Inquisition

by David Gibbins

  A cart came clattering along the cobbles toward him, pulled by four burly men and overloaded with furniture and sundry other household items, precariously baled together with rope. He flattened against a wall to let it pass, and saw that it included the marble embellishments of a fireplace, small mottled-yellow columns that looked as if they had been lifted from one of the ruinous sites of the Romans or the Phoenicians that he had seen along this coast. People were taking everything, stripping their homes bare. The cart could only be destined for the Schiedam, the last ship still taking on private cargo. He wondered whether the hapless Fish would have the wherewithal to lade a vessel effectually, a matter about which Pepys knew precious little from a technical standpoint, though he had attempted to better himself on the subject, studying at his proudest foundation, the Royal Mathematical School for Naval Cadets at Christ’s College, as well as with his friend Isaac Newton. All the abstract learning in the world, however, never equaled the arcane wisdom in these matters known only to those who actually went to sea. At any rate, the appointment of Fish had been his decision and was his responsibility, and there was nothing to be done about the matter now, except to pray that the man had some semblance of sea legs and a large dose of luck.

  He turned the next corner into a street leading down to the port, and took a deep breath. This would be his run of the gauntlet, as it always was, and he was going to have to steel himself against letting the wine draw him in. Every second door was a tavern or a whorehouse, leading to a conjoined nexus of rooms behind, drinking holes and smoking dens and sordid bedchambers, the air hung with the incense of the Orient and the seductive charm of the narcotic. He had been appalled by it when he had first arrived, and had pompously and self-righteously excoriated all those who indulged in it, but then this place had exerted its pull and he had found himself sucked into its delicious and free-floating ambience. On those mornings when he was hung-over and sober, when the cold sweat prickled his brow and his hands trembled, he was repelled by it, but a glass or two of the hair of the dog and the street took on an altogether rosier aspect.

  Already the fishermen’s carts were drawn up outside, bringing the oysters that were used to enhance the smell of ardor and subsume the odors of body and squalor that lay just beneath; and already the whores in the street were mingling with the sailors who had come up from the port for the last time, knowing that their next customers would be the soldiers of the desert who would come sweeping in as the last ship sailed out, men who followed a different creed but had the same carnal desires and the same weakness for pleasure that would forever be the lifeblood of places like this.

  He struck out along the middle of the street, pushing through a knot of sailors and women, knowing that he was hardly an inconspicuous figure with his ample waistline and his finery, and that the whores would gravitate to him, as they always did, like flies to a light. He sensed eyes being turned in interest, but he kept his own rigidly ahead. He heard someone come up behind him, and felt a hand clutch his arm, pulling him. He tried to shake it off, and when he turned, he saw that it was the woman he had woken up next to with a pounding headache only hours before.

  Even with the wine in his belly to soften his judgment, in the cold light of day she looked piteous, with smudged powder and sunken eyes, but instead of feeling repelled, he had a sense of the girl she had once been, and remembered that this was the last time he would ever see her. He reached into his pocket, fumbling for the coins, and pulled them out, spilling them into her upturned hands. It was not exactly the burial of coins among the ruins that King Charles had envisaged, but this was as good a way as any to ensure that they stayed in Tangier.

  “A bientôt, Don Samuel, meu amor,” she said in the international argot of her profession, blowing him a kiss, and then she was off, linking arms with two sailors who had come up behind her.

  Pepys turned again, making his way forward more resolutely, then stopped abruptly in his tracks, jumping sideways and pulling the brim of his hat over his eyes. Good Lord, he muttered to himself. Not now. It was the queen of the whores herself, Mrs. Kirke, wife of the venal and dissolute governor, holding court like a Roman empress on the back of a cart, surrounded by the garish retinue whom she paid to dress up and float about her in a cloud of frippery and powder. Hazily he remembered that he had visited her the afternoon before, his reason overcome in the sultry heat of the day, and that there had been some fumbled carousing, over all too quickly in his excitement. She made him feel young again, as she did half the officialdom of Tangier.

