Ships of the line usually meant problems: either one of them carried an admiral who wanted to give fresh orders, or the senior of the two captains had some task to be carried out. Well, Ramage thought grimly, he was sailing under Admiralty orders, which should make him proof against being humbugged about by any passing senior officers.
He watched Orsini arrive on the quarterdeck, collect a telescope and jump up into the ratlines in a smooth scramble aloft. If Gianna could see her nephew now, he mused. That was a big 'if', since it was by no means certain that she was still alive.
How the years passed. In many ways it seemed no time ago that he had rescued the young and vulnerable Marchesa di Volterra from the beaches of Tuscany, snatching her (with the help of the seaman Jackson) from under the feet of Napoleon's cavalry. It seemed no time at all that he had fallen in love with her (thought he had fallen in love with her, he corrected himself) and back in England the refugee Marchesa had gone to live with his parents. And then later her nephew had escaped from Volterra, a lively lad who had wanted to join the Navy and, at Gianna's request, Paolo Orsini had come to the Calypso as a midshipman and quickly learned seamanship and become a popular young officer.
And then . . '. and then had come the peace following the Treaty of Amiens, and Gianna had decided that she must return to her kingdom of Volterra. His father and he had argued with her, warning her that she would be at risk from Napoleon's assassins, and that the peace would not last. But she would not listen and she had left London for Paris, on her way to Italy. They had heard nothing more of her, and in the meantime Ramage had met and married Sarah, now his wife. Gianna was an ever-fading memory, jogged into existence again whenever he looked at Paolo and remembered. As he had just done. But memories of Gianna were fading, of that there was no doubt; he had difficulty in recalling the details of her face; all that remained was a picture of her personality: lively, at times imperious, warm yet hot- tempered, but for all that very much the ruler of the kingdom of Volterra which, small on the map, yet loomed large in the life of the young girl who - until Napoleon's Army of Italy drove her out - was its sole ruler.
He put the telescope back to his eye. What a long string of memories had been called up by watching Paolo climbing the rigging. How different was Sarah, the wife he had left in England.
It was strange how the Calypso's ship's company knew both women so well. Gianna because many of them had helped rescue her and been on board the ship that took her back to England, and Sarah for a similar reason, only this time the rescue had been from an island off the coast of Brazil.
Yes, those two sail had hauled their wind to meet him, and he was sure they were not frigates: more like ships of the line. A couple of ships making their way from Naples to Gibraltar - or through the Gut on their way to England - would be nothing out of the ordinary; in fact it would be a commonplace, a one-line entry in his journal, merely noting the date, time and names of the ships.
Orsini hailed from the masthead and Kenton snatched up the speaking trumpet to reply. The two sail, Paolo reported, were ships of the line and they had come round on to opposing courses. Their hulls were still below the horizon so it was impossible to identify them.
'Tell him to keep a sharp lookout,' Ramage said without thinking.
Paolo of all people would keep a sharp lookout. His hatred of the French would make sure of that. Ever since the end of the brief peace following the Treaty of Amiens, when his aunt had vanished and it seemed only logical to suppose that she had either been murdered by Napoleon's men or imprisoned, he had added bitterness to his hatred. No Frenchman, Ramage suspected, should ever ask Paolo for quarter.
Down at one of the forward guns on the starboard side a group of seamen gossiped, having completed the morning's exercises and expecting any minute to get the order to run the gun in and secure it. They had heard the lookout's hail and Midshipman Orsini's report; they knew that now they would have to wait until the two ships were close enough to answer the challenge.
'We seem to spend 'arf our life waitin',' growled Stafford, a Cockney seaman. 'Ships of the line - must be ours: stands to reason, after Trafalgar.'
'It'll take more than Trafalgar to change the rules,' said Jackson. 'We didn't sink every French ship of the line, you know.'
'The way Staff tells the story, we did!' said Rossi, the Italian from Genoa. 'Not one escaped!'
'We didn't do too badly,' Stafford said complacently. 'A few frigates got away, but they'll be too scared to come out for months.'
He spoke without considering that the other four of the gun's crew were French, royalists who had signed on in the Royal Navy after helping Ramage and his wife Sarah escape from France when war had broken out again.
'Don't underestimate Napoleon,' said one of the men.
'Boney wasn't at Trafalgar, Louis,' Stafford said contemptuously. 'Pity 'e wasn't; we'd have taken him prisoner and led 'im up Ludgate 'ill with a chain round 'is neck and 'anded 'im over to the Lord Mayor.'
'He's cunning,' Louis persisted. 'See how he has gone off to attack Russia ...'
'Well, he don't need a navy to attack them, I must say,' Stafford admitted.
'And it means he has time to rebuild his navy,' Louis insisted.
'He ain't got much time,' Stafford said emphatically. 'Yer can't build a ship of the line in six months, 'specially if you ain't got no wood to speak of, and we know 'e ain't.'
