Ramage & the Renegades Read Online Free PDF Page A

strained at the heavy ropes securing her by the bow to the mooring buoy. “This east wind—goes right through you. All that time in the West Indies and Mediterranington makes yer blood thin.”
    â€œMediterranean,” Jackson said, automatically correcting Stafford, who had a remarkable inability to pronounce place names correctly. “It’s the damp in the cold that makes it worse. I’m surprised the Captain is bringing visitors with the ship in such a mess. Anyway, how do you know about it?”
    â€œThat chap Hodges. He’s the First Lieutenant’s servant while the other fellow’s on leave, and ‘e ‘eard Mr Aitken and Mr Southwick talking about it. An’ we’re going to have to tiddly up the chair; the rats have been chewing the red baize.”
    â€œAnything to get away from these guns,” Rossi said wearily. “
Accidente,
twenty men should make light work of hoisting one gun, but they seem to leave the hoist to me.”
    Stafford laughed and said: “You mean to say it’s too heavy? A
French
gun? You ought to be able to lift it up like a baby out of a cradle, without usin’ a tackle.”
    He helped heave down on the fall and added: “‘Ere, the Marchesa’s goin’ ter ‘ave a surprise when she sees Mr Orsini. You’d never think he first came on board a shy boy trippin’ over every rope in sight and slippin’ on every step of a companion-way.”
    Paolo Orsini had just left the First Lieutenant and his head was in a whirl. He had expected to be given a couple of days’ leave so that he could visit his aunt and the Captain, and of course, the Earl and Countess, at the Palace Street house. He had never thought for a moment that all of them might visit the ship. His aunt knew what a frigate was like because one had brought her to England from the Mediterranean after the Captain (and men like Jackson, Rossi and Stafford) had rescued her from a beach in Tuscany, but now she was to visit the
Calypso
she would see not only the ship in which he served but which he had helped capture. And since then the
Calypso
had been in action—well, how many times was it? He found he could not remember; his memory was blurred by the time he had been second-in-command to “Blower” Martin in a bomb ketch, and when he had (all too briefly) commanded a captured tartane.
    He had grown a good couple of inches; the sleeves of all his jackets were too short, so that his wrists stuck out like sections of bamboo; the legs of his breeches ended just on his kneecaps, making them very uncomfortable—so much so that most of the time he felt like a hobbled horse, though on watch at night he pulled them down so that the waistband was tight against his hips.
    There was no chance of getting on shore and buying new uniforms here in Chatham: he had hinted to Mr Aitken, who had pointed to the shiny elbows and mildewed lapels of his own uniform and said dourly: “This is ma best—you see what the Tropics did to it!”
    The Tropics were a destroyer: leave a jacket hung in a locker for a week and it grew a fine crop of green mildew wherever a trace of food or drink had spilled on it. Leather, whether boots, shoes, belts or scabbards, grew rich yellow and green mildew as fields sprouted new grass and clover. Iron and steel rusted: a sword or dirk left in its scabbard for a few weeks would rust even if coated with grease—the rust seemed to grow beneath the coating. Rope lost its springiness and became dead, apparently from the sunlight, although no one could explain exactly what happened. Sails suffered too; the humidity and constant Tropical showers brought on the mildew, while the blazing sun took the life out of the threads so that it was easy to poke a finger through canvas which looked perfectly sound. Even worse, the material was so weak that the stitches securing a patch just ripped it away like a slashing knife. He