Admiral (3 page)

“Nobody told me,” Heffer grumbled.

Ned shook his head impatiently, completely exasperated. “That’s the epitaph of the Western Design. ‘
Nobody told me
…
nobody asked.
’ Your stupid officers let their soldiers drive hundred of beeves and hogs into the mountains – and then kill the moriscos who know how to capture them. No meat to eat in a land where the cattle are numbered in thousands…

“No one has the wit to gather the fruit that grows on the trees or the vegetables which they trample on the land. You chased off all the fishermen and stole their canoes and
now
you complain you are starving. Can’t your damned silly men make fishing lines? Can’t they – or you – ask whether these are coney, rat or crab holes? Are buccaneers the only ones who dare go up in the hills and shoot beeves and boucan or salt the meat? How many men will a young steer feed? Your men should be living on fresh meat all the time – there’s so much to be hunted that you can kill daily so you needn’t salt or boucan it. Ah!” Ned broke off, angry with himself for losing his temper, exasperated with Heffer, although the beeves and hogs had been driven off before he had been made governor. “You’ll be running out of fresh water next!”

“We are” admitted Heffer miserably. “That big cistern on the mainland opposite has run dry…”

“No doubt it has!” Thomas exclaimed contemptuously. “It hasn’t rained for five weeks and I don’t suppose you rationed water. The Spaniards didn’t build that cistern for three thousand troops to use as if it was some magic Fountain of Youth! Have you rationed it now?”

“No – how was I to know it wouldn’t rain?”

“Just look out of the window from time to time” Ned murmured, and then said: “It’s too hot standing here – let’s go over and look at the first battery.”

They walked round the stunted shrubs fighting hard to grow knee-high in the sand, and insects buzzed up in clouds, whining and stinging. One or other of the men would occasionally stumble as the sand caved in round land crab holes. Ned paused for a moment to watch a pelican waddling along the water’s edge a few yards away, looking like a portly and beady-eyed prelate, slightly tipsy and wearing boots much too large but well polished.

The walls of the new battery, made of rough stone and mortar, were already three feet high and banked up with sand on the seaward side so that from a ship it would look like an innocent dune.

“I’ve fifty men working on this battery.” Heffer said crisply, striving to re-establish himself as the island commander. “I’m bringing in another fifty tomorrow or the next day to start on the magazines and sleeping quarters.”

“And the cistern,” Ned said.

“Oh yes, of course. Most important.”

“And the sloping area of catchment for the cistern,” Thomas said, “otherwise the rain will be lost in the sand.”

“Of course, of course,” Heffer said impatiently. “Well, now you can see our first battery.”

“The cistern will hold a hundred gallons per man?” Ned asked.

“Well, I hadn’t thought quite as much,” Heffer said lamely.

“That’s the minimum,” Ned said firmly. “Eight guns, five men to each gun, a couple of corporals and a sergeant, cook and a couple of powdermen: forty-six. Four thousand, six hundred gallons.”

“But that’ll be enormous,” Heffer protested.

“There’s plenty of stone, and your men have nothing better to do,” Ned pointed out. “You sit in the sun for a couple of days without water – try that and you’ll insist on five hundred gallons a man.”

By now the three men, followed by Rowlands, had walked up the slight slope and paused to look over the top of the stonework. Fifty bodies were scattered inside an area which had been pegged out and marked with cord in the shape of the battery and its emplacements and buildings. Several of the men had strung their coats across shovels to make some shade.

“Splendid,” Ned said. “If only the Dons could see them now, sleeping peacefully like sheep. Come on, Thomas, it’s too hot for all this martial excitement. By the way, I see emplacements marked out for four guns, not eight, and no sign of a cistern or catchment.”

As the two of them left Heffer and walked back along the beach, they could hear the general screaming almost hysterically at the soldiers, waking them violently – kicking, judging by the yells of pain – and accusing them of everything from drunkenness to treason and threatening to hang every tenth man as a warning to the rest of the garrison.

“I don’t envy him,” Ned said, swerving a few steps to avoid a wave surging higher up the beach. “His men verging on mutiny, officers completely unreliable and mostly stupid, and he doesn’t know if or when a ship will suddenly arrive bringing orders, let alone supplies.”

