by Dudley Pope
Copyright & Information
Galleon
First published in 1986
Copyright: Kay Pope; House of Stratus 1986-2010
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
The right of Dudley Pope to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.
This edition published in 2010 by House of Stratus, an imprint of
Stratus Books Ltd., 21 Beeching Park, Kelly Bray,
Cornwall, PL17 8QS, UK.
Typeset by House of Stratus.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.
EAN ISBN Edition
0755104390 9780755104390 Print
0755117859 9780755117857 Pdf
0755119312 9780755119318 Mobi
0755120442 9780755120444 Epub
This is a fictional work and all characters are drawn from the author’s imagination.
Any resemblance or similarities to persons either living or dead are entirely coincidental.
www.houseofstratus.com
About the Author
Dudley Bernard Egerton Pope was born in Ashford, Kent on 29 December 1925. When at the tender age of fourteen World War II broke out and Dudley attempted to join the Home Guard by concealing his age. At sixteen, once again using a ruse, he joined the merchant navy a year early, signing papers as a cadet with the Silver Line. They sailed between Liverpool and West Africa, carrying groundnut oil.
Before long, his ship was torpedoed in the Atlantic and a few survivors, including Dudley, spent two weeks in a lifeboat prior to being rescued. His injuries were severe and because of them he was invalided out of the merchant service and refused entry into the Royal Navy when officially called up for active service aged eighteen.
Turning to journalism, he set about ‘getting on with the rest of his life’, as the Naval Review Board had advised him. He graduated to being Naval and Defence correspondent with the London Evening News in 1944. The call of the sea, however, was never far away and by the late 1940’s he had managed to acquire his first boat. In it, he took part in cross-channel races and also sailed off to Denmark, where he created something of a stir, his being one of the first yachts to visit the country since the war.
In 1953 he met Kay, whom he married in 1954, and together they formed a lifelong partnership in pursuit of scholarly adventure on the sea. From 1959 they were based in Porto Santo Stefano in Italy for a few years, wintering on land and living aboard during the summer. They traded up boats wherever possible, so as to provide more living space, and Kay Pope states:
‘In September 1963, we returned to England where we had bought the 53 foot cutter Golden Dragon and moved on board where she lay on the east coast. In July 1965, we cruised down the coasts of Spain and Portugal, to Gibraltar, and then to the Canary Islands. Early November of the same year we then sailed across the Atlantic to Barbados and Grenada, where we stayed three years.
Our daughter, Victoria was 4 months old when we left the UK and 10 months when we arrived in Barbados. In April 1968, we moved on board ‘Ramage’ in St Thomas, US Virgin Islands and lost our mainmast off St Croix, when attempting to return to Grenada.’
The couple spent the next nine years cruising between the British Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico, before going to Antigua in 1977 and finally St.Martin in 1979.
The sea was clearly in Pope’s blood, his family having originated in Padstow, Cornwall and later owning a shipyard in Plymouth. His great-grandfather had actually preceded him to the West Indies when in 1823, after a spell in Canada, he went to St.Vincent as a Methodist missionary, before returning to the family business in Devon.
In later life, Dudley Pope was forced to move ashore because of vertigo and other difficulties caused by injuries sustained during the war. He died in St.Martin in 1997, where Kay now lives. Their daughter, Victoria, has in turn inherited a love of the sea and lives on a sloop, as well as practising her father's initial profession of journalism.
As an experienced seaman, talented journalist and historian, it was a natural progression for Pope to write authoritative accounts of naval battles and his first book, Flag 4: The Battle of Coastal Forces in the Mediterranean, was published in 1954. This was followed in 1956 by the Battle of the River Plate, which remains the most accurate and meticulously researched account of this first turning point for Britain in World War II. Many more followed, including the biography of Sir Henry Morgan, (Harry Morgan’s Way) which has one won wide acclaim as being both scholarly and thoroughly readable. It portrays the history of Britain’s early Caribbean settlement and describes the Buccaneer’s bases and refuges, the way they lived, their ships and the raids they made on the coast of central America and the Spain Main, including the sack of Panama.
Recognising Pope’s talent and eye for detail, C.S. Forrester (the creator of the Hornblower Series) encouraged him to try his hand at fiction. The result, in 1965, was the appearance of the first of the Ramage novels, followed by a further seventeen culminating with Ramage and the Dido which was published in 1989. These follow the career and exploits of a young naval officer, Nicholas Ramage, who was clearly named after Pope’s yacht. He also published the ‘Ned Yorke’ series of novels, which commences as would be expected in the Caribbean, in the seventeenth century, but culminates in ‘Convoy’ and ‘Decoy’ with a Ned Yorke of the same family many generations on fighting the Battle of the Atlantic.
All of Dudley Pope’s works are renowned for their level of detail and accuracy, as well as managing to bring to the modern reader an authentic feeling of the atmosphere of the times in which they are set.
