There are times when the human brain struggles to comprehend changes in circumstance and this was one of them. A moment ago I had been relishing the prospect of freedom, going back to Gibraltar and then on to Britain and enjoying life. A split second later my prospects have changed to torture and death. If I was honest with myself Abrantes was one of the reasons I had been keen to leave Spain as soon as possible. Sooner or later I thought that he might hear that the Speedy had been captured and come looking to see if I had still been aboard. But the ship had only been captured two days ago. It took a week for a rider to reach Madrid and another week to get back. How had he got here just two days after we had landed? I must have gaped at him as I took this in. Then I realised that if Abrantes took me away I was a dead man. I had to somehow persuade the Commandant that I was a prisoner of war and should stay in Algeciras. I whirled back to the Commandant and took a big breath as I wracked my brains for a persuasive argument. I needn’t have bothered, for Abrantes had someone stop conversation with one of his favourite methods, someone slammed a musket butt into my skull. There was an explosion of pain and light and then oblivion.
I came too tied to a chair opposite a large window. For a moment I thought I was back on the garrotte but this time my arms were securely tied to the arms of the chair and there was no rope around my neck. My legs were tied to the chair legs and another rope bound my chest to the back of the chair. The back of my head throbbed from the blow but my face hurt too. My lips were stretched and there was a nasty salty taste in my mouth. As I came fully conscious I realised that there was a piece of cloth in my mouth held in place by another strip around my mouth, I had been gagged. I cautiously looked around the room and saw it was an empty office. I looked out of the window and saw that I was still in Algeciras. The view was of the harbour, a British transport ship was anchored just outside in the bay. A chain of around twenty boats were pulling between it and the shore to load it with released British prisoners. I craned my neck to look down on the beach, there were orderly lines of prisoners waiting to be embarked. I saw several of the Speedy’s crew in the crowd and then I saw Cochrane and Archie standing together. They were laughing and joking and I could see that Archie even had my kitbag at his feet. My possessions would make it home even if I did not. They must have thought that I was well on the way to Gibraltar by land. I had to get their attention. I struggled to get up while still tied to the chair but it was heavy and fell back hard on the stone floor. I breathed in deeply through my nose and shouted but the noise was just an incoherent “arggh.” I had to get the gag off and I was furiously trying to drag it away from my mouth by rubbing my cheek against my shoulder when I heard people enter the room behind me.
Abrantes was smiling at me as he went to sit behind the desk. Two of his men came up to me and easily lifted the chair I was tied to between them and moved me to sit in front of the desk.
One of them must have made a gesture towards the gag but Abrantes looked over my shoulder at the man and shook his head. “I am not going to have your gag removed Flashman as you have nothing to say that will interest me.” The black eyes suddenly bored into me. “I know all about your mission to persuade the Spanish fleet to leave Cadiz, and I am pleased to tell you that you have been successful.” He smiled again but there was triumph and not humour on his face. “I was fortunate to be in Cadiz yesterday when news of your capture and the failed British attack reached us. I could not resist coming here overnight to renew our acquaintance. The Spanish fleet is weighing anchor as we speak without the British blockade keeping it in port. It will soon join with the French warships below to make a joint allied fleet that will sweep the British aside. Your government will learn to be careful what it wishes for.”
He sat back looking at me and then continued. “We will stay here for a few days to watch the fleet combine and hopefully the British will be foolish enough to try another attack. Then my friend you must answer for your crimes. There is the murder of Hernandez, the death of Guido my specialist with the hot knife and all those soldiers at Estepona. Did you really think I would let you sail away? You will be tried and convicted as a spy and a murderer and then you will be hanged.” He leaned forward, resting his elbows on the desk. “I told you once that hanging is too quick a death but I promise that it will not be so in your case. Instead of having the knot behind your ear to break your neck, the hangman will be instructed to place the knot of the rope in front of your throat so that you will be able to get rasping breaths to prolong the agony. There will be no long drop for you but a slow haul upwards.” He had spoken calmly up to now but suddenly he let his anger show. “I promise you that it will take many minutes for you to die. You and your friends made me look a fool at Estepona but you will pay dearly for it” he hissed.
His eyes were full of venom now and I had been staring at him frozen like the quarry of a snake but now the spell was broken. I tried to speak, I would have begged and pleaded and offered him anything he wanted but I could not get a word past my gag. As I thrashed around trying to move the gag I felt a rising panic. I struggled to breathe and to think. I was alone and abandoned, it would take days for Cochrane to be sure that I had not been freed and start to make enquiries. Abrantes was powerful and Spanish officials were frightened of him, they would tell the British anything he wanted. With sickening certainty I knew that this time there would be no rescue.
