Free Ramage by Dudley Pope Page B

beach now: the little wavelets were reflecting in the moonlight as they danced towards the shore and sprawled on the sand. He heard a buzzing round his head: they’d all provide a feast for the mosquitoes which made life a misery in this area. And he only hoped none of the men would pick up the ague which was part of the normal life on the marshy Maremma, the flat plain stretching from here down to Rome and beyond.
    ‘Five feet, sir.’
    The water was shoaling fast and the beach was perhaps fifty yards away. The cicadas were making the night ring, sounding like the ticking of a million clocks; and occasionally a frog gave a hoarse croak, as if complaining about the cicadas. From farther inland he heard a series of deep grunts: a wild boar grouting around under the pines and cork oaks.
    Where the devil was the Tower? The narrow strip of sandy beach was clear enough, and he could make out the dunes behind, topped by a dark band formed of masses of juniper bushes and rock roses, and the thick carpet-like plant sprouting thousands of podgy green fingers – what did they call it? some odd name: fico degli Ottentoti , fig of the Hottentots.
    ‘My boy,’ his mother had said when he was much younger, ‘you must go back to Italy one day when you are older; old enough to understand and judge her.’ And now he was doing just that; though his mother’s judgement was that of a woman born into a family which for centuries had wielded power and influence, and a friend of several similar families in Italy who had seen their rights and power usurped and, in their view, anyway, wrongly used by upstarts and degenerate, half-witted Hapsburg or Bourbon second sons, with a following of Austrians and Spanish grandees who had been given estates in Italy to get them out of the way. Or they had seen their land given away as a king’s payment to a temporary mistress’ family. Worse still, they had seen their own and Church lands fall into the clutches of papal princelings, the bastard offspring of ostensibly celibate popes who had been born of broken sacred vows, made noble by the twitch of the same popes’ bejewelled little fingers, and given vast estates: a nobility created from deceitful lust and made rich by corruption.
    But this was nothing to do with the job on hand: his thoughts were only the reflection, or the echo, rather, of his mother’s often, and usually strongly, expressed opinions. He did not know if she was always right in her judgements; but she and her friend Lady Roddam were women famous for their outspoken and advanced views – they had even been labelled as republicans by their enemies.
    To the devil with advanced views, he told himself: how far are we from the Tower? Suddenly he saw it quite close, squat and square, the stonework pale in the moonlight, and half hidden by the sand dunes at the back of the beach. How had he missed seeing it before? He realized he’d been looking for something dark and shadowy, not thinking of the effect the moonlight would have. Hell! If the French had only a couple of guns and even a sleepy lookout on top of that Tower…
    He pulled the tiller towards him to turn the boat southward, parallel to the beach: they were so vulnerable, even to pistol fire, that he wanted to spot the entrance to the river first, so they could run straight in without delay. At that moment he saw a wide but short band of silver spread inland across the beach like a carpet over the sand: the river, with the moonlight on it. He promptly altered course straight for it.
    ‘Jackson, a cast!’ he called as loud as he dare.
    ‘A fathom, sir…five feet…four…four…’
    Blast, it was shoaling fast.
    ‘Keep it going.’
    ‘Four feet…four…three…’
    Damn, damn – they’d touch in a moment, but they were a good thirty yards from the beach: a long way for the men to haul the boat. He saw that Jackson was dropping the lead line like a boy fishing from the quay: there was not room, need nor time to heave