“To be honest, I’m not entirely sure,” the sailor replies. “I’ve always been a man of few words … But for some reason I don’t understand, I feel compelled to explain things.”
“To me?”
“To you.”
Lolita, who is still feeling a little embarrassed, is almost relieved to find herself irritated once more. “You feel the need to explain things? To me?… Captain, I fear you’re getting a little above your station.”
Another silence. Now the corsair is looking at her thoughtfully. He has probably killed many men, she thinks suddenly, probably looked at them with the same cold-blooded, catlike eyes.
“I won’t trouble you any further,” he says abruptly. “Forgive me for intruding, Doña Dolores … or should I address you as Señora Palma?”
She stands bolt upright, gently tapping her fan against her palm to hide her embarrassment. Embarrassed to find herself embarrassed. At her age. She is the owner of the firm Palma e Hijos.
“You may address me however you wish, as long as you do so with respect.”
The man gives a slight nod and turns to leave but then pauses for an instant. He still seems deep in thought. At length, he raises a hand as though suing for peace.
“If all goes to plan we sail next Tuesday,” he says, his voice almost a whisper. “Perhaps it might interest you to take a tour of the Culebra beforehand. With Don Emilio and Miguel, obviously.”
Unruffled, Lolita Palma holds his gaze. She does not blink. “Why might it interest me? I have been aboard a cutter before.”
“Because it is your boat too. And it would be interesting for my crew to know that one of their employers—if that is the word—is a woman.”
“What purpose would it serve?”
“It’s difficult to explain … Let’s just say you never know when certain things might prove useful.”
“I would rather not meet your crew.”
The word “your” gives the corsair pause for thought. After a moment, he shrugs. He is smiling vaguely now, as though he were already elsewhere. “They are also your crew. And they might well make you rich.”
“You are mistaken, Señor Lobo. I am already rich. Good evening.”
Striding away from the corsair, she goes to bid good night to the Sánchez Guineas, Fernández Cuchillero, Curra Vilches and lastly cousin Toño, who offers to escort her home, but she declines. “You stay with your friends,” she says. “It is only a short walk.”
In the cloakroom, as she is collecting her cape, she encounters Lorenzo Virués. The officer is also leaving because, as he explains, he has to be back on the Isla de Léon by first light. Together, they go down the front steps and out into the street, through the crowd of inquisitive neighbors gathered around the caleches. The officer gallantly walks on her left, wearing his bicorn, his cape over his shoulders and his sword under one arm. They are headed in the same direction, and Captain Virués is surprised to discover she is walking home alone.
“I live only a few streets away,” says Lolita, “and this is my city.”
The night is still and pleasant. A little chilly. Their footsteps ring out on the narrow cobbled streets. A few votive lamps illuminate the shrine to the Virgin on the corner of Calle Consulado Viejo where a nightwatchman, carrying his pike and lantern, recognizes Lolita and, noticing her companion’s uniform, doffs his hat.
“Good evening, Doña Lolita.”
“Thank you, Pedro. Good evening to you.”
“From the terraces of Cádiz tonight,” explains Captain Virués, “you can see the comet everyone has been talking about as it streaks across the skies of Andalucía. Those who claim to know about such things say it portends great turmoil and catastrophe in Spain and Europe. Not that a man would need much knowledge of the dark arts to recognize that. With everything that has been happening.”
“What happened in Gibraltar?”
“Excuse me?”
There is a brief silence. Nothing but the sound of footsteps. Lolita Palma’s house is close at hand now and she knows she does not have much time.
“Captain Lobo,” she explains.
“Ah.”
A few more steps without a word. Lolita is walking slowly now and Virués matches his pace to hers.
“You were there together, you told me. You and Captain Lobo. Prisoners.”
“That’s right,” Virués admits. “I was captured during an English raid on a line of trenches we were attempting to open up between the Torre del Diablo and the fortress at Santa Barbara. I was wounded and taken to a military hospital on the Rock.”
