Ramage and the Guillotine

CHAPTER THREE

As he waited in the ante-room to the First Lord's office the next morning, Ramage reflected that although a woman's tongue was reputed to be her only weapon, it was often most effective when she did not use it. When he had rejoined Gianna on the ballroom floor last night and finally got rid of that damned post captain - who seemed hypnotized by her - she had turned to him, her face expressionless and her eyes cold.

‘Well,' she had said, ‘I trust Lord St Vincent and Lord Nelson have accepted your advice.'

He had shaken his head helplessly, scared that if she had even a hint of what was happening she would sail over to Lord St Vincent like a frigate hard on the wind and make a scene. He had taken the cowardly way out, merely telling her that he had to be at the Admiralty early next morning. She had then lapsed into silence: a noisy, echoing and hurt silence that left him punishing himself more harshly than she could have done with her tongue.

They had danced twice more, but they were stiff and distant. She had made excuses to four other men who had requested dances and whose names were noted on her card, and then asked to be taken home. Ramage was thankful his father and mother had been too preoccupied with their own circle of friends at the ball to come over to them for a chat: he was sure Gianna would have involved his father - who must have seen him going off to the library with the two admirals - in the iniquity of officers having their leave cut short.

Now, sitting in this cheerless and chilly room, the skin of his face sore from a razor whose edge was quite unresponsive to the strop, he found he was getting frightened.

Last night he had been too preoccupied with Gianna's behaviour to have second thoughts about what he had been told in the Duke's library, and he had climbed into bed so weary that the next thing he knew was Hanson waking him with the news that it was half past five and time to get up.

Hellfire and damnation, this room was cold - and why, like almost every other room in the Admiralty, was it painted in this ghastly dark green and buff? The one tiny window opened on to a nearby wall so the sun never managed to find its way in. He shivered and a moment later wondered whether it was the temperature or the thought that within the week he would be in France acting the part of a spy. Acting! He would be a spy, a man who once caught would be executed after ruthless questioning and, if he did not provide the required answers, would probably be subjected to imaginative torture.

Had Gianna somehow guessed that not only would he be under Lord Nelson's orders and therefore involved in the preparations concerning Bonaparte's invasion plans, but that he would have to go to France? It seemed impossible, yet surely she would have behaved differently if he was simply being given another ship. She would have complained loudly -that was it: the chilly silence was unlike her. It was as though there was a genuine fear for him, not just disappointment that he was going to sea again after such a long absence.

He shrugged his shoulders. She might have connected the arrival of the messenger with the sudden activity involving Lord Nelson as well as the First Lord: and she had read of Lord Nelson's new appointment in the newspapers that morning. That would have led her to think of the invasion threat, and she could have fitted the rest of the puzzle together. She, of all people, knew that three years ago both admirals were involved when he ended up leading the landing party that rescued her from the Tuscan beaches with the French cavalry hunting her down only a few yards away. Lord Nelson knew that he spoke good Italian and French. In other words Gianna had instinctively reached the conclusion that he had only just reached by disjointed thinking: Lord Nelson had suggested him because he was the only naval officer readily available at one minute's notice who had a chance of working successfully behind the enemy's lines.

Spies must be either unimaginative people, or able to shut off their imaginations at will. He wished he had the knack, because his imagination would almost certainly be too nimble to allow him to sleep comfortably when French soldiers roamed the streets outside. He shut his eyes and pictured himself listening to a church clock striking three o'clock in the morning, and hearing the tramp of a French patrol and the orders and oaths shouted in French. It was bad enough in battle; up to now he had been able to fight off fear that made him want to run below when he saw the guns of an enemy ship's broadsides winking their red eyes . . .

The door opened and Lord Nelson beckoned him into the next room.

