The Mountain of Gold Read Free

"Brian, my son,"—Brian Doyle O'Dwyer, I was, before Omar Ibrahim was hatched out of a Mahometan egg—"Brian, that captain there, he's the famous Quinton that sailed with Drake and fought the Armada, no less. An earl of England, he is." Now, what was that title he bore? Near forty years ago, Captain, and my memory's not what it was. Some bird, I think. Eagleswing? Hawkscar?'
    'Ravensden,' I said. 'The man you saw was Matthew Quinton, my grandfather, and I share his name. My brother is the present Earl.'
    Musk snorted and rolled his eyes; he had been a persistently surly yet ferociously loyal retainer to my grandfather, father, brother and now to myself. But even then, I was not such a raw idiot that I could not see what this O'Dwyer (if such truly was his name) sought to do. Claiming a connection with a stranger at first meeting, and flattering their family name to the heavens, is a sure way of melting the heart of the gullible, especially if this gullible stranger has the power to put a noose round your neck. But it was hardly a story that the Irishman was likely to invent (how else could he have known the name and history of my grandfather?) and I knew from reading Earl Matthew's sea-stained journals in our library at Ravensden Abbey that his ship had indeed spent some weeks repairing in Kinsale harbour in the year twenty-five. Kinsale, the same haven where my first command was wrecked through my utter ignorance of the seaman's trade, costing the lives of over one hundred men.
    The Irishman said, 'Brother to the Earl of Ravensden, by God! That lifts my spirits a little, Captain. To surrender at all, well, that's enough disgrace for a lifetime, and many of my fellow captains, the native Algerines that is, won't even countenance it. But to surrender to a man of noble birth, and to an Englishman, not yon Knight of Malta—'
    'Yes, my thanks, but enough, sir!' I blustered. 'Now, let us return to the matter in hand, namely your imminent hanging. When and why did you turn renegade and traitor, Irishman?'
    O'Dwyer sighed, a little too theatrically for conviction. 'You'll not know Baltimore, I suppose, in west Cork? A grand village, Captain, just grand. We had a good life there, with the fishing and the like. I can remember that day in the year thirty-one as if I was standing there now, back down on the green shore with Seamus O'Sullivan, the brewer's son, and his sister Aoife. We saw the great galley come in from Clear Island, we did, and watched it with all the curiosity that fills youngsters of twelve or thirteen, as we were. It was only when their boats started to come ashore that we realised they were Turks. They carried off the whole village, that day, every man, woman and child. Upward of three hundred souls, all carried back to Algier and eternal slavery. Aoife went into the harem of the dey that ruled Algier, and bore him four sons before the plague took her.' The Irishman's eyes were suddenly distant, as is the way of his kind when they digress into matters of love and death. 'Aoife O'Sullivan.' Matters of love, at any rate, from the sigh that accompanied the name. 'Ah, now there's the thing, Captain Quinton. We were all slaves, you see. But Aoife was the greatest lady in the court. She died in comfort in the palace of Algier, in the full beauty of her youth, rather than as an ancient hag in the putrid hovel of the Baltimore O'Sullivans. That's played on my mind for near these thirty years, Captain. For if we talk of slavery, when in her life was she truly a slave?' This was a strange, unsettling man, this Omar Ibrahim, or O'Dwyer, or whatever he elected to be from one moment to the next. Then the Irishman's temper brightened in the blink of an eye, and he said, 'Seamus, though. A big, laughing lad he was. But, well, he was ever a stubborn one, Captain, the sort who can never accept their fate, you see. He swam for it one night, hoping to reach a French ship lying off Algier. The Turks' guardboat caught him, and they