“Good Lord. Was it serious?”
“Not really.” Virués raises his right arm and twists his wrist. “As you can see, they patched me up pretty well. There wasn’t much damage, no infection, and no need to amputate. Three weeks later I was allowed to wander the streets of Gibraltar. I was on parole, waiting for an exchange of prisoners to be made.”
“And that’s where you met Captain Lobo?”
“Yes. That’s where I met him.”
The officer’s tale is brief: bored officers killing time, forced to live off the charity of the English or what little provisions they received from the Spanish side, waiting for the end of the war or for a prisoner exchange that would see them back with their own troops. Even so, they were a privileged category of prisoner, compared to the ordinary soldiers and sailors locked up in jails or brigs, for whom the chances of being sent home were remote. Among the twenty or so officers permitted to move about freely, having given their word of honor not to escape, were officers from the Army and the Armada and also a number of the captains of captured corsairs. This group included only those with a captain’s license who had skippered vessels of a certain size and tonnage. There were two or three of them, including Pépé Lobo. He kept himself to himself and did not fraternize with the officers. He seemed more comfortable hanging around with the people on the docks.
“Women of ill repute and so forth?” inquires Lolita Palma lightly.
“More or less. He frequented insalubrious places, certainly.”
“But that is not the reason you despise him.”
“I never said that I despised the man.”
“True. Shall we say you do not like him? That you look down on him?”
“I have my reasons.”
They turn into the Calle del Baluarte. As they reach the Palma house, Lolita places her hand on the captain’s arm. She has decided to stop beating about the bush. “I cannot let you go without telling me what transpired in Gibraltar between you and Captain Lobo.”
“Why are you so interested in this man?”
“He works for an associate of mine … and for me, in a manner of speaking.”
“I see.”
Virués, head bowed, stares thoughtfully at his boots. Then he looks up again.
“Nothing happened between us then,” he says. “In fact we barely spoke to one another … As I said, he had little time for the company of Spanish officers. Strictly speaking, he was not one of us.”
“But he escaped?”
The captain says nothing, makes a vague gesture. He is uncomfortable. Lolita concludes that Lorenzo Virués is not a man to talk about others behind their backs. Or not excessively so.
“Despite the fact that he had given his word,” she adds.
There is another brief silence and then Virués nods. “Lobo had indeed given his word. This was why he, like the others, was permitted to move about freely in Gibraltar. And he took advantage of that fact. One dark moonless night, he and two of his men—who had been assigned to a forced work detail down on the docks and whose freedom he bought by bribing the guards, one of whom, a Maltese, deserted and went with them—swam out to a tartane moored offshore, weighed anchor, hoisted the sail and, with a strong easterly wind, made it to the Spanish coast.”
“An ugly business,” admits Lolita. “After all, he had given his word of honor. I can imagine you were not happy …”
“It w
as not simply that. During the escape, a man was killed and another wounded. One of them, the guard working with the Maltese, was stabbed. And the sailor who was guarding the tartane when Lobo and his men boarded was later found in the sea with his head staved in … This meant that the few of us who were free had our parole revoked and we were locked up in the Moorish Castle. I spent seven weeks there before I was sent back in an exchange of prisoners.”
Lolita Palma pushes back the hood of her cape. They are standing in the doorway of her house, lit by two lanterns set out by Rosas, the steward, in readiness for the señora’s return. Virués doffs his hat, and with a click of his heels, takes his leave. “It has been a pleasure to walk with you,” he says. “Might I ask leave to call on you from time to time?” The captain is a genial man, Lolita thinks. He inspires confidence. And trust. If he were a merchant, she would do business with him.
“Have you seen him since then?”
Virués, who was about to put on his hat again, pauses.
“No, but a young comrade, a lieutenant in the artillery, came across him in Algeciras not long ago and wanted to challenge him to a duel … Lobo simply laughed in the man’s face and sent him packing. He refused to fight.”
