By now several men were walking aft from the fo'c'sle, all obviously just awakened, and followed by Martin's men.
'Tell them', Ramage told the master, 'tell them no harm will come to them unless they try to retake the ship. Where is your arms chest?'
The master pointed down the companionway near his feet. 'In my cabin. Six muskets and six pistols.'
'And powder and shot for those swivels?'
'There is a small locker at the forward side of my cabin. A half-cask of powder and a net of shot, and powder and shot for the small arms. Wads, too.'
Ramage nodded as he counted up the Frenchmen. Paolo had been right: only six, and that included the cook. And the lateen rig was so simple that they needed no more. But for the moment only Paolo, Rossi and Jackson understood the working of the lateen rig.
The sun was scorching. For a few minutes the big lateen sail gave some shade on one side; then the Passe Partout had to tack again, zigzagging through the convoy as Ramage watched for the slightest shift in wind direction that might give the Passe Partout an advantage in the struggle to beat up to the Magpie.
The privateer was a puzzle. Ramage had expected her to swoop on the rear ships, the ones right at the stern of the convoy and therefore dead to windward of the Calypso, but the schooner was simply tacking back and forth across the wake of the convoy, as if biding her time.
Had her master a better plan? Ramage thought for a few moments, putting himself in the position of the master of the British privateer suddenly coming across a French convoy escorted by one frigate. He would go for the biggest ship, but she was the Sarazine and the nearest to the frigate.
Very well, he would wait for darkness. Work his way round the convoy - not difficult with a following wind - and sneak in quietly to board in the darkness, having the Sarazine captured and sailing out of the convoy before the Calypso could do anything. If the frigate tried to recapture the Sarazine, then the Magpie would board another merchantman, put a prize crew on board and sail her out of the convoy. Ramage knew that if he commanded the Magpie he would try for three prizes and hope to get away with two, expecting the third to be recaptured by the frigate.
In the meantime the Passe Partout had to work her way up to windward and get close enough to the Magpie to establish communication. But how? At the moment the schooner was staying far enough astern of the convoy for the Passe Partout, if she could only get close enough to the Magpie, to hoist a white flag without any of the French ships seeing it. Would the Magpie think it a trap? Hardly, because there was no way a little tartane in open water in bright sunshine could trap a heavily armed privateer schooner. A pity merchant ships and privateers did not have the Navy's numerary code, because then Ramage could hoist a series of numbers which the Magpie could read out of the signal book as a message.
Again he nodded to Rossi, who had spent the last quarter of an hour at the helm; again the Italian leaned against the tiller; again the Passe Partout's bow swung across the horizon, to put the wind on the other side and bring the lateen yard slamming across as she tacked.
Martin, Orsini and Jackson were busy with the swivels. They had found ten roundshot for each of them and a copper-lined half-cask of powder in the locker forward of the master's cabin filled with cartridges. The wads were damp, so Martin had spread them out in the sun to dry before loading the guns. Several pieces of slowmatch were also hanging up to dry like lengths of stiff line - the guns were fired by slowmatch wound round linstocks; not for them the complication (and expense!) of flintlocks. Nor, from what Martin reported, the luxury of clean barrels: the bores of all of them were rusted, and they had trouble unblocking the touchhole of the forward one on the starboard side.
By now there were only two merchant ships in the convoy remaining between the Passe Partout and the Magpie schooner. Scared of the killer in their wake, they had set every stitch of canvas; and Ramage used the tartane's master's telescope to satisfy his curiosity. The topgallants of both merchant ships had lines of mildew on them, especially in bands where the wide canvas gaskets had held them furled against the yard, with every shower or downpour keeping that strip of canvas wetter for longer.
The next tack took the tartane close to the last ship, and Ramage could see two or three men aft watching, one holding a telescope and no doubt curious why a tartane should be making for the schooner. The fact that their escorting frigate was staying to leeward at the head of the convoy might be something of a surprise but more likely it was providing an incentive for the ship to catch up with the Sarazine. Anyway, they would have seen the tartane go up to the frigate.
Ramage carefully watched the Magpie, estimated her speed, assumed she would hold the course that was now taking her diagonally across the stern of the convoy to the southwest, and tacked the Passe Partout again.
Rossi was quite at home with the tartane; he had commented about them twice to Ramage, indicating he had served in them during his youth, nominally spent in Genoa.
He had searched the fo'c'sle and found half a parmigiano of an age, size and hardness, so Stafford claimed, making it suitable for repairing the stonework of St Paul's Cathedral. Certainly it withstood some violent cutlass blows from Rossi, who quickly found an axe and, later, a rasp in what was obviously the ship's tool chest. Parmigiano, he swore, was proof that there must be pasta somewhere in the ship and the ingredients for making some kind of sauce, and Ramage had given him fifteen minutes - until it was obvious that his skill was needed at the tiller - to find it. He had then discovered some spaghetti in a cask in the galley which, he declared, had not been completely eaten by weevils and from which he could make them a good supper. Several suppers, he had added, obviously hoping that would draw from the captain an indication of how long they would be in the Passe Partout.
