There was no time to shout a warning - Aitken would never hear it - and Ramage hurled his cutlass, leaping after the spinning blade. The hilt caught the side of the Frenchman's head, he staggered, and a moment later Ramage had an arm round the man's neck and they both swayed, a shouting Aitken flicking away the cutlass of another attacker but still unaware that he had nearly been cut down.
The Frenchman was burly, two or three inches taller than Ramage, and he wore no shirt. His body was slippery from perspiration, but now, no longer stunned, he wrenched away from Ramage's grasp after punching him in the face, took a step back, and lifted his cutlass for the slash that Ramage knew would split his head in two, and for the moment he was too dizzy to do anything but stand there.
The Frenchman's blade swung up, only the sharp edge shiny; Ramage registered dully that the blade must be rusty and only the cutting edge clean. Up, up the blade went and the Frenchman's eyes held his: the head was the target and the Frenchman was not going to be distracted.
The Frenchman's face contracted slightly, the body flexed and the right shoulder twisted an inch or two as the muscles drew at the arm. Ramage sensed rather than saw that not one of his own men was within ten feet and no one had noticed this lonely and one-sided duel.
The Frenchman was grinning: two teeth missing in front at the bottom. Unshaven. The arm coming down now. Sarah. Jean-Jacques. Such a waste, but no pain -
But the arm was still upraised and the Frenchman was looking up and tugging. In an instant Ramage realized that the man had held the cutlass too vertically as he raised it for the final blow and the point had caught in the deckhead above. As he struggled to free it, Ramage moved two paces closer, kicked the man in the groin and then picked up his own cutlass. That made seven.
He turned to join Aitken and found that in the few moments of the strange duel, which had seemed at the time to be lasting ages, his own party had combined with the first lieutenant's and driven the Frenchmen forward again, squeezing them against Southwick's party.
Ramage jumped up on to the capstan head and crouched to avoid the deckbeams. It was easier to look across the maindeck from here. Two, four, eight ... twelve ... thirteen ... sixteen ... All the rest wore white bands round their heads. And here were Southwick, Ferris and Martin coming along the starboard side, grinning.
'Just going to give Aitken a hand!' Southwick said and led his men in a scramble over the cranked pump handle.
So apart from a few unwounded but surrendering Frenchmen, the maindeck was suddenly secure. But the déportés? For a moment he had a clear picture of fifty people in irons at the fore end of the lowerdeck, their throats cut by some rabid Revolutionary.
Jackson was beside him now, with Stafford and Rossi. 'Lost you for a moment, sir,' the American said.
'It was a long moment,' Ramage said, 'but come on!'
He jumped off the capstan and snatched up a lantern lying on its side, flipped open the door and straightened the wick. Fortunately it could only just have been knocked over because the wax had not run. He shut the door and clattered down the companionway to find himself outside the gunroom again. What the devil had made him go up on the maindeck after leaving those five men on guard? The whole reason for the voyage and this attack was waiting at the forward end of the lowerdeck, and he remembered with sick fear that Paolo had not reported, nor Gilbert, nor Auguste.
He was past the afterhatch; there, like a vast tree trunk, was the mainmast. Now the mainhatch and past these forms lying over the deck, an indication of the way the Frenchmen had been surprised.
Candles alight on the tables. There was a lantern, two lanterns, moving about right up forward, and now he could see a mass of bodies lying on the deck. And two or three men moving among them - murderous Republicans cutting the throats of the déportés?
He was concentrating so carefully on not tripping in the half-darkness that he was almost among the slaughtered déportés before he realized it, and he looked up with his cutlass raised to find that the nearest rabid Republican killer with the lantern was in fact Paolo.
'Your friend is in the last row, sir,' Paolo said calmly, not realizing how close to death he had been. 'I understand that the key to unlock these irons is in the captain's possession. A Captain Magon, I believe.'
Ramage stepped over the prone people to where Gilbert was kneeling. There, his ankle held by a leg iron, was Jean-Jacques, who looked up and grinned and said: 'I hardly expected to see you here. Is Sarah with you?
CHAPTER TWENTY
Ramage stepped out on to the jetty where the group of Frenchmen stood with a white flag on a staff, and the wind tugged at the similar white flag being held up in the cutter's bow. Gilbert and Paolo followed and as Jackson stood a French officer held up a hand and said in French: 'Only one man, the captain.'
Ramage stopped. 'Where is the island governor?'
'At the fortress, waiting for you.'
'My letter suggesting a truce said we meet and negotiate on this jetty.'
The French officer shrugged his shoulders. 'It is not my concern. My orders are to escort you to the fort.'
Ramage turned to his men. 'We go back to the ship.' He then said to the French officer: 'I shall return in half an hour. If the governor is not here, L'Espoir will then be blown up.'
'But her crew!'
Ramage raised his eyebrows in what he hoped was a cold and callous glare. 'What about them?'
'They will all be killed!'
'The survivors, yes. Many were killed last night. The rest... well, that depends on the governor. Half an hour then. If he is not here, we shall sail at once, and L'Espoir will vanish a few minutes later.' He looked across the anchorage and laughed. 'Perhaps not vanish: you will see plenty of smoke and an abundance of wreckage!'
'A moment,' the French officer said hurriedly, 'we can reach an accommodation.'
'I assure you that we cannot,' Ramage said stiffly. 'I talk only to the governor. No one on Île Royale, the Île du Diable or the Île St Joseph - or for that matter down in Cayenne - is performing a favour for me. I am offering him the lives of sixty-four French seamen from L'Espoir. They treated the déportés so shamefully they will never be exchanged from England. The wounded certainly will not survive the voyage...' he paused and composed himself for another cold-blooded laugh. It came out quite satisfactorily judging from the look on Jackson's face. '... And I have grave doubts about the unwounded. My men have no sympathy...' He gave an expressive shrug and waved a hand towards the broad Atlantic on the other side of the island, a gesture which he saw achieved its purpose in conjuring up a picture of shark fins cutting through the water.
The Frenchman pointed towards the seaward end of the jetty, 'm'sieu, you speak French like a Frenchman. Walk a few steps with me -'
'Tell your party to stay by the boat,' Ramage snapped as he saw a couple of lieutenants begin to follow.
The officer snapped out an order which froze the men. Lot's wife, Ramage thought, and looked curiously at the officer. He did not recognize the man's uniform, which was well cut in green cloth. It had black buttons with a design or initials on them. If his rank was a captain or major, one would have expected ... His thoughts were interrupted as the man tried to smile, indicating that they should walk the few paces which would take them to the end of the jetty and out of earshot of everyone else.
When they stopped, Ramage turned to the man and guessed the answer before he said: 'Well?'