The Mountain of Gold (3 page)

This was indeed a brazen, audacious speech, but even though I was then still but young and foolish, I knew enough of the world to remain sceptical of the Irishman's serpentine words. After all, I reasoned, why was this Omar, or O'Dwyer, but captain of a galley, and that not the largest, rather than the
dey
of Algier or the Grand Vizier himself?

So he would hang; but, perhaps, not quite yet. I donned my broad hat, and came to a decision for good or ill. 'Well, Irishman, as liars go, I have met few to equal you. But your lies have a certain diverting quality to them, and God knows, the Levant trade is tedious work, so I require a little diversion. You will tell me more of your imaginary mountain of gold after I have spoken with this Knight of Malta. Mister Lanherne, see this man chained in the hold.'

As we strode toward the quarterdeck, Musk began to berate me for a fool, but I cut him off. 'What matter can it be if he hangs now or in an hour? It's all fantasy, of course.'

But as I stepped out into the sunlight, the Irishman's plausible words had somehow already planted the thought in my head.
What if—?

Two

Musk had clad me in my finest silk frock-coat. In that heat, and despite the awning stretched a few feet above the quarterdeck, the sweat was pouring down my flesh well before my guest stepped onto the deck, where he was greeted by Boatswain Fuller's whistle. He seemed entirely oblivious to the heat, despite wearing attire even less sensible than my own. It was as though the thick black cloak with its single silver Cross of Malta somehow rendered him immune to the world around him. The gleaming hilt of a sword protruded from the cloak. This magnificent galley-knight raised a splendidly befeathered hat to salute the
Wessex
and its captain, and I stepped forward, doffing my own hat and bowing low in deference. He was a man of middling height and middling age, this Knight of Malta, so thin as to be almost skeletal. His long, watchful face betrayed nothing but disdain for this young captain and his man-of-war, so ugly and towering alongside the shattered but slender galleys. He looked about him with the unnervingly self-confident arrogance of those who are supremely aware of their own power, and with something else, too. Contempt, certainly, but more than that. He had the look of a priest-executioner, weighing up precisely how long it would take his latest batch of faggot-fodder to burn at the stake; and to this day, I retain the uncomfortable suspicion that this was exactly what he was doing. The dark knight looked me up and down. Although it was one of the hottest days I have ever known, I shivered.

He spoke at first in French, which was evidently his native tongue, then in Latin, then in Italian, all fluently, then in a somewhat more broken Dutch, and lastly in a halting and reluctant English. Too late, I realised that his linguistic recitation was occasioned by the simple fact that I had forgotten to order our ensign hoisted as soon as I came on deck. '
Monsieur,
;' he said in his rasping voice, I am Gaspard, Seigneur de Montnoir, captain of the galley
San Giacomo
in the service of his Most Eminent and Serene Highness Rafael Cotoner, Grand Master of the Order of Saint John of Jerusalem, Rhodes and Malta. To whom do I have the honour of speaking?'

His tone made it entirely apparent that he did not consider it an honour at all, rather a task akin to cleaning a dog-turd off one's shoe.

Mustering as much confidence as I could, I replied in the flawless French that I had learned at the knee of my grandmother. 'I am Matthew Quinton, sir, captain of this ship the
Wessex
in the service of that most high and puissant prince, his Britannic Majesty King Charles the Second. You will take some refreshment?' I gestured vaguely towards the stern, knowing that Musk would barely have had the time to lay on my cabin table a flagon of Sicilian wine and two glasses.

But Montnoir was evidently not a man for pleasantries, nor did he display any surprise at my fluency in his native tongue. Reverting to French, he said, 'I thank you, but no, Captain. Our business can be concluded here and now, and very easily, I think. I seek only the delivery of our prize, and of the men that she carried.'

'Your prize, sir. And what prize would that be, pray?'

Montnoir's face was a picture. 'The corsair, Captain Quinton. The accursed heathen corsair galley that we came across by God's good grace as she was plundering an honest flyboat out of Malaga. My men and I fought that devil for six hours, at the cost of many lives and limbs. We seek our lawful prize, bought with the blood of good Christians, and the release of the benighted souls of our faith that the Turks have kept chained to their oars.'

