Admiral (23 page)

It took an hour to slide the heavy planks of the bridge back in place, with both Hernández and Vásquez watching, the former giving the heaving and cursing buccaneers advice how it should be done. Both Ned and Thomas had agreed not to accept Spanish help; that was a certain way, Ned had warned, for the Spaniards to let it drop “accidentally” into the sea below.

While Leclerc supervised the bridge, Ned and Thomas began inspecting Santa Teresa, a move which brought Vásquez along, dogging their heels like a spaniel and apparently anxious to steer the two Englishmen away from his living quarters. His efforts were so clumsy that Ned and Thomas, thoroughly suspicious, suddenly smashed down the door, crossed the hall and went into the nearest room to see an enormous near-naked woman rushing through the opposite door, scattering combs and lingerie, screaming that the English were coming,
Madre de Dios
, and appealing to several saints for help.

“My wife,” Vásquez said in some agitation.

“I am sorry, you have my sympathy,” Ned said politely, but the governor missed the irony.

In the armoury they inspected the breast and back plates of armour and helmets hanging on hooks, the metal rubbed over with goose grease.

“Several of the leather straps need renewing,” Thomas observed, pointing at the straps and buckles fastening the front and back at each side.

“Your helmet,” Ned said, nodding to the only one with a plume. The helmets were well made and carefully designed, looking like an elaborate version of a Roman centurion’s, but with a lower crest and more pronounced peak, as well as a wide lip at the back, angled out to protect the nape of the neck.

The halberds reminded Ned of a past age. They were as long as the pikes in racks beside them, and each had a sharp pike head for stabbing, while on one side there was a blade shaped like the head of an executioner’s axe, and on the other a short claw, curved and sharp.

Also hanging down from hooks were powder flasks. Ned noted that, decorated in bright enamels and without the straps, they would look well on my lady’s dressing table. The flasks were triangular brass boxes with spouts at the apex. A lever on the side worked a measure, so when the nozzle of the flask pointed downwards into the bore of a musket, only a certain quantity of gunpowder came out. There were two sizes of flask, the larger for ordinary powder and the smaller for priming, which was always finer and supposedly of better quality.

Swords were also hung up on hooks. Ned drew one from its scabbard. Double-edged with guillons but no knuckle guard or pommel, it was a simple military broadsword but well made. Between each was a short sword, a wide-bladed dirk with a heavy guard and guillons which stuck out and down like horns. “Used as a
main-gauche
, I should think.” Thomas commented. “You use your broadsword to deflect your opponent’s sword to one side, and with his body then unprotected, you give him a jab with this overgrown dagger which you are holding in your other hand.”

“So every man with a broadsword also has one of these,” commented Ned. “Helmet, breast and back plates, broadsword and
main-gauche
– or a pike and halberd. Or, of course, a musket, sword and
main-gauche
.”

“Where are the muskets and pistols?” he asked Vásquez in Spanish. The governor led the way into the next room and pointed to several long wooden cylinders and to two tubs.

“Ten muskets to a pipe,” Ned murmured to Thomas.“There should be a hundred here.” He saw a pipe with its end levered off and pulled out one of the muskets. It was thickly coated with goose grease but, Ned was irritated to note, was a matchlock, not a wheel-lock. He pointed it out to Thomas, who shrugged his shoulders.

“Wheel-locks are all right, but look at that trusty serpentine there.” He pointed to an S-shaped fitting on the right-hand side, a screw through the bottom allowing the claw at the top to swing over. “A nice glowing piece of slow-match stuck in the claw of the serpentine, and a pan cover that flicks aside easily…”

“Yes, all very nice, especially in pouring rain and a high wind, so you end up with a sodden slow-match and an empty pan!”

“The enemy would have the same problem,” Thomas said, “so you toss the musket aside and set to with swords. But with a wheel-lock, a weak spring won’t spark the wheel against the pyrites fast enough to make sparks, or the pyrites are faulty. So your pistol doesn’t fire, but your enemy, with a strong spring or better pyrites, deposits a pistol ball in your gizzard with a bang you won’t hear.”

Ned grunted and walked over to the tubs of pistols and saw they too were matchlocks.

