The Mountain of Gold Read online

  'Well, Captain, I see it this way. Suppose we were at war with the Dutch again, and we chanced upon a ship of theirs that was plundering a merchantman of ours, but our foe got away from us, and we pursued it.' He took another draught of wine, and said, 'Well, what I'd want to know is this, I suppose—how would you know the name of the captain you were fighting before you actually took his ship?'

  ***

  Tangier.

  As the Wessex beat up into the bay from the north-east, I studied this much-vaunted new jewel in England's crown. A city of low, white houses huddled together on a hill of bare, red rock, like all the land that surrounded it. A city baked by the sun: unceasing, unrelenting sun. There were walls, and forts, and at the summit, a castle, over which flew the Union flag of Charles the Second's two kingdoms (this having replaced the flag of Portugal but the year before, when Tangier formed part of our Queen Catherine's marriage dowry). Soon, it was said, a great breakwater, the mole, would stretch out to sea, part of a grandiose scheme to turn this into a mighty port from which the king's fleets would roam the oceans, and England would dominate the trade of the world. What utter, unforgiving folly. Even as a young captain, ignorant in so many of the ways of the world, I could divine all too readily that this tiny outpost of our country, set down upon an alien shore, was fated to fail. I could see plainly the serried ranks of Moorish horsemen parading in front of the town, searching for a weak spot in the defences. I glimpsed red-coated soldiers upon the ramparts. An occasional matchlock-spark or puff of smoke betrayed the warning shots fired in the name of King Charles. The truth was that for all the great ambitions for it, Tangier was a city under permanent siege.

  We anchored in what Lieutenant Castle proclaimed to be damnably foul ground that was bound to do for our best bower, and Coxswain Lanherne assembled the long boat's crew to row me ashore. The harbour, such as it was, contained no other ships, for the fleet was at sea and our convoy (with which we were meant to rendezvous in this roadstead) had been detained in Alicante by a leak to the Paragon. This was fortunate, for it gave me an opportunity to pursue the matter of the unbelievable claims of the Irish Turk who sat in my hold, secured to the deck by manacles.

  I walked up the street toward the Upper Castle. This was my second visit to Tangier; we had called during our outward voyage, albeit very briefly, for the wind had been in our favour for a passage up the Straits, and no seaman (even one as raw as myself) will ever deny such a favourable breeze. Thus I had not then been able to pay my respects to the new governor, who in any case was leading a sally forth against the Moors of the hinterland, and my limited time ashore had been restricted to berating the victualler on the quayside. Now I had time to absorb the strange sense of this place, and of the even stranger collection of humanity that had fetched up on this most desperate shore. There were Arabs, of course, bearded and robed in white, haggling with the Portuguese merchants who had stayed behind when their country abandoned them. There were soldiers, many of them evidently Scots or Irish, sweating in their rough red uniforms, some running with muskets in hand as they hastened to reinforce one of the outlying forts. There were clerks aplenty; Tangier in those early days was a very heaven for the attorneys, for whom the transfer of territory from one sovereign to another generated endless disputes over title and, consequently, endless opportunities to line their pockets. There were urchins of indeterminate nationality, snapping at my heels from street to street and crying out for baksheesh (or, in one incongruous case, begging for a groat in an accent that was purest Norfolk). Every man of every race seemed to look over his shoulder, fearful of what lay beyond the walls. Then there were women. Some of these, perhaps, might have been respectable; or at least, some of them might have been respectable once. But as I have observed many times in my life, heat, wine and a distance of several hundred miles from England conspire to transform many a cloistered maiden into the most brazen of wenches. It was as well that I was a married man, still newly married enough to be true to my vows.

  By the time I reached the gate of the Upper Castle, I was a vision of sweat. I had removed my wig not long after leaving the boat, and ran a hand over the stubble of my hair (shaven partly for comfort, partly to conceal its premature loss), hoping by that means to reduce the torrent flowing into my eyes. It was with some difficulty that I persuaded the sergeant at the gate that I was the captain of a king's ship, having legitimate business with the governor. My temper was not improved by learning that once again, the governor was not in his residence, but was down the wall, toward what was called the Catherine Port. I set off once more, praying silently for the sudden arrival of a proper English June day with its fine cold rain.