Lolita can picture the scene perfectly, and despite herself is almost amused. “He does not seem to be a coward to me.”
She cannot help but smile to herself. Noticing her smile, the captain frowns, bows deeply and clicks his heels again with excessive formality. Ramrod-straight, contemptuous of the man they are discussing.
“I don’t believe he is. In my opinion, his decision not to fight has little to do with bravery. It was more a matter of insolence … The word honor means nothing to individuals of that kind. But such are the men of today, I fear … they are very much of their time. And of times to come.”
TWO AND THREE-TENTH miles away, his cape over his shoulders and one eye pressed to the eyepiece of the Dolland achromatic telescope, Captain Simon Desfosseux observes the lights in the mansion where the English ambassador is holding his reception. Thanks to the carrier pigeons and the information he has gleaned from sailors and bootleggers, the captain knows that tonight Wellesley, the Anglo-Hispanic High Command and the cream of Cádiz society are celebrating the French rout at Chiclana. The powerful lenses of the spyglass make it easy for Desfosseux to locate the building, lit up like an affront against the black lines of the ramparts, ringed by the sea, on which he can make out the vague outline of anchored boats against a sliver of crescent moon.
“Three point five should be enough compensation. Elevation: forty-four … Try and set it up for me here, Bertoldi. There’s a good lad.”
Sitting on a trunk next to him, the firing tables spread out beneath a dim lantern, Lieutenant Bertoldi completes his calculations; he gets to his feet and descends the wooden steps to the redoubt where, in the glow from the torches blazing at the other end of the rampart, he can see the great, black, cylindrical mouth of Fanfan. The 10-inch mortar, trained on its target, is waiting only for Bertoldi to communicate his final corrections to its operators. Taking his eye from the spyglass, Desfosseux looks up and glances at a white blot on the sky’s vast expanse of black: the windsock hoisted on a flagstaff next to the observation deck. It flaps gently in the wind, last observed as indicating a fresh breeze from south-southeast. Hence the correction factor of 3.5, to compensate for the crosswind. It could be worse, obviously, but tonight he had hoped for a gentler crosswind or—since he is dreaming of the sort of ideal conditions that would have an artilleryman rubbing his hands with pyrotechnical glee—a strong, steady, following wind from east-southeast, a gift from the god Mars. When it blows, it is possible to create straight lines and almost perfect parabolas, with minimal corrections of zero-point-something. Sheer joy for an artilleryman, an intoxication of powder and cannonfire. Pure glory. It would add a few precious additional toises guaranteeing greater range and accuracy across the bay. All these are factors which Desfosseux, a consummate artilleryman, longs for—most especially this evening, since they would favor his plan to put in an appearance at the English ambassador’s reception. This is what he and the men are doing here at ten o’clock, having missed their dinner: fine-tuning the mortar.
After a final look through the telescope, Desfosseux clambers down from the observation deck and heads for the redoubt. There, behind the bank of earth designed to protect the gun emplacement, the 10-inch Villantroys-Ruty has pride of place in the middle of its own large rectangular entrenchment; the dark, ominous barrel is raised at an angle to the huge two-wheeled gun carriage capable of supporting 7,371 pounds of bronze. It is trained on Cádiz using the calculations Lieutenant Bertoldi has just given the artillerymen. By the torchlight, he can see the men are sweating, their faces haggard. The company comprises a sergeant, two corporals and eight hollow-eyed, unkempt, unshaven soldiers. The Fanfan boys. All of them, including the NCO—an irritable, mustachioed man from the Auvergne named Labiche—are dressed in garrison caps, their capes unbuttoned and dirty, their gaiters spattered with dry mud. Unlike the officers, who can sleep outside the compound or enjoy the pleasures of Puerto Real and El Puerto de Santa María, they live like moles, constantly moving between ramparts, barbettes and trenches, sleeping under wooden boards piled with earth to protect them from the Spanish firing from their advance post at Puntales.
