'Deck there! Foretopmast lookout here!'
'Deck here', Aitken replied.
'I can make out a sail on the starboard quarter of the convoy, sir. Three masts, royals flying ...'
'I'll send someone up with a glass!'
Aitken looked around, then decided to go himself, grabbing the telescope and making his way to the shrouds. Two minutes later, breathless, his shin muscles feeling as though they had been stretched three inches, he was standing beside the lookout. The Sarazine was surprisingly narrow below them; the mast seemed to be gyrating round the circumference of a fifty-yard circle.
The seaman pointed, and beyond the Bergère Aitken caught sight of a fleck of white.
'Royals set, eh?' he said doubtfully as he pulled out the eyepiece of the telescope. 'You must have sharp eyes.'
'Ah have that, sir', the man said firmly, thinking to himself that in Cumberland they poached just as skilfully as these Scotsmen; aye and without all that funny talk and across hills just as high.
'You're right', Aitken conceded after three minutes' struggle with the telescope, trying to keep it focused. 'Here', he said, 'take the glass and see if you think she's the Calypso.'
'Ah know that she isn't without needing the glass, sir', the man said, 'but a bring-'em-near might tell me more.'
Aitken thought back to his days as a midshipman, when the masthead seemed a second home, either because he had been mastheaded as a punishment or the captain wanted a ship identified. Those days, he thought ruefully, are Iong past. It was not the advance of old age; merely that he had lost the habit - and his nimbleness.
'French 36-gun frigate, sir; I forget the name of the class and I couldn't pronounce it even if I recalled it. Beating up for us, sir.'
'Right', Aitken said, starting down the shrouds, 'keep a sharp lookout with those poacher's eyes!'
As soon as he reached the deck, Aitken called: 'Bosun's mate! Hands to quarters. The ship's company may have laughed yesterday afternoon at gunnery practice with 6-pounders but it might make all the difference between spending next Sunday in Gibraltar or a French jail!'
On board the Caroline brig, the ship ahead of Martin's Bergère and the one astern of Kenton's Golondrina, Paolo Orsini had the slate and a copy of the signal book ready on the tiny binnacle box, and his telescope under his arm.
He could see the strange sail coming up fast now - the convoy was making less than six knots - and had finally decided she was French. Aitken had given very precise instructions about what the convoy was to do if attacked by French, Spanish or Algerines, and Paolo was thankful that an enemy frigate had not turned up earlier.
The reason was simple enough: the convoy was now in the narrowing channel leading to Gibraltar, so if he had to flee with the Caroline in a different direction from the rest, he would know once it was dark that by the following dawn land should be in sight to the north (Spain) or south (Africa), and as long as he steered westward he was bound to reach Gibraltar. It was not that he distrusted his celestial navigation, of course; simply that his quadrant must be damaged so that his altitudes of the sun were in error, because the latitude he calculated each noon was never quite the same as that hoisted by the Sarazine and the Golondrina. In fact his own answer that day, just over forty-nine degrees north, was (according to the French atlas he found in the former captain's cabin) obviously wrong because the Caroline could not be as far north as Paris.
Obviously Martin, by repeating the bearing, was telling Mr Aitken that the frigate was heading up to them, and Paolo knew from an inspection through his own glass that she was not the Calypso.
Baxter, his sharpest-eyed seaman, was up the mast now and shouted down that she was a French frigate; he thought one of the 36-gun class like the Calliope, a name which at first puzzled Paolo when he looked her up in the French list because Baxter pronounced it Cally-owe-pee.
Paolo looked round for a senior rating but apart from the man at the wheel the nearest was a Marine.
'General quarters!' he shouted. 'Leave the portlids down, and don't underestimate four 9-pounders. If we add up all the guns in the convoy -'
'They don't come to thirty-six', a cheerful Baxter shouted down from the masthead, 'but they'll make a lot o' smoke, sir, an' perhaps bring tears to the Frogs' eyes!'
Paolo looked astern to avoid laughing: he had dreamed hundreds of times of taking his own ship into action; he had imagined himself at the quarterdeck rail in full uniform, dress sword, telescope under his arm, snapping crisp orders to quartermaster, gunner, first lieutenant, master... But the ship in his dreams had been at least a frigate with a crew of 250, not a bedraggled trading brig of 300 tons with a barnacled bottom, four guns and ten men. But at least the ten men had exercised those four guns ...
At that moment Rossi appeared from below.
'Better we fight that frigate with our tongues than our guns, sir', he said in Italian.
'We may not have the choice, but you have the right idea', Paolo said, sarcastically. 'We must think of the right thing to say to the French. Like "What a bella figura you make standing on your quarterdeck, captain!'"
Rossi chuckled at the thought as he went to Paolo's cabin to get the key to the Caroline's pitifully small magazine.
Rennick in the Matilda had long ago identified the distant ship as French and at this moment had all his men, except for the lookout and the man at the wheel, standing in a circle round him.
'Mr Aitken's order, if the convoy is attacked by an enemy ship, is to disperse', he told the men. 'That means we all sail off in different directions. But one of us is bound to be caught, and if the Frogs put a prize crew on board her quickly enough they can go after another ship. In fact if they're awake they can capture all six of us.'
'Prison', muttered one of the Marines. 'I've 'eard about them French prisons.'
'So have I', Rennick said grimly. 'But you remember what Captain Ramage always says ... Come on, now!'
The men shuffled their feet and sucked their teeth, brows furrowed with concentration, and increasingly embarrassed at Rennick's impatience.
'Come on! Come on!'
'Surprise!' the Marine corporal yelled triumphantly. 'Ye gotta do somefing ter surprise the barstids!'
'Exactly', Rennick said, proud that it was a Marine and not a seaman who had come up with the right answer. 'Do the unexpected. Now, what would that Frenchman not be expecting, eh?'
'Us to attack 'im', a seaman said firmly, as if disposing of that possibility once and for all.
'Exactly!' Rennick said once again, slapping his thigh and laughing with delight. 'Mr Aitken can't give us any orders because of the signalling problems, so we must use our common sense.'
He looked round at the eight men, the man at the wheel and the lookout aloft. Ten, led by himself as the eleventh. Well, it could not be helped. Surprise would have to provide the equivalent of the other 290 men he would prefer to have.
'Our common sense tells us', Rennick said firmly, glaring round him for any sign of dissent, 'that if we can save five ships of the convoy, we'll have won.'
There were enough 'Ahs' and 'S'rights' showing agreement that Rennick promptly seized the moment to tell them his plan.