“Mind you, a good Italian wheel-lock pistol,” Thomas said, “which I had owned since it was made – ah, that would be worth having. But a pistol that has been tossed about, fitted with pyrites that no one has selected, spanned by clumsy oafs paying no heed to the tension spring – suicide!”

It took two hours to inspect all the guns and discover that Hernández had been correct in saying that many of the guns had been cast in England, but he had not mentioned that most of them bore the rose and crown and initials of Queen Elizabeth. Nor had he said they were made of bronze, not iron.

“I expect Pym’s expedition visited the Tower of London before leaving England,” Ned said, “and found these carriage pieces and took them before they could be melted down again. Fine guns,” he added, peering into the muzzle of one of them, “just as long as we have enough shot of the English size. We must find some shot gauges, too; otherwise in the excitement of action someone might use Spanish shot and blow up a gun.”

“Just think of it, Ned,
El Draco
could have used these guns,” Thomas mused. “Drake was a hero of my boyhood. We’ll be using the falcons at Portobelo within a few leagues of where they buried him at sea.”

Ned was inspecting the touch-hole of one culverin at that moment and said: “This gun looks as though it hasn’t fired a dozen rounds since Gloriana died more than half a century ago!”

There were iron guns at St Jerome, St Joseph, and La Plataforma de los Artilleros which had rusted to the point where they were more danger to their users than the target: rust had been hammered off and the guns painted so many times that it was difficult to read any gunfounder’s marks.

Ned noted them on his list. “These get turned so their breeches are seaward. Double-shot them with a double-charge, then run a slow-match to the pan. Get everyone out of the way and then as each gun fires, its own recoil will hurl it over the cliff and into the sea.”

“Where did you learn that trick?”

“I’ve just thought of it.”

“You have a pleasantly devious mind.” Thomas said.

Aurelia and Diana walked along the street forming the front of Puerto Catalina, both commenting that because they had been at sea so long they seemed to be walking uphill. Nor could they walk an absolutely straight line. “We shall end up like drunken sailors rolling down the high street,” Diana grumbled, standing to one side as a dozen seamen came running down the hill from the bridge with a small brass cannon on a carriage.

They were followed by several French sailors steering a four-wheel cart which was almost running away with them and clattering as though scores of pots and pans were being kicked round a stone-floored kitchen. Aurelia’s question about their load so startled the sailors, who expected neither to see a beautiful woman standing beside the road nor to hear her speak French, that three of them let go of the shafts, anxious to hear her, until their shipmates yelled at them in alarm.

“Armour,” Aurelia told Diana. “We might have guessed that from the noise.”

“I’d have expected kettles, with a dozen drunken tinkers mending them.”

Diana then asked the men hauling the next cart what was in the barrels, and received the cryptic answer: “Powder, ma’am.”

She turned to Aurelia and, pointing across to the island of Santa Catalina, crowned by its castle, said: “You were rather hard on Ned last night, you know. He captured Puerto Catalina and that island entirely by bluff, with not a life lost.”

Aurelia nodded in partial agreement. “Yes,” she admitted, “but why bluff like that and accept a small prize when you could have a large one?”

Diana said soberly: “I don’t think Ned really wants these islands. He thinks that extra guns and powder might be helpful in the attack on Portobelo. Extra so that he can leave them there when he’s finished.”

“I suppose I was angry at a Spaniard getting the better of him,” Aurelia admitted. “Giving him guns that originally belonged to Queen Elizabeth… Still, the powder is Spanish!”

“The cannons matter less, I think, than the muskets, pistols, swords and pikes. The Spanish make the best swords, so Thomas says, and the buccaneers were short of hand-guns. Now I think they’re well satisfied.”

“Will they argue with Ned about leaving Santa Catalina?”

“No, I don’t think so,” Diana assured her. “They respect his judgement. They’ll follow – and obey – him just as long as he is successful. He was successful at Santiago and he has been successful here.”

“Supposing he fails at Portobelo?”

“It depends why. If it was his fault, they’d probably elect a new leader. Portobelo is the greatest raid they’ve ever undertaken, so one can only guess.”

“But they would never have been able to plan it themselves,” Aurelia protested.

