Galleon Page 2

  “Darling Ned, being in your arms – even for a few moments – is ecstasy!” Diana looked across at Aurelia and winked. “I won’t tell him that being in anyone’s arms is ecstasy after sitting on that damned horse for hours. It’s like being astride the barrel of a cannon.”

  By now she was kissing Aurelia in an affectionate greeting and Sir Thomas Whetstone, a burly man with a thick square beard, flowing moustaches and long black curly hair, had dismounted, kissed Aurelia’s hand with a flourish and slapped Ned on the back.

  “Diana’s taken against horses,” he explained. “She prefers to sit in a boat and be rowed everywhere. Give her a barge and she’ll be the Cleopatra of the Caribbee.”

  “I haven’t taken against horses,” Diana protested, “it’s just this Spanish saddle. No wonder portraits always make hidalgos on horseback look so haughty; the poor fellows have been battered into capons…”

  Whetstone was looking across at the wooden pegs driven into the ground with the lines indicating where the foundations of the new house would be. “Yours looks bigger than the drawing, Ned – and that’s a relief, because ours seems enormous. I was beginning to think we’d made a mistake in the scale on the plan.”

  “Aurelia, do tell him (because he won’t listen to me) that a house can’t be too big,” Diana said. She had a surprisingly deep and rich voice, a complete contrast to Aurelia’s lighter tones and slight French accent.

  “The Devil take the house, what about the bed?” Thomas boomed. “I’ve had enough of ships’ narrow bunks.”

  “I think Ned feels the same way,” Aurelia said. “In fact he is designing a special one for us.”

  “A square bed,” Ned said.

  “I should think so,” Whetstone said in a tone which took it for granted that anything else was unthinkable. “By the way, Ned, this isn’t a social visit. The new Governor has finally decided to introduce himself to the peasants tomorrow. We’re bidden to the presence of m’lud Luce, along with Heffer and probably half a dozen others, mostly tradesmen no doubt. Is your land grant confirmed?”

  The question sounded casual, but Ned understood Thomas well enough to know that he was avoiding alarming the women.

  “Yes. Heffer signed and sealed the papers last week. Yours?”

  “Same, thank goodness.”

  However, the casual tone had not fooled Aurelia. “Why do you ask, Thomas?”

  “I gather the new Governor has either some fancy ideas or special orders from the Privy Council. Either way, from what I hear, he thinks he’s going to announce the beginning of Jamaica’s ‘Golden Age’. Still, gold or dross, I think we’d better start back to Port Royal…”

  Sir Harold Neil Luce, for the past few months a knight, was an ageing survivor; one of a small group of crafty politicians who had managed to back the political horse both ways by dividing their stake. They had lost half with the collapse of the Protectorate in the first race; but they had won handsomely on the second with the Restoration, switching allegiances with that facility limited to politicians and whores.

  Small and sandy-haired, narrow-faced and thin, he looked like a ferret; he had a high-pitched voice that became shrill, particularly when challenged about something of which he was uncertain. Luce had been appointed Jamaica’s first Governor because the King, the Duke of Albemarle, the Secretary of State and members of the Privy Council’s Committee for Trade and Foreign Plantations could no longer stand the sight of his face nor the whine of his northern accent. Like a tout for a brothel, he had seemed to be everywhere, accosting, begging for preferment, pleading, making new offers.

  There was now a powerful group of men at Court, those who had always been Royalist and who had followed the King into exile, who resented the way that Luce (and others like him) fawned, bribed and lied into being tolerated, if not accepted, at Court once the King had been restored.

  As soon as the Civil War had started, Luce had vanished from his estates, hiding his silver and sacking his servants. In fact he had gone into hiding – not because he thought the Roundheads would fail to win a complete victory and make the country a Puritan republic (which meant an ascetic, bloodless, laughterless one) but because he was waiting to see who in the new republic emerged with the power.

