The Portuguese Affair (29 page)

Out at sea long columns of flame, like the tongues of gigantic dragons, shot down from the sky and seemed to link earth and heaven in some devilish bond. Moments after, deafening thunder rolled over us, so that I felt the beat of it deep in my chest, and my ears were numb. Then the rain came, rain such as I had never seen before, hitting us like musket balls. As the bosun and I lifted the last of the injured men, to carry him below decks, the wind caught the awning we had erected for the soldiers, ripped it up till it stood on end and clapped and danced like the Dervishes of the
Barbary Coast, then carried it away. It vanished into the solid wall of rain which was now so heavy we could no longer see the other ships of our dying fleet.

When we had deposited the last soldier down with the others on the gun deck, the bosun clambered hastily up the companionway to the main deck, and I followed after him, but I was not welcome there.

‘Get below!’ one of the officers shouted at me. ‘We want no landsmen on deck in a storm like this. Get out of our way!’

I did as I was told and retreated back down the companionway to the gun deck, then picked my way through the men lying there until I reached the companionway that led up to the poop and the cabins. I heard the faint sound of voices from Dom Antonio’s great cabin, but I did not want the company of my fellow Portuguese. Instead I let myself through Dr Nuñez’s empty cabin and into my cubbyhole. No larger than a clothes press, without porthole or any natural light, at least it was my own place. There I huddled on my bunk, weak now myself, and dizzy with lack of food for nearly a week, trying to blot out the memory, brought suddenly and vividly alive by the tempest, of my first journey north on these seas.

Chapter Eighteen

On Board the Santa Maria, 1582

W
hen my parents and I were smuggled from the fishing boat aboard the merchant ship out of Porto, bound for London, I knew nothing more of Dr Hector Nuñez than his name, that he was the owner of the ship
Santa Maria
, and that he would help us when we reached England. I began to feel a little safer as we sailed west to gain sea room for rounding the Cape of Finisterre, and in the morning of the next day I ventured out of the cabin my family had been given, to explore the ship. During the few hours of the night that remained after we had come aboard, my parents had slept in the single bunk, and I had lain on the floor. After the months on the stone floor of the Inquisition prison it was no hardship.

My father had gone on deck before me. I followed him up the companionway and roamed about the ship, getting in the way of the sailors, and occasionally earning a cheerful cuff from one of them when I asked too many questions. I could hardly believe that my life was returning to some kind of normality. It was strange being at sea on this great ship. It was strange pretending to be a boy in the company of all these sailors. But we were free and alive, my mother, my father and I, with every hour taking us further from danger.

The previous evening, before we slept, I heard my father telling my mother what our plans should be. It would not be wise to travel on from England to Antwerp, as he had originally intended, for the Spanish King had turned his attention to his possessions in the Low Countries. Antwerp would not be safe for us. We would settle in England, where there was already a sizeable Marrano community, who would welcome us. I could not imagine what this place ‘England’ would be like, but I was beginning to feel hopeful. If only my sister Isabel were with us, I would almost feel happy.

After a time, the wind got up and a storm began to heave the seas about. Not a great storm, but enough to make me uncertain on my legs, so I went back down to the cabin.

I found a scene of chaos. My father’s medicines were scattered about, phials overturned and smashed, powders strewn over the small table. My mother was lying on the floor, writhing like a creature in agony. I cried out in horror and flung myself down beside her.

‘Mama! Mama!’ I cradled her in my arms. ‘What has happened?’

She looked at me with feverish eyes, and gasped. A little blood and saliva trickled from the corner of her mouth.

‘I took,’ she whispered, ‘I took . . . things to kill the baby.’

I picked up the bottles lying near her hand. Seeds of
flos pavonis
. Leaf of
leonurus cardiaca
. Root of the rare American
cimicifuga racemosa
. Tincture of
stachys officinalis
. All the bottles were empty. Even then, I knew what they signified.

She could speak no more, for her body arched and heaved, and suddenly a great bloody mass burst out between her legs. She screamed and retched.

Terror swept over me. I did not know what to do. I did not know what to do. I seized a bolster from the bunk and wedged it under her head, then ran for my father. I seemed to hunt for hours, running up and down companionways, along the decks, until I found him at last in the captain’s cabin.

‘Come,’ I gasped. ‘You must come. Mama.’ The words froze on my tongue.

I clutched my father’s sleeve in both hands. If I could hold on to him, perhaps the horror would stop. Time would slip back. Everything would be as it had been, only a few hours before.

