Admiral (28 page)

Diana looked puzzled when Aurelia told her this, and after a minute or two of thought said: “I didn’t realize! When we first met you, he seemed so decisive, so confident. Certainly it was obvious he knew nothing about dealing with the Dons, but he admitted that right away. Why, the way he captured the grain ship at Riohacha and dealt with General Heffer! Thomas was very impressed!”

“Oh, yes,” Aurelia said. “When finally he realized that he had left the old life behind him, he knew what to do. The raid on Santiago,” she said proudly, “I don’t think anyone could have led that better than Ned.”

“The whole thing – idea, plan, execution – was brilliant,” Diana agreed. “That’s why the buccaneers chose him as their leader. Thomas could never have done it. He’s popular but he hasn’t – one doesn’t feel… I can’t describe it. Ned is quiet but definite, like a pointing finger. By comparison, Thomas is a waving hand.”

Aurelia wished that Ned could have heard Diana’s comment. She had seen the pacing in the cabin, the hesitations, changes of mind, changes of plan – yes, and the black despair. She never knew whether he needed comfort, criticism or peace and quiet: she did not like to leave him alone in case he thought she was (briefly) deserting him, but there was never anything she could do by staying with him unless, as sometimes happened, he needed her for release and an hour’s oblivion. Yet, strangely enough, to Diana and Thomas, who knew him better than anyone else apart from herself, he seemed so certain and calm…

Perhaps that was leadership. The ability to lead, not necessarily the ability to plan. Certainly it was curious how others followed one man willingly while a second would have to depend on authority (the backing of enforced discipline, like an army general) to make anyone follow. Thomas, one of the most charming, thoughtful, kindly, intelligent and amusing men she had ever met, a man who inspired confidence and could soothe two people having a bitter argument so that both thought him their friend, was not a leader: the buccaneers had never thought of that when they offered him the job – which Thomas had refused.

Yet they had certainly wanted Ned. Just because of his success at Santiago? No, although obviously that had a good deal to do with it – these men were only interested in purchase: they had no country to which they owed loyalty. Yet they had wanted first to meet Ned, although men like Leclerc, Gottlieb, Coles and Brace already knew him and had become rich because of Santiago. Then, after meeting him, the rest of the buccaneers had agreed that Ned was to be their new admiral.

Leadership… It was a strange thing. Compared with Thomas, Ned was remote from these men: Thomas slapped them on the back, tossed back rumbullion like water, laughed and joked earthily with them. Ned could not slap a man on the back to save his life, had a ready sense of humour but laughed at different things than these men, and preferred wine to rumbullion. Standing in a group of buccaneer captains he looked – well, like an aristocrat among poachers. Yet the captains talked freely with him, although always with a polite “mister”. There was a slight remoteness which happened quite naturally. Was this one of the signs that indicated leadership? Not leadership itself, of course, because she wondered if anyone could really explain what that was. Easy enough, God knows, to point to a man that has it and dismiss another man who lacks it; but what was that curious “it”?

“Ned said six o’clock Wednesday morning. The day after tomorrow,” Diana commented. “It gets light about five-thirty.”

“Yes, he is giving us half an hour’s daylight to weigh our anchors and then get under way. He didn’t want me to run into the Isla Largo Remo!”

“You’ll be leading the fleet, so be careful!” Diana said. “I wish we had an artist with us so that he could paint it. No,” she said as Aurelia blushed, uncertain how the Englishwoman meant the remark. “I’m serious. Not so many months ago you were living with that drunken husband of yours on the plantation at Barbados, and the most exciting event of the week was if Ned paid you a visit. Did Wilson really beat you badly?”

“Yes, but he was usually so drunk I don’t think he realized his own strength.”

“Don’t defend the devil!” Diana exclaimed. “He’s dead now and he was a scoundrel. Any man who beats his wife so that she is a mass of bruises is a villain. Even once. But I understand he did it two or three times a week.”

“He was a very unhappy man. He had many disappoint-ments.” Aurelia was half annoyed to find herself feeling she had to defend him. Did she do it because she felt any criticism of him was in fact criticism of her for having married him?

