Down the long hallway to the door that was already swung wide, and there she was with her arms out-stretched, her expression between utter delight and a crumple into tears of joy.
“Alan, meu amor, you are back!” she cried as he hungrily swept her into his arms, lifted her off her feet, and danced her round the parlour, burying his face in her neck.
“Maddalena, minha doce, Lord how I’ve missed you!” he declared. “It’s been too long!” Then he could not say more as she rained kisses on his face almost frantically, ’til he found her mouth and pressed her to a long, deep soul kiss that made her moan and giggle.
“I have missed you so much!” Maddalena whimpered and cooed.
“I bring good news, grand news, minha querida,” he tried to impart. “The French have been beaten, Portugal is … let me tell it, first. The French are leaving Portugal, Lisbon will be ours, and your country’s free, again! We’ve won!”
“Que ke?” she squealed in astonishment. “Sim? Maravilhoso, oh praise God!” she cried, reverting to English.
“You still have that pink gown ye wore when we met Sir John Moore?” he asked with a laugh. “There’s t’be a grand victory ball, sure t’be fireworks with it, and we’re goin’ t’be invited.”
She leaned back a bit in stupefaction, then broke out an even wider smile, and used one hand to brush away more tears.
“’Less ye’d like a new’un?” Lewrie offered.
“My country is free,” she whispered, marvelling, “my people are free.” Her face screwed up as she began to bawl in his arms, and Lewrie held her close, lost and unable to understand all that she managed to say, all in Portuguese. Her cat, Precious, now a mature young tom, sensing her distress, came to paw at the bottom of her gown, and bat at the gilt tassels of Lewrie’s boots.
She calmed, finally, stepped back and reached down to lift her cat to her breast to cuddle it and stroke its head, slowly pacing about the parlour, as if finding comfort, or giving comfort. Lewrie went to close and lock the door.
“Agradececer tu, Alan,” Maddalena said in a meek voice, looking at him with frank adoration. “Thank you for the finest gift you could ever give me, meu amor.”
“I live to please,” Lewrie japed with a lop-sided grin.
She sat her cat down on the settee and came to his arms once more, sliding into his embrace, wrapping her arms round his neck and kissing him long and deep, and her breath went cow-clover musky.
“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.