'But for free lodgings you need lodging tickets,' the gendarme interrupted, trying to quieten Ramage, who had raised his voice to the pitch of a querulous washerwoman. 'You are conscripts - so you must -'
'Conscripts!' Ramage almost shrieked, and lapsed into a stream of Italian to give himself time to think, afraid that his French had become too fluent. 'Conscripts, are we? Ah, I see now, it is all a trick! That colonel - I thought he was a general - was no more than a recruiting sergeant, eh? All his soft talk about skilled carpenters - and we are skilled, I might tell you; you should see the furniture my brother and I have made. Why, when my brother's daughter (she is my niece, you understand) married the son of Giacomo Benetti, you should see the tables and chairs we made for her dot; even my brother's wife, for all her airs - she's no better than us, but she walks with her nose high, like this - well, even she had to admit, they would have looked well in the Pitti Palace -'
He broke off, afraid he would burst out laughing, and hoping the gendarme would recover quickly from the outburst and say something, but the man just rubbed his jaw rhythmically and stared.
'What have you to say to that?' Ramage said, his voice full of indignation.
'You mean you are not conscripts?' the gendarme asked anxiously.
'Read the documents,' Ramage said with a great show of patience. 'Just read them. A man who can make furniture fit for the Pitti Palace taken up as a conscript? Why, even my brother's wife would -'
'Give me time to read,' the gendarme said hastily, obviously alarmed at the idea of hearing more of the niece's dot. He sat down on the edge of the bed, gripping the papers as though fearful they might be snatched away. Finally he let go with one hand and began following the writing with a forefinger, the nail of which was bitten almost to the quick. For more than five minutes he worked his way through every line of all eight documents. When he had finished he carefully folded the papers, stood up and gave them back to Ramage.
'Carpenters, eh? There is plenty of work for you here, helping to build the flotilla.' He looked round at the other three men and, as if anxious to reassert his authority, said sternly: 'See you don't get drunk. The wine of France is very strong; not like that coloured water you get in foreign places.'
'You need not worry,' Ramage assured him. 'I am their foreman; I'm a father to them. An uncle, at least. I bring them all this way. When they are sick I nurse them; when they are weary -'
'Quite so,' the gendarme said, 'and make sure they work hard in the shipyard.' With that he turned on his heel and walked out, slamming the door behind him. Ramage signalled for silence and listened to his footsteps as he went down the stairs.
'As soon as we have had something to eat,' Ramage said heavily, 'we'll have a look at the docks and the shipyards.’
By noon they had the layout of the port firmly fixed in their minds and were due to meet Louis at a cafe near their hotel, a rendezvous they had arranged by walking purposefully past the Marie, their carpenter's tools over their shoulders and, with no strangers within earshot, calling to the Frenchman.
More important than the layout of the port was the size of the Invasion Flotilla. At first Ramage had been appalled by the number of vessels: those he had seen when he sailed in with the Marie only half-filled the outer harbour, but all the inner docks and muddy banks of the river Liane were crowded with a wide variety of craft. The largest were prames, obviously designed as barges to carry troops and cavalry but, as Jackson commented, looking little more than lighters rigged with inadequate masts, and obviously incapable of going to windward. Any progress they made would only be running almost dead before the wind.
All four men had estimated separately how many soldiers or cavalry the prames could carry and agreed on two hundred infantry with arms and baggage, or fifty horses and cavalrymen and a platoon of infantry, with all their rations, ammunition and forage.
There were sixteen prames altogether, though many were not rigged, and forty-one sloops, which were smaller and more weatherly, and would be crowded with a hundred men and their supplies and weapons. The most numerous vessels were the gunboats, sixty-one of them, but less than a score had masts and mounted the 24-pounder gun for which each of them was pierced. Like the sloops, they could probably carry a hundred men with stores and ammunition. There were fifteen large river barges, normally towed by horses. Presumably they were to be towed over by frigates.
One dock was filled with a variety of different craft: more than a hundred caiques (which could carry less than fifty men and were more suitable for carrying cattle or horses); thirty or so corvettes carrying about the same; and more than half a dozen different types of fishing-boat, their varied shapes showing they had come from such widely spaced ports as those on the shallow north coast of Holland, with its treacherous sandbanks, to the Breton coast, where fishing was in deep water with rough Atlantic seas. The hatches of the fishing-boats were so small and smelly - Ramage could detect the stench from five hundred yards to leeward of the nearest one - that they could not be used for troops, who would be seasick long before the craft cast off from the dock, let alone reached a mile offshore. The largest of them looked capable of carrying twenty horses with saddles, while the smallest might manage five. But alone in the flotilla, the fishing-boats could go to sea in almost any weather and be sure of reaching their destination.
It was curious how hard it was to relate totals written on paper with what you saw afloat: walking round the quays, it seemed Bonaparte had assembled a large flotilla, with the whole port seemingly full. Then when you wrote down the totals for the various types on a sheet of paper, it reduced in size. But this was only the Boulogne section: there would be many more in Calais, and perhaps as many again in all the small fishing ports. And he had no idea yet how many more were building - not just here in Boulogne, but at the other shipyards up and down the coast.
As they walked to the café, Ramage recalled the phrase Louis had used when he pointed out the first of the vessels - Bonaparte's flotilla de grande espèce, which was certainly a grand enough title. They reached the café and found a few workmen at one table, noisily drinking onion soup and pausing only to break pieces from small loaves of black bread. Ramage sat down at the largest empty table and gestured to the others to leave a chair for Louis. One look at the patron showed why Louis had chosen this particular café: unwashed, unshaven, the man was grossly fat, with the slack face and bloodshot eyes of a perpetual drunkard, and when he lurched over to take Ramage's order of soup for all of them he obviously did not trust his own eyes to focus.
'For how many?' he asked.
'For five,' Ramage said and a moment later Louis joined them, settling back in the chair facing Ramage, who saw that he had shaved and combed his hair since they last met. The Frenchman noticed the glance and grinned. 'I thought I had better tidy myself up, so that I look like a carpenter too! Tell me,' he asked quietly, 'is it an emergency.'
Ramage shook his head. 'Not an emergency, but a change of plan -' He broke off as the owner arrived with plates, spoons and a large jug of soup, all of which he dumped in the middle of the table. He fished around in the large pocket in front of his apron and produced a loaf of black bread, which he put down beside Ramage and lurched back to the bar at the far end of the room.