Ramage had already considered salt fish being brought down from Genoa or Leghorn, and military cargoes that could be travelling up and down the coast. He had a vivid picture of the Calypso frigate boarding one French transport and discovering at the last moment that she had five hundred well-trained troops waiting on board, with another five hundred in the consort coming up to the rescue. Likewise a few broadsides fired at close range into a transport laden with casks of gunpowder might well make a very loud bang that none of them would survive to hear for more than a second.
There was only one way of finding out what it was all about. "Allow a knot and a half of northgoing current," he told Southwick, "and give us a course for Punta Ala. If you don't see those ships bursting into flames before moonrise, you can reckon they're just anchored to wait for a wind veer."
Still thinking of the strange shape of the two ships after they had slid into the shadows, Ramage reflected that every country's coast had its own characteristic smell and noise when approached from seaward at night. With experience you can recognize it. The Italian coastline here just south of Elba was just as he remembered it from three or four years ago - but very different from the West Indies he had just left.
Oddly enough there was not so much physical difference in daylight: the high but rounded, breast-shaped Tuscan hills and more distant mountains, scorched brown by the summer drought and with trees only on the lower slopes, were very similar to those of several West Indian islands. Apart from the startling blue of the Caribbean sea and sky, the Virgin Islands, St Christopher, Nevis, St Bartholomew, St Martin and even Guadeloupe and Martinique, could have been part of Tuscany - except, of course, for the noises and smells.
In Italy the carbonaio was always busy cutting thick shrubs and lopping branches from trees and at night he tamped down his ovens with turf so that random draughts did not make too much heat and burn the wood to ash instead of baking it into charcoal. The smoke coming up from the hummocks, like autumn mist starting in a valley, drifted off to leeward with its own distinctive smell: of neither bonfire nor blaze, open grate nor bushfire. When the offshore breeze came up at night in settled weather the smell of the charcoal burning could be detected many miles out to sea, a signpost pointing homeward for the local fishermen but a warning signal to the unwary navigator. Mingling with it but sweeter yet sharper than the charcoal was the smell of herbs: sage, which covered many of the hills, thyme, rosemary and origano.
Among the West Indian islands the effect of the trade winds blowing regularly from the east was that the west side of each island had this almost permanent smell, and it was one which became stronger as you went on shore and entered the little towns: the sellers (usually women) would have their small piles of charcoal under the shade of a big tree. Plump women in colourful but never garish dresses, chattering with each other in shrill voices, occasionally quarrelling but mostly laughing, eager to tease a bargain-hunting buyer who went to a rival.
Ramage shivered in the darkness. Smell, noise - and temperature. If you had been serving on the stormy Channel Station for a few years, a move to the Mediterranean seemed blissful because (apart from a few weeks in midwinter) it was so much warmer. Then you went to the tropics and for the first few weeks the heat seemed stifling, damp and draining off one's energy. Soon you learned tricks like always standing in the shade when the sun was at its zenith, and you discovered the cooling breeze of the trade winds, so that you became accustomed to it. No doubt soldiers on duty inland found it scorching for an hour either side of noon but, to a sailor in a ship anchored in a quiet bay, places like the West Indian islands
seemed to have the perfect climate.
The Caribbean climate was perfect, Ramage thought, and there had been no pleasure leaving the tropics this time, particularly because the Calypso was not bound for home. As the frigate sailed north from Tortola, heading for Bermuda, which was one of the first stepping stones across the Atlantic going eastward towards Gibraltar, the temperature had dropped one degree for every degree of latitude made good northward. He had been thankful when they sighted the Azores and began the long final sweep that would take them down into the Gut, as the Strait of Gibraltar was always known to the Navy.
He pulled his boatcloak round him and with another shiver unconnected with temperature realized how a fox must feel as it paused to watch the pack of hounds sniffing the air, seeking its scent, because those two black shapes he had been watching could be a trap. They could be two hens waiting to be snapped up; they could also be two Trojan horses. All he could do was close with them and hope that sharp eyes and the nightglass would give him enough warning. After all, he told himself sharply, that was why he was here, one of the few King's ships now in a Mediterranean from which the Navy, stretched beyond its capacity, had almost completely withdrawn its strength which was needed more urgently from Brest to the Texel, from Jamaica to the Skaw. The Navy's task of blockading the French was like a cooper trying to prevent an old cask from leaking: no sooner was one leak stopped up with a small blockading force than another was spotted.