Admiral (41 page)

By now the first of Jensen’s boats was making the turn to come alongside, and Ned realized that the coxswain had been very clever: the ships, lying head to wind, also had their bows pointing at the jetty, and the boats were approaching by steering straight at the bows, waiting until the last moment to choose which side to board.

The first boat’s coxswain must have seen that the musketeers were lined up along the starboard side, and at the last moment he steered his boat to come alongside to larboard. Spanish seamen, obviously roused from various parts of the ship, paused to grab cutlasses or pikes before running to meet them.

Ned was puzzled by the way the Spanish musketeers, the heavy guns lodged in the rests, were obviously waiting for something. At least one more buccaneer boat was now almost alongside, making a good target at an easy range. Several of the Spanish musketeers were looking nervously over their shoulders, and suddenly he saw two men running towards them from forward, their arms outstretched, and looking as though they were carrying handfuls of long, thin snakes.

“Those two men running?” Thomas asked. “What’s happening?”

“They’re about to issue slow-match to the musketeers,” Ned said, hardly able to believe his eyes. “Must have been lighting it at the galley fire. The ship came in without any match alight.”

“Shows they believed everything they saw – white flags, our men dressed in their armour…”

“What about the lid of San Gerónimo?” Diana asked.

“Must have thought it blew up by accident.” Thomas said. “It’s probably the sort of thing they expect to happen.”

“There they go,” Ned said, watching the first buccaneer boat get alongside the commander’s ship. In a moment men seemed to erupt from the boat and go up the ship’s side like a cloud of smoke, cutlasses glinting in the sunlight.

He saw the Spanish seamen standing uncertainly at the bulwarks, and then suddenly they bolted. A moment later Ned saw why – the musketeers on the starboard side had turned right round, to face across the ship, and having completed looping the slow-match into the serpentines of their guns, were now rearranging the rests.

Whoever had given them that order, and shouted to the seamen on the larboard side to get out of the line of fire, must also be on the larboard side and have seen only the first boatload of buccaneers nearest him, because the musketeers in obeying orders had turned their backs on the boatload of buccaneers who would be alongside in a few moments.

The first few buccaneers reached the top of the bulwarks and were just starting to scramble over when all the muskets fired at once. Ned saw four or five tumble backwards. A moment later the rest of the buccaneers were swarming over the bulwarks and, with their cutlasses swinging, heading across the deck for the line of musketeers. Some of the Spaniards pushed away their muskets, which pivoted over on the rests and crashed to the deck, their owners tugging at swords. But as the majority of the musketeers retreated they were attacked by buccaneers just boarding from the next boat.

Ned swung the perspective to the next ship. Buccaneer boats were already alongside her, and the deck looked like a suddenly-disturbed termites’ nest, with fifty or sixty buccaneers hacking away at a group of about the same number of Spaniards, half of whom wore the uniform of the Spanish army.

Why so few soldiers? Five ships with – he confirmed it by a quick look at the rest – between a fifty and a hundred soldiers on board each, a total of perhaps five hundred. Where were the rest of the Portobelo garrison and the levies who had set out to recapture Jamaica?

Perhaps they were still there. As prisoners? Or had they succeeded in recapturing the island, and these five ships were simply bringing back a few men because the Viceroy realized the Portobelo garrison was very much under strength?

The dozen boats, having ferried out buccaneers, were now going on to the buccaneer ships to pick up the men who had worn armour to fool the Spaniards. By now they would have taken off the breast and back plates and helmets and armed themselves with cutlasses ready to reinforce the men already fighting.

Ned kicked a tuft of grass growing between the two stones on which he was standing, then saw Aurelia watching him anxiously.

“You couldn’t have done anything, with that arm broken,” she said.

“The newly elected admiral was standing safely on top of a captured fort while his men stormed five enemy ships,” he said bitterly. “That’ll sound fine back in Jamaica – if we haven’t lost it.”