“Most men have disappointments without it making them beat their wives,” Diana said sharply. “Stop defending him. He only wanted your money. You never loved him, did you?”

Aurelia shook her head and Diana went on relentlessly: “I suspect he was regularly unfaithful to you. Didn’t he have a black mistress?”

“All that was my fault,” she said. “I did not attract him. It drove him – to do strange things. He would never have done them if I had been able to rouse him.”

“Rubbish,” Diana said firmly, “he had no manhood. The fact you were his wife was a coincidence. It would have happened with any woman.”

“Let’s talk of happier things,” Aurelia said. “All that’s over now: a bad dream I can barely remember. I can’t remember it at all without a lot of effort.”

Diana nodded. “That’s good. Barely remembered bad memories are useful sometimes just to measure present happiness.”

“Do you think they’re all right?” Aurelia said suddenly, her mind switching back to the expedition. “I have a feeling now and again that things are going wrong.”

“They probably are,” Diana said cheerfully, “but don’t worry. Santiago was unusual – everything went according to plan. Thomas was getting quite gloomy near the end: things were going so well he thought a ship was bound to blow up accidentally, or something equally dreadful!”

Secco cursed softly, trying to get the most satisfaction from the fewest words and the minimum outlay of breath, because his lungs were straining. Lungs, he thought: if it was only the lungs, but it is the muscles along the front and back of the shins, and the great muscles of the thighs. And the kneecaps felt loose. His head, too, had a nasty dizziness and the warning behind his eyes that a headache was coming. His neck ached where it joined his shoulders. His heart was pumping; he was sure he had strained it.

He looked at the other two men. One was unusually pallid and the other redder in the face than usual. Well, climbing mountains took people in different ways, and for several weeks the three of them had had little more exercise than pacing the deck.

One of the men, Sanchez, slowed down for a moment and at once Secco snarled: “Don’t say it! There’s nothing beyond this next ridge except more ridges, each higher than the last. We’re going to Heaven and we’re having to climb all the way!”

“I wasn’t going to say that!” Sanchez said sulkily, and was clearly not going to speak any more.

Secco paused to look down from the ridge, noting that in two or three minutes the red disc of the sun would be coming up clear of the distant mountains, though there would be no real warmth in it for another half an hour.

They had climbed up from the river bank after the long row from the ships, and as he looked westward, across the harbour entrance, there was just sea stretching for twenty, two hundred or perhaps even two thousand miles.

Below him, Portobelo harbour was a long rectangle cut into the rock. As he turned northwards towards the opposite shore, the entrance was on his left, a mile wide from one headland to another. The little town of Portobelo was huddled down there on his right, nestling – no, it looked as though it had been dumped there – at the inland end of the anchorage.

Only the anchorage itself had anything of a regular shape. Built into the high cliffs on the far side of the entrance was one fort, San Felipe de Todo Fierro, the one the English called the Iron Fort and which covered the approach like a sentry standing in his box.

Then gradually the far side of the anchorage sloped down as it came inland: rough rocks, bare hills, the kind of land that everyone left to the goats. At the inner end and on the same side as Todo Fierro was a castle. That must be the Castillo de San Fernando, which was opposite the town.

From San Fernando to the town, the narrow side of the box, and opposite the entrance, the land was flat, and although it was hard to tell in this light and from this height, it looked swampy. Mosquitoes could swarm up from there and fly to the town for victims…

Halfway between Fernando and Portobelo town, with its gates opening on to the swamp, was yet another fortification, by far the biggest. That must be the Castillo de San Gerónimo. Certainly its guns covered the whole length of the anchorage and the town, but what a terrible place to have to serve in: the hills nearby and the distant mountains shut off the cooling Trade winds from the east and the swamp must stink, apart from the insects.

San Gerónimo… That’s the one. As he looked down on the harsh grey outline of its walls he could not suppress a shiver. A stone box at the water’s edge. A wide jetty stuck out into the sea from the castle walls, and he could distinguish a doorway. Perhaps boats from the plate fleet loaded there, covered by the great guns and the muskets up on the battlements.

