Instantly the three drew their swords and, back to back, awaited the onslaught.
It never came. The mob hesitated at the sight of the steel, then, with derisory shouts, ran away down a passage.
‘Rum lot, sir,’ Dodd said, sheathing a stout Highland broadsword he had somehow acquired. ‘The lads never could work ’em out.’
The barracks fronted on to a grand street, and in the quarters for privates, located in the lower part, a ring of off-duty soldiers stood around a splintered plank. They drew back as Kydd approached. He peered into the blackness of a void underneath. A probe with a broom-handle found nothing.
‘Tear up the boards,’ he ordered.
Out of the gloom the outlines of a small passageway or tunnel appeared.
‘Bring a lantern.’ It could be nothing but an old bolt-hole for soldiers to slip out into the town – or was it something more sinister?
Kydd held the light over the hole – and there below was a row of round, familiar objects.
He went icy cold: if these really were . . .
‘Stand clear, I’m going down,’ he grunted, swinging his legs over and dropping into the pit. ‘More light.’
He went to the first object. Now there was no doubt: thirty-six barrels of gunpowder lay beneath the barracks in a plot to wipe out, in one blast, half of Beresford’s army.
Struck dumb by the enormity, Kydd took some moments to recover. He looked about him – the tunnel led away deep into the pitch darkness: were they still there?
‘Sar’nt Dodd – come with me.’
Dodd lowered himself in, peering around apprehensively. Kydd asked for two pistols and a lantern to be lowered. Crouching, they set off into the blackness.
It seemed to go on for ever, but the tunnel was straight and the wavering light reached well ahead. It ended in a stone cellar with dusty stores and a wooden ladder going up to a small trapdoor. Kydd eased it up very carefully, light spilling in as he did so – and all became clear.
The little group looking down the hole in the barrack-room floor started with surprise when Kydd and Dodd magically appeared behind them.
‘Turn out the guard,’ Kydd said briefly. ‘We know where they’re coming from.’
‘Sir?’
‘The convent of St Francis opposite.’
Under the protection and assurances of the bishop, the convent and other sanctuaries had been exempted from access by the British – and that trust had been betrayed.
Clinton was concerned at the revelation of the tunnel, but had other pressing problems to deal with. A sentry had been assaulted by a masked figure whirling a bolas, the deadly efficient gaucho method of bringing down steers. He’d then been badly beaten. Five men had simply disappeared.
For Kydd there was unsettling news. Four feluccas had reached Buenos Aires; they were full of militia from the south, and attempted to land them behind the lines. A small sea battle had ended with their withdrawal, but if the Spanish had the sense to make a massed attack with more, it was certain that Kydd’s tiny navy would be overcome.
He fought off a sense of inevitability and doom, and when the victuallers failed to arrive from Rio de Janeiro it was four upon two – the meagre rations of two men now shared four ways.
Night brought with it its own terrors: sleep in the barracks was once shattered by a demented screeching and howling outside that went on and on. An armed party sent outside returned white-faced – wild dogs had been staked under the walls, then flayed alive and left.
And in the morning the naked and mangled body of one of the missing soldiers was found on the foreshore.
Was this the beginning of the end?
Chapter 14
The sound of trumpets echoed up from Whitehall Avenue. Grenville hurried to the window of the Admiralty, quite neglecting the table of grave faces that were discussing the war at sea. ‘I say, what a grand sight!’ the prime minister exclaimed. ‘Come and see, you fellows!’
With a scraping of chairs the others dutifully obliged, moving to the long windows to peer down into the crowd-lined streets. In the distance the head of a cavalcade was approaching, an escort of the Loyal Britons Volunteers proudly stepping out with fixed bayonets to the sound of two military bands.
People were shouting and cheering, urging on the colourful parade in waves of joyfulness. ‘My word, but I’ve not seen the mobility so exercised since Trafalgar,’ murmured Sidmouth, the Lord Privy Seal.
Even the torpid figure of Fox, the notorious but ageing foreign secretary, gained some measure of animation. ‘An’ they’ve little enough to cheer these last months since Austerlitz,’ he grunted.
Since that climactic confrontation at sea Napoleon had raged about Europe, winning one titanic battle after another. This had brought the late Pitt’s coalition to ruin, and had rendered England without friends and alone in the war once more. Now, however, they had a victory: better than that, there was plunder – treasure that took a stream of wagons, each drawn by six horses, to make the journey from Portsmouth to the Bank of England.
The thump of drums grew louder and details of the procession clearer. ‘What flag’s that?’ enquired Grenville, noticing a Royal Marine holding aloft a green and gold tasselled banner in the first wagon.
‘I’ve been told it’s that of the viceroyalty of Peru, my lord,’ Viscount Howick, the first lord of the Admiralty, said sourly.
‘And the others?’
‘Flags various, taken at Buenos Aires.’
The procession came nearer, the shouts more strident. Each wagon had a large pennant aloft bearing the single word ‘treasure’ woven with blue ribbons, and drawn behind each was a gleaming brass field-piece taken from the enemy. ‘Nice touch,’ Sidmouth grunted appreciatively.
The cavalcade came to a ceremonial halt below their window.
A smart party of Royal Marines emerged from the front portico bearing a banner of blue silk with words in gold – ‘Buenos Aires, Popham, Beresford, Victory!’ – and carried it out to a carriage where Captain Donnelly of Narcissus graciously accepted it on behalf of the gallant soldiers and sailors so far away.
‘Come now, Charles, why so peevish?’ Grenville said. The government could safely be said to be, at least by implication, responsible for this ray of light into the dark miseries of war.
‘The man’s insufferable, very plausible and has insinuating manners,’ Howick blustered. ‘Had the hide to dress up a pirate raid on the Spanish as a tilt at liberation.’
‘Popham? I’d have thought we’ve reason enough to be grateful.’
‘He sails off on some unplanned treasure-hunting expedition, and then starts badgering me to find reinforcements from somewhere for his whimsy.’
‘Isn’t that what we want in a commander – pluck and enterprise?’
‘He left station without so much as a by-your-leave,’ the first lord snorted, ‘which for the Navy you can be very sure will earn any commander a court-martial at the trot.’
‘Like Nelson,’ Grenville responded lightly. The great admiral’s legendary and unauthorised race across the Atlantic had necessarily been accepted by the Admiralty.
‘Hmm. Popham was lucky – he takes a city the size of Bristol with a handful of men and ships, then trumpets it to all the world like a fairground huckster. Pens letters that puff South America as the next big market after India and gets the City all in a tizzy. Now I don’t suppose I can touch him – he’s the people’s hero.’
In the wide street below, the bands started up again and the parade got under way, heading for a grand climax along Pall Mall. The two men watched it together as it disappeared around the corner.
‘I dare say I should get reinforcements out to the villain,’ muttered Howick.
The Plaza de Toros, the bullring, was at the Retiro in the north of the city. After dark in the moonless night it was approached from three directions by a silent stream of men and equipment. By midnight General Liniers had an encampment established within the city.