He held the judge's eyes and the man's lips curled into a sneer.
'Gianfranco di Stefano,' he said softly, as though savouring the words, 'the court has heard the charges against you, and your defence -' he lingered over the words, as if to provoke an outburst from Ramage, 'and the sentence of this court is - death.'
Still Ramage held the man's eyes, thinking to himself: so this is what it is like ... far less frightening than staring into the muzzles of the enemy's guns.
A moment before the guards tugged at his arms, he jumped sideways and down, turned to the door and walked out, shoulders back, head erect, not too quickly, but just fast enough for his guards, all of whom were short men, to have to scurry to keep up with him.
As the door was shut behind him he realized that there had been no jeering. He almost laughed when he reflected that every one of them in that hall, judge, prosecutor, defence counsel and audience, had been cheated: they thought they had sentenced to death an Italian shipbuilder (indeed, the audience did not know even that much: to them a man with an Italian name had been sentenced to death), whereas in fact they had caught a British naval officer, who, despite the affidavit from their own Ministry of Marine that the seal on Admiral Bruix's dispatch was untouched, had read the dispatch and passed the information it contained to Lord Nelson.
There seemed to be a certain cachet about being condemned to death. For a start, two guards now brought each meal, one covering him with a pistol while the other carried the tray. It was as though they too knew that the only way of getting out of the cell was by overpowering a guard. Yet they put the tray down carefully, instead of giving it the bang that spilled the soup.
The improvement did not spread to the Hotel de la Poste: on the contrary, the landlord obviously took the view that selling good food to a condemned man was a wicked waste, and Ramage found himself eating little more than kitchen scraps.
There was a subtle change in the cell, too: previously it was just the cell in which he was locked; now it was a condemned cell. He told himself the cell had not changed; only his attitude to it had altered. Maybe that was so - being sentenced to death certainly required some adjustment on the part of the condemned man. Apart from anything else, he thought grimly, unless he found a way of escaping within a few hours, he was measuring time with a clock rather than a calendar.
The more he thought about it, the more he realized that certain quaint phrases took on a fresh significance. 'Composing himself for death,' for instance: in England priests and parsons were nearly always on hand to help a dying man to do that. Previously he had never quite understood what it entailed, but now that he had nothing else to think about, it made more sense.
An old man would naturally be more composed. His active life was past, and the physical restrictions of age plus the knowledge that no matter what he did, life held no more challenges (at least, no more challenges to which he could respond), probably meant that he could resign himself to the inevitability of death. If it was preceded by a long or painful illness, or perhaps poverty or loneliness, it might even come as a relief.
But a young man faced death with so much of life to lose - he had to fight not just the fear of the unknown (everyone faced that, no matter what their age!) but the feeling of being cheated out of so many years, so many experiences, so many sights. Looking back on the various times he had previously faced death, there was a consistent pattern: on each occasion there had been very little time to think about being killed. The longest period when he had been convinced he would die had been the dozen or so hours in the middle of the hurricane with the Triton brig, but the raw power of the hurricane, the shrieking wind which numbed the brain, the sheer weariness, had meant that he gave little thought to what death really was; he thought of it as the next huge wave, or the next increase in the strength of the wind.
Death had a different face when you were going into action: it was a sudden threat - usually the guns were firing within less than an hour of the first hint of battle, and you were so damned busy that it was only during those awful moments as the enemy came in range and you found yourself staring at the muzzles of his guns that fear suddenly reminded you of death. Then the muzzles would give that dull red wink and spout smoke, and there was no more time to think; all your efforts went into handling the ship well. When the battle was over, relief at still being alive brushed aside the thought of death.
Sitting in a condemned cell made a man realize that most people's attitude towards bravery was entirely wrong: to them heroes were men who climbed on board an enemy ship, cutlass in hand, and slashed and sliced their way to victory, or led a cavalry charge, or at least did something active to defeat an enemy. But really (in Ramage's experience, anyway) apart from a few moments' doubts and fear right at the beginning, once it all started you were carried along by an almost hysterical exhilaration and the knowledge that if you stopped to think you would probably be killed.
No matter how many times you gave the order to fire, or raced across an enemy's deck like a run-amok butcher in a slaughterhouse, you learned nothing about facing death that was of the slightest help in a condemned cell. Death might come at the end of a year's painful sickness or it might come as the red-eyed wink of a gun muzzle, but the sick man would no more recognize the death dealt out by the gun than the fighting man would recognize the drawn-out death from sickness. The label on the bottle might be the same but the contents were different.
Now Ramage had two alternatives: either he managed to escape, or one morning soon they would march him across the place to the guillotine. It was only a hundred yards, but would it seem a long walk or a short one? He found he was far from sure. How did a man who had only a few more minutes to live measure distance? The question had a horrible fascination, and the more he considered it the less sure he was. Knowing that the walk from the police station door to the guillotine was the last he would make, the condemned man (Ramage carefully avoided identifying himself with the victim; he would have escaped by then) might find it all too short: walking a mile might give him time to compose himself. On the other hand, walking a hundred yards to meet the executioner might seem an enormous distance; the condemned man might well prefer to walk out through the cell door and meet him three paces down the corridor, and get it over quickly.
He suddenly stood up to shake off the thoughts: in an hour or so - if he was not very careful - he would be screaming and hammering at that damned door.
Instead he thought of Louis and Stafford and hoped that they were safe. At least they had not been caught - he was sure of that, since the prosecutor would have been quick to confront him with either of them. For Louis, death at the guillotine might well be something of a release: it had claimed his family, and looking back on the brief time he had known the man, Ramage thought that he was lost, a ship without sails or compass, a man deprived of any purpose in life except revenge. The Cockney Stafford would meet death with the same jauntiness that he had faced life. If they caught Stafford, Ramage only wanted to say one thing to him - it was bad luck that led to their discovery. Even when warned that Admiral Bruix's dispatch might have been opened, the Ministry officials in Paris had found nothing wrong with the seal. Stafford would want to know that.
What about Jackson, Rossi and Slushy Dyson? If Jackson had received the dispatch for Lord Nelson, only death would prevent the three men from delivering it. Curious that he was sure that even if Dyson was the only survivor he would still do his best, as though it would give him some sort of absolution for having planned a mutiny and then deserted.