Betrayal (19 page)

It was irregular, if not downright illegal, but was within Popham’s power to carry out simply by forewarning
Justina
of dates and times ahead of any declaration. The pickings to be had would be princely, vastly outweighing any considerations of delay in reporting to Cape Town for orders.

He was rewarded with a quick intake of breath. ‘I understand you, Captain. We accept your offer.’ He rose, offering his hand. Kydd took it, suppressing a surge of elation.

The act was revealing: Maycock was not expecting anything written down that could later be used against either of them.

‘Be damned to it, an’ you can’t do that, mister!’ Hardiman snapped triumphantly. ‘
Justina
’s voyage insurance is t’ Cape Town only.’

Kydd hadn’t thought of this. It was no trivial point: the value of a well-found merchantman this size must amount to something like his annual salary for fifty years or more; even if the premium could be renegotiated it would certainly not cover an act of war.

Maycock looked at him pointedly and waited.

‘Very well. She’ll sail uninsured.’

Maycock kept a polite silence.

‘You’ll have my note of hand to say you’ll be reimbursed for her loss if the worst happens,’ Kydd said. There was no help for it. The risk was all his – the Navy would never agree to what he was proposing, and if the vessel was wrecked or captured, they would wash their hands of him.

He ignored Curzon’s look of appalled bewilderment and hoped his winning smile was convincing. ‘Excellent. We have an arrangement. An officer of the St Helena’s Infantry will be aboard directly to supervise your fitting for troop accommodation. Good day, gentlemen.’

The expedition sailed in two days with Kydd worried. Popham had approved of his move but had carefully ignored the mention of personal risk. The estuary of the River Plate was notorious for shoals and reefs, and when they sailed,
Justina
was not with them. She was still frantically being outfitted and stored and would follow when she could, easy prey to anything hostile, Spanish or French.

Popham had not felt able to deplete his main force to offer escort, and the thought of the vulnerable merchantman thrashing along alone in their wake was hard for Kydd to bear. Despite his nature he grew surly and snappish, swearing when Oakley’s bawling out of the afterguard on the open deck above broke into his dark thoughts.

The next land raised would be the enemy coast and the climax of the expedition, when they would be entirely alone and their best-laid dispositions would be tested to the full. Would they be good enough? Their knowledge of the viceroyalty was sketchy at best, the charts commercial ones of a previous age and by no means to the technical standard he was used to. Furthermore, details of the military deployments to be faced were based on rumour only.

When he and Popham had prepared the operation orders, he had been dismayed by the generalisations and assumptions they had been compelled to employ to cover for lack of intelligence. Before Blaauwberg they had been equipped by ships that had regularly touched at the Cape with vital knowledge of the terrain and enemy strongholds. Here the Spanish had kept away all but their own ships and smugglers, who were not about to make free with their information.

And with barely a quarter of the troops and a handful of guns. In the cold light of day it was beginning to seem more an ill-conceived impertinence than a decisive military assault. His disquiet about the entire conception and its implementation was growing.

L’Aurore
, with her relatively shallow draught, would no doubt be the one ordered to conduct an early reconnaissance and he felt the responsibility keenly. Poor charts and hostile waters were by no means unknown to the Navy – feats of seamanship were performed regularly by the heroes on blockade off the French coast with never a complaint. He recalled Captain Hurd, an officer, like himself, from before the mast. In a humble sloop in fearful conditions he had conducted a secret hydrographic survey of Brest under the very noses of the enemy.

He couldn’t let the Navy down. Besides which—

‘If I’m intruding, I’ll come back later, brother.’ He hadn’t noticed Renzi hovering.

‘No, no, m’ friend. You’ve every right.’

‘Well, I . . .’

Kydd looked up and saw that Renzi was carrying a sheaf of papers.

‘You’re sore pressed, I know, but you did say you’d take a look. Do give me your opinion of its worth – as a regular-going reader, in course. I’m now half done, you know.’

‘I did say that, but I have m’ worries, Nicholas, as are taking attention. It might not be a fair judgement, is all,’ he finished lamely.

