The Portuguese Affair

by Ann Swinfen

  As I rode across the isthmus from Peniche, I wondered whether I might encounter the soldiers of the Spanish garrison who had retreated when we arrived, but I saw no sign of them. Either they were lying low or they had made their way to some other strong point, perhaps Lisbon itself, or even back to Spain. At first I followed the Atlantic coast north, skirting the towns of Óbidos and Nazaré. I kept close to the shore to avoid Óbidos, which lay somewhat inland, and took a ferry across the river mouth. The ferrymen rowed me and my horse across the estuary together with a woman and small boy carrying two pairs of chickens tied together by their legs, protesting feebly, and a dour youth with a pig which nearly overturned the boat. Riding on from the other side of the river, I looped inland behind Nazaré, which lay on the coast. There might be Spanish garrisons in either of the towns.

  Only twelve when I had left Portugal, I knew little of public affairs then, being absorbed in my narrow sphere of family and studies, until my world broke apart into shattered fragments. Although I had now worked for Walsingham more than three years, decoding and transcribing despatches (ours and those of our enemies), I was more familiar with the affairs of Rome and Paris and Madrid than with the current situation in small Portuguese towns. I did not even know whether the Spanish had established garrisons in such towns, or just how dangerous it might be to enter them. There had certainly been that Spanish garrison at Peniche, but Peniche was a major port. One of Philip of Spain’s principal reasons for invading Portugal had been to gain access to our Atlantic ports, so serviceable for him in plundering the riches of the New World. On my present journey I did not want to run the risk of discovering how widely the Spanish army was deployed, so I avoided all places larger than a village.

  After steering clear of the towns, I headed toward the sea, threading my way through a series of small fishing villages along the low shore. The villages were all built to the same pattern: small zigzag clusters of wooden houses raised on stilts, erected directly on the sandy beaches at high water mark. The stilts provided them with some protection from the seasonal spring tides, but gave them a curiously mysterious look, like the fantastic dwellings from some fairytale. Somehow you expected the houses to gather up their fishing net skirts and walk away on their thin legs. The fishermen and their families lived in these raised houses amongst the sheds for their boats and the barns for the oxen which dragged the boats to and from the sea. It reminded me of Ilhavo.

  In appearance these villages were very different from the fishing villages along the Sussex coast which Phelippes and I had searched back at the time of the Babington crisis, when word had come that two traitors were to land somewhere there. The houses in Sussex had been squat but comfortable, solid and timber-framed, infilled with wattle and daub and roofed with thatch. The fisher houses here seemed fragile by comparison, hardly more than temporary shacks perched atop their stilts. Yet the people had money enough to own oxen to launch their boats. In Sussex, the fishermen and their wives had dragged the boats down the beach to the sea themselves.

  Some things united the villages, however different they might seem in appearance. Everywhere, the smell of fish and ocean and seaweed and tar and the peppery scent of rope. It was as if the scents from aboard the Victory had been boiled down to a concentrated essence which saturated everything. I knew that when I left these villages my clothes, my hair and even my horse, would carry the smell for hours. I think if you had to search for a fisherman through the streets of a strange town by night, you could find him with your nose.

  By the time I reached the shore, the fishermen had already set sail for the day, leaving the villages populated by none but black-clothed women mending nets, or gutting and salting sardines, and half-naked children playing with shells and bits of driftwood. It all seemed peaceful enough, with no sign of the Spanish in these remote parts. The oxen were tethered above the high water line, where tough sea-grass grew in ragged clumps, working their way placidly over their circles of restricted grazing until the time should come for them to be harnessed to the boats again, to drag them up the beach.

  Towards noon I stopped in one of these villages to rest my horse and let him drink from the narrow stream which ran down between the houses, before it fanned out into a dozen rivulets across the beach and into the sea. The women raised their heads, watching me cautiously until I gave them a friendly greeting. On hearing my native Portuguese, their faces cleared. What might have turned to hostility was transformed magically into smiles of welcome.