There was a
galita
– he did not know the English name, he realized – built on every corner of San Gerónimo. Standing in one of those stone cylinders built into each corner, a sentry could look each way through the slits of the gun loops and see outside the castle walls which he overhung by the diameter of the
galita
. Secco sniffed and dismissed them as ornaments: sentries would squat on the floor and sleep, out of sight of the sergeant of the guard.

Between San Gerónimo and Portobelo town there was a smaller fort, which must be Triana, probably built long before the others. In fact, he guessed that it was originally Portobelo’s only defence, the others being added much later.

Town! He could see that Portobelo was really just a large village – it was reckoned that only four hundred people lived there now, with a garrison of a thousand or more for the forts, although most of the troops were supposed to have been shipped off to Jamaica.

Looking down on the port he did not envy the Spanish plate ships: the whole of the southern shore was pocked with coral reefs, right up to the town. The main jetty seemed to be the one in front of San Gerónimo. The hills on which he was standing swept down in rolling terraces of rock like the soft folds in a woman’s skirt to meet the southern side of the town, which was in a valley merging into the swamps to the east, while the opposite side (deserted apart from San Fernando at the inland end and the Iron Fort to seaward) was steep too, the whole side being, as far as he could make out, a peninsula or island sticking out of the swamps as if to make a temporary side to the port.

Uninviting, ugly, swampy, humid…and even from up here he could smell the mud, liberally perfumed with the town’s sewage. What it must have been like fifty or a hundred years ago… Secco let his mind wander. Forty or fifty ships would be anchored down in the harbour. Not the great galleons – it was too shallow for them and they stayed in Cartagena. But the smaller ships would be plying back and forth, bringing in cargo taken from the galleons at Cartagena. Then they would start ferrying the plate to Cartagena, taking it on board here at Portobelo, probably from that jetty, straight from the mules and donkeys of the plate trains arriving from Panama.

That jetty over there in front of San Gerónimo would be piled high. All round the town, wherever there was flat space, the Panama merchants would have set up tents. It was said they came to Portobelo over the mountains (along the very track they were rying to find) by the score. Tall or short, fat or thin, they would sit astride donkeys or mules, sore and perspiring, hurrying from Panama to Portobelo the moment they heard the fleet was due, all ready to buy or sell.

They would be selling bales of leather and leather goods, tobacco, and probably some illicit gold, silver and gems, and they would be buying – well, everything! The merchants had customers stretching from Panama to the most southerly Spanish settlement along the Pacific coast… Almost down to Tierra del Fuego, in fact, and that was the end of the world, although why it was called the land of fire he did not know. Clothes by the bale – ranging from boots and hats for men to drawers and lace for the women by way of pots and pans for the kitchens, needles and thread for the sewing rooms, saws, hammers, and nails for the carpenters’ workshops. Everything, in fact, that men and women needed for living, except leather goods. Oh yes, sporting guns, muskets, powder and shot for sportsmen and soldiers. And ink, pen and paper for bureaucrats and dutiful folk to write to their relations in Spain. And decorated floor and wall tiles from Andalusia and Granada for my lady’s rooms…pretty materials for curtains…hinges and catches for the shutters…hoes, rakes, forks and spades for the gardeners…buckets, bottles, jugs. Wine and oil, because olive trees did not grow over here, nor grapes.

Being a merchant in Panama, Secco thought, must be like being a licensed buccaneer: once you had bought your stock from the ships in Portobelo, or taken delivery of goods ordered last year, you carried it over the mountains to Panama, where you put it in your warehouse. If you were a clever man (and could afford to) you left it there for a few months or even a year, until the other merchants had sold all their stock. Then, with mounting demand from every town south of Panama, you could name your own prices. For Guayaquil? A fifty per cent surcharge! For Lima? Why, at least eighty-five! Arica? Goodness me, a hundred! Antofagasta – ah, so far: two hundred per cent. Coquimbo and Valparaiso? Add yet another fifty, my dear sir, and if you talk of shipping goods to such remote places as Valdivia then three hundred per cent, and all of you pay an extra fifty if you argue!

Secco felt better for the rest and glanced at Sanchez and Ramirez, the third man, who mercifully was a cheerful fellow. “Come on, then, let’s go.”