Ramage and the Renegades

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

He came out of the blackness as though swimming up from a great depth and heard Jackson and Rossi talking in a jumble of words before sinking back again. The next time he surfaced, quietly and smoothly like a dolphin, he knew that he was cold and wet, and he could hear Sarah's voice. The third time, when he managed to stay with them longer, he realized that he was lying on the deck of a ship, soaking wet and with a dull, pounding pain in his left arm, close to where the scar was still white from the musket ball which hit him at Curaçao.

'Nicholas,' she was saying, her voice urgent. 'Can you hear me? Nicholas . . . Nicholas!'

He thought he was answering but everything seemed so far away. He shouted and his voice came out as a whisper, and he wished the pain in his arm would stop. 'Yes . . . yes.' That seemed about all he wanted to say. Quite why he was lying flat on his back, this awful pain in his arm, feeling that he was going to vomit any moment, and with something soft against his face, soft and warm, and moving slightly all the time, he did not know. Now someone was approaching with a lantern . . .

The light showed that he was lying by the mainmast of the Earl of Dodsworth and his head was cradled in a woman's arms. But he had swum away from the East Indiaman hours ago and boarded the Heliotrope alone.

What was happening in the Heliotrope? All those passengers, two of them children. He had explained what they were to do in French, and then the Calypso's boarding party had arrived. Yes, now he remembered that a privateersman had woken and roused the rest and there had been a desperate fight in that small cabin . . .

'Jackson! Jackson!' he shouted, and she heard him whispering, his teeth chattering with the violence of the shivering.

'He wants you,' she said to the American, the wetness of his hair soaking through her frock and chilling her breasts. While the American and the Italian continued tying the bandage round his arm, his face was as white as a sheet in the lanternlight: the cheekbones stuck out like elbows, the skin of his face stretched taut as though all the blood and much of the flesh had drained away in the sea while the men towed the raft with him lashed to it.

He was dying, of that she was sure, and her last words to him had been unpleasant; she had turned her back on him and walked away when all she wanted to do was kiss him and have him hold her. Now they had brought him back to die in her arms.

'Sir, it's Jackson,' the American crouched over him, his ears close to Nicholas's mouth. Sarah listened intently. Some last message for the Marchesa? No, he would give that to the young count. But she must not have these bitter thoughts now; if he died, two women would have loved him.

'Wha' happened?'

Jackson knew what his captain wanted to know. 'We saved the hostages, sir. The guards in the cabin were roused. One caught you with a cutlass as you spitted a man going for Spurgeon with a knife.'

'Di' we lose anyone?'

'Spurgeon, sir. The privateersman stabbed him the same moment the other one slashed you with his cutlass.'

'Wha'm I doing here?'

'Now, sir,' Jackson said soothingly, 'you rest now. The Lynx heard nothing. Mr Martin's in command in the Heliotrope and Mr Aitken's taken the Friesland.'

The American straightened himself and shouted aft: 'Look alive with those blankets! Sorry, ma'am,' he said to Sarah, 'but the captain's mortal cold.'

It was no good her explaining to this seaman that the passengers were so bewildered as to be almost helpless; that being seized by privateersmen in the first place had been a great shock; being suddenly rescued in the middle of the night was a second one; and now, having the man they regarded as their saviour dragged bleeding and unconscious up the side of the ship must seem like the end of the world to them.

God, he was shivering so violently. Now he was whispering again, every word taking so much effort. She reached out and tugged Jackson's shirt as he bent down to help Rossi with the bandage, which was a strip torn from a sheet.

'Calypso ... I must get to the Calypso . . .'

'Yes, sir, as soon as we can. Three of the men have swum over to fetch Mr Bowen and a boat.'

'Jackson, why bring me here?'

She realized that the American knew it was pointless to give soothing answers. 'You'd have bled to death a long time a'fore we reached her, sir. We started off for her but we couldn't swim fast enough towing the raft, and when you kept on bleeding in spite of the bandages and tourniquet, we reckoned we needed somewhere quick with dry bandages and a lantern.'

'Nicholas,' she said, 'they're trying to make you a hot drink, but they're frightened the glow of the galley stove might be seen from the Lynx. Will you sip this brandy?'

'Come on, sir,' Jackson said and uncapped a flat silver flask. Finally he said: 'It's no good, ma'am. I know what he's like from other times. He hates spirits.'

'Other times?' she whispered.

'We really thought we'd lost him the last time, didn't we, Rossi?'

'Mamma mia, when we blew up that Dutch frigate, I thought we were all loosed.'

'Lost,' Jackson corrected from habit, and said to Sarah.

'He'll be all right soon, ma'am; you wait until Mr Bowen arrives.'

'Who is he?'