  ‘God be with you, Senhora,’ I said to a plump, kindly looking woman, who had left her netting to draw three rough loaves from the beehive-shaped clay oven outside her house. ‘Have you enough to spare for a traveller?’

  I reached into the purse at my belt and drew out a small coin.

  ‘Put your money away,’ she said. ‘I would be ashamed to turn aside a traveller from my door. Sit, sit.’

  She motioned me towards the log where she had been had just been seated, busy about her work on the nets. She bundled them courteously away to one side. I was glad of a seat, already beginning to feel saddle-sore. She disappeared into the house, which was hardly more than a hut, another of those ramshackle wooden dwellings on legs, and returned with a wooden trencher piled with sardines hot from the fire.

  I shook my head. ‘I cannot eat your meal, Senhora.’

  She waved my objections aside.

  ‘I am cooking more. The fishing was good last night. Eat, young man, and do not argue!’

  At that I grinned and fell to. The sardines were wonderful, fresh from the sea and smoky from her open fire. As I mopped up the last welcome fragments with chunks of the warm bread, I looked up to see four little boys in a row watching me, with their fingers in their mouths. Behind them, two of their sisters peeped at me through their hair. Seeing me looking at them, they all scampered away like young deer, but not too far to keep me under observation. I suspected that I was eating their midday meal.

  The fisherwife brought me a mug of fierce local wine, so harsh it nearly scoured the roof of mouth to the bone, but as it began to circulate through my limbs I could feel myself being prodded out of my weariness. The children crept a little closer. I noticed that there was a hank of string lying where the woman had been at her work. Remembering how Andrew had taught a child how to make a cat’s cradle when he was in St Bartholomew’s, recovering from his injuries at Sluys, I beckoned the oldest boy over to me.

  ‘Do you know how to do this?’

  I hooked the string between our fingers, and began to weave the cat’s cradle, hoping I had not forgotten how to do it. By the time I completed it, then showed how to make it vanish back into a simple length of string, all the children were crowding round, even the little girls, demanding to try it. The woman, who was probably the mother of some of them, had set more sardines cooking and had taken up her net mending again. Looking up from the third or fourth cat’s cradle, I realised that my audience had grown considerably. These could not all be the children of one family. Every one of the children in the village had been drawn by the novelty of a stranger, and especially a stranger who could do tricks.

  Long before they were all satisfied, the woman clapped her hands.

  ‘Enough!’ she said, laughing. ‘Your dinner is ready and the Senhor cannot spend all day amusing you.’

  Her own children fell upon the food, while the others wandered off, taking the string with them and arguing about how to weave the cradle themselves. She brought out a basket of fruit from the hut, the kind of fruit I remembered from my childhood: peaches and apricots warm from the sun and so juicy that when you bit into them the juice spurted out and ran down your chin. The fruits of the south do sometimes reach London, but they never taste like this. Either they have been picked too soon, to stop them rotting before they can be sold, in which case they are edible, but have little flavour; or else they have been picked ripe, but have developed a taste of mustiness and mould, however careful the dealer has been to wipe away any blacken
ed surface traces.

  It was pleasant sitting there at the edge of the beach, with the somnolent midday sun beating down, tempered by a cooling wind off the ocean, whose waves resounded with a deep music on the rocks enclosing the small bay where the village stood. Sitting here amidst the quiet chatter of the children, I could put aside the horrors of Coruña and close my mind, for the moment, to what might lie at the end of my journey to the solar. Yet I must not linger too long. The children and their mother finished eating and when I had eaten the fruit I had been given, I thanked the woman and rose from the log. Before I mounted again I tucked a real under the trencher which had held the sardines. As I rode on my way out of the village, a cavalcade of children ran after me, shouting their good-byes. Two of the boys were linked together by a half-made cat’s cradle.