The First Lord, sitting at the table which was bare except for an inkwell, penholder, sandbox and two single candlesticks, looked up and nodded. 'From today you are under Lord Nelson's orders. I should warn you that secrecy is vital, so don't gossip.' He looked up and smiled, as if to take the edge off his harsh words. 'Don't look so hurt; you'll be the one that Bonaparte guillotines, not me.'

Lord Nelson ran a hand through his wavy and greying hair. 'It is too early in the morning to talk of guillotines, eh Ramage? Come along, the First Lord has given me my orders concerning you, so let us leave him with the rest of his day's business.'

The Admiral led him to a room along the corridor and sat down at a small table, reaching for a leather portfolio. As he fumbled with the straps Ramage reached forward to help, but Nelson shook his head. 'I've been without a second arm so long now that I'm used to it. This is the only thing that bothers me.' He pointed to his sightless eye. 'I think I'd sacrifice the other arm to have the sight back.'

He tipped the contents of the portfolio on to the table, and Ramage saw that much of it comprised pages cut from French newspapers and journals. The Admiral selected several sheets of notepaper, pushing the rest towards Ramage. 'Glance through those,' he said, 'then you'll know as much about Bonaparte's intentions as the regular readers of Le Moniteur.'

The pages, covering nearly a year, contained dozens of newspaper reports of Bonaparte's invasion plans or rather, as much of them as he wanted revealed by allowing them to be published. Some of the reports referred to orders that Bonaparte had given to his admirals and generals - these were in suitably flowery language and gave nothing away. Others showed how the Army of England, as it was hopefully called, had been assembled along the Channel coast over the past few months. But the most remarkable described how France's inventors were helping in the task of transporting the great Army to England.

Here were the original reports from which the British newspapers drew their accounts and people like Gillray drew their cartoons: huge, hot-air balloons which could carry a hundred men in gondolas slung beneath for the 'Descente en Angleterre'; great rafts propelled by sails, oars and huge windmills with their blades somehow geared to paddlewheels mounted on the side of the rafts. The actual invasion barges were described in enough detail for Ramage to guess they were designed by men used to Mediterranean galleys and who over-rated the choppiness of the Channel in anything of a breeze. Little more than great boxes, they must be so heavy that they would need half a gale o' wind to move them under sail. Likewise the gunboats intended to protect the barges seemed more suitable for operation on a large lake than in the Channel, with its treacherous weather and strong currents.

Lord Nelson glanced up as he put down the last page. 'Well, what do you make of it?'

Ramage hesitated: what comment could a mere lieutenant make to the Navy's most successful fighting admiral that would not sound stupid, impertinent, banal - or all three?

'Tell me,' Nelson said sharply, 'if you commanded three hundred of those barges laden with troops and artillery, and two hundred gunboats fully armed, how would you rate your chances of making a successful landing on the Kent or Sussex coast?'

'If I had a brisk easterly wind and a dark night sir,' Ramage said diffidently, 'and the Royal Navy was not around, I'd hope to get fifty, perhaps a hundred, of the barges ashore in England. But they'd probably be scattered along miles of the beaches: it would be impossible to keep them concentrated.'

'Why?' Nelson demanded querulously. 'Doesn't say much for your skill as a commander, does it? Unless you kept the barges together you wouldn't stand a chance: a hundred seasick Frenchmen landing from a single barge in one place, and another hundred getting ashore a mile away - why, even the local Sea Fencible companies could mop them up!'

Ramage flushed but stuck to his opinion. ‘The French won't have enough trained men to command the barges, sir. They would scatter from the moment they left port. Apart from Calais and Boulogne, the other French ports are tiny and dry out at low water, so at least two-thirds of the barges will come from those two ports. Even a hundred barges – not to mention gunboats and sloops - leaving Calais on one tide: why, the confusion would be enormous. They seem to be so cumbersome that with anything but a soldier's wind they can't manoeuvre. So they'd leave the French coast scattered, and I doubt if they could get into any sort of formation in the darkness before they reached England at dawn.'

'Where would you lose the two hundred, then? You said only a hundred would arrive.'

