Flashman and the Emperor

by Robert Brightwell

  We buried the bodies on some scrubland near the shore, digging a deep grave so that they would not be discovered. As the last spadeful of earth covered them up it seemed to me that my affairs in Brazil had been settled. My men had been avenged and the main threat to Cochrane removed at one stroke. I did not doubt that more factions within São Luis would arise – my friend would still struggle to achieve his model of liberty for the state – but I had more than done enough. It was beyond time for me to return home and I knew that I had just the tool to do it, with my friend’s blessing too.

  “The man has completely vanished,” Cochrane told me two days later as we met over breakfast in the residence. The disappearance of Delgardo had been the talk of the town the previous day. While Salazar and his family had discreetly moved to one of their plantations, no one seemed to know who was responsible. As I suspected, the priest was keeping his head down to avoid any accusation of breaking his oath of secrecy or of luring the would-be governor into an ambush.

  “I hear there was street fighting in his quarter of the town last night,” I reported. “It seems members of his clan are fighting among themselves for power.”

  “Good,” grunted Cochrane. “If they are busy killing each other, they will leave us alone. We can get on with building a proper government.”

  “Yes, it will be a good legacy to leave behind when we sail from here.” I paused and adopted a pained expression until the admiral looked up and then continued, “But for you, my friend, I fear it might be too late, at least at home in England.”

  “What on earth do you mean?” demanded Cochrane.

  “I found this yesterday,” I told him, reaching into my pocket for the draft newspaper I had found in the printer’s office. I unfolded it and passed it across. “You are not going to like it,” I warned.

  Cochrane started to read, his jaw dropping as he read one defamation after another. There it was in black and white: his name associated with every vice, depravity, crime and brutality he could think of. If he was not accused of acting directly, then it was implied that he allowed or encouraged his command to commit such acts on his emperor’s behalf. I watched as the colour first built in his face and then drained away. “These are outrageous lies,” he roared and then as he read on he added in a voice barely above a whisper, “My reputation will be ruined if this reaches London. The government there hates me already because of their Foreign Enlistment Act.”

  “This is the public record of news on the day of our arrival. There were dozens of copies printed,” I lied. “Some are bound to have been taken by the Portuguese citizens back to Lisbon. They will doubtless use them to justify their own actions in abandoning the city. They will certainly be used to support official protests to London about you.” For all his virtues, Cochrane had immense pride and I knew that the thought of his standing in society being so vilified would horrify him. I paused before adding, “What you need is someone you trust to take your account of proceedings to London. Someone with connections in government, who can do all they can to stop such foul accusations seeing the light of day. Someone who will stand alongside you in society and say what is necessary to protect your reputation.”

  Cochrane tore his gaze from the tale of his infamy and, if I did not know better, I would swear his eyes were moist as he took in my encouraging smile. “You would do that for me?” he asked hesitantly.

  “Of course. How long have we been friends?” I asked. “I vow to you that I will do all in my power to ensure that this vile rag never sees the light of day in London.” As Cochrane himself held the only copy, I could be reasonably sure of success on that point. In any event, I would do all I could to defend my friend’s reputation. Not least, because I would be tainted with it when it was known I had sailed with him. “You write a robust defence of your actions, a full justification of everything we have done. After all, we have captured half of the country and barely spilled a drop of blood. The truth will make fools of your accusers. You can get the emperor to attest we have done the same. In the meantime, I will organise my passage on the first ship to Europe.”

  Cochrane got up, the emotion now clear in his face as he grabbed my hand and with his other gripped my shoulder. “Thomas,” he said looking me fervently in the eye. “You really are the truest friend a man could have.”

  Chapter 36

  I have found myself unwelcome in a fair few places in my time. Weddings, funerals, the Reform Club, but none compares with a ship called the Dona Estela. Most of the other passengers were men whose families had been sent on ahead to Portugal in the earlier ships. Rather than abandon their property they had stayed behind to sell it, and had found that it was very much a buyers’ market. They were united by two things: a fury at the pittance for their possessions that they had been able to realise compared to what they had been worth just weeks ago; and a hatred of Cochrane and his force that had brought them to penury. In the latter case, that hatred was largely focused on me.

  It had been a struggle to get a berth on the ship at all. I had been forced to appeal to the old grandee in charge of the vessel, who had initially refused to consider having an officer of the ‘Devil’ on board. I explained that I had only joined Cochrane under duress and that I was just as appalled by the behaviour of the imperial forces as they were. I larded on top of this the fact that I was a knight of Alcantara and some of my peninsular service. It transpired that we had fought the French together at Albuera and so we shared some tales of the horror and slaughter of the day. That was enough to get me aboard, but it still did not earn me any friends among the passengers.

  As well as the men, there were two middle-aged women. One was the wife of a plantation owner, who clearly did not trust her husband to get the right price. The second, a sour-faced harridan, was the former owner of what was allegedly the best brothel in São Luis. She had a face that would have curdled milk. I strongly suspected that her establishment would not have been a patch on Madame Sousa’s.

