The Ramage Touch

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Orbetello's jail was next to the town hall, on the other side from the inn, and was simply a large room at one end of the cellar. Because the town was built out on the peninsula the defensive walls were on the water's edge. Indeed, Ramage thought, it was too much like Venice to be comfortable; the foundations of most of the town were below the water level so that the walls of the cellar were sodden with damp. The cellars of most of the houses must have a foot or two of water in them and the cell was either pumped out regularly or the floor had been raised.

The major was a remarkably patient man, even though he was almost cross-eyed from weariness. He had Ramage, Martin and Orsini tied securely to three chairs placed side by side in front of him with two sentries behind them. He had a chair and table brought down and he sat there, a lantern on the table so turned that the light from its window lit the three prisoners, leaving him in shadow.

With only a rudimentary knowledge of English, the major was trying to interrogate Martin and Orsini. He had established that Ramage spoke a little Italian. Ramage had had to admit to that, having been heard speaking to the innkeeper. The other two had been quick enough to insist that they spoke only English - a statement of fact in the case of Martin. Ramage was thankful that the major either disliked the colonel's aide or did not know he spoke Italian.

The major had also been so absorbed with Martin's Sea Service pistol, with its belt hook and the word "Tower" and a crown engraved on the lock, that it never occurred to him that Martin might have more weapons hidden under his layers of shirts. Other officers had seized Ramage and Orsini and quickly searched them but found no weapons. Obviously Martin was the only man carrying a pistol, and they had not noticed the canvas belt round his chest even when they stuck the flute down the front of his clothing, a chivalrous gesture which none of the British had expected.

Ramage felt a curious sympathy for the major: his colonel had eventually slid to the floor, dislodged in the struggle and blissfully unconscious from too much wine. The battery was due to move off to Porto Ercole next morning - this morning, Ramage corrected himself; it was now well past midnight - and suddenly he had discovered three British spies in his midst. Spies who came from nowhere, apparently, because they had not been recognized as naval officers. His commanding officer was beyond reach, thanks to the wine, and he did not know how much of the colonel's diatribe the Englishman had heard and understood.

Indeed, as he questioned the three men, the major tried to remember exactly what the colonel had said. The old man had insisted that the battery's departure be delayed by two hours, to allow him to get sober. Then he had gone on about the sandy track to Porto Ercole. Then he had grumbled about sand getting into everything - but had he mentioned the name of their final destination? The major finally decided that the colonel had not; the diatribe was against sand and its problems; there had been no reason to mention the country's name.

If he had mentioned the name, would this damned Englishman have understood? He admitted to speaking some Italian (with an atrocious accent), but apparently no French. The major had tried to trap him, suddenly giving orders or asking questions in French, but there had been no indication that the man understood. So the colonel was unlikely to have given away any secrets, although the major had no idea what had been said before the colonel called him to the table, except that the colonel's aide, a fop if there ever was one, had sworn that nothing had been said, apart from the innkeeper's remarks about the so-called tziganes coming down from the hills to play for the French soldiers.

It was cunningly contrived, the major admitted. A flûtiste pretending to be a gipsy and acting like a halfwit, his brother, and his nephew leading him on a piece of string . . . And they were only caught by a plate of spaghetti: the major felt himself grow cold at the thought of what might have happened had not the two drunken ensigns from "B" battery tugged theflûtiste so that he toppled from the table and dislodged the pistol.

In fact it did not matter what the British had heard and understood, because they could not now pass any information on to anyone else: they were locked in here, and in a few hours they would be slung in the baggage train, securely bound and heavily guarded, and taken on board the frigates. There the colonel could bring them to trial as spies, and then they could be shot, or hanged, if the navy preferred.

The major sighed with relief. He should have thought of that earlier: the three men could have all the secrets in the world and it would not matter because they could not pass them on to their own people. Quite a problem for a spy, he realized: information was only of use, of value if one was spying for money, when it was passed to a person or country that could take advantage of it.

But what were British spies doing here in Orbetello? By adopting the disguise of tziganes they could, of course, travel easily; no one expected tziganes to have travel documents - indeed, you locked up the house and the poultry when you saw them, but that was all. Tziganes with the flûtiste - that was clever; diabolically clever. Yet. . . perhaps it was just a coincidence. Who sent them? Had they come up from Naples? Were they just looking round for what scraps they could discover about the French in Italy, or were they seeking specific information - like the great operation planned for this autumn? No one could have any inkling of that - no Englishman, anyway - because the operation existed only on paper at the moment; he doubted whether any ships at all had begun to arrive in Crete. The frigates now in Porto Ercole and the two vessels supposed to join them (what were they called - bomb ketches?) were probably the first to start moving eastwards towards the assembly point, or whatever the navy called it.