'Our surgeon. Ah, about time!' he growled as two men arrived with blankets. 'We only needed two or three! Here, take that end and we'll slide one under him and use it to lift him.'

'Where are you going to take him?' she asked anxiously.

'Nowhere, ma'am. If you'll fold those other blankets into a mattress. Keep out a couple to go over him. Then we can lift him on to it.'

Reluctantly, like a woman having a suckling child taken away from her, she lowered his head and helped Rossi cradle the wounded arm.

'He's so cold,' she said to no one in particular.

'Ma'am,' Jackson said, 'if you'd just walk away for a minute or two...'

'Why?' Her voice was harsh.

'Oh ... I just want to - well, remove his wet clothes!'

She leaned over, saw the pin shining in the lanternlight among the folds of silk, and pulled it out, and then unwrapped the stock. The triangle of curly black hair glistened and the men gently lifted the blanket. She held the stock for a moment. There was not a hint of warmth in the silk; it was as though it had been a corpse's loincloth.

Once he was lowered on to the makeshift mattress she took one and then the other blanket and covered him, leaving the left arm outside so that they could keep an eye on it. Already blood was seeping through the bandage, a spreading black stain in the candlelight. His eyes were closed, his breathing shallow. She had earlier watched the rise and fall of his ribs and any moment expected it to stop, as if the effort was too much.

The loss of blood and the shadows thrown by the lantern emphasized his features. His nose was thin and slightly curved, like a beak, and the bone made a white ridge. The cheekbones frightened her; it was almost as if parchment covered a skull. Above his right eye there were two scars on the brow, thin, white bars on the skin, which itself seemed almost grey. The eyes, closed now, were sunk even deeper under heavy brows. His hair, wet and tangled, looked like a clump of seaweed tossed carelessly on a beach by a wave.

His right hand was plucking at the blanket and trying to reach across to his left arm. Before she could move, Rossi had leaned over and with surprising gentleness put the hand back under the blanket. The lips moved and Rossi bent down and listened.

'I think he wants you, ma'am, if you're "Sarah".'

She felt a surge of pleasure, then realized that this Italian seaman had probably misheard a murmured 'Gianna' as 'Sarah'. He was thinking of the Marchesa.

'Nicholas...'

'Sarah,' he whispered, and there was no mistaking it, 'they shouldn't have brought me here.'

Misunderstanding him, she said: 'Don't worry, Mr Bowen will be here at any minute. It's not a bad wound; it is just that you've lost a lot of blood.'

'No ... I meant -' he seemed to lose consciousness for a moment, then she realized he had shut his eyes to fight off a wave of pain '- I'm sorry to have frightened you ... but the Lynx is next, and then home.'

Not knowing quite what he meant, she smoothed the hair from his brow and said: 'Don't worry about the Lynx now, all the hostages are safe.'

'Yardarm . . . both of them,' he murmured and seemed to lose consciousness.

'Yardarm?' she asked Jackson.

'Yes, ma'am,' the American said briskly, touching the side of his captain's throat to check the pulse, 'those privateersmen will hang from a ship's yardarm. Maybe not all of them, but the leaders. Not the Calypso's,' he explained. 'We'll probably take 'em back to England for trial.'

'You have to capture them first.'

'Oh, I'm sure the captain has a plan for that.'

She wanted to shake the American. Did the fool not realize his captain was dying? That he was slipping away from them even now, like smoke in the wind? And they could do nothing to prevent it: the great gash in his arm, now bound up and with a tourniquet above it, was not the problem. He was dying because as his men had swum with desperate haste to the Earl of Dodsworth with him lashed to the raft, his blood had been draining from his body with every pump of his heart. The men who had tied the first tourniquet could not see - did not think to look - that it had come undone.

As she began to weep, she understood that, such was their faith in him that a mention of the Lynx brought the confident comment that the captain would have a plan ... In her imagination she saw him dead, and remembered the funeral service, and the dreadful business of the body sewn up in a hammock and tipped over the side from a plank. One of the seamen had died of a fever off Capetown.

Jackson's body went taut for a moment, then he hurried to the entryport. He came back a few moments later and said: it's the boat with Mr Bowen.'

Obviously they had faith in this man Bowen. It was a pity that the Earl of Dodsworth's regular surgeon was a prisoner along with the rest of the ship's officers and men in the camp on shore.

Suddenly a man appeared out of the darkness behind her and knelt beside Nicholas. A hand went down to his face and a finger pushed back an eyelid. 'You still with us, sir?' The voice had a bantering note which infuriated her. Was this Bowen?

'I didn't cover one of their pawns,' Nicholas murmured. It was an extraordinary thing to say, but Bowen laughed and turned to the plump, elderly man now standing beside him, a man with flowing white hair and carrying a box with a rope handle.

