Dudley Pope - Ramage and the Freebooters

As Ramage's carriage rattled along Whitehall he was surprised to see the long and wide street was almost deserted. A file of red-coated soldiers swaggered past the end of Downing Street with the white plumes of their shakos streaming in the wind, boots gleaming black and cross-belts white from carefully applied pipe-clay. A brewer's dray drawn by two pairs of horses and heavily laden with hogsheads precariously balanced, pyramid fashion, approached the Admiralty from Charing Cross.

A pieman pushing his handcart, corpulent from tasting his own wares and obviously tipsy from sampling those of a brewer, stopped outside the Banqueting House of Old Whitehall Palace and as he mopped his brow bellowed, 'Buy my plum pudden!' A pedlar, sitting astride his spavined horse and trying to persuade the occasional passers-by to look at the remarkable bargains in lace and brocade displayed in his large leather pack, glowered at the pieman and moved on another few yards.

On both sides of the street a few people dodging puddles left by a heavy shower of rain looked from a distance as if they were performing some complicated dance.

Ramage sat back, squashing the upholstery which exhaled a smell of mildew, picked up his cocked hat and jammed it on his head and—as the driver swore at the horses, swinging them over to the middle of the road for the sharp left turn under the narrow archway and into the forecourt of the Admiralty—wished he felt more like the naval officer he was than an errant schoolboy summoned before a wrathful headmaster.

The wheels chattered over the cobblestones before me carriage stopped in front of the four immense columns dominating the main entrance. The carriage door creaked open and a hand pulled the folding steps down. The doorman coming out of the entrance hall as Ramage alighted, stopped when he saw the visitor was a mere lieutenant and went back into the building.

Telling the coachman to wait, Ramage walked up the steps into the spacious entrance hall where a large, six-sided glass lantern hung from the ceiling and his footsteps echoed on the marble floor. On his left the large fireplace was still full of ashes from the night porter's fire and on each side of it were the curious hooded black armchairs which always reminded him of a widow's bonnet.

From one of them a liveried attendant rose with calculated languidness and, in a bored and condescending voice, asked:

'Your business... sir?'

The 'sir' was not an afterthought; from constant practice it was carefully timed to indicate lieutenants were the lowliest of commission officers and that this was the Admiralty, of whose doors the speaker was the lawful guardian.

'To see the First Lord.'

'I... let me look at my list.'

Ramage tapped the floor with the scabbard of his dress sword.

The man opened the drawer of a small table and, although the list was obviously the only thing in it, he scrabbled about for some time before taking out a sheet of paper. After glancing at it he looked at Ramage insolently before replacing it and closing the drawer. 'You'll have to------'

'I have an appointment,' Ramage interrupted.

'Quite... sir. I'll try to arrange for you to see one of the secretaries. Maybe even this afternoon.'

'I have an appointment with Lord Spencer at nine o'clock. Please tell him I'm here.'

'Look,' sneered the man, all pretence at politeness vanishing, 'we get lieutenants in 'ere by the gross, captains by the score and admirals by the dozen, all claiming they've appointments with 'is Lordship. There's only one person on the list to see 'is Lordship this morning and 'e ain't you. You can wait in there'—he pointed at the notorious waiting-room to the left of the main doors—'and I'll see if I can find someone to see you.'

Ramage was rubbing the lower of the two scars on his right brow: an unconscious gesture which a few weeks earlier would have warned a whole ship's company that their young captain was either thinking hard or getting angry.

Suddenly turning to the doorman—who was obviously enjoying the episode—Ramage snapped: 'You! Go at once and tell the First Lord that Lord Ramage has arrived for his appointment.'

The man was scuttling for the corridor at the far end of the hall before Ramage turned back to the liveried attendant who, by now looking worried and rubbing his hands together like an ingratiating potman, said reproachfully:

'Why, your Lordship, I didn't realize... You didn't tell me your name.'

'You didn't ask me and you couldn't be bothered to see if I was the person on the list You merely hinted that a guinea would help arrange for me to see a clerk. Now hold your tongue.'

The man was about to say something when he saw Ramage's eyes: dark brown and deep-set under thick eyebrows, they now gleamed with such anger the man was frightened, noticing for the first time the two scars on the lieutenant's brow. One was a white line showing clearly against the tanned skin; the other pink and slightly swollen, obviously the result of a recent wound.

But Ramage was still shaken—as was every other officer in the Royal Navy—by the latest news from Spithead and felt a bitter rage not with the man as an individual but as a spiteful personification of the attitude of many of the Admiralty and Navy Board civilian staff.

By now impatiently pacing up and down the hall, Ramage thought of the dozens of assistant, junior and senior clerks, and the assistant, junior and senior secretaries now working under this very roof, all too many of whom administered the Navy with an impersonal condescension and contempt for both seamen and sea officers amounting at times to callousness.

It was understandable because of the system; but it was also unforgivable. Many—in fact most—of these men owed their time-serving, well-pensioned jobs to the influence of some well-placed relative or friend. They filled in forms, checked and filed reports, and at the drop of a hat rattled off the wording of regulations parrot-fashion, unconcerned that the seaman they might be cheating out of a pension was illiterate and ignorant of his legal rights, or that the captain of a ship of war suddenly ordered to account for the loss of some paltry item might be almost at his wit's end with exhaustion after weeks of keeping a dose blockade on some God-forsaken, gale-swept French port An inky-fingered clerk was, in his own estimation, far more important than a sea officer; ships and seamen were to him an annoyance he had to suffer. No one ever pointed out that he existed solely to keep the ships at sea, well-found, well-provisioned and manned by healthy and regularly paid seamen. No, to these damned quill-pushers a ship of war was a hole in a gigantic pile of forms and reports lined with wood and filled with convicts.

Most of this shameful business at Spithead was due to men like this, whether a junior clerk at £75 a year humbugging the distraught widow of a seaman killed in battle or a senior secretary at £800 a year ignoring the sea officers and telling ministers what they wanted to hear. The Devil take the----- 'My Lord...'

The porter was trotting alongside him and had obviously been trying to attract Ramage's attention for some moments.

'My Lord, if you'll come this way please.'

A few moments later he was ushering Ramage through a door saying, 'Would you wait in here, sir: His Lordship will be with you in a few minutes.'

As the door closed behind him Ramage realized he was in the Board Room: in here, under the ceiling decorated with heraldic roses picked out in white and gilt, the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty sat and deliberated.