"No, but it does mean he can't use his seniority to take the command away from Mr Ramage," Aitken interjected. "Mr Ramage has his orders in writing from Admiral Tewtin."
"Let's not get too involved in that," Ramage said. "All that concerns us is that if I give the Jason an order concerning the safety of the convoy it's up to Shirley whether or not he obeys it. I think he will. He's obeyed my orders up to now - that's why the Jason is on our larboard beam."
"I dream of the day the Lizard comes in sight," Southwick said.
"I alternate," Ramage admitted. "Sometimes I dream about the day we anchor at Plymouth; at other times I have nightmares about it."
"Have pleasant dreams," Southwick advised. "There's not a damned thing we can do until we get there, and you know my advice - don't fret about something you can't do anything about."
Ramage stood at the quarterdeck rail wishing he could ignore his own rule, that no one was allowed to lean on it with his arms. Evening was the pleasantest part of the day with the sun sinking on the larboard beam and taking with it the heat and glare of the Tropics that eventually seemed to bake and dazzle you into impatience sabotaged by listlessness. Each day the wind had veered a little more. As they left Barbados the Trade winds had blown briskly from the east, with never a touch of north in them, as though to emphasize what many sailors had long suspected, that the old geographers had been teasing when they called them the "North East" trades. Anyway, they had left the islands behind, islands which for the Yorkes and for Ramage had been or become part of life - Grenada, St Vincent, St Lucia and the Pitons, the almost unbelievable matching pair of sugarloaf hills which Nature had dumped on the southwestern corner . . . Martinique, Dominica with its cloak of thick cloud and heavy rain which made it a favourite island for the Spanish plate fleets to make a landfall if they were short of water . . . Guadeloupe which looked on the chart like the two wings of a butterfly, Antigua, parched and mosquito-ridden, then the tiny island of St Barts, and St Martin, the island split between the Dutch who owned the southern half (and called it Sint Maarten, reminding Ramage of a lamb bleating) and the French. Then low-lying Anguilla and beyond Sombrero, a barren rock which seemed to guard the entrance to this wide channel joining the Atlantic to the Caribbean.
From there the convoy had really started its long voyage across the Atlantic and Ramage was thankful their luck had held: the wind had veered to the southeast a day past Sombrero and then held steady for a week so that they were able to steer for Bermuda.
Within a hundred miles of the collection of reefs, wrecks and legends of what used to be called Somers' Island, after its former owner, Sir George Somers, but now more generally known as Bermuda (after the Spaniard who discovered it, Bermudez), the wind had begun to haul round to the southwest and was now starting them off on the great sweep which should carry them into the Chops of the Channel.
Please, Ramage said in silent prayer, do not let it head us; the prospect of much beating to windward with these mules, tacking the whole convoy even once a day, made the patient Southwick blench. But now, as the latitude increased, they were abeam of Madeira away to the east across the Atlantic, while Savannah and Charleston were on the American coast to the west.
Already the real heat had gone: there was a nip in the air at night.
Those hating the heat as the sapper of energy and father to a long list of vile diseases, almost all fatal, and those hating the cold northern latitudes with their rheumatism, colds and consumptions, generally reckoned the temperature dropped one degree for every degree of latitude made good towards Bermuda.
Yesterday the big awning which kept the sun from beating down on to the quarterdeck, making the caulking runny so that if one was not careful the pitch stuck to the soles of one's shoes and made black marks on the scrubbed planking, had been taken down and this morning the sailmaker and his mates had been checking it over, putting in some patches and restitching along the roping where the constant fluttering in the wind and the rays of the sun had rotted the thread. The last job today had been to roll it all up and lower it below to be stowed until the Calypso next slipped back into the Tropics or Mediterranean.
The Calypso was, Ramage reckoned, a hot-weather ship: he had captured her from the French in the Tropics, and she had fought most of her actions in the Tropics or Mediterranean. Her guns would probably warp or miss fire in the cold of the North Sea!
During a near-tropical evening, an hour before darkness and as the last of the cottonball clouds vanished for the night, there was no finer sight created by man than a well-ordered convoy. However patched the sails of the ships, they were brushed a reddish-gold by the setting sun, the heavy shadow on the eastern side of each hull and the light playing on the western making pleasing patterns. Because it was a falling wind, none of the ships was going fast enough to leave a turbulent wake to disturb the pattern of waves and all the ships seemed to be uncut gems set down on deep-blue velvet.
Standing here admiring the convoy as an object of beauty was almost dangerous because he nearly forgot that seventy-two ships were his responsibility: ships laden with valuable cargoes for a country at war and heavily insured, and with probably a couple of thousand men on board. And many women, of course: most of the larger ships carried passengers - plantation owners, tradesmen and soldiers and their wives returning to England. And Alexis, too, who might well at this moment be looking astern from that ship leading the starboard column - although it was unlikely that she could distinguish the Calypso from all the rest of the ships, even if she wanted to.
The quartermaster spoke quietly to the two men at the wheel as the ship wandered a few degrees to windward, and they hove down on the spokes, hoping the bow would swing back before the captain glanced round with a scowl. He never actually said anything but somehow, the quartermaster thought, that was worse: as though Mr Ramage had made an entry in some great ledger and one day he would bring them all to account.
The quartermaster on watch was a Lincolnshire man named Aston, one of the most agile men in the ship but also one of the plumpest. Like a fat pigeon, his body carried extra flesh wherever there was room for it. Although less than thirty years of age, he had jowls and paunch more appropriate to a cleric, although he had a sharper wit and a better understanding of his fellow men. Now he was concerned that the swinging bow should not distract Mr Ramage because he could see that the captain, alone at the quarterdeck rail, was miles away in his thoughts. Aston knew that Mr Ramage had more to trouble him than was a fair load on a man. Commanding a convoy of merchant ships would make a saint run amok, but on top of that there was this strange business of the Jason. Why had she opened fire?
Jackson was with the captain when the Calypso boarded her, and he had been back again with him, but if Jacko was to be believed, Mr Ramage still did not know why it had happened. There was one thing about Jacko - if he could not reveal something out of loyalty to the captain, he always said so. When he just did not know, he usually said so. So Aston was inclined to believe him now - that if there was any explanation at all, it was that the captain of the Jason had gone daft.
That would account for Mr Wagstaffe going over there - it was said he was in command now, which meant Mr Ramage had taken on himself the responsibility of replacing the captain, and Aston knew the Articles of War were hot and strong against that.
But even worse than all that, and something that Aston, recently and happily married, could understand very well, there was the worry about her ladyship: Jacko had heard that the Murex, taking her ladyship back to England, had just vanished after leaving them off Brest. A short enough distance - must be about a hundred miles and the weather was not out of the way. The Murex could have sprung the butt end of a plank and sunk like a stone: she could have been sunk by a French man-o'-war; or she could have been captured by a French privateer. It must be awful for Mr Ramage, just not knowing.