Wagstaffe saluted. 'Surveying is a very boring job; I seem to end up holding these striped poles and measuring angles. By the way, sir, once the draughtsmen really get to work, we're going to have to give names to the bays, headlands and peaks. I mention it, sir, in case you want to state your preferences.'
Ramage was still absorbing Wagstaffe's tact when Southwick came bustling up, holding a slate. 'You want the same watch on the prizes, sir?'
'Yes. Not a boat visited any one of them yesterday.'
'No reason why one should, come to think of it, sir; each ship must have plenty of water and provisions. Any trouble with hostages, and the privateersmen would be going over to the Lynx.'
'Ah, what eyes and brains lost to the Revenue Service,' Ramage teased.
Southwick sniffed contemptuously. 'My big mistake, sir, was not joining the smugglers when I was a boy. I'd be retired now with a big mansion, a stable of horses, two carriages...'
Aitken came up and saluted. 'The swimmers, sir. They're ready for inspection, and the carpenter and his mates have nearly finished the first raft. Would you care to look at it before they put the last nails on the decking and start on the second?'
The raft looked in fact like a large toboggan with wide and deep runners. On the front of what would be the section on which a person would sit to slide on snow was an eyebolt, with another at the back.
'I want a couple of fathoms of line on each eyebolt, and secure line along the sides, so that men can hold on.'
'How many men, sir?'
Ramage shrugged his shoulders. He looked at the raft and said: 'She won't take more than six holding on each side, plus one forward and one astern. That'll make fourteen, and should be enough. Put a batten each side on the decking, carpenter, here and there, so that something put on top won't roll off.'
He left the raft and walked along the line of men drawn up on the larboard gangway. They represented the Calypso's best swimmers, and he jumped on to the breech of a gun. 'Gather round,' he said. 'This is what you'll be training to do in the next few days.'
Four days later, as he listened to the splashing of a couple of dozen men swimming beside the ship, out of sight of the privateersmen, Ramage sat at his desk staring at several sheets of paper held down by a large polished pebble.
His life at the moment seemed divided into halves. One was Gianna, the other was the problem of the Lynx and her prizes.
Since leaving the house in Palace Street and joining the Calypso at Chatham, he had tried to avoid thinking of her. He realized now that he had in fact tried deliberately to destroy every memory of her, particularly of their first meeting, in the darkness and mystery of the Torre di Buranaccio, and the desperation he felt holding her in an open boat knowing she had a musket ball in her shoulder and fearing she would die before he could find a surgeon ... So many memories, some of danger, some of peace. When she came out to Lisbon to see him and the way she had the ambassador, Hookham Frere, dancing a jig in an effort to please her, and quiet days at St Kew when they had walked together over the Cornish moors or rode as far as Roughtor and Brown Willie, the distant peaks which looked as though they had been dropped by a giant... When her eyes glinted and she became imperious, the Marchesa breaking through, revealing a childhood spent in the palace at Volterra with dozens of servants and an early adulthood surrounded by ministers, the ruler of her own state, Volterra. He remembered the walled city of Volterra with its dozens of towers, tall, very narrow rectangles rising high like tree trunks.
Was she safely there, consulting with her ministers, restoring order and without French troops? Had the French removed their guillotines and rusty iron trees of Liberty? Was she ruling wisely and patiently, realizing that forgiving and forgetting might be a wiser policy than judging and revenging? Or was she dead, an assassin's victim?
Because he had previously refused to think about it, chasing away the random thoughts that leapt at him from dark corners of his mind before he went to sleep, or when he woke at night, his head a turmoil and his muscles knotted, he found that new fears for Gianna had spawned and demanded his consideration.
He tried to fight them off by imagining what had happened to her from the time she had boarded the Dover packet with the Herveys. They would have arrived in Calais and presented their passports, duly signed by Hawkesbury and probably, because Jenks was a fool, countersigned by Otto. The Herveys' carriages would have been loaded with their baggage, and knowing both the Herveys and Gianna, he could imagine just how many trunks would be involved. Then they would have set off along the Paris road, probably intending to spend the first night of the journey at Amiens.
They would be little prepared for what they saw: Bonaparte's secret police, the near-starvation, the nearness of the guillotine, the sheer lack of an occasional coat of paint on houses - all had combined to give French towns the appearance of places that have been stripped by locusts, or at least occupied by an enemy army. In fact France's own army had taken so heavy a toll of able-bodied men that the inhabitants of towns and cities were mainly women - many in the eternal black of mourning - and old men. There would be many cripples, too; men who had lost a leg or an arm in battle or even in the ice and snow of the Alps or Apennines.
They would see - particularly in Amiens, where he had once been imprisoned and threatened with it - the Widow set up in most squares. The guillotine had become part of every French square; La Veuve dans la place, usually set up high on a platform so the crowds could watch the spectacle, a wicker basket to catch the head . . .
This the Herveys and Gianna would see - well, not the basket and not the darkened bloodstains, which the rains would have washed away, nor the heavy blade of the guillotine, which was removed by the executioner when not required, so the edge could be sharpened again and greased well to protect it against rust. They would see the gaunt, wooden framework and probably sigh that it had ever been used. It was all over now, they would say, the Treaty had been signed, the war was over. Would Hervey himself, or Gianna, realize that La Veuve had nothing to do with the war and with the Treaty; that it was used by the French government of the day against the French people?
Anyway, eventually they would arrive in Paris, and there they, along with all foreigners, would have to register their presence and their address at the Prefecture. So if they were waiting for her, Bonaparte's secret police did not have to look for the Marchesa di Volterra; she would come to them . . . Leaving the safety of England, she would have walked like the fly into the parlour of the spider Bonaparte. And all, he thought bitterly, in the completely mistaken idea that she was doing it for the good of Volterra.
What good was she to Volterra if she was lodged in a French jail? What influence could she have on Bonaparte when he had her behind a locked door? She argued, of course, that while in England she had no influence on Bonaparte, and both Ramage and his father had immediately pointed out that while she was free she had an influence on Bonaparte: he always knew that the rightful ruler of Volterra was waiting patiently to return; that his French regime there were simply puppets.
There was only one way that Bonaparte eould destroy the Kingdom of Volterra, and that would be by destroying its rightful ruler, and Ramage found he had crushed the quill pen with which he had been tapping the pile of papers representing the other half of his problem.