Admiral (27 page)

Beside another boat he saw a barrel of gunpowder hoisted out and rolled on to a smooth stretch of land. That was followed by a two-handed saw, a tub of nails and a barrel of musket balls. A pipe of muskets and tub of pistols came next, and Brace, watching the men at work, commented to Ned: “We had the boat nearly gunwales under: lucky the sea wasn’t rough!”

“In my boat the worst part was trying to find somewhere to put my feet,” Ned said, watching the assembled falcon being hauled to the edge of the clearing where it would be almost completely hidden by bushes. Noticing Lobb, he said: “Keep an eye on the falcons; I want to see how the rest of the boats are getting on.”

Thomas had his falcon already hidden and the shot, powder, muskets, cutlasses, halberds and pikes spread out on the ground, as though opening a martial bazaar, and the starlight was reflecting from the sharpened blades. To one side were a barrel of drinking water and a stack of leather satchels packed with chunks of boucan, the smell of great pieces of smoked beef making the men slap their stomachs in anticipation of breakfast.

Slowly Ned checked them off. Coles with the
Argonauta
’s boats, Gottlieb with the
Dolphyn
’s, Leclerc with his men from the
Perdrix
, Edward Brace with his two boats and two canoes from the
Mercury
…as they were unloaded the east bank of the Rio Guanche gradually began to look like an army camp.

Ned found Secco and his men half-way along the line of fifty-six boats and sixty-four canoes, and as he arrived he saw the Spaniard carefully inspecting a pike while two men beside him were slipping cutlass belts over their shoulders.

“Ah,
almirante
!” Secco exclaimed cheerfully, “you are just in time to bid us
buena fortuna
!”

“
Hasta la vista
!” Ned said. “But don’t forget, as soon as you find the track, come straight back, marking the trail.”

“Indeed we shall not pause even to seek out a
taberna
!”

“The sooner you get back,” Ned said, “the sooner we shall take possession of all the
tabernas
– and every
bodega
, too.”

“We go, then,
almirante
.”

“Don’t forget,” Ned cautioned. “Not just the track but an easy way to it.”

“Old ladies on Sunday evening,” Secco said. “They will be able to make their promenade along it. They’ll be so grateful they’ll call it the
avenida
of the
filibustero
. I shall become a
cicisbeo
and make assignations there.”

“By all means,” Ned said, “but
after
we’ve finished with it!”

As the sun rose next morning over the mangroves which covered Isla Largo Remo like a thick carpet, Aurelia had tried to make up her mind whether or not to have herself rowed over to see Diana in the
Peleus
. She had stood in the early light at the taffrail of the
Griffin
– where last night she and Ned had checked the boats and their contents – and watched the pelicans glide down on their angular wings and suddenly dive vertically into the water with a crash that should break their necks. Instead, each surfaced with what could only be a grin on his face and seeming to wink conspiratorially as he squeezed the water from the sac of flesh hanging under the long beak. From the way the sac sometimes convulsed, she saw a bird often caught quite a large fish, but a toss of the head disposed of it, like an impatient toper draining the dregs in his tankard.

Occasionally a small white gull with a black head would fly down and alight on a pelican’s back with a cackling laugh, but more often, with wings outstretched to steady itself, it would land right on the domed head of the pelican, which looked like an elderly grandfather patiently suffering the attention of a scrambling grandchild.

When the pelican decided to go off on another fishing expedition the gull, tiny by comparison, flew round until the pelican dived; then, the moment he surfaced, the gull would land on the head again and patiently wait for the squeeze that drained the sac. At once the gull would drop into the water under the pelican’s beak, its head bobbing away in the water like a hen pecking up seed.

When she had first seen it, Aurelia had been puzzled; then she saw that several tiny fish, usually silversides, washed out when the pelican squeezed the sac, were sufficiently stunned or startled to be snapped up at high speed by the waiting gull.

Then, after the pelican had swallowed the contents of its pouch with another convulsive movement, like an old man with a thin neck and drooping jowls swallowing a raw egg, and the gull had finished the silversides, the gull in one elegant movement would return to balance on the pelican’s head.

