The Portuguese Affair Read online

  ‘I will promise you to set up my hospital tent well out of range of the guns.’ I spoke as lightly as I could. Burdened with my other knowledge, I had carefully pushed thoughts of the fighting to the back of my mind. ‘Come, Simon, you should be cheering me on my way with good wishes for our success. And besides,’ I said, as the import of his words struck me, ‘why do you call Dom Antonio a puppet king?’

  ‘Oh, now, Kit, you cannot tell me that he will be anything else? When English money and English ships and English lives have put him on the throne? When the Queen herself bears a quarter of the expense?’

  ‘She wants to follow up the success of the Armada by crushing Spanish power.’

  ‘I am sure she does. But once she has put that weak and vain man on the throne, she will not sit back gracefully and allow him free rein. You may count on it, she will expect to be paid back every penny tenfold in taxes and trade concessions. King Antonio will be tied hand and foot to Her Majesty.’

  I could say nothing to this. I knew a little about some of the conditions attached to the expedition. I did not expect Simon to have guessed so much and deduced more. Yet he was clever and well-informed. He too attended the discussions of politics and world affairs, as I did, held by Raleigh at Durham House. I should not have been surprised.

  I turned the conversation then and we talked generally of how he and the other players were faring under their new patron, and whether the good weather would last so that they could begin performing at the Theatre in a week or two’s time. And whether this year the harvests would be better, and hunger less amongst the poor.

  ‘What of your patients at St Bartholomew’s?’ Simon said. ‘Surely you will be away for months. Are you not troubled for them?’

  ‘Numbers are much less, now that the winter is past,’ I said. ‘The deputy superintendent has arranged for a retired physician to come in two days a week. They will manage without me. It will be a swift expedition, a few weeks. I shall soon be back.’

  He still looked troubled, and I found my heart beating uncomfortably fast. Did Simon indeed care whether I went or stayed? But I was afraid to confront the thought. I was never sure what he felt about me, and would not stop to examine what I felt about him. Instead I turned our conversation again to what he and his fellow actors were planning for the coming weeks. At first he seemed reluctant to leave the matter of the Portuguese expedition, but at last he began to talk of a new play and a new boy actor he was training to undertake women’s roles. We shared a cold pie Joan had left in the hanging meat safe, and I hoped I had successfully put an end to his disquieting questions.

  However, before he went, he threw a comradely arm around my shoulders and gave me a rough hug. I felt my heart jump in my breast and knew he would not have done such a thing, had he known I was a girl. My boy’s disguise had been for so long my sanctuary, where I had felt safe and at ease. In this role, this actor’s part, I could share Simon’s companionship, sit with him virtually alone of an evening while my father slept, with a freedom that the truth would have destroyed in a moment. And yet, and yet, my sanctuary was beginning to feel like a prison.

  ‘Take care of yourself, Kit, in the company of those pirates and lunatics! And come safe home again.’

  At that moment I very nearly broke down and gave away my secret.

  Chapter Three

  Next morning, very early, I took leave of my father. He gave me his blessing, his eyes shining with hope at the prospect of all this expedition might gain for us. If it had done nothing else, the Counter Armada, as it was beginning to be called, had restored to him something of his old strength of body and mind. His movements were vigorous and in the last few weeks there had been no signs of those wandering wits which had so frightened me in recent months. My dog Rikki, accidentally acquired last year in the Low Countries, sensed that something was wrong and howled mournfully as I closed the door on them.

  The previous evening I had packed my knapsack with two changes of light-weight clothes, recalling as I did so the thick garments I had taken with me on my first mission for Sir Francis to the Low Countries in the winter of 1587. Then I had been warned of the bitter cold. Now I was returning to a country I knew well, where the heat of summer would have overtaken us before the expedition returned, and I hardly had clothes thin enough for the weather we would encounter on shore. Aboard ship there would be some hope of a cooling breeze, but even the lightest of my English clothes would be hard to bear in the full heat of a Portuguese summer. The cool cotton fabrics we had known there, a legacy of Arab days, were unknown in London, where the thinnest materials were the silks and fine linens, too costly for me to afford.