  The loading of the ship had taken longer than expected. The man who had managed the docks had left with the earlier fleet and many of the workers had also disappeared, after helping themselves to the contents of the warehouses. Some slaves were drafted in to load food and supplies into the hold, which they did haphazardly alongside the furniture and possessions of the passengers. After several chairs had been smashed, the wife of the plantation owner oversaw proceedings herself to ensure that her prized belongings were safely stowed at the top. As all my particulars were in my sea trunk in my cabin, I left them to it.

  After a farewell meal with Cochrane and Crosbie at the governor’s mansion, I set sail on the twenty-eighth of August. I felt a huge sense of relief to be finally heading back to Europe. If the Brazilian government paid even half of the prize money that Cochrane had calculated was owed, we would all be rich men. Hell, if it only paid a tenth of it, it would have been worth the year and a half away from home. I had helped to liberate a country the size of Europe, although it would be a while before I could claim any credit for that. I was sure that the Portuguese would have friends in London and knew that Cochrane had few admirers in government. He would probably be roundly condemned for a while. I knew a printer who would publish his defence, but his critics would only really quieten down when the fleet that was supposed to have been slaughtered by the phantom army, started to arrive in Lisbon.

  I was still undecided as to whether we had made Brazil any better than it had been before. While my friend trusted his emperor, I suspected that the politicians who surrounded the young ruler were little improvement on the ones who had run the country in the past. However, as I write this account in my dotage, I must admit that the emperor’s son, Pedro II, according to what I read in the papers, is turning out to be the visionary leader that Cochrane would certainly approve of.

  But all that was in the future. For the next month I suffered the cold shoulders of my fellow passengers as they continually snubbed me. Conversations ceased or were continued in lowered vo
ices whenever I approached and invariably they would shift positions to show me their backs when I sat down. Only at mealtimes were they forced to be barely civil as the passengers shared a long table. But even then, they refused to speak to me unless they had to. I took to leaving the table early, to their evident relief. My main companion in those days was a sailor called João, who had once served in the Royal Navy. He had jumped ship at Rio and was now the bosun on the ship. It was a broad-beamed merchant vessel with a cavernous hold that tended to wallow in a heavy sea. But João assured me it was good under sail and certainly it seemed to be making steady progress against the prevailing easterly winds as we ploughed our way north-east.

  The storm hit a month into the voyage. It was a proper tempest that arrived suddenly, causing the crew to rush and batten down the hatches to make things as watertight as possible. Despite their efforts, the cabin planking was soon wet as the sea found its way through gaps in the deck caulking. As usual, I tried to ride out the storm in my cot, but as the gale lashed the ship for two solid days, I had to get up occasionally. I took pleasure in eating my meals enthusiastically and offering food to my greener companions, which they found even harder to swallow than my company.

  Finally, on the third morning, we woke to find that the blow had moved on during the night. Apart from a few broken pots, we appeared to have taken no significant damage. All the rigging was intact as we had only had a storm sail raised to keep the ship pointed into the wind. Soon canvas was billowing above us and the Dona Estela surged north-east once more, a stiff breeze blowing in on her starboard quarter.

  That night I noticed an extra squeak in the noise of the vessel. As you lie in a wooden ship, you become familiar with the sounds it makes. There is a regular rhythm to them and I always found them strangely comforting as I tried to sleep. Having listened to them for a month, a new sound now stood out. I put it down to damp timbers swollen from the storm and thought no more about it. I would be lying if I claimed that I noticed something strange about the way the ship sailed the next day, but the following night there were even more new sounds from the timbers. This time there were deep, irregular groaning noises, as though an arthritic old man was trying to get up just the other side of the bulkhead. Something was not right. I got up early the next morning and when I went on deck, I could see the ship was behaving differently. More water was slopping over the bows; we seemed to be going through the waves rather than over them. I looked over the side and perhaps it was my imagination, but we seemed lower in the water.

  “Is the ship handling differently?” I asked the master when he came up on deck.

  “What is it to you?” he asked curtly.

  “She seems sluggish to me as though we have taken on a lot of water.”

  “Aye, I thought that too but I have sounded the well and it was bone dry.” He turned away satisfied that the matter was closed, but I felt a shiver of alarm. Two days after a storm like that even the best built ships would have some water at the bottom of the keel, yet according to the captain there was none. I had a sudden recollection of a ship that had foundered just off Madras during my last trip to India.

  “Do you mind telling me what cargo we are carrying, Captain?” I asked him.

  The master seemed irritated that I would not let the matter rest. “It all belongs to you passengers. There is no manifest, mostly furniture, although that plantation owner has loaded aboard just about everything of value on their land they could find.”

