Kings and Emperors

“It has been too long, meu querido,” she whispered. “Vamos para a cama,” she cooed as she un-did his neck-stock.

He knew the word cama; it meant “bed.”

“Hell yes, we will!” he growled in delight.

BOOK FOUR

There are some defeats more triumphant than victories.

—MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE (1533–1592) ESSAIS

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

September mostly was spent at sea, along the coast of Andalusia to probe at Málaga, Cartagena, even as far East as Valencia, to discover if the French garrisons were still there in the forts, and how active they were. Mountjoy’s able assistant, Daniel Deacon, went with Lewrie for most of those probes, so he could be rowed ashore to speak with local Spanish insurgents and get the lay of the land. Deacon was so casual when he spoke about his movements, and the great risks that he faced, that Lewrie feared that he had another Romney Marsh on his hands. Here it must be confessed that, in point of fact, Lewrie was of half a mind to go ashore with Deacon, now and then, for a closer look at Spain than the one from his quarterdeck several miles seaward, or the view through Mountjoy’s rooftop telescope.

Satisfied that he’d done all that he’d been asked to perform, Deacon decided, at last, that Sapphire should return to Gibraltar to impart all that he’d gathered to his superior.

Three days in port, though, to re-provision and provide shore liberty to the jaded crew, three brief nights with Maddalena, and Mr. Mountjoy expressed an urge to go himself to Lisbon, and with a breezy, “I say, Lewrie, might you oblige me with passage to call upon our army in Portugal?” they were off.

*   *   *

“A pretty place,” Lt. Westcott commented as he peered shoreward with his telescope. “Rather steep going, though. I can see narrow lanes practically zig-zagging uphill.”

“Good,” Lewrie commented, taking a good, long look of his own. “That’ll keep the hands closer to the seafront so they can’t desert. If we give ’em shore liberty here.”

“We might not, sir?” Westcott asked, a tad disappointed.

“Too many soldiers, and that’s a bad mix,” Lewrie explained, recalling the melees and near-riots between bored soldiers and touchy sailors when Sapphire’s people were allowed liberty at Gibraltar.

“I don’t see that many,” Westcott pointed out.

Indeed, the long shorefront teemed with local Portuguese dock workers, busy ferrying mostly military goods from the many supply ships anchored in the Tagus, or berthed alongside the docks, then loading hired waggons and carts to trundle everything elsewhere. But for some officers and enlisted men from the Commissariat, most of the people in sight were civilians.

“Most of Sir John Moore’s troops must be quartered out in the countryside,” Westcott went on, “to keep them from obtaining so much drink that they collapse, or drink themselves to death.”

“Well, we could, I suppose,” Lewrie grudgingly allowed.

“Ah, Lisbon!” Mountjoy exclaimed, coming to the quarterdeck from his borrowed dog-box cabin off the wardroom. “One of the most impressive cities of Europe, gentlemen, one of the most beautiful. I have always longed to see it.”

Almost gushingly, Mountjoy pointed out the sights, the Praça do Comércio by the riverfront with its mansions and vast square lined with pale lemony facades and mosaic cobblestoned streets, the Baixa district where the world’s first gridded streets had been laid out after the destruction wrought by the earthquake, fires, and floodwaters of the All Saints’ Day disaster of 1755. “Upwards of ninety thousand people, one-third of the city population, perished, don’t ye know,” Mountjoy told them, “but thank God for New World gold and silver to pay for the rebuilding. That’s the Barrio Alto, up above, and off to the right is the old Moorish quarter, the Alfama. Had it for ages, they did, ’til Dom Afonso Henríques took it … with the help of mostly British Crusaders. I read that the pillage after was horrid, though.”

“British soldiers, well. What did they expect?” Lewrie japed, sharing a look with Westcott. “They’d steal the coins from their dead mothers’ eyes.”

“I wish to go ashore and see what Marsh has been up to. Might you wish to accompany me, sirs?” Mountjoy asked.

Lewrie shared another look with Westcott, who, in his eagerness, was almost prancing on his tiptoes, and had his brows up as if to plead.

“Aye, I think we will,” Lewrie relented, after pretending to mull that over. “We’d best go armed, even so. Swords, and hidden pistols. You might wish to fetch your own, Mister Mountjoy. Bosun Terrell!” he boomed of a sudden. “Muster my boat crew and bring the cutter round to the entry-port!”

He spotted Lieutenant Harcourt further forward along the larboard sail-tending gangway and summoned him aft to tell him that he would be in temporary charge, then went aft to fetch his own hanger and the brace of single-barrelled pocket pistols.

He found it almost comical to see the younger “master spy,” Mountjoy, with a sword belted round his waist, two obvious bulges in the side pockets of his natty grey coat, with a wide-brimmed Summer straw hat on his head.

“My word, sir,” he commented before they took deparure honours at the entry-port, “what a piratical picture you make. A freebooter, a Spanish filibustero…”

“A British pillager-ruffian?” Westcott slyly added. “Come to emulate Lisbon’s ancient conquerors?”

“Just for that, you buy the wine,” Mountjoy shot back. But he did so with a droll roll of his eyes.

*   *   *

“Good God, what is that appalling stench?” Lewrie said as he pinched his nose shut, once they were ashore.

“That, I suppose,” Westcott said, pointing to an enormous pile of garbage that almost blocked the entrance to a side street off the impressive plaza. “It looks as if the rains have washed it all down to where it ended up, like a log jam.”

Rather large rats and lesser mice could be seen rooting through the mounds, and it swarmed with thousands of flies. Uphill along that steep side street, it did indeed look as if something had moved that disgusting mess downhill, leaving bits, and a slug trail of filth, in its wake.

“I say, soldier!” Mountjoy called out to a passing member of the Commissariat, a stout little fellow with a sheaf of manifests and ledger book, with a scented handkerchief pressed to his own nose. “Doesn’t anyone tend to the garbage?”

“Sorry, sir?” the soldier said, stopping in his tracks and coming to a rough stance of Attention. “The garbage? That’d be up to the Portygeers, sir. They’re the filthiest folk ever I did see. My officer says ’twas the French did it, shooting all the dogs, soon as they took the place. The Portygeers let thousands of stray dogs do the work for them, if ya can imagine it.”

“Shot the dogs? Why?” Lewrie demanded, astonished.

“Heard they did the same with all the stray cats, too, sir,” the soldier replied, standing a bit stiffer to address an officer. “Feared they was all mad and frothing at the mouth, I reckon.”

“Is the whole city like this?” Mountjoy pressed, whipping out a handkerchief of his own and wadding it over his lower face.

“Well sir, I don’t see all that much of it, but I reckon that it is, or so I hear,” the soldier told him. “The Portygeers live in a pigsty, and think nothing of it. Ehm, beg pardon, sirs, but I’ve chits to deliver, and my sergeant—”

“Aye, carry on, lad,” Lewrie told him, lifting his hat to salute.

“How horrible!” Mountjoy almost moaned in disappointment.

“The dogs and the cats?” Lewrie asked. “Hell of a waste of ammunition. Damn the fastidious French.”

“No, I mean … the whole, beautiful city just tosses all their offal and garbage out the windows into the streets,” Mountjoy mourned, “and leaves it for the beasts to eat before it stinks. What sort of a civilised people do that?”