‘Expert knowledge of naval history’ — Guardian
“An author who really knows Nelson’s navy” — Observer
‘The best of Hornblower’s successors’ — Sunday Times
‘All the verve and expertise of Forrester’ — Observer
Dedication
For Alex and Harry Jonas
who were in Marigot when it happened
Marigot Village
Chapter One
Aurelia examined the inked lines portraying the new house, drawn with geometric precision on the parchment scroll, and then looked round once again at the rough field on the top of the cliff where it was to be built. No matter how hard she tried, she found it impossible to picture the thin, insubstantial lines as a stone house standing four-square, proof against hurricanes, marauding pirates and tropical downpours.
However, Ned had chosen the perfect position. From seaward a lazy swell rolling in from the north thundered to its death against the cliffs below, the breaking water slipping white lace collars round each rock.
Inland the mountains stretched like folded pastry, alternate crests and valleys rising and falling and eventually disappearing in a distant blue haze. From the northern sea horizon to the farthest mountains in the south she could see three distinct broad ribbons of colour: the almost unbelievably vivid purplish-blue of the sea, the green merging into parched brown of the grass and bushes where they were standing, and the blue-grey of the mountains, a colour which she wished could be produced on cloth.
She waved the parchment. “I can’t believe we’ll ever see this house built and actually live here, Ned. Just imagine, those rollers lulling us to sleep, and then we wake up in the morning and look out to sea… Something d
readful will happen to spoil it all.”
Ned shrugged his shoulders. Aurelia seemed able to look into the misty future at will, yet sometimes the view alarmed her. As a rule, he reflected, she accepted life as they all accepted the Trade wind clouds parading past in neat lines of white cotton balls – they were there on most days of the year, and if they vanished it heralded a change in the weather.
He gestured at the deep rectangular pit across which was placed the thick trunk of a mahogany tree. One perspiring sawyer stood astride on top with his mate in the pit below as they pulled and pushed the great two-handed saw, slowly slicing off yet another plank, and sneezing from time to time with the sawdust.
“Just listen,” Ned said, pointing towards a small, circular pit, like a pond except that it glowed red with charcoal, the Trade wind making bellows unnecessary. A couple of men fished out a strip of red-hot iron with long tongs and took it to a small anvil. They hammered it into shape with strokes which sounded curiously flat out in the open, Ned noted; presumably because his ear was expecting to hear the echo inside a blacksmith’s forge.
Several long strips of blackened, forged metal were already scattered in an untidy pile near the charcoal pit. Each had a scroll-like twist at one end and they were window, shutter and door hinges beaten into shape during the last few days. Nearby and covered with palm fronds to keep off the sun – the heat would otherwise split the unseasoned planks – were piles of sawn wood: mahogany for the most part, but there were shorter planks and beams of bullet wood, light red now it was freshly cut, but it would turn dark brown as it seasoned. It was enormously hard (and hated by the sawyers, who had to sharpen the teeth of their saw after only a few strokes across the fine, straight grain). Yet its very name showed why it was used for shutters over the windows: gun loops would be cut out later, like giant keyholes, once the shutters were hung and the carpenters could be sure of the size and positions, because the sole purpose of the gun loops was to allow defenders inside the house to aim their muskets at attackers.
Further inland, muffled by a clump of trees, there was a regular clinking from a newly opened quarry as a dozen men with picks, crowbars and hammers cut and levered stone for others to shape into blocks.
Already a flat space of land just beyond Aurelia was marked out with wooden pegs and pieces of marline linking them, to reveal a shape similar to the drawing on the parchment, the foundations of a large house.
“You know, Ned,” she said, pressing a finger on the parchment as she tried to hold it flat against the tug of the wind, “I think I’d sooner have the kitchen at the other end. It’ll be easy enough to change, won’t it? Saxby and Simpson can move the pegs and restring the marline.”
Ned took the plan from her and rolled it up. “Darling, it took us a week to agree on this plan, so let’s leave it as it is.”
“But the kitchen: surely we can–”
“The kitchen is fine where we’ve put it!”
“Yes, but I want to have a room on the west side, just there, where we can sit in the evening and watch the sun setting…”
“Chérie,” Ned said drily, “do you want to sit and watch the sun set with the stink of boiling vegetables and cooking meat and smouldering charcoal in your nostrils?”
“Of course not!”
“Well, that’s what you’re proposing. Remember, the wind usually blows from east to west” – he gestured up at the clouds and down at the gently swaying bushes, – “so we decided to put the kitchen on the west side of the house, then all the cooking smells blow clear, and we have the sitting and drawing rooms on the south side, which begins to cool as the sun goes round…”
She bit her lip, angry with herself for not thinking before turning a sudden whim into words: she had lived in the Tropics long enough to know elementary things like that. She realized that standing up here on the cliff had suddenly given her the idea of watching glorious sunsets from the drawing room of her own house…
As though reading her thoughts, Ned said: “Darling, it’s going to be your house – your first real home – so you can have exactly what you want. But remember, we have balconies on three sides, and you can always lie in a hamaca…”
“And get eaten alive by mosquitoes and sandflies!”
