Free Ramage & the Rebels by Dudley Pope Page A

you were too busy to think of failure, and often because of that you succeeded. Or perhaps you failed, but failed because success was impossible, not because you had gone into battle defeated by your own dark thoughts and lack of confidence.
    At that moment Ramage acknowledged yet again how much he owed to Southwick. The old man had served with him for years, always the same, always cheerful, yet always grumbling. Cheerfully grumbling about the ship’s company, whichever the ship and however well trained the men, but treating them all like unruly but much loved sons. And, of course, it was not just Southwick: there were those scoundrels Jackson, Stafford and Rossi.
    Defeat, failure, even difficulties were hard to consider for long with those men around. Jackson, for example, an American who had an American Protection in his pocket and need only get word to an American consul to secure his discharge from the Royal Navy—but instead he was the Captain’s coxswain, a man who had saved Gianna’s life once and Ramage’s many times. Rossi, the plump and cheerful man from Genoa whose English was good and whose past in Genoa was a matter of conjecture. Rossi was a volunteer, and with Genoa under Napoleon’s occupation Rossi was happy enough in the Royal Navy, where he was paid for killing the Frenchmen he hated. And Stafford, the third of the men always mentioned by Gianna in her letters. Stafford had, like Jackson and Rossi, helped rescue Gianna. He made no secret that before the press-gang swept him into the Navy, when he had lived in Bridewell Lane in the city of London, and after having been apprenticed to a locksmith, he rarely went to work on the lock of a door with the owner’s knowledge.
    The three men argued interminably, although they never quarrelled; they had—Ramage thought for a moment—yes, they had been in the frigate that sank in battle as they went to fetch Gianna, and had helped row the boat used to rescue her. They had been in the
Kathleen
when she was smashed to driftwood by the Spanish three-decker at the Battle of Cape St Vincent. They had been with him in the
Triton
brig when he had taken command to find most of the original crew had mutinied, and they had been in her through the hurricane which tore out her masts and tossed her up on a reef near Puerto Rico. They had been with him in the Post Office packet brig when they were trying to discover why the mails were vanishing. They had been … and so it went on, and probably would go on.
    Now, to their delight, they had on board the Marchesa’s nephew (or, as Stafford had proudly announced to the rest of the ship’s company when he first heard about it, “the Marcheezer’s nevvy”) and it had been tacitly accepted that they kept an eye on him. Jackson had already saved the boy’s life once when they boarded an enemy ship a few weeks ago with Paolo wielding a cutlass in one hand and a midshipman’s dirk in the other.
    Supposing the boy was killed—how would he ever tell Gianna? Then he checked himself: these thoughts were merely a variation on the game of “if”—”If Paolo was killed …” Paolo was lively, energetic, eager to learn, scared of nothing, and appalling at mathematics. As Gianna had said, in the argument which had finally persuaded Ramage, if the boy survived a few years as a midshipman and later a lieutenant in the Royal Navy, he would have learned lessons which would stand him in good stead if he should ever have to rule Volterra when the French had been driven out: he would understand men, and how to govern them, and that was all (whether midshipman in a frigate or ruler of Volterra) he needed to know to survive.
    Ramage called to the Marine sentry to pass the word for his clerk, and as soon as the report and the list of names and addresses were handed over to the man for fair copies to be made, Ramage sent for Aitken. The First Lieutenant was second in