Dudley Pope - Ramage and the Guillotine

Ramage reached across the breakfast table for the silver bell, shook it and waited. After more than a year at sea in one of the King's ships (when meals were usually dreaded as unimaginative variations on a theme of salt beef or salt pork, and bread was a polite name for hard biscuit that an honest baker would disown and a potter would proclaim a credit to his oven) his stomach still rebelled at the rich fare that old Mrs Hanson insisted on providing for every meal, including breakfast.

She had been the family cook and housekeeper at the London house for as long as Ramage could remember, and her short-sighted husband was the butler, a timid and wispy-haired man whose life seemed to be a sheepish hunt for his mislaid spectacles.

Mrs Hanson firmly believed that all sailors, be they admirals or seamen, lowly lieutenants like Ramage or portly masters, were deliberately underfed by a scheming Admiralty which calculated the scale of rations on the principle that fighting cocks were starved for hours before being put into the cockpit to battle for their lives. It seemed to Ramage that whenever he came up to London on leave she was determined to cram enough food into him to last another year at sea.

'You rang, my Lord?'

Ramage glanced up to find Hanson waiting expectantly, his spectacles slowly sliding down his stub of a nose. 'Ah - please thank Mrs Hanson for an excellent breakfast.'

'But you've hardly touched the cold tongue, sir,' Hanson protested plaintively. 'And the oysters - you haven't eaten a single one!'

'Hanson,' Ramage said sternly, knowing that to the butler he was still a small boy, to be humoured, but made to eat every scrap of food on his plate, ‘you should remember I've always hated oysters; the mere thought of them makes me queasy.'

The butler shook his head sadly. 'Mrs Hanson will be upset; sets great store by oysters, she does; reckons they build you up. A score for breakfast, she says, and you'll never come to no 'arm for the rest of the day.'

'Just look at me,' Ramage said patiently. 'Do you think I'm fading away?'

'Bit on the lean side, my Lord,' Hanson said warily, remembering how sun-tanned his Lordship had been when he first arrived back from the West Indies. 'Your face is paler, too. My wife commented on it yesterday.'

'Remind Mrs Hanson that suntan doesn't last for ever.'

'Well, it's been raining hard,' Hanson said lamely as he began to clear away the plates, 'an' it'll rain again before the day's out.'

'I'm sure it will,' Ramage said soothingly. 'Is anyone else in the family up and about yet?'

'Your father and mother, sir, and hot water has been sent up for the Marchesa, so she'll be down presently.'

Ramage sniffed doubtfully. 'Very well - please fetch me a newspaper.'

'The Morning Post or The Times, sir?'

'I'll have plenty of time to read both before the Marchesa is ready.'

Hanson smiled happily, nodding his head at some private thought as he went to the door. 'A lovely lady,' he murmured to himself, 'and her a foreigner, too ...'

Ramage grinned self-consciously and then felt foolish; praise for Gianna was not flattery for him! Still, Hanson's innocent remark emphasized that now was not the best of times to be a foreigner in England - in Great Britain and Ireland, he corrected himself. The Act of Union had become law while he was commanding the Triton brig in the West Indies, and recently he had been trying to break himself of the habit - which infuriated the Scots and Welsh - of saying England when he meant Britain. The trouble was that foreigners always refer to 'you English,' not 'you British.'

He took the newspapers from the silver tray Hanson was holding and shook his head at the discreet, 'Would you prefer to sit in the drawing-room, sir ...?'

His eye caught a name in the first item on the front page of the Morning Post:

The public will learn with great satisfaction that lord nelson, the hero of Copenhagen and the Nile, will soon leave Town on a secret mission which will rid the country of the Corsican Tyrant's threat of a grand invasion. We understand the Admiralty is confident that his Lordship will soon send the French invasion craft now gathering in Calais and Boulogne to watery graves.'

Hmm . . . the Government must be very worried if they thought it necessary to give Lord Nelson such a job: badgering barges in the Channel ports was more of a task for young frigate captains. Still, agents might have just discovered that Bonaparte had set a date for his great attempt, though it was more likely that the Government was trying to reassure the people.

As he read the next news item he knew it would make unwelcome reading for everyone living within twenty miles of the Kent and Sussex coasts:

'The latest intelligences received in London report that Bonaparte has given orders for the construction of another one hundred barges and fifty gunboats. We estimate that the fleet for the grand invasion now lying at Calais, Boulogne, Wimereux, Ambleteuse, Etaples, Havre de Grace, St Valery, Gravelines, Dunkirk and Ostend now totals more than three hundred large barges to carry men, horses, artillery and provisions, and two hundred gunboats of various sizes intended to defend the fleet and attack the stout defenders waiting on the English beaches. Construction of camps for Bonaparte's Army of Invasion proceeds quickly and our patrolling frigates daily see more tents being erected on the heights around Boulogne.'

He pictured the frigates tacking and wearing along the French coast by day and by night, hoping to catch and destroy any enemy vessels daring to move from one port to another. The French would take full advantage of their shallow draft, keeping close in to the beach, and hoping that the frigates waiting for them like sharks would accidentally strand themselves on off-lying sandbanks.

The completed barges and gunboats were anchored off each port, exposed to gales but protected from the British frigates by batteries of guns. At low water the vessels would dry out, sitting on hard sand or shingle and protected by cavalry patrols from marauding seamen landed by boats from the frigates.

It was a complicated cat-and-mouse game: at high water a frigate would tack back and forth close to an anchorage but beyond the range of the batteries and, when it judged the French gunners had been lulled into inactivity, suddenly swoop, hoping to fire a couple of broadsides into the anchored vessels before the French woke up and began a withering fire. But it was a dangerous game: the whole of the French coast was usually a lee shore, and a lucky shot could dismast a frigate and the wind drive her up on the beach.

As they tacked offshore, the officers in the frigates would be balancing themselves against the roll as they trained their telescopes on the hills and dunes round the ports. They would be counting yet again the scores of tents arranged with geometric precision round flagpoles from which Tricolours fluttered. They would note new camps being set up; off many ports they would see hundreds of tethered horses scattered across the hills, and ammunition wagons, field kitchens and field guns drawn up nearby. And the men in the frigates - and brigs and cutters - knew they were watching not only for signs of reinforcements but for the first hint that the troops were preparing to board the barges for the voyage across La Manche to the beaches of Kent and Sussex.

From what he had heard, the frigates were having very little success in their attacks: the French had so many batteries on the cliffs over the anchorages that they could keep up a lethal fire by day or night.