The Portuguese Affair (30 page)

My work with the expedition was not quite finished. The men who were too sick to be moved were quartered in one of the warehouses which had held the provisions for the fleet before our departure. One of those very warehouses, indeed, which had been broken open and looted by the raw recruits, some of whom now lay here in such a pitiful state. There were plentiful medical supplies to be had in
Plymouth, so that Dr Nuñez and I were able to make our patients more comfortable. With careful feeding and further nursing, those who had survived the horrors of the death march and the voyage home would probably recover. Dr Nuñez managed to arrange for two local physicians to take over the work from us, for it was clear from our own physical state that we could not continue much longer.

He chose to remain for a time in
Plymouth. As one of the major investors in the expedition, he would have meetings to attend. Certainly, there would be acrimonious discussions about how matters were to be resolved. Already we had heard muttered rumours about seizing certain of the largest ships in lieu of payment of debts. Dr Nuñez would try to see fair play, though I knew he would have preferred to return home to London with me.

‘Nay, I shall stay a little longer, Kit,’ he told me wearily. ‘I have written letters to Beatriz and to the manager of my spice business in
London, if you will be kind enough to carry them for me.’

‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Though I still wish I could prevail on you to come with me. I fear you will be able to do little here.’

He shook his head, and would not be persuaded. I do not think he believed he could do much good, but felt it his duty to try his utmost. For myself, I could not cast the dirt of Plymouth from my heels fast enough. Three days after we had landed, I set out to ride back to London. I might, indeed, have travelled in more comfort by ship, for some of the smaller ships were sailing to Chatham for repairs, but I could not stomach a single day more at sea.

The green and lush countryside of southern
England looked inexpressibly beautiful after the wasteland of our overland march and the grey wilderness of the Atlantic. The full heat of an English summer seemed no more than balmy to my skin, parched and peeling as it was from the Iberian sun, and even that mild warmth was tempered by soft breezes that lifted my unkempt hair and rippled through my horse’s mane. All around me as I rode eastwards the land looked rich and bountiful. The air was filled with birdsong and the sweet scent of new mown hay. The fields of wheat and barley and oats were well grown and the crops plump and healthy. In the meadows half-grown lambs followed their freshly sheared dams. As I rode along lanes and high roads through Devon and Dorset and Hampshire, before heading north, cows gazed at me over hedgerows, placidly chewing the cud. In the villages, women nodded their greetings while small children hid behind their skirts and the bolder lads followed me, firing questions, guessing perhaps from my appearance that I came from the expedition. It seemed that word of our return had travelled ahead of me, reaching even the smallest villages.

Had I hurried, I could probably have covered the distance in three or four days, but in my weakened state I could not ride for long hours, as I had done in the past when on a mission for Sir Francis. He would have to wait for my report. News had already gone ahead of me by fast messenger from
Plymouth to London, sent by the leaders of the expedition. How truthful it was, I could not say. And of course Essex’s ship
Swiftsure
would have reached London some days ago. There was no need for me to hurry. Each day I stopped before I was too exhausted and spent the night in some modest village inn. I owed my post horses, like my lodging in Plymouth, to Dr Nuñez, but the small purse of coin I carried would not lodge me at any great expense, and I feared it would barely last me all the way to London.

As I neared the end of my journey, I began to hear gossip in the inn parlours about the heroic deeds achieved by the Earl of Essex in
Portugal. It seemed that, single-handed, he had captured the city of Peniche and driven out the Spanish garrison there, before personally crowning King Antonio. He had then led a victorious march south to Lisbon, where he had instituted a siege. The Spanish garrison quartered there had been too cowardly to meet him in single combat for the Queen’s honour, nor would they emerge from the city to settle the affair in pitched battle, like honest men. Nay, they had cowered behind their defences like silly girls and Essex had only been persuaded to abandon the siege because of the English army’s lack of supplies and the failure of the Dom’s Portuguese supporters to appear. Reluctantly he had returned to England, but he was ready, at a day’s notice, to set out once more and fight the Spanish hand-to-hand.

Had these stories not concealed the tragic truth of the Portuguese affair, I would have laughed. As it was, I came near to weeping.

Soon it began to be whispered that Drake had returned from Portugal with fifteen Spanish galleons, each and all loaded from bilge to deck with gold, silver and precious gems. Even the ballast had been replaced with weighty treasure. Men’s eyes gleamed.

It was more than a week after leaving Plymouth that I found the roads more crowded, busy with those on foot or on horseback, carts of produce heading north, empty carts returning, packmen with their laden ponies, and from time to time a gentleman’s cavalcade, before which all men must give way.

It was beginning to grow dusk as the crowds on the road drew together and slowed, forced together like a flock of sheep through a gate. A slow, gentle English summer dusk. There ahead of me was the Bridge. The gold of the setting sun flashed off the Thames, turning it to molten metal. The first lights winked out in houses and taverns, both in Southwark on this side of the river, and in the city itself on the far side. St Paul’s tower, which had once been topped by a spire, stood on the rising ground almost opposite me.

London
. Home. The Portuguese affair was over.

When I had crossed the Bridge and reached the city, I left my post horse at an inn in
Gracechurch Street and walked the rest of the way to Smithfield. London seemed curiously unchanged, as though it had been asleep during the long weeks of our travails, but the cobbles under the worn-out soles of my boots were real and painful enough, and I found myself limping before I reached Duck Lane. I was ravenous with hunger and hoped Joan would have a meal on the fire, for I had eaten little on my way from Plymouth, guarding the handful of silver Dr Nuñez had given me. My father and I would need to live even more frugally in the future, now that all our savings were lost.