  The cart and its entourage trundled by, and after a decent interval Pepys raised his head and looked back. She was still there, a whirlwind of fans and brocades and sauciness, the last time, perforce, that he would see such a sight; though perhaps, just perhaps, he thought wistfully, she too would take passage on the Schiedam, and in the way of those on ships who always found a nook among the cramped indecency, he would have the opportunity for some attempt at rectification, of a duration to ensure more mutual satisfaction; that is, if he could make his way through her regiment of suitors and she were still inclined to remember who he was.

  He hurried forward, turned a corner and exhaled forcefully, relieved that he was out of temptation’s way. The place designated for the meeting was halfway along the alleyway ahead of him, a low, unassuming entrance that led down a passage to a room that had been the warehouse of a Portuguese Jewish merchant, João Rodrigues Brandão, whom Pepys had helped and befriended, taking him into his confidence when he had discovered that he had family connections in the Caribbean and would be able to facilitate the onward transport of the treasured artifact that Pepys was now, God willing, about to receive. João had been gone for three weeks, intent on concluding his business in Portugal and preparing to rendezvous with Pepys in the city of Porto when the fleet passed on its way back to England. Pepys had been worried for him; the Inquisition had eyes and ears everywhere, even in Tangier, and was always ready to pounce on anyone of João’s faith. The Schiedam and the Black Swan were central to their enterprise, the reason why his priority this morning had been to find captains for them, to ensure that both vessels would be able to make their rendezvous off Porto in a week’s time.

  He turned to the wall beside him, undid his breeches, and relieved himself. The burning sensation had lessened; the tincture of quicksilver prescribed by Lord Dartmouth’s physician was working. That at least was something, and he felt heartened at last. Someone at the entrance to the alley suddenly shouted his name, and he turned back and stared, quickly hitching up his breeches. His heart sank; it was the inescapable Booth. “What on earth do you want?” he exclaimed as the man came stumbling toward him. “You will see that I resisted all temptation, if that is why you have followed me, so you need have no concerns on my account. And I told you to chase after Fish and Avery. You are not needed here.”

  Booth reached him, and bent down with his hands on his knees, panting hard. Pepys could see that his face and hands were blackened like those of an artillery gunner, and one side of his coat appeared to have been scorched. “Good God, man. What has happened to you?”

  “One of the Moors’ fireballs,” Booth said, straightening up. “It bounced off the window and burst just outside. I fear our office is wrecked, and by now burned out.”

  “Are you much injured?”

  Booth rubbed his left ear. “I can hear none too well on this side. But otherwise, fine. By great good fortune I was outside the room on the stairs, about to make my way to the harbor.”

  Pepys suddenly felt faint. “My papers,” he said anxiously. “My diary. My books. All gone. This cannot be.”

  “And it is not, sir, I am most pleased to report. I rescued what I could, including most that was on your desk, and have ordered it all to be taken along with such other of our belongings and papers that survived, to be embarked on the Schiedam forthwith.”

  “I owe you thanks,” Pepys said, mightily relieved. “My most profound gratitude indeed.”

>   Booth looked around. “I had surmised that you might be here. Senhor Brandão’s warehouse, is it not? He has been gone these three weeks past.”

  “Can I keep nothing from you, Booth?”

  The other man took out a handkerchief and wiped it across his face, blackening the cloth completely. “Very little, I would hazard, sir. I could not do my job effectually otherwise.”

  Pepys knew that he was now going to have to bring Booth in on the entire secret affair: on the reason for this meeting, on the association with Brandão, and on the dangers that they might be about to face. In truth, cloak-and-dagger antics were not Pepys’s forte, however much they gave him a certain frisson of excitement; going down a dark passage in the worst city on this side of the Atlantic, he would welcome a companion. It would mean that Booth would be privy to a secret that the King had entrusted to Pepys alone, and he would have to be sworn to silence. Yet it was possible that he might not prove a complete liability.

