For himself, Renzi felt a lurch of premonition at the mention of Jamaica, but perhaps in the naval headquarters there would be no exposure and therefore little risk of confrontation. A new life of petty politics at headquarters was not to his liking, for he had deliberately chosen the sea life as the purest form of exile.
Next day the packet swarmed with the Admiral's retinue. Renzi, as a seaman, knew precisely where to keep out of the way and watched with wry amusement the fluster and confusion as the pretty little topsail cutter put to sea. A small frigate accompanied them as escort, the pair foaming along in the freshness after the hurricane, heading westward deep into the glittering blue of the Caribbean sea.
The island of Jamaica was raised five days later without incident, an impressive blue-grey monolith appearing out of the morning on the distant horizon. They had passed St Kitts during the night and Hispaniola was a disappointing low scrubby headland, approaching then receding as, with the favourable north-easterlies, they headed direct for the southern coast of Jamaica.
Off Morant Bay they hove to, a pilot schooner plunging and rolling as she sent across the Kingston pilot, and in turn took aboard the Admiral's flag lieutenant. They would remain there for the night while warning of the arrival of their august passenger reached the capital overland.
It had been a pleasant, if crowded passage; the tedium of a sea voyage without duties brought Renzi an unexpected pang of sympathy for the passengers he had previously scorned. More immediately useful was the information he had gleaned from casual talking with the Admiral's staff. In the West Indies there was wealth, more millions than he had ever suspected, a river of silver and gold heading back to England from trade and its support, but above all from sugar. The plantation society, the plantocracy, had high political significance in London and lived like lords, if the tales of high living were to be believed, but with the great wealth there was another of corrupt and unscrupulous conspirators who infested every class.
He had met the First Clerk, Mr Jacobs, a dry but astute man who weighed and measured each word before it was uttered. From him Renzi learned that they would be going not to the capital, Kingston, but further inland to Spanish Town, the administrative centre of Jamaica, and would be involved primarily in the necessary dealings of the navy with the civil administration. It was not a prospect that pleased Renzi.
Morning saw the two ships proceeding sedately westward to the entrance of Kingston harbour. On the sheltered inner side of a low encircling spit of land miles long was the Jamaica station of the Royal Navy: a mighty 74-gun ship-of-the-line, four frigates, sloops of war, and countless brigs and schooners.
The Admiral had transferred to the frigate during the night in order to make his arrival with all appropriate ceremony, and in the light airs of the morning, clouds of smoke eddied about the anchored 74 as her salute crashed out at the sight of the frigate's bunting.
The packet followed humbly in the wake of the frigate, but when the bigger ship went to meet her brethren, it passed across the bay to bring up noisily into the wind opposite a wharf at the end of a street in Kingston town. A heaving line sailed across and they were pulled alongside.
The hot, sandy streets were alive: drays filled with the trade goods of two continents, merchants concluding deals in the broad piazzas, processions of traders with their slaves following behind. The cheery green and white of the houses was complemented by the gardens, which differed wildly from the calm neatness of English cultivation: here there were fruit-trees, coconuts, tall palms and a riot of colour from vines.
There was little time for Renzi to stand and stare. Mr Jacobs was clearly discontented with the arrangements for transport. The ketureens — the ubiquitous Jamaican gig sporting a gay raised sunroof on rods — offered insufficient security against possible rain for the two chests of correspondence. When this had been settled, with dozens of negroes walking beside and an overseer riding ahead to clear the way of wagons and carts, they set out on the flat road to Spanish Town. After passing a great lagoon with vast reed beds, they stopped at the Ferry Inn to refresh and change horses before the final run to the old town.
'It is of an age, I believe,' Renzi said to Jacobs, as they wound along among the outer streets of Spanish Town.
'It is. Founded by Christopher Columbus, and settled by the Dons. Captured by us in 1655.'
Renzi would have to be content with that bare information, but his mind expanded upon it: two centuries of Spanish indolence and fixed ways, eventless years that were in stark contrast to the tumults in Europe. Then the English had flooded in, upsetting the staid times with their thrusting, mercantile rudeness, turning the old, comfortable social certainties on their head.
The procession ground into a large square with imposing buildings that would not have been out of place in far Castile. One notable exception was a distinguished white marble edifice set between the two largest structures. They disembarked in its shadow and, to his surprise, Renzi saw that it was a splendid colonnaded statue of an undeniable sea flavour — cannons, rope and the sterns of fleeing enemy ships.
‘Rodney,' explained Jacobs.
Of course. Renzi remembered. Admiral Rodney had fought the French de Grasse to a smashing defeat in a great fleet action some ten years earlier off Guadeloupe; as a result, Jamaica had been saved from French colonisation.
He looked around the square: it had a slightly offended air, as of an older gentleman put out by a younger man not fully recognising his dignity. But the cool, ochre-painted stone of the government offices was real enough. There he would see out his working life for the immediate future. These were his prospects. He could envisage only a dreary vista of daily sameness in the months ahead.
The work was easy enough: the endless round of returns, reports, minutiae of the Fleet, now lying at anchor. It had to be victualled, clothed, repaired, administered. As Renzi dealt with his tiny part of the steady stream, he grew increasingly respectful of the scale of the operation: tens of thousands of men, the Fleet as big as a county town, a moving town that might be anywhere, yet needing the same flow of all manner of goods.
In the main Renzi was left to himself. He often caught flashes of suspicion from Jacobs, but realised that these were because of his reserved, indeed secretive nature. His, however, was a circumstance of endurance, of serving a sentence, and he had no care of what his interim fellows supposed. His thoughts strayed to Kydd. By now he would probably be a lonely corpse in up-country Guadeloupe, or a prisoner-of-war in a French vessel on his way to incarceration, anything. In the absence of any knowledge, logic was useless, and in sadness he forced his mind to other things.
The Admiral did not live in Spanish Town: his mansion was out of town in the cooler hills north of Kingston, and after several weeks Renzi was summoned there.
Admiral Edgcumbe received him at his desk, leaving him standing respectfully. 'What do ye think o' that?' he said, thrusting a newspaper at him and jabbing a blunt finger at the top of one column. It was a copy of the Moniteur from Paris, not three months old, and the article about the unstable, now executed Robespierre was interesting and significant. Renzi hesitated — what was he being asked to do? Had the Admiral sent for him merely to ask his opinion on a newspaper article?
'By this, sir, I believe we find that the Thermidor coup has established itself. Robespierre overstepped himself, the Committee felt threatened, combined to overthrow him, execute him, and then—'