The Mountain of Gold (26 page)

Yet my aversion to O'Dwyer was tainted by some other emotion, although I struggled to acknowledge it. The man talked plausibly, lightly and with good humour. He described the court of the
aga
of Algier and his harem with the skill of a born story-teller. He painted the
Porte
of the Sultan in colours so vivid that I almost felt myself transported thereto. Despite myself, I listened ever more intently. The renegade had the knack of explaining even matters of great difficulty in words understandable to everyman; a knack that he shared with Uncle Tris, I thought, although the comparison was unsettling. I began to see how even our sovereign lord the King, the arch-sceptic in an age when scepticism reigned, had been convinced by O'Dwyer's tale of the mountain of gold. And yet...

The Irishman's talk of harems and wives made me essay one of my rare interventions into his flow of silken talk. 'You had a wife in Algier, Colonel?' I asked.

'Three,' said O'Dwyer. 'Well, wives of a sort. Such is the Mahometan way. Two Moorish women and a Spanish girl whom I plucked off the shore of a village in Menorca, ten years or so past. And you, Captain?'

'I have a wife,' I said reflectively. 'A Dutch woman. I love her, indeed, but three of the kind would surely test the bounds of love.' I know not why I said it; do not know to this day why I shared such a confidence with such a rogue. But the words were said, and could not be unsaid.

O'Dwyer looked at me quizzically, then smiled. Ah, Captain,' he said sadly in his unique brogue, 'there you have the right of it. I have seen bold young men come over to us from France or Spain—England, too—convinced that turning to the Prophet will set them on course to the beds of countless women. They learn quickly enough that the obvious advantages of the flesh are but transitory.' He took a measure of Rhenish. 'What was it that old Scot said? That women were a monstrous regiment? He knew not the real truth of his words, for unlike me, Matthew, he was not married to the regiment.'

I laughed despite myself, and raised my cup to the renegade. Thus our dinner continued in better cheer than I could ever have imagined, and despite the untrusting voice that still muttered somewhere within me. Finally, though, our conversation turned, as it was surely bound to do, to the matter of our destination; but I had not expected O'Dwyer to instigate the turn.

We had been discussing the late civil wars in England. Of course, the renegade had learned of these only at second hand, and he seemed genuinely intrigued by my child's-eye account of those tragic years. He was particularly engrossed in my description of the battle of Naseby: for any of our Cavalier breed, that battle stands as the great 'if only' of history, but perhaps it was so for the House of Quinton more than for most. Every Cavalier regretted that Prince Rupert of the Rhine, commanding the right flank of the king's cavalry, had not ordered his victorious cohorts to turn in upon Parliament's infantry, thereby winning the war at a stroke. But my family, and myself especially, regretted Prince Rupert's failure the more, as it cost my father his life.

O'Dwyer was as good a listener as he was a talker, and betrayed no surprise at such an unwonted confidence. 'Well, Matthew, that accords with my impression of His Highness, these last months. An impulsive man. A great scientist, of course—an enquiring mind, but not methodical enough. Too prone to seek the quickest and easiest solution. He attended many of my meetings with the King, and did much to convince His Majesty of the existence of the mountain of gold. As you know, the prince has long had an interest in that particular grail—an interest almost as obsessive as that of our French enemy, Montnoir.'

At once I became more guarded. 'So you persuaded the prince first, and he in turn persuaded the King?'

O'Dwyer took from his mouth a particularly dubious piece of Bradbury's handiwork that he had been chewing for some little time, looked at it curiously, and laid it upon his plate. 'Don't demean His Majesty's originality of thought, Matthew!' he said. 'The King was amenable enough to my—well, to my blandishments, shall we say? But the fact that the prince, his cousin, believes passionately in the truth of the mountain, and had sought it himself. Let us say it made my tale the more convincing.'

'To some, perhaps,' I said bitterly.