  Once he had identified the man beyond all doubt as Oliver Cromwell, he swiftly decided to pay the price for his tardy allegiance and he compounded, the euphemism for paying the Roundheads a large sum of money for forgetting that during the actual fighting he had sat not on, but behind the fence (Royalists paid much more), and was allowed part of his estate back. For the next ten years “Mr Luce” had lived as close to Cromwell as he could, currying favour and sniffing out Royalists with revolutionary zeal.

  When the Protector died he tried to transfer his allegiance to the son Richard, who was not interested in the succession. Then suddenly (or so it seemed to Luce, who was trying to see where and how much he could benefit from the Army’s discontent with Richard, although it was nearer two years) General Monck, one of the late Oliver Cromwell’s great generals, had gone across the Channel, brought back the King and put him on the throne. While almost everyone was hailing the Restoration, devout Roundheads hid under their beds and prayed even more fervently than they had under the rule of the Lord Protector.

  Luce gave a silent cheer while former Roundhead friends disappeared into the countryside, as discreetly as he had himself a dozen years earlier. But as he watched the activities of his fellow turncoats who had compounded with the Roundheads, he saw how General Monck (now created Duke of Albemarle) was quietly squeezing them out, while advising the King against revenge. Yet Luce was quick to understand that, whether the country was a republic or a monarchy, it took the same number of men to administer it. He saw that the task was impossible without using men who had the administrative skills, even though as former Republicans they were tainted, and anyway the King had declared a general amnesty.

  Luce came back into public life stealthily. His compounding was explained away to anyone who remarked on it as a method of survival (as it had been in the case of many genuine Royalists); close friendship with Cromwell and his Puritan cronies was excused as the only way of existing. In fact it had been part of the glory-and-riches-for-Luce policy which he pursued all his adult life with the tenacity of a hungry debt collector. Before the Restoration he had been angry because during Cromwell’s dozen years in power he had never been able to get his hands on even one of the Royalist estates confiscated by the Lord Protector and given to his favourites. Two estates in particular (one of them bordering his own) had taken Luce’s fancy, and he was furious when the neighbouring land went to a wild-eyed parson famous in the county not for the quality of his sermons or the attention he gave his flock, but for the zeal with which he smashed, in all the churches within a day’s ride, everything he regarded as “idolatrous”. The sound of his mason’s hammer chipping fine altarpieces, the shrill orders which started off the pecking of chisels and the thud of mauls to deface wooden carvings, and the shattering of stained-glass windows wrought to the glory of God two centuries earlier by artists and artisans produced in him a secret fervour usually reserved for old men in bordellos and won him a public reputation as a sound Puritan – and Luce’s envy.

  At the Restoration, when the priest vanished, Luce’s hopes of ownership once again ran high – but the original Royalist owner of the estate (who Luce had been sure was killed at Marston Moor) had been with the King during the whole of his exile and returned home to miss the decamping priest by less than a week. Luce later heard that the priest had discovered from a servant (whom he had installed as one of his mistresses, assuring the bewildered girl that although she might fear pregnancy – she carried three children – she was obeying God’s will and thus there could be no sin) where the silver had been hidden when the Royalist had fled. The priest had apparently regarded it as part of his secul
ar duty to take the silver with him, packed in panniers on two mules, deciding he preferred the certainty of receiving his reward on earth.

  One way and another, Luce decided, the Restoration had so far added nothing to his fortune, but he was cunning enough to admit that General Monck’s virtual amnesty (the King’s rather) meant that Luce’s head stayed on his shoulders. He knew, during the darkest hours of the night, that he had been guilty of treason, but in the bright sunshine of the Restoration it was being overlooked, as though the Roundheads had not been regicides.

  Then with all the zeal found in devious converts, Luce assured himself that the country wanted a monarchy and set about being an ardent Royalist; so ardent that Monck, now the Duke of Albemarle, when considering the future of Jamaica (about which few people knew anything), saw it as just the exile he needed for Luce, thus beginning the long tradition of using Caribbee governorships as the dumping ground for men who were incompetent or otherwise an embarrassment to decent society or the government in London.

