Ramage looked at it with his telescope. 'Yes, the Dover-Calais packet. Started again after being stopped for eight years.'
The wind remained steady in strength and direction and Ramage tacked the Calypso as they approached within six miles of Fécamp, easily recognizable because it sat in a gap in the cliffs. The frigate could comfortably steer north by west, and by nightfall they tacked to south by west as the Owers, off Selsey Bill, came abeam. Ramage's only concession to peace was that the Calypso had four lookouts on deck at night, one on each bow and each quarter, instead of the six of wartime. With so many ships sailing up and down Channel, the risk of collision was considerable, and the Calypso, with a newly coppered bottom, new sails and well trained ship's company, was probably one of the fastest. This meant she faced the added risk of overtaking some merchant ship lumbering along without lights and running into her stern. Which, Ramage thought gloomily, would mean carrying away the Calypso's jibboom and bowsprit, and that in turn would send the foremast by the board . . .
Southwick, after filling in the new course and the time, put the slate back in the binnacle drawer and, as if guessing Ramage's mood, walked over and said: 'It's like hopping across Whitehall with your eyes shut, isn't it, sir? I'd forgotten what peacetime was like. Still, war can be worse: I remember once in a ship of the line finding myself in the middle of a West India convoy one night. More than one hundred ships, we found out afterwards.'
To Ramage it had all the qualities of a nightmare: far more dangerous than battle. A ship of the line could cut a merchant ship in half; with the bowsprits of a couple of merchant ships caught in her shrouds she could lose her masts. 'What did you do?'
'Ah, Sir Richard Strachan was the captain.' Southwick laughed at the memory. 'I was only a passenger but I happened to be on deck, and so was Sir Richard. A pitch-black night; we hadn't seen a ship for a week. Suddenly we hear shouts nearby and sails flapping. Then our lookouts start shouting; a ship on each bow and one on our larboard beam - all crossing from the starboard side. You know what a cusser Sir Richard is: well, he cusses, but in a trice he has the foretopsail back and we heave-to on the larboard tack and start burning blue flares. That was quick thinking, I must say: we hadn't a hope of seeing and dodging all those merchant ships; but we were so big that once they saw us - we must have looked a splendid sight, all lit up with those flares - they could do the dodging. It must have taken an hour for them to pass us, and there was Sir Richard with the speaking-trumpet swearing at every one that came within hail.'
'He can swear,' Ramage commented.
'We could hardly stand for laughing, sir. "Here's another one, sir," the first lieutenant would say, and if she was going to pass ahead Sir Richard would run up on the fo'c'sle, jam the speaking-trumpet to his mouth and bellow at the master something like "Call yourself a man of God, do you? You look more like Satan to me!"
The wind veered slowly northwest during Saturday night and by dawn on Sunday the Calypso was making nine knots, steering southwest, and Ramage intended to make his departure from Ushant. It was more usual to keep to the north, so that the Lizard was likely to be the last sight of land for a ship's company. The danger of being far enough south to use Ushant was that a sudden gale usually made it a lee shore, but the weather was set fair.
Hammocks were lashed and stowed; the ship's company had eaten breakfast; Ramage had carried out the usual Sunday morning inspection of ship and men. The smell of paint was at last disappearing. Ordering the wind sails to be rigged had helped - the tall cylinders of canvas, the tops open and winged and used in the Tropics to funnel a breeze down the hatches, had forced a strong draught through the ship which had made men shiver, but it had cleared the air.
Finally the order was given 'Rig Church'. Long wooden forms, used by the men to sit at the tables on the lowerdeck, were brought up to the quarterdeck, a chair was carried up from Ramage's cabin and put in front. A large Union flag was draped over the binnacle box, which was to serve as the altar. The quartermaster would not be able to look at the compass until the service was over.
Down in his cabin Ramage changed his shoes - his steward always had his newest pair, fitted with the heavy silver buckles, ready for the Sunday service. Ramage wondered where they spent the rest of the week. He stood still while the steward fitted the sword belt, and then slipped the sword into the frog. Just as he was looking round for his hymn book and prayer book, the Marine sentry reported the first lieutenant's approach.
Aitken came into the cabin. 'All ready for you, sir. The chaplain is holding a bundle of papers as thick as a pound loaf. I hope they aren't the notes for his sermon.'
'You haven't forgotten what I said?'
'No, sir,' Aitken said with a grin. 'And the wind is freshening.'
Ramage walked across the deck and sat down in his chair, facing aft. The chaplain stood immediately behind the binnacle, just in front of the two men at the wheel. The Marines under Renwick were drawn up across the after end of the quarterdeck; most of the ship's company were sitting on the forms. As usual Catholics sat among the Church of England men; Methodists sat near the front and John Smith the Second stood to one side with his fiddle. The ship's officers sat on a form to one side. Ramage thought that at a time when a prime minister had resigned because he disagreed with the King over religion, it would do them all good to see practical religion functioning in a ship of war. Most captains knew that sailors liked a good sing; two hundred voices seizing on to a rousing hymn, with John Smith's fiddle to help them along, did the men good. More important, as far as the Navy was concerned, the way men sang hymns told an intelligent captain if he had a happy or a discontented ship's company.
Stokes, watching Ramage sit down, clasped his hands as if in prayer, but there was something odd about the man. His surplice was not only creased but filthy: not the smears of some recent encounter with a dirty object but the greyness of grime: it had not been washed for months. And the man was standing strangely. The Calypso, on the starboard tack, was rolling with a slightly larger dip to larboard. Men standing on deck were tensing and flexing their knees to remain upright, but Stokes had the wrong rhythm: he was like a single stalk of corn that moved against the wind while all the others bowed away from it.
Ramage glanced across at Southwick, who was watching the chaplain closely, but none of the lieutenants had noticed anything. The man's voice was blurred but punctuated by the hiss of passing swell waves, the creak of yards overhead, and the thud and flap of a sail momentarily losing the wind and then filling again with a thump that jerked sheet and brace.
Stokes announced a hymn, John Smith tucked his fiddle under his chin and poised the bow. Stokes lifted a hand, John Smith scratched the opening bars and the ship's company, standing and swaying with the roll like the field of corn Ramage had pictured, bellowed away happily. Most of them knew the entire hymn by heart, and Stokes was beating time with his left hand. Not the time for the hymn and its music, Ramage noted; rather as though he was a tallyman counting as sheep ran through a gate.
There was still a little warmth in the sun but measurable only because of the chill when the increasing number of clouds hid it. The sea was a darker blue now as the Calypso approached the Chops of the Channel and deeper sea. The ship's company was going to be lucky this year: there would be no winter for them. With more than a hint of autumn in England, they would within hours be turning south, towards the Tropic of Cancer and the Equator, before stopping just short of the Tropic of Capricorn. Ramage doubted if many of the men had ever crossed the Equator. As far as he was concerned, the ship could not get back to the Tropics fast enough. Admittedly he had returned to England after several months in the Mediterranean, but after the Tropics, the Mediterranean seemed a wretched climate: scorching hot and windless in summer, without the constant cooling breeze of the trade winds, and bitterly cold in winter, though never a Spaniard, Frenchman or Italian would admit it, building his house as though there was always sun, and the bitter wind of winter did not blow through, chilling marble floors so that, even as far south as Rome, men and women hobbled about like lame ducks, almost crippled by chilblains. The trade winds made the West Indies as near Paradise as Ramage could imagine; and providing one avoided yellow fever which killed, and rum, which wounded first. . .