The Mountain of Gold (29 page)

With no obvious solution presenting itself, my officers soon became peevish. Harrington, whose knowledge of war was less sound than his grasp of a set of accounts, proposed bombarding the town into submission, but Castle and Lindman both pointed out that the Spanish could bring dozens, if not hundreds, of cannon to bear upon us; and as Castle said, it had been difficult enough even for the immortal Blake and his great fleet, let alone for one Fifth-Rate frigate. (No man there needed to ask if
Jersey
would assist us; Holmes' estimate of the odds would undoubtedly be at one with Castle's and Lindman's, and besides, he was unlikely to wait for us before sailing off to begin his own private war against the
hogen mogens.)
Kit, who knew the politics of port towns as well as any man, suggested that we should enlist the assistance of the English merchants of the place to negotiate on our behalf. That met with grudging assent from the entire council, but none of us had any faith in a measure that depended on the mediation of mean, prevaricating tradesmen.

Thus I was still in the blackest of moods when I retired to my half-cabin. Musk entered, placed a bottle of sack in front of me, and retired without a word. The day would probably have ended with the disillusioned captain of the
Seraph
slumping unconscious onto his sea bed, but the Good Lord in his mercy provided one last blessed moment of relief to lift my spirits. Perhaps half a glass had passed when I heard O'Dwyer return to the larboard side beyond the partition. He seemed to pace the deck for some moments, as though wrestling with a decision. Then he came over to my side, knocked, and did not await my reply. We exchanged what passed for pleasantries between us, he asking how the chain-pumps fared (I enlightened him but little) and I enquiring how his own day ashore had passed.

'A pleasant enough town, and it is good to plant one's feet upon land again—I'm no longer used to such long voyages, if truth be told. And Vespers were performed most beautifully at a Dominican monastery in the upper town. It is a long time since I attended a service of the old faith—it brought back memories, such memories.' O'Dwyer blinked and looked away for a moment, as though he had something in his eye. 'A strange coincidence, though, Matthew,' he said O'Dwyer. 'Everywhere I turned, I seemed to find two or three of your men! Why, now, a man of a suspicious bent might believe that they had been deliberately ordered to watch his every movement.'

I replied with as much innocence as I could muster. 'A strange coincidence indeed, Colonel O'Dwyer. But I'm sure that the presence of my men must have been a mighty reassurance to you—keeping you safe from any agents of Montnoir, let us say, or from the machinations of any Sallee Rovers in these parts.'

He smiled, but it was the inscrutable smile of the tiger. 'Yes, a mighty reassurance. You are quite right, Captain Quinton. I am most grateful to you, sir.'

With that, he left me; but before we both sank into sleep, I could have sworn that I heard him punch or kick a bulkhead.

The next morning brought the glad sight of a boat coming across from the newly arrived
Madras Merchant,
outward bound from London to the East Indies. She carried packets of mail for ourselves and the other ships, and as soon as the letters were distributed, I shut myself away in my half-cabin.

Nothing from Tristram; that was a disappointment. But there were several letters from Cornelia, and I opened them feverishly, both for what they might contain and for what they represented: the loving, witty expressions of her dear warm soul, written on papers that would have been clasped longingly to her chest before their despatch.

Cornelia's letters were ever characterised by her unique reinvention of written English. She spoke the language with fair fluency (indeed, she was mastering its more colloquial oaths with unsettling speed) but on paper she never paid much attention to such niceties as spellings, grammar and—all too often—legibility. So it was now. Even so, by assembling her letters into chronological order and setting aside all the talk of friends and the court, I was able to construct something of what had been happening in England since my departure. For instance, this was from her letter of 6 January:

Ye great hore kips away from us at Ravnsdin. This is blesing tho yr mothr thinks not. As yet miladys bellie dos not swell, wch yr brothr finds strayng. I fynde it strayngr that hee thinks hee has suf—suffy—enouff manhood to mak her so. He is moor at court thn evr he has bin, she wth him. Still we seek prooff of ye great whor's crymes. Triss wrytes to his yonge men ax ye landt—
('ax' perplexed me until I realised it was her somewhat inventive rendering of 'across')—
and travles much to seek ye trooth of her grate moneys. For my part, husband, I wayt for ye lettr frm ower frend tht will bare news of ye dauchter.

