The Mountain of Gold (45 page)

As we walked, we talked. Roger had news of the man I had expected to encounter there, on the quarterdeck of this mighty French man-of-war. 'Alas, Matthew, Montnoir seems to be more than ever in the favour of my king. He scuttles between Malta and our court, and I do not doubt that whatever business he is about, it is not to the benefit of England or of yourself. I fear you have made a great enemy who will stop at nothing to be avenged upon you,
mon ami. '

I shuddered, for I judged that I had already encountered the Seigneur de Montnoir enough for one lifetime.

At length we came to the poop deck of
Le Téméraire,
over which the fleur-de-lis standard fluttered splendidly in the breeze, and looked along the whole upper deck of Roger's magnificent command.

We exchanged some more conversation about the qualities of the ship, then her captain turned to me and said, 'You have had no mail, these last weeks?'

I shook my head. 'None since Funchal. Afterwards, we were battered relentlessly by the storms of Biscay—driven far to the west, and had to beat back up toward Ushant again.'

'I thought not. It is why I—well, diverted my ship, let us say. I wished to intercept you. That you could hear the tidings from a friend rather from a letter at Falmouth or Plymouth.'

Tidings? My first thought was for Cornelia, but Roger had attached no sense of foreboding to her name—Then that other bottomless dread, the one that had consumed me since our departure from the mouth of the Gambia, overtook me. 'She has had a son,' I said, resignedly.

Roger looked at me sadly, looked away over his ship's rail, and then returned my gaze. 'No,' he said.

This answer was so unexpected that I had to grip the rail for support.
No?
Then what tidings—? You found her daughter, or the evidence of her true origins? Her murders have been exposed?'

'None of these things, alas, though not for want of trying on all our parts. For instance, your uncle still seeks the missing page of the parish register—it is said that the priest who conducted the marriage went into the Americas when your king returned, so even if he still lives, it will take many months to find him. Even then, of course, it might all be the pursuit of the goose, as you English say. Or perhaps he might choose not to reveal anything to agents of a king he regards as the Antichrist.' Roger shrugged, for the ways of our dissenting sects, and their very existence, were an oddity to him. And we have had no more good fortune with finding the lost daughter, although I undertook further rigorous inspections in the convents of Flanders.' I raised an eyebrow at that. 'But as to the most immediate and important matter—no, the Countess of Ravensden has no child. Those are the tidings, Matthew. The most unlikely tidings.'

On the horizon, two great Dutch Indiamen were sailing warily, no doubt glad to be well away from the French and English warships in their sights. I turned from them and gazed blankly at Roger. 'Why unlikely? It never seemed so likely to any of us that my brother could father a child.'

The comte d'Andelys sighed. He nibbled his lip, seeking the words with which to deliver the blow. '
Mon ami,
he was not the one intended to father it.'

My thoughts struggled to digest what I was hearing. I clutched the rail even more tightly. 'Then—'

'It is easy to see what your mother and brother thought,' said Roger. 'To whom do you turn if you seek a son to continue a dynasty? If you wish to guarantee the birth of an heir? Why, to the most fertile man in Europe. Who else?'

'
The King.'

'Your king, yes. Though God knows, my own runs him close in fecundity.'

'But—Roger, in the name of God, why would the king do such a thing?'

The Frenchman smiled bitterly. 'It is hardly a burden, in his case. But your Uncle Tristram, who stayed with me some weeks ago while journeying to a disputation at the Sorbonne, tells me that there are bonds of mutual obligation between King Charles and your brother that no man understands but those two alone.' This I knew well enough, but even so, to carry it to this—'The king seems to regard himself as repaying a debt to your brother. And the Lady Louise offered herself as the vehicle,' Roger continued. 'Strangely, she was one of the seemingly few women at court—no, in England—that your monarch apparently had no interest in bedding. But she became aware of the fact that a Countess of Ravensden was sought, and selflessly put herself forward for the position.'

'To wheedle her way into the king's bed, and into his affections!' I cried. But as I already sensed, she would not be the first, nor by any means the last, woman to exploit Charles Stuart's notorious weakness for a comely ankle or a well-scrubbed bosom.