When we reached my mother she was breathing still, but the floor was awash with blood and she could not speak.

‘What did she take, Caterina?’ My father took me by the shoulders and shook me so I could not speak.

‘Abortifacients,’ I managed to say at last, breaking away from his grasp and pointing at the empty bottles. Tears were running down my face and soaking the front of my tunic. Jaime’s tunic, ragged and filthy.

‘But why?’ His cry was terrible to hear. ‘Why?’

I hung my head. I could not meet his eyes. ‘She was raped,’ I whispered. ‘Over and over, they raped her in the prison. She told me she was with child. While we were still in the prison. And now, she said . . . now all she could say to me, was that she wanted to kill the baby.’

‘She has killed herself as well!’ he wailed, taking my mother in his arms.

We made her as comfortable as we could, but the blood flowed and flowed. My father helped her to drink an infusion of
capsella bursa pastoris
, which is believed to stop haemorrhage, but I guessed from his face that there was no hope. I know now that she had taken far too much of the drugs. A lethal dose. She was so desperate to kill that child which made her feel defiled.

By the next morning she was too weak even to lift her head to sip water. She asked our forgiveness, and died before noon. They slid her overboard, my mother who had disguised me as a boy and kept me safe all those months, in the prison of the Inquisition. Kept me safe by enduring all that they had made her suffer, to protect me. The sailors had wrapped a shroud about her, but not sewed it as close as they should, so that those cruel waves plucked it away and I saw her pale face looking up at me before her heavy skirts dragged her down and she was gone for ever.

Chapter Nineteen

On Board the Victory, 1589

T
he present storm lasted three days and three nights, and by the time it died away the
Victory
was off the Pointe de St. Mathieu in the west of Brittany. More men had died during the storm, but none of us had the strength any longer to heave them up on deck and tip them overboard, so they lay and rotted where they were. Towards the end of the next day, the ninth day since we had left Cascais – or was it the tenth? – I dragged myself up the companionway, one rung at a time. The last of the pewter-grey storm clouds lingered over France, but the Channel lay ahead of us, clear under the July sun, a kinder sun than we had known in Portugal.

The ship was making its way slowly northeast, slowly because we were under half sail, since many of the sailors lay dying of starvation and disease like the soldiers, and those who were still on their feet had barely strength to trim the sails. There were four men at the whipstaff to control the rudder, two on each side. One man alone had not the power left in his arms to move it an inch. Behind us, the remaining ships of our broken fleet straggled, unkempt, their sails sagging untrimmed, their yardarms kilted over at careless angles. Captain Oliver was on the forecastle deck, and I made my way slowly towards him, holding the rail, for I was unsteady on my feet.

‘Where are we now?’ I asked.

Without answering, he pointed to some jagged white rocks thrusting up out of the sea ahead, amidst a churning maelstrom of waves, while the ship, groaning as if her timbers had been wrenched in the tempest, began to turn gradually to starboard.

I shook my head. ‘I’m no seaman. What are those?’

‘The Needles,’ he said, and his voice creaked as though the lack of water had caused rust to set in. ‘Off the tip of
Cornwall. Did you not see them on our way out? Nay perhaps not. I remember, the rain was as thick as a heavy mist.’

He coughed, a dry hacking sound.

‘The men are too weary to sail as far as Plymouth tonight,’ he said, when he could speak again. ‘We’ll heave to when it gets dark, and reach port in the morning.’

I carried the good news to the soldiers down below, that we were in sight of the tip of
England, but they looked at me with lacklustre eyes and made no response. When I found Dr Nuñez in his cabin, he was little better.

‘
Plymouth?’ he said. ‘Well, at least let us hope there will be food in Plymouth.’

His face was pinched and grey, and his eyes sunk in dark hollows below his tangled eyebrows. Like all the men, he had neither shaved nor trimmed his beard for weeks. Apart from the young cabin boys, I was the only beardless person aboard. As for all our hair, it was matted and lice-ridden, and lately frosted with salt from the spray. And filthy, as our bodies were filthy. I sank down on a joint stool opposite him, where he sat on his bunk, slumped in despair. I was so tired I could not keep on my feet any longer.

‘Though there are few enough of us left to eat it,’ he said, picking up his thought again. ‘Any food. In Plymouth. And then the reckoning comes.’

‘What will happen to the men?’

He shrugged. ‘Given a meal and turned ashore, I suppose.’