  So Commodore Mings had just returned to Port Royal with a frigate, delivering the new Governor. Luce’s first call once the anchors had splashed down had been for Major-General Heffer, a survivor of the Roundhead force which had originally captured the island and who (to his own surprise) had eventually found himself in command of the island as acting Governor. Since those heady days following the island’s capture, Heffer had died a hundred times in his own imagination, prey to every rumour about Cromwell’s health, Richard’s intentions, impending Spanish attacks, the starvation of his garrison – and mutiny.

  Originally the garrison had been (in Cromwell’s mind) the powerful force which would carry out his Western Design, starting with the capture of Hispaniola. That attack, Heffer readily admitted, had been a débâcle won by the Spanish and vile diseases like cholera and dysentery.

  The Roundhead survivors had reeled away to leeward, and captured Jamaica as a sop to the Lord Protector, driving out the small and started Spanish garrison and accidentally acquiring, without realizing it, one of the most strategically important islands in the West Indies, one that was as effective a threat to the galleons carrying the treasures of the Main to Spain as a knife at Philip IV’s throat.

  However, this was not how Heffer saw it. When General Venables and Admiral Penn, the leaders of the original expedition, hastily departed for England to make their excuses and claims over Hispaniola to an unsympathetic Lord Protector, Heffer had found himself left commanding an island garrisoned by disaffected and sickly troops and facing a threat from Spain that could only be driven off by the very ships of war that Venables and Penn had taken home. Not only that, he told Luce almost tearfully, his officers turned against him. By an oversight all the cattle and hogs on the island had been let loose and driven up into the mountains and the Cimarróns, the Indians made slaves by the Spaniards and who were expert in hunting them, had also been driven off, and his officers would do nothing to encourage their troops to till the land and plant the crops that would provide food – and make it easier for them to stay.

  When Luce had asked how his soldiers had survived so far, General Heffer admitted that he had managed to buy several hundred tons of maize from some pirates who had bought it from the Spaniards and smuggled it over from the Main. When asked whence came the cannon which Luce saw in some forts and batteries protecting the port, Heffer once again had to admit that the guns, powder and shot came from Santiago, in Cuba, and had been captured specially for the purpose by the same pirates.

  “Pirates?” Luce had exclaimed. “Seems obvious to me that these ‘pirates’ saved the island while you and your wretched army squabbled. You admit your officers won’t do anything that could result in them being left here. No sense of duty or honour, that’s obvious! You leave the defence of Jamaica to the pirates, while your officers want to abandon it altogether, eh?”

  Luce’s anger frightened Heffer, who had long ago lost his always flimsy confidence. First, there had been the rumours of the death of the Lord Protector, whom Heffer had come to regard as a talisman. Then after his death there had been a brief reprieve, when Richard Cromwell succeeded, but the rumours telling of that also told him that Richard had no liking for the job. Then had come the news that even now Heffer found it hard to credit – General Monck had crossed the Channel and brought back the King: Cromwell’s most successful general had restored the monarchy. And for Heffer there had been the weeks and months of waiting in Jamaica, never knowing when a frigate would appear over the horizon, never sure whether the orders it brought would set in motion Heffer’s hanging, reprieve, promotion, recall or what… Now the frigate had finally arrived, bring Sir Harold Neil Luce, Kt.

  Chapter Two

  After taking a cold and dispassionate look across the table at Heffer, Luce finally decided that he had made a dreadful mistake in accepting the governorship of Jamaica. In London at the time it had seemed exciting (romantic almost), and when whirling from drawing room to drawing room taking his farewell, he was the centre of congratulations (but far too naïve and self-centred to realize why so many influential people were glad to see him go). Then sailing in a special frigate which was waiting for him at Portsmouth…ah, governors were men of considerable importance!

