Everyone at the camp was very sympathetic and understanding; infuriatingly so in fact. What annoyed Ramage was that everyone had pretended to be surprised. Ramage was sure that - with the exception of Maxine - they had thought all along that he was on a wild goose chase, but encouraged him out of politeness. Metaphorically patting him on the shoulder as he tried, and now patting him on the head as he failed.
He sat in his room, his journal open in front of him, his body rigid with tension. It was unlikely any of them would have got any of the treasure anyway, so why had he become so obsessed with that damned poem that he slipped back into the world of an excitable schoolboy? He felt humiliated.
There was a knock at the door and at his call, Maxine entered.
"Nicholas," she said hesitantly, "my father -"
"Wants to see me?" Ramage was already on his feet and moving towards the door.
"Non!" she said, smiling and gesturing him to sit down again. "My father knows I am visiting you."
"Oh," Ramage said lamely. He always found it embarrassing when a woman visitor indicated that her reputation would - or would not - be compromised by being alone with him. "You are a welcome visitor."
He escorted her to the only other chair in the room and she sat with a movement which was both feline and regal; a movement that transformed this shabby, hot and dusty room into an elegant salon.
As soon as he sat down she looked directly at him, making no attempt to disguise the fact that he attracted her. She was deliberately setting aside the fact that she was a young married woman, that her husband was thousands of miles away, and that she was alone in a room with a young man. She was conveying frankly and with superb taste, that she knew she was a beautiful woman attractive to men, and surely he knew he was attractive to women, so why did not they accept the facts without gaucheness.
"You are very upset," she said.
He shrugged his shoulders. "Disappointed, perhaps. Natural enough, surely?"
"Yes, very natural, mais - that is not all you feel..."
She spoke quietly, but with certainty, choosing her words carefully and concentrating on her accent. She was not anticipating that he would tell her she was wrong, and, he realized, he was not going to.
"Not finding a king's ransom in treasure when you thought you were standing on top of it..." he said lamely.
"You feel you've failed."
"And I have too!"
She sighed. "You men! You are more frightened of the word 'failure' than of all the devils in hell!"
"Failure is more apparent," he said dryly.
"But it is not failure! If you had orders from your Admiral to find the treasure and you could not find it, that would be failure only if it was known for certain the treasure was there."
She slapped her hand on to her knee for emphasis. "It isn't failure if there is no treasure. If someone told you to fly up to the moon on the back of a goose, the fact that you could not would not be failure!"
"Yes, but it's different for-"
There was a loud, rapid knocking on the door.
"Come in!" Ramage snapped, annoyed at the interruption.
An excited Jackson stepped inside the door, but the moment he saw Maxine he stopped in embarrassment.
"Sorry, sir-"
"Carry on, Jackson."
"It's about the digging, sir..."
"Go on - there's no need for secrecy."
"Well, sir -" Jackson broke off, and Ramage saw it was not because of Maxine. Something disagreeable had happened, that much was clear from the American's slightly sheepish manner. But something else had happened, too, which had brought him hurrying back from Punta Tamarindo, where he and half a dozen seamen were supposed to be filling in the trenches.
Ramage began tapping the table with his fingers, and Jackson started again.
"After you left with Mr Yorke, sir, we got to thinking about the skeleton, sir."
"Come on, Jackson, out with it, do you want me to wheedle every word out of you?"
"The skeleton was neither right under the tree nor clear to one side, sir."
"I can't see -" Ramage's voice broke off, because suddenly he could see that the position of the skeleton was odd. If the tree marked the grave, it should have been directly over the body, but it was to one side, four feet down, and only the side roots had grown through it. The tree had been planted - or the seed began growing - after the body was buried. Did it matter? But Jackson had not finished.
"Stafford and me tried to work out why. We couldn't think of anything, so after you'd gone we decided to do some more digging. The rest of the lads were keen, sir."
"Where did you dig?"
"All round the tree, sir, in a big circle and we found lots more skeletons."
"Did you, by Jove!"
"Yes, sir, eight so far and still more coming up."
Maxine sighed. Ramage glanced at her and saw she was as white as a sheet. In a moment he was at her side, holding her against him by the shoulders.
"Breathe deeply," he said quietly. "I'm sorry, we are crude oafs."
'Non," she whispered, "it's not the talk of bodies and skeletons; I just started thinking of ... things. I'm all right now."
Ramage gestured to Jackson to leave the room and as the door closed he turned to Maxine and took her in his arms. It began, he realized later, as a gesture to reassure her; but she closed her eyes and raised her lips and a moment later they were clinging to each other as desperately as if they were drowning.
"Oh, Nicholas," she whispered, what seemed an age later, "I've wanted to kiss you for so long..."
"We must be careful - people will..."
"I don't care," she said. "And my father and mother have guessed already."