Renzi’s face fell and Kydd held out his hand. ‘Let me have ’em and I’ll tell you when I’ve read through.’

‘Things aren’t going so well for you?’

‘Just your usual mullygrubs afore an action, nothing to worry on.’

He had not told Renzi about Pitt’s death and his increasing unease that they were sailing without Admiralty orders. By now the gunroom would be agog with the tale from Curzon of how their captain had cozened passage for the reinforcements and there would be considerable speculation as to why it had been necessary to go to such lengths.

Renzi hesitated, as though he was about to say something, then left quietly.

Kydd put down the sheaf of paper. Damn it all to blazes! This was the final act of what should be an historic occasion and it was turning into a nightmare. And if anything happened to
Justina
, most surely he’d be ruined financially – would he then be expected still to play his full part?

Mind full of worry, he picked up Renzi’s manuscript. Anything was better than being left alone with his thoughts. The paper was well used, crossings-out and tiny insertions everywhere, but in Renzi’s strong, educated hand it was easy to read. He focused on the first page, remembering with a sigh the awkward delivery the first time he had read it. He determined, however, to persevere for at least an hour.

Within minutes he was gripped. It was so
different
! The first scene was not the father’s study, it was the milking shed. And without any elaborate setting out, the action opened quickly with the hero, Jeremy, tiptoeing into the dark, playfully whispering for Jenny, the milkmaid, who finally emerged pouting from the shadows. It went on from there in startling detail until the closing act of the chapter when the doors were flung wide and they were discovered.

It was extraordinary! The flow was quite different as well – instead of a modest first-person telling it was now a confident invisible observer drily chronicling the vigorous adventurings of a young man learning about life. Kydd read on; the succeeding chapter in which Jeremy was rusticated to a country academy was unexpectedly pathetic and noble by turns, Renzi’s device of standing outside the character yet at the same time in intimate connection with thoughts and desires nothing short of masterly.

Kydd found himself a whisky, then settled back in anticipation. The passage of young Jeremy’s staunch defence of a younger in the face of bullying by a master had all the hallmarks of Renzi himself but his ultimate expulsion for whoring in town was not. Or was it? Just how much was this his friend and how much fiction?

‘Sir?’ It was the first lieutenant, leaning through the door.

‘Er, yes?’

‘The master-at-arms reports all lights out, an’ we’re full an’ bye on the larboard tack, course sou’-sou’-west, commodore in sight.’ Kydd realised that he’d not been up to take his accustomed turn about the upper deck before retiring, which must be puzzling the watch-on-deck.

‘Oh – er, thank you, Mr Gilbey,’ he said pleasantly, ‘and, um, goodnight to you.’

He turned back to the tale, spellbound.

The wasted years following, spent in idleness at the grand family estate under the eye of his noble and irascible father, were set out in unaffected detail; the growing emotional crisis resulting from their differences was temporarily resolved by his unexpected friendship with a certain other-worldly young man, a poet, whose wild and romantic leanings seemed to give so much point to existence.

The writing darkened, though, as it went on to describe how they set off together on a tour of the continent, vowing to live life to its fullest. The first scenes of debauchery and carnal excess were forthright and clear – Kydd could hardly believe what he was reading, still flowing as it did in the strong hand he knew so well.

Bemused, then astounded, Kydd read on until, with a pang, he realised that what he had of the manuscript had come to an end. He considered going to Renzi and waking him up, but of course he couldn’t. Instead he leaned back in admiration. Either this would be the wonder of the season or it would be howled off the streets for its wickedness.

He chortled, hearing the marine sentry outside the door stir uneasily.

Before a spanking north-east trade wind the little armada made good speed across the South Atlantic, the weather remaining kind if steadily dropping in temperature into the southern late autumn. The continental influence far to starboard was of a quite different quality from Africa at the same latitude. At five hundred miles off,
Leda
and
L’Aurore
were detached to range on ahead.