“If the army has thrown out Richard, he may not get orders for years!” Thomas commented. “In the meantime we aren’t getting our batteries built…”

“We will: I have a feeling that he wasn’t joking back there when he threatened them with the noose.”

“What a position for a Roundhead general to find himself in!”

“Just wait until he finds out who
we
are,” Ned said grimly. “I want to watch when he discovers he was saved by a pair of Royalists! And let’s hope it’s soon; I’m getting bored with our new surnames.”

Ned tapped Thomas’ arm as they turned across the sand to pass Heffer’s house, skirt the fish market and reach the jetty, where they could signal for a boat to take them back to their respective ships. “Don’t be too harsh with the poor fellow. He’s at least admitting to himself that his garrison of apparently God-fearing Roundheads are really jail sweepings.
We
knew that, but
he
couldn’t accept it because he genuinely thought Cromwell, Puritanism, the New Model Army, the Western Design, being sad on Sundays, all had magically transformed this dross into pure gold”

“On the other hand,” Ned said with ironic emphasis, “he has seen what he considers real scum – people like us, with our former servants, truly wicked men and women who swear, blaspheme, rarely if ever go to church, never spend an hour at prayer, live in a state of sin with our women – sail out, and bring him a cargo of grain, capture a Spanish city and give him guns, powder and shot… The poor fellow’s world has been turned inside-out!”

“Well, I still think he’s a psalm-singing hypocrite and I don’t trust him!” Thomas said flatly.

“We don’t have to, but you must admit the best way of getting this place fortified so that
we
can use it as a base is to give him guns and shot in exchange for him building the batteries.”

“And you’ve just seen the soldiers at work!” Thomas jeered. “Wait till I tell Diana: she can’t stand the man! She’ll want to go off to find our own island to fortify as a base.”

“You talk as if he was my hero – hey, what’s happening now?”

A horse was galloping along the track from the eastward towards the general’s house. The rider was an officer, his style betraying a fairly recent acquaintanceship with horsemanship.

He stopped a few moments at the general’s house, where the sentry pointed to Ned and Thomas. Two or three minutes later the officer, his face soaked with perspiration and almost wide-eyed with excitement, reined up in front of the two men with a jerk as though trying to pull off the horse’s head.

“The general – quickly, where’s the general?”

Thomas wagged a finger at the man, pulling at his carefully trimmed black beard with the other hand. “I’m hard of hearing young man,” he said querulously. “Did I understand you to say: ‘Excuse me gentlemen, but can you direct me to the general?’”

“Er – well, yes sir.”

“You seem in a hurry – are you going to trouble the general with some footling emergency?”

“Yes, sir, indeed! Please,
where
is the general?”

“Before you gallop off you had better tell us what the footling emergency is: we command this island’s naval forces.”

“That’s just it sir!” the officer exclaimed. “The Spanish fleet has been sighted and –”

“Coming from which direction?” Ned asked quietly.

The man turned on his horse and pointed eastward along the coast. “There, sir, from Point Morant.”

“How many ships?”

“The message doesn’t say, sir; it’s been passed from post to post: just that the Spanish fleet is coming!”

“You haven’t actually seen it then?”

“No, sir.”

Ned pointed westward towards the artificial hillock intended as the battery. “You’ll find the general over there, rousing his defences.”

The man thanked him and galloped off, leaving Thomas cursing and coughing in the cloud of dust. “What clodhoppers!” he exclaimed. “They pass a warning half the length of the island – God knows how many men have been galloping – which doesn’t say how many ships!”

“They haven’t the wits of our cane cutters,” Ned agreed.

“When you think of what we achieved with that motley crowd we took to capture Santiago…”

“We’d better hurry and signal for a boat,” Thomas said, “otherwise we’ll have Heffer hanging round our necks bleating about a Second Armada with all the fervour of a Second Coming. And the mastheads of our ships are higher than anything else round here – our lookouts can see right across the Palisades and along the coast.”

The boat put Thomas on board his ship the
Peleus
and then took Ned on to the
Griffin
, where his second-in-command, John Lobb, was waiting with Aurelia to greet him. Lobb obviously had news and Aurelia deliberately stood back while he reported.