Ramage thought of her husband. Had she forgotten? And what did her parents think, now they had guessed? They could hardly approve of their married daughter having an affair with a lieutenant in the Royal Navy.
"Kiss me again," she whispered, "and then you must go to Jackson. But, my darling, don't let this treasure hunt dominate your life."
He held her tightly. "I've found my treasure!"
"It took you long enough," she said.
An hour later Ramage and Yorke were standing on the edge of a large semi-circular hole, the tree forming the centre of the radii. The skeletons had not been moved; the seamen had simply started digging again to the side as soon as they had found one and cleared away the earth.
"Look, sir," Jackson said as he jumped into the hole and moved from one skeleton to another, pointing. The top of each skull was badly damaged.
"A shot in the back of the head," Ramage said.
"Yes, sir. And their arms are together."
"Hands tied behind them, shot in the back of the head, and pitched into a big open grave," Ramage said.
"That's what we thought," Jackson said. "But we can't understand why, sir."
Ramage began thinking aloud for Yorke's benefit.
"A mass execution, but who were the victims? Perhaps pirates, if one band attacked another, or if the members of a band quarrelled? Or a party of slaves who were killed to ensure the secrecy of some work they'd been doing?"
"Slaves," Yorke said, as if to himself. "Made to dig their own grave."
Ramage nodded. "It would make more sense because we'll find at least twenty skeletons if this is a circular grave. To tie up and execute twenty pirates would probably mean at least twenty more."
"But why do it?" Yorke said softly. "It doesn't make sense. There's no point in leaving a poem as a clue to a mass grave."
Ramage stared at Yorke. Perhaps there was treasure as well as skeletons. Most people would not dig below the level of the skeletons: one glimpse of a human bone and a man would be reluctant to disturb a grave. That was why he had stopped the original digging and left the men to fill in the trenches after the first skeleton had been found.
He was reluctant to let all the old excitement well up again after his recent disappointments but perhaps those two converging lines of shells did mark sbmething else ...
When he pointed to the spot, Yorke nodded.
"I don't understand what the devil it's all about," Yorke said, "but I think we should carry on digging there."
Ramage told Jackson to set four men to work and he and Yorke settled down to the worst wait of all.
The men had to chop more than they had to dig, and the roots of the tree snaking down into the earth were springy yet unyielding. More than an hour had passed before one of the men, digging with a pickaxe in a corner of the hole, gave a grunt and, turning slightly, struck again with the pick.
"Jacko!" he called. "Wot abaht this?"
Ramage, talking to Yorke five yards away, noticed that the man's voice was puzzled: whatever he had found it was not a skeleton.
Jackson jumped lightly into the hole and crouched down. Ramage walked deliberately slowly towards them and heard the muttering of voices. Then Jackson leapt out of the hole, knelt before Ramage with a flourish, and opened both hands. In his palms were several coins which shone dully.
Gold doubloons, dollars, pieces of eight and reals ... He rubbed a dollar to make it shine. The Spanish "cobb" of seaman's slang and recruiting posters. He nodded and passed it to Yorke.
"Are there many?" he said in an offhand voice.
"Hundreds, sir - all spilling out of a rotted wooden box."
"I'm so glad," he said in the same off-hand voice. "You'd better send Stafford to fetch more Marines; we need a strong guard on here, and ask Mr Southwick to tell our guests we have - er, had some success."
It was remarkable how calm you could be when you succeeded.
The next eight days were so unreal that Ramage felt he was not just dreaming, but dreaming of a dream. Most of the seamen had been moved up to Punta Tamarindo, slinging their hammocks between trees, to save the long walk every morning. Under the casuarina tree seamen dug carefully, while on the landward side of the open space the carpenter's crew worked with saws, hammers and nails making strong crates in which to stow the treasure.
The coins were sorted into different denominations, put into canvas bags made from sail cloth - "a quarter o' the size o' a normal shroud" as Stafford commented - and sewn up. Each bag was then put into a wooden crate and pummelled until it took up a square shape. Then the lid of the crate was put on and nailed down securely.
Ramage limited each crate to half a hundredweight, and after the money had been checked by Southwick, the details of the contents were painted on the outside. A pair of long poles secured along the sides enabled two men to carry the crate comfortably like a stretcher, and it was taken away to be stowed. One of the houses in the village had been nicknamed "The Treasury" and was closely guarded by the Marines.
The gold and silver plate and ornaments - they ranged from dishes to candelabra - were dealt with in much the same way. They took up larger crates since they were bulkier and lighter than coins, but every item was described in an inventory kept by Southwick. When they did not know the name or purpose of a particular vessel or ornament, a small sketch was added with the main dimensions and weight.
As the totals of coin, plate, ornaments and jewellery mounted in what came to be called "The Treasure Log", Ramage was thankful that the men still regarded the digging and packing as a great game.