O'Dwyer smiled. 'You're not a believer, then?' he asked mischievously. Before I could reply—intemperately, no doubt—the Irishman said, 'Ah, no matter, Matthew. No matter that you and every man on this ship thinks I'm a treacherous renegade who deserves the fate of Ravaillac, or preferably worse. Fix my limbs to horses, set them off in different directions and feed the remnants to ravenous dogs and the odd demented crone—would that suffice for you, Captain Quinton?' I said nothing, taking a measure of my wine to conceal the extent to which O'Dwyer had uncovered my sentiments. 'Perhaps not for you, though, above any man. Despising a goose chase instigated by Brian Doyle O'Dwyer is cause enough for the likes of Lieutenant Castle or your friend the chaplain, simply because of who I am and what I have been. But you, Captain. ah, now, you're so much younger and yet you see so much more than them, as though you possess another eye that they lack.' He leaned forward, this unsettling, plausible man—'For you, this is about more than me, I think, and about more than whether or not my mountain of gold truly exists—for I know no words of mine will ever convince you of that, Matthew. But you know full well that whether the mountain exists or not, ultimately this voyage is not of my making. I could have been ignored, or hanged, as you intended at the very first. Or handed over to Montnoir, come to that.' O'Dwyer appeared genuinely moved by the thought of the fates he had evaded. 'No, Captain Quinton. What you resent, I'd say, is that this entire quest stems from a prince whom you hold responsible for the death of your father and a king whom you no longer trust—'

'
Enough
, sir! This is a King's ship, I am a King's captain, and you—you—'

'—are a King's colonel. The same king, Matthew. But remember, I have come to this king, and to his England, with fresh eyes. Now, it seems to me that you, and your country, had so many expectations of this king, of how his restoration would make all things right. And yet, three years and more since his return, what did I sense in England through all of last summer and autumn? Disappointment. All those great hopes, all that excitement, all washed away by a floodtide of bitterness. The endless quarrels and petty vindictiveness of your Parliament. The hatred of Cavaliers for Commonwealth's-men, and vice-versa. The arrogance of the bishops. Above all, the whoring and vacillation of the King.' I made to protest, but could not find the words; it is not easy to protest against one's own innermost thoughts, uttered by another. O'Dwyer said coldly, 'So I should not be the target of your resentment, Matthew Quinton. Nor should my golden mountain—for that is but the easy way for a venal king and prince to abate a nation's disillusionment with them. Thus they play their pawns. You and I, Matthew, for we're nothing more than pawns in this.'

The man's words were so very plausible. I struggled with my feelings. Honour demanded that I should defend my king, but somehow, the words would not come. Charles Stuart, my brother's friend, and yet the man who had compelled that same brother and friend, a man for whom the very notion of marriage was anathema, into the worst marriage of all. Charles the Second, King of England, who had commanded me upon a voyage intended to free him of Parliament and make him an absolute monarch, just as Venner Garvey said.

So very plausible; yet as I sat there, looking upon the bronzed, worldly face of Brian Doyle O'Dwyer, I still wondered who were the pawns in this game, and who the players.

Fifteen

A knock upon the bulkhead heralded the entry of Vincent, a scrofulous Bristolian, with an urgent request from Lieutenant Castle for Captain Quinton to come on deck at once. My head swam, but still I stood: for even if honour was laid aside, there was still the duty of a captain to be fulfilled, and with it a responsibility to some one hundred and thirty souls.

O'Dwyer followed me from the cabin.

I stepped out onto the deck, climbed to the quarterdeck, and registered that the winds were significantly lighter than they were when I went below, when we had been scudding easily across a gentle sea. But it was a warm, sun-filled day, with no cloud to be seen. No cloud in the sky, at any rate.

Castle was at the larboard rail of the poop, standing alongside Kit Farrell. It should have been Negus's watch, but he was below, being attended by the surgeon; a victim of the flux, it was said, and I hoped his sickness did not presage the coming of the Guinea fevers. As it was, my lieutenant and boatswain both had telescopes trained on the horizon to the north-east. Kit handed me his eyepiece and said, 'A sail, sir.'

I focused on the distant speck of canvas and felt annoyance and puzzlement in equal measure. We saw sails a dozen times a day, more when close to shore, and hardly any were worthy of the captain's attention, especially when they were so far distant. But I knew Kit Farrell and William Castle would not have summoned me without a purpose. 'What of it, gentlemen?' I asked.

