There were four fishing boats drawn up on the beach facing the harbour entrance and although all the paint was peeling they had once been decorated in bright colours, red and blue predominating. But the other beach, between the château and the church, was obviously the fishermen's favourite - it gave more shelter when swells came through the entrance, and most of their little houses were built just at the back of the beach, midway between the château and the church, so they could choose either sanctuary.
Nine boats were hauled out. One of them had been turned upside-down and he could see that two planks had been taken out of the hull. Three men were working on replacements, one of them standing on a piece of wood and making chips fly with his adze.
There were trees a few yards back along the beach providing some shade, and he saw what at first glance seemed to be a row of corpses sitting under them on the sand, their backs against a low wall. When he looked more closely he saw they were women, all dressed in black, some with black scarves round their heads and others - they seemed to be younger - with white scarves. But all of them had bundles of fishing net beside them, and all had a leg extended and a bare foot sticking out from the hem of their dress. The big toe, he saw, was used to poke through the mesh of the net and keep a section taut as each woman methodically mended a tear, using a wooden net-making needle which seemed to dart in and out like a pecking bird. Occasionally one of the women would give a violent jerk with her body, as if caught by a spasm of pain, but it was only to heave away the repaired section of the net and draw over the next part, to be extended by the big toe, inspected and if necessary repaired.
In the shade of the high wall of the château, which formed one end of the beach and cut it off from the second, farther round to the south, half a dozen men were making or repairing fishpots, two of them trimming thin laths of wood, using a type of spokeshave, while the others used the new laths to repair the pots, bending them with a skill that came with the years.
The sails had been loosened from the lateen yards on two of the fishing boats and men were sewing in patches. Each boat was very beamy and shallow-draughted, unlike the boats one would see on the beaches of southern England. The mast was stubby and the lateen yard was made up of two pieces of wood fished together in the middle, presumably to give a certain spring and also probably because straight wood was difficult to find. The forward end of the yard was bowsed down tight at the bow of the boat, lashed to a section of stem which stuck up an extra foot or so. The bow piece formed the pivot for the yard, so that when it was hoisted up the mast by the halyard, the forward end stayed low in the boat while the after end rose high, stretching the sail into its traditional triangular, leg-o'-mutton shape.
Ramage saw that the lower hills round the village were heavily terraced, and he could just make out the vines growing on them. Surely Collioure was renowned for its white wine, while farther south was Banyuls, which produced a sweet red to which the village gave its name? It was hard to remember; when he was last here, as a midshipman, such things did not interest him.
Captain Ramage, with a dozen important jobs to do, was dredging his memory for details of local wines ... He swung his telescope round to the citadel, perched on its hill above the church as if to emphasize that in France today the State was above Church. He watched it for five minutes and saw no movement, noting the building was little more than a stone barracks. There were no guns, and more important, no flagpole. He suddenly realized that flagpoles were a great source of information because in Revolutionary France, where it was de rigueur to fly a Tricolour, every military establishment would have both flagpole and flag. The semaphore tower and its buildings had both; the château neither, nor the citadel. So the semaphore station was the only place where there would be soldiers or sailors; the absence of the Royal Navy from the Mediterranean made garrisons unnecessary for little ports like Collioure. *
Jackson arrived on board with Stafford half an hour later, cheerful and obviously delighted at having brought the Passe Partout safely to Collioure.
'Only lost you once, sir', he told Ramage. 'The first night out from Sant' Antioco, when we had that squall. The rain was so thick we missed your stern lantern and couldn't find it again when the squall passed.'
'I'm not surprised', Ramage said, laughing. 'The squall blew it out. The lamp trimmer thought he was going to get a flogging over that. We put up another lantern as quickly as we could.'
Jackson sighed dramatically. 'There was I thinking it was my clever navigation that found you again, sir; instead it was a new lantern! I must admit I thought you were pretty close when we saw the light again ...'
Ramage assembled Southwick, the corporal of Marines, Jackson, Stafford and the three remaining bosun's mates, and said: 'Stand round as though we are gossiping, just in case there are any prying eyes up at the semaphore tower. Now I want you all to listen carefully.
'We are here to destroy that tower, and I want it done so effectively that no signals can be passed until the tower is rebuilt - a week or so's work - unless they are taken by horseback from Port Vendres to the next station to the north of here, which has no name, only a number, twenty-seven. That's thirty miles' riding or more over rough and rocky tracks. Horses and horsemen are likely to be rare; donkeys are the usual transport here.
'You might wonder why I want to knock down this one particular tower when there are so many others. Well, it's so flat where number twenty-seven is built that it would be easy to repair it. Number twenty-nine, at Port Vendres, will be too strong for us: the port is well defended, and even if we managed to destroy the tower, the French would build a new one very quickly because there's a shipyard there, which means wood, nails, shipwrights, carpenters and tools.
'But here in Collioure ...' he gestured round him. 'You can see it is a small fishing bay with a small anchorage. I imagine that boat being repaired over there exhausts the port's carpentry resources.'
He paused a moment because Jackson obviously had a question. Ramage raised his eyebrows and waited.
'Excuse me asking, sir, and I don't want you to think we in the Passe Partout aren't enjoying it, but why knock down a tower at this end of the Mediterranean? Foix is much closer to Toulon, where the orders start from.'
'Ah, that's a good question. Anyone know the answer - or wants to have a guess?'
They all shook their heads and Ramage said: 'Jackson was near when he said Toulon is the source of orders. We want to cut the semaphore now to stop signals, or at least slow them down, somewhere between Toulon and the action!'
'What action?' Southwickexclaimed. 'Action seems scarce round here - at least, until we knock down that tower.'
'We're trying to stop the action', Ramage explained. 'Within a day or so, the Spanish naval authorities at somewhere like Cartagena are going to get word from a fishing boat or a coastal vessel that a French convoy of six ships is sailing westward. They'll know that any convoy that far west can only be intended for Cartagena: there'd be no point in sending it to Almeria or Málaga because, militarily Spain stops at Cartagena. Yet the reports will say the convoy is well to the westward of Cartagena and still steering west.
'So obviously the Spanish admiral at Cartagena will makea signal to the French admiral at Toulon, using the semaphore, asking him what it is all about, because almost certainly he would be the person to send off such a convoyand the only one who could explain why it is passing (haspassed, I hope) Cartagena.