I shrugged, for I had learned French mannerisms, too, at my grandmother's knee. 'Good sir, I see no prize of yours. When we came upon the galley, she was disabled and sinking. With all possible respect, the like condition applied to yours, which was a long way further off, and I see you still have some considerable distance to close before you can even lie alongside this corsair again, let alone claim it as yours. Much depends, of course, on how many of the benighted souls of the Mahometan faith that you keep chained to
your
oars can be whipped into enough effort to give you any sort of headway.' Ali Reis, who was clinging to the main shroud, smiled at that, and I recalled him telling me once that his brother was a slave on a galley of Malta. 'You had, and have, no prospect of making her prize, Captain, whereas we do. And our lawful prize she'll be proved, I don't doubt.'

Montnoir was dumbstruck. 'You deny my right?'

'
Monseigneur,
I gladly make over to you the poor galley slaves, for otherwise we would have to feed and accommodate them, and our cabins and victuals cannot bear so many. Besides, most of them are of your French race, I gather, or else Italians and a few Spaniards. None to give any concern to an Englishman, at any rate. But the galley itself and all its officers are now in the custody of His Britannic Majesty and his representative here present. In other words—myself.'

Despite my inward nervousness I was relishing this taunting of Montnoir, a man evidently much more the sea-veteran than myself. After all, I possessed the trump card, and if he forced me to play it...

The Frenchman was oblivious, and puffed up in all his splendidly cloaked arrogance. 'Captain Quinton, you are a fool. Can you really wish to bring about a breach between King Charles and those whom I serve, the Grand Master of Malta and the Most Christian King Louis?'

So we had it, at last. For all its eternal fame, the name of Malta was not enough to deter a captain and a ship of the King of England. But the name of
le Roi Soleil,
the king of the largest and most feared land in Europe, was a very different case. I determined on impudence for my reply, for I knew that the eyes and ears of my crew were upon me (and enough of them knew sufficient
port taverne
French to keep up a hasty and clearly audible translation for those who knew none). Both they and my far-distant King demanded a certain swagger in such a circumstance. Ah, so you serve two masters, then,
monseigneur?
How terribly confusing for you.'

A few of my men nodded gravely. Julian Carvell, who still bore the scars from a fist-fight with a dozen Frenchmen at Messina some weeks earlier, grinned broadly, and not a few smirked with him. But it was not merely a cheap jibe against Montnoir. I knew that the loyalty of the proudly international Knights of Saint John to their Order was superseded all too often by their abiding loyalties to the lands of their birth, and to the monarchs who reigned over them. Nowhere was that more true than with the French Knights, who dominated the Order and yet also somehow provided the backbone of King Louis' own ever-increasing navy.

For all his pride, Montnoir was no fool. He could see our battery plainly enough—he stood almost between two culverins, polished to a suitably warlike sheen, with a neat pile of eighteen-pound iron balls at the side of each—and he could see the lust for a second prize and a consequent augmentation of prize money that blazed in the eyes of my men. He would have known very well that against the fearsome broadside we could fire in an instant, upon my word of command, his proud but wounded galley was so much matchwood.

He turned to me and said, 'Very well, Captain Quinton. Your prize. So be it. But one thing only I request, sir. Let their captain, the heathen named Omar Ibrahim, be turned over to face the Grand Master's justice.'

I was on firm ground now. For all my apparent confidence, in truth the issue of what might or might not be lawful prize lay in the hands of those blood-sucking leeches and eternally avaricious parasites who infested the High Court of Admiralty in London. In other words, lawyers. But the issue of who might or might not be a renegade Irishman turned Turk, a natural-born subject of my King and thus one who had committed the most infamous of treasons, lay at that moment with one authority alone. I said, 'The man that you name as Omar Ibrahim, Captain, is the man that I name as Brian Doyle O'Dwyer of the Kingdom of Ireland, and thus a subject of
my
master, King Charles. Therefore his fate rests with me, sir, and not with you, nor with the Grand Master, nor with King Louis.'

Montnoir looked at me as though he was seeing an apparition. Then he did something entirely unexpected, something that made his cadaverous face even more ghastly than it had seemed at first.