Aurelia never tired of watching this duet between a bird that at first glance was a clumsy and ugly distant cousin of a goose and the little gull, among the most elegant of seabirds.

Now the last of the pelicans had flown off to the next island, Samba Bonita, on the
Griffin
’s quarter, where presumably the fish would be less wary, less alarmed.

She went down to the cabin and combed her hair carefully and put ribbons in the lowest ringlets. She envied Diana’s dark mass of curly hair: it had personality, a springy life of its own, and made a frame for Diana’s beautiful face. She could imagine Thomas holding Diana’s head, his hands and fingers deep in the hair, the two of them laughing or loving. But her own hair, this blonde, what Ned called ash, was colourless and lifeless: it did not make a frame for her face – more like a wrapping, in fact. And her complexion! Both she and Diana were tanned golden by the sun, but her own tan was more yellowish: Diana’s skin had life and was the mellow brown of polished wood, but hers was greasy by comparison.

Her breasts were well tanned, thanks to the canvas screen Ned had put up aft, but it had taken so long! Especially the lower parts. Ned would come and inspect them – and she would retaliate by teasing him about his white buttocks which, try as he might, refused to brown like the rest of his body.

Everyone else, except of course Diana and Thomas, who were doing the same thing, thought they had gone mad: it was common knowledge that the sun dried out the essential oils and left the body open to the noxious night vapours, to which everyone knew they were more vulnerable to anyway because frequently they slept on deck at night. However, Aurelia reflected as she looked at the tan on her belly, which was still as flat as when she was a young girl, everyone did not know, or believe, that the mosquitoes did not bite tanned skin as much as white, and it was mosquito bites, not the heat and humidity of the tropical showers that could make life a misery in the West Indies. At least, for an hour around dawn and from an hour before sunset until the late evening. Apart from itching and almost driving you into a frenzy, the bites sometimes turned septic. Why did the mosquitoes and sandflies concentrate round wrists and ankles, where the flesh was thin on the bone?

Suddenly, sitting naked in the cabin, she burst into tears, a hairbrush in one hand, a tortoiseshell comb in the other. It was hopeless; she could fill her mind with all this nonsense, this comparison of Diana’s hair and her own, the merits of a tanned skin, even speculate (yet again) how passionate Diana was and if the depth of her passion was indicated by her black hair, but none of it drove away this dreadful fear for Ned, a fear which soaked into her like fog drifting in along the harsh Atlantic coast of Brittany.

In Tortuga days ago it had seemed quite natural for Ned to accept the leadership of the Brethren; quite natural for him to agree to lead the attack on Old Providence and Portobelo. But now the ships were anchored and Ned and Thomas, with all the boats, were rowing along an enemy coast with little more than toy guns and swords to attack the third strongest port this side of the Atlantic. Havana and Cartagena were – so people said – enormous; but
nom de Dieu
, Portobelo had four castles to defend it. If anything happened to Ned – yes, she would be alone, but not for long: if anything happened to Ned she did not want to live. But how to die?

She realized that Diana, in the cabin of the
Peleus
, might be just as worried, unhappy and uncertain. She stood up, pulled on the divided skirt that had become famous among all the buccaneers as the wear of women on board the original three English ships, selected a jerkin and pulled it over her head and secured the lacing, and then ran the comb through her hair again. The tears had subsided into sobs; now the sobs were occasional hiccoughs which jerked her breasts uncomfortably.

The canoe took her across to the
Peleus
. It meant leaving the
Griffin
with not a man on board, because she needed them at the paddles, but there was little risk with the
Peleus
anchored less than five hundred yards away. A seaman took the painter and helped Aurelia on board. Her ladyship, he said, was in the cabin: a warning to Aurelia of Diana’s mood, because the approach of a canoe would have been reported and normally she would be on deck to meet a visitor.

Aurelia hurried down the companion ladder, tapped lightly on the door and went in without waiting for a reply. Diana’s eyes were red, her face puffy – and, naked, she too had been brushing and combing her hair.