‘Without pay?’ I stared at him. ‘After all they have suffered?’

‘Who has the wherewithal to pay them?’ He lifted his eyes to mine. They were full of despair. ‘The investors have sunk everything in this expedition, with nothing to show for it. None of the Dom’s glorious promises made good. I shall be near ruined myself. The men were to have been paid with the booty seized from the sack of Lisbon.’

‘That was a shameful pact,’ I said. Exhausted as I was, I still spoke vehemently.

‘It was. It should never have been countenanced.’

‘There was the gold Drake took at Cascais.’ I ventured this suggestion without much hope, for I had a good idea what the answer would be.

‘The Queen’s gold?’ He shrugged. ‘Aye, well, she may grant them a little of it, when Drake returns from the Azores. Perhaps he will have increased his bounty there.’

I could not sleep that night for the gnawing hunger in my belly, as the ship yawed to and fro, as if she was uneasy, hove to. To my haunted mind it seemed that the ship herself was starving and dying, here on the last few miles of the sea. The pains in every one of my joints had grown even more acute. The thought that food was only hours away made it all the harder to endure, this final agonising wait. I was dizzy with hunger and thirst. From the gaunt faces I had seen around me in the ship, I could imagine how I myself must look. My doublet and breeches hung on me. They stank of sweat and dirt and sickness. Once I was home I would burn them, for they were so full of rents and tears that even a pauper would scorn them. My stockings gaped with as many holes as a fisherman’s net and my shirt barely reached my waist, for all the lower part had been ripped off to make bandages. Even my precious physician’s gown had suffered the same fate. The stuff was too thick for bandages, but in the end, no one cared. We used what we could.

I wondered whether Simon would recognise the ragged sunburnt skeleton I had become, but realised bitterly how little it mattered. I was nothing to him but a passing acquaintance, a male companion to share a meal or a visit to the playhouse. Why did I torment myself with foolish thoughts? I found myself longing to break out of my disguise, to become a girl again, Caterina, my father’s daughter, dependent, handing myself over to the guardianship of others. It would be nothing but joy to lay aside the burden of my manhood, my responsibilities and cares. I was nineteen years old, and I longed to abandon my travesty of a life.

All through that last night on board, I wrestled with my crowding thoughts, with the flashes of memory that ambushed me. Isabel, laying her cheek briefly against mine. The fires in the citadel of Coruña and the drunken soldiers lying in the streets below. Teresa holding the new babe. The snake and the taste of its venom on my tongue. The men dying and dying and dying on the march. The severed head of Father Hernandez on the walls of
Lisbon. The heat. The thirst. The hunger. The wounded soldier dying in my arms on deck. And Isabel, Isabel. I felt such black despair I wanted to howl, and yet even to utter a sound would have cost me too much effort. In the morning we would see England. What did I care? My wits were so dulled that it no longer had any meaning for me. All through that last terrible night, I lay awake.

By first light I had crawled my way up on deck. It was our tenth day – or was it the eleventh? – out from Cascais. The second of July, Captain Oliver said. At least that was what he thought, for like all of us he was confused and weak from hunger and sleeplessness. The sailors were making sail, going about their tasks with maddening slowness, as if they were sleep-walking, yet they must have been as eager as any of us to quit the
Victory
and find themselves on dry land again. As we made our way slowly along the coast of Cornwall to Devon, one of the sailors pointed to a tiny village that seemed to climb vertically up the cliff and hang suspended over the water.

‘That’s Polperro,’ he said. ‘That’s my village, an
d I never want to leave it.’ Like the captain he gave a dry, rasping cough. ‘I’ll never set foot in a ship again. Once I get my feet on English soil, you never see me step off it.’

‘How far to
Plymouth?’ I asked.

‘You see that break in the coast? Ahead, a little further along? That’s the mouth of Plymouth Sound. Not far now, God be thanked.’

And I noticed that he crossed himself furtively, as the Catholics do.

Plymouth Sound is a large and complex body of water, all inlets and small islands, and what look like the mouths of many rivers, but which may perhaps be deeper inlets running into the land. As usual it was crowded with huge galleons and smaller ships, which apart from their size all looked much the same as one another, for I do not have an eye for a ship. I could not have named any of them.

Dr Nuñez had come on deck to stand beside me, and the soldiers had limped and crawled their way into the light and air, looking anxiously around, as if they feared that England were no more than a mirage, sent to torment them. Even Dom Antonio and Dr Lopez had come on deck, and the Dom had insisted that his standard should be flown, which was unwise of him.