  Early in the afternoon I turned somewhat east, away from the coast and found that my way led through the fringes of the vast pine forest. I had become very hot under the unremitting sun, no longer benefitting from the ocean breeze. Before I reached the forest the land was open and quite barren, with few villages or even isolated farms. As my road passed in among the trees, the glare of the sun was cut off. The trees stood tall and regal as pillars in a church, and shafts of sunlit played across the forest floor as if they fell through illuminated windows. The long heat of the day had roused the scents of the pine, heady as incense. It was very quiet amongst the trees. An occasional bird crossed my path, but there was little birdsong. I imagined that they reserved their singing for the cool of the morning and evening. The forest seemed devoid of animals too, unless they too were sleeping away the heat of the day. The coolness and the shade were like a drink of fresh water. Even the horse felt it, for he raised his head and stepped more briskly. For the last hour he had been plodding like a cart horse.

  Late in the day, I found a small wayside inn north of Leiria. It was clean enough, and seemed safe enough, but after a frugal meal I chose to sleep in the stable with my horse, rather than pay extra for a bed, thus saving my money and keeping a watch over my mount. It was not the first time I had spent the night in a stable and I was content, but I slept poorly, for the hard riding and the chafing of my clothes had broken the thin skin which had begun to form over the burn in my shoulder. The pain fretted me and prevented me from driving the anxious thoughts about my plan from my mind. During the day I had been able to concentrate my mind on finding my way and covering the ground as swiftly as I could without over-tiring my horse. The brief interlude in the fishing village had raised my spirits for a time, but lying on my bed of straw and staring into the darkness, I could no longer keep at bay the worries I had thrust away during the daylight hours. Since leaving Portugal seven years ago, my father and I had heard nothing of those of our family who had been left behind. My grandfather, being one of the most substantial landowners in the area inland from Coimbra, and moreover being a pure-blood Christian of ancient Portuguese lineage, would have been safe from the Inquisition. Surely he must have been able to protect the rest of the family. Yet in all these years we had heard nothing, despite sending several letters. Under Spanish occupation, Portugal was no longer a sovereign country and perhaps our letters had never arrived. Or else they had been deliberately confiscated, though I knew my father had always worded them with care. And would their connection with us have endangered even my grandparents? These thoughts tumbled over and over in my head. The following day, or the one after, I would know the answer. In the end, the weariness of my aching body finally drove out all thought, and I slept.

  The next day, as I drew even further away from the sea, it grew hotter. It was still early in the summer, but my years in England had made me unaccustomed to Portuguese weather. By midday I was sweating and wiping my face every few minutes on my sleeve. We had reached the Beira Litoral now, with its groves of olives and cork-oaks. Some of the south-facing slopes were terraced for vines, but this was not an area particularly suited to vineyards. There were no towns and few villages here, but scattered over the countryside there were some of the great solares like my grandfather’s estate, and more humble farmhouses, with fields of wheat and barley, and, on the higher ground, sheep grazing.

  Accustomed to the more melodious birdsong that filled the English countryside, I had forgotten how maddeningly monotonous the grating sound of the cicadas could be. Even over the sound of my horse’s hoofs it drilled into my head. It drove me to stop early to eat. I had bought cheese, flatbread and olives at the inn, together with a leather jack of thin wine, so under the burning sun of midday I retreated into an olive grove, where there was shade for me and a little thin grazing for the horse. The heat and my growing exhaustion had driven out any desire for food, but I forced myself to eat, knowing that it was important to keep up my strength for whatever might lie ahead. It was much too hot to continue for a while yet. The horse was hobbled. I lay down in the shade of one of the largest trees, my head on my satchel, and watched the silvery leaves barely stirring in the breathless noontide.

  Somehow, I fell asleep. When I woke, I could tell by the different slant of the light through the branches that several hours must have passed. The leaves above me were beginning to stir in a slight movement of the wind. I could hear the horse tearing up grass, accompanied still by that mindless scratching of the cicadas. I found I was stiff when I tried to get up – too long in the saddle and too long lying on the baked earth – but I must continue. I put on the horse’s saddle and bridle again. He seemed willing enough, after his rest, to carry on.

