Aitken had reported that no interest had been shown in the three ships during the day. With three frigates arriving in the harbour at Porto Ercole unexpected by the Italians, the equally unexpected arrival of another frigate and two bomb ketches off Santo Stefano was unlikely to raise an eyebrow whether Italian or French. Southwick pointed out that not even one boat had come over with local whores, a sure sign of the unpopularity of the French.
Ramage picked up the nightglass and looked over towards the north-west corner of Argentario, where he could just make out the extreme end, Punta Lividonia, and as he watched - with the image turned upside-down by the glass, so that it was as if he was standing on his head - he saw a small black shape moving along the horizon, slowly merging with the Point and then vanishing. The Fructidor had weathered the Point, following the Brutus, and was now easing sheets as she found a soldier's wind to carry her down the west side of Argentario and which would, if it held, let her later stretch comfortably round to anchor off Porto Ercole.
Argentarola was the only obstruction they might hit, a tooth of a rock jutting up a few hundred yards offshore past the second sizeable headland beyond Lividonia, and Jackson and Stafford remembered it well enough to be able to help Kenton if he was at all uncertain. No moon yet, but the sky was cloudless and the stars were bright enough to show up the land. Bright enough but insipid compared with the Tropics, Ramage thought.
So the two bomb ketches were running with a following wind round to Porto Ercole, but for the moment the Calypso remained at anchor: her part was yet to come. His plan was simpler - at least, as simple as he could make it. There was no complex timetable which would leave them all at the mercy of wind or current.
Doubts, uncertainty . . . should he, shouldn't he . . .? Why was commanding one of the King's ships sometimes like gambling with cards or dice, an occupation which bored him? He had just discovered information about intended French troop movements which should be sent off as soon as possible to the Admiralty, or the nearest admiral with enough ships to do anything about it. Yet if he did that, the three French frigates which were due to transport a good many of those French troops, artillery and, most important, cavalry, might well escape.
Should he bolt with the news he had, which could quite reasonably be dismissed by an admiral as wild guesses made as a result of idle gossip by a drunken French artillery colonel, or should he stay and see if he could both alter the situation and add to the information?
He had managed to get over the time he had dreaded: sending Gianna's nephew and heir off on a dangerous operation. Up to now the boy had always been within sight. Yet, he asked himself bitterly, why should it make any difference whether he was killed by a French musket ball while close to Ramage or distant. Still, the idea that he might be killed several miles away in another ship seemed like abandoning him. Gianna would never blame him - but she would be only human if she felt that the boy might still be alive if Nicholas hadn't. . .
The boy was now with Kenton and acting as the third lieutenant's second-in-command, which was excellent experience for a young midshipman. Jackson, Stafford and Rossi were with him as an unofficial bodyguard. No one is dead yet, he told himself sourly, not a shot has been fired. In fact all that has happened is that a French colonel drank himself into a stupor and a tired French major asked a number of aimless questions of a trio of British spies who had since vanished.
Ramage snapped the nightglass shut, using the metallic double click to break the train of thought. He put the glass back in the binnacle box drawer. Count your blessings, he told himself: he had manoeuvred a frigate and two bomb ketches right up to the enemy's doorstep without them having the slightest suspicion; all they had seen were three gipsies . . .
He had played his cards, rolled his dice, or done whatever gamblers did in London for the latest fashionable game of chance, and now he had to wait for several more hours to see how good his luck was. He had many faults, and impatience was one of the worst of them. The most uncomfortable anyway, because it left him pacing up and down like a caged tiger (or a sheep trapped in a pen), feeling that he could chew the end off a marlinspike or scream like the gulls that swooped astern when the Calypso was under way, hoping that the cook's mate would empty a bucket of garbage and give them a good meal which they would gulp down as they fought on the wing, snatching tasty morsels from each other's beaks.
For the next hour, the ship slept. The ship's company, apart from half the starboard watch, were in their hammocks and the Calypso too seemed to be resting along with the frames and planks and beams whose groaning normally formed a descant to her progress through the water, with the creaking of ropes rendering through blocks and the canvas giving an occasional thump as a random puff of wind lifted a sail for a moment. The noises would return, one by one, as soon as the frigate was under way again, but now there were only the wavelets lapping at the hull as the Calypso swung to her anchor, the wind now ahead and then on one bow or the other. There was the occasional hail as the officer of the deck checked with the lookouts, more to make sure they were awake than to see if they had sighted anything.
Very occasionally, as a small swell wave coming into the bay made the ship roll slightly, the yards overhead creaked, and it was difficult to know if it was the wood protesting faintly or the rope of the halyards.
From time to time the two dogvanes fluttered their feathers, making no more and no less noise than one would expect from a few corks with feathers stuck in them.
It was not often that the Calypso was so short of officers. Wagstaffe and Martin in the Brutus disposed of the second and fourth lieutenants, Kenton and Orsini in the Fructidor of the third and the midshipman. This left the frigate with her first lieutenant and her master. In fact Aitken and Southwick were only too happy to stand watch and watch about because they anticipated their four hours on and four hours off ending in a brisk frigate action.
The day's rest under the pine trees had been very refreshing although it was a strange sensation sleeping amid so much noise. Several years at sea, with only an occasional night spent on shore, left you ill equipped on arriving in Italy for the continuous and rapid buzz of the cicadas which seemed to be hiding by the score in every tree, for the monotonous 'kwark' of some strange bird that regularly, at one-minute intervals, managed to keep up his doleful commentary all through the day, and for the wild boar that grunted and scratched their way busily through the trees, cracking dried branches underfoot and, as far as Ramage could make out, never going round a thicket of bushes if they could blunder through. Ramage had discovered that after he had gone to sleep, the particular man on watch had roused the others more than fifteen times during the day, uncertain whether it was wild boar or a French patrol approaching them through the undergrowth. There had even been the rapid tapping of a woodpecker, quite apart from the buzz, hum and whine of various flying insects, most of which left determined bites and itches, and the tiny varieties of ants, some of which seemed to wield red-hot pokers.
He decided as he began pacing the deck again that there was nothing, judging from the brief stay in the Pineta di Feniglia, that made him want to change a seagoing life for that of a gipsy, hunter or even a landowner: he remembered how, in a house, whether a casetta or a palazzo, there were the mosquitoes and even more vicious but much tinier flying insects called the papatacci, which stung like the jabs of sail needles, as well as ants that invaded furniture. Worse, if you owned a house, was the death-watch beetle that methodically clicked its way (as though its teeth were loose) through the beams and other woodwork, turning the strongest oak to powder and tunnels. Compared with all these land noises, the creaks and groans of a ship under way was faint and agreeable music . . .