The Portuguese Affair

by Ann Swinfen

  ‘Moll says it’s because she’s so strong, from heaving pails of water and lye, and great buck-baskets full of wet linen,’ he said. ‘Her babies were bound to be strong.’

  ‘Boys or girls?’ I said, holding one of the apples on my palm so Hector could lift it softly with his velvet lips.

  ‘One of each. She’s called the boy Francis in honour of Sir Francis and called the girl Bess after the Queen.’

  He chattered on while I gave Hector the second apple and he blew affectionate juice into my ear.

  ‘And what of all the backstairs coming and going?’ I said casually. The stable lads never missed anything.

  ‘The usual. That Kit Marlowe was about here last week, him you don’t like.’

  I gave him a startled look. I hadn’t realised the lads had even noticed that. He gave me a cheeky grin.

  ‘Oh, never fear. I’ll say nothing to Master Phelippes or Sir Francis.’

  ‘I’d rather you did not. It is a private matter, nothing to do with Seething Lane. Marlowe has insulted me more than once.’

  ‘Arrogant bastard,’ Harry said dispassionately.

  I saw that I would need to ask him outright if I was to get the information I wanted.

  ‘Have you seen anything of that fellow who was in the Tower?’ I said, making my voice as casual as I could and keeping my back to him. ‘Poley, was he called? I wonder if he’d dare show his face around here again.’

  ‘Oh, him.’ Harry spat into the straw. ‘Aye, he was here, two-three weeks ago. Master Phelippes has sent him off to the Low Countries with despatches. He can’t do much harm there.’

  It seemed Harry shared my doubts of Poley, but it would be wiser to probe no further. Our talk turned to other matters, and when Harry went off to his supper, I bade Hector an affectionate farewell and left, dropping the bolt on the door as I went.

  Soon after the defeat of the Spanish fleet, a remark made by the Lord Admiral Howard had been discussed everywhere amongst our community. He had said that now was the time to invade Portugal and defeat the Spanish. All the older men amongst our Marrano people seemed carried away on a wave of expectation and excitement. At last the chance had come to return to their homeland, to restore Dom Antonio to the throne – Dom Antonio of the royal house of Aviz, claimant to the lost crown. We would drive the Inquisition, together with the Spanish, out of our country. Then Portugal, that great nation, once a power in the world, with colonies to east and west, with ships trading on every sea, and above all with tolerance of the Jewish faith, would rise again; the Golden Age of a century before would be restored.

  Part of their argument was based on the ancient Anglo-Portuguese Alliance, ratified two hundred years ago when John of Gaunt’s daughter married the king of Portugal, but dating back more than two hundred years before that. The alliance of perpetual friendship had begun when England helped Portugal to drive out the Moors, but it had been strengthened in the days when Portugal was the greater power, home of seafarers who explored all the world, discovering new lands. Back in those times, England was the lesser nation. Now the situation was reversed again and Portugal cried out for help from her ancient ally. And with such aid, Portugal would once again become great, free of her Spanish overlords. So they argued.

  These were the old men’s dreams. We who were younger did not share them. Anne Lopez and I discussed it one day towards the end of winter when I was visiting them.

  ‘I am glad, Kit,’ she said violently, ‘glad that my proposed marriage to the banker of Lyons has been abandoned. I want to stay in London. My father talks of nothing but returning to Portugal in glory, as Dom Antonio’s chief adviser and courtier, but my mother is English and so am I. The Queen is going to pay for my brother Anthony to attend Winchester College. What interest have we in Portugal? It is nothing to me or my brothers and sisters.’

  I nodded. ‘I have no wish to go back,’ I said. ‘My memories are too bitter.’

  I did not tell her of unfinished business there, which filled me sometimes with hope, and sometimes with despair. And, always, there was the shadow of remembered terror.

  ‘Yet our fathers think differently,’ I said. ‘Even my father, after all he suffered, dreams these dreams of a free Portugal.’

  Anne’s mother Sara, too, shared her worries with me.

  ‘Ruy is drawn more and more into Dom Antonio’s affairs, Kit. He has poured every penny we possess into this expedition they are planning. Dom Antonio has pledged him fifty thousand crowns and five percent of the proceeds from the West African franchise when Portugal is freed, but what if the expedition fails? We will lose everything. Somehow they have even persuaded the Queen to invest five thousand pounds, but the greatest burden is being borne by Ruy and Hector Nuñez and my father and the others.’

  ‘Drake is a partner in the venture, is he not?’ I said. ‘And Sir John Norreys. The greatest sea captain and the greatest professional soldier.’

  ‘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.