“Just one moment, Captain,” says Bertoldi, “and I’ll be with you.”
Desfosseux watches the artillerymen work. The operation they are carrying out tonight with Fanfan is one they have performed many times using 12-inch Dedon and 8-inch Villantroys howitzers: to them this is routine—handspike, ladle, linstock, one pace back, mouth open to ensure the blast does not burst the eardrums. To Labiche and his grubby squad, it does not matter a fig whether they are aiming at the English ambassador’s reception or at his mother’s petticoats. Sooner or later, they either succeed or fail to hit their target; the non-com and the soldiers will go back to their lice-infested blankets and tomorrow morning will be served the same scant rations with foul, watered-down wine. Their one consolation is being based in a garrison where the enemy’s strengths have been gauged, where the risks are known and are more or less reasonable, unlike other places in Spain where troop movements expose men to bloody battles and dangerous encounters with gangs of guerrilleros. It is true that elsewhere the dangers sometimes have their compensations, opportunities to loot and pillage, to fill your knapsack during raids, marches and overnight billets, whereas in the area around Cádiz, where thousands of French, Italians, Poles and Germans have descended like a plague of locusts—the Germans, as always, are particularly brutal to the local population—there is nothing left to pillage. It would be a different matter if the city, which is as rich as they come, were to finally surrender. But no one has any illusions about that.
“Thirty pounds exactly, Labiche?”
The sergeant, who snapped to attention when Desfosseux appeared, spits a plug of tobacco to the floor, picks his nose and nods. The thirty pounds of powder have been loaded into the breech and the barrel is angled at precisely 44 degrees, based on the corrections provided by Bertoldi. The hollow iron shell, weighing 80 pounds, is filled with lead, sand and only a third of the usual powder charge, with a special fuse fashioned from wood and tinplate in which the oakum burns—or should burn—for 35 seconds. Sufficient time for the internal fuse still to be burning on impact.
“Did you solve the problem with the bush pin?”
Labiche, who is fiddling with his mustache, takes a moment to answer. The copper cylinder which carries the flame to the mortar charge has a tendency to unscrew itself every time it is fired because of the enormous force required to fire the projectile from the barrel. This ends up enlarging the borehole in the breech and reducing the distance obtained.
“I think so, Captain,” he says finally, as though still unsure. “We screwed it in cold. I think it’ll work fine, but I can’t guarantee anything.”
Desfosseux looks rou
nd the faces of the men and smiles.
“I hope so. Tonight, the manolos are having a party in Cádiz. What do you say we liven it up a little?”
The quip barely raises a weak smile. Slides off the greasy skin and sunken eyes. It is obvious that Labiche and his thugs leave enthusiasm to the officer class. They don’t care whether the shell reaches its destination or not, whether it kills many, few, or none. All they want is to be done for the night, get something to eat and go back to their bunks to get their heads down.
The captain takes his watch from his waistcoat pocket and checks it.
“Fire in three minutes.”
Bertoldi, who is standing near him, consults his own watch. Then he nods, says, “Yes, sir,” and turns to the artillerymen.
“Labiche, take the linstock. Everyone to their posts.”
Simon Desfosseux snaps shut his watch, slips it into his pocket and carefully goes back up to the observation deck, trying not to trip in the dark and break his leg. That would not be funny. When he gets to the top, he throws his cape round his shoulders, presses his right eye to the telescope and looks at the brightly lit building in the distance. Then he stands up again and waits. How wonderful it would be, he thinks, as he drums his fingernails softly on the copper telescope, if Fanfan sang a perfect note tonight, a deep booming doh, crashing through the windows at the English ambassador and his guests with 80 pounds of steel, lead and powder—and with feeling. Greetings from the Duc de Belluno, from the Emperor, and from Simon Desfosseux for the role he played.