  After breakfast, I found João and persuaded him to let me into the cargo hold. “We are hearing strange noises from the crews’ quarters too,” he told me. “There is some water trapped on this ship somewhere, even if it is not reaching the well and the pumps.” We found four lanterns that we hung on convenient nails and started to explore the fat belly of the ship. There were trunks and chests, some of them damn heavy, carpets, furniture and all manner of other items, mostly tied down with rope to stop them moving in a heavy swell. We had already stood silently for a moment to listen for water splashing around at the bottom, but apart from the creaking, the hold was ominously as quiet as a grave.

  “We need to burrow down through the middle,” I told João and so we set to work. In no time at all we were both sweating like the stokers on the Rising Star; the hold was unfeasibly warm. There were strange smells too and I was not surprised to find some bales of tobacco when we lifted a table out of the way.

  “That belongs to the plantation owners,” João told me. “The wife cleared out all of their barns even though it might perish on the voyage. She was determined not to leave anything for your Brazilian empire.” He laughed. “She is a bitter old cow. She probably salted the fields so that nothing would grow too.”

  “It’s not the tobacco that is worrying me,” I told him. “That will not hold much water but something else obviously is.” We pressed on, tunnelling our way through the hold like a weevil in a piece of cheese. We found sacks of sugar and coffee, then some other beans that had started to go soft in the damp and finally we reached a new layer of sacks that seemed to spread from one side of the ship to the other. I tried to tug one out but it was stuck solid.

  I glanced up at João. “Give me your knife,” I ordered.

  “They won’t want you cutting their sacks open,” he warned as he passed the blade across.

  “Never mind that,” I told him as I cut through the rough fabric. I ripped it apart and João held down a lantern so that I could see what was inside. It was the thing I had least wanted to find: rice. The ship off Madras had sunk due to rice. A hatch had not been properly covered in a storm and water had got into the hold. Not much, but enough to cause a small part of the cargo to swell. That in turn had sprung one of the planks in the hull and more water had poured in. Over a brief period, that had caused more of the sacks to expand, breaking more of the timbers, until eventually the whole ship broke apart. Fortunately, the crew had been saved. The captain had reported that the pump well had been dry throughout the slow destruction of his ship, until the final morning. I had read about the incident in the Madras papers and it had come to mind the moment the master on the Dona Estela had mentioned that there was no water in his well either.

  I reached into the sack; the grains were tightly packed but I dug some out with the knife. They were damp but still hard, with more swelling to do. João and I exchanged a long and meaningful glance. He was a sailor and must have heard of similar events to the one in Madras. “Let’s check the sides of the ship,” I told him. “Perhaps the sacks are not spread that far.”

  It took an hour to burrow down to the inside of the hull. We were less cautious now, throwing obstructions out of the way and careless of any damage caused. On both sides we found the same: soaking wet rice sacks. When I tried to lift one I found it was too heavy. But even lifting a corner, I could see water pouring in underneath through a gap in the planks.

  “We should tell the master,” called João as I pushed a sack back to partially stem the inflow of the sea.

  “Wait,” I called, grabbing his arm as he started to get up. For while we had been digging about, I had been thinking and I did not like the conclusions I reached. “Sit down,” I told him pointing to some bales of tobacco higher up the hold. He did as I asked, watching me curiously, while I too studied him closely. For I understood that this unlikely moment in the hot fetid hold of a ship could be as important to me as any cut and thrust in the heat of battle.

  “Do you have a family?” I asked.

  “I have a woman and a child in São Luis,” he grinned and added, “and another child with someone else’s wife in Rio.”

  So far so good, I thought. The last thing I needed was for him to reveal himself to be some pious Christian. “What will happen if we tell the captain about this?”

  João looked puzzled. “We will need to lower the boat to see how bad the damage is from outside the ship. Then we throw the rice overboard.” His eyes darted away from mine as he added, “And plug up the holes.” />
  The fact that he could not hold my gaze hinted that he held the same suspicions as me. “And what if the holes cannot be plugged?” I persisted. “What then?”

  “We will have to take to the boats,” he conceded, but this time he was staring down at the sacks by his feet when he spoke. I stayed silent, letting him mull over that for a while, for we both knew that there was not room for everyone in the boats. There were no guns on the ship to man and so the crew was light, around sixty men, I guessed, for a similar number of passengers. I waited for the man to peer up at me before I spoke again.

  “There is room for what, thirty men on the longboat in addition to supplies for a long voyage and perhaps twenty in the cutter. So, who is going to go?”

  “The women and then the captain might draw lots?” His voice ended in a question that I suspected was drawn more on hope than knowledge.

  I gave a snort of derision. “One of the women bloody well caused this mess with her greed. If there is a draw, you can wager that most of the wealthy passengers will win a seat. But they are more likely to steal away in the boats at night, leaving you to your fate. They all hate me and so I will be another certain to be left behind.”

  “But we will need the captain to navigate,” protested João.