-and that was that. He, James Aitken, a lieutenant in the Royal Navy and the Calypso's first lieutenant, was rambling amidst superstition like an ancient widowed crone outside her croft high in the Perthshire hills, weaving with gnarled hands and prattling through toothless gums and staring about her with fading eyes, living in a world of vague memories and dreams of what might have been.
Yet here was the captain referring to 'something unusual •i all this' and looking as if he had .just seen a ghost.
It was nothing to do with Aitken, but it had happened as the young Scot had entered the cabin: Ramage had had this overpowering sense that he knew what Aitken was going to say. Earlier he had found himself giving orders as though repeating the words from a play or something said in a dream. Southwick had been puzzled because he had not gone on board the Tranquil, and even Ramage had been surprised to sear himself telling Jackson he was not going.
While Baker and Kenton had been on board her, somehow be had known what they were seeing; he had known that women had been murdered. But he had dismissed all that as something he did not understand; he had given his orders, come down to his cabin and gone through the letters, and had thought of Gianna, and all the time he had pushed aside this-this what? '
And then as Aitken had come through the doorway he had remembered a story his father had told him. He must have been very young at the time, and Father was telling him something of the Ramage family; how one day, when he was grown op, he would become the Earl of Blazey in place of his father.
At first he had not understood; then he had realized his father was saying that when an earl died his eldest son became the next earl; that his father was the tenth earl, and he had succeeded his father, Ramage's grandfather, who was the ninth earl and who in turn had succeeded the eighth earl, who was Ramage's great-grandfather.
It was great-grandfather, Charles Uglow Ramage, the eighth earl of Blazey, about whom his father had told him the story. He could not remember many of the details - he had been so young that the story had little more significance than so many of the tales that his mother or father told him before he went to sleep at night.
But great - grandfather Charles, the second son, had been in Barbados during the Civil War, a Royalist, and for reasons which Ramage could no longer remember he had later fled the island and headed for Jamaica in the ship the family owned and which was used for supplying the plantation there. And something had happened which caused great - grandpa to become a buccaneer; he had hated the Spanish so bitterly that for years he harried the Main and the Spanish privateers - just as his great - grandson was doing now, only as a King's officer.
Ramage could remember faintly that there was some story of a privateer, perhaps more than one - indeed there must have been many of them at one time or another - but the details had gone, lost in childish memories of stories about pixies and gnomes and fairies with magic wands.
Had great - grandfather found a similar massacre? In his voyaging in the Caribbean - they called it the North Sea then, and the Pacific was the South Sea, and men were still alive who remembered Drake fighting the Spanish Armada as it came up the Channel - had he experienced something which made him so hate the Spanish that for the rest of his life he fought them?
Then he remembered the set of silver candlesticks used at dinner at home, three - branched candelabra, five of them but usually only two used unless there were many guests. Those candelabra had been part of the ransom paid after a raid on some town or other along the Main. There were several things - the candelabra, the smaller set of silver plate which was not used now because cleaning and polishing was wearing away the intricate design, said to be Moorish, those long - barrelled matchlock pistols and arquebuses which lined one of the halls, some of the armour, richly - chased corselets and helmets - all had been acquired by the eighth earl during his buccaneering days.
Of course the word buccaneer was used now to mean someone akin to pirate, although in great - grandfather's day it was generally someone who, before there was a proper Navy, held a commission from the King or a governor allowing him (encouraging him, in fact, because the expense was entirely his) to wage war against the enemy. Drake, Ralegh, Hawkins - buccaneers all.
Aitken was looking at him, apparently puzzled. What had be just said? The first lieutenant had been about to leave the cabin and he had gestured to him to wait, and he had said something, as an explanation. But now he could not remember what it was, so it could not have been important 'Boarders,' he said for the sake of saying something. "Exercise the boarders as much as you can. Get the grindstone up on deck and make sure the cutlasses are honed and the boarding pikes sharp. And boats, we must exercise hoisting out boats . . .'
'You had mentioned that, sir,' Aitken said patiently.
'Oh yes,' Ramage said, 'so I did. Very well, I think that's all for now.'
Aitken stood up slowly, hoping the captain would resume what he had started to say, but he had a faraway look in his eyes, and Aitken knew this was not the time to fetch him back from wherever his memories had taken him.
CHAPTER FOUR
The darkness immediately before dawn was depressing, chilly and damp, and Ramage pulled his boat cloak round him, hating the way the wool smelled because the salt soaked into it had absorbed the humid night air. In three or four hours the scorching sun would make him envy the seamen wearing only light shirts and thin trousers. But now, as they all waited for dawn, it seemed as cold as the English Channel. It wasn't, of course; he was now so accustomed to the Tropics that any time the temperature dropped below what would be a scorching day in England he felt frozen.
Baker was the officer of the deck; every ten minutes he called to the six lookouts posted round the ship, one at each bow, one amidships and one on each quarter. He called to them individually and received the same answer, that nothing was in sight, but this constant hailing was not because Baker was nervous or there was any particular danger: it was one way of ensuring the lookouts stayed awake. Staring into the darkness was peculiarly tiring; it was fatally easy to drop off to sleep, even though standing up. And sleeping on duty was a serious crime; not the mere fact of dozing but because in those minutes (even moments) of sleep an enemy could close in or a rocky shoal come into sight. One dozing man could lose the ship and kill every one of his shipmates.
Ramage accepted that lookouts might doze; his own days as a midshipman were not far behind him, and he could remember the tricks he had been reduced to as he tried to stay awake. Wetting your eyelids and facing the wind - that revived you for a few minutes, but never for long enough. Rocking back and forth on heels and toes, shaking the head like a wet dog, flexing the knees, knuckling the eyes and brow .. . But best of all was the officer of the deck checking every man every ten minutes, and that was in his night orders. Perhaps other captains ordered it, although he had never been lucky enough to serve with one. But never in the years he commanded a ship had he needed to flog a man for sleeping on duty.
He imagined the earth slowly turning towards the sun, bringing dawn to start the day here, bringing twilight, to end the day there, somewhere at the far end of the Mediterranean. In Cornwall, dawn had arrived four hours ago; by now it would be broad daylight with St Kew bustling: breakfast would be over and what would Gianna and his parents be doing? The old admiral would probably be astride a horse, cantering out to inspect a field of growing wheat or call on a sick tenant; his mother would be deciding the day's menus. Gianna - perhaps Gianna would be writing to him, another page in the long letters they wrote like diary entries.