  I might also be welcome for my medical skills. Like all naval expeditions, the ships would carry their own surgeons, but they were a class of unskilled butchers, whose main purpose was to hack off injured limbs too fearfully smashed to preserve. They probably killed more men than they saved. As a physician I was better qualified to help the men, both afloat and ashore, with the many illnesses that sailors and soldiers are heir to. However, as a physician I would have little freedom to carry out the plan I was tentatively forming in my mind. I would need a reason to leave the expedition at some point and venture into the interior of Portugal on my own. I decided I must call on Walsingham.

  Never before had I gone willingly to offer my services to Sir Francis. Originally, when I was but sixteen, I had been coerced into his service as a code-breaker and translator by the contrivance of Robert Poley, who had discovered my sex. For a woman to disguise herself as a man was regarded as heresy, and the punishment, as for any form of heresy, was burning at the stake. Threatened with exposure by Poley, I had entered Walsingham’s service in fear and resentment, yet gradually, working under the chief of his agents, Thomas Phelippes, I had found I enjoyed the challenge of breaking new and seemingly impossible codes. They were the most intriguing and exciting of puzzles, and yet they were not mere trivial entertainment. My work with Phelippes was aimed at the protection of the nation and the Queen against our many enemies, principally Spain, France and the Papacy.

  When Phelippes trained me in forgery, I was less happy, but many of the ‘projections’, as he and Walsingham called them, required slipping false reports and misleading information in amongst the enemies’ own intercepted papers, and I proved to have a useful skill here as well. When Walsingham had despatched me on other missions, first in England and later in the Low Countries, I had survived and had some small successes – more through accident and luck than through skill on my part. A few times my own clumsiness had nearly cost me dear.

  One skill which they had arranged for me to be taught – swordsmanship – I had chosen to improve for my own satisfaction. Since returning from Amsterdam I had spent more time with Master Scannard at the Tower, who had undertaken my original training at Walsingham’s bidding. Although I would never be a master at the skill, nor wish to be, yet I hoped I would no longer fall over the sword Walsingham had provided for me. I did not carry it in London, preferring the simple dagger my father had given me, but if I was going on the Portuguese expedition, I would wear it. Scannard, a man scanty of words and even scantier of praise, conceded that I had made some progress.

  To go now to Walsingham and willingly offer to serve him was contrary to everything I had felt before, but it seemed the only way to accomplish what I had in mind to try. He had agreed to see me, and I presented myself in good time at Seething Lane, to be shown into Sir Francis’s office by his chief secretary, Francis Mylles.

  ‘We have not seen you since last autumn, Kit,’ Mylles said. ‘You are well?’

  ‘Aye, never better. And you?’

  We exchanged the usual pleasantries.

  ‘Sir Francis will be here shortly,’ Mylles said. ‘If you would not mind waiting?’

  As if I should take offence at waiting for the Queen’s Principal Secretary, her most senior advisor after Lord Burghley.

  Mylles offered me wine, but I refused, wanting to keep a clear head. Indeed he was gone only a few minutes when Sir Francis appeared, apologising. He looked, as he so often did, tired and ill but resolutely indomitable. I never knew a man so determined to defeat his physical weakness by strength of mind.

  ‘Kit, my dear boy, it is very good to see you! Has Mylles not offered you wine?’

  Before I could object, he was pressing a glass into my hand. As always, it was of the very best quality. He had his sources. However, I took only small
sips.

  ‘The Portuguese expedition, Sir Francis.’

  ‘Ah.’ He gave me a knowing smile. ‘You are to sail with it, of course.’

  It was no surprise to me that he knew. He always seemed to know my affairs before I did.

  ‘Possibly. Probably. If I can get leave from St Bartholomew’s. My father–,’ I paused. ‘My father has invested in it.’

  ‘And you are not happy about that.’

  I suppose my feelings were writ large on my face.

  ‘Nay, I am not, but it is done now.’

  ‘The Queen has invested twenty thousand pounds.’

  So the Queen had been persuaded to increase her stake in the venture.

  ‘The Queen has rather more means than my father and I!’ I should not have said it, but the words were out before I could stop them.

  He did not rebuke me, but I apologised quickly.

  ‘You are concerned, of course,’ he said. ‘And you will go with the expedition to ensure that all is well.’

  ‘There is little I can do, surely, to ensure that, but my father wishes me to go. Otherwise he would try to go himself, but he is not strong enough. I have no wish to return to Portugal.’

  I swallowed hard and Sir Francis nodded. He knew a little of my history, but by no means the most dangerous part.

  ‘However, I do not want to be merely a passenger.’ I cleared my throat. ‘It would seem a fruitless waste of time. I thought I could perhaps serve you in some way, if there is any mission you want undertaken in Portugal? I know you have agents there already, so perhaps there is no need.’

  My voice trailed away. My whole purpose in coming here suddenly seemed foolish. Yet Sir Francis looked at me thoughtfully, not at all dismissive of my suggestion.