'Put it down there, Southwick. We ought to have brought the chessboard. Now, Jackson, what happened?'

She wanted to tell him first to do something about the terrible pallor of his skin, to make him drink some brandy to stop this awful shivering.

'Cutlass slash across the upper arm, sir. We put a tourniquet on, just as you showed us years ago, and a bandage, and lowered him on the raft to tow him back to the Calypso. We hadn't gone above a hundred yards when Rossi reckons he'd never cover that distance alive, so we made for this ship, sir.'

'Why the devil didn't you go back to the Heliotrope?'

'She's French, sir. All that gabbling and panic with the passengers. They wouldn't keep out of the way once they saw Mr Ramage had been wounded - he'd spoken to all of them, o' course, when he first got on board. Oh yes, and Spurgeon was killed. It was trying to save him that led to Mr Ramage getting cut.'

Cut, indeed, she thought, not knowing that Jackson was using a slang word regularly spoken in the West Indies to describe a sword wound. It originated among the Negroes, when they slashed each other with machetes, but she had never heard the phrase.

Bowen had knelt while Jackson talked and was unwinding the bandage Rossi had just put on.

She said: 'It's a clean wound, I can tell you that.'

'Thank you, ma'am,' Bowen said courteously, and continued to unwind the strip of sheet.

'You might start it bleeding again.'

'It is still bleeding,' Bowen commented. 'But don't you worry. Perhaps you'd like to return to your cabin, ma'am? The sight of blood...'

Jackson coughed and said: 'The lady helped us hoist Mr Ramage on board and she found the tourniquet had come adrift. Then she cleaned the wound - the basin of water is still over there.'

'My apologies, ma'am,' Bowen said, and detecting more in Jackson's words than the bare meaning, added: 'Perhaps you would care to help me. A woman's touch is gentler than that of my clumsy but well-meaning shipmates. Now, Southwick -' he paused as he began to lift the bandage clear '- open the medicine chest for me and stand by with the pad of cloth you'll find in the top left-hand corner. Rossi, let's have that lantern closer. . .'

He now had the wound uncovered and seemed to be talking to himself. 'Ah yes, chipped the humerus bone slightly but no fracture because the blow was directed at a sharp angle downwards... missed the main artery... veins bleeding - that seems to be the main problem... Muscle torn but probably still functional...'

He bent over Ramage's head. 'Still with us, sir? Ah, good. Would you try to move your left hand slightly? Ah - yes, it hurts. Now just wriggle the fingers. That starts more bleeding but tells us that no ligaments have been cut. You'll be able to carve a roast in three or four weeks. Southwick, stand by with that pad... the lady did a very good job of cleaning the wound; nothing for me to do there. Now, I'm going to release the tourniquet for a minute or two, and then retie it. Except for the lady, you all know why, but as it looks rather alarming, should I explain, ma'am?'

She nodded, finding that she now had complete faith in the man: he seemed far removed from her idea of a naval surgeon, which in turn was based on the rather tough individual presiding over the Earl of Dodsworth's medicine chest.

'Well, if we leave a limb cut off from its blood for too long, the flesh can die and gangrene starts, so we release a tourniquet for a minute or two every twenty minutes, and then tie it again.'

He loosened it, waited and retied it with skilled fingers. 'Pad, Southwick - perhaps you would hold it in place, ma'am, while I apply the bandage. No, there's no need to press, and it's not hurting him. He's in pain, but that's from the whole wound.'

As he prepared to roll on the bandage he leaned over and sniffed and commented: 'He's refused the brandy again, eh?'

' 'Fraid so, sir,' Jackson said. 'Even when the lady tried.'

Bowen looked up at her for the first time: up to this moment he had rarely taken his eyes off Ramage's wound or his face.

'You notice, ma'am, that we all seem to be rather familiar with the, er, routine of patching up our captain. The fact is he does get himself knocked about. I remember the last time, at Curaçao, was just like this except that -'

'Jackson told me,' she said hurriedly. The strange thing was she had not felt faint when she had to retie the tourniquet, wash the wound and staunch the bleeding; when she believed he was dying and thought that if he was to be saved she would have to do whatever was necessary. But now, with Nicholas obviously not dying - not even in any danger, according to this surgeon, who was clearly an extremely competent man - she could feel the strength going from her knees, and the lantern was beginning to blur.

'The brandy, Jackson,' Bowen snapped. 'The lady.'

Southwick bent down and caught her as she slid sideways. 'There, m'dear, just have a sup of this . . . gently, it'll make you cough . . . now swallow.'

'Put her down on her back,' Bowen said, 'and get her head on a level with her heart. Now, ma'am, breathe deeply, and when you feel better, I'd be glad of your help.'

