'What now, sir?'
Again Ramage shrugged his shoulders. 'There's only prayer left,' he said sourly.
At that moment Southwick saw him stiffen, as if stabbed in the back. He began rubbing the scar on his brow, swung round and walked aft to me taffrail. The Master watched closely, having made no secret that he was worried about the Admiral's orders: it was obvious to him—though Mr Ramage made light of it—that the Admiral had chosen the Triton's captain as the scapegoat. And, Southwick brooded to himself, the Ramage family have already suffered enough from the time the Government of the day used the old Earl as their scapegoat.
Southwick had lived too many years to expect justice or fair play; he'd long ago asked only that the injustices and unfairness in Service and political life should be kept within reasonable bounds. Yet to be fair to the Admiral, the two frigate captains who'd already failed to find the privateers were probably men he'd had with him since they were lieutenants: he owed them some loyalty.
When faced with an apparently impossible task maybe it was only natural to shield them by passing it on to someone to whom he owed no loyalty—Mr Ramage. Although it was bad luck for Mr Ramage, the fact was he had been lucky recently inasmuch as he'd gained a loyal ally in Commodore Nelson who, judging from his performance so far, would go a long way in the Service—if he didn't fall foul of the Admiralty through not obeying the exact wording of some order or another.
At that moment Ramage came back to Southwick. The expression on his face was an odd mixture of anger, embarrassment and happy surprise: like a child who'd been given an unjustified beating one moment and an unexpected present the next.
'I'm beginning to think we're tackling this from the wrong end,' he said quietly.
'How so, sir?'
'Well, we've been trying to find the privateers' base. But since there's never any sign of them at sea, obviously they don't patrol looking for schooners ...'
Southwick looked puzzled. 'Then how do they find 'em?'
'They must know exactly when and where to look.'
'I don't follow you, sir.'
'Oh, wake up, Southwick: they must get secret information. If they don't go and search, then they must know that a schooner will pass a certain headland at a certain time, so they can be there to meet her in the dark. Minimum distance to sail, and a certain interception: that's why no one's ever seen them.'
'By Jove!' Southwick exclaimed. 'That is the only answer! And it means there's a spy at work in Grenada! But"—he paused, forehead wrinkled, nose twitching like a rabbit's—'but they sail from Grenada in darkness: it's 160 miles to Martinique and 115 miles to St Lucia. How the devil can a spy get the information to 'em quickly enough? Why—beggin' your pardon, sir,—it's almost impossible.'
'But it happens, Southwick; obviously it happens. I'm dam' sure that's how they do it. And because the privateers guess we'd think it's impossible, they succeed. Surprise, Mr Southwick: do the unexpected and you'll nearly always win, whatever the odds.'
Southwick had heard that often enough from his Captain, and seen him put it into practice. 'Was that why you left the master's mate and some men at Carriacou—so they might spot how the news is passed?'
Yet again Ramage shrugged his shoulders 'Yes and no— I'd a feeling we could do with some eyes we could trust keeping a watch from somewhere along the route, and Appleby can get down to us in a local cutter in five or six hours...'
'If he can keep his men sober.'
'I warned them what'd happen if they so much as touched a drop of liquor...'
'Aye, but whatever you threaten seamen think it's worth it.'
'Well, Appleby'll stay sober; and he has enough guineas in his pocket to hire the cutter's crew as well.'
Sir Jason Fisher, the Governor of Grenada, represented a new type of colonial administrator, but Ramage was far from sure he was any improvement on the old. Sir Jason came from humble origins—that much was obvious from his every action, from every sentence he spoke, from every thought he ever expressed in his whining Midland accent.
According to Colonel Wilson, who made no secret that he detested him, as a young man Sir Jason had been lucky to get a clerkship in 'John Company', and he'd worked hard and made the best of it. Like many a clever lad in the Honourable East India Company service, he'd received an excellent training, and he'd soon left it to begin his own business, so that twenty years in India changed him from a clever but impoverished and timid clerk into a rich nabob, able to retire to England at forty-four.
But Ramage guessed that the riches he'd acquired through trade had brought Sir Jason problems he'd never thought of when he'd started to accumulate his money. He was wealthy, yes; but he had no social position. Very rich nabobs returning to England with their fortunes could usually buy their way to an Irish peerage and men by sheer persistence (and a judicious marriage into an aristocratic but impoverished family who needed money sufficiently to overcome any distaste for wealth obtained through 'trade') finally become tolerated—though never accepted—by Society.
All this Sir Jason obviously had only discovered when he arrived back in England. And at the same time he'd also discovered that although he was rich, he was not rich enough. His wealth would, with some 'interest', buy him a seat in the Commons but the House of Lords would forever be beyond his grasp; even an Irish peerage was beyond his purse since the competition from other, richer nabobs was too great.
But Fisher had been shrewd; he'd recognized the problem and thought he'd found a way round it—a 'wise' marriage. Finding what to him was an aristocratic (but impoverished) family, he married the younger daughter, reversing the usual procedure by himself providing a 'dowry' in the form of a handsome settlement on his prospective father-in-law.
Unfortunately, the marriage did not open the doors to London Society; his knocks went unheeded because, as he soon discovered, his bride's family, though certainly impoverished, was by, no means aristocratic.
To his dismay, he had found (and Wilson chortled as he told Ramage, who listened only because of the insight it gave him into the mind of the man he had to deal with at Government House) that in London baronet fathers-in-law were as common as coal-pits in Lancashire.
However, his father-in-law was married to the cousin of a marquis who controlled several Parliamentary boroughs, and the marquis, a kindly man, thought poor Jason deserved some reward for marrying a very distant member of the family who'd hitherto been considered unmarriageable, doomed to a nagging spinsterhood and a perpetual trial to her relatives.
And what better reward than to procure poor Jason a knighthood and give him one of the boroughs, so that he could also call himself a Member of Parliament? It mattered little to the marquis who actually walked into the voting lobbies in the Commons, providing he walked into the one that cast the vote the way the marquis wanted.
Two years of marriage, two years of voting in the Commons as the marquis dictated, two years of snubs as he persisted in trying to become 'accepted' socially had finally opened Jason's eyes, but not before it had embittered his wife, who'd shared his ambitions.
But, Wilson continued, the man with brains enough to make a small fortune in India had eventually realized what many others in a like situation discovered at about the same stage in their lives: if London Society was powerful, proud and impregnable—rating the eldest son of a cousin of an earl higher than a knight with a quarter of a million in the Funds who'd been 'in trade'—why not look elsewhere: for a smaller society where a nabob knight married to the distant relative of a marquis would count for something?
So Sir Jason had asked for, and the marquis had secured for him, the Governorship of Grenada. At this point Wilson had become scornful—the wretched Sir Jason had, of course, made another mistake: most governors came out to the islands for a few months during the dry season and were careful to leave the actual work to a deputy.