Admiral (15 page)

“We’ll meet
that
emergency when it arises,” Slinger said contemptuously.

Ned stared questioningly at Heffer, who, although careful to keep his hands on the table, shrugged his shoulders and said apologetically. “He doesn’t know. There were only half a dozen of them I could trust and he wasn’t one of them.”

“What don’t I know? Tell me at once!” Slinger demanded in his shrill voice.

Ned said quickly, before Heffer could speak: “If the general didn’t trust you before, obviously he doesn’t trust you now, so he’d be silly – and so would we –” he added icily, “to tell you.”

“We’ll see about that!” Slinger exclaimed, and gestured to Rowlands. “Come with me. You –” he pointed to one of the officers “–go and inform the other colonels that I have assumed all powers. You other two will guard these men. I shall lock the door from outside and within the hour three companies of my men will be guarding this house.”

“Only
three
companies?” Thomas protested. “You insult all three of us!”

Slinger looked uncertain and then suddenly left the room, followed by Rowlands, who pulled the door closed after him. There was some whispering, and then they heard the key being turned.

Ned looked at Heffer. “You are a fool, you know,” he said conversationally. “You ought to enter politics, because you can’t distinguish your friends from your enemies; by trying to be popular you end up trusting the wrong people.”

“Yes,” Heffer said miserably, “I know. My mother and my wife say the same thing.”

Thomas looked round at the guards and found himself staring into the bore of a pistol. “That flint is chipped,” he commented. “It’ll give a poor spark.”

The officer grinned and nudged the other soldier. “Yes, if Lieutenant Foot will pick up the other pistol and replace the priming powder, we shall have a reliable gun.”

While the other officer picked up the pistol and began shaking out powder from a small horn powder flask, Ned sighed: “I’m tired, Thomas. I presume these gentlemen have no objection to us sitting down.” Without waiting for a reply he sat at the table opposite Heffer, who seemed to have aged ten years in ten minutes. There was no chance of talking to him confidentially, so Ned said lightly: “Can we expect dozens of loyal battalions to come thundering across the Palisades to rescue us, or are they likely to listen to this jumped-up apothecary, Slinger?”

“Apothecary?” Heffer said. “He’s not an –”

“No, he just looks like one. I was insulting him,” Ned explained patiently, noting how difficult it was to make jokes when talking to a humourless man. “Be patient with me and answer my question.”

“Well no, I don’t think so,” Heffer said miserably.

“Please, General Heffer, ‘yes’ or ‘no’ does not answer the question…”

Heffer shook his head as though starting a clock ticking. “I am not relying on being rescued by loyal battalions,” he said. “The loyal battalions are the ones furthest from here – I decided I could risk only certain commanding officers at places like Runaway Bay. The doubtful ones I kept close to Cagway.”

Thomas sniffed disparagingly. “Now you know better than nursing vipers to your bosom. You should have had the loyal battalions close round you; then it doesn’t matter what the devil the distant ones do.”

“Yes, I see that now,” Heffer said ruefully. “I’m afraid all the battalions within fifty miles will obey Slinger. Can we expect any help from the buccaneers?”

Ned looked at Heffer disbelievingly. The man really was a fool. In front of two mutinous officers who were guarding him, he could ask questions about rescue…

“To start with, we didn’t come on shore until about five o’clock, which means that no one will expect us back until at least midnight. No,” Ned shook his head regretfully, noting that the officers were listening carefully while pretending to be doing other things, like adjusting a sword belt, “probably not until morning because the women won’t wait up for us. It’ll be dark in half an hour…they’ll be going to bed soon.”

“What about the crew of your boat?”

“They’ll be in some tavern and drunk by now. They won’t start worrying until they wake up in the morning, when the mosquitoes and sandflies start to eat them.”

Thomas was quick to realize what Ned was trying to do. “By the time we’re missed it’ll be noon tomorrow. The buccaneers will question the boat’s crew, who’ll know nothing, and then they’ll come here, looking for us in this office. By then, I suppose, Slinger will have taken us away somewhere…”

One of the officers laughed, delighted at the idea that such a famous Royalist could be so miserable. “Yes, you’ll be a long way away by then, “he said. “Up in the mountains among the clouds. Cold and wet.” He gave a brutal laugh. “Yellow fever up there; you’ll see the graves. Spanish, some of them; they soon learned that this is an island for dying.”

