?' 'Yes,' she whispered.

'And then the tom-tom signalled it to the north?'

'Yes.'

'What did the tom-tom say—just that the schooner would sail that night?'

'Yes—that it would sail about two hours later.'

'To whom did you pass the information?'

Suddenly he felt her body go rigid: the hand he was holding tensed. The room seemed cold, as though an invisible fog had swirled in through the window. It wasn't the question: it was something else. He felt his senses sharpening: colours were brighter, he heard noises more sharply.

Someone had come into the room: someone of whom she was terrified. Someone who would kill them bom to keep the secret.

Ramage's mind started racing and to gain the vital few moments he needed he said, with studied casualness, trying hard to keep his voice at the same pitch:

'Leave that for a moment—a more important question is do you think the schooner has already been captured?'

'Yes.'

Her voice was almost a sob: the tips of her fingers moved slightly in his hand as if trying to warn him of the other person's presence.

Ramage moved slightly as if his right leg was cramped from kneeling, and apparently absent-mindedly rubbed the shin muscle—at the same time managing to flick up the strap over the top of the throwing-knife nestling in its sheath inside the boot.

He tried to sense exactly where the person was standing as he asked: 'Will the next schooner be captured if I let it sail?'

'I expect so.' Then, as he gently squeezed her fingers to show he'd understood her signal, she added. 'I'm certain.'

'So there's nothing we can do to save me first one? Think carefully before you answer.'

There was the edge of a shadow to his left: me shadow of the top of the man's head. Ramage's back was square to the door and the sun was shining in from the window to his left, so the man must be standing almost directly behind him. And there was a draught blowing through the room. The man had come through me door—that accounted for the sudden chill a minute or two ago; and it meant whoever it was probably had a right to be in Government House.

'Nothing,' she said. 'It has already------'

Ramage was on his feet like a spring uncoiling, throwing knife in his hand, and facing the man. Sir Jason's butler was holding a pistol in his hand, aiming it at Ramage's stomach.

Surprise—create surprise! The words hammered in Ramage's brain. But how? Then without consciously thinking, he said, as if in a casual reproof:

'I didn't hear you knock.'

For a moment the butler was startled. Obviously he'd been expecting either an attack or angry shouts; but his natural politeness made him begin to reply automatically with an apologetic:

'Well, sir------'

'Close the door!'

The hand holding the pistol moved indecisively—and the muzzle swung a few degrees.

At the same instant Ramage's right hand jerked up and forward, there was a flash of metal and the man spun round with a stifled grunt of pain.

The pistol dropped to the ground and, even as the man's left hand clutched the black-hilted knife sticking in his right shoulder, Ramage leapt, knocking him flat on his back and jumping down astride his chest.

In the same movement he'd wrenched the knife from the man's shoulder and now held the point in one hand, the hilt in the other. As he called to Claire to pick up the pistol he pushed the blade down horizontally across the man's throat.

'Don't move!' he snarled. 'Before you the you can answer some questions!'

'But I'm bleeding to death!' the man croaked. 'My shoulder—for pity's sake, sir—oh for pity's sake------'

'I don't give a damn whether you live or the.' Ramage hissed. 'I know all I need to know, but you can fill in some details.'

Suddenly the man gave a convulsive heave up with his stomach in an attempt to pitch Ramage forward over his head. The jerk was so unexpected that Ramage, almost losing his balance, had to press down to avoid being flung on his face, his whole weight coming on to his hands.

A hissing and gurgling as he regained his balance astride the man made him look down. The knife had cut the man's throat; even as he watched a bright red river of blood pumped in an ever-widening pool across the polished wooden blocks of the floor.

Ramage felt no regret; instead, as the pumping and the stertorous breathing stopped, he simply thought bitterly to himself that he didn't know all he needed to know; that many details had to be filled in.

He stood up and turned to Claire. Still clutching the pistol, she had fainted.