Hislop said, “What will happen to those men?”
“No question. The Spaniards will treat it very seriously. The officers, Donohue and Powell and the others, will be executed. The men will all be imprisoned. I always told them. Tell me — this is about something in the letter — why do you think all the agents I sent out here failed me, or went bad? You know about Bernard. I know about the others.”
“They got tired of waiting. They lost faith. Like Picton. In spite of what people say about him, he didn’t come here to buy estates. He never wanted to be a planter. He is a military man, and he came here hoping for action. They promised big things in South America, but the alliances kept changing in Europe, and the politics kept changing in London. The invasion was postponed and postponed. You can’t ask a man to wait and wait. Not everyone has your steadfastness, General.”
“Steadfastness. I don’t know. Perhaps there has never been an alternative. No second possibility ever came up. No one has ever offered me a second idea.”
“No one would ever think of doing that, General.”
“There was a time when I used to talk against Picton in London. I thought he was destroying my agents and destroying the revolutionaries from across the Gulf. I was wrong. Old Manuel Gual and the others who were killed here were killed by a Venezuelan I now know about; Caracas recruited him and gave him the famous glass pills. The one man of mine Picton expelled and sent back to Europe turned out to be a fraud. My bad judgement again. The man could write me a witty letter about the unreliable revolutionaries of France, and then, almost on the same day, write a tearful letter to the king of Spain, begging to be forgiven. Picton expelled him almost as soon as he saw him. I was enraged when I heard, but he did me a service there.
“Actually there was another reason why I talked against Picton. But I couldn’t admit it to anyone. In 1798, without knowing anything about me or my past or all the work I had done for the revolution, he wrote to London about me. He said they might find me useful, but I shouldn’t be told too much. The actual words were much worse. I can’t forget them. They were reported back to me by my friend Rutherfurd. Those words did me much harm with the ministers. I know them by heart. ‘There is a native of Caracas now in London who might be useful on this occasion, not that he possesses a great local knowledge, or has any considerable connection, being the son of a shopkeeper of Caracas …’ This was nearly thirty years after I had left home. I had done so much, established my cause and my character, taken so many risks. He had ignored all that. And he himself had done nothing.”
Hislop said, “He was only repeating what the Caracas people had put in his way, to damage you.”
“I know that. I knew it then. And things like that don’t worry me at all now. But I couldn’t forgive him then. I always talked against him. So much so that when the ministers in London decided to replace him by commissioners and to have him investigated, the news was brought to me as good news, and I was asked to send out one of my own people with the new commissioners. I thought I should send the most reliable man I knew, to re-establish my credit generally. I couldn’t have chosen anyone worse. Bernard, you know, came out and never wrote me a word. This man wrote all the time. His name was Pedro Vargas. Every two or three weeks, when the mail ships arrived from Barbados or the Leeward Islands station, the people in Whitehall would send me bundles of letters from the first commissioner’s office, from my man Pedro Vargas. Every word was false. I should have spotted it. The language was rhetorical, in the Spanish manifesto style. Vargas was a master of that. I was a messiah, a redeemer. Everyone in Venezuela and New Granada was waiting for me, ready to give their lives and property to the cause.
“One letter made me lose my head. He said that he was writing in great excitement. For various reasons the moment for action had absolutely come. We shouldn’t wait. If necessary the two of us alone should start the revolution. Once we landed, at any spot on the coast, people would flock to our banner. I took the letter to ministers. I showed them what Commissioner Vargas — giving him this false title — had written. I nearly caught myself out, with that exaggeration of the dignity of Pedro Vargas. I told the ministers I would be willing to forego the allowance I had from the British government if they would give me a ship and equipment and allow me to go to Trinidad and raise a force from among the black troops there. Fortunately they refused. I don’t know whether othey knew more about Vargas than I did. Can you imagine what would have happened if I had turned up here and asked for black troops to invade the continent? You hardly have enough men to defend this little town. And the planters wouldn’t have given me their Negroes. I would have had to go back to London and ask them to give me my allowance again.
“I later discovered that Vargas hadn’t even embroidered some little incident or some piece of local gossip. He had written that letter just to give a little variety to his reports. He had attached himself to the suite of the first commissioner as a kind of secretary and assessor in Spanish law. He would sit in the first commissioner’s house — this very house — and every few days write me a fairy story. He was getting an allowance from me, ten shillings a day. He was getting a good deal more from the first commissioner. He had been a revolutionary at one time. He had been part of a conspiracy in New Granada and had exposed himself to real danger and had suffered. But what mattered to him now was getting that regular money from the first commissioner.”
Hislop said, “It was Vargas’s evidence that condemned Picton at the trial in February. I’ve read the transcript. Vargas was called as the Spanish legal expert. He was the only man in England — if you would believe it — who had the relevant Spanish lawbooks. He said that there were very old Spanish laws that permitted torture, but no modern ones. And that was it. Strange that all the bigger charges of hanging and burning should have been thrown out, and this case of petty theft should have brought Picton down. Signing the order that the very respectable magistrate brought him for the torture of the young mulatto girl. And Picton is tried, and the magistrate is untouched. And very strange that Picton should have been ruined by this man you sent here who let you down. He has opened up the possibility of all those charges against me now. The mulatto and the love potion, the very first week I came here. Every night in my head I work out my defence in the Court of King’s Bench. I wonder who I’m going to call as a witness, and how I’m going to prove that the Spaniards do torture. And then I think it’s a waste of my life, all this worrying about something I had almost nothing to do with.”
Miranda said, “Even when I was enraged by Picton, I didn’t want him brought down like this. He would despise the lie and he would despise us for it. I certainly didn’t want him brought down all these years later by someone like Pedro Vargas.”
“MY DEAR Sally, all goes well. You see, you are too nervous. With Hislop’s help we have brought the Leander Americans round. There are still days when they get drunk and make a racket, but discipline gets better and better. We drill them and the French every day at the local barracks. Count Loppinot de Lafresillière refused absolutely to serve under an American, and we have decided it is better to keep the two groups apart. This time we will make a little armada of ten ships. The British are helping unofficially with the ships, and I can gauge the strength of my support in London from the attitude of people like Admiral Cochrane and General Maitland and Hislop here. These men court me. I can see regard in their faces. They still think I am the man who can do things for them, and I thank God for that. Hislop thinks I can give him a good job, and Maitland and Cochrane (his immense greed makes him easy to manage) expect me in due course to grant them vast estates on the continent.