"Five days up and five back, plus two, which is twelve days," Yorke said. "Which means she can't get back until a week after the trial is over, even allowing that she'll drive the coachmen hard and may well sleep in the coach, stopping only for meals and change of horses."
Southwick nodded his head in agreement. "I can't see that young lady wasting time."
"No, she has hardly any luggage. Mine host at the King's Arms tells me that Alexis hired a coach and four and set off with one piece of luggage and a brace of pistols."
"A brace of pistols?" exclaimed Ramage. "A good idea for a young lady travelling alone, but where did she get them?"
"Oh, we always carry a brace each when we take a voyage," Yorke said. "Who knows, the commanding officer might go mad, apart from the risk of pirates, Frenchmen, privateersmen -"
"- and descendants of buccaneers," Ramage teased.
"It's because of our forebear that we are always well prepared," Yorke admitted with a grin. "Our forebear became rich because the Dons were never prepared. Anyway, you might well feel sympathy for the footpad or ravisher that stops Alexis's coach."
Ramage gave a shiver. "I'd rather not. I've never grown accustomed to being shot with a pistol, and by such a beautiful markswoman would be too painful. However, to get back to the point: what can we do now?"
"Have you anything else to present to the court in your defence?" Yorke asked. "Anything else for next Monday?"
"Nothing. Shirley will make his closing statement for the prosecution and then I make a statement outlining my defence, and the court is cleared while Goddard and his twelve captains consider the verdict. Then, when they've decided, I'm marched in again escorted by the provost marshal - who, incidentally, turns out to be a nice young fellow - and all the witnesses and spectators who are interested follow me in."
"And we all wait for the verdict to be announced," Yorke said.
Ramage laughed. "No. You've forgotten the trial you attended in Port Royal. I'll know the verdict the moment I walk through the door. I just look at my sword on the table: the hilt towards me means not guilty, the point, guilty. I then have a few anxious minutes waiting to see under which Articles of War I'm found guilty. You don't know them like the rest of us, but some carry a mandatory death sentence."
"So if the court ... ?"
"If the court finds me guilty on any one of those, it has no choice but to sentence me to death."
Yorke looked grim. "I wonder if Alexis is thinking only of that?"
Aitken said quietly: "She asked me for a copy of the Articles of War, and I gave her one, sir. I hope I did the right thing. And I marked the ones under which you're charged."
"You were quite right," Ramage said, and remembered Alexis's question in court about the charges, when Goddard had dropped the question rather than read through all the relevant Articles of War. So Alexis had known all the time: she had started provoking Goddard from the moment she began giving evidence.
He had to admit that seeing her sitting in the row of spectators' chairs, he regarded her as a very elegant ornament, much as one might be proud of a fine portrait in oils on one's dining room walls. He had (he went hot at the thought) only called her as his last witness from fear that she would be offended if he left her out. Ye Gods: one day, when they were old and grey and reminiscing, he would tell her how close she came to never being a witness. But after being a lively witness she was now making a madcap dash to London in a coach and four with a brace of pistols close at hand. Gianna would have done that - and Gianna was at this moment probably dead, killed by one of Bonaparte's police agents. Sarah would have done it - but she had almost certainly died in the Murex. Would he always bring death to the women he loved?
The rest of the week passed slowly. The last days of autumn brought zephyrs which ruffled wavelets to make the sea look like hammered pewter. Each morning the Calypso's cutter under Jackson's command went to fetch Sidney Yorke from the North Corner of the dockyard - the name given to the part close to the Gun Wharf and where North Comer Street met the jetty.
Yorke enjoyed leaving the King's Arms and walking the road from Plymouth itself, passing between the barracks and squares named after famous generals and skirting the Post Office as he strode down Cumberland Street to the noisy Market Place, where most things from cabbages to penny nails were being sold from the stalls.
Along Catherine Street and turning left a few yards into Fore Street brought him to the Dock Gates which seemed, improbably, to be guarded by the chapel just inside. A few more yards along Queen Street in the shadow of the dockyard walls brought him to the landward end of North Corner Street, with the jetty and the Calypso's cutter at the bottom.
Walking along the streets, some cobbled, some surfaced with bricks, he passed men pushing laden carts and wheelbarrows, carrying baulks of timber, striding along with an adze over the shoulder or swinging a caulker's maul with, in the other hand, the wooden box of caulking cotton with its wide handle forming a seat.
A few sailors hurried along pulling a cart laden with coils of new rope intended for one of the ships anchored in the Hamoaze; a file of Marines marched to the sergeant's monotonous "leff. . .ri'. . . leff .. . ri'" - where were they going, he wondered?
He felt an air of unreality; everything seemed insubstantial, as though he was walking in a dream. The sun was still weak at this time of the morning but cast chill shadows across the narrower streets. The town of Plymouth Dock, he thought, comprised more angular buildings than any other place he knew, and every one of them caused a shadow.
Yet despite this strange remoteness affecting him, there was a sense of purpose about the dockyard area as a whole: workmen heading for the Dockyard gates, each man with his own tools and most of them with their midday meal wrapped in a bright bandanna; the seamen running with a cart, shouting and yelling, teasing each other and hurling well-meant abuse at men from other ships; the marching Marines, serious of face and giving the impression of a moving panel of white diagonal lines, a tribute to hours of pipeclaying. All had obvious links with the ships of war at anchor.
It all had a sense of purpose until he thought about the enormous Salvador del Mundo moored out there in the Hamoaze, and the Calypso riding at a single anchor. Could a man like Ramage, wounded several times, who had captured from the French the frigate he now commanded (apart from capturing the famous Diamond Rock, commanding the approach to Fort Royal the capital of Martinique), the hero of many attacks on the French in the Mediterranean, now be in desperate danger?
What was wrong with a system under which such a man could be tried for his life by his own people and, as far as Yorke could make out, be almost certain of being executed by them? Why was the Navy, no matter who represented it, about to do what Bonaparte most certainly would do, given the chance - kill Captain Ramage?
Ramage had written to his father, the Earl of Blazey, and told him not to attempt to interfere. Nicholas was obviously frightened that the old political vendetta which had made his father a scapegoat could somehow be renewed, so that the old man could be harmed. Could it? Yorke was far from sure. He only knew that any politician would always do unspeakable things to save his own political skin. Making a career out of murder, or prostitution, or burgling, or pimping, was against the law: society in its wisdom had decided that each was wrong. Politics came into the same category, but since politicians were also lawmakers, there was no law regulating politics; the only limit placed upon them was the natural contempt of honest men. Yorke for a moment felt sorry for a man who had taken up politics. Possibly in the early flush of youth the man had intended to do great things: then, probably quite slowly, he found that men outside politics whom he respected did not exactly shun him, but kept him at a distance, as though shamefully hidden beneath tailored breeches and silk coat he had the scabs of some vile disease.