“And where are the messages you carry?”
“I have none.”
“Come, you must bear some report.”
“No. Sir Anthony Ashley has the official report on Swiftsure.’
“And you have an unofficial one.”
“No, sir. None.”
They talked again, then Portocarrero motioned to the guards. “Aside for further consideration.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
The cell was twenty-four feet long by half as broad with two high-barred windows through which a man could only see by standing on another’s shoulders. The floor was of beaten earth, the walls of a sort of moor-stone which was as hard as granite.
Ten of us shared it. Besides myself there was Major George reunited with me in spite of his farewells Victor, Lieutenant Fraser, a Lieutenant Harris and five others. We were not illused, indeed often received small concessions from our jailers; nor at first was food lacking: dried codfish, maize bread, meal and rice. All that was amiss was that we were all in greater or lesser degree in need of medical care, and living in mephitic conditions and great heat. And we were the gentlemen; I never knew how many of the crew or the wounded soldiers survived.
Sometimes it occurred to me to wonder if all this had come on me, this capture and all the suffering that followed, as a judgment for the desecration I had wrought to the altar in Cadiz. In spite of the influences under which I have lived my life I have never quite been able to escape from a sense that in the end Divine justice is meted out in this world. The sensation comes and goes with circumstance and event, but the old feeling, like a childhood scar, remains.
The first man in our cell died after two weeks. He had been wounded a second time by the explosion and his wound turned gangrenous. The stench in the cell in that hot weather made life for the rest of us unbearable. Victor’s recovery was checked but he kept cheerful and, thanks to his lute which he was permitted to retain, we passed many an insupportable hour. My old wound remained open and festering and I had a return of the fever at nights. Major George, like the iron man he was, tidied up the ends of his two lost fingers and the stumps healed. Then he began at night to work on one of the bars of the window. It was exhausting work holding him up, but there was something in the spirit of the man that compelled the rest to help him.
To my surprise I had been able to cheat the searchers of the jewels I carried by passing them to Victor and then recovering them back again before they turned to him. Both the Portuguese soldiers who searched us were suffering from the prevalent fever and had little interest in their task.
News from the outer world scarcely reached us until I became friendly with one of the guards, a cheerful soul called Cabecas, and when he found I spoke halting Spanish he talked freely.
He was a Portuguese, and we were in fact in southern Portugal, a country which had lost its independence to Spain a decade ago. Though in name an ally and a part of the Spanish Empire, the country still had about it an air of occupation: the military governor and his officers were Spanish, the soldiers Portuguese.
Cabecas told me that soon after our capture an attempt had been made by the Spanish to exchange us for prisoners taken at Cadiz; but Lord Admiral Howard did not trust Portocarrero and rejected the overture. Cadiz had at last been evacuated and instead a force landed south of Faro to attack that city. The Spaniards concentrated their main defence at Lagos, forty miles to the west, where we languished in prison. Our forces had marched overland and captured and burned Faro almost without resistance; had they then come on those last few miles we should have been set free; but they did not follow up their success and re-embarked and sailed away. No one had seen them since, but it was thought they were returning to England.
One day I asked permission to write a letter home suggesting that ransom be paid to set me free; and I was given paper and pen and ink. I had no hopes of any sum whatever being forthcoming, but if the letter reached its destination it would at least tell them I was alive, then Sue might hear and would know I could yet return.
While the opportunity existed I also wrote to Mariana de Prada, telling her I was again a prisoner. With Victor so frail any device was worth trying.
So for a time life went on. Nine men living in a small cell at the height of a Spanish summer. Few complained. Individual suffering had to be borne in silence for the common good. All things must come to an end in time. We were hoping for ransom or exchange. At the worst, the weather would soon cool. Victor tried to teach the lute to a young man called Crocker, and often one heard the tune
“Weep not, my wanton, smile upon my knee;
When thou art old there’s grief enough for thee.”
I instructed a Lieutenant Mabe in the rudiments of Latin. One man re-knitted his jersey with two old sticks of wood. Major George worked on his window.
In the middle of August the food grew suddenly almost uneatable: the fish was rancid, the bread full of weevil, the water foul. Three men fell ill with dysentery. I complained to Cabecas; he shrugged, and said he could do nothing about it. I asked him for an interview with Don Juan Portocarrero; he shrugged again and said Portocarrero had left Lagos and we were now in the charge of Manuel Buarcos, military governor of the town, who it seemed was the scarred man at our first interview. I asked to see him. Cabecas blew through his teeth and said better not, he was a hard one, better leave him alone or worse might befall.
Two days later Lieutenant Fraser died. Since he lost his leg I think he had little taste for life, and it is hard to blame him. Major George and I now wrote a formal letter asking for an interview with Buarcos. It was refused. Lieutenant Harris, who had been sick with a scorbutic condition, became worse, his swollen gums having so grown about his teeth that he could chew nothing. We pestered Cabegas again, but he said it was as much as his life was worth to pass our message through. When we asked if Portocarrero was returning, he said the admiral was now with many others arraigned before a court martial for the loss of Cadiz.
At the end of August Victor caught the dysentery and began to lose ground. By giving a small ruby to Cabegas I was able to have some food smuggled in. My own wound had become an open place that wept pus and lacked the most elementary cloths. Lieutenant Harris died. Major George, working away at his prison bar, said grimly that this gave more room and a better chance for the others, but there were only three of us now strong enough to support him at the window, and soon he turned to being the support himself and leaving us to pick and scratch at the mortar around the bar. Some progress had been made, and each morning before dawn the broken stone was filled in with dampened bread; but the bar went farther down into the wall than expected, and now we had come up against a piece of stone which would not yield. We could not be noisy, for the cell windows looked out on an alley much frequented by the guards when off duty.
Victor now gave up playing his lute. He was often racked with colic, and afterwards seemed too weak to care. Sometimes I would see him lying with his hands clasped over his abdomen and his head rolling slowly from side to side. I did what I could for him, bathing his face with water, though we did not have enough of it and it rapidly grew warm and foul from use. I gave Cabecas another ruby to buy some extract of poppy seed and some starch, and this when it came helped Victor. The pain was eased and the fever lighter. Cabegas was sympathetic and brought an amulet stone from his mother which was good for all distemper of the bowel. He bound us to secrecy in all this: it would go hard for him if anything were known.