Hunting Midnight (26 page)

Mama kept her eyes fixed on the ground as he offered this tune to the night. Her cool distance plainly silenced any last hope in him, for when he finished the song he attempted no other.

After several miles we reached a cove guarded by mammoth oaks concealing three large carriages. Nine people were already on board. Father chatted with the driver while we acquainted ourselves with the other passengers.

When the bells of the city tolled three, Mother and Father kissed each other on the cheek and he helped her up into her seat. I held Papa for a long time. My heart was pounding a warning to me about never seeing him again in this life.

I inhaled the glorious scent of him and gave myself over to his warmth. At length, he held me away from him, smiled to hide his anguish, and handed me his pipe and pouch of tobacco.

“Take this, my beloved John,” he said, kissing my brow.

“But, Papa – ”

“Take it and climb aboard. And think often of your father, who feels nothing but love for you. Be well, my son.”

My steps into the carriage were the heaviest I had ever taken.

“And, May,” Father said to Mother through the carriage window, “I shall always carry the burden of guilt, so it is not necessary for you to do so. Only one of us need be condemned. I release you.”

Papa retreated several paces and shouted to the driver that he could get on his way. We were off, and I could no longer hold back my sorrow. As my father waved to me, I could see his tears freely falling as well. Leaning out my window, I shouted, “We shall return to you and all will be well, Papa.”

How I wish I could have said something more important – words that might have changed his mind. When I looked at Mother, she was gazing at the moonlight playing like silver fishes across the water, afraid to look at me.

Two days later we found ourselves lodging in a dank cottage on the north bank of the Douro River, seven miles from Regua. Mother was in a foul temper due to the dirt and soot, and the first thing she did upon arrival was embark on a cleaning frenzy.

We survived for four weeks on turnips, potatoes, and kale, doing our utmost to stay dry and healthy, as the weather had turned wet and windy. But we were safe, and that was all that mattered.

While we were upriver, the French descended on Porto, sounding their trumpets as though about to enjoy themselves. As far as I can determine, Father had spent his first days after we left preparing himself for battle, practicing with his pistol in the garden, hoarding bread, drinking whiskey, and tending to Fanny and Zebra, whom he allowed to sleep in his bed.

Senhor Benjamin had boarded up his apothecary shop and moved into his cellar. He had no idea how to use a firearm, but he
kept an old rusty sword with him that had been in his family for many generations. It had a silver handle, of course – just right for a Jewish alchemist, since the goal of their work was not to create gold but to find the silver essence in all of God’s creations.

The Olive Tree Sisters continued sketching and molding their fruit by day. At night, they shared the same bed, clinging tightly to each other. As Jews, they wondered if they would be burned alive, since the French officers were rumored to be viciously
anti-Semitic
. If this did come to pass, they resolved to ask to be bound together.

In response to a call to arms that fateful morning, Father joined a line of Portuguese troops already positioned at the Olival Gate, very near our home. Shortly after the fighting began, however, the cannonading of the French guns and superiority of their musket power proved too much for the city’s defenders. The men fell in heaps, moist red roses blooming on their chests.

The battle at the Olival Gate was lost within minutes.
Miraculously
, Father had only taken a grazing shot to his leg. Peeling a musket free from the death grip of a lost comrade, he rushed with several other men to the eastern defenses, near the Bonfim Church, where fighting had now begun. A terrific battle was fought there for nigh on four hours, during which time perhaps ten thousand more of the city’s residents were given time to flee through Porto’s gates. Papa soon came to the conclusion that he would be of greater use as a diligent orderly than a poor marksman and served in this capacity for most of the struggle. By just after eleven o’clock, it was clear to one and all that their cause was lost. Some two hundred men, Father among them, retreated to the Bishop’s Palace.

Hundreds of French cavalrymen then led the greater part of the infantry into Porto. A few brave residents continued firing pistols from their patios and windows, but they were soon silenced. Papa and the other soldiers who had reached the palace were well-aware that their cause was lost, but they hoped to hold off the French forces as long as they could, to give the people of Porto more time to escape.

