Ramage & the Guillotine by Dudley Pope Page B

nothing to gain and his life to lose. They needed to send that man at once, so although they might just have the man—fluent in French, with plenty of experience of working in France as an agent—obviously if he was not available they had to pick the least unsuitable man, and he happened to be called Ramage. The devil take the Duchess of Manston, he thought sourly; but for her damned ball I’d still be down at St Kew, out of sight and probably out of mind as far as the Admiralty, Lord Nelson and French invasion plans are concerned …

CHAPTER FOUR
    A S the carriage stopped at the top of Wrotham Hill to let / the coachman push a metal shoe under each of the rear wheels, so that the drag would prevent the carriage careering down out of control, Ramage walked round to stretch his legs. Almost the whole of the Weald of Kent was laid out before him, the hop fields, meadows and orchards fading into the distance in geometric patterns that were softly-coloured exercises in perspective. The clouds threw fast-moving shadows which, from this height, reminded him of wind shadows across a green sea, with the red-brick hop kilns and their stubby wooden spires looking like buoys marking roads and byways.
    So far the war against France, fought for almost a dozen years, had left no marks or scars on the countryside of England. Prices were much higher in the shops and markets, and there was hardly a village which did not boast a son or husband away in the Army or at sea in one of the King’s ships. But unlike the Low Countries, Spain and Italy, there were no ruined or burned-out houses, no empty hamlets and fields overgrown because people had fled or been killed or left impoverished by Bonaparte’s invading troops, who reckoned to live off the land.
    â€œLiving off the land” was a polite way of describing how an army looted its way across a continent, stealing food for its stomach and valuables for its pockets. A hundredweight sack of grain, a pair of silver candlesticks from the church altar, a peasant’s store of wine which was maturing before being sold in the autumn to pay all his bills, a woman’s honour and her man’s life if he tried to defend it—Bonaparte’s Army took it all and thought nothing of it because it was done in the name of
Liberié, Egalité et Fraternité.
Ramage shivered when he thought of the Invasion Flotilla preparing for sea in Calais and Boulogne within sight of the English coast.
    The coachman called and Ramage walked back to the carriage, reluctant to climb inside and settle back on the seat whose padding exuded a damp and musty smell with every movement he made. As the horses moved, the metal shoes began to grate and occasionally screech as one or other dragged over a sharp stone. The second coachman, now sitting behind ready to lean on the brake lever, shouted across the roof to the man at the reins.
    How did the Men of Kent and the Kentish Men—the former living on the east side of the Stour, the latter to the west—regard the prospect of Boney coming? The innkeepers and potmen and porters on the road up to London from Cornwall seemed blissfully unaware or blithely unconcerned, and he guessed that most of the folk on the 65 miles of road from London to Dover had the same attitude. He was well over a quarter of the way to Dover and had yet to hear Bonaparte’s name mentioned, and so far not a sign of soldier or volunteer on sentry duty; not an Army camp or field headquarters.
    The journey was tedious enough, but everything about it felt unreal. At first he thought it was the effect of having spent so much time at sea: the rolling green countryside made such a contrast that it seemed separated from him by a pane of glass. But as the carriage arrived at the bottom of Wrotham Hill without mishap and the metal shoes were removed and hooked up under the axle, and the horses whipped up so that the carriage soon reached Maidstone, he began to have