CHAPTER THREE

Ramage took up his pen and inspected the point. The quill was blunt but he could not be bothered to sharpen it. It was a miserable feather, taken from a moulting goose no doubt At least it was from the left wing, for a right - handed writer. After unscrewing the cap of the inkwell he took his journal from a drawer and made a brief entry recording the encounter with the Tranquil. Then he took out a blank sheet of paper and began the draft of a report to the Admiral. Be brief, he told himself; old Foxey - Foote will examine every word, looking for trouble (an admiral's privilege, of course), and the fewer the sentences the fewer the loopholes. The obvious criticism from such an inexperienced admiral was going to be that he did not pursue the privateer, and the equally obvious answer was that in twelve hours of darkness the privateer could be anywhere, and Ramage knew he would be wise to point out that he was acting under the Admiral's orders to proceed to Curacao. He read the draft through again. Less than a full page - that would please the clerk when he came to make the fair copy and also copy it into the letter book.

He took a piece of cloth from the top drawer and carefully wiped the pen dry of ink, then screwed the cap back on the inkwell and put it away. Then he knew he was deliberately putting off looking at those letters.

The first was from the Tranquil's master to his owners, intended to be posted in Jamaica, because the Post Office picket would arrive in England weeks before the convoy with IDS ship. He was reporting that the weather had been fair for the whole voyage so that instead of anchoring at Barbados with the rest of the convoy he had sailed on alone. He had 'topped at Nevis only to buy fresh vegetables for the passengers and then left for Jamaica. He explained that with so many ships calling at Barbados, the price of fruit and vegetables there was often three or four times that in Nevis. A piece of economy, Ramage realized, which had taken the ship out of the convoy and put her some fifty miles farther north than she would have been if she had remained in the convoy when it sailed from Barbados. The reason the ship had gone to Nevis and then come in sight of the privateer had been the high price of fruit and vegetables in Barbados; the reason the Calypso had tacked an hour early - and thus panicked the privateer —had been Captain Ramage's trick on La Creole. . . The wife of a major in the 79th Foot was visiting her parents, who obviously owned a plantation in Jamaica. She had written a letter to her husband in the form of a diary, the last entry being the day before. Ramage pencilled in the two names on another sheet of paper, beneath the name of the master and the name and address of the owners of the ship.

A man living in Jamaica and returning there after a visit to England was writing an angry letter to his agent in London. He was probably a planter, so they would know him in Port Royal. For some reason the agent had not made sure that the furniture, cases of wine and boxes of crockery bought in London had reached the Tranquil before she sailed, and the letter told him in no uncertain terms what a stupid fellow he was. By now the goods would either be in another ship or still in a warehouse in London, but had the agent been sharper they would have sunk in the Tranquil - not that it mattered now, with the owner dead. Ramage copied his name and the name and address of the agent on to his list. Another letter written by a woman. She was rejoining her husband in Jamaica after a visit to England, and she was writing to her mother in Lincolnshire - was it Louth? Her writing was not easy to read. She too described the voyage from London out to Nevis, and told her mother how she was excited at die prospect of seeing her husband and children again, and she wondered if she had been wise to be away so long - eighteen months. But she was glad to be back in the warm weather again - she apologized to her mother but, she admitted, Lincolnshire was cold and damp. Then Ramage realized the woman had written the last few lines only an hour or so ago: a ship had just come in sight, she had written, and was heading towards them. The captain was afraid it was a privateer . . . The captain was sure it was; he could see the Spanish flag . . . The Spaniard had fired some shots across their bow and they were stopping and she was, she told her mother, praying for their deliverance. The name of the Spanish ship, the captain said, was the Nuestra Sefiora de Antigua ... a gentle name, she wrote, and in an hour or two she would complete the letter and tell her mother what had happened. And there the letter ended. But the woman had perhaps not died in vain: the Nuestra Senora de Antigua, and, Ramage vowed, God help her if she was ever sighted by a ship of the Royal Navy.

Ramage found that the letters written by the men were impersonal; they were names and addresses to be added to the list. But the women - they were describing new sights and ventures to distant loved ones, and although Ramage was hard put to avoid feeling he was prying, as he read the written words he felt he was getting to know the writers. And then, as he held the letters, each so vital, each describing minutes in the writer's life and looking forward to future events, like seeing children, arriving in Jamaica, noting how much newly - planted flowering trees and shrubs had grown, once again came the shock of knowing that each writer had ceased to exist; that now each was only someone's memory.

He thought for a moment, chill striking his whole body, that Gianna could well have been in 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 bad fled to England, and there she lived in Cornwall with his parents, old friends of her family, and they were treating her hie 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 tea 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.