Her eyes were upon me. Her skin was flushed, her lips were gleaming and parted. I think if she had asked me to take her right there, on the thick green carpet, in front of all her slaves, I would have done it. I could not have resisted. Then and there, had she bade me, would I have spread her and tupped her, without a thought of saying no. Such was her hold on me.
But of course that could not happen, and it did not happen. She leaned away from me, she let the throb and tremor go from her voice and the fire from her eye, and we did talk again like dowager and monk, all calm and innocent, until the visit had its end.
When I was outside in the full blaze of the day, though, a sweat came over me that had nothing to do with the heat of the murky air, and I was hard put to steady myself. Jezebel! Messalina! She was terrifying, that woman: she was an irresistible force, that swept down upon a man like the River Zaire.
And yet must I resist the irresistible.
Her design was perilous for me. It had been bad enough in the times gone by for me to be cuckolding Don João with her; but either Don João had not known, or he had known and had not cared, or else Don João peradventure had known and found it amusing and flattering to have his favorite concubine futtered by the valiant Englishman. For that was truly all he saw her to be, his concubine, his plaything; or he would not have acted out the cruel game of letting her travel in pomp with him to Europe and then producing upon her his proper wife.
But now that she was Souza’s, it was another matter. Souza was proud; he was young; he carried a sword, and looked for the chance to employ it. I did not care to trifle with a hot-blooded young Portugal in his early manhood. Souza might choose to close his eyes if his wife did swive the governor from time to time, and would tell himself that by so doing she advanced his own position in the government: that was vile, but it gave him vantage. But I doubted much that he would accept the horns from anyone less mighty than Don João. For my part I craved no quarrels, no duels, no gangs of angry bravos setting upon me by night; I wanted only peace, safety, security, until I could get me out of this land. For the satisfaction of my desires I had the pleasant and indulgent Matamba. Dona Teresa, though I lusted for her vastly and always would, to the end of my days, could bring me only trouble, and I resolved to steer clear of so risky a shoal as she.
But easier would it have been to steer clear of the continents of the Americas, if you were making your voyage westward toward the Indies.
Twice did she send messages to me in the next few days that I should come to her at such and such a place. The message was most careful not to say why; but I knew. The first time it was an inspection of my pinnace that she desired, but I replied to her that the ship had been careened for the removing of its barnacles, and was not ready to be boarded. The second time, she begged me to convey her to the isle of Loanda in our harbor, so that she might visit the factory where the money-shells were heaped; but that island has many empty places and few Portugals on it, and it was not hard to imagine what would befall between us the moment we were alone there. Again I extended an excuse. I hoped she would take her clue from that, that I loved her no less but did not dare to embrace her. For some days I did not have word from her, which gave me heart that she had understood my meaning. To refuse a woman like Dona Teresa was not easy for me, yet I must; and I prayed she would comprehend that I was not spurning her for any reason other than that of safety, my own and even hers.
During this time a new chore descended upon me that took my mind away from these intricacies. For there appeared in our harbor a merchant-ship out of Holland, who had come to trade with the Portugals. And I was pressed into service to be the interpreter, for the Dutchmen spoke but feeble Portuguese, and the Portugals of Angola spoke no Dutch whatsoever. So Don João, greatly mystified that a Dutchman should be here at all, called me to the task, since the Dutch skipper, like most men of his kind, had a fair quantity of English, and I knew a shred or two of Dutch from my early voyaging days to Antwerp and such places.
This ship of the Dutch was of the kind they call a fluyt, or flyboat, and a great hulking thing it was. I would call it no more than a floating cargo hold, practically flat on her bottom, with simple rigging and no guns to speak of and the masts stepped well apart, and the length of the ship maybe five times her beam—just a big barge, really, that could carry God’s own tonnage of cargo at the cheapest possible cost. I had heard that the Dutch had built many such vessels of late to fetch goods between Europe and the Americas, and were in their busy Dutch way prospering mightily by selling cloth and slaves in Brazil and buying sugar, and bringing salt from Venezuela to Europe, and such.
But it was surprising to see Dutch traders come to Angola. The Dutch they are a maritime people, and do voyage hither and yon with great success, but also are they Protestants, and enemies of King Philip of Spain, that very King Philip who also had become ruler of Portugal and thus had sway over Angola, too. Philip once had been sovereign over the Low Countries, by some trick of inheritance from his father the Emperor Charles, but the Protestant folk of Holland, so I recall, had rebelled and set up their own republic, an endeavor into which we English had given great aid. Had that republic fallen, I wondered, so that Holland was again Philip’s fief? If not, what were Protestant Dutch merchants doing on a venture into Papist Africa? Had they no fear of being seized and imprisoned, as I had been seized and imprisoned by the Portugals of Brazil?
Some talk with the Dutch merchant captain, one Cornelis van Warwyck, and I had a better understanding of the complexities of the situation. The Dutch republic had not fallen; indeed in these past few years of my absence the Hollanders had expelled Spain from all their seven United Provinces. So they were as much King Philip’s enemies as ever. But I had been merely privateering, going into the Brazils hoping to steal Philip’s gold, the which made me forfeit to him if caught. These Dutch had come to trade, though, a thing which brings prosperity to both sides if the trading be done with skill. And so although there might be a state of war between Spain and Portugal on the one hand and the United Provinces on the other, it was a purely European war, and took second place to the necessities of profit-making out here in these distant colonies. The Portugals, moreover, had not been enemies to the Dutch before Anno 1580, when Philip came to take the Portuguese crown, and had not learned the hatred for them that the Spaniards had. Then, too, the Hollanders did bring good guilders and ducats to pay for the spices and silks and ivories and other such exotic merchandises they desired; guilders and ducats are neither Protestant nor Papist; and so these bold merchants and Don João both chose to ignore, for the sake of everyone’s merry enrichment, the quarrels that divided their nations at home. Such things, I understand, were common in Africa and the Indies. Why, there were even a few Portugals who sailed in Captain van Warwyck’s crew— shabby scoundrel rogues with flittering shifty eyes, that I would not have had in any crew of mine, though Warwyck did maintain that they were hard workers.