The Mountain of Gold Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Epigraphs

  PART ONE

  One

  Two

  PART TWO

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  PART THREE

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Epilogue

  Historical Note

  Acknowledgements

  Footnotes

  First U. S. Edition

  Copyright © 2011 by J. D. Davies

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book,

  write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company,

  215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  www.hmhbooks.com

  First published in Great Britain by Old Street Publishing Ltd, 2011.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Davies, J. D.

  The mountain of gold / J. D. Davies.—1st U.S. ed.

  p. cm.

  Sequel to: Gentleman Captain.

  ISBN 978-0-547-58099-9 (hardback)

  1. Ship captains—Great Britain—Fiction. 2. Pirates—Fiction.

  3. Treasure troves—Fiction. 4. Great Britain. Royal Navy—Officers—Fiction.

  5. Great Britain—History—Charles II, 1660–1685—Fiction.

  6. Great Britain—History, Naval—17th century—Fiction.

  7. Africa, North—Fiction. I. Title.

  PR6104.A863M68 2012

  823'.92—dc23 2011028559

  Printed in the United States of America

  DOC 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Good God, what an age is this and what a world is this, that a man cannot live without playing the knave and dissimulation.

  The Diary of Samuel Pepys, 1 September 1661

  It is by my order and for the good of the state that the bearer has done what has been done.

  Cardinal Richelieu in The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas

  PART ONE

  His Majesty's Ship, The Wessex

  The Western Mediterranean and Tangier

  June 1663

  One

  The Last Trump sounded, summoning all the dead to rise again.

  This inconveniently interrupted my stimulating nocturnal activities with both the Queen of Spain and my wife in the perfumed opulence of the Khan of Samarkand's state bedroom. A state bedroom with walls of rough oak. Walls that vanished, one by one, as a scrofulous carpenter's crew tore them down. Perfumed fragrances that gave way in an instant to the all-pervasive stench of tar, tobacco, piss and sweat. A provocatively naked Queen of Spain replaced in the blink of a waking eye by the ugly bald pate and eternally pained face of my clerk Phineas Musk. He held a breastplate in one hand and my sword in the other.

  My thoughts and ears finally caught up with my eyes. On the deck above my head, men were running to our ship's guns, our drummer was beating to quarters, and our trumpeters were sounding a chorus of defiance that their somnolent captain had mistaken for the harbingers of the Dies Irae. I was aware again of the heat, the ceaseless, unforgiving heat that had kept me awake until moments before my dream-time wife and the Queen of Spain began to...

  'Fog's lifted,' said Musk in his gruff Thamesman's voice. 'We're right on top of a corsair galley. Another one in sight, too. Both crippled and sinking, by the looks of things, after fighting each other nigh to Hell and back. Probably fallen out with each other over some fat argosy. Mister Castle's talking about it as the easiest prize we'll see in all our days, if not two of 'em at once. Looks like the good Lord smiles on you once again, Captain Quinton.'

  I buckled on the sword but declined the breastplate, ignored the unceremonious disregard with which my men were throwing my worldly belongings into the hold, and made my way up onto the quarterdeck, where the full force of the morning sun struck me at once. My shirt was open to the waist. My chest, the palest dove-white at the beginning of our voyage, was now as red-brown as that of the longest serving foremast-man.

  The guns were already run out, and the ships' boys were bringing up extra powder and shot. The trumpeter kept up his cacophony, and the drummer added a persistent rhythm to our preparation for war. Everywhere, men wore the grim smiles that anticipated bloodshed and prize money, with little heed of the possibility that they might be on the cusp of their own mortalities.

  The Wessex was ready for battle, and only her captain remained ignorant of her enemy.

  William Castle, my veteran lieutenant, raised his plumed hat in salute. He was even more jovial than was his wont, this round, red-faced man of forty or so whose left hand had been carried away by a Spanish shot when Myngs took Santiago da Cuba a few years before. He said, 'A good day to you, Captain. A very good day indeed, by all the heavens. We come out of that dismal fog, and straight away there she lies, right in our path. If ever a man needed proof of God's divine providence, there it is, sir.'

  I turned and looked out no more than half a mile. There, off our starboard bow, was the galley. Not a large one—perhaps thirty oars on each side—but she was in a dire state. Her masts were all gone, and much of her larboard quarter with them. Perhaps half the oars on that side were shattered or missing altogether. Dark stains, some still discernibly red, marked her hull: the blood of the godly slaves who had manned her oars, and equally of the heathens who had whipped them into battle. Blood mixed once and for all in the indiscriminate ooze of death. A torn black flag still flew defiantly at her staff, and I could hear the howls of a few of her crew, still determined to give a feeble imitation of the terrifying noise that brought not a few of our merchants' ships to surrender before they had even engaged. Plainly, these men had fought long and hard, and they might have won their passage back to Algier or Tunis, but for the leaks that would surely sink them long before they got there—that, and coming out of a fog to find themselves directly in the path of the Wessex, a good stout English frigate of forty-six guns commanded by Captain Matthew Quinton, who despite his tender twenty-three years was already in his third command, a veteran of battle, wounding and shipwreck, and an increasingly consummate seaman. Or so he liked to believe.