“Take him away” said Abrantes dismissively. His two men lifted the chair with me still tied to it and walked out of the room. The cloth in my mouth that had been tied in with the gag was nearly at my throat after all the thrashing and was causing me to choke. For a second I wondered if it was more merciful to die now than slowly in the noose but my survival instinct cut in and I tried to calm myself and use my tongue to push the filthy cloth to the front of my mouth. By the time I was breathing easily we had arrived back in the room that Cochrane, Archie and I had been held in before. They left me tied up in front of the little window. Sitting down I could not see down into the harbour but I could see the tops of some of the masts. When the furthest ones started to unfurl sails I guessed that this was the transport with the crew of the Speedy on board. I watched it sail slowly out of my view and wept with frustration, self pity and fear.
~~~~~~
Chapter 20
I was held in that room for four more days, speaking to no one. They had untied me after the British transport had sailed and warned me that if I started shouting the gag would go back on. There was no one left to shout to and for most of that time I slumped against the window. In my time I have been in prisons and jails on nearly every continent, I have even ended up in other Spanish jails and certainly many where conditions were a lot worse. But those few days were among the most frustrating I have ever had in captivity. Your first time in prison is always hard and in this case I was convinced that it would also probably be my last. Well half of me was anyway. I must have been close to 20 then and young men always have an instinctive feeling of immortality, they know death happens but feel it will not happen to them. If you look at the groups of volunteers called ‘Forlorn Hopes’ that are brought together to storm a breach at a siege you will invariably find that the majority are young men seeking glory. Those with the most to lose will put their faith in a gut feeling that they at least will pull through, while the hardened veterans who have seen the youthful remains of too many forlorn hopes take a more realistic view of the odds and hang back.
My heart told me that I would not die. I simply could not die this young. I would look out of the window and see Gibraltar just six miles away and convince myself that I was being missed and some sort of rescue effort would be put together. Then I would review the position with my rational brain and see little grounds for hope at all. It would take several days for people to be sure that I had not returned. The Navy would be far more concerned with defeating the French and Spanish fleets than tracking down a missing courier and no Spaniard in his right mind would get in the way of Abrantes. That is
how I spent the days, bouncing from heart to brain, optimism to pessimism and back again, time and time again.
When I was not driving myself mad, I did have an excellent view of the French hauling their ships off the sandbanks and positioning them so that they could use their broadsides if the British attacked again. A swarm of French and Spanish shipwrights descended on the captured Hannibal and as I watched it was gradually brought back to life as a fighting ship and by the fourth evening it was floated alongside the French ships and looked ready for sea. Far from capturing the French ships in their first attack, the British had just succeeded in giving them a fourth battleship for their fleet.
The Royal Navy showed no sign of making a further attack, having retired their fleet to Gibraltar. For them the situation got worse when the Spanish fleet joined the French off Algeciras on the eleventh of July. The Spanish fleet consisted of six ships of the line including two huge 112 gun four deckers, several frigates and a flotilla of smaller gun boats. With the French fleet now of four ships it was a prodigious force, considerably larger than that of the British. On the morning of the twelfth of July it was clear that the combined fleet was preparing to leave port with various provisions being rowed out to the ships.
My frayed nerves were fast reaching breaking point as once the fleet had sailed Abrantes would have little reason to stay in Algeciras and my journey to trial and execution was likely to begin. When the door to my room opened mid morning and, instead of the usual servant with food, two guards stood in the doorway I feared the worst. Wordlessly they beckoned for me to leave the room. One led the way and the other fell in behind. When we got outside there was a carriage and horses waiting in the courtyard but to my surprise we turned away from them and followed the cobbled street down to the harbour. There a launch was waiting to take me out to sea.
For a brief wildly optimistic moment I wondered if my exchange had been arranged after all but looking around I saw no British boats waiting to collect me. The boat crew were also far too smartly dressed for such a mundane task all wearing clean matching shirts and trousers with a Spanish naval lieutenant in command of the boat. He looked at me with some disdain but asked “you speak Spanish?” I confirmed that I did and so he explained what was happening. “Your colonel is to travel back to Cadiz in the Real Carlos and has arranged for you to accompany him as his prisoner.” The lieutenant had managed to squeeze extra contempt into the words ‘your colonel’ and it was clear that whatever he had been doing, Abrantes had not been winning friends amongst the officers of the Real Carlos.
Soon it became clear that we were heading to the massive four deckers anchored out in the bay. The Real Carlos and the San Hermenegildo were by far the biggest ships that I had ever seen and among the biggest ships afloat at that time. As we sailed between them their sides blocked out the sun, it was like rowing into a floating canyon. We approached the sides of the Real Carlos and I looked up at four storeys of wood and cannon muzzles, on top of which was a forest of masts and yards to power this mighty behemoth. It was truly an awe inspiring sight and for the first time I thought that Abrantes might have had a point, keeping these beasts trapped in harbour, seemed a lot more sensible than letting them loose.
