In fact it did not matter what the British had heard and understood, because they could not now pass any information on to anyone else: they were locked in here, and in a few hours they would be slung in the baggage train, securely bound and heavily guarded, and taken on board the frigates. There the colonel could bring them to trial as spies, and then they could be shot, or hanged, if the navy preferred.
The major sighed with relief. He should have thought of that earlier: the three men could have all the secrets in the world and it would not matter because they could not pass them on to their own people. Quite a problem for a spy, he realized: information was only of use, of value if one was spying for money, when it was passed to a person or country that could take advantage of it.
But what were British spies doing here in Orbetello? By adopting the disguise of tziganes they could, of course, travel easily; no one expected tziganes to have travel documents - indeed, you locked up the house and the poultry when you saw them, but that was all. Tziganes with the flûtiste - that was clever; diabolically clever. Yet. . . perhaps it was just a coincidence. Who sent them? Had they come up from Naples? Were they just looking round for what scraps they could discover about the French in Italy, or were they seeking specific information - like the great operation planned for this autumn? No one could have any inkling of that - no Englishman, anyway - because the operation existed only on paper at the moment; he doubted whether any ships at all had begun to arrive in Crete. The frigates now in Porto Ercole and the two vessels supposed to join them (what were they called - bomb ketches?) were probably the first to start moving eastwards towards the assembly point, or whatever the navy called it.
The senior of these Englishmen was obviously the eldest, the fellow with the black hair and penetrating eyes and slightly hooked nose. He looked like an aristo and now that he was not acting as a gipsy he had the bearing of one. He could not hide it. With those high cheekbones, too, he was a handsome fellow; the women would have fallen for him if he had been going to live past tomorrow, or the next day. He imagined a navy hangman's noose round the fellow's neck, taking the whole weight of the body. Not as spectacular as a guillotine because you did not get that satisfying hiss and thud of the heavy blade running down the slide and lopping off the head, with the explosive spurt of blood and the thump of the head falling into the basket. Still, hanging from the yardarm was probably slower . . .
"You - where you come from?"
"England."
"Oui, I know, but now, before . . . before you here?" The damned man just shrugged his shoulders and repeated what he had answered twenty times before. "From the hills."
"You are spy."
"I am not." He said it very firmly. "What is there to spy on?"
"Troops, the defences of Italy, the ships in the ports ..."
"So, now I know that French officers are living at an inn in Orbetello. There are some rowing boats with fishing nets in the lagoon. It looks as though there will be a good crop of grapes. Last year's wine should be good, too. To whom could I sell that intelligence, m'sieur?"
"You may find other information."
"What is there to discover? That the French have invaded Italy? That is old information - several years old. That they hold Corsica or Elba? All that is old. That there are French soldiers in Orbetello?" Ramage shrugged his shoulders as best he could with the ropes holding him tightly to the chair. "I think anyone sitting in London with a map of Italy could guess where French troops were stationed."
"Ships then."
Again the Englishman shrugged his shoulders. "There are only a certain number of ports, m'sieur. I can tell you there are French warships in Genoa, Leghorn, Civita Vecchia, Bastia and Ajaccio. You can tell me that there are British warships in Plymouth, Portsmouth, Dover, Sheerness and Harwich. You can also tell me there are British troops in those places. It is obvious. Ports have ships - and they have to be protected by garrisons. I can go on - Toulon, Barcelona, Cartagena, Cadiz, Ferrol, Rochefort, Brest ... all contain French warships and troops. I haven't been to any of them - but it is obvious."
The devil of it is, the major thought, the thrice-damned Englishman is right. Spies were bound to be trying to find out information for their masters, and what information could they find along this coast that would be of the slightest interest to the English? Obviously there were garrisons at various towns and, as the Englishman had pointed out, any fool with a map would know where they would be. Any port of a decent size would hold warships. So ...
Nevertheless, here were three spies. What the devil could he do with them? There was no point in getting the two sentries to knock them about - these men were not clods; any information they had would be extracted only by trapping them with words.
He took out his watch. In five hours the regiment was due to move to Porto Ercole. By then the colonel would probably still be in a drunken stupor, but it was no good starting two hours late because, faced with the wrath of a senior officer for arriving late, the colonel would have no scruple in denying he had given the order the previous night. To be fair, the old fellow often said things when he was drunk that he did not remember next morning when he was what passed for sober. Most of the time this was just as well.
Obviously there was nothing more that needed to be done at once: the spies had been caught, and they could be taken out to the frigates, interrogated again, then tried and executed. In the meantime he could get some sleep and this jail could hold the three men until they were transferred to the baggage train. They could spend the rest of the night in those chairs, securely tied up - there was no point in risking them escaping. He gave orders to the guards and said to Ramage: "I leave you for the night. Do not try to escape - the guards have orders to shoot. Later we find out what you are doing."
The guards changed hourly and noisily, each couple bringing a new candle with them so that they could change the one in the lantern. Ramage talked to Martin and Orsini, after making as sure as he could that neither guard spoke English. There was little to talk about and neither youngster seemed very worried because, Ramage realized just as he was feeling sick with despair, they endowed him with magic powers which would ensure their escape.
What a brief and inglorious sally into enemy territory it had all been! He had left his ship and her two prizes; he had landed on French-occupied soil for what had seemed at the time the best of reasons - to find out the destination of a possible French army and fleet; he had been captured within three or four hours; he and two of his officers were to be executed within a few hours more.
The Admiralty ... the devil take Their Lordships. Gianna was about to lose the man she loved, and the nephew who was her heir. Of course she could fall in love again, and would, too, and produce her own heir. He shrugged his shoulders, feeling slightly silly at making such an obvious gesture while lashed to a chair in Orbetello's jail, and told himself that as far as the kingdom of Volterra was concerned, all that had happened was that the clock had stopped for a while. And for Britain? That was more serious. Their Lordships, and therefore the British government, would have no warning that the French were not only planning a new attack by land, but were busy assembling an army and a fleet, and that the target for the new attack was in the eastern Mediterranean. Ramage realized that it would be many weeks after the attack had been made that the British would learn about it, because they had effectively evacuated their ships from the Mediterranean.
Egypt or the Levant - that was where the attack was to be made. He was sure of that because of the drunken colonel's diatribe against sand. It could be another attack on Egypt, to make up for Bonaparte's defeat at the hands of Nelson and General Abercromby, or it could be an attack in the Acre area, for example, because it was the British defence of Acre that prevented Bonaparte's move northward. In either case, Egypt or the Levant, the French were using Crete as a base, and that plus the impending attack was all that the Admiralty needed to know.