  As well as clothes I packed a pair of summer shoes that I wore normally at the hospital, my physician’s gown, and two books. One was the volume of Sidney’s poetry which Simon had given me for my seventeenth birthday. I was never sure how he had managed to obtain it, for it had been privately printed and circulated simply amongst the circle of Sidney’s friends. There was talk of a public edition being printed, but nothing had come of it yet. The other book had been given me the previous Sunday by the rector of St Bartholomew’s church, the Reverend David Dee. It was a small, rather badly printed copy of the four gospels, produced in Geneva. He was not himself a Genevan, deploring their extreme Protestantism, but they were very active in producing inexpensive books of piety.

  ‘I am sure you will have many tedious and idle hours at sea, Kit,’ he said, with a slightly repressive smile. ‘This may help to pass them. You have told me that you wish to read the Bible for yourself, and this is the most important part, the life and works of Our Lord. It may also be a consolation for you, in the difficult times which lie ahead, for I fear there will be fighting.’

  ‘Aye, Father,’ I said. ‘I fear there will.’

  The Reverend Dee was a somewhat difficult man. My father, amongst those of higher rank in the parish, respected him for his learning and certainly his sermons were models of well-argued prose, straight from the Oxford Schools. However, he had one over-riding passion, and those afflicted by this particular passion are rarely loved by their neighbours. He was a builder. I was not privy to the details of his vision, but I knew – for he often dwelt on it in his sermons – that he fervently deplored the destruction of so much of the ancient and beautiful priory of St Bartholomew’s and dreamt of restoring it. After so many of the monastic buildings had been pulled down in the time of King Henry, a huddle of cottages had been built on the glebe land, mainly from the broken stone and timber of the priory buildings. They were an unlovely collection, but they provided housing in the parish for a number of families. The Reverend Dee wanted to eject the tenants, pull down the cottages and replace them with an extension to the church and other parochial buildings. As a result, he was regularly at loggerheads with the tenants, who had countered by laying charges of lewd behaviour against him.

  I believed none of it, for he was an upright man, even if obsessed and prepared to drive a carriage and four through other people’s lives in pursuit of his dreams. The dispute, if taken to the law courts, could drag on for years. He had never been other than courteous to my father and myself, so I thanked him for his gift, wondering the while whether he had any idea of the extent of danger and fighting which lay ahead of me. Privately, I felt that Sidney’s poetry might bring me more consolation than these dense, almost indecipherable pages, but it was kindly meant of him.

  In addition to my knapsack, I carried my satchel of medicines. This was crammed as full as it would hold, until the seams strained and I could barely buckle it shut. I retained the special compartment at the bottom, which the leatherworker Jake Winterly had made for me, and into this I placed my most precious items – ground pearls and unicorn horn, calabar beans against poisoning, and the rarest of our herbs. The rest of the satchel was filled with every sort of wound salve, febrifuge herbs, extract of poppy, vomitives, senna, and binding tinctures against the flux. I took few instruments, just a scalpel, a probe, t
weezers large and small, needles and thread for stitching wounds. Dr Nuñez and I had consulted over the medical supplies which should be carried by the fleet. Our own ship would be better provided than the rest, with the two of us and Dr Ruy Lopez on board. We advised the captains of the other ships, but they had their own naval surgeons and whether they would listen to us was doubtful. We were regarded as civilians, with no experience in warfare, at sea or on land. The fact that I had cared for the wounded soldiers who had survived the siege of Sluys counted for little, as did my brief encounter with a naval battle the previous summer.