'That is what is assumed.'

'But Tris cannot have known that—'

'Oh, her function was common knowledge at Fontainebleau,' Roger said, airily. 'We possessed certain intelligence that not even your esteemed uncle could ever hope to learn. Remember, Matthew, that France is a nation much richer than your England. Consequently, our king and his ministers are in a position to—shall we say, to pay judiciously for information and loyalty.'

'Bribes! Pensions!' I protested.

'I would prefer to call them retainers, I think, or expenses.
Mais oui,
we supply money to many in England. Courtiers, ministers, mistresses, members of that bizarre institution you call Parliament—it is just what we French do,
mon ami
.' He shrugged. 'We have an interest in ensuring that our neighbours think and act in—well, in as French a way as possible. So it is in this case.'

The truth, when it came, was like a hammer upon my heart. 'You are paying her,' I said angrily. 'She is a French agent.'

The sumptuous costumes that the Lady Louise always wore; the grand style that she always maintained; and yet, the apparent fiction of the great wealth from the estates inherited from two husbands. The paradox was all too clear, now I thought upon it.

Roger was uncomfortable, for he knew how much pain these revelations would cause me. 'She, and many others in your country, are happy to accept the gold that our treasury can offer them. That much is true, certainly.' He lowered his voice conspiratorially, so that his subordinates on the quarterdeck could not hear. 'Matthew, you and I, we are but puppets of the greater ones above us. So you were, in your recent foolish quest for that illusory mountain of gold. Above all, we are the pawns of two mighty and capricious men, Charles Stuart and Louis de Bourbon.' I recalled with a shudder that Brian Doyle O'Dwyer had once said something similar to me. 'Your king decides to father a child on behalf of one of his closest friends—so be it. Our king decides that the mother of that child should be one of his agents, who will thus gain a potentially useful degree of intimacy with your king—so be it.' He placed his hand on my shoulder. 'So you see,
mon cher ami,
to continue a campaign against the lady would be the height of folly, flying against the express wishes of the kings of England and France. For good or ill, old friend, you cannot bring down the Countess of Ravensden. Neither you, nor Tristram, nor Cornelia, should even attempt it.' He stared deeply into my eyes. 'But there are consolations in all this, of course.'

I could find no consolation in that moment. My brother, mother and two monarchs had connived in a conspiracy to foist a bastard heir on Ravensden,
and I could raise not a finger against it.
All I had, all I aspired to be, derived from my loyalty, and that of my family, to King Charles the Second; and no matter how shaken my loyalty had been by the voyage in quest of the mountain of gold, the simple truth remained that everything I held dear in life depended upon the whim of that crowned enigma. How could I reject a policy that was favoured not only by him but also by the cousin that he idolised, King Louis the Fourteenth? Nevertheless—'Aye, consolation,' I said with difficulty. 'The consolation that she has not bred.'

'Despite not inconsiderable efforts on the part of your king, or so our sources within the palace of Whitehall suggest. Oh, and yours, too—your friend Captain Berkeley wrote to you to similar effect, but I presume that letter miscarried with the others.' Roger smiled tentatively. 'As well, then, that our agents read it first.' He waved a hand as if to suggest that such blatant interference in the private correspondence of Englishmen was but second nature to the French. 'Now as experience tells us, Matthew, King Charles does not usually need to make any effort at all. His passing within a few inches of any woman is normally sufficient for her to produce a large, ugly black-haired child some nine months later. The failure in this instance is a mystery to all, especially the king, and a disappointment to some, especially your mother. So savour your moment, Matthew Quinton. You remain the heir to Ravensden, however ambivalent you may feel about that position. And there is your other consolation, of course.'

'Another—?'

He clapped me on the shoulder, and was at once the cheerful, carefree soul that I had once known as Roger Le Blanc. 'Your country will soon be at war with the Dutch,
mon ami
Why, I believe that you have played a not insignificant part in ensuring that this will come to pass—capturing a fort of theirs in the River Gambo, I hear? Their High Mightinesses at The Hague are greatly displeased.' He pointed out to sea. 'So should not a captain of the King of England be making all sail to enforce the salute to the flag upon those two Dutch Indiamen on the horizon? And even if they do give you the salute, might not that same captain find an excuse to seize them regardless, and seek to have them condemned as lawful prize?' Roger grinned broadly. 'Might not such a glorious windfall of prize money be ample compensation for Captain Matthew Quinton?'