Martin came aft to report that all six swivels could be fired and, thanks to a liberal application from the greasy slush found in the cook's slush bucket, the swivels now turned easily in the fittings in the bulwarks, and the trunnions of the guns moved freely in the swivels. There was no shot gauge to ensure that no shot was oversize or swollen by rust but it had been easy enough to try every shot in a gun: matter of rolling in the shot and then - with the muzzle inboard - tilting the barrel down so that the shot rolled out again into waiting hands. All the socket fittings for the swivels in the bulwarks looked sound enough. 'The guns have just been neglected for the past year: they were originally fitted well enough', Martin reported.
A year, Ramage thought: just a little less than the length of time the Royal Navy left the Mediterranean because of the demands for ships of war in other seas and other oceans. Clearly no Algerine pirates came far enough north to persuade this tartane's master that his swivels needed anything more than canvas covers by way of maintenance. Or, more likely, the tartane usually hugged the coast.
The schooner was still holding her course: obviously the Britons on board were either curious or uninterested in the tartane - staying on a course which would very soon have them crossing tracks could mean either.
Martin examined her with the glass, wiped the objective lens with a piece of cloth to remove specks of spray, and looked again.
'That hull hasn't seen a paintbrush for a year or two', he commented. 'And her jibs have an odd cut to them. Like flour bags, they belly so much.'
'I noticed that', Ramage said, taking another bearing of her across the top of the Passe Partout's steering compass.
'And those quarterboats - they weren't built in a British yard: look more like bananas.'
'Probably lost her own months ago and took those from an Algerine prize.'
'Still, she has British colours, so we shouldn't have any problems, sir.'
Ramage looked astern and saw that the last of the ships of the convoy were now two or three miles away, and Jackson, Orsini and Stafford were standing by the line reeved through a block at the after end of the lateen yard and used as a flag halyard.
He then looked across at the Magpie and called to Orsini, who promptly gestured to the two seamen and the French colours came down at the run. Another glance forward reassured him that on this tack the curve of the Passe Partout's sail made a big enough belly of canvas to hide any flags from the convoy.
As soon as the Tricolour was down and removed from the halyard, it was replaced with a flag twice as large, one which Jackson, Stafford and Rossi had hurriedly cobbled up from a bolt of canvas found in the bosun's tiny store in the fo'c'sle.
'Hoist it slowly', Ramage said, and a large white flag - as white as sail canvas could ever be - rose to the end of the yard.
Ramage took the glass and watched the afterdeck of the Magpie. A white flag was accepted universally as a flag of truce, and on the matter of colours, Ramage noted, the Magpie's were faded. There was just enough for it to be recognizable as a Red Ensign, but - there were a lot of swarthy faces on her fo'c'sle. She must have shipped a crew from - where? And there were many more men with swarthy faces on the quarterdeck, too. Swarthy! They were Arabs! They even had the Red Ensign upside-down, something he had only just noticed because it was flapping spasmodically in the Magpie's soldier's wind.
'Go about', he snapped at Rossi and with seconds counting leaned against the tiller.
'Man the swivels, she's an Algerine!'
The Passe Partout spun round to the northwest, away from her rendezvous with the schooner, and almost at once Ramage heard the faint pop-pop-pop of muskets and then the deeper boom of 6-pounder guns.
There was a heavy crash of spars and flapping of canvas as the Magpie wore round to try to intercept the tartane on her new tack and, with Rossi now holding the tiller over, Ramage was able to use the glass once again.
Yes, the larboard side of the Magpie, hidden until she wore round, was damaged and had been temporarily repaired but not painted - and now the Red Ensign was coming down and the green-and-white crescent flag used by the Algerines was going up in its place, an enormous flag that seemed more suitable for a fortress than a ship.
'Jackson - signal flags - British: hoist number sixteen where the Calypso can see it. Martin, Orsini, get those swivels firing - don't worry about hitting the Magpie, make plenty of smoke so that the Calypso sees it!'
'Number sixteen, 'Engage the enemy more closely' goingup, sir', Jackson yelled, overhauling the halyard.
'Yer gotta laugh', Stafford said gloomily as he slid a flannel cartridge into the muzzle of a swivel. 'Here we are, British mustering under Frog colours, and there they are, a crowd of h'Arabs musterin' under British colours to attack the Frogs.'
'Yes', said Paolo indignantly, pushing in a wad and rolling a shot after it, 'but you heard what the captain said – they had the British flag upside-down: they're just damned Saraceni. Barbarossa's brood.'
'Barbey Rossi - I'd forgotten 'im', Stafford said. 'You'd think he was an Italian with a name like that, just like our Rossi.'
'No', Paolo corrected him. ''Barba' means 'beard' and 'rossa' is red. Redbeard was his nickname, not his true name.'
Ramage watched the Magpie as the Algerines trimmed the sheets of the big mainsail and foresail. Obviously they were much more used to the lateen than the gaff rig, but reaching as she now was, with the wind on the beam, they would not need the sail-trimming skill necessary to get her moving fast to windward.
She came round into the Passe Partout's wake and about half a mile astern. Her masts were now in line.
'Martin! Your quadrant. Give me the elevation of the Magpie's foremast!'
The young lieutenant opened the mahogany box as the first of the tartane's swivels fired. By the time the third had fired he was balancing, sighting the Magpie in the quadrant's mirror. A few delicate movements with the quadrant's arm and Martin was reading off the minutes and degrees.
Ramage looked at his watch and said to Rossi: 'Keep her masts in line: I want to see how quickly she can overhaul us on a reach.'
'Very quickly', Rossi muttered. 'Only to windward can we escape!'