'Collisions, sir. That would bring masts tumbling down like corn before a scythe. And if they are being rowed, it needn't be an actual collision: one barge getting too close to another one means all the oars are ripped away and the rowers injured.'

'Two hundred lost like that?'

'No, sir: perhaps a hundred. Another fifty or so would be lost on sandbanks by navigational mistakes and poor seamanship while leaving the harbours in France - or hitting rocks and reefs on the English coast. The rest would probably sink because the planking opened up - poor construction, gun carriages breaking loose from their lashings, horses stampeding...’

'You're a damnably depressing fellow, Ramage! Are you always as gloomy as this?' The Admiral's expression made it clear he was teasing.

'No, sir, just that the barges and gunboats described here don't seem to have been designed by the French Navy - they have fine ships - and ninety per cent of the men on board will be landlubbers. Why, Bonaparte hardly has enough officers and men for the Fleet. And I was only answering your question, sir; I'm not counting losses caught by the Royal Navy.'

'Very well,' said the Admiral, 'another hypothetical question. You are allowed to pick your weather - and Bonaparte's only orders are that you have to concentrate the barges along a ten mile stretch of the Kent or Sussex coast. But now the Royal Navy is at sea. How many barges will you get ashore?'

'A few dozen, sir, and they'd be even more scattered,' Ramage said promptly.

'I'm glad Bonaparte can't hear you; he'd be dismayed!' The Admiral flattened the sheets of paper he had been holding. 'Now, the point of all this is that I want you to read and remember every scrap of information in the Admiralty's possession about Bonaparte's plans for his invasion, and forget everything you know about our defences. In case you are captured,' he added.

'I have a very poor memory, anyway,' Ramage said apologetically, appalled at the thought of learning facts and figures by rote. 'I mean, for learning and remembering numbers.'

Lord Nelson shook his head and said grimly. 'There's nothing to alarm you here -' he tapped the papers, 'because we know precious little about the barge and gunboat flotillas, apart from what has been published in the Moniteur. What we know from our agents - mostly emigrés, and their information out of date - is written down here. All the items of interest from the Moniteur are there - the ones you've glanced at. Put it all together and it doesn't make a big pile, does it?' he noted ruefully. 'Now, I want to run through what's written here; then you can spend the rest of the day digesting it.'

Quickly he read aloud from the written notes, which were the totals of barges and gunboats reported to have been completed and launched at each of the ports, the numbers actually under construction at the same ports, and the numbers believed to have been ordered but not yet started. Another list gave sites of army camps round Boulogne and Calais and some details of the troops and artillery occupying them, with possible sites for further camps. A third list gave the names of the senior French military and naval officers and their roles in the invasion plan.

As Lord Nelson spoke, occasionally making shrewd comments on the abilities of those French officers he had encountered in the past, Ramage became more and more appalled at the magnitude of the task he was being given, even though he did not yet know the exact details. How on earth was he to land in France and, within a very few days, start worming one of the greatest secrets in France out of generals and admirals? The whole thing was ridiculous, and he began to feel resentful at being singled out. He had been trained to command ships at sea; it was unreasonable to involve him in this hole-in-the-corner spy business.

At that moment he glanced up to see the Admiral looking at him. It was disconcerting because he was more than conscious that the right eye was almost opaque, as though a thick film had grown across it. But the left eye was sharp enough; Ramage had the uncomfortable feeling that the Admiral had just looked into his innermost thoughts.

'Unfair, isn't it,' he commented. 'Damn' fool admirals expect you to land in France and winkle out secrets within a week or so. Was that what you were thinking?' He suddenly smiled, a friendly and understanding smile, and nodded before Ramage could answer. 'I should hope so; anyone with enough imagination to succeed should have decided fifteen minutes ago that the whole thing is impossible. No, don't look so surprised; the fact is - and I'm speaking from a few years of experience - that the task that looks utterly impossible is often the easiest to accomplish. The tallest mountain isn't always the hardest to climb, you know; it's often the smaller ones that have vertical faces.'