Kydd complied unhappily, for
Justina
had still not hauled into sight. His mind shied from the implication and took refuge in his duty, the satisfaction of shaking out sail and quitting the slow progress of the rest of the force.

They criss-crossed the sullen grey wastes for days without incident until they reached the parallel of the great estuary at which their instructions were to make rendezvous with
Narcissus
, sent on before to reconnoitre. Shaping course due west, the pair ran down the latitude of the River Plate until, astonishingly, even at seventy-five miles to seaward, discolouring of the monotonous grey-green seas became noticeable, strengthening until the entire character of the sea was changed.

By nightfall they were within the loom of the land but prudently lay to until morning for there was every possibility that
Narcissus
would have news of the return of the Spanish warships. At first light they resumed their course, and when a rumpled grey-blue rising on the starboard bow announced their landfall on South America, with it was the distant pale blur of sails –
Narcissus
on her beat across the wide estuary mouth.

The three ships lay together in the cross-swell and exchanged news. The captain of
Narcissus
blared out from his speaking trumpet that, to his knowledge, the Spanish Navy had not yet returned, that all was quiet but that navigation in the estuary was the very devil due to its uncertain and shifting shoals, mud-banks and terrifying squalls.

Kydd hailed back that the fleet was on its way and that all was well, while Honyman in
Leda
wanted to know if
Ocean
had been sighted.

Narcissus
then spread sail for the open sea to find the commodore. She was replaced on station by
Leda
while Kydd, with the shallowest draught, was dispatched to penetrate deeper into the River Plate to make sure of the reconnaissance.

It was a fearful task: at nearly 150 miles across at the mouth to a mile or two at its inner end hundreds of miles away, every rutter, pilot and guide they could muster was unanimous in its warnings. The chief peril was the shallow and treacherous trending of the river, which made impossible any approach into the estuary by a sea-going vessel unless by the deeper channels, which wove among the notoriously shifting hard-packed banks. It was said a thousand ships had laid their bones in this bleak place.

The other threat was the weather. The southern bank of the River Plate was in effect the edge of the endless flat plains of the Pampas across which the wind could blast without check. The notorious pampero could become so strong as to kick up a sea potent enough to stop the river in its flow – one from the south-east was sufficient, incredibly, even to reverse the tide – and a hard blow coming from the north-west could virtually dry out the estuary.

Kydd and the master pored over the charts. The funnel-shaped estuary had on the north side the outlying port of Maldonado, with Montevideo fifty miles further in at the true entry to the River Plate. The river narrowed there from sixty miles to thirty, at which point the past Portuguese settlement of Colonia lay opposite Buenos Aires. Twenty miles further on, it ended abruptly in a maze of marshes.

The south side had, except for the capital, no settlements of note and was very low-lying, with cloying mud-flats that stretched for miles. And in the river there were two main sandbanks: the long Ortiz Bank in the middle, and the sinuous length of the Chico closer inshore towards Buenos Aires. Beyond there was nothing but un-navigable shallows.

In hostile waters, without local knowledge or a pilot, they stood in as grave danger as anywhere Kydd had known before. Their stowaway, Serrano, was apologetic: he knew nothing of the sea so their track was entirely their own decision.

‘We stand towards Montevideo, then keep in with the north,’ Kydd finally decided.

Narcissus
, a heavy frigate with a draught to match, had been unable to look into this port, the most likely to harbour defending Spanish men-o’-war. It was an essential first step, of course, for this was the designated assault point for the expedition.

With Maldonado safely out of sight, well to the northward,
L’Aurore
set her prow to the west with doubled lookouts. The lowering grey skies were menacing and the captain and ship’s company were sombre. As they headed in, it was hard to believe they were sailing up a river for there was no land in sight and none expected: it was as if they were in the open ocean, but for the shorter wave-shape and tainted sea.

The master studied intently his
Remarks
, a printed booklet produced by a merchant captain of half a century before that persuasively gave sailing instructions for safe entry into the port of Montevideo. ‘Bear west b’ north until we raise the isle o’ Flores,’ Kendall intoned.