  I took my telescope from Musk and levelled it on the second galley, perhaps a mile and a half or two miles away. This one, much larger, was almost as dreadfully shattered, but still had a jury mast for her lateen rig—terms I had learned barely a month earlier—and rode a little higher in the water. Her flag, too, still flew from her staff, but it was of a very different nature to the black banner of the corsair in our path. On a red field, riddled with musket holes, was emblazoned a white or silver cross, its ends pointed.

  I lowered the telescope and said, A galley of Malta, gentlemen. She flies the flag of the Order.'

  There was a hum of disappointment about the deck (some of it emanating from Phineas Musk) as men realised that a Maltese galley would be no prize for a Christian ship of war; quite the reverse, in fact. The galleys and knights of the Order of Saint John of Malta were legend. A hundred years before, the tiny, barren island fortress of the Knights had beaten off the greatest siege the world had known, and with it the vast and previously invincible armies of Sultan Suleiman
the Magnificent. The Order waged an unending war against the heathens who fought under the Crescent. So I knew the legend of the Knights of Malta, and I respected those who maintained its ideal; indeed, but a week earlier we had fulsomely saluted two of the Order's galleys that we encountered off Sicily. But the Maltese galley was much further away than the Wessex from the enemy that she had evidently fought almost to destruction. Her own damage meant that it would be an hour or more before she could come up with the corsair, if she ever did—for the corsair could sink, or make good its repairs and escape, or blow itself up rather than fall into the hands of the infidel. I had heard of such things.

  One thing for it, then.

  The gazes of Lieutenant Castle, Phineas Musk, the half-dozen other men on the quarterdeck, and not a few of the men at the guns on the upper deck, were focused intently on me. There was Martin Lanherne, ship's coxswain, and behind him his fellow Cornishmen, the likes of the simian John Treninnick, the mountainous George Polzeath and the minute but formidable John Tremar. Then there was the black Virginian Julian Carvell and the young Scot Macferran. All of their faces were lined with undisguised, brazen avarice. These men had served in my previous command, the frigate Jupiter, and had volunteered to sail with me again, even though that last commission had come perilously close to despatching us all to the seat of judgment. Only my young friend and mentor Kit Farrell was missing, for he was bound to the Barbados as master's mate on a large London vessel with a sure cargo of tobacco waiting to be brought home, and was thus guaranteed rather more substantial pay than he could expect in the same rank aboard the Wessex.

  At last, I smiled and said, 'Our prize, I think, Mister Castle. A shot across her bows, if you please, followed by a summons to surrender.'

  Rarely in the history of the navy can an order have been carried out with such rapidity and ill-concealed delight.

  ***

  The corsairs of the Barbary Coast were the most feared spectacle on all the seas, particularly in their own, the Middle Sea that stretches from the Pillars of Hercules to the Holy Land. They preyed upon the shipping of Christian countries, and even roamed as far afield as the shores of England and beyond. Thousands of poor innocents were held as slaves in their hell-hole cities, above all in Algier, with which my master King Charles was formally at war. After all, this was why we were where we were; the Wessex was convoying six valuable cargoes back from Smyrna in the Levant, for the merchants of London demanded—and were duly given—naval protection against the ever-present threat of the corsairs. We were cruising independently only because Sir John Lawson, the admiral commanding our fleet in those seas, had temporarily entrusted our charges to the lumbering Paragon, freeing my Wessex (a better sailer, clean and fast) to hunt down the Barbary scourge.

  We had pursued a corsair ship off the coast of Minorca only a few days before, trading round shot with him before the wind died away and he put out his oars. On that occasion the captain had laughed heartily as, stroke by stroke, his craft pulled away from us, free to fall on other benighted mariners.

  But even a corsair sometimes has to acknowledge the harsh reality of defeat, particularly when half his crew is dead and his craft is sinking, and even more so when a broadside of over twenty iron guns on each side can send him to Allah in a matter of minutes. The stricken galley's captain, a swarthy, turbaned man of forty or fifty, even raised his curved scimitar in salute to me as his men hauled down their black flag.

  Lieutenant Castle organised a prize crew to take possession, its chief task being to liberate the poor souls who had spent many long years chained to oars on behalf of their heathen masters. I could see and hear them as they were brought up from below, pale creatures, some stark naked, others clad only in a cloth about their privates, all with wrists and ankles red and bleeding from their newly-broken shackles. A few looked around uncomprehendingly, but others cried out in joy, not a few wept uncontrollably, and some pointed to the Wessex and her captain, bowing and waving in relief and gratitude.

  I remember that sight, I hear the sounds, and I smell the stench, as though it was all but this morning. In all my long years on this earth, I have seen many sights to turn a stomach or elevate a heart, but only once have I witnessed a scene that brought on those two sensations together. All these years later—past sixty of them—I can still see the tears on the face of one thin grey-bearded old man, his hands clasped in prayer as he offered up thanks for his deliverance. In that moment, he fell down to the deck. Even though I was standing on another ship a few hundred yards away, I did not need the shake of the head from my crewman who attended him to tell me that the old man was dead. True, he had died a free man, but ever since that day, I have debated in my mind whether the sudden realisation of that very freedom killed him.