  I found the governor of Tangier in the midst of a bevy of his officers, gazing out toward the wild mountains that overlooked the city, to the tiny, isolated forts that guarded the perimeter of this minute empire, and at the small groups of Moorish horsemen who rode back and forth across the barren ground, screaming obscenities in surprisingly vivid English. The younger men in the governor's company, Captain This and Cornet That, looked on me with more than a mild distaste. They were uniformed, and I was not; they were immaculate, and I was soaked like a galley slave; they had purchased their commissions, and thus possessed the inestimable arrogance that only a profound lack of merit can buy. I already found it hard to believe that until but a year before, my overriding ambition had been to join them; indeed, to be better than them, for these were mere infantry, and the King of England himself had offered me a commission in his Horse Guards, until so recently the summit of my own (and, even more, my wife's) ambitions for my destiny. A commission that I turned down to his face, having travelled a notably watery and violent Damascene road in the sea-lochs of western Scotland.

  Fortunately, the governor was of a different metal to his subordinates, and readily granted my request for a private audience. General Andrew Rutherford, newly created the first Earl of Teviot, was a Scot of middle years, a large, bluff papist with an easy and open manner.

  I told him of the business with the Irish renegade and the Maltese galley, and of the tale of the mountain of gold. At the mention of that, he stopped, and considered me gravely. 'A mountain of gold. South of those mountains yonder, south of the great desert beyond them. You're certain, Quinton?'

  'You can interrogate him on the matter, My Lord. I intend to bring him ashore for that very purpose. All a ploy to save him from the noose, of course, but I thought I had best refer the matter to yourself or the admiral, whosoever I encountered first.'

  Teviot frowned. 'I don't think any interrogation of mine would add to the case, Captain. But I can think of others who'll want to talk to this man. Our most gracious sovereign, for one.'

  I was incredulous. 'The King. My Lord, this man's a renegade and a liar. It's as plain as day, all he seeks is to save his own worthless traitorous neck. I thought a hanging here, in the public square of Tangier, would be more exemplary than killing him on the Wessex—'

  'Captain Quinton, only I decide who hangs in this city.' Lord Teviot's eyes flashed, but in the next moment he reverted to his accustomed easy informality. 'Matthew, I have served far and wide for a quarter-century and more. In that time a man hears much, and learns much. Only ten years ago, the France that I then served was on her knees, torn apart by civil war. Many believed she would never rise again, but the young King Louis—he was no more than fifteen then—was entirely confident that a miracle to outdo Saint Joan would raise up France once more. You see, Captain, the young king had been convinced by one of his nobles, a man with mystical tendencies, that somewhere in Africa a great mountain of gold waited to be found. A new Potosi, no less, and a hundred times richer than the original.'

  'Potosi? I think I have heard the name, My Lord—my uncle might have talked of it—'

  Teviot pointed at the bleak land beyond the outlying forts of Tangier. 'See that, Matthew? All that sand and rock? Most of the soil of Old Spain is like that, or but little better.' I knew this to be true, fo
r I remembered Old Spain well from my days in exile there. 'Yet for a hundred years,' Teviot continued, 'Spain was the greatest and most feared country in this world. She ruled an empire on which the sun never set. Her armies were invincible until my own day. Your own grandfather sailed against their Armada, the most powerful fleet on God's Earth. I grew up, and to a degree even you have grown up, fearing the Black Legend of the dread Spanish empire.' I nodded, for in my childhood nightmares the Inquisition had featured almost as often as Cromwell's Ironsides. 'And how did poor, barren Spain achieve all that, Captain?' asked Teviot. 'Because one day, over a century ago, some of her soldiers chanced upon a vast mountain of silver in the wilds of South America. Potosi. The silver of Potosi paid for the armies I fought against, it paid for the great Armada that your grandfather battled, and it paid for an eighty-year war against the Dutch. An eighty-year war. Can you conceive of England fighting even an eighty-month war, Matthew? The King would be bankrupt within twenty.' I had to nod, for some truths are inescapable. 'So the chance, even the faintest, most improbable chance, that somewhere in the world there exists a mountain of gold, waiting to be claimed by the first nation that finds it—I ask you, Captain Quinton, would you really wish to be the man held responsible by your monarch for executing that most improbable chance in the market square of Tangier?'

  He fixed me with a stare that gave me no opportunity to argue the case, a case rather too close in substance to that which had been argued by the renegade O'Dwyer himself. But there was one other thought; one thing that the governor had said. There was one question—'My Lord, the French nobleman who convinced King Louis of the mountain of gold. Was his name Montnoir?'

