‘Drake,’ said Sara bitterly, ‘is a pirate. Everyone knows that whatever other men gamble and lose, Drake always manages to fill his pockets – nay, his very barns – with gold and precious stones. If there is profit to be made, Drake will find a way, and the freeing of Portugal will not be the first thing on his mind.’
Yes, Sara was bitter, but she had good cause. Ruy was prepared to thrown away everything in this venture, destroying her peace of mind and risking her future in her homeland of England. She had never even trodden the soil of Portugal, for her father, Dunstan Añez, had come to London long ago. Like her brothers and sisters she had been born here and thought of herself as English.
I was also growing worried about my father. Ever since our long weeks caring for the sick and wounded after the Armada, I had watched him becoming older and more frail before my very eyes. Of late he had turned forgetful, setting down a tincture half made and wandering off to some other task, and then to another. More and more often in the hospital I had to conceal some business he had left unfinished and finish it myself before anyone noticed. I was terrified lest he should lose his position. If he did, would I retain mine? How would we live?
It was when he began to call me ‘Felipe’ that my heart clenched with alarm. For some time now I had suspected that he had forgotten that I was his daughter Caterina, and truly believed I was a son. Now his confusion grew as I seemed to become, in his mind, my long-lost brother somehow come back to him. There was no one I could confide in but Sara, and she had worries enough of her own. I kept my fears to myself, but the more I tried to seal them up in my heart, the more they grew like some monstrous cancer, eating me up from within.
One evening very early in that spring of 1589, I returned late from the hospital to find Dr Lopez seated with my father in our small parlour, with a jug of malmsey and glasses on the table, and their heads together. The glasses must be a gift – a bribe? – for we normally drank from pewter. They stopped speaking when I entered, like guilty boys cheating over their lessons. What could be afoot? I discovered soon enough.
‘Good evening to you, Kit,’ said Dr Lopez, with a little too much geniality.
‘Shalom.’ I helped myself to a glass of malmsey and sat down opposite them. ‘Have I interrupted a private conference?’
‘Not at all, not at all!’ said my father. His eyes were bright and he looked more like his old self than I had seen him for days.
‘The plans for the Portuguese venture are nearly complete,’ he said. ‘Drake will command the fleet, aboard his ship Revenge, while Dom Antonio and our Portuguese party will sail in his ship, the Victory. Altogether we will have a hundred and fifty ships, and an army of thirty thousand to land at Lisbon.’
‘And when we land,’ said Dr Lopez excitedly, ‘the oppressed people of our homeland will rise up and join us, proclaim Dom Antonio as king, and slaughter the Spaniards to a man.’
And proclaim you, I thought, the Lord Burghley of Portugal. I saw coronets glittering in his eyes, and ermine robes, and country estates, and wealth beyond measure. A fine pinnacle indeed for a man who had come as a penniless refugee to London, and once filled my father’s humble role as physician to the city’s destitute and homeless.
‘Father,’ I said, thinking it best to have it out in the open, ‘Father, you do not intend to join this expedition yourself, I hope? For you are hardly strong enough for such an undertaking.’
‘I am younger than Hector Nuñez,’ he said petulantly.
‘If your father is not well enough,’ said Dr Lopez smoothly, ‘you may come in his stead, Kit.’
‘I have no wish to return to Portugal.’
I tried to keep the fear out of my voice, and found that I was clutching my glass too tightly. The bitter cold of the prison. The stench. The screams. My throat is raw with the screams. Lest I snap the stem, I forced myself to ease my grip on the glass.
‘Ah, but you might wish to follow the success of your father’s investment,’ said Lopez.
I felt my heart tighten in my chest till I could scarcely breathe.
‘Father? Surely you have not invested in the venture? We have little enough put aside.’
My father looked shifty, but Dr Lopez said smoothly, ‘Your father has kindly invested a thousand pounds, Kit, so you see, the success of our venture is of some interest to you after all.’
My hand flew to my mouth and I gasped in shock. The wine slopped over the rim of the glass and the stain of it spread over my knees. My father had handed over every shilling and groat we owned to this adventurer. Money painfully put aside over seven years, while we lived so shabbily and worked so hard. We had debts which must be paid – to apothecaries for supplies of herbs and other materials, to the butcher and fishmonger, to the alewife. I could scarcely hold back my tears, and when Lopez had left, I could restrain them no longer.
‘How could you, Father? You have gambled our future on this venture. What if it fails?’
Suddenly he looked frail and confused. ‘But Ruy has promised us all great profits from the voyage, and we could go home again, Felipe. I will return to my university once the Inquisition is driven out. We will live in our old house again; it’s so much better than this hovel, and your mother will have her garden that she loves so much!’
I felt chilled to the very bone. Felipe! He thinks I am my dead brother. And Mama . . . Our old garden. Oh, Papa, I am losing you. I could not berate him any more, but took his hand and stroked it, and said that perhaps all would be well in the end.
After this my father’s health grew worse, both in body and mind. He took it as agreed that I would sail with Drake and the others in his place, and do my part in freeing Portugal. I felt another trap closing about me. Portugal! The very name terrified me. I began to have nightmares again, the same dreams which had haunted me when we had first come to England. I was back in the prison of the Inquisition and could hear my mother screaming, but I could not reach her. The scars the scourges had raised on my back began to burn again with pain. I did not know whether this was a true physical pain, or some trick of my frightened mind, but it felt real enough. And I feared to leave my father. Some days he was brisk and eager, discussing plans for the expedition, then the cloud would descend over his mind and he would forget what he had just said, repeating it again and again, or wandering off into the streets until I fetched him home. Yet when I suggested that I should not go but stay with him, he grew angry and distressed. What should I do? Deep in my mind, a voice whispered that there was something I could do in Portugal, that my conscience would never be clear until I made the attempt. But I was mortally afraid.
Chapter Two
One morning I woke early, still shaking from the horrors of the dark hours, but with the sudden gleam of an idea. I was still troubled by thoughts of what I might be able to do in Portugal that would ease both my father’s mind and my own evil memories. Although it was mostly dread that held me back, I knew that I could only join the expedition as one of those, like Ruy Lopez and Hector Nuñez, who went to keep a sharp eye on their investments, all of them aware that Drake would need watching, else he would turn the venture into yet another of his piratical raids. I would be regarded as a gentleman adventurer, not committed to any part in the fighting.