Southwick tapped his arm and Ramage saw the master pointing at a faintly brownish-green patch in the water over on the larboard bow. 'That'll be the shoal, sir, Santa Catarina. Won't interfere with us . . ."
By now the leadsman standing in the forechains was beginning to chant the depth as he heaved the lead, hoisting it with the water streaming down his leather apron, reading off the marks and coiling the line again. Four fathoms . . . five fathoms ... six fathoms . . . five fathoms . . . Ramage watched the chart with Southwick and noted that the shape of the sea bottom being revealed by the leadsman's shouts was corresponding to the soundings on the chart. The pines lining the Feniglia were now beginning to stand out as individual trees rather than a dark green band at the back of a strip of golden sand which was almost blinding in the bright sun. Through the gap formed by the next bay, peaks showed up like the leaves of an artichoke. Five fathoms ... six fathoms. Ramage ignored the "and a half" and "and a quarter" or "and a quarter less"; he was not interested in anything less than a whole fathom; the Calypso was merely getting into a good position, not trying to find her way through a difficult channel. Five fathoms . . . four fathoms ... He glanced back to Porto Ercole, now over on the frigate's larboard quarter, and at the two bomb ketches, and then he looked at Aitken and nodded. The first lieutenant put the speaking trumpet to his lips and shouted the first of the orders that would wear round the frigate so that she would be steering back almost along the reciprocal of the course that had brought her some three thousand yards off Porto Ercole.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Paolo was angry because his hand trembled as he held the quadrant. It was a one-handed job with the quadrant already set at a particular angle, and all he had to do was to watch the centre of the three French frigates and warn Kenton when the mainmasthead made the correct angle. Finally he used his left hand as well, not to stop the slight tremor of the right - the left did not help because it too was shaking - but because he did not want to make any mistakes. Both the Captain and Kenton had been emphatic that the angle must be correct within a few seconds of arc; any error would mean that the frigates were nearer or farther away, and that could be disastrous.
He would not have been so cross with himself if his hands were trembling because he was frightened - he was not; it was simply that he was excited. Who would not be excited in this situation? Here were a couple of captured French bomb ketches, once again French according to their colours, just nosing up to an enemy harbour under a flying jib and mizen, making perhaps a knot . . . Captain Ramage had been very emphatic in saying that it must all look quite normal, as though the two bomb ketches were just anchoring normally off the harbour, and the senior of the two commanding officers would be coming in as soon as his ship was properly anchored, ready to report to the senior of the frigate captains and receive any new orders that might be waiting for him. The ketches must not waste time and fiddle about so that the French had any idea that they were in fact anchoring exactly 2,000 yards from the frigates . . .
Kenton was watching him, speaking trumpet in his hand; Jackson, too, standing forward ready to let the anchor run, was watching him. Everyone seemed to be watching him. Guiltily Paolo took a hurried look through the quadrant eyepiece. He saw thankfully, after being frightened for a moment that his inattention had taken the Fructidor too far in, that the frigate's masthead in the mirror was not level with the waterline that he could see through the plain part of the glass. Almost, but not quite.
"How far, do you reckon?"
Kenton's voice was harsh. It was hard to guess. He had not heard the Brutus's sails flapping as she luffed up to let go the anchor, and he could just see her out of the corner of his eye, seemingly fixed on the starboard beam not a hundred yards away.
"About a cable, I reckon, sir."
Two hundred yards . . . how the devil was he expected to translate in his head a few seconds of arc measured by the quadrant into yards along the surface of the sea? That was for people like Southwick, who could work out mathematical problems in the same way that a child's ball goes down a staircase - it starts at the top and bounces down, step by step, until it reaches the bottom and stops. And that, ecco, is the answer . . . Southwick made it all seem very logical when he was explaining it, but the minute he stopped explaining and asked for an explanation, the ball seemed to want to bounce upwards, or miss three steps . . .
"A hundred yards to go, sir," Paolo said firmly, but realized that in addition to his hands trembling, his knees felt shaky too. He was not frightened, but they should not have given this job to someone who did not understand mathematics. "Twenty-five yards, sir!"
Everything happened at once: he saw the Brutus turn into the wind, sails napping; Kenton shouted at the helmsman; seamen let halyards go at the run and the flying jib sheets flogged for a moment before the sail began sliding down the stay. Porto Ercole, the frigates and the big fort up on the hill, Filippo, which seemed to be watching them like a crouching animal, suddenly slid to starboard. He turned quickly for a last check – yes, the turn into the wind meant the ketch was still sailing along the 2,000 yard radius from the frigates, so by the time she lost way and the anchor cable began to run, the distance would still be exactly right.
Accidente, his hands were trembling even more now, and the muscles in his knees seemed to be turning to water, and yet he had made no mistake; he had done exactly what Kenton had told him; the ship would be anchored exactly right. He put the quadrant down on the binnacle box and caught Kenton's eye. The third lieutenant winked, and Paolo saw that he too was holding a quadrant - he had checked at the last moment.
"Good lad," Kenton said. "Now get forward. I want that spring clapped on the anchor cable as soon as we've veered ten fathoms."
These French galliots were clumsy things, but one could hardly expect too much; they were little more than heavily built boxes which in peacetime would probably be plying between places like Calais and Havre de Grace with cargoes of potatoes or casks of salt fish; perhaps even carrying stone, from somewhere like Caen, which was needed for building a new breakwater at Boulogne. Stone-blocks, so Rossi said, were a cargo which most seamen dreaded. The great weight for a small bulk meant that masters tended to overload and if the ship sprang a leak it was usually impossible to shift the heavy blocks down in the hold to get at the source to make repairs. After a few hours' threshing to windward with a stone-block cargo, Rossi had said, and his experience had been in carrying marble from Carrara, even the toughest sailor began to imagine that with all the violent pitching the blocks were lifting and dropping on to the hull like an enormous mallet, forcing the planking . . .
"Yes," he said hurriedly as Jackson reported that ten fathoms of cable had been veered, the anchor was holding, and they were all ready to clap on the spring.
Paolo looked round at the spring, a heavy rope which came in over the bow but which had been led aft right along the starboard side outside of all the rigging, secured temporarily with lashings to stop it dropping into the water, and coming in over the starboard quarter.
"Right," he said to Stafford, Rossi and two other seamen, who were waiting at the bow, just beyond the mortar. "Secure the spring. A rolling hitch, of course," he added airily.