The Lizard was still a smudge on the horizon when he dropped the last one on the deck and stuck the needle back in his hat. He held one of the handles between his knees, the whipped end hanging down, the other end conveniently placed to work on. Unlaying the three strands of the rope for a couple of inches, he took one of the tails and worked the unwhipped end between the unlaid strands of the rope in the fashion of a long splice. Holding it in place with one hand he did the same with another, then a third and fourth until all nine had been spliced into the handle.
Retrieving the needle from his hat and re-threading it, he ran a few stitches through each tail where it was spliced into the rope, which then had one whipping put over the end and another an inch farther down. There'd be no chance of the tails pulling out.
After inspecting it carefully he put the cat down on the deck and took up a roll of red baize material. Measuring the handle against the material, he used an enormous pair of sail-maker's scissors to cut off a strip just long and wide enough to wrap right round it. With all the care of a seamstress making a ball dress for her most important customer, he then wrapped the material round the handle like a stocking, joining it by stitching a seam along the entire length. With the thread cut and the needle stuck back in his hat he held up the finished cat.
Even from five yards away it looked both terrible and grotesque: a vile and deadly tropical plant perhaps, or a deformed octopus—the stiffness of the line made the nine tails stick out like groping tentacles from the red handle.
Ramage was thankful the men had not been guilty of theft because that would have meant the tails of the cat being knotted, three knots in each. Mutiny, desertion, disobedience, drunkenness, bestiality—for all those crimes the cat was not knotted; only for theft.
Yet there was a crude justification for that apparent anomaly—men cheerfully put up with rats on board, and there were weevils in the bread that they shared with the mice and rats, but there was no worse animal in a ship than a thief; a seaman who stole from his shipmates.
As he watched, Evans finished sewing a small bag of red baize with a drawstring round the neck, curled up the cat, put it in the bag and tightened on the drawstring. Then he began making the second cat.
It was a ritual, a tradition, whose origins were probably lost in antiquity, and although he'd witnessed many floggings in ships in which he'd previously served, first as a midshipman and then as a lieutenant, Ramage never realized (perhaps, he thought grimly, because he'd never been responsible for ordering a flogging) just what effect a bosun's mate sitting there making a cat had on the rest of the ship's company. Perhaps even more of an effect—as far as being a deterrent was concerned—than watching an actual flogging.
Always a new cat-o'-nine-tails for each flogging; always the cat was made the day before; nearly always it was given a red baize handle and put in a red baize bag.
Red to hide the bloodstains? Hardly, since the whole snip's company had to watch a flogging and could see the tails becoming soaked in blood and tangled after each stroke, so that the bosun's mate had to straighten them out by running his fingers through them—'combing the cat'. And one look at a man's back after even half a dozen strokes made such niceties as a red handle unnecessary.
No, probably the origin was just that red was a colour of warning; that before the flogging, while the victim was being seized up and a leather apron tied high round the back of his waist to protect his liver, spleen and kidneys from the tails, the ship's company would see the bosun's mates standing there ready, some of them, depending how many men were to be flogged, holding red baize bags.
One victim, one bag. But if he was to get more than a dozen strokes, then more than one bosun's mate, because it was customary to change the bosun's mate after he'd administered a dozen.
Ramage knew of one captain who always made a point of having at least one left-handed bosun's mate on board. If a bosun's mate was right-handed, the tails of the cat fell diagonally downwards from the right shoulder. This captain boasted that his left-handed bosun's mate 'crossed the cuts'.
Shaking his head as if trying to rid himself of the thought of flogging, Ramage turned and looked back at the Lizard. The wind was north, a nice breeze, almost a soldier's wind to give Ushant a wide berth. In fifteen minutes the headland would be out of sight, and he took a bearing, noting it and the time on the slate.
As he put the slate down on the binnacle he reflected how many thousands of times seamen before him had noted the bearing of the Lizard ...
The wretched Duke of Medina Sidonia with the Spanish Armada: the Lizard had been his first sight of the England he was supposed to conquer for his master, Philip II. It was the last sight of England for the Pilgrim Fathers sailing for America; Sir Francis Drake's, too, before he died off Porto bello almost exactly two centuries ago. (And how excited be must have felt, before that, as he sailed back to sight it and complete his great Voyage of Circumnavigation—three years in which he encircled the globe.) Nor did Ramage forget the Lizard was Cornwall. Hidden under its lee was Landewednack, whose parish church was the most southerly in England. There was the fishing village of Coverack whose fishermen often used the stone quay for landing strange cargoes at dead of night, since many of them more often fished for bottles and casks than fish; bottles and casks brimful of smuggled brandy. The French Directory might be at war with Britain, but nothing would interrupt one of Cornwall's profitable industries, smuggling from Brittany.
Ramage already knew from a previous glance at the chart that the Triton was steering a course which, if one drew a line on a chart along her wake, would go through the Lizard and diagonally right across Cornwall to touch Tintagel on the west coast, the birthplace—so legend had it—of King Arthur.
For the moment Ramage had little concern for King Arthur: the line, a few miles before reaching Tintagel, passed through St Kew, the home for several centuries of the Ram He imagined a bird crossing the Lizard and flying towards St Kew, mentally ticking off the places it would cross and revelling in their names, delighting in their very Cornishness, their complete difference from other names in the rest of the country. Indeed, the majority of Cornishmen still regarded anyone living outside the county boundary as foreigners.
Over the Lizard, then, passing the link village of Gunwalloe in a small cove among towering cliffs—cliffs at the foot of which was the wreck of a treasure ship belonging to the King of Portugal, the St Andrew, driven there to her death by a south-westerly gale more than 250 years earlier. Legend had it that the folk of Gunwalloe saved eighteen great ingots of silver—and four suits of armour, made in Flanders for the King.
On and on: Feock, Old Kea and Malpas, Penkevil, Probus and (too far for the poor bird to see, he admitted, but he delighted in the names) Sticker and Polgooth; and Veryan, near St Austell, where an ancient king was supposed to be buried in his armour, and beside Him a golden boat in which, on the day he rose up again, he would sail away.
Right over Castle an Dinas (a more suitable claimant to being the birthplace of King Arthur than Tintagel, Ramage always thought: any man born at Tintagel, with the sea thundering against the cliffs, would surely have been a great sea king). Then after Talskiddy and Bilberry Bugle the bird would be flying over rugged land laced with sheep tracks, gashed with rocky hills, softened by grassy mounds—Ramage country!
Lying in the cemeteries of the surrounding churches were dozens of long-dead Ramages. Men of honour who'd died in battle, sickness and old age (and some had died dishonourably too: his family had had its share of black sheep). There were Ramages killed fighting the Royalist cause alongside Sir Bevil Grenvile and Sir Ralph Hopton, Sir John Arundel and Sydney Godolphin, Sir Nicholas Slanning and Sir John Trevanion—aye, they and almost every Cornish family, aristocrat or peasant had fought hard against Cromwell's armies.