He pulled his boatcloak round his shoulders. Timing . . . minutes, perhaps even seconds, would make all the difference between a sufficient, in other words, moderate, success and a disastrous failure. Once again he seemed to be risking too much for too small a prize. Only an ass put down a single stake of a hundred guineas for a nine-to-one chance of winning a single guinea. He seemed to have read somewhere, or heard a seasoned gambler say, that the prize should match the stake and the risk. He supposed some people did in fact find themselves in a position where they could put down a stake on the green baize table with a decent chance of winning a reasonable prize at reasonable odds, and he envied them; but that must be what made a man a professional gambler - a person who would only bet if the odds were right. How nice it must be to have a choice: yes, I will bet now; no, I'll stay out of the game and come in again when the odds seem more favourable.
Ramage never seemed to have that choice; he had to put down his stake and watch the dice roll to a stop, or the card turn over, even when the odds against him were absurdly high. Yet he ought not to grumble; he certainly ought not pity himself, as he was doing at the moment, because in the past he had won when the odds simply did not exist; when there had seemed absolutely no way of winning. In other words, he had been lucky. Gamblers who relied too often on their luck instead of calculating the odds usually ended up ruined; captains of ships of war who relied on luck to bring victory instead of careful planning usually ended up dead, taking many of their ship's company with them.
Steady, he told himself. He had made a plan and worked out the odds, and the odds seemed no worse than usual, perhaps even better. The only luck he needed (the element of chance that was bound to enter into even the best of plans) was that the wind should not drop. The direction mattered little; it just had to blow, anything from a gentle breeze to half a gale ... a tramontana from across the mountains to the north, a lebeccio from the west, bringing rain, a sirocco from the south, hot and searing with thick cloud, shredding nerves and nearly always lasting three days, or a maestrale from the north-west - just let there not be a calm, which stopped any movement. With the settled conditions at the moment, a clear sky, the stars sparkling, a nip in the air, and the hint of dew, with only the very slightest occasional swell wave, there could be calm an hour after sunrise. The usual sea breeze that set in about ten o'clock in the morning might decide to have a rest for the day . . .
A bulky shadow loomed up beside him and Ramage recognized Southwick.
"Just that one fishing boat still working over towards Talamone, sir. Everyone else seems to have gone to bed."
"Very wise," Ramage said cheerfully. "There isn't much to stay up for, unless you're one of the King's officers."
"I hope all those dam' French officers are staying up late in Porto Ercole," Southwick said, his sniff indicating that he was making a joke. "Let's hope the navy is entertaining the army and that they all drink too much, so that in the morning they all have dreadful headaches ..."
Southwick always amused Ramage by making "dam' French" sound like one word. "If it's up to that artillery colonel, they will. Argentario wine is rather special and the colonel was certainly drinking it like water when we met him in Orbetello and so were his officers."
"So they'll introduce the navy to it," Southwick said hopefully.
"Yes. The vino locale might be an unexpected ally . . ."
Southwick took out his watch and held it to the lantern kept burning in the binnacle box so that the ship's heading could always be checked against the compass. "Half an hour to go, sir. I'd better rouse out the watch below. General quarters once we're under way?"
"Not yet," Ramage said. "We can wait until dawn - the men will have been at the guns long enough before the day ends."
Soon the bosun's mates - cursed by drowsy seamen as "Spithead Nightingales" from the shrill sound of their calls piping through the ship - were rousing out the other half of the starboard watch. Within five minutes the bars had been slid into the capstan, John Harris, the toothless fiddler, had climbed on top, and three men stood at each chest-high bar. With the bars radiating out like spokes, the capstan now looked like a horizontal wheel. A seaman walked round hitching a line, called the swifter, to join all the ends of the bars like the rim of a wheel over the spokes.
Finally Southwick gave the order "Heave round" and Harris began scraping away at his fiddle, under strict orders not to play a traditional British song because it might be recognized by some Italian or Frenchman within earshot fishing without a light. The men began pushing against the bars, and the anchor cable slowly creaked home, the strain squeezing water from the strands like a washerwoman wringing out a sheet.
Topmen were standing by the shrouds, ready to run aloft to let fall the topsails; waisters and afterguard were also standing by, the waisters amidships at the frigate's waist, which gave them their name, and the afterguard on the poop, ready to trim the sails by hauling on the braces which controlled the great yards, or the sheets and tacks which controlled the set of the sails.
The pawls of the capstan gave their heavy but rhythmic clack, making sure that the barrel did not suddenly spin back under the strain of the anchor cable and hurl the seamen away like winnowed corn. Down below, as the anchor cable led in through the hawse, the ship's boys secured it with short lines to the endless cable revolving from the capstan barrel on the deck below to a large block right forward. Holding the lines with which they had "nipped" the two cables together until the anchor cable arrived at the hatchway leading down to the cable locker, they quickly unwound their "nippers", from which they received their own nickname, and ran forward to start the same process over again.
Down below in the locker several seamen manhandled the heavy cable so that it stowed evenly in concentric rings, making sure it would run out freely when the ship next anchored. It was a hot and smelly job; when stowed in the locker the rope was a breeding ground for mildew and fungus; when in the sea it became a happy hunting ground for small crabs and various little plants that grew in the water and often had a sharp sting. It picked up sand as it scraped across the bottom and worked it into the strands so that it rasped the skin of hands like the rough bark of an old tree.
Ramage waited in the darkness with Aitken at the quarterdeck rail, the young Scotsman holding the black japanned speaking trumpet and listening for a hail from Southwick to say that the anchor was aweigh; just off the bottom and still hanging down in the water like a great pendulum yet not securing the ship to the sea bed. Away and aweigh; Ramage mused over the two words, and how often they confused landsmen. The anchor was "aweigh", meaning it was off the bottom, when in effect it was being weighed by the cable. With the anchor hoisted on board, the ship made sail and was "under way" or, putting it more clearly, was on her way somewhere. She "weighed" anchor and then got under "way" or, if she was still moving after furling sails, or was being carried along by the wind, she had "way" on.
There was Southwick's first hail. "At short stay", which meant that the anchor was still on the bottom but the anchor cable was taut, coming up at an angle as though it formed an extension of the forestay. More scraping from Harris's fiddle, more clanking of the pawls, more encouraging calls to the men from Southwick, which Ramage could hear quite clearly, and then the master's hail that the cable was "up and down", which meant that the anchor was just about to lift off the bottom, and, a few clanks later, the report: "Anchor is aweigh, sir."