Within half an hour it was almost dark, and one of the officers went to fetch candles. It took him ten minutes with his tinder box, cursing and gently blowing the tinder, to produce enough flame to light the crude rush candles, and then he set them down on the table, jamming them into three empty bottles he had found outside.

The dim light did not encourage talking, and Ned tried to remember which six men had rowed the
Griffin
’s boat. Yes, they were sensible men. What would they do when their captain and Sir Thomas did not arrive back at the jetty?

Probably one of them would walk over to this house, quietly, and ask the sentry, what was delaying his master. Either there would be no sentry, or he would get an unsatisfactory answer. Or he would be made a prisoner. Certainly within fifteen minutes the rest of the boat’s crew would be suspicious: they would come over to the house – and one glance through the window would be enough to warn them.

Ned suddenly felt a twinge of doubt. Supposing the boat’s crew had already been made prisoner? He then decided it was unlikely that Slinger would think of it: he was in a whirling fury of rage, excitement and righteousness when he left the house and, being a soldier, he would not associate buccaneers on land with boats – any more, Ned admitted, than buccaneers would necessarily associate a band of soldiers with horses.

Well, without risking a pistol ball in the gizzard or a slash from one of the heavy swords, there was nothing to do but wait for an opportunity. These two officers were conscientious: there was no chance of them dozing off or getting drunk…though a chance remark told him that they were getting hungry.

One of them had a watch which he opened and held the face towards the nearest candle. “Nearly nine o’clock. If the colonel remembered, they should be along with some supper in a few minutes.”

Ned caught Thomas’ eye and casually looked round the room. Heffer had the table in the centre so that the door was on his right, and thus on the left of Ned and Thomas sitting opposite him. The guards were behind, between the table and the window, the two of them making do with one chair and taking it in turns to sit down. The only light came from the three candles stuck in bottles on the table. He had been listening ever since Slinger and Rowlands left, and there was no hint of anyone in the ante-room, which opened on to a large hall and led to the front door.

He attracted Thomas’ attention again and with his eyes tried to indicate his plan. Finally Thomas rubbed his nose and gave an uncharacteristic belch.

When it happened it took Ned unawares: he had not realized how thick was the door and what a good fit the Spanish carpenters had made so many years ago. The key grated in the lock and first Rowlands, carrying a lantern, and then Slinger came into the room. Rowlands, obviously put out that both Ned and Thomas completely ignored him, almost flounced, making the heels of his boots thud on the stone floor and, Ned noted, passing right across the room. Slinger stopped a couple of paces inside the door and looked questioningly at one of the guards.

“Everything in order, sir; the prisoners have been quiet.”

“Very well. A couple of men are coming with your supper. Nothing elaborate.” Ned saw a faint glow of light through the door. He could picture a soldier carrying a saucepan or bucket in one hand and a lantern in the other. The second man – bearing in mind that only two soldiers were carrying food for six people – must be laden with pots and pans.

Slinger said to Ned: “I hope you have been having second thoughts. You must have realized you are a long way from London. By now the Commonwealth will be re-established and the King either executed or forced to flee back to France.”

“The Netherlands, I believe.”

“The Netherlands?”

“Yes, General Monck brought him back from the Netherlands, I’m told.”

“Oh, the Netherlands, eh?” Slinger muttered, completely confused by Ned’s remark. “Well, I expect they’ll have him back.”

Ned then heard footsteps which were slowing up as they neared the door, then he saw the glow of a lantern, and pictured a nervous soldier slowing down, perhaps intending to poke his head round the door jamb and ask where to place the food.

He leapt up and flung over the table in the same moment, sending the candles flying, and ran the few steps to the door. In the same motion he thrust Slinger in front of him so that the little colonel bounced off the startled soldier, who dropped the lantern and saucepan with a loud clatter.

With only Rowlands’ lantern left alight, the ante-room was in almost total darkness, and Ned tried to guess where the front door was, somewhere on the far side of the hall. He heard an oath, a crash and a whimper of pain and the single lantern went out: Thomas had obviously flung Rowlands to one side and with a triumphant bellow of “Make way for Whetstone, you mumbling yokels!” crashed through the ante-room and hall after Ned, hurling aside furniture and somehow staying on his feet.