Ramage realized he had just been given a revealing insight into the man who had destroyed the French fleet at the Nile, saved the present First Lord from disaster at the Battle of Cape St Vincent and turned it into a narrowly-won victory, and more recently, smashed the Danish fleet at Copenhagen in a battle that hung on a knife-edge for a couple of hours. Tall mountains aren't always the hardest to climb, he repeated to himself. He must remember the phrase: his father would be more than interested since Nelson, as a young post captain, had served under him.

'Very well, Ramage, that's all the information we have from our agents. I want you to have a complete understanding of it for a particular reason: whatever you pick up in France, you must be able to estimate its importance at once: whether we know it, whether we ought to know it and how urgently, and its significance. You'll also know what to ignore. But there's another reason. Frankly, I have my doubts about the accuracy of most of this -' he tapped the written notes, 'because I have no great faith in the reports of agents and emigrés. It'll be useful to be able to check as much of it as we can when you get back. As far as the Moniteur reports are concerned, you must bear in mind that it is the most convenient way that Bonaparte has of providing us with misleading information.'

'Which in itself might provide positive information,' Ramage thought to himself and as Lord Nelson looked up suddenly realized he had said it aloud.

'Exactly, my dear Ramage, two negatives make a positive, and that's something you can bear in mind as you read those Moniteur reports - which I only obtained late last night from the Secretary of State's office. My French isn't good enough to make all that easy reading, but see what you can find out. Make notes. Mention anything you think might interest me. Anything,' he reiterated, 'however unimportant it might seem.'

'Aye aye, sir. But how am I to get to France?'

The Admiral laughed; a short, almost mirthless laugh. That's your problem. You can be put on shore by boat from any one of my cutters; or you can find out how the smugglers travel back and forth. Now for your specific orders. As the First Lord mentioned last night, it is essential to find out how many of each type of vessel the French can put to sea at the next new moon period. Barges, gunboats, fishing craft and so on. I'd like some estimate of how many more can be commissioned by the following new moon. So that is the first part of your task, and the most dangerous. The second part you can do by keeping your eyes open: accurate estimates of the number of troops, guns and horses and amount of provisions the vessels can carry.'

'And the sailing date . . .?' Ramage asked cautiously.

The chances of your discovering that are slight, even if Bonaparte knows it, which I doubt very much. We can be certain of one thing, though: the French won't risk having the troops and horses on board for more than twenty-four hours before sailing. Most of those vessels are anchored in such exposed places that the soldiers will become seasick within fifteen minutes.'

The Admiral stood up. 'You can stay here and go through those papers. Put them in the portfolio when you've finished and return them to the Board Secretary. I'm going down to Dover now, and you can report to me there tomorrow evening. Is there anything you want to mention now that won't wait until then?'

Ramage nodded hurriedly, since he had been wondering how he could raise the point. 'Men, sir. At the moment I don't know how I'll be handling all this, but -'

'But by chance,' Nelson interrupted, 'you happen to know the ships in which some of those scoundrels from your last ship are now serving ...'

Ramage grinned. 'Purely by chance, sir!'

'Very well, I’ll speak to the First Lord, and you can leave a list with the Board Secretary when you give him the portfolio. No more than a dozen, and I don't know what the deuce you need them for.'

He had written the names of the three men he wanted before he realized that only one of them was British. The first man was Thomas Jackson, the American who had served as his coxswain in all the ships he had commanded. 'All' included the Kathleen cutter, which he lost at the Battle of Cape St Vincent, the Triton brig, which he lost after a hurricane in the Caribbean, and more recently the Lady Arabella brig. The second name was the Briton, Will Stafford, a Cockney who had been a locksmith and burglar before being swept up by a press gang. His former trade might come in useful. The third man was an Italian, Alberto Rossi, whose presence in France would not arouse suspicion.

