‘Tell him again.’
The fist clenched tighter. Pasquale hit it with his mallet and Fant screamed. Pasquale caught the forefinger, held it against the beam and hit it a few times with the mallet while Fant roared and writhed. Longing for the civilised equipment of his office, of gags and restraints and so on, Pasquale caught the sweaty second finger and left the mashed first finger to hang.
‘Tell him as long as he is willing to talk to me in English and not lie, I will leave his other fingers alone. As long as he remains silent, I will…’
Pasquale hit the middle finger with the mallet and Fant screamed again then, jabbered hoarsely at Probert.
‘Is that English?’ Pasquale asked.
Probert nodded, looking a little pale. He listened intently. ‘Yes, Señor, he says he is English, he says his name’s Anthony Fant what I told you, he says he come here to sell guns and thought of making money…’
Pasquale hit the second finger again. ‘Tell him I expect no lying.’
Past Probert’s blond bulk, Pasquale suddenly caught sight of Mevrouw van den Berg … the woman, bowed over and weeping into her small hands. He stopped. It would be better to separate them, in order to cross-check their stories.
He moved over, lifted the woman up by her armpit so she staggered to her feet and pushed her past her husband and the soldier. Fant began roaring in English again, and Pasquale ignored all the noise and undignified hysteria and pushed the woman out into the passageway.
‘Look after her,’ he ordered the carpenter who was leaning against the wall, staring up into space. ‘Keep her here, don’t let her escape.’
Shutting the door, Pasquale concentrated on Fant who was still jabbering away in English.
‘He confessing, Señor,’ said Probert excitedly. ‘Say his wife knows nothing, she came because he order her … He say he come to learn the Duke’s plans for invade England, something about a miracle of beauty, sir. That all he say, over and over, he come to find out the miracle of beauty, what is it.’
Fant was hunched over, tears streaking down his face, spittle bubbling in his mouth. It was hard to be sure. Pasquale gave the middle finger another whack with the mallet and Fant jumped as if he was a deer, screamed incoherently, bug-eyed, neck-corded.
‘He say, what more do you want, Señor,’ said Probert. ‘Well, he say more but I leave it out.’
Pasquale frowned coldly at Probert. ‘Never edit what he says. Tell me exactly.’
‘Sorry, Señor. He say, what more do you want, oh illegitimate man who fornicates his mother, Señor. Sorry.’
The soldier sniggered until Pasquale had stared him into silence. ‘Take his boots off,’ he told Probert.
‘Me, Señor?’
‘You.’
It was a struggle and the soldier had to get a firmer grip against the flailing of Fant’s stump, but in the end he was standing on his bare feet while the smell of sock added to the stink of fear filling the brig. Pasquale bent, took a grip on Fant’s right foot, and beat the big toe with his mallet until it was a bag of purple jelly and Fant was howling like a dog.
‘Tell him to keep a civil tongue in his head,’ Pasquale told Probert who nodded, looking shocked and passed on the message. Fant didn’t seem to be paying attention, lifting his wounded foot off the ground and crying.
Pasquale banged the mallet against the other toe, making Fant hop. ‘Be quiet,’ he said softly. ‘Why are you making such a fuss? You have barely been touched.’
Whimpering, Fant stood still, staring at Pasquale in the way he had learnt to know was the beginning of truthfulness.
‘Now, take us from the beginning.’
Fant had been ordered by the Queen to find out about a vital part of Santa Cruz’s plan for the Armada. It was code-named the Miracle of Beauty and nobody in England knew what it meant, only they suspected it had to do with the galleases. That was all. He had brought the shipment of guns from Burghley and a woman to be his interpreter, and he had joined the Armada at Corunna as the Señor himself knew well …
They went through it again, in a different order and it was the same. Pasquale nodded, rubbed his eyes, used the man’s doublet to wipe the end of the mallet clean. ‘Let him go.’
The soldier unwrapped his arms from Fant’s neck and the spy sagged against the beam. Pasquale nodded in approval – the chain was short so he would have to stand, which would tire him and the pain would keep him awake in case they needed any more from him. But Pasquale thought not. He had an instinct for these things and he thought that Fant genuinely knew very little more. Perhaps one more piece of information.
