Ramage and the Freebooters by Dudley Pope Page A

Harris,’ Ramage said coldly, motioning him to put the pistols down on the table, ‘if you shot me and Mr Southwick you’d be no guiltier than you are already. You can’t be hanged more than once. Mutiny, intelligence with rebels, treason – a couple of murders won’t make matters much worse.’
    Even in the chilly light Ramage could see the man was almost fainting.
    ‘Sit down!’
    Harris sagged on the edge of the settee behind him, head between his hands, his whole body trembling.
    Ramage was sickened by what he’d been forced to do; but now the most intelligent of the original Tritons fully understood the significance of the Fleet’s action. And Harris sat there realizing, for the first time, how close his neck was to the noose at one end of a rope rove from a block at the foreyardarm.
    Even now Harris was probably imagining the coarse rasping of the rope on his skin, the knot jammed against one side of his neck; imagining a shouted order and the sudden crash of a gun firing on the deck below where he’d been standing. Then the garrotting while his body soared straight up in the air as men ran with the other end…
    Ramage said: ‘Harris, my precise orders are known to very few people: the First Lord of the Admiralty, the Port Admiral and Mr Southwick. But I’ll tell you this much: this is going to be a long voyage. You already know nearly half the ship’s company have served with me before. Only a few weeks ago I had to give them orders which they knew should have resulted in them being killed by the Spaniards. Even before that several of them risked death many times at my side. They’ve never flinched and they’ve never refused. In fact they carried out those orders cheerfully. You know all this?’
    ‘Partly, sir; they was telling us last night.’
    ‘Well, I command a different ship now. More than half the crew haven’t served with me. The point is, Harris, I may have to give similar orders again…’
    ‘Yes, sir?’
    ‘Those orders will have to be obeyed.’
    ‘And they will be, sir, if it’s up to me!’
    ‘Yet my first order – to weigh anchor – was not. Hardly a good start.’
    ‘But sir–’
    ‘That’s all, Harris: carry on.’
    The man wanted to say something but Ramage waved him through the door.
    How many such men were there in the Fleet, in those great sail of the line, each with a ship’s company of seven or eight hundred? Perhaps barely one in a hundred was a real trouble-maker, which left ninety-nine Harrises, all equally guilty in law but in fact guilty only of putting their trust in hot-heads; of being led astray; of believing they had a just cause of complaint and that once the Admiralty knew of it, they’d put it right…
    Ramage took off his coat. It was a chilly morning but the coat was sodden with perspiration. And watching his own hands trembling he knew he wasn’t a born gambler. He could sit back and plan the gamble, work out the odds and place his bet. But he lost his nerve just before the card turned face up and, more important, there was no thrill, no pleasure in it; just fear.
    And the fear was like a fogbank: it penetrated everywhere and extended an unknown distance. It could last an hour or a week, and no man caught in it could drive it away.

 
CHAPTER FOUR
    Southwick watched Ramage’s hand. Both men were bending over the chart spread on the table in Ramage’s cabin and the Triton had long since picked up the men from the cutter and got under way again to pass the entrance to the Beaulieu River, where four years earlier, the brig had been built under old Henry Adams’ supervision at Buckler’s Hard.
    As he waited for Ramage to speak the Master wondered if old Adams was still alive. In view of some of the rubbish they were hammering together these days and calling ships, he reflected, it’s a comfort to be in one that old Harry kept his eye on. Planked with oak cut from the New Forest, her ironwork wrought at the works at Sowley Pond just near the