The senior of these Englishmen was obviously the eldest, the fellow with the black hair and penetrating eyes and slightly hooked nose. He looked like an aristo and now that he was not acting as a gipsy he had the bearing of one. He could not hide it. With those high cheekbones, too, he was a handsome fellow; the women would have fallen for him if he had been going to live past tomorrow, or the next day. He imagined a navy hangman's noose round the fellow's neck, taking the whole weight of the body. Not as spectacular as a guillotine because you did not get that satisfying hiss and thud of the heavy blade running down the slide and lopping off the head, with the explosive spurt of blood and the thump of the head falling into the basket. Still, hanging from the yardarm was probably slower . . .

"You - where you come from?"

"England."

"Oui, I know, but now, before . . . before you here?" The damned man just shrugged his shoulders and repeated what he had answered twenty times before. "From the hills."

"You are spy."

"I am not." He said it very firmly. "What is there to spy on?"

"Troops, the defences of Italy, the ships in the ports ..."

"So, now I know that French officers are living at an inn in Orbetello. There are some rowing boats with fishing nets in the lagoon. It looks as though there will be a good crop of grapes. Last year's wine should be good, too. To whom could I sell that intelligence, m'sieur?"

"You may find other information."

"What is there to discover? That the French have invaded Italy? That is old information - several years old. That they hold Corsica or Elba? All that is old. That there are French soldiers in Orbetello?" Ramage shrugged his shoulders as best he could with the ropes holding him tightly to the chair. "I think anyone sitting in London with a map of Italy could guess where French troops were stationed."

"Ships then."

Again the Englishman shrugged his shoulders. "There are only a certain number of ports, m'sieur. I can tell you there are French warships in Genoa, Leghorn, Civita Vecchia, Bastia and Ajaccio. You can tell me that there are British warships in Plymouth, Portsmouth, Dover, Sheerness and Harwich. You can also tell me there are British troops in those places. It is obvious. Ports have ships - and they have to be protected by garrisons. I can go on - Toulon, Barcelona, Cartagena, Cadiz, Ferrol, Rochefort, Brest ... all contain French warships and troops. I haven't been to any of them - but it is obvious."

The devil of it is, the major thought, the thrice-damned Englishman is right. Spies were bound to be trying to find out information for their masters, and what information could they find along this coast that would be of the slightest interest to the English? Obviously there were garrisons at various towns and, as the Englishman had pointed out, any fool with a map would know where they would be. Any port of a decent size would hold warships. So ...

Nevertheless, here were three spies. What the devil could he do with them? There was no point in getting the two sentries to knock them about - these men were not clods; any information they had would be extracted only by trapping them with words.

He took out his watch. In five hours the regiment was due to move to Porto Ercole. By then the colonel would probably still be in a drunken stupor, but it was no good starting two hours late because, faced with the wrath of a senior officer for arriving late, the colonel would have no scruple in denying he had given the order the previous night. To be fair, the old fellow often said things when he was drunk that he did not remember next morning when he was what passed for sober. Most of the time this was just as well.

Obviously there was nothing more that needed to be done at once: the spies had been caught, and they could be taken out to the frigates, interrogated again, then tried and executed. In the meantime he could get some sleep and this jail could hold the three men until they were transferred to the baggage train. They could spend the rest of the night in those chairs, securely tied up - there was no point in risking them escaping. He gave orders to the guards and said to Ramage: "I leave you for the night. Do not try to escape - the guards have orders to shoot. Later we find out what you are doing."

The guards changed hourly and noisily, each couple bringing a new candle with them so that they could change the one in the lantern. Ramage talked to Martin and Orsini, after making as sure as he could that neither guard spoke English. There was little to talk about and neither youngster seemed very worried because, Ramage realized just as he was feeling sick with despair, they endowed him with magic powers which would ensure their escape.

What a brief and inglorious sally into enemy territory it had all been! He had left his ship and her two prizes; he had landed on French-occupied soil for what had seemed at the time the best of reasons - to find out the destination of a possible French army and fleet; he had been captured within three or four hours; he and two of his officers were to be executed within a few hours more.

