“Yes, very well thought out,” Mountjoy quickly agreed. “He’s the best we have, is Moore, the chief reformer of our armies into the modern age. Why, I should think that he has cavalry vedettes out in the field this instant, scouting the roads, making maps…”
“Ever seen Spanish maps, of their own bloody country, sir?” Marsh sneered some more. “Even they don’t trust them, and they show nothing of how passable the roads are, how steep the elevations and descents are, whether the bridges are wide enough to take wheeled waggons or guns, or if they’re even still standing! Cattle paths one steer wide they call roads!”
“You say you’ve tried to speak with Beresford and Moore, sir?” Lewrie asked him, beginning to get a bad feeling.
“I have, Captain Lewrie,” Marsh archly and sarcastically told him, “but, I am a spy, sir … a despicable, sneaking, lying hound not worthy of associating with proper English gentlemen, or of being given the slightest note. Their aides openly sneer at my arrival.”
“Perhaps if you changed your clothes…,” Westcott suggested, a bit tongue-in-cheek, which earned him a sudden squint of anger and warning. Romney Marsh was not quite the half-mad theatrical poseur living out a great game of intrigue; he was murderously dangerous.
“Perhaps if I spoke with our generals of this matter, along with the other topics I came to Lisbon to discuss with them, I might make them see reason,” Mountjoy supposed.
“Someone must, sir,” Marsh agreed, settling back and making free with the wine bottle again, turning in an eye-blink to a mild and reasonable fellow. “You know that General Sir David Baird is to land eight or nine thousand men at Corunna, in Northwest Spain, and is to march to collaborate with Moore’s army? I gather from what I have picked up at headquarters, despite my shunning by one and all, that both armies are to meet at Salamanca, cut the French lines of supply, co-operate with Spanish armies, and drive the French out of Spain altogether.
“Hah!” Marsh erupted in sour mirth, loud enough to startle even a few sleepy whores in the tavern. “With no aid or support from the Spanish, with poor, or only imagined roads to march on, campaigning into Mid-winter … in the mountains of Spain in Midwinter? My Lord! They’ve no idea where the remaining French armies are, and how they might move against them. It’s daft, daft as March hares … as daft as I am!”
“That’s assumin’ that Napoleon’ll let Spain go without a fight,” Lewrie stuck in, feeling even more gloom and trepidation. “He can’t hold his empire if he’s seen bein’ defeated.”
“That’s right, sir,” Mountjoy agreed. “We in the Foreign Office are aware of growing dis-content in his possessions already, nationalist movements growing. Why, he’d have riot and revolution facing him from here to the Russian borders!”
“The French will be back in strength in the Spring, is that what you’re saying?” Westcott asked, equally gloomy. “‘Boney’ has untold thousands of fresh troops available, his own, and thousands of troops from the other countries he’s conquered. He has to come back and finish off the Spanish for good.”
“Then, God help the Spanish,” Lewrie gravelled, “even if they can’t seem t’help themselves.”
“And God help our armies, if they cross the border, trusting the Spanish,” Westcott sorrowfully agreed.
“Hmm, well,” Lewrie summed up, pushing his empty plate aside. “What’s it t’be, Mountjoy? A tour of fabled Lisbon, or will you go see General Beresford or Moore?”
“You weesh zhe grand tour, senhores?” Marsh offered, tittering and off in one of his guises, again. “I am expert guide!”
“Only if you can steer Westcott to the prettier whores, sir,” Lewrie said with a snigger.
“No, dear as I wish,” Mountjoy said, torn between finally seeing Lisbon’s impressive attractions, and duty, “I must go talk with our generals, first. A tour, later, if you’re still offfering, Romney.”
“My delight,” Marsh agreed, beaming.
“I suppose we should get back to the ship,” Lewrie told his First Officer. “Will you be staying on, Mountjoy, or should we wait for you and carry you back to Gibraltar?”
“Let you know later,” Mountjoy said, digging coins out to pay the reckoning. “I may only need to stay a day or two.”
* * *
“You’ll not be haring off to see another battle ashore, will you, sir?” Lt. Westcott asked as they made their way back downhill to the seafront.
“Too far inland for me, if one comes, no, Geoffrey,” Lewrie scoffed. “I’ve seen my share, and those are enough.”
“If half of what Marsh says is true, I’d not wish to go off with our soldiers, either,” Westcott said, displaying a deep scowl that made some Libson passersby duck away from him, in fear of the Evil Eye. “Maybe General Moore should wait ’til Spring.”
“But, the French will be back by Spring,” Lewrie pointed out.
“Marsh,” Westcott mused aloud, still scowling, “do you really think he murdered that French officer as he claims?”
“We’ve only his word for that,” Lewrie replied, shrugging. “I always thought he was much like a half-insane version of Mountjoy, an inoffensive sort who perhaps enjoyed playing some great, dangerous game a tad too much, but … now I wonder if he is indeed capable of violence, like that old spy-master, Zachariah Twigg, who’d cut your throat just t’watch you bleed. You saw that look he gave you when you remarked about his clothes?”
“Aye, I did, sir,” Westcott heartily agreed, “and it made me wonder if there’s a knife in my back, in future.”
“Tortas, senhores?” an old woman in widow’s black weeds cried from a pastelaria set between two tumbledown houses. “Tortas laranja, de Viana, tortas de limao?”
“Tarts!” Lewrie enthused. “Orange, lemon, and I think some with jam fillings. We didn’t have dessert, did we, Geoffrey? Ah, senhora, queria dois, dois, and dois,” he said pointing to each variety in turn. “Quanto custa?”
“Eh … vinte centimos, senhor,” the old lady dared ask, not sure if that was too much in these troubled times.
“Twenty of their pence, is it?” Lewrie said, digging out his wash-leather coin purse; he had no Portuguese coin, but he did have two six-pence silver British coins, and handed them over. The sight of silver almost made the old lady faint.
“Aqui esta, senhor, bom apetite!” she exclaimed, wrapping his selections in a sheet of newspaper.
“Obrigada, senhora,” Lewrie replied, “thankee kindly.”
“Viva Inglaterra!” she shouted in departure.
“I say, these are tangy,” Westcott said as he bit into one of the orange-flavoured tarts as they resumed their downhill stroll for the docks. “But, just when did you become fluent in Portuguese, sir?”
“Fluent, me?” Lewrie laughed off. “Not a bit of it, Geoffrey, ye know how lame I am at languages. But, the best place to learn a tongue, even a little, is with the help of a bidding girl.”
“So I’ve always thought,” Westcott said with a smug leer.
“Viva inglese, viva Inglaterra!” a pack of street urchins began to chant, skipping and prancing behind them, and begging for centimos.
“It appears we’ve made some Portuguese happy,” Lt. Westcott said, looking over his shoulder at them.
“For now, at least, Geoffrey … for now,” Lewrie mused.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
“All this will fill the cisterns, sir,” Pettus commented as he came back into the great-cabins from the stern gallery, where he had been trying to dry some washing in the narrow, dry overhang of the poop deck above. “Still damp, sorry,” he said of Lewrie’s under-drawers and shirts.