A booming laugh startled him. “Dear old Ned,” Thomas said, “only you could have said that. We took all the forts in Portobelo – using your plans. We found all the bullion – just where you expected it to be. Then, following your orders, we blew up San Gerónimo and then captured – I don’t think there’s much doubt about that, they’ll have done the job in the next fifteen minutes – five Spanish ships which could have trapped us all. Is Ned cheerful? Oh no, Ned’s weeping in his pot of ale, feeling sorry for himself because he was hoisted by his own petard, or hit by one of his own bricks, if you prefer it. Ah,” Thomas suddenly exclaimed, “I see what your little game is – you want compliments from us! And what about
me
: I’m only the admiral’s second-in-command, but he wouldn’t let me lead the attack on the Spanish ships. ‘Oh, no,’ he said, ‘you’re too valuable. You take command if anything happens to me.’ He doesn’t specify what is likely to happen to him standing on top of his fort, but what will the buccaneers think when they hear that the noble and brave Sir Thomas watched them cut, thrust and parry – but through a perspective?”

“Thomas is right,” said Diana, “so stop feeing sorry for yourself. And I see the first Spanish ship has been captured: they’re lowering the colours. If you want my opinion – and you shall have it anyway – the buccaneers see the whole thing quite differently.”

“They don’t want a husky great brute of a man with a voice like a bull leading them into battle waving a two-handed sword; they’ve all been in action a dozen, a score and some no doubt a gross of times. I suppose what I mean is, they know they don’t have the brains and ability to plan a raid like this and, if things go wrong, produce new alternative plans that succeed.

“No, my dear Ned, I’ll tell you what they’ll do. They’ll count up the purchase, which will be more than they ever dreamed of in their wildest moments of greed and venery, divide it by the number of buccaneers, and try to hurry you back to Port Royal, that being the nearest place offering wine, hot liquors and women. And they’ll count up their casualties and marvel. And you, my dear Ned, will be their hero.

“Within a few hours of them getting to windward of a bottle or a tankard you’ll be the greatest admiral that ever put to sea: by comparison, Drake will be a capon: the defeat of Medina Sidonia and the Spanish Armada a mere fracas. Quite apart from that, Ned, you and Aurelia are rich now – or you will be very soon. Thomas and me, too. Our new and noble King’s fifth will make him a very nice Restoration present. Cheer up Ned, we love you.”

Ned found it curious how Diana swayed and the horizon began moving like a seesaw. The anchorage was expanding and contracting, as though someone was turning a rectangle of blue wood so that one minute it was flat, the next on edge. It was so hot, yet he felt cold: his breathing seemed shallow, his knees trembled and his arm seemed to contain all the pain in the world, but he managed to hold the sling away from his body when the ground moved from under his feet and hit him in the face.

He recovered consciousness to find himself with his head cradled in Aurelia’s arms. As soon as she was sure he knew what was happening round him, she said: “All the Spanish ships have surrendered,
cheri
.”

“Tell Saxby to arrange prize crews. Thomas had better finish in Portobelo town.”

“That has all been arranged,” Aurelia said, moving so that her breasts lightly touched his cheek, “and Saxby is sending the Spanish commander to see you.”

Ned groaned and tried to organize his thoughts while Aurelia shaded his face from the sun. “I’m so proud of you,” she whispered. “Will that arm prevent you… I mean, will we… The pain?”

The commander was Don José Arias Ximenez, who was also the mayor of Portobelo, and he had been acting, he told Ned petulantly, under the orders of the Viceroy of the Province of Panama, Don Juan Perez de Guzman.

The commanding officer’s quarters in Triana were cool and well furnished. Ned sat back comfortably in a reclining chair that was almost a hammock of interwoven soft leather straps. Aurelia sat on a stool by his head while Thomas, holding a cutlass, stood behind Arias, who was perched on the edge of an upright wooden chair. Secco, a wheel-lock pistol in his belt and holding a heavily jewelled ceremonial sword in his right hand (one which he had obviously just confiscated from its original owner, and the jewels of which he examined from time to time), sat between Arias and Ned and translated, although Ned found he could understand Arias without much effort.

“What happened in Jamaica?” Ned asked.

Arias gave an expressive shrug. “It was madness from the start.”

“What happened?” Ned repeated.

“The Viceroy’s orders. ‘Liberate Jamaica’, he said. Madness.”

“Start at the beginning,” Ned said patiently. “You say you are the mayor of Portobelo. Very well, one day you are here in Portobelo when a messenger arrives from Panama with orders from the Viceroy…”

Arias sighed, as if the memory wounded him deeply. He was, Ned considered, an improbable man to lead an expedition to recapture an island the size of Jamaica, but typical of the mayor of a town like Portobelo.

