The Ramage Touch Read Online Free Page B

all means give written orders, otherwise officers might suspect their captain was trying to avoid responsibility if anything went wrong later, but if the plan was so complicated that its execution required to be written, it was too complicated. All too often the bulk of any plan had to be carried out by seamen and Marines who lacked nothing in courage or initiative but who might not be able to read or write. They acted instinctively; usually they could be relied on to do the sensible thing. But, as Southwick once said emphatically: ‘Don’t stitch up anything fancy.’
    Ramage told Aitken: ‘Orsini will command the red cutter and Jackson the green.’ A moment later he added: ‘You’d better send Rossi and Stafford in the red cutter, too.’
    ‘Yes, sir. Young Orsini’s got to get experience, but there’s no need for him to take too many risks.’
    ‘I’m not concerned with Orsini’s personal risks,’ Ramage said sharply, ‘but he’ll be responsible for eighteen Marines and the ten seamen at the oars.’
    ‘Of course, sir,’ Aitken said hurriedly, knowing Ramage’s strict rule that Orsini should receive no favouritism. The Scot knew only too well that the result was very unfair on the lad because Orsini had a far harder time than any other young midshipman. But the nephew and heir to the ruler of the state of Volterra was cheerful, absurdly brave, quite useless at mathematics, apparently a natural seaman, and a favourite with most people on board. Southwick – old enough, as he said on one occasion when trying to din some mathematics into him, to be his great-grandfather – liked him, so did Alberto Rossi, the Genovese, an able seaman who kept his history in Genoa a secret (most people were sure that he had stabbed a man) but whose casual remarks from time to time gave glimpses of a lurid past. The man who had struggled through boyhood in the back streets of Genoa and the fourteen-year-old aristocrat who was the heir to a state, seemed to share the same practical approach to life. Perhaps it was really a practical approach to death.
    ‘Very well, Mr Aitken, we’ll heave-to now and have a good look round before we get the cutters hoisted out.’
    Ten minutes later the Calypso was stopped in the water, her foretopsail and foretopgallant hauled round until the wind blew on the forward side, trying to push her bow one way while the wind on the after sails tried to push her bow round the other. Southwick had trimmed the sails so that the opposing thrusts were equal and the ship, balancing like a pair of scales with similar weights in each pan, sat on the water like a gull so that when the order was given the two cutters could be hoisted out by the stay tackles. Once in the water the boats were led aft and streamed astern, where both crews would wait by the rope ladders which were ready to be rolled down from the taffrail. The boats would be visible from the French ships, but it was not unusual for a frigate to tow a boat or two in reasonably calm water.
    ‘We’ll go in closer,’ Ramage said. ‘Half a mile.’
    The moon was rising higher, making an ever-widening silver path to the French ships. Southwick gave the orders for the foreyards to be braced up; the sheets and braces were hauled home – there was very little weight on them – the tacks settled, and the water began chuckling under the Calypso ’s bow as the frigate gathered way again. On the fo’c’sle a group of men under the bosun were rousing out a cable and preparing an anchor.
    As he watched through the nightglass for the moment when one of the two ships would be right in the path of the moonlight, Ramage tried yet again to distinguish the type. Was he taking all this trouble just for a couple of leaky galliots laden with casks of Marsala, or local craft from the Adriatic come round to the Tyrrhenian Sea collecting marble from Carrara, or delivering salt fish from Leghorn, or gunpowder from Toulon? He would know soon enough.
    He could hear