Ramage had, in effect, arranged a competition between Wagstaffe and Kenton in which each had an assistant and team: Wagstaffe had the new fourth lieutenant, William Martin, and his prize crew; Kenton would have Paolo, Jackson, Stafford, Rossi and three more seamen. Wagstaffe had gone over to the Brutus confident that he and Martin would easily beat Kenton - and an apprehensive Kenton had gone off to the Fructidor without realizing what allies he had waiting for him. Only
Ramage knew that Paolo had been studying tne gunner's notebook for a couple of hours that morning out of sheer curiosity, long before Ramage had decided on the shooting contest.
Predictably, there had been a great deal of grumbling among the rest of the men in the Calypso when they heard about the contest: they wanted Ramage to call for volunteers or, better still, put the opened pages of the muster book in front of a blindfolded man and let him use a sail needle to pick names - a modern version of the old "pricking" as a way of choosing at random. Each mortar needed six men, so trying to choose a dozen from the Calypso's two hundred was more unfair than saying arbitrarily that the two prize crews would also be the mortar crews.
Aitken had wanted to use both mortars in each ketch, but Ramage viewed the aftermost one with suspicion: if anything went wrong with the shell there was the risk that it would carry away the mainmast or mizenmast, whereas there was little chance of anything being carried away if a shell fired by the forward mortar ran wild like a winged partridge.
The green cutter's men had their cask at the mark left by Kenton and were levering it upright. They stood back to look at it as they slapped their hands against their thighs to get rid of the sand. Now they were running back into the sea and struggling out to the green cutter, whose crew were backing water as the coxswain shouted impatiently. One after another the cask men climbed on board and while the last one was being hauled up, the cutter started making its way back to the Fructidor. Each ketch would have a cutter lying astern on a long painter, just in case of accidents.
Southwick came to join him, mopping his face with a large red handkerchief. "Damned hot," he grumbled. "The temperature may be lower than the West Indies, but there's no trade wind to keep us cool."
Ramage closed the telescope and turned to the master. "You make the same complaint at the same time every day," he said unsympathetically. "You'll just have to remember you're back in the Mediterranean now. It has its compensations: there isn't a British admiral within a thousand miles, and we increase the distance every day. Nearly every day, anyway."
The master grinned and waved vaguely towards the distant hills and mountains. "I'm not complaining, sir. The nights are cooler, we'll dodge this year's hurricane season, and we've a better chance of seeing some action."
"But we might face a Mediterranean winter - or even the Channel," Ramage reminded him.
Southwick nodded and then looked first at one ketch and then the other. "Which are you betting on, sir?"
"Neither," Ramage said. "I'm just putting up the prize guinea for the winning team."
"I'm putting my money on the Brutus. Wagstaffe's a smart fellow, and this young Martin seems wide awake. I'm afraid Orsini's mathematics are so bad he won't be much help to Kenton, who's a long way from being a mathematical genius himself."
"After the first shell, I should have thought a good eye for distances was more important," Ramage said mildly.
Southwick shrugged his shoulders. "Blessed if I know, sir," he admitted. "I've never served in a bomb ketch; never even seen one fire a round."
"Nor me," Ramage admitted. "I spent three months in one as a midshipman, but we never fired the mortars. That's one of the reasons why I want to see what happens."
Southwick looked at him knowingly from beneath bushy eyebrows. "Aye," he said enthusiastically, "it's the kind of information that might come in useful one day."
"One never knows," Ramage said as he turned to the bosun and ordered: "Hoist that signal now."
He had been very careful in his instructions to the two lieutenants to ensure that they fired alternately, so that he could observe the fall of the shells. It was, as Southwick said, the kind of information that might come in useful one day - if you did everything wrong and Their Lordships put you in command of a bomb ketch . . . Officers did not have to accept such a command, but if the alternative, as it certainly would be, was to spend the rest of your life on the beach picking up seashells and looking longingly at the distant horizon . . .
Doing something wrong, being afraid to take a risk because of the doubtful wording of orders, being scared of doing something because you did not have written orders and thus allowing the enemy to escape: all these were the best argument for a captain having a private income. He need not be a rich man; just rich enough to avoid having to worry about the fate of a wife and children, if he had them. Then he could do what was best for the Service without worrying too much about the idiosyncrasy of an admiral. A nice payment of prize money was often just enough.
This was not to say that a rich captain could or should ignore or disobey proper orders or take needless risks. Occasionally a situation arose which was not properly covered by written orders, however, and where the captain should use his own initiative, confident that his senior officer and the Admiralty would back him. In fact he could not always rely on such backing; in fact, too, he might do the wrong thing. Ramage remembered his father's advice - better to be blamed for doing something than for doing nothing. All too often doing nothing was a form of cowardice; the form that paralyses your brain in the wish to avoid being blamed. The clerk's creed, in other words: you could not be wrong if you never made a decision.
What the devil all that had to do with firing a couple of dozen shells from a pair of captured bomb ketches he did not know; nor, for that matter, did he know why the Navy always called them bomb ketches, abbreviated, oddly enough, as 'Bb', since what their mortars fired were called shells not bombs. When did a shell become a bomb? Grenadiers threw grenades - which were sometimes called bombs, but perhaps only loosely by people who did not know. Anyway, the Admiralty named most of their bomb ketches after volcanoes, several of which began with "V", so in the Navy List there were, for example, "Vesuvius (Bb) . . . Volcano (Bb) . . . Vulcan (Bb)" although he could remember Tartarus, Terror and Thunder.
Southwick nudged him. "Wagstaffe will be first," he said. "A couple of his men are already wrapping the slow matches round their linstocks."
Ramage had a mental picture of young Paolo talking to Peter Kenton. He would have found out that there was no race against the watch; that it was the bomb ketch that blew up her cask with the fewest shells that won. Paolo was shrewd enough to know that the most vital shell of all would be the first one fired . . .
Over on the foredeck of the Fructidor the conversation had already taken place, just as Ramage had imagined it. While the half a dozen seamen and two powder boys were collecting equipment from the ketch's magazine, Paolo had managed to persuade Kenton to walk aft with him. Twenty-three-year-old third lieutenants, only two men removed from the Captain, treated midshipmen with disdain where service matters were concerned, and it was obvious to Kenton that Orsini had some idea he wanted to put forward. Orsini was a brave enough lad in action but had a little too much imagination at times . . .