The Admiralty ... the devil take Their Lordships. Gianna was about to lose the man she loved, and the nephew who was her heir. Of course she could fall in love again, and would, too, and produce her own heir. He shrugged his shoulders, feeling slightly silly at making such an obvious gesture while lashed to a chair in Orbetello's jail, and told himself that as far as the kingdom of Volterra was concerned, all that had happened was that the clock had stopped for a while. And for Britain? That was more serious. Their Lordships, and therefore the British government, would have no warning that the French were not only planning a new attack by land, but were busy assembling an army and a fleet, and that the target for the new attack was in the eastern Mediterranean. Ramage realized that it would be many weeks after the attack had been made that the British would learn about it, because they had effectively evacuated their ships from the Mediterranean.

Egypt or the Levant - that was where the attack was to be made. He was sure of that because of the drunken colonel's diatribe against sand. It could be another attack on Egypt, to make up for Bonaparte's defeat at the hands of Nelson and General Abercromby, or it could be an attack in the Acre area, for example, because it was the British defence of Acre that prevented Bonaparte's move northward. In either case, Egypt or the Levant, the French were using Crete as a base, and that plus the impending attack was all that the Admiralty needed to know.

Ironically, he had found the probable answers, Egypt or the Levant, within a very short time - but as the French major must have realized, information is useless to a spy if he cannot pass it on to those who can use it. Nevertheless, he had been criminally stupid in bringing Paolo along; Rossi would have been just as useful . . . and it was doubtful if he had really needed Martin.

He should have no sympathy for Rossi and Jackson, but he was grateful for their misguided attempt to help and worried about them. It seemed inevitable that they too should be captured. Well, Aitken had his orders, so he knew what to do if the Captain had not returned by midnight. He would be in command of quite a little squadron, and he would behave in the same way and have the same responsibilities as if Ramage had died on board from wounds or illness. The Royal Navy was organized on the axiom that no man was indispensable . . .

Someone hammered on the door and a moment later a key turned from the outside. As it was flung open, Ramage saw several soldiers waiting in the passage. One of them said to the guards: "Take the prisoners out: we are about to march."

"Are we to shoot them here in the square?" a guard asked in a matter-of-fact voice.

"No, the navy will do that in Porto Ercole, so the sergeant says. They are to go ahead of the baggage train." As he spoke, Ramage could hear the clippety-clop of a horse's hooves and the heavy rumble of wheels rolling over cobbles as a cart approached the town hall.

"Do we keep them tied up?" the guard asked.

"Leave them as they are; we'll load them on to the cart secured to the chairs. We don't have time to waste undoing these ropes and then tying them up again, and the mayor won't mind us taking three of his chairs."

The other guards sniggered and the rest of the soldiers crowded into the room. Ramage felt himself tilting backwards as three men picked up the chair to which he was bound and carried him out through the door. They hurried along the corridor, up the short flight of steps and along to the front door of the town hall, cursing as they banged elbows on the walls in the near-darkness and barked shins on the legs of the chair. Finally they had the chair tilted back so that Ramage was lying almost horizontally and was able to see another group of men behind carrying Martin and his chair, while more sturdy curses in English from beyond showed that Paolo had not been left behind. Ramage hoped that the French soldiers would not suddenly drop Paolo's chair, or bump him so painfully that he let fly a broadside of French or Italian oaths . . .

Outside, a chilly greyness over the far end of the square showed that dawn was approaching. Two unshaven soldiers with battered and sooty lanterns lit up a baggage wagon; about eighteen feet long with four wheels, the front pair smaller than the rear, it had a single horse pulling it, a wretched-looking animal whose ribs showed up as black stripes of shadow, its back a steep valley between neck and rump. A canvas hood protected the wagon from rain, a grotesque and tattered bonnet in the dim lantern light.

The wagon was stowed with crates and kitbags but a space the width of the wagon and about three feet long had been left at the rear end. The soldiers heaved the chair up and another man waiting inside helped them tilt it over the tailboard. A moment later Ramage found himself sitting upright in the back while more soldiers lifted Martin's chair. Finally, when the three chairs were in the wagon, the waiting soldier checked the ropes binding them and then climbed up on top of the casks and kitbags so that he could watch his prisoners. A lantern was handed up to him and, at a shout from the sergeant, the driver cracked his whip and the horse lurched forward, its harness rattling.