He had talked to Southwick and Yorke about a potential danger: the survivors from the two ships numbered some seventy-five seamen, but there were only three King's officers and a dozen Marines. If the seamen from both ships decided to keep the treasure, killing officers in their beds at night would present no problems. With the officers dead, the corporal of Marines would be a fool if he tried to stop his men joining the seamen...
The three of them had watched closely, but there was not the slightest hint of an intention to plunder on the part of the crew of either ship. Ramage was reasonably sure that by now the men had a few gold coins sewn into the waistbands of their trousers: he secretly hoped that they had, since it was unrealistic to begrudge a man ten guineas when ten thousand were his for the taking.
Yorke had agreed that as far as they were concerned no treasure was "dug up" until it was noted in the log as it was lifted out of the hole. What men did with odd coins when they were in a hole six feet deep and eight feet square was not their affair. There was a limit to what they could hide each time since none of them wore more than a pair of trousers. He only hoped the diggers shared with the rest of the men.
From the time the treasure was first found, St Brieuc had been urging Ramage to take special precautions against the seamen mutinying. He was so alarmed and so certain they would all be murdered in their beds that Ramage had asked Yorke to give him and St Cast a brace of pistols. St Brieuc had accepted gladly and then, four days later, returned the pistols to Yorke, explaining that having them about the house upset his wife and daughter. As Yorke told Ramage, it was a signal that St Brieuc now agreed with them that the men were "safe".
Teniente Colon frequently asked to see Ramage, but when the guard took him pencil and paper, with instructions to write his message, he wrote nothing, so presumably he was simply curious to know if any treasure had been found.
Ramage did not care whether Colon knew or not, but had neither told him nor given the Marines instructions that he was to be kept in the dark. It was interesting that the Marine guards had said nothing to him even though Colon often tried to strike up conversations with them in his halting English.
Two days before the supply ship was due from San Juan the last of the treasure had been brought to the surface and packed, and the skeletons reburied. Ramage read a burial service, the ground was smoothed over, and the working party marched away from Punta Tamarindo for the last time.
"I wish we'd been here when it was buried," Yorke commented. "Intriguing not to know exactly what happened."
Ramage shrugged his shoulders. "We might have ended up in the grave. I'm more interested to know why the owner decided to bury it. I'm sure we've guessed correctly that the hole was dug by slaves or prisoners, and that they were killed and buried here as well to ensure secrecy."
"Why the poem, then?" Yorke persisted.
"That's the puzzle. How about pirates trapped here because their ship hit a reef, and hurrying to bury their treasure before being captured. Perhaps they were put in prison and never came back ... and one of them made up the poem ..."
"Or one of them stayed behind on the island - Colon said something about an ancestor having a copy of the poem."
"An ancestor ... one of the original pirates who stayed or came back ... we'll never know."
That night at dinner Bowen asked the question on nearly everyone's lips.
"Any idea of the value of it all, sir?"
Ramage shook his head. "I don't know the current price of gold."
St Cast glanced up. "I can help there. Last February I was realizing some assets in London, and I can remember the prices quite well. Bar and gold coin was £3 17s 6d per fine ounce, and Portuguese gold was the same. That's troy measure, of course," he added. "A troy pound is over half an avoirdupois pound. Eight-tenths, if I remember correctly."
Southwick was scribbling with a pencil.
"A pound of gold avoirdupois is worth at least £100," Southwick said. "In other words, over £11,200 a hundredweight avoirdupois."
"How much does all the treasure weigh?" St Brieuc asked.
Ramage said: "We haven't totalled it all up yet, but we've estimated there's more than five tons of gold, and roughly a ton of silver."
"A ton of gold," Southwick said, "is worth nearly a quarter of a million pounds."
"Nearly?" Yorke repeated.
"About £224,000. So our five tons totals roughly £1,120,000..."
Southwick caught Ramage's eye. "It won't rate as prize, sir, I'm sure of it. The Crown will claim it all, and no shares for anyone."
"I told you that when we started digging," Ramage said heavily. "It's a pity we didn't let the Spanish find it, and then capture the ship they used for carrying it away ..."
"Why?" asked St Cast.
"That would have made it prize money ... in which case I would have received two-eighths. Southwick and Bowen would share an eighth, and the seamen two-eighths."
Southwick threw down his pencil in disgust. "It would have meant £280,000 for you, sir," he told Ramage, "while Bowen and I share £140,000 equally. Phew," he whistled, "I've just realized young Appleby would have an entire eighth share, £140,000: no other principal warrant officers, lieutenants of Marines, chaplains and so on to share with him..."
Yorke began laughing. "Actually I come off best. Since I'm not entitled to anything I haven't just lost either £280,000 or £140,000!"