'Ah, you're looking at it from halfway through, sir,' Jackson pointed out. 'We're already in France and halfway through carrying out the orders. I doubt if you thought they were so easy when Lord Nelson gave them to you.'
Ramage recalled the three meetings - in the library at the Duchess of Manston's, in that miserable room at the Admiralty with the green-painted walls, and in that cellar-like room in Dover Castle. Jackson was right; at the time they seemed the most impossible orders he had ever heard of, let alone received.
'I see what you mean, but don't let's get too confident, Jackson. And we need some sleep too.'
CHAPTER NINE
Ramage woke next morning with a start but knew he had not been roused by the daylight trying to penetrate the dirty window panes. Approaching footsteps - the heavy tread of boots on wooden planks; the measured steps of a man climbing stairs, not the thud-and-click of the Corporal and his wooden leg. He sensed that Jackson was already awake and looked round at the two men in the other bed. Both of them were watching him over the top of the blanket, waiting for a word or gesture.
'If he's coming here, we bluff! Pretend to be sleepy,' he whispered.
The man reached the top of the stairs and marched along the corridor. Ramage remembered two other doors, but the man was not interested in them and, even though he was waiting for it, the sudden heavy banging on the door made Ramage jump.
'Open the door! Police!'
Ramage forced himself to wait. One gendarme. Surely there would be two if it was trouble? But they might be intelligent enough to have surrounded the inn, or more could be waiting at the bottom of the stairs. Again there was a banging on the door and an impatient order to open it. Ramage forced a noisy yawn and, in the French heavily laced with Italian that he had used the night before, called out: 'Who is that making so much noise? Is breakfast ready?'
'Police,' the man called, 'open the door!'
'Open it yourself,' Ramage said in a surly voice, 'I am still waking up.'
The door swung open and a gendarme, one arm protruding from under the cape drawn round him against the early morning chill, slouched into the room. He flung the cape back over his shoulders, like a bird settling its wings, and rubbed a hand over the stubble along the side of his jaw, the rasping reminding Ramage of a holystone sliding along a dry deck.
'Out of bed!' he ordered, 'and show me your passports and lodging passes!'
Knowing the other three would be watching him for a lead, Ramage slowly got up, mumbling to himself in Italian, and Rossi followed, muttering a stream of Italian which more than made up for the silence of the other two. Ramage fished around under the mattress and Jackson, guessing what wasneeded, pulled the documents from under his side of the mattress and gave them to Ramage.
. Handing the four passports to the gendarme, Ramage waited for him to read the details, but instead the man barked: 'Lodging tickets!'
Ramage shook his head dumbly. 'What are lodging tickets?’
'No lodging tickets?' the gendarme repeated incredulously. 'But you must have them! Why ...'
They could knock him out and tie him up and leave him gagged under the bed. Providing he had been alone, they might be able to escape through the window - although Ramage realized that he had no idea what was outside: perhaps a yard with a high wall. Blast Louis for forgetting lodging passes: here they were, trapped and about to be arrested as spies, all because Louis had forgotten lodging passes. But - up to a point - time was on their side; a little judicious stupidity on his part might result in the gendarme revealing whether or not he was alone.
'Do not talk to me of lodging tickets,' Ramage said with a sudden show of anger. 'You tell that captain in Genoa!'
'What captain in Genoa?' the gendarme said warily, startled by the outburst.
'Captain or colonel, I don't know which,' Ramage said, taking advantage of the effect the rank had on the gendarme. Many promises he made when he gave us the passports and travel documents. "Plenty of work and good pay for carpenters," he said.' Ramage mimicked the precise voice of someone in authority. '"Just take your tools there and turn the wood shavings into soldi!" So we walk and get rides in farm carts - mostly we walk - fifteen hundred kilometres, no less. And when we arrive in Boulogne, what happens? Ah, you see what happens; the first night we get a decent bed to rest our weary bodies, along comes a gendarme. Bang, bang on the door. "Open!" he shouts. "Where are your lodging tickets?" he shouts. A fine welcome that is for honest Italians who come to help fight the English but -'
'But for free lodgings you need lodging tickets,' the gendarme interrupted, trying to quieten Ramage, who had raised his voice to the pitch of a querulous washerwoman. 'You are conscripts - so you must -'
'Conscripts!' Ramage almost shrieked, and lapsed into a stream of Italian to give himself time to think, afraid that his French had become too fluent. 'Conscripts, are we? Ah, I see now, it is all a trick! That colonel - I thought he was a general - was no more than a recruiting sergeant, eh? All his soft talk about skilled carpenters - and we are skilled, I might tell you; you should see the furniture my brother and I have made. Why, when my brother's daughter (she is my niece, you understand) married the son of Giacomo Benetti, you should see the tables and chairs we made for her dot; even my brother's wife, for all her airs - she's no better than us, but she walks with her nose high, like this - well, even she had to admit, they would have looked well in the Pitti Palace -'
He broke off, afraid he would burst out laughing, and hoping the gendarme would recover quickly from the outburst and say something, but the man just rubbed his jaw rhythmically and stared.
'What have you to say to that?' Ramage said, his voice full of indignation.
'You mean you are not conscripts?' the gendarme asked anxiously.
'Read the documents,' Ramage said with a great show of patience. 'Just read them. A man who can make furniture fit for the Pitti Palace taken up as a conscript? Why, even my brother's wife would -'
'Give me time to read,' the gendarme said hastily, obviously alarmed at the idea of hearing more of the niece's dot. He sat down on the edge of the bed, gripping the papers as though fearful they might be snatched away. Finally he let go with one hand and began following the writing with a forefinger, the nail of which was bitten almost to the quick. For more than five minutes he worked his way through every line of all eight documents. When he had finished he carefully folded the papers, stood up and gave them back to Ramage.
'Carpenters, eh? There is plenty of work for you here, helping to build the flotilla.' He looked round at the other three men and, as if anxious to reassert his authority, said sternly: 'See you don't get drunk. The wine of France is very strong; not like that coloured water you get in foreign places.'
'You need not worry,' Ramage assured him. 'I am their foreman; I'm a father to them. An uncle, at least. I bring them all this way. When they are sick I nurse them; when they are weary -'
'Quite so,' the gendarme said, 'and make sure they work hard in the shipyard.' With that he turned on his heel and walked out, slamming the door behind him. Ramage signalled for silence and listened to his footsteps as he went down the stairs.
'As soon as we have had something to eat,' Ramage said heavily, 'we'll have a look at the docks and the shipyards.’
By noon they had the layout of the port firmly fixed in their minds and were due to meet Louis at a cafe near their hotel, a rendezvous they had arranged by walking purposefully past the Marie, their carpenter's tools over their shoulders and, with no strangers within earshot, calling to the Frenchman.
More important than the layout of the port was the size of the Invasion Flotilla. At first Ramage had been appalled by the number of vessels: those he had seen when he sailed in with the Marie only half-filled the outer harbour, but all the inner docks and muddy banks of the river Liane were crowded with a wide variety of craft. The largest were prames, obviously designed as barges to carry troops and cavalry but, as Jackson commented, looking little more than lighters rigged with inadequate masts, and obviously incapable of going to windward. Any progress they made would only be running almost dead before the wind.