“I won’t kiss you, I’m all sniffy and horrible,” she said. “I’ve been trying to pull myself together to come over and visit you.”

Aurelia hiccoughed and then laughed. “I was sitting just like you, combing my hair, when suddenly I began crying. I thought of you, managed –” she hiccoughed again “–to dress and here I am. With hiccoughs!”

“Those damned men,” Diana said, trying to smile, “there’s only one thing worse than having them around under your feet and that’s having them away.”

“They’ll be at the river mouth now,” Aurelia said brightly.

“They should have arrived there before dawn. The boats should be unloaded and everything hidden from prying eyes, with sentries out.”

“And that Spaniard should be going up the mountains looking for the track.”

Diana sniffed and then blew her nose vigorously. “Yes, but if he doesn’t find the track…”

“It
must
be there: Ned’s whole plan depends on it.”

“I know, and it is there, I’m sure, but will they be able to get to it from the river, I wonder? Those mountains…”

“Where there are mountains there are passes,” Aurelia said, with more assurance than she felt.

“I suppose so. I like looking at mountains but I don’t trust ’em. I come from one of the flat counties of England. A few rolling hills, but that’s all. These mountains of the Main – particularly around La Guaira – make me nervous. Well, not nervous, exactly, but they make me feel so insignificant. Once upon a time I used to get the feeling only when I looked up at the stars and the moon; now mountains have the same effect on me, as though I’ve shrunk.”

Aurelia nodded, although they did not have the same effect on her, nor did the stars; in fact mountains always gave her more confidence – the feeling that she could range over them without the restraints of priests, governors and petty officials of any government, that she and Ned could just walk hand in hand. It was the freedom a ship had to sail towards the setting sun, where the stars dipped down…

Diana had stopped sobbing now. “Thomas and Ned would be ashamed of us.”

“I doubt it. They’d be flattered that we thought them worth a tear! Still, perhaps they don’t picture tearful women taking the ships round!”

“Aurelia,” Diana said quietly, “both men know what they they are doing and we’re lucky. A few years ago Thomas found a naïve girl whose most exciting experience up to then had been riding a steady horse in the company of a groom. Slowly he gave me confidence – why, at first I could not meet strangers without blushing. To begin with he gave me confidence in myself, and then he gradually showed me what I could do. That I could make decisions without staying awake all night worrying. He taught me how to sail a ship and proved to me that my decisions were as likely to be as right as his.”

“There aren’t many such men,” Aurelia admitted. “He’s saying in effect you’re as clever as he is, even though he’s a man.”

“Yes, although Thomas doesn’t need to worry about his manhood. At first I thought he was really trying to show people that he was clever enough to choose a clever woman; then I realized it was nothing of the sort: he didn’t give a damn what other people thought; he loved me and wanted to share everything with me – bed, buccaneering, voyaging, seeing new and strange places…

“And Aurelia,” Diana added, “I think Ned is the same with you.”

“Yes – it has taken longer, of course, because he is a different kind of man. Ned was shy and uncertain at first when we escaped from Barbados: he had lost his father and brother – they had fled to France – which meant the estates and houses where he spent his childhood had been taken by Cromwell. Then he heard they were going to confiscate the Kingsnorth plantation.

“It’s almost unbelievable now, but when Ned and I escaped from Barbados in the
Griffin
with our people and a few tons of sugar, we thought we’d be able to trade. Or, rather, Ned did. I wasn’t so hopeful.

“I knew we had more enemies than Ned realized. Anyway, Saxby was wonderful. Ned was lucky when he hired Saxby as the plantation foreman who could also be the master of the
Griffin
.”

“Still, Ned saw what he had to do and did it – he took you with him! Kidnapped you!”

Aurelia laughed at the memory, but Diana was wrong, because Ned had not been like Thomas. He had been uncertain – both as a lover and as the leader of the group of people from Kingsnorth. She had been able to give him confidence as a lover, and she had been able – without him realizing it – to change his mind from planting in another island to smuggling to the Main. Meeting Thomas had done the rest: like a plant suddenly getting the sun and water it needed, he grew fast and sturdily.