There was only one way that Bonaparte eould destroy the Kingdom of Volterra, and that would be by destroying its rightful ruler, and Ramage found he had crushed the quill pen with which he had been tapping the pile of papers representing the other half of his problem.
Destroy . . . another word for murder. And murder was another word for what? Not the guillotine, that would be too public. The garotte - did Bonaparte's police favour the Spanish garotte for simple killings of women? Or perhaps just a pistol shot in the head. God help him, he was considering the fate of the woman he had loved. Yes, he had to admit now it was in the past tense. Had loved but still respected, like a favourite sister. Yet now was hardly the time to think about it any further. He had to keep the door shut in his mind. otherwise dreadful thoughts sneaked out. Gianna dead, murdered on Bonaparte's orders; Gianna locked in a cell, wasting away in darkness and subsisting only on sparse prison fare, and no one knowing what had become of her, outside the upper circle of Bonaparte's police . . .
Deliberately he picked up the top pages. They were the reports of four days' watch on the prizes, four pages for each of the five ships. He selected another quill, found it had been cut to give too broad a tip, and took a knife from a drawer inthe desk and cut it again. He then found the ink, removed the cap, found a blank sheet of paper, and on the left side wrote down the names of the five ships. To the right of the names he drew four more columns, and at the top of them he wrote, in sequence, 'Passengers', 'Guards', 'Crew', 'Flag'.
Starting with the Earl of Dodsworth, he saw that each day Bowen had reported seeing sixteen passengers (eight women and eight men) and he filled in the first column. Eight guards - he saw the same eight men each day, so it was reasonable to suppose they were the only eight on board, and that filled in the next column.
Southwick's four daily reports on the Amethyst and the Friesland showed the same consistency. Yorke's ship - Ramage found himself picturing the young shipowner as he read the name - had three women and seven men on board as hostages, and four guards. Southwick noted that on the second day he had seen only three guards, but the fourth man, easily recognizable by his red hair, reappeared next day and was there on the fourth day. Ramage filled in the appropriate columns, and then worked through the Heliotrope and Commerce, slowly filling in the columns.
Then he drew a line across the bottom and filled in the totals: exactly forty passengers (seventeen women, twenty-one men and two children), and twenty-four guards.
But most important: in four days, no boats had visited the prizes. No one had come round from the Lynx; no men from one prize had visited another. It would be such a normal and commonplace thing for them to do so that obviously Tomás or Hart had forbidden it.
Southwick's estimates of the sizes of the ships' companies of the five prizes before they were taken agreed with his own and showed there should be ninety-five or a hundred British, Dutch and French ships' officers and men held prisoner in what Wagstaffe had called an amphitheatre on shore.
The John Company ship, apart from being the most valuable, was physically the nearest: the Earl of Dodsworth was anchored about two hundred yards away. Close enough, he noted ruefully, for him to see that at least four of the women were young, two were elderly, and two had been impossible to guess at because they wore large, flopping hats, presumably to keep the sun off their faces.
The problem, he thought to himself, was going to be keeping the hostages out of the way when the fighting started.
He unrolled the first rough draft chart of the bay. There was the outline of the shore, from the headland forming the southern side to the other peninsula forming the northern. From each of the two rocks being used as starting points, a series of straight lines radiated out to seaward; they represented the compass courses steered by the soundings boat, and along the lines, at ten yard intervals, were written numbers, some with a large figure followed by a small one. The larger figure represented fathoms, the smaller feet. Also marked in were the positions of the five prizes, the Lynx and the Calypso. The nearest sounding to the Lynx was four fathoms and three feet, or twenty-seven feet. The inner bay itself, Ramage noted, was quite shallow; none of the soundings showed more than forty feet, although many more runs were needed before the boat had got out as far as a line joining the two headlands.
The big reef to larboard was a long and slightly crescent shaped sausage, lying east-west and almost cutting the bay in two, with all the ships anchored in the southern half. The reef, made up of rock and staghorn coral - so named because it grew up from the bottom like the horns of a stag, flattening out near the surface - varied from a couple of feet over the coral to two fathoms over the rock. Martin had marked each end with a dan buoy, and once the sun was up it was easy to see the brown patches formed by the staghorn.
Ramage then unrolled the rough map showing the small section of the island surveyed so far. Williams and White had, at his suggestion, begun by concentrating on a broad band between the landing beach and signal hill. This included the approaches to the amphitheatre, where the crews of the prizes were kept prisoner, and the two sources of fresh water.
Finally there was Wagstaffe's report on the 'forum' and on the Lynx. Jebediah Hart and the small grey-haired Frenchman had been on shore once in the only boat to leave the Lynx in four days. Their boat had been pulled up on the beach and the two men had climbed up to the 'forum', stayed half an hour and then gone back to the ship. A routine visit, it seemed to Wagstaffe; they did not take provisions or water, so presumably the camp was adequately supplied.
He tidied the papers and rolled up the chart and the map. There, reduced to words and lines on paper, were all the facts he needed to carry out his next task, yet nothing there provided an answer to the most important question of all, one that was screaming in his brain like a descant sung by a mad chorus in an empty cathedraclass="underline" how to keep the hostages out of harm's way when the fighting started.
He had worked out the general plan, and he was certain that he had reduced chance to the minimum. He could only attack two ships a night: it would be too exhausting for the swimmers to try more. Tired men made mistakes, and he had to be sure that the risk he took was reasonably small. By seizing the Earl of Dodsworth and the Amethyst on the first night and the Heliotrope and Friesland on the second, he was releasing the majority of prisoners first. The risk was simply that privateersmen from the Lynx might come to the Earl of Dodsworth or the Amethyst on the second day, before the other two ships could be secured. The Commerce could be left: she had no passengers, and the four privateersmen on board her were obviously little more than shipkeepers.
How to warn the hostages... Confound it, as far as the Earl of Dodsworth and Amethyst were concerned it was already too late: he had set the time for the attacks at 3 a.m., a time when he reckoned the privateersmen on guard would most likely be all asleep, and there was no way of getting a warning to the two ships.
Well, the two boarding parties were now well trained: every one of them could swim a mile and at the end of it silently board a ship by shinning up the anchor cable if a rope ladder had not been left hanging over the side. At the moment all four ships had ladders down their sides: obviously the privateersmen were confident they had nothing to fear. However, a plan to board could not be based on the chance of a rope ladder, or the hope that no sentry would be waiting at the top.