He smiled.

'An Irishman. Omar Ibrahim is an
Irishman?'

'I can bring him out to tell you that himself, if you wish.'

The Frenchman looked about him with a strange, far-off expression, as though transported from the deck of the
Wessex
to some distant fastness. He frowned. He smiled again, and frowned again. Then, quite suddenly and disconcertingly, Montnoir reverted to English and waved his hand dismissively. 'No, Captain Quinton, the word of the heir of Ravensden is sufficient upon the matter. I bid you good day, sir.'

With that, he doffed his hat once more, stepped out of the opening in our starboard rail, and descended the ladder to his boat. I waited until he was half way back to his galley before I threw my hat to the deck and tore off my silk frock coat and my so recently new shirt, all now wetter than my native River Ouse in flood.

As I returned to my cabin, I said to my grumbling clerk: 'Was that not strange, Musk? Aye, the whole affair, I'll grant—but above all, how could he know that I was the heir to the earldom? How could he know me for who I am?'

Phineas Musk had both the wisdom of his years (perhaps forty, more likely sixty; it was difficult to tell) and the impudence of a man who had spent most of his adult life discreetly abusing the great lords and ladies that he served. He said, 'Not strange at all, Captain. We've been in this sea for months. An English man-of-war captained by a certain Matthew Quinton—well, they'll know that name, won't they, certainly over in Cadiz and all parts of Spain. What did they call him, your grandfather, back in the old queen's day?
El diablo bianco,
wasn't it—the White Devil? So the stupid and credulous will assume that the White Devil has risen from his grave, while the noble and educated will examine the genealogies in their libraries and note against the name of Charles Quinton, tenth Earl of Ravensden, that his brother and heir happens to be a captain in the King of England's navy.
Quod erat demonstrandum.'

The occasional flashes of Musk's unsuspected learning always unsettled me. We reached my cabin, and without a by-your-leave the cause of my discomfort poured himself a large glass of the neglected Sicilian wine. He continued, 'But there was that other strange matter, though.'

'Another matter, Musk?'

'Well, Captain, I see it this way. Suppose we were at war with the Dutch again, and we chanced upon a ship of theirs that was plundering a merchantman of ours, but our foe got away from us, and we pursued it.' He took another draught of wine, and said, 'Well, what I'd want to know is this, I suppose—how would you know the name of the captain you were fighting before you actually took his ship?'

***

Tangier.

As the
Wessex
beat up into the bay from the north-east, I studied this much-vaunted new jewel in England's crown. A city of low, white houses huddled together on a hill of bare, red rock, like all the land that surrounded it. A city baked by the sun: unceasing, unrelenting sun. There were walls, and forts, and at the summit, a castle, over which flew the Union flag of Charles the Second's two kingdoms (this having replaced the flag of Portugal but the year before, when Tangier formed part of our Queen Catherine's marriage dowry). Soon, it was said, a great breakwater, the mole, would stretch out to sea, part of a grandiose scheme to turn this into a mighty port from which the king's fleets would roam the oceans, and England would dominate the trade of the world. What utter, unforgiving folly. Even as a young captain, ignorant in so many of the ways of the world, I could divine all too readily that this tiny outpost of our country, set down upon an alien shore, was fated to fail. I could see plainly the serried ranks of Moorish horsemen parading in front of the town, searching for a weak spot in the defences. I glimpsed red-coated soldiers upon the ramparts. An occasional matchlock-spark or puff of smoke betrayed the warning shots fired in the name of King Charles. The truth was that for all the great ambitions for it, Tangier was a city under permanent siege.

We anchored in what Lieutenant Castle proclaimed to be damnably foul ground that was bound to do for our best bower, and Coxswain Lanherne assembled the long boat's crew to row me ashore. The harbour, such as it was, contained no other ships, for the fleet was at sea and our convoy (with which we were meant to rendezvous in this roadstead) had been detained in Alicante by a leak to the
Paragon.
This was fortunate, for it gave me an opportunity to pursue the matter of the unbelievable claims of the Irish Turk who sat in my hold, secured to the deck by manacles.