'Ah yes, you told me. Did very well in that Porto Ercole affair with the bomb ketches, and then with young Paolo in the convoy from Sardinia.'
'That's the lad. If he goes on like this he deserves to get his flag.'
'Won't stand a chance if there's peace. By the way, Nicholas, you ought to get Paolo up here from Chatham. Gianna is anxious to inspect her nephew, but she won't say anything to you for fear of it seeming like favouritism.'
Ramage smiled and nodded. 'Yes, I'd guessed that, and talked it over with my first lieutenant and Southwick. There's an enormous amount Paolo can learn while a refit like this goes on, so we decided he'd get no leave for the first three weeks but they'd cram as much as they could into him and then make sure he has a week or two with Gianna.'
'She's so proud of him.'
'She's right to be. He's very much like her in some ways. Not so - well, explosive, but a very quick brain. Gets on very well with the men. Brave to the point of foolhardiness. If he survives and improves his mathematics, he'll pass for lieutenant at the first try.'
'Have you thought of taking Gianna down to Chatham so that she could see the ship as well?'
Ramage's face fell. 'What a fool I am! She'd love it and all the old Kathleens - Jackson, Rossi, Southwick, Stafford -would go mad. Would you and mother come down as well?'
'Ah - well, I was hoping you'd propose it. Yes, we'd be delighted: we've already discussed it, so I know your mother's answer.'
CHAPTER TWO
The black-hulled Calypso frigate had caused a stir of interest from the moment she sailed up the muddy Medway on the first of the flood, her ship's company racing round the deck working sheets, tacks and braces as she tacked and then tacked again the moment she had way on. The Medway narrows up as it nears the towns past the ruins of Upnor Castle (battered a century and a half earlier by the Dutchman, de Ruyter), and has some nasty bends, with mudflats a few inches below the water to trap the unwary.
Once she had moored off Chatham Dockyard, the ship and her men came under the authority of the Commissioner and was soon the target of all his minions. Ramage had managed to get a copy of a recent Royal Kalendar to see the names of the men who would be responsible for the Calypso's refit and whom Aitken, the first lieutenant, would spend several weeks cajoling, persuading and threatening to get work done properly and reasonably promptly.
The first name in the Kalendar under 'Chatham Yard' was the Commissioner Resident, listed as 'F.J. Wedge, esq., 800 L., more for paper and firing 12 L'. Ramage conceded that the Commissioner probably earned his £800 a year pay, and probably quadrupled it from bribes and all the corrupt activities a man in his position could indulge in. The Navy Board were showing their usual parsimony in allowing only £12 a year to pay for stationery and fuel for the fires or stoves. Still, there must be plenty of old wood lying around.
The Master Shipwright, Martin's father, was paid £200 a year - the same as the Master Ropemaker, Master Boatbuilder, Master Mastmaker, Master Sailmaker, Master Smith, Master Carpenter, Master Joiner and Master Bricklayer. The Bosun of the Dockyard received only £80, but the storekeeper received £200 and was probably - because of the opportunity for fraud - the wealthiest of the Dockyard employees.
Most of them had come on board as the frigate was moored up, not because a 36-gun French frigate captured and brought into the King's service was an unusual sight but because the exploits of the Calypso and her captain had been mentioned in enough Gazettes to make them both famous. It would not mean any favourable treatment for the ship, because Dockyard officials were by nature close-fisted men, issuing paint, rope, canvas and the like as though they paid for it themselves. There was the story of one eccentric and aristocratic captain who, receiving the Navy Board's issue of paint for his ship, wrote to their Lordships and asked which side of the ship he should paint. Their Lordships were not amused and the captain ended up doing what most captains did - paying out of his own pocket for the extra paint needed.
Ramage had stayed on board for a week as the Calypso swung on the buoy with wind and tide until their Lordships answered his request for leave - no officer was allowed 'to sleep out of his ship' without written permission, and that included admirals. Ramage had been given a month's leave and the ship was left in command of James Aitken. The Scotsman had no wish to go up to Perth on leave (Ramage discovered for the first time that Aitken's mother, the widow of a Navy master, had recently died) and he obviously trusted no one else to make sure the refit was done properly. Ramage knew that, however keen and eagle-eyed Aitken was, the man who really mattered was Southwick, the master, a man old enough to be the father and almost the grandfather of both his captain and first lieutenant.
Leave for the men, all of whom had been away from Britain for at least a couple of years, was always a problem for any captain. Usually half the men had in the first place been seized by pressgangs, and if the ship was an unhappy one because of the captain or her officers, giving the men leave would result in a number of them deserting: never returning to the ship and forfeiting a year or more of the pay due to them. Popular captains did not have to worry so much, but even if the men returned, a percentage of them would have spent their leave in and out of brothels and would come back riddled with venereal disease. This would put money in the surgeon's pocket, because he was allowed to make a charge for venereal treatment, but eventually it meant lost men: nothing cured syphilis.