Lobb pointed aloft and Ned saw a man perched high in the rigging. “There’s a ship in sight, sir,” Lobb said. “I’ve sent Green aloft with the perspective glass.

“
One
ship?”

“Just one, sir. Green is sure it’s a frigate.”

“A horseman’s just arrived at General Heffer’s headquarters with news from look-outs along the coast that the Spanish fleet’s in sight.”

“Aye, belike he has,” Lobb said phlegmatically, “but no one’s told them poor benighted soldiers that the Spanish ’aven’t got a fleet in these waters.”

“No, and it’s better they don’t know: they’ll keep a sharper look-out if they think the Dons can come any moment. Anyway, the Spanish king might send a fleet one day and scare us all!” He looked aloft and hailed the look-out.

“Green – what do you see?”

“She’s a frigate all right, sir, and just furling her courses as she comes abreast the Palisades: she’ll come in under topsails.”

“What flag?”

“The Union, sir, but no jack. She’s English built, too, I’ll take my oath on that.”

Lobb coughed and pointed across to the jetty. A fisherman’s canoe was just leaving with half a dozen men at the paddles and an army officer sitting in the stern.

The man whom General Heffer knew only as “Mr Kent” looked at Aurelia and grinned. “There’s your friend Rowlands – coming to warn us the Spanish are coming and asking Thomas and me to go over to see the general…”

“I need a walk on the land,” Aurelia said, her French accent more pronounced than usual, and, Ned noted, her voice more attractive as a result, “and I’m sure Diana does, too. Perhaps the sight of us will take the general’s mind off the Spanish for a moment or two.”

“You must give up tempting Puritans.”

“It’s the only sport you men allow us,” Aurelia said demurely.

Thomas had seen Rowlands coming out by canoe and one of the
Peleus
’ boats delivered him and Diana on board the
Griffin
before he arrived. Diana was wearing a dress instead of the more usual divided skirt, a fashion she had started among the women in the English ships, and Aurelia commented on it.

Diana laughed and waved towards Thomas. “He assured me that one of the general’s officers has just ridden in to report the Spanish fleet is in sight, so I thought I would dress up to welcome them.”

“Always surprise the enemy, Ned,” Thomas rumbled. “Just when they’re expecting broadsides, fire beautiful women at them.”

“Or Mrs Judd,” Ned said referring to his former cook, who was now living on board the
Phoenix
, a prize they had captured and put under the command of Saxby, once the
Griffin
’s mate and before that the foreman of Ned’s plantation in Barbados. Mrs Judd was a very large woman; large in body, large in all her appetites and large in her generosity.

Green called down from aloft: “She’s an English frigate all right, sir, twenty guns and they’re run out – for saluting,” he added. “She’s not cleared for action.”

Thomas tugged at his beard. “No Commonwealth jack, eh…” He pulled out the tube of his perspective glass and looked seaward across the low peninsula of the Palisades. “Ah, there she is. I see they’ve been painting her up in the last few days. Well, if she brings good news for old Heffer, it’ll be bad news for us. There’s one thing about this island at the moment – sauce for the goose is bound to be poison for the gander!”

Because the frigate was running close to the beach on the far side of the long sand-spit they could not see the sea. “Looks as though she’s running on wheels,” Thomas commented. “A Mrs Judd-size carriage.”

There was a flurry of movement at the
Griffin
’s entry-port on the starboard side, and Lobb came up to Ned to report: “That soldier’s arrived sir, the one who usually smells of fish.”

“Let him come on board – once you’ve made him brush off the fish scales.”

Diana gave her musical laugh. “One day poor Lieutenant Rowlands will have the sense to order a fishing canoe to be scrubbed out and reserved for his own use.”

Thomas shook his head. “Perish the idea: we’d have nothing to bait him about!”

Rowlands was agitated and saluted Ned smartly. “An urgent message from the general, sir!” he said, unlacing the straps closing the leather sabretache he had been wearing slung from his belt. “The general asks that you treat it as particularly urgent,” he added, handing over the paper folded four times and closed with two seals.

Because the lieutenant always annoyed him, Ned tucked the paper carelessly into a pocket, nodded a dismissal to Rowlands, and turned to Thomas. “I wish the breeze would get up, it’s so damned hot. Drains all one’s energy.”