He put the list to one side and began reading through the notes he had made while going through the dozens of pages taken from various issues of Le Moniteur. 'Two negatives make a positive,' Lord Nelson had said, and a pattern was certainly emerging. The Sussex coast was mentioned twenty-three times as a destination for the invasion and Kent only thrice; each time it was a passing reference to the white cliffs of the South Foreland at Dover. Essex was mentioned nineteen times, Ipswich seven and Colchester nine. London was never named, except for one reference to Napoleon holding a victory parade in St James's Park.

Providing it was not all a wild coincidence, there was someone on the staff of Le Moniteur whose job was to make the British believe that the French would land on the Sussex coast -using the vessels at Calais, Boulogne and nearby ports - and in Essex, using those at Ostend and Dunkirk. He was doing his best to make the British think there was no interest in landing on the Kentish beaches, and that London would not be the main objective.

Ramage shrugged his shoulders: Lord Nelson could draw what conclusions he liked, once he had the facts. He arranged the pages in sequence and found himself trying to look at it through the eyes of Admiral Bruix and Marshal Soult, who were in command of the French Invasion forces. Did Bruix know the English coast well? Had Soult ever visited England? Well, they had advisers, that was certain enough.

Forget visits and forget advisers: Lieutenant Nicholas Ramage is now a French admiral whose sole concern is to get at least 100,000 troops on shore and ready to fight. Where would be the best spot to land them?

Romney Marsh: somewhere along the dozen miles of flat coast between Dymchurch and Dungeness!

He reached for bis pen and began writing:

'1 Landing troops from flat-bottomed barges requires (ideally) a smooth, sand or pebble beach. The barges should arrive near high water so they dry out as the tide falls and their cargo can be unloaded on to the beach.

2 The beach should not have off-lying rocks or sandbanks on which barges could strand themselves, but must be reasonably well sheltered from prevailing westerly winds.

3 The countryside inshore of the beaches must be reasonably flat so that large numbers of cavalry and troops can deploy immediately.

4 The beaches must be readily identifiable from seaward because navigation in the barges will vary from poor to non-existent.

5 The stretch of coast from Dungeness to Dymchurch, about eight miles, fulfils all these requirements, and barges would need only to steer for the southernmost piece of land (Dungeness itself).

6 It also provides the shortest practical sea crossing for the Boulogne ships and adds only a small distance for those from Calais.'

He put down the pen and read over what he had written. As far as he was concerned, if the French troops managed to land, they would march first towards London. They would cross Romney Marsh, that strange, secretive part of Kent, absolutely flat for miles, much of it below sea-level and only saved from flooding by the sea wall, and laced with more canals and drainage ditches than there were hedgerows. They would find scattered hamlets built round squat, square-towered churches, and peopled by the dour Marsh folk, men who smuggled, fished, bred sheep and kept their own counsel. They would find few trees on the Marsh and those there were bent by the wind. The Marsh had precious little but mutton for an invader to plunder . . .

He put his notes in his pocket and replaced the papers in the portfolio. A day spent shut up in an airless room, poring over Le Moniteur's fine print, had left him with a headache and, for that matter, an empty feeling in his stomach as he contemplated the enormity of the task ahead. The whole thing seemed absurd until one realized that the Admiralty had no choice: their only chance of discovering the answers in good time was by sending a man to Boulogne, the port which was obviously the French headquarters. The Admiralty had nothing to lose and everything to gain; the man had nothing to gain and his life to lose. They needed to send that man at once, so although they might just have the man - fluent in French, with plenty of experience of working in France as an agent - obviously if he was not available they had to pick the least unsuitable man, and he happened to be called Ramage. The devil take the Duchess of Manston, he thought sourly; but for her damned ball I'd still be down at St Kew, out of sight and probably out of mind as far as the Admiralty, Lord Nelson and French invasion plans are concerned. . .