I thought upon it, and at last, I smiled. 'Ample compensation indeed, My Lord d'Andelys. A veritable mountain of gold, in fact.'

Historical Note

The Mountain of Gold
is based loosely on a true story. In 1651 the tiny royalist navy-in-exile was operating on the coast of West Africa, and its commander, Prince Rupert of the Rhine, heard rumours of the existence of such a mountain, far up the Gambia river. Rupert proceeded some way upstream with a force that included Robert Holmes, who was granted his first command during this expedition. After the Restoration, Rupert persuaded the king to back two expeditions to West Africa. These were both commanded by Holmes and were nominally under the auspices of the newly formed Company of Royal Adventurers, later renamed the Royal African Company. The first expedition, in 1661, was aimed at the Gambia and was explicitly an attempt to find the 'mountain of gold'; the second, in 1663-4, was a much more ambitious attempt to drive the Dutch from the Guinea coast. As Matthew recounts, these expeditions, and the creation of the Royal African Company, have been seen by some as the beginnings of properly organised British involvement in the slave trade, but in practice, the development of that trade formed a relatively small part of both the objectives and immediate outcomes of the two Holmes expeditions. On the other hand, the two expeditions—especially that of 1663-4—were certainly among the most important catalysts leading to the outbreak of the second Anglo-Dutch war, although contrary to the accounts in some older histories, Holmes did not sail on to New Amsterdam, force its surrender, and name it New York; that was accomplished by a separate expedition commanded by Richard Nicholls. For the purposes of this book, I have combined various elements of the two Holmes expeditions. For example, the fort on St Andreas island was captured and named James Fort during the 1661 expedition; I have greatly exaggerated the strength of the fort, which actually put up almost no resistance (Holmes' assessment of the size of the garrison provides one of the first recorded uses of the phrase 'two men and a boy'), but the circumstances of its debatable transfer from Courland to Dutch rule were as described here. However, the capture of the
Brill
and Holmes' assault on the Dutch trading posts took place during the 1663-4 expedition, again very much as described. I have taken several incidents directly from the manuscript journals of Holmes' expeditions, now held in the Pepys Library at Magdalene College, Cambridge: these include the 'red sails' off Cape Verde and the spontaneous firing of the musket during the march to the court of the King of Kombo. (There was such a potentate, although I have invented his gargantuan proportions.)

The character of Robert Holmes is based closely on the written record, notably Pepys'
Diary
and Richard Ollard's judicious biography,
Man of War: Sir Robert Holmes and the Restoration Navy.
As in this book, he tended to be known interchangeably by his military rank of major and naval rank of captain until he ultimately received a knighthood in 1666. Pepys' unjustified suspicion that Holmes had seduced his wife, their clash over the appointment of the Master of the
Reserve
and Pepys' mystified ignorance of buggery can all be located in the diary. I have also based the characters of Pepys' colleagues on the Navy Board closely on the accounts of them that he provides. Other real-life characters to appear in this book are the Earl of Teviot, Captain William Berkeley, John Shish and John Cox. Morgan Facey and Otto Stiel were also real people, and served in the capacities described in this book; but I have invented personal histories for them. Both William Castle's description of the Battle of Santa Cruz and Matthew's of the 'Great Storm' of 1703 are based closely on the historical record, while my accounts of both Old St Paul's and Deptford Dockyard are based closely on a number of contemporary or near-contemporary descriptions. 'Chips' remained a problem for the naval administration until the beginning of the nineteenth century. The Battle of Deptford Bridge took place in 1497 in the manner described by Martin Lanherne and John Tremar; to this day, it remains a source of great pride and regret in Cornwall. However, I took some liberties by instituting a pope-burning procession in Wapping in 1663. These outbursts of anti-Catholic sentiment really only began on such a scale some fifteen years later.