‘One more thing,’ he said. ‘Who is your captain in this business?’
A slightly odd expression flitted across Fant’s face, half-smile, half-sob. ‘David Becket,’ he said loudly and firmly. ‘David Becket captain.’
‘Hm.’ Lifting the lantern high, Pasquale nodded to the soldier to pick up the toolbox and beckoned both him and Probert, leaving it dark behind him. He would report to Medina Sidonia before dawn, he thought, because this was clearly an important matter. First, of course, Pasquale had confirmed the existence of the spy and found out his mission, but if the code-name Miracle of Beauty was genuine, and was as secret as Fant had said, it meant that there had been a serious escape of information from Medina Sidonia’s own court. The Duke needed to know as soon as possible …
Pasquale expected to find the carpenter holding onto the woman in the passageway, waiting for the return of his toolbox. But neither of them were there, only a splash of new blood on the wood.
For several heartbeats he stood and stared blankly at it, unable to understand what it meant. The carpenter … The man he had told to take care of Mevrouw van den Berg must have decided to take her with him somewhere, no doubt to commit the sin of fornication with her … Or perhaps she had tried to escape and there had been a struggle … No, surely not. She was only a little weak woman.
She must be found. Heart in mouth, Pasquale told Probert to tell the officer on watch that the woman had disappeared. He left the soldier on guard at the cell door. The brig was on the orlop deck, in the stern castle, just beneath the main magazine. Lantern held high he began searching frantically through the ship, checking every place he could think of that a woman might hide.
Dawn came and he was given ten soldiers to help in his search and they went through the ship methodically, from jib to afterdeck. Occasionally he would remember that he was on the San Salvador while the glorious Armada went into battle against the English. Except there didn’t seem to be much battle going on. Certainly, the English admiral had sent a little ship close to San Martin to fire off a gun and then the other English ships who had somehow magically got themselves to the west of the fleet, sailed close to the fighting ships at each horn, north and south, of the half-moon formation. But San Salvador was a transport ship and so was protected in the middle of the moon shape, where the galleases scuttled up and down, eerily independent of the wind, pacing across the waves with their long caterpillar-like legs. Once Pasquale heard banging and thought someone was beating a drum, but the clouds of smoke from where the great Spanish and Portuguese warships sailed told him that this was cannon fire. It was even stranger to watch: there would be a flash and a puff of smoke, quite quiet, and then later would come the bang. What held back the noise of the gunpowder explosion? Pasquale wondered.
Then he remembered what he was about and returned to the search. At last, a soldier came to him and bowed, said that the door to the cartridge-filling room next to the magazine in the stern castle was locked on the inside and no answer when they knocked.
Pasquale strode over to the hatchway, and almost ran down the ladder in the quarterdeck, down into the deck where the main magazine was. A soldier was banging on the door of the cartridge-room. Pasquale motioned him back and tapped more gently on the door.
‘Mevrouw van den Berg,’ he said softly. ‘Mevrouw van den Berg?’
There was a loud sniffle.
<
br /> ‘Please don’t be afraid, Señora, I don’t intend to harm you.’
Another sniffle.
‘If you would let me in…’
‘You’ll hurt me … You’ll break my fingers…’
‘No, no, Mevrouw van den Berg. I promise. I have learned all I need from your husband, nor would I put a good Christian woman like yourself to the question. If you would only trust me, I will see you are protected…’
‘He never loved me, he only married me to translate…’
‘Of course, Mevrouw van den Berg, of course, he is a wicked heretic Englishman and I know that you have been scandalously abused. Please let me in.’
There was another sniff, a scuffle and the door opened just enough to let him through.