  Pepys reached into his left pocket and pulled out one of the pistols. “Can you shoot?”

  “Indeed I can, sir. You showed me those very pistols when they arrived yesterday, you will recollect. Mr. Pierrot, gunsmith, Drury Lane, a Protestant Frenchman, fled from Orleans. His firelocks have a high reputation for the temper of their steel, for always sparking well with a fresh Dover flint.”

  “For an avowed Puritan, you surprise me, Mr. Booth.”

  “You forget, sir, that though you see me this way now, and it is much my preferred course of life and belief, as a boy I served the Lord Protector Cromwell as a musketeer and pikeman, and fought at Edgehill and Worcester.”

  Pepys handed him the pistol. “Then this is yours.” He pulled out his pocket watch, a beautiful silver repoussé piece by Patrick of London, and saw that it was still half an hour to ten o’clock, the time he had appointed for the meeting. The others were men of the desert, for whom time was told by the sun and the stars and all those other observations that sailors also made, but he knew from his past meetings with them that they would be on time; that they had an uncanny ability to match the hour told by his watch. He would have enough time to fill Booth in on the backstory, but only just. He put back the watch, pulled out his cravat from his other pocket and tied it back around his neck. “And now I need a drink,” he said. “But where to find one?”

  Booth had been checking the safety latch and the springiness of the cock on the pistol, and feeling the sharpness and hold of the flint in the jaws. He put it on half-cock, engaged the safety, and pocketed it, and then pulled out a pewter flask from inside his jacket. “I have come prepared for just such an eventuality, sir.”

  “Ah,” Pepys said, his saliva rising. “The day brightens, even in these dark times.”

  Booth unscrewed the top and passed it over. “The juice of the mango, sir. I assure you, it is truly most efficacious.”

  Pepys gave Booth a wan look and sighed, then put the flask up and drained it, wiping his lips with the back of his hand and passing it back. “I see a doorway opposite where we may be concealed, and I may talk. You will hear a tale that will astonish you. After that, we needs must enter the darkest pit of this place to conduct our transaction, and then, God willing, if still alive and uninjured, we will take our precious new cargo to the docks and depart this pestilential town once and for all.”

  9

  The air in the chamber was dank and heavy, still smelling of the tobacco that had once been stored in it, and the only light came from thin slits in the plaster near the ceiling, and through the entranceway. Pepys remembered how João had told him that he preferred to store his bales in humid conditions, and to dry the leaves just before milling; it kept in the flavor, and was why the Brandão tobacco had found such a ready market in Portugal, and for a while in Tangier too. He looked around, seeing if anyone was lurking in the corners, hoping that Booth was being vigilant outside in the alleyway. He spotted a coin in the dust and picked it up. It was a Spanish silver piece of eight, irregular and imperfectly impressed as they always were, but more satisfying as a crude piece of bullion than the milled coins of King Charles that he had given to the woman; those were somehow impersonal, whereas the Spanish coins spoke intimately of their history, of the slaves in the mines who brought up the ore, of those in the mints who cut up the planchets and hammered the dies and weighed the coins so precisely, and of the great galleons that sailed with them toward the Old World, running the gauntlet of privateers and pirates in the Caribbean and beyond.

  He peered more closely at the coin, and saw that it had been overstamped with the Star of David mark of the Brandão family, a mark that he himself had seen João make on his coins with a special die and anvil in this very chamber. It was a clever way of ensuring that nobody in Portugal would steal them, or an unscrupulous banker winnow them, thinking that the absence of a few might go unnoticed; to be seen with a coin with such an overt symbol of Judaism would be to invite immediate arrest by the Inquisition, whereas João could secretly ship the coins abroad to pay for transactions within the family, who would then have the silver re-smelted and milled into local currencies. It was most unlike João to have mislaid even a single coin, and it made Pepys think of the haste with which his friend had departed, and to consider the risk attached to this enterprise that he himself, an emissary of the King of England and immune from the Inquisition, would never have to consider, but that laid João and his family bare to the worst form of persecution that humans had devised to inflict on one another.