  It was a beautiful morning when I left home, soft with the pearly light of early spring, and the whole of London was aflutter with courting and nesting birds. In muddy corners primroses raised faces as shiny as butter and in a patch of waste ground, where a house had collapsed and not been rebuilt, there was a patch of bluebells as gloriously bright amongst the rubble as the southern skies we would soon be seeing. There was a tightness in my chest, part fear, part – I suppose – excitement, for although I was apprehensive, there was something gallant and defiant in this whole undertaking. We might have won the great sea battle in the previous year, but we all knew in our hearts that we had come near to defeat, confronted by that fleet, the largest the world had ever seen. Had the great wind not come to our aid, scattering the Spanish ships and preventing the rendezvous with their army in the Low Countries, we must surely have been defeated and would now be living under the iron heel of the Spanish conqueror.

  I shivered, despite the bright morning. It had come very close, that defeat. And now we were to sail south to Spain, into the mouth of the lion, and attempt to turn the tables on them, by destroying their fleet, landing on soil they held, defeating their army. Could we possibly achieve such a victory, unless God were once again on our side? We would have a fleet of nearly a hundred and fifty ships and an army of thirty thousand soldiers, but the Spaniards had but to hold fast where they had fortified towns and harbours. Moreover, of these ships of ours, eighty were pinnaces or Dutch vlieboten, small and manoeuvrable, but carrying limited fire-power. There were only six war galleons. The rest were armed merchantmen, built for trade rather than warfare. And our soldiers would mostly be untrained recruits, with just a small leavening of experienced troops drawn from our forces who had been supporting the Dutch rebels in the Low Countries. If the two armies should ever meet in pitched battle on land, there was little doubt what the outcome would be, in the face of Spain’s professional army. Ours was the greater task and could not be accomplished unless the people of Portugal – my own people, I reminded myself – rose up in support of the invasion and fought side by side with us.

  When I reached the Legal Quays near the Tower, there was a great bustle and shouting. Only the smallest part of the fleet was here, for most was in harbour at Plymouth, or on the way there. Nevertheless the cranes on the dockside were hard at work loading provisions and weapons on to the ships moored here, or on to the supply boats ferrying goods out to the largest ships anchored off shore. The cranesmen were stripped to the waist and sweating profusely. Sailors crowded the decks of the ships, catching hold of the awkward bundles which spun dizzily at the ends of the cranes’ hawsers and guiding them down through the hatches into the holds below deck.

  I scanned the ships, searching for the Victory, the ship which had been allocated to the Portuguese party. Amongst this busy throng I could not see her, but then caught sight of Dr Hector Nuñez, standing on the quayside, a little behind Ruy Lopez, who was attending obsequiously on Dom Antonio. All three were splendidly dressed, as were the men in the Dom’s livery, marshalling what appeared to be an immense amount of personal baggage. I might be one of this Portuguese party, but I could hardly compare with all this sartorial splendour, despite the fact that I was wearing my best doublet, a shirt topped with a small but elegant ruff, and a pair of woollen stocking finer than any I had ever possessed before, a parting gift from Sara Lopez. I would keep my distance.

  Skulking half hidden behind a massive barrel which, from the smell, contained stock fish, I thought I would watch where they went and follow at a distance. However, Dr Nuñez, glancing round, spotted me and motioned me to join them. Reluctantly, I did so.

  Dr Nuñez clasped both my hands in his. He was glowing with excitement. ‘Well, Kit, so we are on our way at last! I never believed this day would come. Soon we will walk again on the soil of our motherland.’

  I tried to smile. At the same time, I wondered. For had not Dr Nuñez and his wife left Portugal to come to London long before Spain had invaded? They had chosen to leave, to make their home in England. They were not enforced exiles like my father and me, driven out by the terror of the Inquisition. I could not quite understand his enthusiasm. Instead, I turned to practical matters.

  ‘Which is our ship?’ I asked. ‘I can see none called the Victory.’

  ‘There.’ He pointed to one of the galleons anchored off shore, too large to tie up beside the quay. ‘We are just waiting for a boat to take us on board.’

  She was certainly a fine ship, I had to admit. Of course I should I have realised that the ship which would convey the new king to his kingdom would be one of the finest in the fleet. He could not be expected to travel in one of the merchantmen, however comfortable. One consolation, I supposed, was that she carried a full complement of forty-two guns.

