Betrayal

*Charcas, Hidalgo de Sarmiento, lieutenant and emissary of Pueyrredon

*Manuel Galvis, peon

*Vicente Serrano, artist and exiled student

Chapter 1

In the dilapidated office Mr Owen looked up from his reckoning. ‘Bananas at eighty reis the quintal seems a little excessive, Mr Ribeiro,’ he said slowly, mopping his brow. The humidity was formidable, the dull heat like a suffocating blanket, but the purser of a frigate of His Majesty’s Navy had his standards and he sweltered in coat and breeches.

Shrugging, the fat Portuguese trader leaned back in his chair. ‘You think? I sell you green ones, not go rot, best in Mozambique.’

Tugging at his clammy neckcloth and dismissively eyeing the hand of half-ripe fruit brought for his inspection, Owen looked pained. ‘My captain wishes only to serve his worthy crew with a mort of sweetness in their diet, but if the price is beyond my allowance . . .’

‘Then I help! I can find th’ red banana, very creamy, very cheap and for you-’

‘No, no, Mr Ribeiro, the crew would think it sharp practice. Were you to vary your price to accommodate a larger order – say, five quintals – and payment in silver reals, then . . .’

Nicholas Renzi, sitting to one side of the table, fanned himself with a palm leaf. The negotiations dragged on and his attention wandered. The doorway was jammed with wide-eyed children, fearful but entranced by this visitation from the outer world. Beyond, in the harsh sunlight, was the noisy ebb and flow of an African market town. The world of war with Napoleon Bonaparte might have been in another universe but it was precisely why he was here. Hove to off the river mouth and enjoying the fresh oceanic breezes was HMS L’Aurore, a thirty-two-gun frigate whose captain was his closest friend, Thomas Kydd.

As his confidential secretary, Renzi had an unquestioned right to come and go on ship’s business; in these last weeks he had often landed with the purser but not to lend his presence for business negotiations to secure fresh foodstuffs. He had every sympathy for the dry Welshman who, as a man of independent business aboard ship, had to balance his costs at supplying stores and necessaries with fairness at the point of issue yet leave himself with sufficient profit to weather financial storms. In the absence of an agent-victualler this meant making a deal with often unscrupulous local merchants that might well be repudiated later by an officious Admiralty functionary in faraway London.

The purser probably suspected but had never enquired the real reason why Renzi so often accompanied him: if there was one thing a scouting frigate needed from the shore even more than fresh victuals it was information. With an infinite number of directions to sail off in, even the tiniest whisper was better than nothing, and Renzi had personally witnessed the effectiveness of Admiral Lord Nelson’s network of merchant intelligence in the Mediterranean before Trafalgar, overseen, it was rumoured, by his own secretary.

The current mission for L’Aurore was an important one. Only a few months before the British had taken Cape Town, the Dutch settlement at the tip of Africa at the Cape of Good Hope, to secure the all-important route to India. With slender military resources, it lay vulnerable to a vengeful counter-attack by the French, specifically by Admiral Marechal, who was known to be at sea with a battle squadron greatly outnumbering the few ships of the Royal Navy on station there.

L’Aurore’s orders were to follow the coast around the south of the continent and up the Indian Ocean side, stopping vessels, seeking word. As far north as Lourenco Marques, there had been not even a rumour, but Kydd had pressed on, if only to prove the French absent from the area. He knew that on the other side of Madagascar the French had strong island bases in a direct line from India, which could well be sheltering a battle group. Leda, the larger fellow frigate to L’Aurore, was sent to look into these, so L’Aurore had sailed on into the Mozambique channel, past hundreds of miles of the frightful remoteness of the dark continent to the foetid flatness of Quelimane, an ancient Arab slave market but now a lonely outpost of the Portuguese empire, itself dating from the daring voyage of Vasco da Gama in the 1490s.

‘Five quintal?’ Ribeiro came back with a frown. ‘We just quit o’ three cargo for Zanzibar, not so many left. Cost me more to find.’

Idly Renzi looked out at a grove of densely clustered scrub palms nearby. To his surprise he made out arrays of the unmistakable yellow curves of magnificently sized fruit. More than enough, surely. ‘Er, may we not avail ourselves of those fine bananas yonder, or are they spoken for perhaps?’ he enquired.

The other two men turned to him with surprise. ‘Do allow I should conduct my business without your valued assistance, Mr Renzi,’ Owen said huffily. ‘Those are not bananas, rather plantains, which every soul knows may only be suffered to be eaten after cooking.’ He turned back to Ribeiro and stiffly concluded arrangements for a delivery of three quintals of standard bananas.

As Renzi rose with the purser, he offered casually, ‘Then your trade prospers, Mr Ribeiro?’

The man looked up guardedly. ‘As is always the chance o’ luck in these days. Why you ask?’

‘Oh, just that Mr Napoleon is stirring up trouble in these parts. Has your business suffered at the hands of the French at all?’

‘They don’t trouble as we,’ Ribeiro replied.

‘Then you haven’t heard – his ships of war are at sea. He seeks bases for his privateers, territory to add to France. Should he decide on Quelimane, well, as you have no friends . . .’

‘Er, no friends?’

‘Those who will rid you of him, should you tell them in time. You haven’t seen any French ships – big ones, I mean to say?’ Renzi added.

‘Um, no, not b’ me.’

‘Perhaps have had word of such?’ It was a last try. So far north and failing any intelligence, L’Aurore must now cease her search and put about for Cape Town with nothing to report.

‘No.’

Renzi shrugged and turned to go.

‘Wait.’ Ribeiro hauled himself to his feet, snorting with the effort. ‘I not seen, but the fishers? They on the sea, they will know.’ He went to the doorway and called over a wizened man on the other side of the street.

After a brief exchange in some African dialect, Ribeiro beamed. ‘He say yes! Ver’ big one, two day ago up th’ coast.’

Renzi snapped to full alert. ‘Just one? Where was it going?’

‘He remember Pebane way – t’ the north.’

Curious onlookers joined them, and another seamed individual broke in with excited jabber.

‘He say he saw as well, four day ago but swear it were off t’ the south.’

Renzi frowned. How much reliance should he place on these fishermen? A lone ship – and was it truly a big one?

‘How many masts did it have?’ he asked.

Both were insistent that it was three-masted and square-rigged on each. This, therefore, was not a local trader, nor yet a privateer or even an armed schooner, for it was ship-rigged in exactly the same way as a frigate or ship-of-the-line. Was it one of Marechal’s scouting frigates ranging ahead of the deadly squadron?

His heart quickened, but Kydd would need to know details. North or south – where was it headed? If he offered money to the wider community for information they would say anything they thought would please him but he did have something up his sleeve. ‘Oh, Mr Owen,’ he said to the purser, ‘do send for my sea-bag, if you will.’

One of the boat’s crew, red-faced with exertion in the heat, hurried up with a mysterious carry-all, surrounded by a noisy crowd of screeching children and their elders. Renzi took it, bowing politely to the young seaman who, taken aback, awkwardly bowed in return and for good measure touched his forelock.