  He pulled out his pocket watch and glanced at it. As he did so, a person was suddenly there, having entered the room noiselessly; a man dressed in the cape and hood that made so many in the markets and back streets of Tangier indistinguishable of origin. He swept back the hood and Pepys saw that it was Ismail Ben Ali, son of Ali Ben Abdala, Alcaïd of Alcazar, the local chieftain who had been deputed by the Sultan of Morocco to besiege the English at Tangier. Pepys had formed something of an acquaintance with Ismail and his brothers during his forays out of the city to meet the Alcaïd and negotiate the terms for the evacuation.

  Ismail was delicately featured, rather beautiful in fact, with large dark eyes and a wispy beard, though with the fatalism of expression that Pepys had seen among men of the desert; for the Alcaïd’s family were not Berber but were descendants of the Arabs who had swept across Africa a thousand years before, and retained both the outlook of the desert Arab and his extraordinary toughness. Most helpfully, Ismail had been schooled in his youth in Tangier by an excellent tutor in English; Pepys himself was no linguist and had scarcely grappled these past months with a word of Arabic or the local Berber tongue, other than for his needs on occasion in the markets, and, God forgive him, his nocturnal excursions.

  Ismail said nothing, as was the custom of the Alcaïd until settled. He sat down on the floor, crossed his legs and opened his cape, revealing a bejeweled curved dagger on one side of his belt and on the other a long-barreled gold-plated pistol, a distinctive type of firelock of Portuguese origin favored by the Moors and made for them by the Ottoman gunsmiths of Albania and Greece.

  “As salaam alaykum, Samuel Pepys,” he said at last. “May peace be upon you.”

  “And upon you, Ismail Ben Ali Ben Abdala.”

  “I will pray first.”

  “As you wish.”

  Ismail closed his eyes and began quietly chanting.

  Pepys felt he had come to know something of these men of the desert over the past few months. He knew them because there was something familiar about them, something they shared with the men of the sea. Both lived for the visible horizon, their worlds compassed only by what they saw, an endlessly shifting vista of sand or sea but always fundamentally the same. Where they differed was that the men of the sea could escape it; those so inclined could go belowdecks to their books and companions and ponder the wider compass of life, and the ordinary seamen could become the most domestic of creatures.

  The men of the desert had no such luxury, nor inclination
. For them, just as their God was everywhere around them, so they were inescapably part of that world of their experiences, one of extreme heat by day and cold at night, and of ceaseless struggle for water and food and survival. Their life suppressed all mundane emotions, and yet led to sudden explosions of elation or cruelty: a joyous outburst of song and dance or the flash of a knife through a throat, forgotten as suddenly as it had begun, something that Pepys had been shocked by at first but had learned to accommodate. And just as the experience of life for them was distilled to its essence, so their thoughts had expunged all doubt and ambiguity, so that there was only truth and untruth, belief and unbelief. They lived by instinct and intuition, in a world that did not pose them taxing questions about morality or meaning, in which life was life and death was no cause for grief.

  This realization had helped Pepys in his negotiations with the Moors on behalf of the Governor of Tangier and His Majesty King Charles of England. They had negotiated lines in the sand, exchanges of prisoners, access to water, gunpowder for ceasefires. As a fellow of the Royal Society, Pepys had existed in a world where the advancement of knowledge was built on doubt, where the best conclusion was often some shade of gray. To be thrust into negotiations that only allowed black and white had gone against all his instincts, and yet he had come to relish it, and to question whether those hours of heated debate on matters of propriety and morality in the coffee houses and taverns of London had too often been an excuse for indulgence, or mere sophistry. He had come to envy Mr. Booth and the Puritans their similar starkness of belief, one in which the world was divided into sin and goodness, into cities where the devil held sway and those of light; indeed, the longer he spent in Tangier, the more he had come to believe that such extremes did truly exist.