Ramage then saw men on horseback riding into the piazza, their plumed shakos showing that they were officers obviously waiting for the colonel and the major to appear so that they could start off for Porto Ercole. Where were the men and guns? Ramage guessed they must be camped along the via Aurelia and were yet to have their first taste of the sand on the causeway.

By the time the wagon reached the via Aurelia and turned right along it, Ramage could distinguish the features of the guard and Martin and Paolo.

"It's cold," the boy said, "but at least the mosquitoes haven't woken up."

"Yet," Martin said, "and we're still alive. I've even got my flute, but the damned thing has slipped down so the ropes are trying to shove it through my ribs."

"Is everything else all right under your shirt?" Ramage recalled the sailmaker making the waistcoat with the vertical pockets, and cursed himself for not insisting on flaps being added which could be buttoned down.

"Yes, sir. I'm sorry about. . ."

"It wasn't your fault. Never trust inn tables."

A sudden noise like a bull being strangled startled them, and a few moments later a peasant jogged past on his braying donkey, sitting astride the animal with his feet nearly touching the ground. The trees recently planted at even spaces along each side of the road to provide shade for marching troops were growing well and proving useful for the landless owners of livestock: several dozen goats had been tethered to various trees and, as was always the way with goats, most of them had gone round and round until their ropes were wound up so short that they could hardly move. As it grew lighter the guard opened the door of the lantern and blew out the candle, and the smell of the smouldering wick caught the backs of their throats.

A pair of oxen pulling a wide-wheeled cart passed going the other way and Ramage saw how each animal leaned inwards, towards the single pole between them that acted as the shaft. It was said that from the time an animal first pulled a cart and was put, say, in the right-hand position it always had to be on that side because it became used to working with an inward list. The useless information one acquires, Ramage thought sourly just as the wagon swung round to the right, rattling and bumping as it left the via Aurelia and started down the track leading to the Pineta di Feniglia, the southern causeway which ended in Argentario just short of Porto Ercole.

Looking eastward, Ramage could see that the first rays of the sun, which was still below the eastern horizon, were just catching the top of Monte Amiata and, a few minutes later, Monte Labbro, lower and nearer. There was very little cloud; it was, as Martin remarked with irritating cheerfulness, going to be a scorching day.

The track dipped downhill for a few hundred yards and as the wheels went silent Ramage knew they had reached the sand. There was an occasional shudder as a wheel hit an old tree stump. Then, as the upper tip of the sun lifted above the distant mountains and a ray shone into the wagon, Ramage glanced across at the soldier sitting among the kitbags and guarding the three Britons. He had leaned back and slipped slightly so that he was cradled between the bags; his mouth was open, his unshaven face greasy with perspiration, and he was quite clearly sound asleep. Ramage was not sure when the man had dropped off, but had been expecting him to forbid them to talk. Then he remembered that the man had been both clumsy and silent when the prisoners were hoisted on board: he was still partly drunk from the night before.

The horse ambled on; there was no cracking of the whip or cursing, and it was obvious that the driver was in no hurry to arrive at Porto Ercole: being a good soldier he knew that it was better to travel than arrive: the arrival of the baggage wagon only meant that the baggage had to be unloaded, and although he might not have to hoist out crates or toss down kitbags, he would have to rub down the horse and feed and water it, and, judging by the squeaking, put some tallow on the axletrees.

Ramage thought it curious that the man in point had cracked that whip amid a shower of curses every fifty yards or so along the via Aurelia, and for the first few hundred yards along this track. Now, as they reached the sand, he had stopped. Perhaps he too had dropped off to sleep.

Jackson's head suddenly appeared above the tailboard, the sandy hair soaked with perspiration. The American was holding a cocked pistol.

"Morning, sir, where's your guard?" he asked quietly, loping along to keep up with the cart.

A dumbfounded Ramage nodded with his head towards the sleeping man and a few moments later Jackson vaulted over the tailboard into the wagon, reaching across the kitbags and gently removed a pistol from the Frenchman's hand without waking him. He gave a sniff and showed Ramage the empty wine flask that had been in the guard's other hand.

"You must find that chair uncomfortable, sir," Jackson said conversationally as he took out a long-bladed knife and began cutting the rope.

"A little," Ramage said. "We're glad to see you: we've all been sitting like this for the last six or seven hours."