  In their turn, the captain of the galley and his surviving officers were brought over for questioning. I watched them brought aboard, these three dark-skinned men in their long white robes. They looked about our deck with disdain, as though only a trick of the unkindest fate had put them into my power; as, indeed, it had. Coxswain Lanherne led the captain down to my cabin. He was tall and defiant, this Moor, his bearing that of a nobleman. He was clean shaven, a thing unusual for that race. He saluted me with an elaborate wave of his hand, after the fashion of his kind, and muttered some imprecations that might or might not have been calling down the blessings of Allah upon my head. I began by asking him the name of his home port, for I assumed that like so many of the men of the African shore, he would have acquired at least a smattering of the tongues of those whose ships he preyed upon relentlessly.

  He stared at me, uncomprehending.

  I tried again in French, in which I was fluent, and Dutch, with which I was reasonably conversant (having lived in that country for some time before the happy restoration of King Charles, and having acquired a vivacious Dutch wife and tedious Dutch brother-in-law as a consequence).

  The brown-red face remained a mask, even when Lieutenant Castle tried his competent Spanish and Phineas Musk attempted the rudimentary Greek that he had acquired a few weeks earlier from an intriguingly immoral nun on Rhodes.

  I spoke to Musk, who returned after a short while with a man as dark-skinned as my captive, albeit shorter by a head. This was Ali Reis, an Algerine renegade who had served with me on the Jupiter. I asked my questions again through my interpreter, and at last the corsair captain launched into a babble of incomprehensible speech, rolling his eyes to the heavens (or at least, to the deck a few inches above his head) and gesticulating wildly. Finally he drew breath, and Ali Reis said, 'He claims to be of Oran, Captain, and says his name is Omar Ibrahim. His galley was twenty days out of Algier when it encountered the Maltese. But there is one thing more, Captain.'

  Ali Reis stepped across to me and whispered in my ear. I frowned and asked, Are you certain?'

  The Moor nodded determinedly, placing his hands on his chest and head. I looked hard at the corsair captain and said, 'Omar Ibrahim of Oran, indeed. A shame for you, Omar Ibrahim, that Ali Reis, here, has a better ear for languages than all the diplomats of the Pope, the King of France and the Sultan combined, even if you locked them all away together in the Tower of Babel for a hundred years. He tells me that as an Algerine himself, he has encountered many men from Oran, but never one who speaks Arabic with the brogue of County Cork.'

  At that, Musk reached out and pulled off the man's turban, revealing a shock of sun-curled red hair. The corsair captain nodded slowly, as though ending some secret inner game, looked me in the eye, and said in rolling Gael-English, 'Ah well, Captain. God bless all here.'

  Lieutenant Castle raised his eyebrows and nodded vigorously. 'A renegade, then, and what's worse, a damned Irish renegade! A king's subject turned Turk, by God. There's only one outcome for that, Captain. Hang the bastard. Send him up to meet Saint Peter and then down to meet Lucifer, fast as you like.'

  Castle pronounced the sentence with his usual good humour, making a public execution sound like a forfeit in s
ome hilarious tavern game, and Musk (who had found the perfect carousing partner in my veteran lieutenant) nodded heartily in agreement. Now, I am no milksop in such matters—as I get older, my list of those who should be summarily hanged lengthens almost daily, the most recent additions being my cook and most of the inhabitants of Winchester. But as it was, my more tolerant younger self sensed that more might be gained by questioning this Irish Turk than by at once placing a noose around his neck and throwing him off the main yard.

  I attempted to make myself as grand and terrifying as possible, saying, 'Well, my renegade friend, Lieutenant Castle has spoken justly. The King himself instructed me to execute any of your kind that we encounter.' (This was strictly correct, as my orders contained such an injunction; but my attempt to convey the impression that Charles the Second and I spoke intimately about such matters was the merest bluster.) 'But we Quintons don't despatch men to their maker without giving them the chance to tell their tale.'

  Castle shook his head, clearly believing this to be an unnecessary diversion which delayed a good hanging. He excused himself, returning to the quarterdeck to monitor the slow approach of the Maltese galley. Ali Reis went with him, for evidently I now had no need of an interpreter, and both Musk and John Treninnick, who guarded the door, carried enough weapons to deter a small regiment, let alone one unarmed Irishman-turned-Turk.

  The corsair captain grinned and said, 'Ah, but you're a fair man, Captain Quinton. Now that's a name of some honour, I think, that I knew from my old life. Is it not so? I was in Kinsale town, a lad of seven or eight, when Lord Buckingham's fleet came back from Cadiz. There was one ship especially, with an old captain on her quarterdeck, and my father pointed him out, and he says to me, "Brian, my son,"—Brian Doyle O'Dwyer, I was, before Omar Ibrahim was hatched out of a Mahometan egg—"Brian, that captain there, he's the famous Quinton that sailed with Drake and fought the Armada, no less. An earl of England, he is." Now, what was that title he bore? Near forty years ago, Captain, and my memory's not what it was. Some bird, I think. Eagleswing? Hawkscar?'