"Admiral Poitier," Ramage said quietly from the doorway, "can you walk up to my cabin or shall I get a couple of men to carry you?"
The man had gone rigid for a moment, a movement which brought another stab of pain to his leg, but he slowly relaxed when he realized that there were many ways by which Ramage could have learned his name and rank.
"I can walk slowly," Poitier said, sitting up in the swinging cot and putting his right leg on the deck as he looked round for something to grip. Ramage held out a hand and a moment later, with a deep grunt, Poitier was standing beside him. He was not as tall as Ramage remembered, and there was the smell of rum on his breath, but he was sober enough.
"Your surgeon," he muttered, "he did a fine job. Just cuts, from splinters. No permanent damage - if I understood his French correctly."
Ramage stood back as the man hobbled from the cabin, glanced at the seaman stretched on the table and murmured a few words of encouragement, and then made his way up the companionway, able to walk more easily than Ramage expected because the kneecap had not been damaged.
Ramage led the way to his cabin, then stood back at the top of the companionway, noting Poitier's obvious familiarity with this type of ship: the duck of the head at the fifth step of the companionway to avoid a deck beam, sharp turn aft at the bottom to enter the captain's cabin, the nod to the Marine sentry who came to attention and was obviously about to challenge Poitier until he saw Ramage following.
Inside the cabin, Ramage twisted the armchair round until it faced the desk, and gestured towards it. Poitier sat down carefully, as though expecting it to be some trick chair with arms that would seize him, and then he sighed as it gave him relief from the pain in his leg. Ramage tossed his hat on to the settee and sat in the straight-backed chair at the desk. He took a key from his pocket, opened the lower drawer and took out the documents, putting them squarely in front of him on the desk.
"Admiral," he said quietly, "I must congratulate you on your recent promotion -"
Poitier inclined his head in acknowledgement. This too was information the Englishman had obviously obtained from some of the men.
"- which I imagine you never expected. You are a Breton, no?"
Poitier nodded. "You speak very good French, Captain. Fluent, in fact. I would have -" he paused for a moment, his eyes searching Ramage's face warily. "Do you come from Paris? Are you a royalist?"
Ramage shook his head. "You flatter me. No, I am English. I must apologize for not introducing myself: my name is Ramage, Nicholas Ramage." He pronounced the name in the French way, and Poitier seemed to freeze.
"Lord Ramage?" he asked, seeming breathless, his hands grasping the arms of the chair as though he expected to be tipped out of it at any moment.
"Yes - why? Is my reputation so bad?"
Admiral Poitier shook his head. "Not bad in that sense . . ."
"What sense?" Ramage asked, curious but at the same time flattered that the French in Toulon had even heard of him, let alone given him an assessment.
"Well, talk from the West Indies . . . that you abandoned drowning men after sinking their ships - that sort of thing."
Ramage thought back over several years in the Caribbean; he remembered the trouble and risks he had taken to rescue the survivors - scores, indeed hundreds of them - in the action in which he had captured the Calypso. Risks, because the rescued were so numerous they could have seized the ship from the rescuers, and that had led to a warning from his own admiral. In crossing the Atlantic the story had undergone a radical change ...
He looked directly at Admiral Poitier. "Do you believe such stories now?"
Poitier shook his head vigorously. "I do not believe them now and I did not really believe them then. You understand that newspapers like Le Moniteur have to print stories of British atrocities." He gave a short, dry laugh. "Now I think about it, I should really have been able to say: 'Yes, Captain Lord Ramage?' when you came down to me in the cabin and addressed me as 'Admiral Poitier'. The attack on Porto Ercole, the sinking of one of my frigates using one of my own bomb ketches . . . yes, it has the Ramage touch."
"You flatter me," Ramage said, thinking that Admiral Poitier's compliment meant a good deal more than the grudging treatment he had recently received from the commander-in-chief on the Jamaica Station. "However . . ." he said, his tone changing to indicate that the conversation was now taking a different turn, "I believe you were engaged upon 'a special service', with your frigates and the bomb ketches."
"Of course not," Poitier said slowly, as if considering each word. "Just a routine cruise."
"With bomb ketches?"
"I met them by chance."
"But three frigates and two bomb ketches - an unusual squadron to be cruising in the Mediterranean, you must admit. What targets are there for bomb ketches? With few ships of my own country - this one is almost an exception - in the Mediterranean, is not a squadron of three frigates rather large?"
Poitier could not see that the documents on the desk came from his own cabin in the Furet, Ramage realized. Most British naval officers would know that such grey-tinted paper would not be used by the Admiralty or commanders-in-chief, but, after years of war, a Frenchman would have forgotten that really white paper still existed.
"Admiral," Ramage began, tapping the small pile of documents, "I have been -"
He had heard someone clattering down the companionway and now the sentry knocking on the door interrupted him. "Captain, sir: Mr Aitken would like to see you."
"Send him in."
Aitken had a broad grin on his face and Ramage realized that the Scot was a handsome fellow, a fact which was usually disguised by his sombre expression.
Noting Poitier's presence, the first lieutenant said: "May I report to you privately, sir?"
Damn! Ramage had spent some time leading up to the right moment - creating it, in fact - when he would confront Poitier and force the secret of the expedition out of him. Now Aitken had arrived at the wrong moment. Yet Aitken would not have intruded unless. . . Ramage picked up his hat and followed the Scotsman from the cabin, telling the sentry to latch back the door and keep an eye on the prisoner.
Halfway up the companionway Ramage hissed up at Aitken: "What's happened?"
"That xebec, sir: Wagstaffe's sent it. Orsini's brought news of what happened at Porto Ercole."
Ramage stopped climbing. "What happened that we don't know about?"
"Well, nothing really important, sir," Aitken said lamely. "I just thought -"
"Very well, tell Orsini to wait: I want half an hour with this French officer ..."
Aitken acknowledged the order and Ramage went down the companionway, apologized to a startled Poitier for the interruption, and sat down at his desk after dropping his hat on the settee once again.
"We were discussing your orders," he reminded Poitier, "and you claimed you were on a routine cruise."
"Yes," Poitier said, obviously becoming bored, as well as tired and shaky from his leg wound. "A routine cruise. We'd sighted nothing; we needed wood and water . . ."