As I rounded the corner into the lane, something hurled itself at me, a dark shape exploding from a dark corner so that instinctively I threw up my arms to protect myself. The next minute I was flat on my back in the dirt and a shaggy, smelly creature was half on top of me, alternately whining and licking me.

‘Rikki!’ I said, trying to sit up. I put my arms around his warm familiar shape. Unaccountably I found myself crying into his shoulder. His rough tongue set to work again.

‘Good lad,’ I said, managing at last to lift myself part way off the ground.

I ran my hands over his sides and back. His fur was matted and beneath it he was thinner than I remembered. I could feel the knobs of his backbone.

‘Rikki! Why are you so thin?’

His only response was to sit on my feet and pant lovingly into my face. He was still wearing his collar, but otherwise, as far as I could judge in the growing dusk, he was in poor shape.

‘Has Joan been ill-treating you?’ I frowned. Joan had been annoyed when I had brought the dog back from the
Low Countries and tried to throw him out into the street, but my father and I had always insisted that she must treat him with kindness.

‘Come on, lad.’ I managed to heave him off my feet and scramble up. ‘We both need a good meal and a wash. And I can see that I’ll have to spend hours combing the tangles from your fur.’

He leaned against my leg and pressed a wet nose into my palm. I rubbed my damp face with my ragged sleeve. My heart ached with the joy of seeing him again, the dog who had followed me halfway across the Low Countries from love and loyalty, at a time when I had barely known him. I owed my life to him.

We started up the lane together. Outside our house, a woman I had never seen before was sweeping the front step and scolding a boy of five or six back indoors. She was lit from behind by the light from the doorway, and I could see clearly that it was not Joan. Had my father taken on a new servant? But the woman looked too well dressed to be a servant. I approached her cautiously, for the past months had taught me to be even more distrustful of strangers than I had been before.

‘Is Dr Alvarez at home?’ I asked her.

The woman stopped her sweeping and stared at me. Then she leaned on her broom and frowned. ‘Are you his son? We were told his son had sailed on the
Portugal venture.’

‘Aye,’ I said cautiously. Something was wrong.

‘I am his son, Christoval Alvarez.’ I frowned at her, suddenly full of mistrust. There was no Inquisition here. Surely my father was safe in London. Why was he not coming out to greet me?

‘Where is he?’ I demanded harshly. ‘Where is Dr Alvarez?’

‘You had better come inside,’ she said.

More by This Author

The Anniversary

The Travellers

A Running Tide

The Testament of Mariam

Flood

The Secret World of Christoval Alvarez

The
Enterprise of England

Praise for Ann Swinfen’s Novels

‘an absorbing and intricate tapestry of family history and private memories … warm, generous, healing and hopeful’

Victoria Glendinning

‘I very much admired the pace of the story. The changes of place and time and the echoes and repetitions – things lost and found, and meetings and partings’

Penelope Fitzgerald

‘I enjoyed this serious, scrupulous novel … a novel of character … [and] a suspense story in which present and past mysteries are gradually explained’

Jessica Mann
,
Sunday Telegraph

'The author … has written a powerful new tale of passion and heartbreak ... What a marvellous storyteller Ann Swinfen is – she has a wonderful ear for dialogue and she brings her characters vividly to life.'

Publishing News

‘Her writing …[paints] an amazingly detailed and vibrant picture of flesh and blood human beings, not only the symbols many of them have become…but real and believable and understandable.’

Helen Brown
,
Courier and Advertiser

‘She writes with passion and the book, her fourth, is shot through with brilliant description and scholarship...[it] is a timely reminder of the harsh realities, and the daily humiliations, of the Roman occupation of First Century Israel. You can almost smell the dust and blood.’

Peter
Rhodes
,
Express and Star

The Author

Ann Swinfen spent her childhood partly in
England and partly on the east coast of America. She was educated at Somerville College, Oxford, where she read Classics and Mathematics and married a fellow undergraduate, the historian David Swinfen. While bringing up their five children and studying for a postgraduate MSc in Mathematics and a BA and PhD in English Literature, she had a variety of jobs, including university lecturer, translator, freelance journalist and software designer. She served for nine years on the governing council of the Open University and for five years worked as a manager and editor in the technical author division of an international computer company, but gave up her full-time job to concentrate on her writing, while continuing part-time university teaching. In 1995 she founded Dundee Book Events, a voluntary organisation promoting books and authors to the general public.

Her first three novels,
The Anniversary
,
The Travellers
, and
A Running Tide
, all with a contemporary setting but also an historical resonance, were published by Random House, with translations into Dutch and German.
The Testament of Mariam
marks something of a departure. Set in the first century, it recounts, from an unusual perspective, one of the most famous and yet ambiguous stories in human history. At the same time it explores life under a foreign occupying force, in lands still torn by conflict to this day. Her second historical novel,
Flood
, is set in the fenlands of East Anglia during the seventeenth century, where the local people fought desperately to save their land from greedy and unscrupulous speculators.

Currently she is working on a late sixteenth century series, featuring a young Marrano physician who is recruited as a code-breaker and spy in Walsingham’s secret service. The first book in the series is
The Secret World of Christoval Alvarez
, the second is
The Enterprise of England
and the third is
The Portuguese Affair.

She now lives in Broughty Ferry, on the northeast coast of Scotland, with her husband, formerly vice-principal of the University of Dundee, a cocker spaniel, and two Maine coon cats.

http://www.annswinfen.com