‘You have not gone to bed, 1 find,’ he said.
‘Nor have I, indeed,’ said Padeen. ‘At the end of the watch I began thinking about the man that betrayed us, the informer, the Judas; and what with the fury and the dread of being sent back to Botany Bay there was no sleep in me at all’
‘The back of my hand to the informer,’ said Stephen. ‘Hell is filled with them seventeen deep. They are. . .’ He was cut short by a triple flash of lightning and an almost simultaneous thunderclap over the cliff to leeward. ‘There,’ he went on, ‘there is the coast of Spain itself.’ Still more lightning showed it clear. ‘And once you have set foot in that country, no man can take you up and send you back to that infamous place. In any event I am confident that within the year I shall get you your pardon, and then you can go wherever you please. But, Padeen, for the present I wish you to go with Brigid and Mrs Oakes to Avila, in Spain, to look after them. They are to live there in a convent where many other ladies stay with the nuns. And listen, now, Padeen, if you look after them faithfully for a year and a day, you shall have a small farm I own in Munster, near Sidhein na Gháire in the County Clare, with seventeen acres – seventeen Irish acres – of moderate land: it has a house with a slate roof, and at present there are three cows and an ass, pigs of course, and two hives of bees; and it has the right to cut seventeen loads of turf on the bog. Are you content, Padeen?’
‘I am content, your honour, your discretion,’ said Padeen in a trembling voice. ‘I should look after the Brideen for a thousand years and a day for nothing at all; but oh how I should love some land itself. My grandfather once owned nearly three acres, and rented two more . . .’
They talked about the land, the pleasures of farming, the delight of seeing things grow, of reaping and threshing; or rather Padeen talked, such a clear torrent of words as Stephen had not heard from him before; and the day broke, broke quite suddenly, the clouds tearing away in the first gleam of dawn.
‘All hands, all hands!’ roared Bonden right aft, and he and others ran beating on the hatches. ‘All hands, all hands on deck!’ Padeen, easily amazed, tripped Stephen with his rod and his basket of fishes and before they had recovered Reade was on deck in his nightshirt, giving orders. Half a mile astern, in the bay closed by Cape Vares, lay a three-masted lugger, long, low and black. She was heavily armed and heavily manned; she was already increasing sail.
Padeen had instantly run to his station at the fore-sheet. Stephen took up a post on the starboard quarter where he was reasonably out of the way: he could hear the rapid exchanges between Reade and the men whose opinion he asked; and he caught the hands’ words as they worked or stood by. All agreed that the lugger was a Frenchman out of Douarnenez called the Marie-Paule – very fast: the Revenue cutters had never caught her – sometimes a privateer – privateer now, for certain sure, so full of hands – they might spare a Brixham trawler, but no one else, Christian, Turk or Jew – and François the skipper was a right bastard – a brass nine-pounder in the bows they served most uncommon well All hands spoke very seriously, and they looked grave. He could not see Reade’s expression – he was at the tiller with Bonden and his back was turned – but Bonden’s was firm-set, composed.
Looking fore and aft Stephen assessed the position, the light strengthening every’
minute and the clipper heeling more and more as the sheets were hauled and belayed right aft. As far as his sea-going experience went there was no way out. A short mile ahead Cape Vares ran north into the sea: they could not clear its tip on this starboard tack: they must go about to gain an offing, and as they did so the big lugger must necessarily board them. She was coming up fast, full-packed with men.
Many a sea-chase had he known, as either hunter or quarry, and they had all been long, sometimes very long, a matter of days, with the tension great yet sustained, as it were spread out and more nearly bearable. Now it was to be a matter of minutes rather than hours or days: the clipper, her lee-rail buried in foam and a cloud of sail abroad, was already making ten knots and she must either strike that cape in four minutes or go about and receive the lugger on her starboard beam.
As these minutes passed he realized, with an extraordinary intensity, just what his fortune, lying in its chests below, meant to him and his daughter and to a thousand aspects of his life. It had not occurred to him that money could have such value – that he could prize it so much. Gulls drifted between the Ringle and the cape, waves breaking along its shore. He turned a haggard face to the men at the helm and as though he felt the look Reade glanced back at him. The young man’s expression had something of that happy wildness Stephen had often seen in Jack Aubrey at times of crisis, and smiling he called ‘Stand by, Doctor. Watch out,’ adding some words to Slade about a biscuit. Then he and Bonden, their hands on the triple-turned rope and the tiller, their eyes fixed to the leach of the foresail, eased the helm alee, and still more alee.
Stephen saw the dreadful shore of the cape, now so close, racing away to the left.
He saw its seaward end appear, just clear of their larboard bow, at ten yards perhaps. He heard young Reade cry ‘Toss it hard.’ Slade flung the biscuit, hit the rock, and in a roar of laughter they were past, round into the open sea.
The lugger fired an ineffectual gun and tacked, incapable of weathering the cape, losing ground, impetus, and her prize. The pursuit continued for some hours, but by noon the lugger was hull-down in the east, hopelessly outsailed.
The Ringle carried on in a state of extraordinary good humour, often laughing, often reminding one another that ‘they had weathered that old Cape Vares within biscuit-toss, ha, ha, ha!’ Some tried to explain their triumph to Mrs Oakes and Brigid, but although they conveyed their happiness and sense of good fortune they had not fully succeeded before the Ringle opened the port of Corunna, or as some said, the Groyne.
As Stephen stood in the bows, smiling at the busy harbour and the town, Mould sidled casually up to him and out of the corner of his mouth be said ‘Me and my mates know the Groyne as well as we know Shelmerston: this is where we used to come for our brandy. And if so be you should like to have the goods landed discreet, as I might say, we know a party, dead honest, or he would have been scragged long since, that might answer.’
‘Thank you, Mould, thank you very much for your kind suggestion but this time – this time, eh? – I mean to land them in all legality. And that is what I am going to tell the captain of the port and his people. But I am very much obliged to you and your friends for your good will.’
Some hours later Stephen, sitting in the cabin with a perfectly mute Reade and the two senior port authorities, said ‘And apart from the martial stores belonging to this vessel, the tender to His Britannic Majesty’s ship Bellona, that you saw so recently, none of which constitutes merchandise, there is nothing except some treasure belonging to me personally, which I mean to lodge with the Bank of the Holy Ghost and of Commerce in this city – I am acquainted with don Jose Ruiz, its director, who shipped it to me in the first place. As it is in minted gold, in English guineas, it is of course exempt from duty.’
‘Does it amount to a great deal?’
‘The number of guineas I cannot tell, but the weight, I believe, is somewhere between five and six tons. That is why I must beg you to do me the very great kindness of giving this vessel a berth against the quay, and, if you possibly can, to lend me a score of trustworthy able-bodied men to carry the chests. Here’ – waving to two fat little canvas bags – I have put up a sum that I hope you will distribute as you think fit. May I take it that we are in agreement, gentlemen? For if so, I must hurry ashore, speak to don Jose about the gold, and then go straight up and pay my compliments to the Governor.’