Some captains gave leave only to selected men but Ramage disliked the system: it smacked of favouritism and the men not chosen were resentful. As he told Aitken, it was leave for all or for none, and he had decided on all: they would be allowed two weeks each.
One watch could go at once; the other when the first came back. He had mustered the ship's company aft on the quarterdeck and told them of his decision - and told them he trusted them to come back on time. In the meantime, he added, the watch left on board would have to work twice as hard.
Nor had that been an exaggeration. One of the most arduous tasks to be done was changing the Calypso's guns: she still mounted the French cannons with which she had been armed when Ramage and his men captured her. Ramage had managed in Antigua to get rid of the unreliable French gunpowder and stock the magazine with British, and there had been enough French roundshot on board to fit their size of guns, but the ship had been in action enough times to have the gunner reporting that the shot locker was now less than a third full.
The Ordnance Board had agreed to supply British 12-pounders to replace the French, and the shot to go with them, but not without a good deal of argument. Ramage never understood why the Ordnance Board, part of the Army, should have anything to do with naval gunnery, let alone control it completely. Anyway, hoisting out all the Calypso's French guns and carriages and lowering them into hoys, and then getting all the shot up from the shot lockers - a deep, narrow structure in the ship like a huge wardrobe open at the top - was going to be hard work for the fewer than one hundred men comprising the one watch left on board. Then the hoys would bring out the new guns and carriages, and getting them on board would be more wearying than disposing of the French ones.
Once the new guns were at their ports, there would be new train tackles and breechings to be spliced up - the Master Ropemaker had agreed that the French rope had not been of a very good quality to start with, and two years' more service had brought it to the end of its life: when the rope was twisted to reveal the inner strands, they were grey; there was no sign of the rich golden brown of good rope.
Halyards, tacks, sheets, braces and lifts were all being renewed, along with many of the shrouds. The Master Shipwright and Master Mastmaker had inspected the masts and decided not to hoist them out for inspection. Only the foreyard, which had broken in the Mediterranean and been fished by the Calypso's carpenter and his mates, would be replaced. Then the Calypso would be towed by her boats into the drydock and, once all the water had been pumped out, leaving the ship sitting high and dry, shored up by large baulks of timber wedged horizontally between the ship's side and the walls of the dock, her copper sheathing would be inspected. All the sheets round the bow and stern would have to be replaced - this was a regular procedure for ships of war because, for a reason not yet understood (though there were dozens of theories), the sheathing there always became thinner and thinner and was eventually reduced to a mass of pinholes. Ramage hoped - even though it would delay sailing - that all the sheathing would be renewed.
It was unusual to keep a ship's officers and men standing by her during a long refit; usually the captain was given another command, and the officers and men distributed among other ships, but as a gesture to Ramage's record, Lord St Vincent, the First Lord, had directed that the Calypso's men should be kept together. Which was also more than a hint that he had a job for them all once the refit was over.
The Calypso, newly coppered, with new rigging and perhaps even new sails, would sail like a witch, he had told his father, who shared his enthusiasm for the skill of French naval architects: they had mastered that strange mixture of artistry and science which produced fast ships of war, particularly frigates.
'Jacko!' Stafford said as soon as he found the American on deck among the crowd of men who were preparing to hoist a gun out of a port.
'Jacko, you 'eard the scuttlebutt? About the captain?'
The tall, narrow-faced American whose sandy hair was thinning, seemed to freeze. He turned round slowly and stared at Stafford. 'No. He's all right, isn't he?'
The Cockney seaman laughed, not realizing the effect his question had on the captain's coxswain. 'Yus, he's all right - what harm could come to him in London? No, he's bringing the Marchesa down to see us. And his father and mother. Old 'Blaze-away' himself!'
'You gave me a scare,' Jackson said, turning back to give orders to the men straining at the rope. 'I thought something dreadful had happened.'
'You don't trust him on his own!'
'I've picked him up unconscious enough times, bleeding like a stuck pig from a sword cut or a bullet, never to take anything for granted.'
'An' he's saved you enough times,' Stafford said, intending to tease.
'Five times up to now,' Jackson said soberly, if I stay with him I may reach old age and see South Carolina again.'
'You don't seem very pleased at the idea o' seein' the Marchesa again.'
'I am. It's just I'm still cold all over from your clumsiness. And his father. What a sailor he was. The Countess must be a remarkable woman, judging from her husband and her son.'
'There's Rossi - hey, Rosey, hear about the Marchesa?'
The Italian seaman looked up. He had no need to ask 'What Marchesa?', but because of the tone of Stafford's voice he suddenly grinned. 'Are they getting married?'
'Nah, nothing like that. But they - she and the captain and his father and mother - are coming down to see the ship tomorrer. Probably coming down specially to see Signor Alberto Rossi, once the pride o' Genoa!'
'Watch out,' Jackson muttered, 'here comes the bosun.'
The two seamen began heaving on the rope while Jackson went to the gun and made sure the cap squares holding the trunnions down on to the carriage had
