"You are very upset," she said.
He shrugged his shoulders. "Disappointed, perhaps. Natural enough, surely?"
"Yes, very natural, mais - that is not all you feel..."
She spoke quietly, but with certainty, choosing her words carefully and concentrating on her accent. She was not anticipating that he would tell her she was wrong, and, he realized, he was not going to.
"Not finding a king's ransom in treasure when you thought you were standing on top of it..." he said lamely.
"You feel you've failed."
"And I have too!"
She sighed. "You men! You are more frightened of the word 'failure' than of all the devils in hell!"
"Failure is more apparent," he said dryly.
"But it is not failure! If you had orders from your Admiral to find the treasure and you could not find it, that would be failure only if it was known for certain the treasure was there."
She slapped her hand on to her knee for emphasis. "It isn't failure if there is no treasure. If someone told you to fly up to the moon on the back of a goose, the fact that you could not would not be failure!"
"Yes, but it's different for-"
There was a loud, rapid knocking on the door.
"Come in!" Ramage snapped, annoyed at the interruption.
An excited Jackson stepped inside the door, but the moment he saw Maxine he stopped in embarrassment.
"Sorry, sir-"
"Carry on, Jackson."
"It's about the digging, sir..."
"Go on - there's no need for secrecy."
"Well, sir -" Jackson broke off, and Ramage saw it was not because of Maxine. Something disagreeable had happened, that much was clear from the American's slightly sheepish manner. But something else had happened, too, which had brought him hurrying back from Punta Tamarindo, where he and half a dozen seamen were supposed to be filling in the trenches.
Ramage began tapping the table with his fingers, and Jackson started again.
"After you left with Mr Yorke, sir, we got to thinking about the skeleton, sir."
"Come on, Jackson, out with it, do you want me to wheedle every word out of you?"
"The skeleton was neither right under the tree nor clear to one side, sir."
"I can't see -" Ramage's voice broke off, because suddenly he could see that the position of the skeleton was odd. If the tree marked the grave, it should have been directly over the body, but it was to one side, four feet down, and only the side roots had grown through it. The tree had been planted - or the seed began growing - after the body was buried. Did it matter? But Jackson had not finished.
"Stafford and me tried to work out why. We couldn't think of anything, so after you'd gone we decided to do some more digging. The rest of the lads were keen, sir."
"Where did you dig?"
"All round the tree, sir, in a big circle and we found lots more skeletons."
"Did you, by Jove!"
"Yes, sir, eight so far and still more coming up."
Maxine sighed. Ramage glanced at her and saw she was as white as a sheet. In a moment he was at her side, holding her against him by the shoulders.
"Breathe deeply," he said quietly. "I'm sorry, we are crude oafs."
'Non," she whispered, "it's not the talk of bodies and skeletons; I just started thinking of ... things. I'm all right now."
Ramage gestured to Jackson to leave the room and as the door closed he turned to Maxine and took her in his arms. It began, he realized later, as a gesture to reassure her; but she closed her eyes and raised her lips and a moment later they were clinging to each other as desperately as if they were drowning.
"Oh, Nicholas," she whispered, what seemed an age later, "I've wanted to kiss you for so long..."
"We must be careful - people will..."
"I don't care," she said. "And my father and mother have guessed already."
Ramage thought of her husband. Had she forgotten? And what did her parents think, now they had guessed? They could hardly approve of their married daughter having an affair with a lieutenant in the Royal Navy.
"Kiss me again," she whispered, "and then you must go to Jackson. But, my darling, don't let this treasure hunt dominate your life."
He held her tightly. "I've found my treasure!"
"It took you long enough," she said.
An hour later Ramage and Yorke were standing on the edge of a large semi-circular hole, the tree forming the centre of the radii. The skeletons had not been moved; the seamen had simply started digging again to the side as soon as they had found one and cleared away the earth.
"Look, sir," Jackson said as he jumped into the hole and moved from one skeleton to another, pointing. The top of each skull was badly damaged.
"A shot in the back of the head," Ramage said.
"Yes, sir. And their arms are together."
"Hands tied behind them, shot in the back of the head, and pitched into a big open grave," Ramage said.
"That's what we thought," Jackson said. "But we can't understand why, sir."
Ramage began thinking aloud for Yorke's benefit.
"A mass execution, but who were the victims? Perhaps pirates, if one band attacked another, or if the members of a band quarrelled? Or a party of slaves who were killed to ensure the secrecy of some work they'd been doing?"
"Slaves," Yorke said, as if to himself. "Made to dig their own grave."
Ramage nodded. "It would make more sense because we'll find at least twenty skeletons if this is a circular grave. To tie up and execute twenty pirates would probably mean at least twenty more."
"But why do it?" Yorke said softly. "It doesn't make sense. There's no point in leaving a poem as a clue to a mass grave."
Ramage stared at Yorke. Perhaps there was treasure as well as skeletons. Most people would not dig below the level of the skeletons: one glimpse of a human bone and a man would be reluctant to disturb a grave. That was why he had stopped the original digging and left the men to fill in the trenches after the first skeleton had been found.
He was reluctant to let all the old excitement well up again after his recent disappointments but perhaps those two converging lines of shells did mark sbmething else ...
When he pointed to the spot, Yorke nodded.
"I don't understand what the devil it's all about," Yorke said, "but I think we should carry on digging there."
Ramage told Jackson to set four men to work and he and Yorke settled down to the worst wait of all.
The men had to chop more than they had to dig, and the roots of the tree snaking down into the earth were springy yet unyielding. More than an hour had passed before one of the men, digging with a pickaxe in a corner of the hole, gave a grunt and, turning slightly, struck again with the pick.
"Jacko!" he called. "Wot abaht this?"
Ramage, talking to Yorke five yards away, noticed that the man's voice was puzzled: whatever he had found it was not a skeleton.
Jackson jumped lightly into the hole and crouched down. Ramage walked deliberately slowly towards them and heard the muttering of voices. Then Jackson leapt out of the hole, knelt before Ramage with a flourish, and opened both hands. In his palms were several coins which shone dully.
Gold doubloons, dollars, pieces of eight and reals ... He rubbed a dollar to make it shine. The Spanish "cobb" of seaman's slang and recruiting posters. He nodded and passed it to Yorke.
"Are there many?" he said in an offhand voice.
"Hundreds, sir - all spilling out of a rotted wooden box."