Cannons were soon hauled by French troops onto the plaza in front of the palace, where they fired away mercilessly.

The pontoon bridge across the Douro River was the only way of escape, and thousands fled in that direction. To the deafening roar of Gallic drums, the French cavalry charged down from the upper town to the river, firing indiscriminately and slicing their way through the terrified crowds with their swords. At the sight of the enemy, Portuguese artillery stationed at the Serra do Pilar Convent on top of the cliff on the opposite bank opened fire. It was then that the bridge surrendered to the weight of the terrified people it had been made to carry. With a wicked groan, it split apart, tossing two or three hundred into the river. There was no hope for them, even for able swimmers. They met their end in the greedy arms of the river, just as Daniel had seven years earlier.

How many drowned that day, no one can say for sure. I only know that I have it on good authority that scores of corpses washed ashore downriver, attracting a cloud of gulls the likes of which had never been seen before. Among the dead were Senhor Tiago the roofer and Senhor Policarpo’s wife, Josefina, along with her two children. Bloated, gray-eyed bodies were still being pulled from the river three days later, and for years afterward fishermen complained of lines constantly becoming tangled in boots, wigs, and even skulls.

So horrific were the next three days of violence that I do not believe any inhabitant of Porto will ever be able to think of the French again and not wish for revenge. The Olive Tree Sisters, like many women, were viciously raped by gangs of soldiers. Graça hemorrhaged on the night of the Twenty-Ninth, fell into a coma, and died in her sister’s arms the next day. Luna’s spirit was broken – precisely in half, I’d say. I shall never forgive what was done to them.

As for Benjamin, just after the French broke through the city’s defenses, he heard someone in his sitting room. Tricked by a cry for help shouted in Portuguese through his locked cellar door, he rushed upstairs carrying his rusty sword, where he was
confronted
by a young French soldier.

This young man’s triumphant grin unleashed the warrior in Benjamin, and when the Frenchman squeezed the trigger of his
gun only to have it misfire, the apothecary lashed out, fatally wounding his foe in the neck. Benjamin then raced to the riverside. As this took place before the collapse of the pontoon bridge, he was able to scurry across to the far bank. He continued to make his way south and hid in the woods along the road to Espinho, returning to the city only after five days of hiding. Twice during his escape, a regiment of Gallic soldiers came within a hundred yards of him, and twice he lay facedown in the soil, silently reciting Hebrew prayers for the soul of the youth he had killed.

My beloved Fanny and Zebra were not so fortunate. I never saw either of them again.

I would wager that on the morn of the great battle, Papa let them out into our garden, as I found a plate of bones there, most probably some chicken he had scrounged. When French soldiers broke the hinge of our front door, both dogs would have breathed fire like Scottish dragons – and been summarily shot, I have no doubt.

But I found no blood. Possibly it had seeped into the garden soil. Their bodies must have been tossed onto dung heaps with the rest of the fallen and set ablaze.

I only hope they were not made to suffer.

Mother and I left our rural refuge for Porto on the Third of April, when news reached us of the sacking of the city. As there were no barges to take us downriver, we set out on foot. I would never have believed Mama would be able to walk such a distance – sixty miles, at least – but she was driven onward by terror, as though a burning metronome were beating inside her. Every day we walked from cockcrow to midday, at which time, with the sun highest in the sky, we rested by the side of the road, in the spring shade afforded by pine trees. Then we continued on till sundown, finding shelter in farmhouses and barns.

The peasants we met were kind, displaying the generosity one often encounters by accident. One old woman sat in a field
munching raw cabbage and watching the night sky with me. She told me that the stars were not hunters, as Midnight had said, but rather seeds scattered by God. The earth itself was one such seed.

Gazing at the Milky Way, I wondered where Violeta was. I dearly hoped that she had escaped Portugal to America.

Eleven days after we had started out, we spied the Clerics Tower from a clearing several miles outside the city. Mother and I burst into tears.

