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.
Steady, Ramage told himself, bundling up the letters, and realizing that Jackson would have recognized her, this way lies madness: this was how young captains, isolated by the routine and tradition of command, became eccentric, even mad: they sat alone and in their cabins, brooded, thinking this and fearing that, playing the eternal game of 'if. 'If this had happened, that would have been avoided ... if I had done this ...' The worst of the 'if game was, of course, that it was very easy for a captain to lose confidence in himself: as he read his orders he could, without much difficulty, consider them far more difficult to carry out than they were, and then he would find himself wondering what would happen 'if he failed.
The next stage after that was wondering 'if he would succeed, and once he stepped into that quicksand he was lost; he would fail no matter what happened. That was the one lesson that Ramage had learned about command, dating back to the time when Commodore Nelson - as he then was - first gave him command of the little Kathleen cutter and put Southwick in as master.
Those first orders from the Commodore had been desperate enough, but looking back on them Ramage realized that, young and inexperienced as he was, he had not really thought of failure. There hadn't been time enough to consider it. The important thing was to avoid brooding. Keep your mind occupied - it could be a thick head from drinking too much wine at a reception the night before, or perhaps you were too preoccupied because the ship's company was badly trained - it could be any one of a hundred things, but you were too busy to think of failure, and often because of that you succeeded. Or perhaps you failed, but failed because success was impossible, not because you had gone into battle defeated by your own dark thoughts and lack of confidence.
At that moment Ramage acknowledged yet again how much he owed to Southwick. The old man had served with him for years, always the same, always cheerful, yet always grumbling. Cheerfully grumbling about the ship's company, whichever the ship and however well trained the men, but treating them all like unruly but much loved sons. And, of course, it was not just Southwick: there were those scoundrels Jackson, Stafford and Rossi.
Defeat, failure, even difficulties were hard to consider for long with those men around. Jackson, for example, an American who had an American Protection in his pocket and need only get word to an American consul to secure his discharge from the Royal Navy - but instead he was the captain's coxswain, a man who had saved Gianna's life once and Ramage's many times. Rossi, the plump and cheerful man from Genoa whose English was good and whose past in Genoa was a matter of conjecture. Rossi was a volunteer, and with Genoa under Napoleon's occupation Rossi was happy enough in the Royal Navy, where be was paid for killing the Frenchmen he hated. And Stafford, the third of the men always mentioned by Gianna in her letters. Stafford had, like Jackson and Rossi, helped rescue Gianna. He made no secret that before the press gang swept him into the Navy, when he had lived in Bridewell Lane in the city of London, and after having been apprenticed to a locksmith, he rarely went to work on the lock of a door with the owner's knowledge.
The three men argued interminably, although they never quarrelled; they had - Ramage thought for a moment - yes, they had been in the frigate that sank in battle as they went to fetch Gianna, and had helped row the boat used to rescue her. They had been in the Kathleen when she was smashed to driftwood by the Spanish three - decker at the Battle of Cape St Vincent. They had been with him in the Triton brig when he had taken command to find most of the original crew had mutinied, and they had been in her through the hurricane which tore out her masts and tossed her up on a reef near Puerto Rico. They had been with him in the Post Office packet brig when they were trying to discover why the mails were vanishing. They had been .. . and so it went on, and probably would go on.