For King or Commonwealth (4 page)

‘Of course, Sir Henry,' Faulkner said, his voice again level. ‘Forgive me.'

Mainwaring raised his hand in a deprecatory gesture, as if there was nothing to forgive. There was indeed iron in the younger man, he noted again, a product of those early years of abject penury which, allied as it was with a quick intelligence, produced a character of singular distinction. In different times, Mainwaring thought, Faulkner might have risen far by his own abilities and with a woman of Katherine's beauty . . .

‘How is she?' Faulkner asked casually, bending over the chart again.

‘Distraught. She came to me last night and begged me to come to you.'

‘Not as an admiral.'

‘No, as a . . .'

‘Go-between.'

‘Perhaps.'

‘Perhaps, Sir Henry,' Faulker said, interrupting and sitting back in his own chair, ‘you are grown blind but what I wear instead of my wig is a pair of horns: she has cuckolded me, sir. And since she has done so with His Highness, I am unmanned, humiliated and made to feel my own insignificance. It is not, I assure you, a feeling that I much like. Were our royal wastrel here in person I should be tempted to run him through and thereby perhaps do us all, and England most of all, a great favour. No doubt they could find a royal bastard to fill the breach, but I think the pretensions of the House of Stuart would not translate into England again. Indeed, I am not certain there is the slightest chance of His Highness succeeding in this regard which makes me incline to your own plan.'

Mainwaring leaned forward. ‘You are of like mind?' he asked.

Faulkner sighed and nodded. ‘Who is going to stay loyal to a prince who cuckolds his most devoted servants? The son is no better than the father; true the method is different, but the infirmity of morality is identical.'

‘Aye.'

Faulkner looked at the older man. ‘You are weakening in your resolve?'

Mainwaring shook his head. ‘No, though I admit the contemplation of the effort necessary exhausts me. They will suspect us, Kit.'

‘Of course. Tell me, what did she ask you to say to me?'

‘Mmm? Oh, to point out that she admitted the betrayal, but it was no worse than your betrayal of your wife and, in point of detail, a good deal less.'

Faulkner rose, went to a sideboard and lifted a decanter and two glasses from the fiddles. He filled them and passed one to Mainwaring. ‘She admits to playing with his prick and no doubt he toyed with her cunny. 'Tis a technicality . . .'

‘If it is true, though, your abandonment will drive her the more to his bed.'

‘If she has not been there already.'

‘But . . .'

Faulkner held up his hand. ‘Lay it aside, Sir Henry. I can no longer trust her. As for my wife, it is nothing like, and she knows it. I was fond of Judith but knew not a great passion for her such as Katherine aroused in me. Do you know of what I speak, Sir Henry?'

Mainwaring shrugged. ‘I have not been a man greatly favoured by women,' he said. ‘My career, such as it was, was too volatile.'

Faulkner smiled. ‘But you are not unknown to women, Sir Henry, I know that. You are not a man like our late King, for example.'

‘God, no!' Mainwaring broke off to take wine, after which he stared for a few moments into the middle distance, leaving Faulkner to contemplate a career that had led Mainwaring from Oxford University by way of military service to piracy and from piracy to the office of Gentleman of the King's Bedchamber and confidant of the Duke of Buckingham. He had then become first a captain and then an admiral in the King's Royal Navy, besides holding the Mastership of the seafaring Fraternity of the Brethren of Trinity House.

‘I took my pleasure when I required it,' Mainwaring resumed, his tone gently reminiscent, ‘for which there are women willing enough, but as to wilting love, no, it never troubled me.'

‘I,' put in Faulkner, ‘had not the disposition to engage with whores.'

Mainwaring laughed. ‘Oh, they need not be whores, at least not always, though a seaman must resort to any port in a storm.'

‘Sometimes the port has its own attractions,' Faulkner responded, ‘and the voyage ill fits one for a wanton.'

‘No, you did well by Judith,' Mainwaring said, stirring himself. ‘And you doubtless will again if we throw ourselves upon the mercy of the Parliament.'