  The first boat took off Dom Antonio, Ruy Lopez and some of what I imagined must be their most precious possessions. I went in the second with Hector Nuñez and more of the luggage, carrying my own knapsack and satchel myself. It needed a third and fourth boat to convey the remaining servants and bundles. The Thames was at the slack of the tide, so that it was easy enough to climb the sturdy ladder lowered for us, not like a frightening experience I had had when joining Dr Nuñez’s ship the Santa Maria off the coast of Portugal when I was twelve. That was past, I told myself firmly, jumping down on to the deck. I would not let myself think of the past, but only of the future, of the three missions I must accomplish, two for Walsingham and one for myself.

  It was some time before we sailed. While the older members of our Portuguese party were being received graciously by the captain and his senior officers, I kept out of the way and found a place by the railings of the poop deck where I could watch all the activity of the loading. Most of the Victory must have been loaded already, but there were still goods coming aboard, besides the Dom’s possessions. The ship had its own crane for lifting goods from the supply boats inboard. When I grew tired of watching that, I strolled about the decks, making myself familiar with the layout of the ship which would be my home for all the weeks ahead. Apart from that first journey from Portugal I had never been on such a large ship, for those which had taken me twice to the Low Countries were pinnaces, as small by comparison as a terrier beside the mythical oliphants that are said to inhabit the inner lands of Africa, or like a herring beside a whale.

  The size of the ship reminded me of that first ship I had travelled in, although that had been a merchantman, not a ship of war, and despite my determination to banish all thoughts of that voyage seven years ago, I knew a moment of panic. We would be travelling back over those same waters, in a ship not so very different. I tried to concentrate on immediate and urgent problems. I needed to know where I would sleep. Here I could not offer to sleep with the horses, as I had done when Nicholas Berden and I had travelled together on Walsingham’s business. Would I be expected to sleep with the crew? It would be impossible, and still conceal my sex. To share a cabin with the distinguished members of our party, or with the ship’s officers would be just as dangerous.

  I investigated the ship from bow to stern as unobtrusively as possible, keeping out of the way of the sailors, and at last found what I was looking for. There was a corner on the foredeck, behind a massive water cask and between two huge coils of thick rope, where I reckoned I could bed down unseen, if I could make my way here without being forestalled. It would be uncomfortable, but
not cold, even while we were in English coastal waters, and it would be far better and safer than sleeping hugger-mugger in a hammock amongst the crew. I stowed my knapsack here, but kept my satchel on my shoulder.

  That was one problem solved, I hoped, but as the last of the supply boats drew away and the swirling river waters showed that the tide was turning to the ebb, I felt a terrible lurch of fear in my stomach. It caught me so suddenly that it stopped my breath. A single topsail was hoisted on the mainmast. The anchor chain rattled up as six of the crew trudged round the capstan with a rhythmic chant to help their efforts. The great anchor rose, dripping weed and Thames mud. The signals from officers to crew on this huge ship were conveyed by whistles or trumpets, unlike the friendly shouts I had known on the pinnaces. I saw a ship’s boy climbing the main mast, nimble as a monkey, with something gripped in his teeth. The mainsail and the lateen sail on the mizzen mast were hoisted, but not yet the rest of the canvas, for the ship would need to manoeuvre slowly down river until we were clear of London’s water traffic. All around us, other ships in the fleet were making ready to sail down the Thames on the ebb tide, bound for Plymouth.

  The boy had reached the masthead and seemed to be busy up there, then I saw what he was about. As he shinnied down again, the wind caught the standard fixed there, and it broke out fully in view: Dom Antonio’s standard, bearing the coat of arms of the Portuguese royal dynasty, the Aviz. There could be no going back now. The sight of that flag, the increasing speed of the ship, the diminishing view of the Tower and the Bridge behind us was like the stuff of nightmares, as though some hidden, malevolent force were sucking me back the way I had come, making a mockery of my escape from Portugal.