Admiral (6 page)

Aurelia held out her hands, palm uppermost. She looked directly at Ned and said in a low voice: “My late husband used to beat me every day. I never want to see that plantation again. The one he stole from you and which I want to give back to you as soon as the probate is done, I value only because it’s yours. I don’t want to see it again. I will, of course, because I will be with you.”

“Sell ’em,” Thomas growled. “Sell Kingsnorth. I suppose you’ll have to give the money to your brother, because it was a family plantation until that man Wilson stole it, and it could be argued it still belongs to the family. Use the money raised by
your
plantation, Aurelia, as a reserve when the Dons are parsimonious with prizes.”

Diana said: “Or rent yours, Aurelia. I agree with Thomas about Kingsnorth: Ned was managing it for his family. But if you rent out both of them, it means you have an income until you feel like retiring from the sea in your old age. By then everyone will have forgotten the words Cromwell, Roundhead and Commonwealth.”

Ned said: “I am more concerned that Aurelia and I get married. But I didn’t realize she was reluctant to go back to Barbados. You said nothing,
chérie
.”

The Frenchwoman shook her head. “I thought you wanted to go back,” she said simply. “Where you go, I go.”

Ned gestured to Thomas. “Well, the answer for the moment, then, is that we shall not hasten back to Barbados. I might write to John Alston, my only friend while I lived in the island, and if he’s survived I’ll see what he thinks about renting or selling. So let’s have the next question.”

Thomas waved them aside. “There were only more questions if you’d given different answers to the first ones. Now we need to talk to the privateers again.”

“What about?” Ned demanded.

Thomas ran his fingers through his beard. “Why don’t you wait and see? I know what it is, but they swore me to secrecy. It is nothing unpleasant, I can assure you.”

The French privateer
Perdrix
was, as Thomas quickly pointed out, a ship with a strange name. The most powerfully armed of the four other privateers and so bereft of paint that she seemed made of bare wood, her decks were filthy with scraps of food lying in the scuppers, her side stained where rubbish was thrown or poured over the side, and her French colours looked like a torn blouse left pegged out for the wind and rain to clean and now bleached by the sun.

“Partridge!” Thomas exclaimed as he helped Aurelia on board from the
Griffin
’s boat. “‘Vulture’ would be a better name!”

“Look at the rigging – and the sails,” Ned said quietly. “Freshly tarred rope, and that hemp looks almost new.” He looked round, saw a sharp-eyed, fat-bellied man he recognized as the owner, and waved a salute.

The man bustled over. “Forgive me,” he said in a cultured voice that belied his appearance – he looked, Ned thought, like the foreman in a slaughterhouse – “but I did not hear you arrive and these
canaille
did not bother to tell me.” He turned and bowed to Aurelia, welcoming her on board in French, but changing back to his excellent English as he kissed Diana’s hand. Obviously Diana knew both ship and owner well, because she immediately began teasing him.

“If you won’t give the order to swab the decks, why don’t you drive this old bird to windward for an hour or two and ship a few seas to start the job?”

The man shrugged and patted his stomach. “We look after the important things, milady Diana. You will find no fault in the
Perdrix
’s rigging, sails or guns, so as a privateer she is
formidable
. You have many times in the past praised our
cuisine
. What else is of importance?”

Diana laughed and turned to Aurelia. “It’s true about the
cuisine
. That is why these four privateers make him their leader – it gives them an excuse to dine on board the
Perdrix
!”

The privateersman shook hands with Thomas and Ned realized that this man, Leclerc, was the one with the questions – and, he hoped, some answers.

“If you will follow me,” Leclerc said, leading the way aft and disappearing down a companion-way. The cabin was large, the full width of the ship, with standing headroom, and Ned turned as he reached the bottom of the ladder to find three more men, obviously the other captains, already greeting Diana and being introduced by her to Aurelia.

The cabin was a startling change from the rest of the ship: it was panelled in rich polished mahogany; the handrails for the companion-way were covered in fine ropework; the hammock, now pushed to one side out of the way, was edged with lacework and a large cot, or box, was fitted into it – big enough, Ned noted, for two people, even allowing for Leclerc’s paunch. A rack pierced with circular holes held several onion-shaped bottles inserted neck downwards, so that the tropical heat should not dry the corks and spoil the wine. The rack must contain Leclerc’s favourite wines: most privateersmen seemed to prefer tapping a barrel.