  On the long voyage to the Tropics he had pictured the Governor’s residence in Jamaica as large and airy, high-ceilinged, the walls covered with rich hangings (he understood they liked them in the Tropics), plenty of servants, and all the tradesmen living there only too glad to welcome him and give him credit as they fawned their way to favouritism – yes, he was looking forward to that, and speculated what it would mean in terms of “presents”.

  Heffer with his long sheeplike face symbolized all of Sir Harold Luce’s disappointments: there was no Government House, no one apparently gave a damn that the new Governor had arrived and certainly on one was in a hurry to beg favours.

  This damned man Heffer, who had occupied the only house of consequence near the harbour (Luce had yet to explore the capital, which was inland) and had immediately been made to surrender it to the new Governor, was a typical Puritan: the whole damned house was whitewashed like a monk’s cell or a Roundhead privy. In fact, Luce was both intimidated and intrigued because Heffer’s austerity and cold disapproval of just about everything seeped through the house like the reek of sewage, even creeping invisibly into rooms he had obviously never used.

  On the voyage out here, Luce had imagined a large and well furnished room, probably panelled and with a long and polished table, at the head of which he would sit, with his newly chosen island executive council seated left and right in order of seniority. Servants would bring in refreshing drinks as diligent clerks wrote minutes or prepared letters and copied them into the letter book. Life would be conducted (leisurely) by a snap of finger against thumb.

  So much for imagination; Luce had now to admit that the reality was quite different. The new council chamber would have to be this wretched little room that Heffer used as an office, little more than a rabbit hutch with one tiny window, a desk and chair, and a small table at which five could be seated. Six, if Heffer could find another chair.

  Work with Heffer…well, that’s what his orders said, but they might as well have told him to bring out a shepherd’s crook: Heffer was a man who always lost; that much was clear to Luce who, by playing a waiting game, had so far always won.

  Luce looked down at the list of items he had written down in preparation for this first meeting with the acting Governor (from whom he was taking over and who was to become his deputy) and a few leading citizens chosen by Heffer. Ah, how he had thought about it all during the long and very tedious voyage from England: he had made list upon list, tearing up one after the other as new ideas came to him and new problems emerged.

  He need not have bothered. Instead of Sir Harold Luce, Kt, Governor of Jamaica, etc., etc., consulting with his deputy Governor (gra
nting him an occasional audience, Luce had supposed) the whole thing was taking on the tone of a local parson questioning the grocer about overcharging – and doing it in the potting shed.

  And the heat. And the damnable insects – the mosquitoes he could see and hear and they were biting, but the sharpest stings, like stabs with red-hot needles, came from wretched little things he could not even see, and which Heffer casually dismissed as “only” sandflies, explaining that the soldiers called them “no-see ’ems”, and the worst itching soon wore off. And the humidity. And the hurricane season. And no fruit or vegetables to speak of, according to Heffer, and precious little meat…

  Luce told himself for the second time that he had made a bad mistake: he should have stayed in London. No glory was coming his way out here, even if he made a good job of being Governor; and there would certainly be no money, apart from his salary, because it was already quite obvious that these Puritan peasants were too mean and too righteous to offer a bribe and possibly too poor anyway: they wallowed in their poverty as though it brought them closer to Heaven.

  The next item on Luce’s list was establishing an island currency.

  “Money,” he said to Heffer. “Currency.” And noting the blank look on the man’s face, said impatiently: “Without a legal currency and a credible rate of exchange we can’t have trade! We have to establish trade, so we need currency. You can’t go on exchanging things. Using sugar as money is absurd. ‘A pound of sugar is worth a penny’–” he laughed cynically and then smiled understandingly at Heffer: these sort of things were beyond the understanding or competence of soldiers.

  “But we have a currency, sir,” said a startled Heffer. “We use it all the time now.”

  “Ah yes, some metal coins your fellows have stamped out with a hammer and die, no doubt. No, I mean a proper and acceptable currency which has its own intrinsic value, based on silver or gold.”