‘The harbour is very crowded,’ I said, to no one in particular. It seemed we would have difficulty finding anchor room. The
Victory
was too large to be able to berth at most quays, but I realised that we were feeling our way slowly towards the principal quay, where it seemed there was deep water, instead of dropping anchor out in mid harbour, as I had expected. All the sails had been furled but one foresail and the lateen sail on the mizzen. A pinnace with a towline had its oars out, though I do not know how any of the sailors found the strength to wield them. I saw that there was space enough for one large ship, beside another galleon, already trimly moored. We were gliding slowly toward it, without the need for the pinnace.

Suddenly Captain Oliver gave a cry, so agonised that I wondered for a moment if he had run mad in these last hours of our ordeal. He pointed to the other galleon moored at the quay and shouted. It was taken up in fury by the sailors.

‘The
Revenge
! It’s the
Revenge
! Drake never sailed for the Azores at all! He’s here!’

Drake had betrayed us once again. He had taken all the food and drink and sailed straight home to
Plymouth, leaving us to starve and die on the high seas behind him.

Our reception in Plymouth was furious and frightening. The families coming to welcome home their husbands and sons had learned the truth of the expedition when Drake arrived the day before us. Instead of men with their pockets full of gold they found men weary and penniless, and news of many deaths. The men on Drake’s ships, however, were those in better health. The hopes of the families that their men had survived were kept alive until Norreys’s fleet made port. When the poor remains of our army stumbled or were carried ashore from our last ships, deathlike in their gaunt pallor, a terrible cry arose from the women and children crowding round the quays. I hope I shall never hear the like again. Then the despair turned to anger, and the anger to fury. Dom Antonio, trying to make a dignified descent of the gangplank in the tattered remnants of his finery, suddenly caught their attention. They recognised him from our triumphant departure in April.

‘Dog!’ they screamed. ‘Cur! Jewish thief! Liar! Bastard king!’ (Which last was true enough, though rarely mentioned.)

They picked up stones from the ground and hurled them at the never-to-be king of Portugal. He escaped unhurt, for their aim was poor, but one caught Dr Nuñez on the left cheek, and it bled a little. Luckily for me, I was no more than some unknown youth of the company, probably a midshipman, or someone else of no account. They did not recognise me as one of the hated Portingalls. As unobtrusively as possible, I made my way ashore with Dr Nuñez. Both of us, without exchanging a word, chose to avoid the company of Ruy Lopez and Dom Antonio.

In
Plymouth I stayed at an inn (none of us could endure another moment aboard the
Victory
), where I ate and washed, but I still wore my threadbare clothes, for I had nothing else. I owed my lodging to Dr Nuñez, for I had no more than two Spanish
reals
left in my purse. He urged me to keep them in case I needed money on my journey home, so I changed them at the inn for good English coin, which jingled thinly in my purse with the handful of pennies and groats he had managed to give me.

Someone, somewhere, found a paltry dole for the men. I do not know whether Drake had loosened his grip on the gold, which he proposed to share with the Queen. Perhaps it was the City investors, who had hastened to Plymouth when they learned of Drake’s arrival, and who met us with grim faces and their account books under their arms. They would have been unwilling to part with yet more money, but if the troops were not dispersed quickly, there would be trouble.

There was a small amount of booty aboard the ships, the booty taken at Coruña, which was to be auctioned off and used to repay some of the creditors. In the event, the aftermath of the expedition proved to be months of legal wrangling between the investors, the leaders of the expedition, the ships’ captains, and the Mayor of Plymouth. Bitter accusations flew between them, but it was nothing to me. I knew my father’s thousand pounds would never be repaid.

Nevertheless, someone, somehow, did find that dole for the men. They were given one meal when they stepped ashore at Plymouth, handed five shillings each, and told to disperse to their homes, those who were fit enough to walk. This was their reward at the end of the glorious expedition which they had been promised. Norreys spent an evening writing licences for them to beg their way home. It did not take him long, there were so few men left.

‘Five shillings!’ I cried to Dr Nuñez, when I heard of it. ‘Five shillings for so many months of suffering! How can they be so unjust?’

He shrugged. His eyes were dull and the skin on his face sagged like soft old linen, washed till it has barely any substance.

‘It is more than you will have, young Kit.’

‘Oh, I have my memories,’ I said bitterly. ‘That is payment for this venture, and more than enough.’