  Teviot shrugged. 'It was a long time ago, Matthew. I can't recall whether Turenne even told me the name. Why do you ask?'

  'No matter, My Lord.' Even if the governor could not recall the name, I knew a man who might.

  Teviot leaned on the parapet, looking down on a particularly bold party of turbaned riders. 'Look at them, Matthew. Look at this place. Oh, it will hold, because those Moors can shout all they wish, but they don't have the cannon to bring down these walls and they don't have the ships to starve us out with a blockade. But they will wear us down, strike at a fort at a time, kill good men by the score, and then by the hundreds, so the King will have to build more forts, and send more men, and one day, the whole place will become so expensive that our King will be glad to sell it to the Dutch or the Spanish. Or the French, as he did with Dunkirk.' Teviot knew that better than any man; he had been governor of the short-lived English garrison at Dunkirk. 'We are soldiers,' he continued, 'and we can look around at what we see in this place, and know that yet again, we will fight and die for a hopeless cause. But that, my dear Matthew, is what soldiers do. After all, isn't that what your father did?'

  My father, who had fallen in glory at Naseby field, fighting for a king doomed to lose that battle, that war, three kingdoms, and his head. Just as Teviot would fall the next summer, leading out a raid against the Moors. It was an ambush, and My Lord Teviot fell in battle. When I was in Tangier again, years later—not long before King Charles abandoned the place by blowing it up, rather than selling it—Teviot's successor pointed out his bleached bones from the ramparts. They probably lie there still, crumbling into the red dust.

  Finally, I asked the living Teviot, 'What, then, should I do with the man O'Dwyer?'

  The governor said, 'I should sail with the tide, Matthew, and carry him straight to England and the King.'

  'But My Lord, I have orders to await the Paragon, and the convoy lying at Alicante. I would have to await the return of the admiral—'

  Teviot frowned. 'I will settle matters with Sir John, once he has vented his necessary rage at me, a mere soldier, for daring to overrule his command as an admiral. Be not afraid on that score, Matthew. But while you await the tide, you'll take some refreshment with me, perhaps, at the castle? It occurs to me that letters came for you in the last ship from England. God knows, I seem to spend half my time acting as postmaster to every officer in your damned precious fleet.'

  The whitewashed governor's house within the castle precincts was blessedly cool, and Lord Teviot was generous in his hospitality. There was quite a bundle of letters, and I divided them by the easily recognisable hands of the senders. There were ten from my dear wife Cornelia; significantly fewer than usual. There was one from my mother; significantly more than usual. There was one from my brother, the earl; ditto. There were the inevitable letters of duty from my Lord High Admiral, the King's brother James, Duke of York; and from Samuel Pepys, esquire, Clerk of the Acts to the Navy Board, who sometimes seemed to think himself the Lord High Admiral. There were several from friends, who would either be begging for money or reporting on loves won and lost. All of these, I decided, could be postponed; even Cornelia's letters, which were bound to raise my spirits with their bottomless well of good humour, loving endearments and scurrilous venom directed against my mother and most of the people that we knew, from the King downwards. Yet there was one letter which stood out: one that demanded to be opened first.

  This letter was addressed as follows.

  For The Honourable Matthew Quinton

  Captain of His Majesty's Ship the Wessex

  Copied to Lisbon, Cadiz, Tangier, Alicante, Malaga, Malta, Messina, Leghorn, Venice, Smyrna, Constantinople, Aleppo, Alexandria and Antioch.

  I smiled, recognising my uncle's hand and his typically thoroughgoing efficiency in sending to every possible port-of-call that we could make, and to several that were entirely impossible. I broke his wax seal—the arms of Mauleverer College, Oxford, of which Tristram Quinton was a most unlikely Master—and read. Ever since I was a small, fatherless child, letters from my uncle were to be treasured, for he could transport me in a few words to lands beyond the limits of my imagining. And so it was on this occasion, though the new land that he conjured up could be found only in the imagination of Satan.

  Dearest nephew Matthew.