His black hair, sallow skin, thin and pointed face, protruding teeth and bulging eyes under a sloping forehead gave him the appearance of a startled piebald rabbit. The moustache was thin and sagged as though it was a weather-vane indicating the man’s mood. The eyes were the man’s most revealing characteristic: they were never still and apparently never looked above shoulder height. They jerked from one wall of the room to another; Arias inspected Ned from the waist down in a series of darting glances and then transferred his attention to Aurelia who, wearing her divided skirt, her skin a golden brown, was obviously a kind of woman he had never seen before.

Arias noticed that she and the other woman, the brown-haired one, spoke out just like men, commenting and suggesting, and the men listened. But this man with the splinted and bandaged arm was most persistent, and that renegade Spaniard doing the translating was getting impatient, so he had better answer fully.

“I am sitting here in my office in the town hall attending to important matters. I have to see the Intendant over some tax questions. Suddenly this lieutenant arrives, dusty and very insolent, saying he has just ridden from Panama with urgent orders from the Viceroy, and five hundred levies will be arriving in two days from Panama, Venta de Cruz and various other towns. With that he tosses a letter on to my desk and demands
comfortable
accommodation suitable for an aide to the Viceroy.

“I was very angry at his manner,” Arias said, and added, a look of extreme craftiness settling on his face: “But I decided to say nothing until I had read the letter.

“It was from the Viceroy. It listed all my titles.”

“What did it say?” Secco prompted because it seemed that Arias regarded the fact that the Viceroy listed all his titles as the climax of his narrative.

“Ah, the Viceroy was giving me the commission of a major, and this aide was a mere lieutenant, so I told him to get out of my office and find himself a bed in one of the brothels, or sleep under a table in a
taberna
.”

“Where
did
he go?” Ned asked, curious about the way Arias was fiddling with his moustaches.

The man flashed, his face becoming an angry purple, his eyes looking as though they might pop from their sockets. “He knew my wife,” he said. “I don’t know where he went. I had too much responsibility now to be bothered with him.”

“The Viceroy’s orders?” Secco prompted.

“Ah yes. He put me in command of the whole garrison of Portobelo, one thousand men.
And
the five hundred levies when they arrived.
And
two thirds of the garrison of Old Providence.”

“To do what?” Secco asked sarcastically.

“Why, to recapture Jamaica, of course.”

“How were you to get there?” Ned asked.

“I was given authority to requisition as many ships as I needed. There were three in Portobelo, unloading grain, and two more came in from Cartagena next day to load hides. I requisitioned them all in the name of the Viceroy.”

“And they’re the five ships anchored down there now?”

Arias nodded, and to save time Ned said: “You embarked the Portobelo garrison and the levies, sailed for Old Providence to collect the rest of the men, and then went to Jamaica.”

“No,” said Arias triumphantly. “First I loaded the ships with provisions, and powder and shot.”

“Good for you,” said Ned ironically, “that was thoughtful planning.”

“One must,” Arias said seriously. “It took four days to unload the rest of the grain.”

“Why did you not just dump it over the side?”

“Dump it?” Arias could hardly believe his ears. “But it was
my
grain. The shipments were consigned to me.”

“I quite understand. There was no need for haste.”

“None at all,” Arias agreed, realizing that this Englishman with the bandaged arm was more understanding than he had seemed at first.

There was a pause, interrupted by Secco. “You’ve provisioned the ships, have the troops on board, and arrive at Jamaica. What then?”

“I order the troops to land.”

“Where?”

“On the north coast.”

“Then what happened?”

“Again I ordered the troops to land.”

“Then?”

“Well, they were not enthusiastic. But the Portobelo garrison landed after I made certain suggestions.”

“Such as?” Ned asked, intrigued by the tone of the man’s voice.

“Well, I pointed out that their wives and families were still in Portobelo and that if the men did not carry out the duties of soldiers, then the families could not live in soldiers’ families’ quarters. I reminded them they had sworn loyalty to the king. Those kind of things.” He dismissed the problem with a wave of the hand, as though such threats were routine.