Diana laughed and patted Aurelia’s arm to take the sting out of what she was going to say. “Let’s bear in mind that we also don’t know for sure that Ned and Thomas can do it. Snatching a year’s bullion won’t be easy. The Dons are poor sailors, but no one’s faulted them as builders and defenders of castles.”

“Ned never wanted to be elected admiral,” Aurelia said quietly, as though talking to herself. “I suspect he was happier with just Thomas and Saxby.”

“I know Thomas and Saxby were but, as Thomas says, the only way to get rich enough to be able to settle down is by leading all the buccaneers on a few big raids.”

“Settle down!” Aurelia exclaimed. “I don’t think I could go back to that life again, either in Barbados or London. All that making lace and needlepoint and conversation limited to the colours of the thread and the patterns and some dreary woman saying she is expecting her fifth child and looking for a good wet-nurse – yes, and unfaithful husbands and sordid
affaires
and what is happening at court: not the politics but who was seen flirting with whom… Who
cares
? Life does not bore me, but people can – and do!”

Diana sighed. “That’s exactly why I left England with Thomas: I didn’t care. I love Thomas, life with him is exciting, we’re never reduced to talking about the harvest or the cattle not giving so much milk.”

She stopped and looked calmly at Aurelia. “My dear, in a way we’ve already ruined our lives, or committed ourselves. If we lived near each other in England, we would, as you say, be reduced to discussing lace bobbins and other people’s
affaires
. But out here, we discuss the capture of Santiago. In England as a dutiful wife you might chide your husband for selling one of your favourite horses, but out here you’ve just been chiding him for the terms he laid down for the Spaniards to surrender two islands.”

“I wonder if, even in old age, we could ever go back again to bobbins and
affaires
. Supposing Ned and Thomas each made a fortune from buccaneering, and hung us with jewels and gave us fine clothes and splendid homes with dozens of servants…could you bear it?”

“For a year, perhaps,” Aurelia said. “For six months I could look at the jewellery, finger the fine cloth, train the servants, plan a beautiful garden, furnish the house as I would want it, and for another six months live on the memories of Santiago, Santa Catalina, Portobelo and a dozen other raids.

“Then would begin
le grand ennui
: an immense boredom. An immense boredom because I
have
the finest jewels, I
have
the finest clothes, I
have
a house everyone envies, I
have
three splendid coaches, drawn by black, white, grey and brown – bay, do you call them? – horses. The excitement is in
getting
; the boredom is
having
. Ned would grow as dull as a cabbage. I should grow as fat as a turnip. We should bore each other.”

“My dear,” Diana said, “you think too much. What was it that Shakespeare wrote in Julius Caesar: ‘Let me have men about me that are fat, sleek headed men and such as sleep o’nights. Yon Cassius has a lean and hungry look, he thinks too much, such men are dangerous!’ Perhaps the same goes for women!”

“Lean and hungry?” Aurelia repeated in alarm. “You don’t think I look ‘lean and hungry’ do you, Diana?”

The Englishwoman patted her own hips. “You are not as well nourished as I am – but no, you are not ‘lean and hungry’. You don’t look the kind who are dangerous! But don’t think too much; accept things as they come!”

They stood back off the track as two more carts came thundering down the hill, the buccaneers pulling back on the shafts to slow them.

The first cart was under the command of a Dutchman who spoke enough English to understand Diana’s question and imitate a man holding a pistol; the second cart was loaded with large wooden cylinders which were, the men told Aurelia, pipes of muskets, ten muskets in every cylinder.

The two women turned up a side-street and began walking uphill through the small town. Several houses had balconies running completely round the upper floor, the roof sloping well out to shade them. But the paint on the planking was peeling and on several houses the planks were dropping at one end or another, showing where termites were eating away round the nails and leaving the houses looking scarred and wounded.

Wooden shutters over the lower windows were obviously the favourite of termites and several, slewed on their hinges, gave houses the appearance of bespectacled old men winking lewdly at passers-by. On walls and under the eaves of most of the houses were stuck small balls of mud, looking like miniature nests of swifts. Diana pointed them out and Aurelia explained that they were made by wasps, and inside were small tubes in which they laid their eggs. The newly-hatched wasps broke their way out, but the nests remained.