He saw then that she was holding a pistol, a small wheel-lock dag, in both her small hands, the muzzle wobbling up and down because it was too heavy for her. Pasquale’s heart nearly stopped. He knew that in a place where gunpowder was likely to be lying around, any spark at all was hideously dangerous, it would cause an explosion, a fire and then … They were right next to the magazine, there was even a chute for passing the gunpowder through the wall. The white canvas bags of cartridges were piled up on all sides. Just one spark was all it took …
‘Mevrouw van den Berg,’ he said, even more softly, heart thudding, not to startle her, ‘don’t shoot,’ Not that she was likely to hit him the way she was waving the pistol around but the flash from the shot itself might ignite … ‘Mevrouw van den Berg, I beseech you, give me the pistol. You are endangering yourself, if the spark lights the gunpowder…’
Even as he talked coaxingly to her a part of his mind was wondering how she came to have such a well-made small weapon. It was certainly the only firearm she had any chance at all of using but as far as he knew only officers carried them and she could not …
‘Come in,’ she said. ‘Come in or I fire.’
‘Then you will die in the explosion.’
‘I know. I would rather die that way than have my fingers mashed.’
He came in, shut the door. ‘Give me the pistol, mistress, I will take you under my protection. By God’s Holy Mother, I swear I will take care of you.’ She didn’t give it to him. But she did put it down on a pile of cartridge bags. Somehow she had got rid of her manacles and he wondered how but then when her face crumpled into tears he forgot the question and only reached out for her, held her close against his chest so she could lean on him and weep. He swore to himself that after the execution of the evil English spy who had so used this gentle fragile creature, he himself would marry her, would take the advice of the priest who gave fasting for penance, and marry rather than burn. No more would he seek out the small house of women, no more beg to be tied and gagged so that they could unleash the swollen ecstasy of sin that he so weakly craved, he would be this delicate lady’s most gentle and magnanimous husband and she would …
Something rustled behind him. He looked round. ‘It’s a rat,’ whispered Mevrouw van den Berg. ‘So many rats.’
‘Come out of here with me, I will look after you … Mevrouw van den Berg … Tell me, what is your Christian name?’
She nestled her head in the hollow of his shoulder, her cap sideways from her escape, her black curling hair falling about her ivory face like a veil … Unable to help himself, he bent to her mouth, kissed her, marvelling at the delicacy of her bones and the softness of her lips, losing himself in the round tip-tilted scent of woman, of her body, in her …
Somebody punched him very hard on the back just under his ribcage and there seemed to be an enormous spike in it that impaled him on the most appalling pain he had ever felt, a vast, excruciating explosion of pain. It was so bad he could not even take breath to scream. He stared, staggered, let go of Mevrouw van den Berg and saw her face take on a feral, yes, devilish ferocity as she drew a carpenter’s blade out of her sleeve and stabbed him in the gut with it.
His hands lifted reflexively as she slashed away at him, the awful shrieking pain in his kidney radiating down his bladder and up to his head, his knees wobbled, lost feeling, he dropped down, down … she kicked him, in the face with her pointed boot, smashing his teeth, again, smashing his nose, again and he started to lose hold on the world, his body had suddenly gone to a heap of pain, he simply didn’t know what to do … Surely it couldn’t be the delicate, the beautiful, the almond-eyed Mevrouw van den Berg who …
Her serving maid the dwarf stepped round from behind him with a bloody knife in her hand. A woman and a dwarf had murdered him … but why? He had only been trying to help? He loved her. He wanted to marry her. Why had she done this to him?
He was in a heap on some of the cartridge bags. The dwarf bent over him, put one manacle on one wrist, passed the chain behind the nearest beam and clicked it shut on his other wrist. He still couldn’t scream or do more than gasp, but he was trying. Then Mevrouw van den Berg shoved a lump of tow in his mouth, making him retch, suffocating him, the blood from his nose was going down his throat with every breath, making him choke … It was terrible, agony, unendurable. Why? Why him?
‘You want my Christian name?’ hissed Mevrouw van den Berg in his ear. ‘I am not a Christian, I am a Jewess, like your bitch of an apostate mother and her poor parents before her. You have as much Jewish blood in you as I do. And my name is Rebecca Anriques, wife of Simon Anriques whom you tortured and put in the galleys and now,’ those magnificent almond eyes blazed, were beautiful still in their rage, ‘now, you filthy Gentile bastard, now…’
She spat and slashed at his genitals, slashed again while he tried to wriggle away, protect himself, fighting the pain, the darkness. Her dwarf-woman put a hand on her arm and spoke to her in … in English? The woman, Rebecca Anriques, breathed deeply, stopped slashing and then answered, also in English.
