Ramage and the drum beat

Unaware of the effect his own enthusiasm had had on his captain's thoughts and decisions during the past fifteen minutes, Southwick would have given anything to know what was in Ramage's mind; what his plan was to capture the frigate. To the Master the whole thing looked impossible, and he'd been in half a mind to tell Mr. Ramage so but couldn't think of a tactful way of saying it. Anyway, the captain had looked confident enough from the time the hulk first hove up over the horizon, and had guessed she was a Don long before she'd shown her colours. So obviously he had a plan, though Southwick admitted that if it'd been up to him he'd have squared away for Gibraltar by now, merely noting in the log the time the Spaniard's colours had been hoisted, and her position.

Standing to weather of the men at the tiller, Ramage appeared confident enough in his faded blue uniform and a battered hat, whose silk cockade was so frayed that it looked like a black dahlia. He sensed from the way the men bustled about that they thought these were the first moves in some brilliantly simple scheme to capture the frigate. But his mind had never been so barren of ideas, and the Kathleen was closing rapidly with the hulk - hell, how the scraping of that grindstone grated on his nerves.

He needed a red herring to draw across the Spaniards' bows to occupy their attention while he conjured up some plan to force them to surrender - but it'd need to be an explosive red herring to do any good, he thought gloomily.

An explosive red herring!

'Gu

CHAPTER FOUR

George Edwards, the gu

The fire screens round the magazine had already been unrolled and were hanging down like thick blankets and dripping with water. By the light of the lantern placed outside and illuminating the magazine through a glass window, Edwards inspected the magazine men as they trooped in, stripped to the waist, bare footed, and with rags tied round their heads to stop perspiration ru

Although he had not been back to his native Kent for more than a few weeks at a time in the last thirty years, Edwards had lost little of the Kentish burr in his voice and none of the slow, thoughtful, almost cautious habits of the fisherman, painfully learned during a boyhood spent in his father's fishing boat working among the treacherous shoals of the Goodwin Sands from Deal beach.

In build he was like one of the guns to which his life was devoted: slightly round-shouldered, barrel-chested with narrow thighs and long legs. From his shoulders to his feet his body had the same taper as a gun, his head forming the knob-shaped cascable at the end of the breech, his body the barrel.

For once Edwards was satisfied with what he saw in the magazine: thanks to the Captain he'd been able to exercise the men so they could be trusted to pass the cartridges to the boys with the minimum of fuss and movement; in fact they could do it blindfolded - that was how they'd been exercising for the past week.

For all that, Edwards was puzzled when he heard the word being passed that the Captain wanted to see him at once, and the sudden bright sunshine made him blink as he emerged on deck to find Mr. Ramage and the Master waiting.

Ramage said abruptly to him and the Master: 'We have to make the Dons think we can destroy their ship.'

Southwick said 'Aye aye, sir,' in a matter-of-fact voice, but Edwards thought of the row of gun ports along the frigate's side.

'How do you propose we should do it, Mr. Southwick?'

Both Master and gu

'Listen then, particularly you Edwards. I want you to be able to blow the stern off that ship.'

Ramage, nettled by Southwick's easy-going attitude and disappointed that neither looked surprised at what he's just said, mistook their confidence in him for indifference and snapped at Edwards: 'Any ideas?'

The gu

Ramage nodded, realizing that resentment from either man at the present moment would mean he'd lose their cooperation.

'Well,' he said, noticing both Gia

Ramage saw both men nod warily, obviously expecting another question to be shot at them.

'Now then, you can see she's lying with the wind fine on her starboard quarter, which means, Mr. Southwick?'

'That we can run across her stern, rake her with one broadside and luff round and rake her again with the other without getting into the arc of fire of her broadside guns!' the Master answered promptly.

'We could. Now supposing she was one of our own ships - on fire, perhaps, and we wanted to get the men off?'

Southwick thought for a moment, ruffling his hand through his hair. 'We could heave-to the Kathleen to windward and drift a boat down on a grass warp, sir.'

'And how does all that help us with our present problem of capturing an enemy ship?'

'Fill the boat with boarders?' Southwick asked hopefully.

'And have them picked off one by one by musket fire?'

Edwards' eyes narrowed. If it'd been a question of seamanship alone, Mr. Ramage would have sent for the master's mate and the bosun's mate as well as the Master, but certainly not the gu

'Powder, sir? A few barrels in the boat and a long fuse?'

He was a man who spoke slowly and deliberately, as if every word was a shot to be aimed without haste and, when fired, to have the maximum effect on the target.

Ramage nodded and unexpectedly felt relieved. Perhaps his idea wasn't so wild after all if Edwards could guess it. He took a piece of paper from his pocket, unfolded it, spread it on top of the bi

'No idea, sir,' Edwards admitted frankly, making no attempt to avoid Ramage's eyes, which seemed to bore right through him. 'Never heard of a thing like that before. No experience of powder exploding in an unconfined space. Lose p'raps two-thirds of the effect.'

'If you loaded up a boat and saw it explode, do you reckon you could then judge how much more or less powder you'd need in another one to damage the frigate?'