Leclerc, now seating Aurelia and Diana with all the courtesy of a host with highly regarded guests, was a complete contradiction, and Ned wondered if Thomas and Diana had deliberately not warned him, to avoid influencing his opinion. The man’s ship was outwardly filthy yet, as he had said, the masts, spars, rigging and guns could not be faulted. But the rotted scraps of food in various corners of the deck, the smell of rotting food fighting with the reek of garlic, the man himself gross, unshaven yet not bearded, his face greasy and obviously unwashed for days, his clothes giving the appearance of having been slept in for several weeks – and yet this cabin, spotlessly clean, the panelling and furniture highly polished (could he detect the smell of the beeswax polish?) and lockers and table fitted with well-polished brass hinges. And that swinging cot – it was too elaborate to be called a hammock. A woman’s touch? That could explain the cabin, and obviously Leclerc kept her hidden away.

“Now, M’sieur Yorke, you have met these gentlemen only briefly before the Santiago raid,” Leclerc said, “so I will introduce you again. First, your fellow countrymen, Charles Coles, who owns the
Argonauta
and Edward Brace, who commands the
Mercury
.”

One
owned
a ship with a Spanish name; the other
commanded
one with an English. Ned wondered at the significance and decided there was none. He immediately recognized Coles, who was stocky, blond-haired and blue-eyed, had a hearty manner and a vigorous handshake. “My lads want to thank you for the biggest purchase they’ve ever shared – and, when you blew up the castle at Santiago, the biggest bang they’ve ever heard!”

“The same goes for the
Mercury
,” Brace said. Red-headed and thin, the bones of his face angular, he was the taller of the two men. “Cursing the lack of taverns and whores though: they don’t have any use for money they can’t spend!” Brace was the only man present, apart from Thomas, who had a beard. But while Thomas’ beard was a thick black growth, the bottom of which Diana occasionally squared off with a carefully sharpened pair of scissors, Brace’s was pointed, neatly trimmed and combed several times daily. He had a special comb made from turtle shell and edged with silver, and which he kept in the top left-hand pocket of his jerkin. The point of the beard curled forward; Brace had a habit of twirling it between the first two fingers of his left hand. Pale of skin and his eyes deep-set and in the poor light seeming black, Brace was a man who smiled frequently and would sooner joke than give a serious answer – that was clear within a couple of minutes of him being introduced.

Both Coles and Brace came from northern England. Yorkshire or Lancashire? Ned could not distinguish, and did not have time to ask before yet another blue-eyed, blond man was standing in front of him, hand outstretched, and repeating: “Gottlieb, Gottlieb, Gottlieb.”

“You remember our Dutch friend,” Leclerc said. “Mr Gottlieb who owns the
Dolphyn
.”

“Very good, very good,” Gottlieb said, and Ned realized that he was agreeing with what Cole and Brace had just said. The Dutchman had a flat face and his widely-spaced eyes and blond eyebrows gave him a perpetually startled appearance, as though dazzled by a bright light. Small but well built, Gottlieb gave the impression of quiet competence.

Aurelia sat back in her chair and looked round at the six men in the cabin, marvelling at the circumstances that brought such different characters together. Leclerc, she suspected, was a French version of Thomas: a well-bred man who for reasons of his own had deliberately quit France. Was it religion? He could be a Protestant, and out here, among some of the islands, religion was of little consequence – or, rather, the Catholic priests had much less power and influence.

The Dutchman was a typical refugee from the Spanish occupation of the Netherlands; he probably hated the Spanish for much more than “No peace beyond the Line”. He was a quiet man who said little: a blond version of Ned and, she suspected, as deceptive. Ned gave the impression of a calmness bordering on remoteness. She knew that to other people he often seemed a thousand miles away, yet once there was anything to be done he had a power of concentration which was frightening in its intensity. She guessed Thomas knew all this because over the past months he had seen Ned slowly change from the uncertain and harried young plantation owner to the man using his ship for smuggling in order to feed his people and finally becoming a buccaneer because – well, because there was no peace beyond the Line, and his enemies had been the Roundheads (until Cromwell died) and the Spanish. She also guessed that Diana knew all this instinctively, in the way that many women can look at a man and assess him as a lover.