Understanding suddenly flowered in Pasquale’s head: it was she who was the spy, Fant was only her unfortunate helper. This was the true devil, this woman who had fooled him into desiring her, using his own sin as a weapon against him. The knowledge stood there, grinning at him, like a devil in itself.
She was standing now, moving to the door. She had laid slowmatch to the chute to the magazine where the main powder barrels were. Now, at hideous risk, she used the wheel-lock to make the sparks to light it and when it was glowing and smoking, she backed from the room, shut the door, locked it on him.
Pasquale watched it, unable to move, bleeding away inside, part-choked by the rope-fibres stuffing his mouth with its broken teeth, somehow watching from a great height as the bright glow travelled along the match, closer and closer to the spilled gunpowder from the magazine, the ship rocking and creaking along unconcernedly and then …
He felt the explosion, but never heard it. Blazing heat flayed off his skin, a giant hand made of air broke him, tossed him up as beams broke, though not the one he was chained to, and the end of the stern castle blew out into the fresh air. He looked down and found he no longer had his legs, only the mangled splintered wreckage of someone who had been given the Scottish boot.
The whole of the stern castle had been blown away, he was now looking out past splintered timbers, bits of body, white cartridge bags floating like flower blossoms down to the water … Somebody was screaming hoarsely … Was it him? No, he couldn’t scream, but the screams he wanted to make seemed to be filling up his destroyed body, swelling it … Why wasn’t he dead? Surely he could not have survived such an explosion, surely it couldn’t be true that he was staring out across the water, part dangling by his flayed arms from the manacles that had chained Mevrouw van den Berg … Poor little Mevrouw van den Berg, the explosion would have frightened her …
There was something wrong with that thought, he didn’t know what. He blinked blood from his eyes, waited for Death to come for him, the sunlight and the wind flaying him again … More screaming, shouting, flames and smoke – fire was taking hold on the ship, reaching to the upper rigging, the sails were flaming into brief beauty a
nd clouds of foul-smelling smoke. Pasquale looked up and back, but it was hard, to move his head so much was too difficult, too tiring. So he looked out, aft of the ship, out of the vast window torn by the gunpowder, which had somehow avoided killing him completely.
Something was happening among the great galleons of the splendid Armada: one had somehow collided with another, he could see them clearly like model ships on a duck pond. Some of the rigging had come down in a cluttered tangle on the deck, sailors were crawling amongst it with axes flashing in the sunlight.
In the distance, Pasquale could just make out the small, low, despicable English ships, swooping towards them like jackals to take them now they were wounded. Then, thanks be to God, here came the Admiral on San Martin with his squadron, and two of the strange galleases tiptoeing over the waves towards them. The Admiral came between San Salvador and the hungry English, fired guns.
To watch from his ringside seat as the dogs and bears of the sea fought each other was really entertaining. Somehow the vast agony that was his body was fading into the distance, the brave sight of the ships under sail, the glistening waves, the clouds of grey gunpowder smoke making it all the more like a dream.
One of the galleases came near, moving precisely in close to the side of San Salvador that was not on fire. A rope twisted across the gap and was pulled taut. It was San Lorenzo, the flagship of the galleases. The ships were grappled together, as if boarding was planned … And it was, for the soldiers on San Lorenzo leapt over the gap between the ships and began putting out the fires. How brave, how noble, to risk their lives to save a fellow ship.
A little voice was yammering at him, its source somewhere in the lower half of his body which was bleeding slowly away, its terrible wounds cauterised by the flash of the explosion. As I am going to die should I not perhaps say an act of contrition? Should I not turn to God in repentance for my sins? But why? thought the head-part of Pasquale. I was fooled by a woman but my intentions were noble. I am on crusade and I know I will go straight to heaven when I die. I have been Christ’s most faithful servant, I have done nothing wrong since I made my confession for my last visit to the house of women, therefore why should I make an act of contrition? I would rather watch the ships.
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