Ramage thought it curious that the man in point had cracked that whip amid a shower of curses every fifty yards or so along the via Aurelia, and for the first few hundred yards along this track. Now, as they reached the sand, he had stopped. Perhaps he too had dropped off to sleep.
Jackson's head suddenly appeared above the tailboard, the sandy hair soaked with perspiration. The American was holding a cocked pistol.
"Morning, sir, where's your guard?" he asked quietly, loping along to keep up with the cart.
A dumbfounded Ramage nodded with his head towards the sleeping man and a few moments later Jackson vaulted over the tailboard into the wagon, reaching across the kitbags and gently removed a pistol from the Frenchman's hand without waking him. He gave a sniff and showed Ramage the empty wine flask that had been in the guard's other hand.
"You must find that chair uncomfortable, sir," Jackson said conversationally as he took out a long-bladed knife and began cutting the rope.
"A little," Ramage said. "We're glad to see you: we've all been sitting like this for the last six or seven hours."
As the last piece of rope dropped free and he tried to stand up, Ramage felt as though every bone in his body had been hammered with a caulker's maul and every sinew overstretched by an inch. It must have felt like this when the Inquisition unwound the rack to give the heretic a chance to confess.
Ramage sat down on the chair again, afraid he would topple over, and tentatively wriggled his left arm. He moved it up and down until the worst of the pain had stopped and then tried the right arm. Then he moved his left ankle in a circular movement and gently bent down to massage his shin. Finally he was able to stand up without too much pain as Paolo copied him and Jackson cut through the last of Martin's bonds. The three men thanked him through their groans.
"Sorry we weren't here sooner, sir," Jackson said apologetically as he slipped his knife back into its sheath on his belt. "We came as soon as we heard."
"Where's Rossi, then?"
"Driving the horse with one hand and propping up the driver with the other - he's asleep too. Horse seems to know the way, which is just as well, 'cos Rossi's better with a tiller than reins."
"But how the devil did you know that -"
"That innkeeper in Orbetello, sir. He saw what happened - accidentally caused it, so he said - and guessed you were British. He and his brother belong to a sort of partisan group that fights the French when it gets the chance. Anyway, his brother owns the cantina in Porto Ercole. Rossi had already made friends with him, so that when the other brother sent word from Orbetello, we were warned. His son, a young lad of eight or nine, paddled across the lagoon with a duck punt and then ran the rest of the way. We knew the troops were due to arrive in Porto Ercole today to board the frigates, and this is the only way from Orbetello, along the Feniglia, so we waited here as a sort of ambush, because we guessed they'd have to use a cart to move you."
"But just two of you - supposing the French had sent a platoon to guard us?"
Jackson grinned and pointed forward along the track. "There's twenty or so of the cantina fellow's cronies waiting up there, where the pine trees come in very close to the track, like the neck of a funnel. They're armed with a weird collection of weapons - muskets that must have been intended for the Armada, billhooks, scythes, a butcher has the big knife he uses to cut up oxen . . . They're all waiting. Rossi'll give them a wave in time, so they'll know everything's all right. Now, if you'll excuse me, sir, I think we'd better wake the driver and stow him in here with his mate. We can use these scraps of rope to tie them up."
Ramage held up a hand. "Wait a moment. If the French find our guards tied up, they'll know we were rescued, which means they'll start searching for the partisans and probably taking hostages. Innocent people will get shot in reprisal. We must make it look as though we escaped on our own." He thought quickly for a few moments. "Here," he said to Jackson, "take Martin and lodge the driver so that he stays asleep without falling off the cart. Don't wake him up. Paolo! Put that pistol back in the hand of that guard, but be careful with it."
He realized that Paolo still had not understood the idea. "Here, give me the Frenchman's pistol. Go with Mr Martin and Jackson and help settle the driver. When the sentry and driver wake up, they're going to think we escaped without help."
As the others scrambled over the tailboard and dropped to the ground, Ramage leaned over and put the pistol in a fold of a kitbag an inch or two from the sleeping sentry's hand. Then he jumped down, found that his muscles were still bunched up, saw Martin, Paolo, Rossi and Jackson scrambling down from the front of the cart, and joined them as they ran towards the nearest pine trees. Once hidden by the trunks, they watched the wagon jogging along the track towards Argentario.
"Those two soldiers are in for an unhappy week or two," Jackson said. "It'll be bad enough for them when they wake up and find the empty chairs, but you can just imagine what the sergeant and then the major will say."
"That damned major," Martin said as he extracted the pistols and knives from his canvas vest. "He's going to want to shoot them."
"Rather shoot them than us," Paolo said, his voice showing that he had seriously considered the point. "Now what do we do, sir?"
Ramage looked towards Jackson and Rossi. "First, thank these two for disobeying orders," he said with a grin. "Then we'll get some rest."
The Italian guerrilla group had been told that the rescue had been achieved without a blow struck and Ramage had formally thanked them. The five men had then walked towards Argentario, keeping to the beach on the seaward side of the causeway, while half a dozen partisans shadowed the wagon. The cliffs forming the north side of the entrance to Porto Ercole prevented Ramage from seeing into the harbour over to his left, although he could distinguish the frigates' masts and yards sticking up like trees stripped by winter and canted by sudden storms.
The way some of the yards were a-cock-bill and others were braced up as near the fore-and-aft line as possible, showed that the hulls of the ships, with their sterns secured to the small quay and anchors out ahead, were almost touching each other; so close that only bracing the yards of one sharp up stopped them locking with those of the next ship.
Ramage found himself trying to picture the harbour as a seagull would see it. A 36-gun French frigate is about 145 feet long on the gun deck, with a beam of 38 feet, making a total of 5,500 square feet. Times three for the three frigates made 16,500 plus the distance between them, say 120 feet by ten feet, twice . . . That made nearly 19,000 square feet - compared with the top of a cask, it was a good target for a mortar . . .
"The punt used by the innkeeper's boy is hauled out and hidden among some bushes on the lagoon side of this causeway where it meets Argentario," Jackson said, pointing over to the right. "He left it there, sir, in case we wanted to pole across the lagoon to the other causeway . . ."
Ramage's orders to Aitken were to send the cutter to the spot on the northern causeway where they had originally landed as soon as it was dark. If no one arrived by midnight, then Aitken would, in official parlance, "proceed at once in execution of orders already received". In the meantime, Ramage thought it unlikely that many French troops would be available to make much of a search for the escaped British prisoners, for the simple reason that they would be busy loading guns, horses, ammunition, provisions and themselves on board the three frigates. Navy and army officers being the prickly men they were, there would be many arguments: majors and colonels, angry that their own thoroughbred horses were treated in the same way as baggage-train horses, would scream at ship's officers as strops were put under the frightened horses' bellies ready to hoist them on board; ship's officers would scream back, telling the soldiers to attend to military affairs and leave ship's affairs to ... and so it would go on.