“Gallows Point! Make for Gallows Point,” Ned hissed as they flung open the front door and plunged down the three wide steps.

“What about the boat?”

“If they haven’t seized it yet, it’ll be the first thing they’ll make for now!”

As the two men ran along the track over the dunes towards the battery which Heffer had shown them only a few days earlier, Thomas said: “What’s the attraction of Gallows Point?”

“Last place they’ll look for us!”

“They’ll find us – blast, nearly broke my ankle in a land crab hole – at daylight!”

“We’ll see,” Ned said. “Save your breath for running.”

Behind them they heard the crack of a pistol, followed by a second shot.

“Aimed away from us,” Thomas said. “Firing towards the jetty. You were right, they think we’re making for the boat.”

The sea on their left reflected the stars, but the moon, in its last quarter, would not rise for several hours. They reached the battery, and once past it the track narrowed down to an almost indistinguishable path as it went on towards the end of the sand-spit.

“We can walk now,” Ned said, slowing down. “Less risk of twisting an ankle.”

“We’re just about abreast the
Griffin
and
Peleus
. Want to risk swimming out to them?”

“No,” said Ned firmly. “I doubt if you’re good for half a mile. I know I’m not.”

“Sheer bravado,” Thomas admitted cheerfully. “With this paunch twenty yards would scuttle me.”

Now they were standing among knee-high shrubs, and Ned said: “I’m hoping we’ll find a fisherman’s canoe on the beach up here.”

Thomas held his arm so that the two men stopped.

“We’re safe enough now, Ned. Let’s sit here and think for a while. What about Teffler? Do you think this fellow Slinger will hold on as governor?”

“Heffer has three thousand men. Your guess is as good as mine about who picks Slinger and who picks Heffer. It boils down to a handful of colonels and two handsful of majors: the subalterns and the rest follow their commanding officers.”

“But what happens when the news reaches London?”

Ned shrugged his shoulders. “Slinger is clearly mad, and can’t accept that the King is restored permanently –”

“We don’t know that for sure, Ned!”

“We can make a good guess, though. Because General Monck and the army decided to bring the King back, and the navy sent a ship to fetch him, then the army and the navy are so involved that the Restoration must be a success. It
has
to work. The old monarchy was overthrown but the Commonwealth replacing it was obviously failing even before its leader, your benighted uncle, had died.”

“And the first real news the King will get from Jamaica is that a group of fanatical Roundheads have turned the island into a republic.”

“Exactly, and I suspect that Heffer has only just worked that out!”

“So what can we do?”

“Do with 1,250 buccaneers against perhaps three thousand soldiers? I don’t know. I can’t see the Brethren wanting to do anything: after all, the Restoration in England is no concern of theirs. They’re interested in Port Royal only as a base. I’m sure most of the French, Dutch, Portuguese and Spanish Brethren barely know the name of their own king!”

“Let’s be selfish, Ned. The Brethren have no brains and precious little organization. The Portobelo business will be a farce, unless we organize it for them and you lead. If we’re going to put purchase in their pockets, then in return they can give us a hand when need be.”

Ned was silent for a minute or two. “Better if they gave us a hand without realizing it.”

“How so, Ned?”

“Well, they’d cut throats by the dozen to rescue you and me – they’ll start as soon as they discover we are missing. But if we warned Slinger that we’d turn the Brethren loose on him…he doesn’t know how many men we have, and it looks an impressive fleet at anchor…and…” His voice tailed off and Thomas left him with his thoughts for three or four minutes.

“And…” Thomas prompted.

“I was thinking; Heffer warned Slinger that the Spaniards were coming, and Slinger brushed it aside. I suspect that by now Slinger has had second thoughts. I believe Slinger was one of the first to run away in that farcical attack on Santo Domingo, so he has a healthy respect for the Spanish soldiery!”

“How does all that help us ? If the buccaneers won’t budge to support us Royalists, and Slinger controls Jamaica for the Commonwealth – which no longer exists, except here in the person of Slinger – and Slinger chooses to ignore the Spanish threat, then I’m going to suggest the Brethren return to Tortuga.”