"Pope, Dudley - Ramage - Ramage and the Freebooters" - читать интересную книгу автора (Pope Dudley)

'I have an appointment with Lord Spencer at nine o'clock. Please tell him I'm here.'

'Look,' sneered the man, all pretence at politeness vanishing, 'we get lieutenants in 'ere by the gross, captains by the score and admirals by the dozen, all claiming they've appointments with 'is Lordship. There's only one person on the list to see 'is Lordship this morning and 'e ain't you. You can wait in there'--he pointed at the notorious waiting-room to the left of the main doors--'and I'll see if I can find someone to see you.'

Ramage was rubbing the lower of the two scars on his right brow: an unconscious gesture which a few weeks earlier would have warned a whole ship's company that their young captain was either thinking hard or getting angry.

Suddenly turning to the doorman--who was obviously enjoying the episode--Ramage snapped: 'You! Go at once and tell the First Lord that Lord Ramage has arrived for his appointment.'

The man was scuttling for the corridor at the far end of the hall before Ramage turned back to the liveried attendant who, by now looking worried and rubbing his hands together like an ingratiating potman, said reproachfully:

'Why, your Lordship, I didn't realize... You didn't tell me your name.'

'You didn't ask me and you couldn't be bothered to see if I was the person on the list You merely hinted that a guinea would help arrange for me to see a clerk. Now hold your tongue.'

The man was about to say something when he saw Ramage's eyes: dark brown and deep-set under thick eyebrows, they now gleamed with such anger the man was frightened, noticing for the first time the two scars on the lieutenant's brow. One was a white line showing clearly against the tanned skin; the other pink and slightly swollen, obviously the result of a recent wound.

But Ramage was still shaken--as was every other officer in the Royal Navy--by the latest news from Spithead and felt a bitter rage not with the man as an individual but as a spiteful personification of the attitude of many of the Admiralty and Navy Board civilian staff.

By now impatiently pacing up and down the hall, Ramage thought of the dozens of assistant, junior and senior clerks, and the assistant, junior and senior secretaries now working under this very roof, all too many of whom administered the Navy with an impersonal condescension and contempt for both seamen and sea officers amounting at times to callousness.

It was understandable because of the system; but it was also unforgivable. Many--in fact most--of these men owed their time-serving, well-pensioned jobs to the influence of some well-placed relative or friend. They filled in forms, checked and filed reports, and at the drop of a hat rattled off the wording of regulations parrot-fashion, unconcerned that the seaman they might be cheating out of a pension was illiterate and ignorant of his legal rights, or that the captain of a ship of war suddenly ordered to account for the loss of some paltry item might be almost at his wit's end with exhaustion after weeks of keeping a dose blockade on some God-forsaken, gale-swept French port An inky-fingered clerk was, in his own estimation, far more important than a sea officer; ships and seamen were to him an annoyance he had to suffer. No one ever pointed out that he existed solely to keep the ships at sea, well-found, well-provisioned and manned by healthy and regularly paid seamen. No, to these damned quill-pushers a ship of war was a hole in a gigantic pile of forms and reports lined with wood and filled with convicts.

Most of this shameful business at Spithead was due to men like this, whether a junior clerk at г75 a year humbugging the distraught widow of a seaman killed in battle or a senior secretary at г800 a year ignoring the sea officers and telling ministers what they wanted to hear. The Devil take the----- 'My Lord...'

The porter was trotting alongside him and had obviously been trying to attract Ramage's attention for some moments.

'My Lord, if you'll come this way please.'

A few moments later he was ushering Ramage through a door saying, 'Would you wait in here, sir: His Lordship will be with you in a few minutes.'

As the door closed behind him Ramage realized he was in the Board Room: in here, under the ceiling decorated with heraldic roses picked out in white and gilt, the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty sat and deliberated.

Their decisions, jotted down by the Board Secretary on scraps of paper as they were made, resulted in orders being sent out to despatch a fleet half-way round the world to the East Indies, or the I28th captain in the Navy List commanding a frigate off Brest receiving a reprimand for failing to use the prescribed wording when drawing up the report of a survey on a leaking cask of beer.

Large or small, right or wrong, it was here in this room that the decisions were made that governed the activities of more than six hundred of the King's ships whether they were cruising the coast of India or the Spanish Main, blockading Cadiz or acting as guardship at Plymouth. If the ships were the fighting body of the Navy, he reflected, here was its brain, working in a long room which had three tall windows along one wall and was panelled with the same oak used to build the ships.

And Ramage saw it was an impressive room which had absorbed something of the drama and greatness of the decisions Their Lordships had made within its walls during the last five score years or more, sitting at the long, highly-polished table occupying the middle of the room.

The high-backed chair with arms at the far end was obviously me First Lord's, and the pile of paper, quill, silver paper-knife, inkwell and sandbox in front of it indicated he probably used the Board Room as his own office.

Ramage, intrigued by several long cylinders looking like rolled-up white blinds and fitted on to a large panel over the fireplace, walked over and pulled down one of the tassels. It was a chart of the North Sea. A convenient way of stowing them. Then he noticed the whole panel was surrounded by a frieze of very light wood covered with carvings of nautical and medical instruments and symbols of the sea.

The instruments were beautifully carved, standing out in such relief it seemed he could reach up and use any one of them. An azimuth overlapped an astrolabe; a set of shot gauges hung over a pelorus; a cross staff used by the earliest navigators was partly hidden by a miniature cannon. And, emphasizing the importance of good health in a ship, especially on long voyages of discovery, the snakes and winged staff symbol of Aesculapius and a globe of the world.

There was what seemed to be the face of an enormous clock on the wall opposite the First Lord's chair, but instead of two hands it had a single pointer, like a compass needle. Instead of numbers round the edge, there were the points of the compass, while the map of Europe painted on its face had the axle of the pointer exactly where London was.

He saw the pointer was moving slightly, ranging between 'SW and 'SW by W. It was the dial that his father had long ago described to him and which, by an ingenious arrangement of rods and wheels, showed the direction the wind vane on the Admiralty roof was pointing.

And it was very old--that much was clear from the map which showed the North Sea as 'The British Ocean'. Calais appeared as 'Calice' while the Stilly Isles were simply labelled 'Silly P.