  I had hoped I might reach my grandfather’s house before nightfall, but my horse was growing tired. As evening began to close in, much more quickly than in England with its long twilights, and after the horse had stumbled a third time, I reined in and looked about, trying to decide what to do. There would be little hope of finding an inn in this sparse country, unless I pressed on to Coimbra. I had promised Dr Hector that I would avoid the town, and the thought of the prison there turned me cold even in the heat. At last I headed my horse, at a slow, ambling pace, towards a grove of trees on rising land about two miles away. It would be cool under the trees, especially now as the evening drained away the heat of the day. Before heading further into the little wood, I looked again in the direction where I knew Coimbra lay. The wood grew on the foothills which lifted up to the Serra da Estrela and I could see below me the valley through which ran the river Mondego, as it flowed toward Coimbra. I would need to cross it to reach my grandfather’s solar. There was, I knew, a bridge a little to the east and north of Coimbra. In the middle of the day tomorrow it might prove busy with beasts and carts, but if I could reach it early there would not be too many people about.

  I rode a little further into the wood towards the sound of water and found a stream where both I and my horse drank. Then I unsaddled him, rubbed him down, and hobbled him again so he could graze without wandering too far. In my satchel I had bread left from Peniche – somewhat stale after two days of summer heat – some dried fruit, strips of dried beef and a small goat’s cheese wrapped in vine leaves. I fed well enough on these before lying down under the trees and trying to sleep. I was tired from the long ride, despite my midday siesta, and painfully stiff, not having been on horseback since we had left London. My shoulder throbbed and was weeping a thin yellow pus. Also, my troubled thoughts kept me awake again. Until now I had not allowed myself to think what I might find when I reached the solar, but I would surely be there before the next day was out. My grandparents would be horrified to see me, disguised as I was, sunburnt and coarse. It might be that they would turn me away. Nay, surely they would not do that! They must have been told of our escape from Ilhavo by Dr Gomez, but would know nothing of what had become of us afterwards. All those letters sent by my father, met with nothing but silence.

  My worries robbed me of sleep until far into the night. At last I slept, but woke again after a few hours, aching in every muscle and joint, and could not sleep again. I doused my head and face with cold water from
the stream, ate a piece of bread and a lump of cheese, and saddled my horse.

  When we reached the old stone bridge over the Montego about dawn, there was no one about but a shepherd trying to drive his flock over its arched span ahead of us. The bridge rose high, almost to a perfect semicircle, for the boats which brought produce down from the Beira Alta had to pass underneath it, and the sheep were skittish and reluctant to cross over it.

  ‘Shy of the bridge, are they?’ I said, dismounting.

  He shrugged. ‘Fool animals. Take them over a bridge with a parapet so they can’t see the water, and they think it’s a road, no matter how narrow it is. But here,’ he waved at the bridge, which was wide enough for a hay cart but open on both sides, ‘here they can see the river and they panic.’

  ‘Like some help?’

  ‘I’d be glad of it. My boy usually helps me drive them to market in Coimbra, but he’s laid up with a fever.’

  Between us we rounded up the sheep which had begun to run along the bank in a skittish crowd and herded them over the bridge. Once on the other side they began calmly to graze, all fear of the river forgotten.

  ‘Thank you, Senhor,’ the shepherd said, pulling off his cloth cap and using it to wipe his face.

  ‘It’s nothing,’ I said. ‘Tell me, do you know Senhor da Alejo? His solar is over that way.’ I gestured away towards the east.

  He shook his head and grinned. ‘I live five miles south of here, and only bring the sheep to Coimbra three or four times a year. I’d not be mixing with the likes of such a man.’

  With that he went off, whistling to his dog, who had proved of little use in herding the sheep, but had watched us, panting, from the shade of a thorn bush.