The Portuguese Affair Read Free Page B

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