Unless you were a complete land lubber and were hauled aboard in a bosun’s chair, the normal way to enter a warship was to leap onto some battens on the side of the ship and climb up them onto the main deck. For such a tall ship this was impractical and so there was an entry port on the second gun deck from the bottom that we climbed through. Coming from the bright sunlight it took my eyes a few seconds to adjust to the gloom of the gun deck, even though the gun ports were open. The place was a hive of activity, there were over eight hundred men in each of these ships, they were like floating fortified towns. I was prodded by my guards to continue and we went up two more flights of stairs through identical gun decks before we climbed again to emerge on the deck of this mighty ship. Again I had to blink in the glare as my eyes adjusted back to the sunlight and then I saw a group of officers on the poop deck. I don’t think I have ever seen so much gold braid in one place before or since. There were bicorn and tricorn hats, some with ostrich plumes and one with peacock feathers, old fashioned coats of velvet with knee britches and other garments of silk. If they could fight as well as they dressed then this fleet truly would be unstoppable. The centre of their attention was an elderly officer whose uniform front was encrusted with orders and decorations and a light blue silk sash.
“Who is that?” I asked the lieutenant from the boat that was escorting me.
“That is his Excellency Vice Admiral Moreno, the commander of the Spanish fleet.”
I still was not sure why I was on the ship, although I was happy for any delay to my execution. I was now feeling very poorly dressed as I was still wearing some of my patched sea going clothes and now had a week’s growth of beard as my razor was in Gibraltar with Archie. Suddenly amongst the group of fawning officers I saw Abrantes. He alone was dressed in the more modern style of boots and trousers and his uniform seemed relatively plain compared to those around him with just some gold braid around the lapels. He stood patiently waiting for several of the other officers to be sent away on errands or with orders for their ships and then he stepped towards the Admiral and beckoned for the lieutenant.
“This is the spy I was telling you about Excellency, as he was plotting to have your fleet sail from Cadiz I thought it would be amusing to allow him to see the error of his ways before he suffers his punishment.”
The Admiral glanced at me with haughty disdain which seemed to also extend to Abrantes and I sensed that this aristocratic looking old man disapproved of both spies and spy catchers. This I realised could be my last chance. If I could appeal to the Admiral I might be saved yet but if I failed then Abrantes would make my final days a living hell. When the alternative is death I did not hesitate more than a heart beat and then spoke clearly in the aristocratic Spanish accent that my mother had taught me
“Apologies Excellency but I am not a spy I am a British naval officer that this rogue has previously tried to capture and torture. I am a prisoner of war and I would ask for your help to be exchanged as has happened with the other British officers.”
Abrantes shot me a look of annoyance but he must have expected some outburst and was ready for it. “Excellency I have personally witnessed this man shoot a priest. He is a dangerous criminal, as well as a spy, and I will ensure that he is hung for his crimes.” To the lieutenant he added “take him away.”
The lieutenant pulled my arm but I wrenched it back. “The man I shot was not a priest but a spy in disguise. The priest at Estepona will still be able to vouch for me despite this villain removing his finger nails and breaking all of his fingers.” I was shouting now and pointing at Abrantes. Other officers had stopped their conversations and were turning to look at this confrontation and for the first time Abrantes looked rattled.
“Wait” said the Admiral speaking for the first time, and the lieutenant stopped hauling on my shoulder. The Admiral looked at Abrantes and spoke quietly “Did you, an officer of his most Catholic Majesty, really torture a catholic priest?”
“Sir, the man was an enemy agent who was passing on messages to his brother, who in turn was spying on your fleet for the British. I have since tracked down this brother and watched him hanged.” As he said these last words he looked at me with such spite that I knew that this exchange had probably added a minute or two to my dying time and then he continued. “I have been appointed by his most Catholic Majesty’s ministers to track and capture enemy agents, it is necessarily a harsh business, but if the priest wishes to complain about my conduct he can do so through his bishop to the minister.”
The Admiral was already turning away in disgust, no longer interested in this sordid matter and Abrantes whispered furiously to the officer holding my arm. “Take him away, put him below in chains.” That was it, my final throw of the dice. It might have damaged Abrantes’ reputation with
his brother officers but it had done nothing to save me and what I had done would almost certainly result in a more painful death. The Admiral was clearly a proud old aristocrat and I had taken several steps away when I realised that I still had one more card to play.
I broke free of the lieutenant and ran back several paces before shouting. “Sir I am the grandson of the Marquis of Morella, would you see a son of that noble house thrown in chains on your ship?” I stood upright looking as noble as I could, thinking this was how he would expect the son of a Spanish nobleman to behave. The admiral slowly turned around to look at me while Abrantes stared in astonishment.
“I knew the old Marquis well” said the Admiral quietly, “How are you related?” There was a note of warning in his voice as though he thought this was a trick of some kind.
“He had a daughter, she married an Englishman, my father.”
He was still not convinced. “What was the name of the daughter?”
“Maria Luisa sir.”
“Ah yes I remember now, she was a pretty young thing and married an Englishman with a strange name, Don Pedro was furious and she was never mentioned again. What is your name young man?”
“Thomas Flashman sir” I held my breath, this was going better than I dared hope. I risked a glance at Abrantes who was now looking furious as the situation seemed to be slipping out of his control.
“Flashman, yes that was it. So you are Don Pedro’s grandson are you?” The Admiral’s haughty demeanour relaxed slightly into a weak smile.
Flashman and the Seawolf Page 22