Quickly she sat up, the faintness vanishing. 'Yes, what can I do?'

'Just hold his forearm up high enough for me to pass the bandage round... You see, you don't feel faint while there's something for you to do: when you thought he was dying, you took control. Now you've no responsibility, you get the vapours, like some silly young woman in a London drawing room!'

Bowen was right, of course, and she smiled at him. 'I don't like brandy, though!'

'Just as well,' Bowen said cheerfully, 'I nearly killed myself with it, years ago. You'd never believe I once had a flourishing practice in Wimpole Street... took to brandy...' He continued winding the bandage, pausing now and again to straighten an edge. 'Lost all my patients - they shunned a drunkard. So I became a naval surgeon . . . My first ship was commanded by Mr Ramage, who decided no drunkard was going to tend his sick ... So he and Southwick here, this man with a head of hair like a dandelion run to seed, decided to cure me . . . Succeeded, although it was a grim business for both of them -'

'Not too pleasant for you either,' Southwick said.

'No, it wasn't. Anyway, I've had not a drop of alcohol since. A new man, a new life, thanks to these two. I'm not telling you that story, ma'am, to frighten you off brandy, which you obviously dislike, but to show you that old Southwick and I do our best to keep an eye on him.'

Had this man Bowen guessed? Was she being too obvious? That seaman Jackson was watching her, smiling. And the white-haired man, too. She bent her head and concentrated on holding Nicholas's arm.

Finally Bowen said: 'That's it. Perhaps you'd close the medicine chest again, Southwick. It's no good offering him any Tincture of Opium, to make sure he sleeps, because he'll insist he has to stay awake. Now, how do we get him down into the boat?'

'Oh no!' She said it before she could control herself, and continued hurriedly: 'I mean, he must stay here. We have plenty of cabins with comfortable beds - enough for all of you. And fresh meat and eggs - just what he'll need while he convalesces.'

She saw Nicholas's right hand signal to Bowen, who leaned over as he whispered something.

'We'll see about that!' the surgeon said disapprovingly. 'Aitken and Southwick can deal with them!'

Again the hand signalled and Bowen listened. 'Sir, with respect, I'm beginning to think it would be best if you stayed in this ship.'

'Southwick...'

Bowen moved back to let the white-haired man move nearer.

'Get a stay-tackle rigged . . . Lash me in a chair...'

'Aye aye, sir,' the old man said reluctantly.

They were taking him away. It had something to do with the Lynx. If only they would go away for a few minutes . . .

She watched as Southwick and the seaman went to the ropes and began pulling on some and loosening others.

'Ma'am,' Southwick called, 'could you ask a couple of men passengers to bring up a chair with arms?'

She ran below, hurriedly gave instructions, and came back to find Bowen sitting crosslegged on the deck beside Nicholas. She called to Southwick that the chair was being brought up and, kicking her skirt sideways, sat opposite Bowen, with Nicholas lying between them, apparently asleep, his bandaged left arm lying across his stomach.

Bowen looked across at her and said quietly: 'The cutlass slash will soon heal - you cleaned it perfectly. The weakness, which looks so distressing to you, as though he's dying, his face so pale, his voice weak, is simply the result of losing so much blood. But the human body is very resilient. It'll have made up that quantity of blood in a matter of hours. By breakfast time he'll be grumbling. By dinner time he'll be impossible!'

'Thank you, Mr Bowen. I. . . well, I thought he was dying when they brought him on board.'

'So did Jackson and Rossi, and the other man, until you got to work. They say you spotted the tourniquet was loose, and stopped them panicking.'

'That's not true, but it is nice of them to say it.'

'Ah well, here comes the chair. I'll go and see what Southwick and the men are going to rig up.'

As soon as the surgeon had left she turned the lantern so that the light was not in his eyes. In fact, he was almost in shadow.

'Are you awake?' she whispered.

'Yes . . . where has everyone gone?'

'They are arranging a chair, so they can lower you into the boat. Are you warm enough?'

'The shivering ... it's reaction, not cold... Thank you for helping me; I heard what Bowen said.'

She shook her head, her eyes swimming with tears. 'You will rest now, promise me. The Lynx, whatever you plan, can be done by your officers. This man Southwick, he's obviously a very competent man.'

'You didn't -' he winced, and then continued '- think so yesterday.'

'Your chair is nearly ready,' she whispered.

She leaned down and her hair tumbled over them. He was still shivering and as she held his face in her hands the skin was cold.

She kissed him and said: 'I'm going now - I'd rather you didn't see me cry like a baby.' She stood then and ran aft to the companionway but had to wipe away the tears that blurred her vision before she dared to walk down the steps.