you enjoy it?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good,’ the admiral said, then paused beside a cannon that faced the bay. ‘I need more money,’ he said.
‘You will have it, my lord.’
‘Money,’ the admiral said in a tone of disgust. He was the Marquis de Cardenas and he had been born to money, and he had made more money, but there was never enough money. He tapped the cannon with the tip of his cane. ‘I need money for bribes,’ he said sourly, ‘because there is no courage in these men. They are lawyers, Father. Lawyers and politicians. They are scum.’ The scum of whom the admiral spoke were the deputies to the Cortes, the Spanish parliament, which now met in Cadiz where its chief business was to construct a new constitution for Spain. Some men, the liberales, wanted a Spain governed by the Cortes, a Spain in which citizens would have a say in their own destiny, and such men spoke of liberty and democracy and the admiral hated them. He wanted a Spain like the old Spain, a Spain led by king and church, a Spain devoted to God and to glory. He wanted a Spain free of foreigners, a Spain without Frenchmen and without Britons, and to get it he would have to bribe members of the Cortes and he would have to make an offer to the French Emperor. Leave Spain, the offer would say, and we shall help you conquer the British in Portugal. It was an offer, the admiral knew, that the French would accept because Napoleon was desperate. He wanted an end to the war in Spain. To the world’s eyes it looked as if the French had won. They had occupied Madrid and taken Seville so that now the Spanish government, such as it was, clung to the land’s edge at Cadiz. Yet to hold Spain meant keeping hundreds of thousands of Frenchmen in fortresses, and whenever those men left their walls they were harried by partisans. If Bonaparte could make peace with an amenable Spanish government then those garrisons would be freed to fight elsewhere.
‘How much money do you need?’ Montseny asked.
‘With ten thousand dollars,’ the admiral said, ‘I can buy the Cortes.’ He watched a British frigate sail past the end of the long mole which protected Cadiz’s harbour from the open Atlantic. He saw the great ensign ripple at the frigate’s stern and felt a pulse of pure loathing. He had watched Nelson’s ships sail towards him off Cape Trafalgar, he had breathed the powder smoke and listened to the screams of men dying aboard his ship. He had been felled by a piece of grapeshot that had shattered his left leg, but the admiral had stayed on the quarterdeck, shouting at his men to fight, to kill, to resist, then he had watched as a crowd of yelling British sailors, ugly as apes, swarmed across his deck, and he had wept when Spain’s ensign was lowered and the British flag hoisted. He had surrendered his sword, and then been a prisoner in England and now he was the limping admiral of a broken country that had no battle fleet. He hated the British. ‘But the English,’ he said, still watching the frigate, ‘will never pay ten thousand dollars for the letters.’
‘I think they will pay a great deal,’ Father Montseny said, ‘if we frighten them.’
‘How?’
‘I shall publish one letter. I shall change it, of course. And the implicit threat will be that we shall publish them all.’ Father Montseny paused, giving the admiral time to object to his proposal, but the admiral stayed silent. ‘I need a writer to make the changes,’ Montseny went on.
‘A writer?’ the admiral asked in a sour tone. ‘Why can’t you make the changes yourself?’
‘I can,’ Montseny said, ‘but once the letters are changed, the English will proclaim them forgeries. We cannot present the originals to anyone, because the originals will prove the English correct. So we must make new copies, in English, in an English hand, which we shall claim as the originals. I need a man who can write perfect English. My English is good, but not good enough.’ He fingered his crucifix, thinking. ‘The new letters need only persuade the Cortes, and most deputies will want to believe them, but the changes must still be convincing. The grammar, the spelling, must all be accurate. So I need a writer who can achieve that.’
The admiral made a dismissive gesture. ‘I know a man. A horrid creature. He writes well, though, and has a passion for English books. He’ll do, but how do you publish the letters?’
‘El Correo de Cádiz,’ Father Montseny said, naming the one newspaper that opposed the liberales. ‘I shall print one letter and I shall say in it that the English plan to take Cadiz and make it a second Gibraltar. The English will deny it, of course, but we will have a new letter with a forged signature.’
‘They’ll do more than make denials,’ the admiral said vigorously, ‘they’ll persuade the Regency to close the paper down!’ The Regency was the council which ruled what was left of Spain, and ruled it with the help of British gold which was why they were eager to keep the British friendly. A new constitution, though, could mean a new Regency, one which the admiral could lead.
‘The Regency will be powerless if the letter is unsigned,’ Montseny pointed out drily. ‘The English will not dare own to its authorship, will they? And rumour can do its work for us. Within a day all Cadiz will know that their ambassador wrote the letter.’
The letters had been written by the British ambassador to Spain and they were pathetic outpourings of love. There was even a proposal of marriage in one letter, a proposal made to a girl who was a whore called Caterina Veronica Blazquez. She was an expensive whore, to be sure, but still a whore.
‘The owner of the Correo is a man named Nunez, yes?’ the admiral asked.
‘He is.’
‘And he will publish the letter?’
‘There is an advantage to being a priest,’ Montseny said. ‘The secrets of the confessional, of course, are sacred, but gossip persists. We priests talk, my lord, and I know things about Nunez that he does not want the world to know. He will publish.’
‘Suppose the English try to destroy the press?’ the admiral enquired.
‘They probably will,’ Montseny said dismissively, ‘but for a small sum I can turn the building into a fortress, and your men can help protect it. Then the British will be forced to buy the remaining letters. I’m sure, once we have published one, they will pay very generously.’
‘What utter fools men make themselves over women,’ the admiral said. He took a long, black cigar from a pocket and bit the end off. Then he just stood, waiting until a couple of small boys saw the cigar and came running. Each lad held a length of thick hemp rope that smouldered at one end. The admiral indicated one of the boys who slapped his rope twice on the ground to revive its fire then held it up so the admiral could light the cigar. He waved the boy towards the men who followed him and one of them tossed a coin. ‘It would be best,’ the admiral said, ‘if we possessed both the letters and the gold.’ He watched the British frigate that was now near the rocks that lay off the bastion of San Felipe and he prayed she would run aground. He wanted to see her masts lurch forward as the hull struck the rocks, he wanted to see her canted and sinking, and he wanted to see her sailors floundering in the heaving seas, but of course she sailed serenely past the danger.
‘It would be best,’ Father Montseny said, ‘if we had the English gold and published the letters.’
‘It would be treacherous, of course,’ the admiral observed mildly.
‘God wants Spain great again, my lord,’ Montseny said fervently. ‘It is never treachery to do God’s work.’
The sudden boom of a gun sounded flat across the bay and both men turned to see a far white cloud of smoke.
