Ramage

'What news, Nino? Sit down - we have no wine, only water.'

Nino grinned. 'In the name of my uncle at Port' Ercole, Commandante, I took the liberty of bringing you something.'

He untied the neck of a small sack and took out three bottles of the deep golden white wine for which the district was famous, followed by several cheeses and half a dozen long, thin loaves of bread.

'Those biscuits,' he said. 'The Marchesa told me of your ship's biscuits, and so I found you some bread.'

'It was kind of you, Nino.'

'Prego, Commandante; it was nothing, you are welcome. The bread is made from my uncle's grain.'

Drinking wine in the heat of the sun always gave Ramage a headache; but he knew Nino would be hurt if he did not. 'We'll have a little now and keep the rest for the voyage.'

'Drink it all now, Commandante; the two gentlemen will be bringing supplies for the voyage.'

Ramage glanced up at the peasant. 'The two gentlemen, Nino?'

'I have a message from the Marchesa, Commandante. She said to tell you that three of the gentlemen have decided their duty keeps them here.'

Nino's voice was polite, but there was no mistaking his views on the reluctant trio.

'The two.gentlemen: who are they?'

'I do not know their names: they are young and I think they are cousins. Now, Commandante, I must leave you: I have work to do before I meet you again at nine o'clock. Permesso, Commandante?'

'Yes, and thank you, Nino: my greetings to your brother and your mother and your wife, and my apologies for disturbing them last night.'

'It was nothing, Commandante'

With that he was gone. Ramage told Jackson to take some wine and food to the seamen and then lay back on the sand again, watching the insects zig-zagging among the spines of the junipers. The air was alive with the buzzing of the cicadas; the noise seemed to come from everywhere and yet nowhere; almost as though it was being produced inside one's head.

The sleep had done Ramage good: now he felt restless and full of energy. With the immediate problems solved, he found himself thinking of the girclass="underline" he re-created a dozen times the episode in the Tower, dwelling again and again on the quality of her voice. It was hard to define - soft, yet it had the ring of authority; precise in the way she spoke, but musical to the ear. Clear - and yet always on the verge of huskiness. He started to wonder how husky it would become when she made love, and hurriedly forced the idea out of his mind: the sun was hot enough without thinking of that: he'd already disturbed himself enough with memories of Ghiberti's naked Eve and speculations about the body beneath the black cape.

He felt a deep and powerful longing to roam free over the Tuscan hills once again: to ride the tracks and stir up the white dust; to see the lines of dark green cypress growing up the side of hills, stark against the hard blue sky. To watch a pair of creamy oxen plodding along, tails lazily flicking the flies from their flanks, and the owner asleep in the cart. To see a walled hill town, ride up the twisting path to the gate, his horse's hooves clattering on the cobbles of the narrow streets, and glance up at a window to see a pair of beautiful eyes watching him curiously. To go back in time, to his boyhood, when Gianaa was a little girl the Marchesa brought to the house....

The cicadas still buzzed in the darkness - did they never sleep? - as Ramage watched the moon rising over Mount Capalbio. Earlier in the day, looking at a flat stone set high in the south wall of the Tower, Ramage had just been able to distinguish some Latin words, a name and a date carved into it, recording that a certain Alfiero Nicolo Verdeco was 'the architect of this edifice' in AD 1606. Had Signor Verdeco stood on this spot nearly two centuries earlier and seen his 'edifice' bathed in the warm, oyster-pink glow of a full moon — a harvest moon?

Ramage heard some splashing near by and from the top of the dune looked down at the mouth of the river: the boat was being held by three seamen, up to their knees in water, so that the after end of the keel rested on the sand bar. The rest of the men were already in the boat, waiting to help the refugees on board.

He called down to Smith, asking the time.

He saw a faint glow as Smith lifted up the canvas shield over the lantern and held the watch close to the light. Thank God someone had brought a good supply of candles.

'Five minutes short o' nine o'clock, sir.'

Time to walk along the top of the dunes towards the Tower, to keep an eye open for the refugees. Let's hope they'll be punctual. Nine o'clock in Italy could mean anything between ten o'clock and midnight.

He guessed they had been hiding somewhere near the little hill town of Capalbio, inland on the far side of the lake. Their shortest route to the boat would be round the northern edge of the lake, where they would pick up the track running parallel with the beach, forty yards or so inland, and linking the Tower with the little village of Ansedonia, farther up the coast towards the causeways. Nino had said it was called the Strada di Cavalleggeri, the Road of the Horsemen, but no one used it now. The track was hard sand, built up with an underlay of rocks where it crossed patches of marshy ground, and it ended at the bridge of narrow planks over the river by the Tower. The refugees need only walk along it until they met the bridge, turn right and climb up on top of the dunes, then carry on beside the river until they reached its mouth, where the boat waited.

The moon was coming up fast, losing its pinkness the higher it rose, and seeming to shrink in size. Damn, thought Ramage it must be nearly half past nine.

Jackson seemed to sense his mounting annoyance and anxiety.

'Reckon they're all right, sir?'

'I imagine so: I've never yet met a punctual Italian.'

'Still, she said half an hour. If they left at dusk they've been nearly an hour, sir.'

'I know, man,' Ramage said impatiently. 'But we don't know whether they left on time, or where they started from or how they're coming, so we can only wait.'

'Sorry, sir. Reckon those men with her ladyship have had a rough time today.'

'Why? How do you mean?'

'I wouldn't like admitting to her I was scared of doing something....'

‘No.'

Jackson was in a talkative mood, and obviously nothing short of a direct order would stop him.

‘... I guess she could make a man feel pretty small, sir.'

'Yes.'

'But there's another side to it, sir...'

Ramage guessed Jackson knew he was anxious and was deliberately making conversation to help him over the waiting.

'Is there?'

"Yes - if a man had a woman like that to encourage him, he could push the world over.'

'She'd push it for him, more likely.'

'No, sir. Although she's small and dainty, I reckon she's -well, tough like a man; not all "fetch my smelling salts, Willy" as you might say. But I reckon it's only because she's boss of the family and has to be like that. I guess that inside her she's all woman.'

He wanted Jackson to talk. The American was not being familiar: dammit, he was old enough to be his father, and his salty wisdom obviously came from experience. But more important, Ramage realized, that low-pitched nasal voice was helping beat off the waves of loneliness and despair that were threatening to drown him. He looked once again over the flat marshes of the Maremma to the distant mountains silhouetted by the moonlight; then he stared up at the moon itself, now looking with all its pockmarks like a polished silver coin; and the stars, so clear and so close together it'd be hard to jab the sky with the point of a sword without touching one of them. They all seemed to be saying 'You are very insignificant, very inexperienced, very frightened ... What little you know; and what a short time you have in which to learn ...'