Our house had been ransacked and all my mother’s porcelain destroyed. The skylight in the Lookout Tower had been
shattered
, and rain had soaked through to the upper floor of the house.

We hadn’t the heart to dig under the rosebushes, so we were unaware that our silver and jewelry were safe. The pianoforte was undamaged, still buried under books.

Grandmother Rosa’s house remained safely boarded up, and Senhor Benjamin, who had returned home by now, told us that he had heard she was still in Aveiro and that all was well.

Father was missing. Mama and I searched frantically for anyone who might have seen or spoken to him, and we finally found a neighbor up the street who’d spotted him leaving our house at dawn on the morning of the Twenty-Ninth. No one saw him again after that.

Two days later, I learned of his fate from a young sergeant in the Loyal Lusitanians, one of the lucky few to survive the cannon fire at the Bishop’s Palace. His name was Augusto Duarte Cunha, and I found him in one of the overcrowded wards at St. Anthony’s Hospital, where he was recovering from a bullet wound in his chest.

With his foreign looks and accent, my father struck a
memorable
figure, and the sergeant knew exactly who I meant as soon as I started to describe him.

“I remember him well,” Cunha said, inviting me to pull up a chair to his cot.

Holding tight to hope, I asked, “Sergeant, do you know if … if my father survived the French attack?”

“No, I’m afraid not, son,” he replied solemnly. “I was with him when the end came.”

“You … you saw him die?”

“Yes, I was right beside him.”

I fought to keep from crying but in the end had to dash out to the corridor, where I hid my face against the wall. When I returned to the ward, the sergeant shook my hand and said, “I liked your father a great deal, John. He was a brave man. I’m sorry.”

“Please … please tell me everything you can about his last hours.”

“I will tell you what I know, but you have to understand, the French attacks came one after another, and we were far
outnumbered
. Time for conversation was scarce.”

“Father fought beside you?”

“Yes, he had a pistol – an antique of sorts. Not much good, I’m afraid. Though that didn’t stop him from trying. Your father proved himself a good shot, but he was out of practice.”

The sergeant then described the battle at the Olival Gate and how my father had been grazed with a bullet in his leg. “A short time later,” he said, “when the fighting moved to near the Bonfim Church, your father put down the musket he had taken from a dead soldier and helped nurse the wounded men. He proved himself an able orderly. For the young lads, having an older man attend to them was reassuring.”

“This was all on the Twenty-Ninth?”

“That’s right, John.”

“And when you were able to speak to him, what did you talk about?”

“I remember that the first thing I asked him was what made him decide to live in Portugal.”

“And what did he say?”

“Love and wine.” The sergeant laughed. “I didn’t believe him at first, but he said it was the absolute truth. Your father said his gods were Venus and Bacchus.”

“He worked for the Douro Wine Company, but he wanted his own vineyard – and he wanted me to join him. He married my mother shortly after coming to Portugal. They were very much in love.”

“He spoke of her, John.”

“What … what did he tell you?” I asked fearfully.

“Your father said he had a good friend who was always trying to turn lead into silver. ‘Sergeant,’ he told me, ‘I’ve done just the opposite with my marriage.’ I asked what he meant, and he told me he’d made a mess of things with your mother. John, I think he confessed that to me because we all knew we might not live to see another day. He made me promise to value my wife and children above all else.”

“What else did he say?”

“Later, after we’d retreated to the Bishop’s Palace, we spoke once more. Your father said something odd: ‘Perhaps I’ve passed the test after all.’”

“What test?”

Sergeant Cunha considered my question. “He wouldn’t say, son. He just said that when you came back from upriver he would take you to Amsterdam as he’d promised. He was thinking of taking you to Constantinople too. He said you had a grandfather from there and ancestors going back for many centuries. He gave me to understand that he was planning a grand tour of Europe. ‘When we’re done, we’ll all go to Scotland,’ he said. He wanted to take you up to the ramparts of Edinburgh Castle and look out across the entire city. ‘I want to stand with my family as high as we can and let my son see where we come from.’”