Free Ramage & the Rebels by Dudley Pope

that ship; a passenger for Jamaica. She could have decided on an impulse to sail from England to join him, knowing that she would arrive almost as soon as a letter warning that she was on her way. His father and mother would try to dissuade her; but for too many years the Marchesa di Volterra had ruled her own little country among the Tuscan hills, had too many servants running around after her, too many ministers deferring to her, to hesitate when she wanted to do something.
    Her little kingdom had been overrun by Napoleon and she had fled to England, and there she lived in Cornwall, with his parents, old friends of her family, and they were treating her like a daughter. A somewhat wild and impetuous daughter, fiery tempered and yet gifted with a generous nature and, most important, a sense of humour. That the young Marchesa and their son had fallen in love they regarded as the most natural thing in the world, a fitting and suitable arrangement.
    Ramage knew that his father had spent too many years at sea to see anything particularly romantic in the fact that Ramage had rescued the Marchesa from the Tuscan beaches as French cavalry had hunted her: Admiral the Earl of Blazey knew his son had his duty to do, and naturally expected him to do it. That the Marchesa had turned out to be a tiny, black-haired beauty then barely twenty years old and not an ancient and gnarled tyrant was—well, the old Earl had shrugged his shoulders and made no comment, recalling Gianna’s mother, whom he had been expecting, not knowing that she had recently died.
    Ramage tried to stop his imagination plunging on. Gianna could have been one of these bodies in the
Tranquil,
and because neither Baker nor Kenton had ever seen her, the first he would have known would be reading a letter if she had written one, and if Baker or Kenton had been able to find it.
    Paolo would have been one of the boarding party had Ramage not forgotten him. Gianna’s nephew, whom she had bullied Ramage into taking to sea with him … Paolo Orsini, the heir to the kingdom of Volterra, until Gianna married and had children of her own. Young Paolo would have found his aunt—how ridiculous referring to her as the boy’s aunt; she was only five or six years older—among the pile of corpses.
    Steady, Ramage told himself, bundling up the letters, and realizing that Jackson would have recognized her, this way lies madness: this was how young captains, isolated by the routine and tradition of command, became eccentric, even mad: they sat alone and in their cabins, brooded, thinking this and fearing that, playing the eternal game of “if.” “If this had happened, that would have been avoided … if I had done this …” The worst of the “if” game was, of course, that it was very easy for a captain to lose confidence in himself: as he read his orders he could, without much difficulty, consider them far more difficult to carry out than they were, and then he would find himself wondering what would happen “if” he failed.
    The next stage after that was wondering “if” he would succeed, and once he stepped into that quicksand he was lost; he would fail no matter what happened. That was the one lesson that Ramage had learned about command, dating back to the time when Commodore Nelson—as he then was—first gave him command of the little
Kathleen
cutter and put Southwick in as Master.
    Those first orders from the Commodore had been desperate enough, but looking back on them Ramage realized that, young and inexperienced as he was, he had not really thought of failure. There hadn’t been time enough to consider it. The important thing was to avoid brooding. Keep your mind occupied—it could be a thick head from drinking too much wine at a reception the night before, or perhaps you were too preoccupied because the ship’s company was badly trained—it could be any one of a hundred things, but