Ramage's Prize by Dudley Pope Read Free Book Online Page A

America—a part of the way round the edge of the spider’s web, as it were—cost four pence.
    Well, anything more he was to learn about the Post Office would have to come from Mr Smith. He gave the
Kalendar
back to the Governor’s secretary, once again refused a rum punch, borrowed a pencil and some paper to make some calculations and left, tucking the papers in his pocket.
    The Deputy Postmaster-General of Jamaica was a man with a mania for tidiness. Although the enormous outer office looked like a cross between a counting house and a warehouse, with sorters working on the local mail at a long bench along one wall and the canvas mailbags hanging from hooks along another, Mr Smith’s own room was as neat as a column of printed figures.
    He worked at a large, square, mahogany table on top of which smooth pebbles held down piles of papers whose edges fluttered in the breeze coming through the jalousie at either end of the room. The piles were spaced out with geometric precision, as if the pebbles were chess men.
    On top of each pile under the weight was a neatly written label indicating what it contained, and a scrutiny of the labels showed the scope of Mr Smith’s work. The largest pile was marked
“Inward packets—lost,”
and next to it was
“Outward packets—lost.”
Another large pile contained
“Complaints—from committee of West India merchants,”
and next to it,
“Complaints—from private citizens.”
Yet another said simply,
“From Lombard Street, miscellaneous.”
Directly in front of him was a small pile which said:
“From Lord Auckland.”
    In contrast to the neatness of his table-top, Smith was a large, gangling man with heavy features and large hands seemingly too clumsy to handle papers: they were, in size, the hands of a labourer. Yet Smith not only had one of the most coveted jobs in Jamaica—in peacetime, anyway—but he did it supremely well. He had it and, despite the influence and patronage of other claimants, held it because without him the Post Office’s foreign section in Jamaica became chaos.
    Unmarried, and with a widowed sister in Cumberland as his only relative, he lived for the mails. Until recently his life had had a series of fortnightly peaks. Every two weeks—in normal times—the packet arrived and he went on board to meet the commander, inspect the sealed bags of incoming mail, sign for them and supervise their removal on shore to his office before arranging for the outgoing mail to be brought out and stowed on board.
    He was meticulous in having the mail sorted quickly—and equally meticulous in refusing to allow anyone but Post Office employees to be in the sorting-room while it was being done. The early days when impatient folk protested that his predecessor always allowed them to wait there for it were now long past.
    He was equally meticulous in having the commander to dinner on the night the packet arrived. Although in any case he enjoyed the company of the lively Falmouth men, the long chats over glasses of rum punch after the meal also meant that he kept himself well informed about everyday events in England. Also the commanders had few problems, whether concerning their youngest sons, maiden aunts or their ships, that they did not discuss with him. Over the years he had become a distant uncle to most of the sons and daughters of the commanders, and his ambition when he retired was to live in Falmouth and enjoy the company of the large and closely knit “packet families.”
    His closeness to the commanders, and his meticulous habits, meant that at this moment his world was chaos: Smith was now a man with a job but almost no work. There were no bags of foreign mail to be officially sealed and labelled—no one was writing letters to England now, not until the
Kingston Chronicle
announced that a packet had at last arrived. And then, Smith thought gloomily, everyone possessed