This from her letter of 17 January:

Yr brothr and ye grate hore have com, ye court beeng gon to Hampton. She now lords it ovr us hear. Iff they ar to give ye Huis of Quinton its heir, they do so most strainglie—they mak to shair ye saim chambr at nicht, but I know they do not shair ye saim bed. You know how thin ye walls arond ye earl's chmbr are. I hear all. Ye Barkoks hear all. Yet ther is nowthing to hear, husbnd. Methnks even yr mother begginns to regrt having maid ths maridg to ths gratest of harlots, ths—
The two pages that followed were wholly indecipherable.

These tidings made me mightily anxious—and as Our Saviour knows, I was already anxious enough over the fate of the infernal chain-pumps. A little later that day, I discussed the gist of my correspondence with Francis Gale and Phineas Musk, my two confidantes aboard the
Seraph
in the matter of the Lady Louise. We could speak with some freedom, for my neighbour O'Dwyer was ashore, once again taking the air of Santa Cruz de Tenerife. And once again, he would find shifts of my men, ever present and attentive to his wellbeing.

'My wife's bitterness is to be expected,' I said. 'I can barely conceive of her and the Countess Louise existing together under the same roof. It was bad enough with her and my mother alone.'

'Quite so,' said Francis. 'But what is not to be expected, I think, is your brother's willingness to spend so much time at court. From what I have observed, he detests the institution—its vanities and its great throng of people.'

Always has done,' said Musk. 'Just like your father, Captain. Not like
his
father, of course.'

'The Lady Louise's spell over my brother must be intoxicating indeed,' I said. 'But this suggestion that my mother is having second thoughts about the marriage—great God, I find that hard to believe. She would rather sup with the shade of Noll Cromwell than ever admit she could be wrong about anything.'

Musk and Francis both nodded, for they knew my mother well enough.

I looked at my two fellows and wondered what we could possibly achieve by our discussion of events that had taken place in England weeks before, and which we could not affect in any way. But sometimes it is good to unburden oneself. As a man of God, Francis's very presence encouraged such openness; my ancestors had confessed their sins to men like him for century after century, and it took more than a few brief generations of Protestantism to purge such sentiments entirely from an Englishman's soul (especially from that of an Englishman brought up in part by a French Catholic grandmother). As for Phineas Musk: well, his presence was of a rather different nature. But as was so often the case, it was Musk who cut to the heart of the matter.

'Fucking,' said Musk, quite suddenly. Francis and I both looked at him curiously, for Musk was not usually a coarse man. 'It all hinges on fucking. The Earl and the Countess at Ravensden—no fucking. The Earl and the Countess at Whitehall—fucking. Or so your brother suggests, if he doesn't understand why the bitch wasn't with child after their time there. So we need to know why they were fu—carnal with each other in the one place and not in the other.'

This was a simple truth, but an unanswerable one. Or was it? We simply had no direct knowledge of what had transpired at Whitehall, and Cornelia was not well placed to obtain it. Ironically, I was, despite being so many hundreds of miles away. When Musk and Francis had left, I sat and began to pen a letter to Will Berkeley, captain of His Majesty's ship the
Bristol,
requesting his intercession with his brother, Viscount Fitzhardinge, and their father, the treasurer of the king's household. If any men on earth knew the dark secrets of the court of Charles the Second, it would be the members of the noble house of Berkeley. Would that I could call on friendship and family to solve my problem with the chain-pump parts...

A storm often begins as an insignificant speck of a cloud upon the horizon, growing and darkening as it approaches. Thus it was with the idea. Once I had finished the letter to Will, I sat in my stern window, looking out over the bay of Santa Cruz de Tenerife. Small craft scurried back and forth, carrying wares to and from the Spanish, Dutch, Swedish and Hamburg ships that lay there. I watched a lofty Spanish galleon of some sixty guns come into the bay: a magnificent sight, but badly handled by her crew, who would be mostly unwilling conscripts, as Don Alonso de Villasanchez had explained to me during the Dunes campaign. Oh, how my grandfather would have looked upon that spectacle, and thought at once,
an easy prize, my lads...