‘I doubt that, if I know the lady's character,' Faulkner said. ‘As for our future . . .'

There was a knock at the cabin door and the two men fell silent as a gentleman entered. ‘Captain Faulkner?'

‘Yes?'

The man was elegantly dressed under his cloak and he withdrew a sealed letter from his gauntlet. ‘His Highness Prince Rupert heard of your return to Helveotsluys and desires that you wait upon him at your earliest convenience.'

Faulkner looked at Mainwaring and the unspoken thought flashed between them. ‘I am obliged, sir,' said Faulkner with a heavy emphasis that placed the matter of his discussion with Mainwaring beyond recall.

‘You may take my horse, Kit,' offered Mainwaring, indicating his understanding.

‘If you are Sir Henry Mainwaring,' the stranger said, ‘I am charged to request that you also attend His Highness.'

‘God's wounds, but this wind chills to the very marrow of my bones and these casements give it free and unhindered passage!'

Shaking his head, Mainwaring removed his hand from the window and stared at it, as though the keen gale, blowing in from the North Sea through the interstice, would leave some visible mark upon his skin. Neither Faulkner nor Katherine Villiers responded to Mainwaring's unnecessary remark. The former stared half-heartedly at a chart spread out before him, a Dutch Waggoner lying open beside it; the latter bent over the threadbare stockings of Sir Henry's that she was darning.

A week after the two men had answered Prince Rupert's summons, and attended his council of war aboard his flagship, the
Constant
Reformation
, they were back in their rooms at The Hague. Faulkner and Katherine had patched up their quarrel after a fashion, but the mood of both had been subdued. Their spirits had been further depressed by the news that had come from London a few days later: the King had been put on trial in his own palace. Faulkner recalled the white splendour of Whitehall Palace beneath the walls of which he had reacquainted himself with the lovely Katherine Villiers in happier times, times that seemed in retrospect to be so full of promise.

He shot a glance at her, bending solicitously over Mainwaring's laddered hose. Half his mind filled with venom, half with a tender pity that forced him to suppress a sob and turn it instead into a cough. He lowered his eyes swiftly as Katherine looked up. She must not divine his distress, whatever her own agony.

His eyes wandered unseeing over the chart dedicated to ‘The Master, Wardens and Assistants of the Honourable Corporation of Trinity House'. It depicted the entire estuary of the Thames, extending to the so-called Weilings, the archipelago that choked the estuary of the River Schelde, and ran on to include the deep tidal inlets that ran between the islands. One such was the Haringvliet, or Herring-fleet, as the English mariners called it, upon which lay the port of Helvoetsluys, the base of the exiled Royalist fleet of the former King Charles I.

But Faulkner saw none of this; his head was too full of Kate and her
affaire
with Charles, Prince of Wales, who, if the King's trial came to the fatal term predicted by its advocates, would soon be King in the eyes of his supporters. Instead of the shoals and channels scrupulously laid out before him after assiduous survey, his mind's eye could see only Katherine's face, pale and pleading as she knelt before him after Mainwaring had dragged him back from Helvoetsluys.

What, he had repeatedly asked himself, was he to make of her protestations?

‘But Kit, it was nothing . . . nothing. A mere amusement . . . a playing between us, affectionate yes, but not . . .' her voice had choked with the humiliation of it. ‘Not a carnal
knowing
such as you and I have known each other. Why, he esteems you, relies upon you for your loyalty.'

‘Am I to be content with such an assurance?' Faulkner had asked, pricked by conscience following his discussion with Mainwaring. ‘What more might he not do when I am at sea, which I shall surely be as soon as the ice breaks up? Will he want more than thy hand about his member? Besides, what did he want of you?' He was himself choking now and she had reached up and placed her hand across his twisted mouth. The other had fluttered about her bosom, indicating the focus of the royal attention.

‘Only a little unlacing,' she had admitted, her own eyes filling with tears. He had felt bile burning his throat, the more so since he had fancied fortune had raised him and the realization that he was so subordinate cut like a sharp blade into his soul. He had closed his eyes and, unseeing, gathered her into his arms; and so they had embraced with what passed for forgiveness.