Yet what was this meeting now on board
Perdrix
all about? Why were they all gathered in this cabin? Thomas was so mysterious that Aurelia doubted if Diana had been able to do more than guess. Were the two of them eventually going to sail back to England, now the King was back on the throne? Aurelia was far from sure. Thomas seemed to want to go but Diana appeared determined to stay in the West Indies. Thomas commanded the
Peleus
– but she had been bought with Diana’s money.

There seemed to be no particular reason for Thomas to go back: as Diana had pointed out to him with her usual candour, only his debtors would welcome him! There was no family estate; simply, she thought, that Thomas could imagine the fascination of court life with a new King and wanted to be part of it, overlooking that it would need money… It was indeed a Restoration: as Ned had commented, people could openly laugh and sing now, and wear bright clothes.

For the next few months no doubt England would be an exciting place, with the people throwing off all the greyness brought down on them by the Puritans. Yes, life in Restoration England would be joyful and expensive, and Thomas had only his share of the Santiago purchase, while if Diana had any money left in England she would be wise to keep it out of Thomas’ hands.

She looked across at Ned, who was laughing at something Leclerc had just said to Thomas. What was Ned finally going to do? He had the choice of either going back to Barbados and putting the plantation in order or continue buccaneering, making this new island of Jamaica a base. To her surprise (and disappointment) he had seemed rather cool towards Thomas’ notion of going on buccaneering, although admitting that Spain was still the enemy. Yet would Spain remain the enemy? Both Ned and Thomas were worried about these rumours, said to have originated from the
Convertine
’s captain, that the King’s long exile, much of it spent in Spain, meant that there would be a peace treaty as a return for Spain’s hospitality.

Where, Aurelia asked herself bitterly, would that leave Jamaica, so recently captured from Spain? Would the Spanish king demand its return – even before Heffer had a chance to anglicise all the place names? Certainly it was a tiny island in the middle of Spanish territory…like a fly on the back of a bullock. But in time it could become a horsefly with a vicious sting. The Spanish king already knew that, though whether or not he would do anything was anyone’s guess.

Anyway, she cared little for what the king of Spain decided. What concerned her in the next hour or so, sitting in this stuffy cabin listening to these droll fellows make proposals, was what
Ned
would decide: what would be their future? Had she persuaded him that she
really
had no interest in Barbados? That she
hated
Antigua? That she (like Diana)
preferred
this present almost gypsy existence afloat? Ned seemed unable to believe it; he gave an impatient shrug and assumed that she and Diana were merely being loyal to their men: “Whither thou goest…”

Diana was nervous: Aurelia suddenly realized that with a shock. The Englishwoman was always so calm, whether with the enemy coming over the horizon or Thomas in one of his tantrums. It was an inner calm that came from complete confidence in herself. Like Ned’s calm in a way and, for a moment, she realized they were probably in some ways very much alike – outwardly calm and inwardly capable of almost frightening passion. She could not be certain about Diana, of course, but judging from Thomas’ infatuation with her and their obvious joy in each other’s company, it must be so. Was this outward calm a particularly English trait? Her late husband was just the opposite, but she chased the thought of him away; he had been a greedy, brutal schoolboy and now he was dead. And Leclerc was coughing, to get everyone’s attention.

“Gentlemen,” he said, “only M. Yorke (and Mme. Wilson and Mlle. Diana, of course),” he added with a bow, “do not know why we are here today, but as it is important that M. Yorke understands our proposals and plans, I intend to start right at the beginning. First, M. Yorke and Sir Thomas, we thank you for inviting us to accompany you on the Santiago raid and the very satisfactory purchase it yielded. The important thing that expedition showed us, M. Yorke, is what we buccaneers can achieve if we act together and if we are properly led. You know what has been happening until now –”