Kit was pensive. 'There's been a ship, or ships, in that quarter for almost a couple of watches now, Captain. And another to north-west. She's in sight for a little while, then drops over the horizon, as you'd expect if she was about her trade and course. Then the same happens in the other quarter. Then we sight another sail, perhaps on a different bearing and tack, seemingly a different ship, maybe with a different rig. But—'

'They're the same ships,' said Castle decisively. 'Two of them. Trying to make us believe they're chance sightings, a different ship each time, then coming back into view just long enough to check our position and course. Dropping down beyond our sight, changing the rig, all to lull us right enough, sir. An old game. We used to play it on the Spaniard in the Caribbee, under Myngs, when we sought to follow some rich argosy out of Cartagena. There'll be a third ship, well astern, always out of sight of us but in sight of the others. And maybe a fourth, a fifth, God knows how many, out of sight astern, or on either beam or both, too.'

I glanced at O'Dwyer, and the fleeting sense that had grown upon me during our dinner—a sense that might even have been a form of liking, or at least of empathy—died with our breeze. For if we had an enemy in these waters, I felt certain that it could only be one that served the purpose of the man who had been Omar Ibrahim. But the Irishman's expression was merely curious.

'If you're right, gentlemen,' I said—a captain must always be a sceptic, even if he is less qualified than those of whom he is sceptical—'then they'll have known for hours that we're detached from Holmes in
Jersey,
and from the
Prospect
too.' Such had been the consequence of a vicious little squall of hurry-durry weather, as the old seamen called it, on the previous day. 'If they're intent on attacking us, and assuming they outgun us, surely they'd have struck already?'

Kit looked up at our ensign, furling ever more limply about its staff, and said, 'Not if they needed to wait for their advantage, sir. An advantage they'd gain only in light winds, or none. Which means—'

'Galleys,' said O'Dwyer without emotion. And in this sea, sirs, there's but one power with galleys, and the skill to try the ruse with the ships over yonder. The rovers of Sallee.'

I recalled the renegade's words before the Navy Board—
I sailed past it on a Sallee rover but the last summer.

I turned on O'Dwyer. 'The Sallee rovers. Your late friends, then, Colonel. Come to take you back into the Mahometan fold, no doubt?'

The Irishman remained inscrutable. Ah, now, Captain Quinton ... doesn't every man have embarrassing old friends he would rather forget?'

Part of me longed to order him chained up in the hold, as I had done to him aboard the
Wessex.
Once again the Cavalier heart of Matt Quinton did battle with the dutiful head of the captain of the
Seraph,
and as was increasingly the case, the head prevailed. There was no evidence that O'Dwyer was responsible for luring us into a trap, perhaps by means of a letter slipped aboard any of the several merchantmen with whom we had spoken on the way south. Indeed, he would hardly have needed to do so: the date of our sailing from England would have been common knowledge in every port from Archangel to Alexandria, the trade winds ensured that the approximate course of any ship bound for the Gambia would be easy enough for skilled mariners to deduce, and of course no skilled mariners knew these seas better than the notorious Sallee rovers. The very name struck more terror into Christian hearts than was even the case with their brethren, the Barbary corsairs. At least the corsairs sailed on behalf of properly constituted governments that paid lip service to the overlordship of the Ottoman Sultan. But Sallee had no government. The city was a pirate republic, nothing less. Moors and refugees from every land in Europe fetched up there, setting sail to prey on the trade of Christianity...

'The colonel's galleys,' said Castle, ambiguously. 'Three coming over the larboard horizon, two to starboard.'

I lifted Kit's telescope. There was no mistaking the low, menacing hulls. Individually they were small, and would have been easy meat for the
Seraph's
battery; but five together was a very different case, especially as the need to supply prize crews meant that rover and corsair craft were always grossly overmanned by our standards. There might be even more men on the decoy sailing ships, and any engagement with the galleys would give them time to come up, too, even in this lightest of breezes. If this Sallee fleet caught us, and boarded, they would outnumber us at least three or four to one.

We would be dead men inside an hour.

The galleys came on. Now we could hear their dreadful cacophony: the beating of drums accompanied by the wailed ululations of the crew. That noise alone had been sufficient to make many a Christian ship surrender without a shot being fired.