  I know not why I write, for what can you, fighting the Turks so very far away, do to remedy the disaster that has befallen the House of Quinton? God knows, by the time you receive this, the scheme will be well afoot, and I might be dead, driven to my grave by grief or the bottles that line my table here in Oxford. But I feel a need to unburden myself, Matt, and since my brother, your venerated father, fell on Naseby field, who can hear my confession, if not you? There were several crossings-through at this point, after which my uncle's hand commenced a rather less steady progress across the page, as though the bottles that doubtless lay by his other hand were beginning to write their own story.

  The truth is, as ever, the matter was put in train by that unnatural crone, my good-sister. Your mother. My Lady Anne, Dowager Countess of Ravensden. Call her what you will. This was strong, even by my uncle's standards; he loved my mother, after a fashion, but generally only in the hours between sleep and waking. The truth is, Matt— The paper was stained at this point, the colour suggesting spilt claret—she has made a match for your brother.

  The walls of the governor's house swam before me, and only a brusque cry from Lord Teviot, who must have seen the blood drain from my face, saved me from the disgrace of fainting. A match for your brother. Charles, Earl of Ravensden, one of the most intimate (and by far the most discreet) of our King's very few close friends. My dearest delicate brother, twelve years older than myself, who had taken enough wounds for that king on Worcester field to kill many men with constitutions far stronger than his. Earl Charles, half of whose manhood had been shot away by Cromwell's dragoons, and the remaining half of which was pledged to a circumspect young actor of Betteridge's company. In short, my brother was as likely a candidate for the marriage bed as I was to be the next King of Poland.

  Teviot's attendant brought me a glass of wine, which settled me a little, and permitted me to read on. Of course, it is all to do with the two things that have ever driven our noble house, money and our bloodline. Let us be honest he
re, nephew. Or let me be honest, at any rate, with this pen and this piece of paper. Imprimis, money. We have none. We have had none for generations. Oh, our lands produce a fair income, but we are mortgaged several times over and in debt to every tradesman in Bedfordshire and to much of the City of London besides. The home of our forefathers, Ravensden Abbey, is a calamity. The roofs leak, and the rains stream down our walls to meet the damp rising to meet them from the floor. This much you know better than I, Matt, as you have lived there for some of the past three years, whereas I have been dry and drunk in my Master's lodgings. This much, indeed, was perfectly true. Only the winter before, one of Steward Barcock's children had been killed when the entire north-east wall collapsed, taking two rooms with it. The Dowager Countess, my mother, had simply summoned our new vicar to utter some peremptory prayers over the rubble and then sealed off the entire wing.

  I forced my pained eyes back to Tristram's text. Your mother is convinced that only a marriage to a great fortune will remedy our situation. In that, perhaps, she is right; but methinks that sometimes a fortune can come at too great a cost. Now, secundo, our family line. We must be intimate and frank here, nephew. I have no wife. Many children, of course, but no wife, unlike our dear monarch, who has a wife and many children, but alas, none by her. Now, we know that I could have a wife with no difficulty. (Modesty had never been a particular characteristic of Tristram Quinton's, especially when it came to women.) But thanks to the perversity of my college's outmoded and byzantine statutes, that would mean surrendering my post here at Oxford, and necessarily the considerable income and perquisites that accrue from it, not least my cellar of old Bordeaux wines. So if the glorious earldom of Ravensden is not to perish, and pass into dust like old Hotspur and Mortimer, then either you or Charles must father children, as we have no collateral lines. Now, you have been married five years, Matt, and so far your Cornelia has not even managed an encouraging miscarriage. My uncle could be brutal in his cups, but there was truth enough in this. Cornelia, the epitome of a rational, modern Dutch woman, had even begun to visit a wise-woman in the forest beyond Baldock, who convinced her that our failure to conceive was entirely my fault. As wise-women do. Of course, it is possible that Cornelia will die, or that you will find a means to divorce her. (My uncle could be very brutal in his cups.) But your mother has calculated that you are too besotted with her to do the latter, and that our House is too unfortunate for God to facilitate the former. Thus she has convinced Charles that it is his duty to marry and endeavour to continue our line, regardless of his own inclinations (which we both understand amply enough, I think). What is more, and for reasons that I cannot fathom, the King himself is an enthusiast for the match. As we know, the noble Earl your brother can never refuse the wish of our esteemed monarch. This, too, was true; their friendship dated back to the darkest days of the King's first exile, when he was but a penniless and titular Prince of Wales, and had been strengthened thereafter in ways of which I was then only dimly aware.