Free Ramage by Dudley Pope Page A

by sunset tomorrow – that’s Saturday – you’ll leave in the boat at nightfall and make your way to a point five miles north of Giglio, where a frigate should be there to meet you at dawn on Sunday and again on Monday. If it doesn’t turn up, you’ll have to make for Bastia.’
    A splash nearby showed Jackson had flung the weighted canvas bag overboard, and Ramage told him to go forward with the lead line – the American had fashioned one from a length of marline and a smooth, heavy pebble – ready to give a cast.
    Ramage took the tiller. ‘Right men: steady strokes and no noise: give way together.’
    The boat’s erratic rolling and pitching stopped as the blades of the oars bit and thrust it ahead once again; the tiller came to life as the water surged past the rudder and bubbled away astern, talking to itself.
    They were lucky it was calm: a wind with any west or south in it – a maestrale libeccio or scirocco , for instance – whipped up such a sea along this coast that beaching the boat or getting into the river would be impossible. And the same went for launching again afterwards: any of these winds, which often came up suddenly with little or no warning, could maroon them on shore for several days, so that they would miss the frigate off Giglio.
    ‘A cast, Jackson.’
    ‘Two fathoms, sir.’
    The beach was now very close. The noise on board a ship or boat was usually sharp and clear, not muffled by echoes and deadened by trees or buildings; but now the creak of the gig and the slop of the sea were becoming overladen with the faint – for the moment – mechanical buzzing of thousands of cicadas and the squawks, barks and grunts of wild animals and birds. The heavy yet astringent, austere resin smell of the juniper and pines, floating seaward like an invisible fog, permeated everything, its sharpness emphasized for Ramage because for years he had been accustomed to the ever-present, sickly odours of sweat, reeking bilges, tarred rope, damp wood and damp clothing.
    The dark green pines – their smell was as sharp in the nostrils as burnt gunpowder and as unforgettable. It was odd how smell, much more than sight or sound, brought back memories. What could he remember best of the years in Tuscany? The pines, larches and cicadas, of course; and the white dust clouds trailing behind carriages; the dark and heavy green of the cypress trees growing narrow and pointed, jutting up along the side of a hill like boarding pikes stowed in racks. He particularly remembered the sharp contrast between the deep green of pine and cypress, with their sturdy solidity which no wind could ruffle, and the silver-green scattering of leaves which seemed too young, too fluttering, to grow from the tortured, twisted olive trunks. And the creamy-skinned oxen with their huge horns, so massive and so gentle; he could picture their steady plodding, a pair always working together, so accustomed to leaning in towards each other that they could never be changed round. And the poverty of the peasants, the contadini , who lived like the slaves he had seen labouring in the plantations in the West Indies, but who were in many ways worse off, because a plantation owner who had paid several pounds a head for slaves was careful to keep them alive, while the Tuscan peasants, breeding and dying like flies, were free labour for the landowners…
    ‘Another cast, Jackson.’
    ‘Fathom and a half, sir.’
    In a few minutes, Ramage thought, he would be on Tuscan soil. Was it Tuscan, though? Or did the King of Naples’ enclave stretch as far south as this? What a patchwork quilt Italy was: a dozen or so small, self-centred states, kingdoms, princedoms, dukedoms or republics, each jealous of the other, each a centre of intrigue and villainy, where politicians made more use of an assassin’s dagger than a vote in council. They’d long since learned that sharpened steel always beat logic.
    ‘Jackson!’
    ‘A fathom, sir.’
    Yes, he could see the