“Yes,” he protested, “but they come into the rooms to bite you just as much. We beat them simply by having tobacco leaf smouldering outside. The smoke will keep them away just the same as it does inside.”
Aurelia laughed and took his arm. “Yes, you’re right as usual: I’ve been living in a ship so long that I’ve forgotten about itching insects. When will the house be finished? I want to start planning the beds and chairs and tables, and mosquito nets, and the cooking pots for the kitchen, and the china and cutlery, and–”
“Concentrate on the bed,” he said, and as she blushed he added: “Large, and with a mosquito net as big as a tent hanging over it. A square bed,” he added as an afterthought. “I want some compensation for all the time we’ve been squeezed up in a bunk.”
“You can explain that to Saxby,” she said. “I shall be too embarrassed.” A square bed. The more she thought about it though, the more attractive the idea became: she admitted that and was startled when Ned muttered: “I wish we had one now, this minute!”
“Chéri, we have a long ride back to the ship, so concentrate on that.”
“That dam’ bunk is so narrow.”
“This is the first time you’ve complained about it,” she reminded him. “You always say how snug it is.”
He grinned at her. “Yes, but that was when we couldn’t even consider a real bed – a big square bed.”
She sighed and she seemed content, and yet he thought he detected a certain nostalgia too, and perhaps uncertainty.
“You are sure that you really want to come on shore and live in a house?”
“Oh, Ned, I don’t know what I do want. Well, yes, I know I want to be with you, but do I want to sail off somewhere in the Griffin or be the mistress of this house? Arranging beds of flowers, arranging a square bed for us,” she said with an impish smile. “Do I want to look down at the sea from our own house, or cross the sea in our own ship? I don’t know.
“Ask me now, and I say the ship. In a few hours’ time, when we are on board again, I shall crave for the house and the smell of the herbs and the flowers, and the booming of the rollers down there. In fact,” she admitted, “sit me down in Port Royal and I’ll change my mind every ten minutes.” She shook her head and the blonde hair, seeming almost white in the bright sun, the colour of an ash twig stripped of its bark, streamed out in the wind gusting over the edge of the cliff. “Oh, Ned! I’m spoiling it for you just as your dreams are coming true.”
He shook his head and took her hand. “I feel the same,” he admitted. “Ever since Cromwell and his Roundheads drove us out of Barbados and we had to leave the Kingsnorth plantation, I’ve dreamed of saving enough money to start a new plantation. Well,” he said ruefully, “thanks to the Brethren of the Coast we have plenty of money, and now we have two thousand acres here in Jamaica.”
“And we’ve started building a house with a kitchen at the western end,” she added. “Cromwell is dead, the King is back on the throne, and the new Governor has just arrived. We should be content!”
“Yes,” Ned said gloomily, “but instead we may find that our troubles are just beginning.” He caught sight of two riders approaching in the distance. “Ah, here come Diana and Thomas: they’ve been looking over their acres, too.”
“Diana feels the same as me,” Aurelia said. “Changing with the wind. Women are weathercocks.”
The woman slid off her horse into Ned’s arms. She was the only woman he had ever seen ride astride – she wore men’s breeches and riding boots that were very new. Port Royal now had a good bootmaker who, Ned realized, must have the f
inest selection of leather at his disposal. Certainly Diana’s boots were made of leather as soft as cloth and at this very moment the cobbler should be busy at his last, making a similar pair for Aurelia.
If Nature had wanted to find an opposite to Aurelia, the search would end with Diana. Lady Diana Gilbert-Manners had black hair and deep brown eyes, a wide, sensuous mouth and a body where everything – breasts, thighs, slim legs – seemed emphasized without her appearing to notice it. She was, Aurelia had once commented (sympathetically, not maliciously), someone who would, like a succulent rose just before it bloomed fully, have to watch her weight in a few years’ time.
Now, tanned, flashing-eyed, high-spirited, it was obvious she was deeply in love with Thomas and again Aurelia had summed it up: they loved each other in bed and out.
The contrast with Aurelia, Ned saw, was only a physical one: Aurelia was as lively (but quicker-witted?) and as loving and loved, but in contrast to Diana’s her hair was so blonde that from a distance in bright sun it seemed white. She was slim; her bosoms were firm and high, the nipples small and pink, compared with the big-bosomed Diana, who had large, dark nipples, Ned’s knowledge of them being gained because the four of them, refusing to accept the usual warning about the sun, had screened areas on board their ships where they could lie in the sun and become tanned all over, and then never had to worry about being sunburned.
Aurelia’s deep tan emphasized her blonde hair and blue eyes, but the same tan on Diana emphasized her body. Why? Was it more intriguing speculating about Diana’s tanned breasts? Ned neither knew nor cared; he loved Aurelia and Diana was attractive, and he knew the reverse was true for Thomas, and that was how it should be.