As the last piece of rope dropped free and he tried to stand up, Ramage felt as though every bone in his body had been hammered with a caulker's maul and every sinew overstretched by an inch. It must have felt like this when the Inquisition unwound the rack to give the heretic a chance to confess.

Ramage sat down on the chair again, afraid he would topple over, and tentatively wriggled his left arm. He moved it up and down until the worst of the pain had stopped and then tried the right arm. Then he moved his left ankle in a circular movement and gently bent down to massage his shin. Finally he was able to stand up without too much pain as Paolo copied him and Jackson cut through the last of Martin's bonds. The three men thanked him through their groans.

"Sorry we weren't here sooner, sir," Jackson said apologetically as he slipped his knife back into its sheath on his belt. "We came as soon as we heard."

"Where's Rossi, then?"

"Driving the horse with one hand and propping up the driver with the other - he's asleep too. Horse seems to know the way, which is just as well, 'cos Rossi's better with a tiller than reins."

"But how the devil did you know that -"

"That innkeeper in Orbetello, sir. He saw what happened - accidentally caused it, so he said - and guessed you were British. He and his brother belong to a sort of partisan group that fights the French when it gets the chance. Anyway, his brother owns the cantina in Porto Ercole. Rossi had already made friends with him, so that when the other brother sent word from Orbetello, we were warned. His son, a young lad of eight or nine, paddled across the lagoon with a duck punt and then ran the rest of the way. We knew the troops were due to arrive in Porto Ercole today to board the frigates, and this is the only way from Orbetello, along the Feniglia, so we waited here as a sort of ambush, because we guessed they'd have to use a cart to move you."

"But just two of you - supposing the French had sent a platoon to guard us?"

Jackson grinned and pointed forward along the track. "There's twenty or so of the cantina fellow's cronies waiting up there, where the pine trees come in very close to the track, like the neck of a funnel. They're armed with a weird collection of weapons - muskets that must have been intended for the Armada, billhooks, scythes, a butcher has the big knife he uses to cut up oxen . . . They're all waiting. Rossi'll give them a wave in time, so they'll know everything's all right. Now, if you'll excuse me, sir, I think we'd better wake the driver and stow him in here with his mate. We can use these scraps of rope to tie them up."

Ramage held up a hand. "Wait a moment. If the French find our guards tied up, they'll know we were rescued, which means they'll start searching for the partisans and probably taking hostages. Innocent people will get shot in reprisal. We must make it look as though we escaped on our own." He thought quickly for a few moments. "Here," he said to Jackson, "take Martin and lodge the driver so that he stays asleep without falling off the cart. Don't wake him up. Paolo! Put that pistol back in the hand of that guard, but be careful with it."

He realized that Paolo still had not understood the idea. "Here, give me the Frenchman's pistol. Go with Mr Martin and Jackson and help settle the driver. When the sentry and driver wake up, they're going to think we escaped without help."

As the others scrambled over the tailboard and dropped to the ground, Ramage leaned over and put the pistol in a fold of a kitbag an inch or two from the sleeping sentry's hand. Then he jumped down, found that his muscles were still bunched up, saw Martin, Paolo, Rossi and Jackson scrambling down from the front of the cart, and joined them as they ran towards the nearest pine trees. Once hidden by the trunks, they watched the wagon jogging along the track towards Argentario.

"Those two soldiers are in for an unhappy week or two," Jackson said. "It'll be bad enough for them when they wake up and find the empty chairs, but you can just imagine what the sergeant and then the major will say."

"That damned major," Martin said as he extracted the pistols and knives from his canvas vest. "He's going to want to shoot them."

"Rather shoot them than us," Paolo said, his voice showing that he had seriously considered the point. "Now what do we do, sir?"

Ramage looked towards Jackson and Rossi. "First, thank these two for disobeying orders," he said with a grin. "Then we'll get some rest."

The Italian guerrilla group had been told that the rescue had been achieved without a blow struck and Ramage had formally thanked them. The five men had then walked towards Argentario, keeping to the beach on the seaward side of the causeway, while half a dozen partisans shadowed the wagon. The cliffs forming the north side of the entrance to Porto Ercole prevented Ramage from seeing into the harbour over to his left, although he could distinguish the frigates' masts and yards sticking up like trees stripped by winter and canted by sudden storms.

The way some of the yards were a-cock-bill and others were braced up as near the fore-and-aft line as possible, showed that the hulls of the ships, with their sterns secured to the small quay and anchors out ahead, were almost touching each other; so close that only bracing the yards of one sharp up stopped them locking with those of the next ship.

