Dudley Pope - The Ramage Touch

"They'd arrive after dark . . ."

"The sea's calm enough," Southwick commented, knowing the exact moment when to interrupt his captain's thoughts and stop him brooding. "We'll save these Frenchmen. But their ship hasn't much longer to go . . ."

"When I left her I didn't think I'd get off before she capsized," Ramage said. "The rolling doesn't look too bad from here, but on board . . ."

"The way her masts snatch on the shrouds - you just look at it," Southwick said, looking round for Ramage's telescope and passing it to him.

He saw that either the Furet's rigging had not been set up very tight with the lanyards in the first place, or her hull was distorting, because her masts were like tall pines buffeted by gusts of wind. As she rolled to larboard the masts gave an enormous twitch and tightened all the shrouds on the starboard side with another violent jerk which Ramage thought would have parted them.

Even as he watched the ship, the frequency of the roll seemed to be slowing down but it was increasing in amplitude, the masts swinging like inverted pendulums.

"All that water swilling round as though it was inside a bladder," Aitken said miserably. His love of ships and the sea made him hate to watch a ship die, even if she was an enemy. "Fancy scuttling her . . ."

"They didn't," Ramage said. "She sprang the butts of some planks just as we started to catch up. Seems a mortar shell burst in her wake as she came out of Porto Ercole, so one of the bomb ketches can claim her. The French didn't find any damage - until we started closing up on her and they began to drive her hard. Then she sprang a butt, then more went. . . That was why she suddenly luffed up - the water was pouring in."

"Those bomb ketches earned their pay today," Southwick commented. "Whew, just look at that!"

The frigate rolled towards them and, for a moment, seemed about to capsize: the remaining yards came swinging round the masts like flails, again to hang vertically, and they could see several guns dropping across the deck, ripping away the bulwarks on one side as the train and side tackles and breechings tore out the eyebolts, and then falling to crash through the other. As the Furet staggered back again, like a drunken man making an enormous effort to stay on his feet, they could see that the bulwarks, jagged where the guns had fallen, were now like the smashed-in battlements of a besieged castle.

The red cutter was back among the survivors, picking up more men as the jolly boat and then the launch returned to the Calypso and sodden, spluttering Frenchmen climbed up the side, to be met by seamen who marched them forward to the fo'c'sle while others kept them covered with muskets.

Southwick waved down at the bosun, who called back: "That makes seventy-three, sir. I reckon there's another couple of hundred left."

"Looks like it from up here," the master said, "but there's no rush, they've all found floating wreckage or hammocks. She had a full complement, from the look -"

He broke off as the Furet rolled slowly to starboard, so that for a few moments he was looking down on to her decks, the view of a bird hovering seven or eight hundred feet above her when she was floating normally. Now he saw more guns breaking loose from the larboard side and falling across the ship, smashing their way into the sea through the bulwarks.

Water pouring into the ship through the starboard gunports, now immersed, built up the air pressure down below and water spurted up through unexpected holes like whales spouting; suddenly a dozen or more casks popped out of the hatches like, as Southwick commented, peas rolled out of a measuring mug. Still the great masts continued to heel; several of the yards dropped so that once again they were perpendicular to the masts; then the tips of the yards touched the water as she continued rolling over, her larboard side rising like a surfacing whale as the starboard sank. With a graceful but despairing slow movement she turned upside-down, the black planking vanishing as she capsized, to be replaced by the coppered bottom of the ship. The copper was reddish here and green there and tried to reflect the sunlight; whole sections were missing, and there the teredo borers would have riddled the wood . . . The ship paused for a minute or two, white swirls of frothing water showing where air was still forcing its way out of the hull as water poured in and looking, from this distance, like grotesque whirlpools swirling round a half-tide rock.

Suddenly they were all looking at a great smooth patch of sea, and while they absorbed that shock, dozens of pieces of wood came to the surface, some of them long topsail and topgallant yards which shot up several feet like leaping sword-fish before dropping back to float as if it were kindling tossed into a village pond. Great bubbles of air belched up and slowly the wind waves covered the smooth patch where the Furet had been.

Ramage turned away and saw the unwounded French officer standing at a gunport abreast the mainmast, a Marine behind him. Obviously Renwick had allowed him to watch his ship die while the other one was being treated by Bowen.

While the rest of the survivors were being picked up he had work to do, Ramage realized, and the first task was to see what was in that weighted box. Renwick had, as instructed, left it on Ramage's desk, watched by the sentry. It was the usual type in which most ships carried the secret papers unless their captains preferred a canvas bag. It would sink quickly when thrown overboard, but in the case of the Furet the man responsible for making sure it was thrown over the side when the colours were struck had, fortunately, failed in his duty. Perhaps, in the excitement, his first lieutenant had forgotten it or been killed. Unless there were two boxes? That might well be the case, Ramage thought. The second box, with the secret papers, orders, signal book, challenge and private signals for the next three months might have been put down beside the binnacle and, as the colours came down, thrown over the side. Or, he realized with dismay, it might still have been there as he stood talking to the French officers; it might just this moment have sunk with the Furet.

He shook the box but the weight of the lead prevented him from guessing if it was empty. He looked around for the Marine sentry at his door and said: "Use your bayonet to open this box, please."

When he saw the impatient look on Ramage's face the man put his foot on the box, pinning it to the deck as he inserted the bayonet point into the tiny gap between lid and box just above the lock.

Suddenly the box sprang open and a bar of lead, which had been inside it, slid across the deck and startled the Marine who, never having seen such a thing before, made a leap for it as Ramage hurriedly grabbed the box and looked inside, seeing that there were several papers.

He sat at the desk and put the battered box in front of him. All at once he felt so weary that he would have liked to sleep for the rest of the day. One French frigate blown to pieces in Porto Ercole by a mortar shell, another sunk alongside the Calypso, a third looking badly damaged in the fleeting glance he had given her as they passed the harbour entrance. Two out of three accounted for. Considering that they were formerly sister ships of the Calypso, a superstitious man might feel a chill. Yet perhaps not... the fourth, the Calypso, flew different colours and had a different loyalty . . .

What was it about the cabin in the Furet that had looked odd? The memory nagged him. The cabin was the same shape as this one, although the furniture was better. The lid had come off the wine cooler. The left-hand drawers were full of the bits and pieces that a man tended to accumulate in extra drawers.

A jacket had been slung down on the settee. Not a captain's coat because the epaulettes were wrong. He knew very little about French naval uniforms but could recognize the coat of a French captain, and that was not one. Based on that one glance, when he was thinking of something else, and his present memory of it, that frock coat belonged to someone senior, probably a rear-admiral.