The sight of the great Spanish ship brought back memories, and the memories brought knowledge. I knew the Spanish well; better than I had remembered, if truth be told. I had lived in Spanish Flanders before my move to Veere. I had fought under the Spanish flag, albeit only because King Philip was then the only sovereign to recognise our exiled, pathetic royalist cause. I had lived very briefly in Old Spain itself, when I accompanied my brother on a mission to the Escorial. The Spanish were a people who regarded honour even more highly than we English, and respected rank above all; every peasant sought to prove himself of noble birth, only partly because nobility in Spain secured the not unattractive perquisite of lifelong tax exemption. The Spanish respected their military, too, but they were also a superstitious race, and squirmed at the memory of their terrible defeats...

The idea had grown from that tiny cloud into a mighty storm. It was unlikely and it was desperate, but ours was an unlikely and desperate cause, and what did we have to lose?

I smiled, and sent for Martin Lanherne and Julian Carvell.

The two quite different stories both began as facts. The first, told by Lanherne's men in the
tavernas
of the south part of the town, was the story of the Honourable Matthew Quinton, brother of one of the noblest earls of England and captain of yon royal warship in the bay, who had served nobly with the Spanish army under Don John of Austria at the Battle of the Dunes. Several hours' worth of Englishmen trading the story from one tavern to another meant that by the end of the night, I was supposedly a general of Spain to rank alongside Spinola and had received an honorary knighthood of Calatrava from King Philip himself.

The second story, told by Carvell's men in the northern part, needed no embellishment and no exaggeration. It was the simple truth that the young Englishman commanding the ship in the bay was the blood-heir of
el diablo bianco
himself. The natural progress of tavern communication ensured that by the night's end, most of the inhabitants of Santa Cruz de Tenerife were convinced that the ghost-ship of Earl Matthew was due on the next tide.

The net effect of the two stories combined was that by dawn, we had seven rival estimates for the new chain-pump parts. Founders competed with each other to swear upon the graves of their mothers that they would be able to fashion the esses and rowls before the sun sank again, and that the new parts would endure until the Day of Judgment.

Seventeen

The squadron duly weighed from Santa Cruz de Tenerife,
Seraph
falling in proudly alongside her consorts, and with a fair wind we set course for Cape Verde, a few hundred miles north of the mouth of the Gambia. This was an easy sail but for one curious incident. I was wakened one morning by Musk, who was in a state of rare agitation, demanding that I come on deck at once. Pausing only to buckle my sword-belt, I followed him out into the brilliant glare of another oven-hot day. Several of the men were standing at the feet of the masts, murmuring to each other and pointing upward—at sails that were blood-red.

I blinked at the sight, hoping that it was but an illusion that would evaporate as soon as my eyes became accustomed to the heat and light. But it did not. Overnight, the sails had turned red.

'There's murmuring of a curse,' said Musk. 'Sails of blood. Some are saying they presage the deaths of every last one of us upon this voyage. Poseidon was thwarted of his blood-sacrifice when the chain-pumps didn't sink us, so this is his way of announcing his revenge.'

If I knew one thing alone in that moment, it was that I needed no more doom-laden counsels from Phineas Musk. I needed heads that had been rather longer upon the sea .

Kit Farrell came on deck, and I silently gave thanks unto my Lord. He looked at the sails, looked at me, and said, 'Well, Captain. I've never seen the like.' This was not the opinion I needed in that moment, with the muttering of the men growing ever louder. But it was sometimes too easy to forget that Kit was but a young man of my own age; although he was a hundred times the seaman I would ever be, his experience was inevitably limited. However, he had a sharp eye and even sharper wits. Looking out to larboard, he said, 'But then, I wonder if they've seen the like on the other two.'

I followed his gaze, and saw that the sails of the distant
Jersey
and
Prospect of Blakeney
were of the same blood-red hue.

'I'll summon Mister Castle and Mister Negus to the deck,' I said.

Kit shook his head. 'No need to disturb their slumbers, I think, sir. I have an idea. I suggest bringing the ship as close to the wind as she'll go, then bringing her back again—luffing and touching, in other words. We'll hardly lose ground on Captain Holmes and the
Prospect,
as we can outsail them easily enough.'