Ramage found himself trying to picture the harbour as a seagull would see it. A 36-gun French frigate is about 145 feet long on the gun deck, with a beam of 38 feet, making a total of 5,500 square feet. Times three for the three frigates made 16,500 plus the distance between them, say 120 feet by ten feet, twice . . . That made nearly 19,000 square feet - compared with the top of a cask, it was a good target for a mortar . . .

"The punt used by the innkeeper's boy is hauled out and hidden among some bushes on the lagoon side of this causeway where it meets Argentario," Jackson said, pointing over to the right. "He left it there, sir, in case we wanted to pole across the lagoon to the other causeway . . ."

Ramage's orders to Aitken were to send the cutter to the spot on the northern causeway where they had originally landed as soon as it was dark. If no one arrived by midnight, then Aitken would, in official parlance, "proceed at once in execution of orders already received". In the meantime, Ramage thought it unlikely that many French troops would be available to make much of a search for the escaped British prisoners, for the simple reason that they would be busy loading guns, horses, ammunition, provisions and themselves on board the three frigates. Navy and army officers being the prickly men they were, there would be many arguments: majors and colonels, angry that their own thoroughbred horses were treated in the same way as baggage-train horses, would scream at ship's officers as strops were put under the frightened horses' bellies ready to hoist them on board; ship's officers would scream back, telling the soldiers to attend to military affairs and leave ship's affairs to ... and so it would go on.

Ramage was sleepy, and so were the rest of the men; they all seemed thankful when he slowed down as they half walked and half paddled through the sand at the water's edge to avoid leaving footprints, and finally found a stretch of hard sand up the slight rise to the line of the pine trees, where the fallen spiny leaves of past years made the sand firmer.

They were now at a safe distance from where they had quit the wagon, Ramage considered, and they were in sight of Porto Ercole in case something unexpected happened. It was just the place for them to catch up with the sleep they had all missed the previous night. If they started moving towards the other causeway by five o'clock, using the punt to cross the lagoon, they would have plenty of time, and by then they would be refreshed. He brought the group to a halt, said he would take the first watch of an hour, and told them to sleep. Recalling the wine-bloated face of the French colonel warning the major of the problems of sand in the desert, he added with a grin that left them all looking puzzled: "Don't get sand in your pistols."

The sun had dipped behind Argentario, lighting up the northern slopes of the mountain, when Paolo woke them all with the announcement that it was five o'clock, an accuracy of which he could be certain because Ramage, having hidden his watch in one of his long socks before he had been captured and searched, had lost nothing of value to the French soldiers.

They all went to the water's edge and rinsed their faces in the sea.

"Ho fame," Rossi grumbled.

"We're all hungry," Ramage said sourly. "You could have snared a few rabbits while we were sleeping."

"Or even gone round to the cantina in Porto Ercole," Paolo added, "and brought back wine, bread, meat. . ."

"I might also have been captured and brought back a French patrol. . . sir," an exasperated Rossi answered.

"Providing the lad left lines and hooks on board, you can all fish as we pole across the lagoon in that punt," Ramage said.

"There'll be hooks," Jackson said confidently. "Fishing is all they use boats for on the lagoon. It's only five or six feet deep."

There were in fact three fishing lines and, as Rossi and Jackson poled, leaving on the right the town of Orbetello, a group of buildings hidden behind a high defensive wall and poking out into the lagoon like a mailed fist, Ramage, Martin and Orsini trolled the lines. There were some tiny scraps of fish, baked hard by the sun and the relic of a fishing expedition several days before, and, using them as bait, they caught nothing, Rossi declaring that the lake was only good for eels and every fool knew that dentice was the only fish worth catching.

Ramage just had a chance to see where they should land on the northern causeway when darkness fell, and by then several other punts were round them, most of them being poled by one man with another sitting in the stern handling the line. The punts had started coming out from Orbetello at dusk, as though the men, finishing with their usual jobs, liked to spend an hour or two trying their luck with fishhooks before going home to supper.

The five men hauled up the punt and crossed the causeway to the seaward side where half an hour later, as they waited amid the whine of mosquitoes and the continual buzz of cicadas, they saw the black outline of a boat rowing in fast from the north.

"Give them a quiet hail," Ramage told Jackson. "I wonder if they really expect to find us here?"