The Confusion

“It is better not to remember this. Knowing that she would make a full report of these events to her husband in Mexico City, I did not delay in writing the Viceroy a letter, in which I related these events-but obliquely, in case the letter was intercepted. I assured him that his secret was safe with me, for I was a Caballero, a man of honor, and he could rely upon my discretion; my lips, I told him, were sealed forever.”

There was now a long and somewhat agonizing silence there on the roof of the banyolar.

“Some months later, I received a communication from this same Viceroy, inviting me to go to the Governor’s House in Vera Cruz on my next visit to that port, to receive a gift that awaited me there.”

“A lovely new set of neck-irons?”

“A pistol-ball to adorn the nape of your neck?”

“A ceremonial sword, delivered point-first?”

“I have no idea,” said Jeronimo, a bit ruffled, “for I never reached the house of the Gobernador. It is important to mention that our purpose in visiting Vera Cruz was to pick up a shipment of small arms from a merchant I had come to know there-a fellow who had a knack for taking delivery of the King’s armaments before they reached the King’s soldiers. Several of my men and I accomplished this errand first, in a couple of hired wagons, and then we told the teamsters to take us to the Governor’s House via the most direct route, for we were running late even by the standards of New Spain. I was in my finest clothes.

“We entered the central plaza of Vera Cruz from a direction that they did not expect, for instead of proceeding up the main street with its boarded-up houses, we had come in from the depot of the arms merchant, which lay on the other side of the town. Our first hint that something was amiss came from the countless fine tendrils of smoke spiraling up from various places of concealment around the town square-”

“Matchlocks!” Jack said.

“Of course our pistols were already loaded and at the ready, for this was Vera Cruz. But this gave us warning to break out the muskets and to knock the lids from several cases of granadoes. The matchlock-men opened fire on us, but raggedly. We charged them with cutlasses drawn, intending to kill them before they could reload. Which we did-but we were astonished to discover that these were Spanish soldiers of the local garrison! At this point fire came down on us from all around: the windows of the Governor’s House and of the churches and monasteries ringing the square all served as loop-holes for this emboscada.”

“The soldiers had occupied all of those buildings?” exclaimed Mr. Foot, whose capacity for indignation knew no limits.

“So we assumed at first; but when we returned fire, and flung our granadoes, the burnt and dismembered bodies that sprayed out of those windows were those of monks and mid-level government officials. And yet still we were stupid, for our next mistake was to drive the wagons forward, out of the square, and into the main street of the town. Whereupon planks began to fall away from the windows and doors of the sorry wooden houses that the Viceroy’s officials had put up there, and the true battle began. For it was here on this street where they had planned to make the ambush. We overturned both of the wagons, and made a fortification out of them; we shot all of the horses and piled their corpses up as ramparts; we fought from doorway to doorway; we got a runner out to my ship, and she opened fire upon the town with her guns. In return she came under fire from the cannons of the castle. We never would have survived against such a force, except that the guns set some of those buildings afire, and a wind blew the flames down the street as if those rows of wooden buildings had been trails of gunpowder. Many bodies fell in the dust of Vera Cruz on that day. Most of the town burned. My ship sank before my eyes. I escaped from the town with two of my men, and we made our way down the coast as best we could. One of my men was killed by an alligator, and one died of a fever. At length I came to a little port where I bought passage to Jamaica, that den of English thieves, now the only place in the Caribbean where I could hope to find sanctuary. There, I learned that in the weeks following the catastrophe, what remained of Vera Cruz had been taken and sacked by the pirate Lorenuillo de Petiguavas, and utterly leveled with the ground, so that it would have to be built again from nothing.

“As for myself, I tried to make my way back to Spain so that I could return to the place of my birth in Estremaduras. But when Gibraltar was almost in sight, my ship was captured by the Barbary Corsairs, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.”

“It is a ripping yarn,” Jack conceded, after a few moments’ silence, “but the best story in the world does not amount to a Plan.”

“That is my concern,” said Moseh de la Cruz, “and I have a Plan that is nearly complete. Though it has one or two leaks in it, which you might be able to plug.”

Book 5 The Juncto