'He's got enough wood to repair those ships we knocked about,' Jackson said. 'Patch 'em up and send 'em to sea to interfere with our shipping - that would soon have us hopping about.'
'I don't see why,' Stafford said stubbornly.
'Use your head,' Jackson said sharply. 'A ship of the line at sea on the loose means at least one of our snips of the line finding her. And it means a dozen or more looking for her. Don't think it'd be a question of sending out a frigate or two ...'
'All right, all right, I get your point,' Stafford conceded. 'But I presume their Lordships will be keepin' a blockade on places like Brest, Lorient, Cadiz and Toulon.'
'And Ferrol, and Cartagena . . . You forget the Dons have more ports than the French - as many, anyway. And to prevent one ship slipping out on a dark night it has to be a tight blockade.'
'Frigates,' Louis said unexpectedly. 'Supposing the French turned loose all their frigates to raid convoys. Don't forget we rarely have more than a couple of frigates escorting the big West Indian convoys-just imagine three French frigates attacking ...'
'The way you all tell it, we won Trafalgar and lost the war,' Stafford grumbled.
'No, nothing like that,' Jackson said placatingly. 'We're only saying don't expect we won't see another French sail at sea.'
'You'll be saying next that these two up ahead are French and steering down to sink us,' Stafford retorted.
'No, they're probably Russian,' Louis said drily. 'With snow on their decks!'
'Wild men, these Russians,' Stafford said. 'I remember seeing a Russian ship in Malta some years ago. Their seamanship was 'orrible. Good job they 'ad strong ships, the way they came alongside the jetty. 'Bang, crash, sling a rope' - that's 'ow they did it.'
Ramage put the telescope to his eye again and then said to Southwick: 'I don't like the cut of their sails. Their hulls will be coming up over the horizon any moment now, and we'll hear from Orsini, but in the meantime those sails have a strange cut.'
'Could be a couple of Algerines,' Southwick commented. 'They've got a few big ships.'
Ramage shook his head. 'I don't think so,' he said. 'They could be, but why would there be two of them?'
Southwick shrugged his shoulders. 'No telling with Algerines.'
Several more minutes passed before Orsini hailed, and there was no mistaking the excitement in his voice. 'Deck there! I can make out their hulls now. They look French!'
Ramage glanced across at Southwick. 'Could be like us -captured and put into service.'
'Aye,' Southwick said. 'Maybe even taken at Trafalgar. Could have been bought in at Gibraltar and commissioned there.'
Ramage nodded again. 'The battle was four months ago, so there's been enough time.'
And that, he thought to himself, settles that: it was an uncomfortable thought that two French line of battle ships could be bearing down on them. There could be no escape; the Calypso would be pounded into firewood unless she could get far enough away to escape in the dark of night.
Ramage knew that now he had two options: first, to turn away this minute, and make a bolt for it. This could get him the reputation of the captain who fled at the sight of two of his own ships. Or, second, carry on and meet them, making or answering the challenge, assuming they were the King's ships, captured from the French.
It was not the first time he had had to make the choice, and looking at it another way, since the Calypso had been captured from the French and bought into the Royal Navy, she too could be mistaken for French by any other ships and in fact more than once he had passed her off to fool the French.
'The man who ran away' - no, he did not want that reputation, and with two ships involved it would be one to spread quickly. Not that anyone would really blame him: a frigate being engaged by two ships of the line would be as brief an episode as a kitten being savaged by two bulldogs.
Five minutes later, when Ramage put the telescope to his eye again, there was no mistaking the correctness of Orsini's hail: the two ships were French; that much was clear from the sweep of their sheers and the cut of their sails. But there was no reason to suppose that since they Were French built they were not King's ships. The more he thought about it, the more likely it seemed that they had been taken at Trafalgar.
Ramage noted that both ships were staying close together: they were sailing within a couple of ship's lengths of each other. If they were French and planning mischief, they would spread out to cut off the Calypso's escape. But in fact they were behaving just like two British ships of the line after sighting a friendly frigate . . .
'Beat to quarters, Mr Kenton. Have the challenge and our pendant numbers bent on, and the reply, in case they challenge first.'
The thudding of the drum as a Marine drummer hammered away with his drumsticks suddenly brought the Calypso's decks to life, as though an anthill had been disturbed with a stick.
The gunner and his mate hurried below to the magazine, unrolling felt curtains as they went, to prevent any flash from the guns penetrating to the powder stowed in scores of cartridges and in casks in the powder room.
Men rigged the washdeck pumps and began sluicing water across the decks as others scattered sand: water would soak any spilled gunpowder and the sand would prevent feet slipping. The second captains of all the guns hurried down to the magazine to collect the locks from the gunner which would provide the spark to fire the guns. They collected priming wires and lanyards for the locks as well as horns of priming powder and boxes of quills, which were already filled with priming powder.
Ship's boys, known as powder monkeys, waited in the long corridor leading to the magazine, ready with their cylindrical wooden boxes to receive the cartridges
