"So if the court ... ?"
"If the court finds me guilty on any one of those, it has no choice but to sentence me to death."
Yorke looked grim. "I wonder if Alexis is thinking only of that?"
Aitken said quietly: "She asked me for a copy of the Articles of War, and I gave her one, sir. I hope I did the right thing. And I marked the ones under which you're charged."
"You were quite right," Ramage said, and remembered Alexis's question in court about the charges, when Goddard had dropped the question rather than read through all the relevant Articles of War. So Alexis had known all the time: she had started provoking Goddard from the moment she began giving evidence.
He had to admit that seeing her sitting in the row of spectators' chairs, he regarded her as a very elegant ornament, much as one might be proud of a fine portrait in oils on one's dining room walls. He had (he went hot at the thought) only called her as his last witness from fear that she would be offended if he left her out. Ye Gods: one day, when they were old and grey and reminiscing, he would tell her how close she came to never being a witness. But after being a lively witness she was now making a madcap dash to London in a coach and four with a brace of pistols close at hand. Gianna would have done that - and Gianna was at this moment probably dead, killed by one of Bonaparte's police agents. Sarah would have done it - but she had almost certainly died in the Murex. Would he always bring death to the women he loved?
The rest of the week passed slowly. The last days of autumn brought zephyrs which ruffled wavelets to make the sea look like hammered pewter. Each morning the Calypso's cutter under Jackson's command went to fetch Sidney Yorke from the North Corner of the dockyard - the name given to the part close to the Gun Wharf and where North Comer Street met the jetty.
Yorke enjoyed leaving the King's Arms and walking the road from Plymouth itself, passing between the barracks and squares named after famous generals and skirting the Post Office as he strode down Cumberland Street to the noisy Market Place, where most things from cabbages to penny nails were being sold from the stalls.
Along Catherine Street and turning left a few yards into Fore Street brought him to the Dock Gates which seemed, improbably, to be guarded by the chapel just inside. A few more yards along Queen Street in the shadow of the dockyard walls brought him to the landward end of North Corner Street, with the jetty and the Calypso's cutter at the bottom.
Walking along the streets, some cobbled, some surfaced with bricks, he passed men pushing laden carts and wheelbarrows, carrying baulks of timber, striding along with an adze over the shoulder or swinging a caulker's maul with, in the other hand, the wooden box of caulking cotton with its wide handle forming a seat.
A few sailors hurried along pulling a cart laden with coils of new rope intended for one of the ships anchored in the Hamoaze; a file of Marines marched to the sergeant's monotonous "leff. . .ri'. . . leff .. . ri'" - where were they going, he wondered?
He felt an air of unreality; everything seemed insubstantial, as though he was walking in a dream. The sun was still weak at this time of the morning but cast chill shadows across the narrower streets. The town of Plymouth Dock, he thought, comprised more angular buildings than any other place he knew, and every one of them caused a shadow.
Yet despite this strange remoteness affecting him, there was a sense of purpose about the dockyard area as a whole: workmen heading for the Dockyard gates, each man with his own tools and most of them with their midday meal wrapped in a bright bandanna; the seamen running with a cart, shouting and yelling, teasing each other and hurling well-meant abuse at men from other ships; the marching Marines, serious of face and giving the impression of a moving panel of white diagonal lines, a tribute to hours of pipeclaying. All had obvious links with the ships of war at anchor.
It all had a sense of purpose until he thought about the enormous Salvador del Mundo moored out there in the Hamoaze, and the Calypso riding at a single anchor. Could a man like Ramage, wounded several times, who had captured from the French the frigate he now commanded (apart from capturing the famous Diamond Rock, commanding the approach to Fort Royal the capital of Martinique), the hero of many attacks on the French in the Mediterranean, now be in desperate danger?
What was wrong with a system under which such a man could be tried for his life by his own people and, as far as Yorke could make out, be almost certain of being executed by them? Why was the Navy, no matter who represented it, about to do what Bonaparte most certainly would do, given the chance - kill Captain Ramage?
Ramage had written to his father, the Earl of Blazey, and told him not to attempt to interfere. Nicholas was obviously frightened that the old political vendetta which had made his father a scapegoat could somehow be renewed, so that the old man could be harmed. Could it? Yorke was far from sure. He only knew that any politician would always do unspeakable things to save his own political skin. Making a career out of murder, or prostitution, or burgling, or pimping, was against the law: society in its wisdom had decided that each was wrong. Politics came into the same category, but since politicians were also lawmakers, there was no law regulating politics; the only limit placed upon them was the natural contempt of honest men. Yorke for a moment felt sorry for a man who had taken up politics. Possibly in the early flush of youth the man had intended to do great things: then, probably quite slowly, he found that men outside politics whom he respected did not exactly shun him, but kept him at a distance, as though shamefully hidden beneath tailored breeches and silk coat he had the scabs of some vile disease.
Byng was fifty years ago. And today? Certainly members of the present government were intellectually barely equipped to run some of the stalls he was now passing in the Market Place. Addington, for instance, the prime minister, was a man so weak and vacillating that no one in his right mind would leave him in charge of a greengrocery stall.
Yorke recalled bitterly that Alexis might in fact be calling on the wretched man in three or four days, trying to persuade him to do something. Yorke was far from sure what Alexis had in mind, and he was beginning to realize that Nicholas and his officers were just being polite.
Yes, they were deeply touched that Alexis had impulsively hired a coach and four and was at this very moment hurrying to London; they were very grateful for her spirited appearance in court. They appreciated that Yorke was waiting to give what evidence he could to help.
Yorke now realized that the "but" was that nothing Alexis could do would be in time. She would hardly have arrived in London by the time the court sat again next Monday; by Monday evening, or Tuesday morning at the latest, the court would have returned its verdict and Nicholas would have been found guilty or not guilty. And that would be that.
Yorke had the feeling that they thought Ramage would be found guilty and sentenced to death, but that the Admiralty would order a reprieve. Poor Alexis. Yorke knew by now that his sister loved Ramage but, more important, had during the long voyage home from the West Indies, when she had seen a good deal of him as a guest on board the Emerald or when they were dining on board the Calypso, accepted that she had lost him before she found him, because he was married to another woman. Alexis had come to know that woman through the occasional remarks of Ramage and his officers, and as she had learned of the circumstances of the two of them meeting at some island off Brazil, and the honeymoon cut short by Bonaparte's police, she had come to admire her.
At the moment she was trying to save him because he was a friend of the Yorkes who needed help; but she was also trying to save him for Sarah, whom she had never met. Perhaps - who really ever knew all the details of a person's motives? - she had wild hopes that if anything had happened to Sarah (which seemed highly probable) she could take her place. Whatever Alexis was about now, though, she did not know (fortunately, he thought) that on board the Calypso brave men had in fact finally given up.