But he could not drive the image of them from his head and doubted the lolling voluptuary had restrained himself as Kate claimed. Furthermore, what added to his torture was his liking for the Prince – a liking which would be complicated should he assume the title of King. How should he stand with regard to the young rake in that capacity? He himself had taught him how to handle a boat and flattered himself that His Highness had some regard for him. A tear dropped on to the chart before him and he hurriedly brushed it away before it distorted the paper.
This
was what he must think on, this cunningly delineated plan of . . . of what? Christ! Did not the very debouchement of the Schelde look like some pox-rotten prick aimed at the vast cloaca of the Thames?

He shook his head to clear it of such a foul thought, squeezing his eyes as though to dry them of incipient, weak and unmanly tears. He was, for God's sake, a sea officer, not a wailing, unrequited swain. With an almost savage gesture he thrust his index finger near the chart's western margin, obscuring the sandbank and its attendant legend The Nore.

‘
Here!
' He breathed through clenched teeth so that Katherine looked up and Mainwaring roused himself. Seeing him thus preoccupied, for so they thought, they exchanged glances and Mainwaring smiled away Katherine's distress. ‘He will be himself again,' his kindly expression seemed to say. ‘He is not like us and is, for all his years, experience and responsibility, still something of an innocent.'

Court bred, she understood him perfectly and responded with a shy, hesitant smile of her own.

With a mighty effort of will Faulkner had driven his mind from one painful reminiscence to another scarcely less so, coming as the event he recalled did so hard upon the heels of the other and prefaced, as it was, by discussions of defection. The council of war aboard the
Constant
Reformation
had been an odd affair, stiff, when you thought about it, with men of dubious loyalty. Both he and Mainwaring had not an hour since been questioning the Royalist cause; two others, Batten and Jordan, had both come over to the Prince after troubles with the Parliament and the fleet. Neither was held to be entirely trustworthy. Even Prince Rupert, the shining star of Cavalier chivalry, had found himself spoken against by those close to the King and estranged from his uncle in the last year of his freedom. And now, here they were, with the captains of some eight or nine half-provisioned men-of-war whose crews were unpaid and mutinous, mewed up in a Dutch ditch while Warwick's fleet, if it lay not now in the outer waters of the Schelde, was not far away – only the width of the chart upon which Faulkner's now blazing eyes gazed: Here! At the Nore!

The Prince had served them honey in that ill-lit cabin. The red sun of an early setting ensanguined every artefact capable of reflecting its bloody redness as it sank over the flat and frozen landscape. Rupert's goblet, the rings upon his soft-gloved hand, the sword pommel and its buckled baldric that lay upon the table before him, Batten's pretentious half-armour, Jordan's gold necklace, even Mainwaring's soiled lace, picked up the ominous, scarlet splendour of the wintry sunset.

‘There are now sufficient funds at our disposal,' Rupert had said without further explanation and in his perfect but accented English, ‘to enable us to commission several of the ships, all, in fact, whose commanders are here present, with the exception of the
Antelope
. She I intend to sell, having first disposed of her artillery, some among your ships, some to a buyer eager to get his hands on heavy English iron guns.'

He had looked about, confident, but making certain they were all attentive. ‘Now, as for our dispositions for the coming campaign, I intend to carry my flag to Ireland where my lord, the Marquess of Ormonde, maintains the struggle. You will all accompany me with the exception of Sir Henry Mainwaring and Captain Faulkner. You, Sir Henry, having employed your well-known talents in preparing my squadron, will remain here in charge of our interests and acting on behalf of Captain Faulkner who is, I know, like unto your son. He shall be charged with taking his own ship under warrant of the Prince of Wales. My commission unto you, Captain Faulkner, is to cruise in the mouth of the River of Thames, to annoy our enemy and to seize as many prizes as you may be able and disposing thereof among these greedy Hollanders, thereby engorging our war chest.' Rupert paused again, staring directly at Faulkner until he nodded assent. ‘If you are able to take such vessels that may be persuaded to join us, and seem proper to you and Sir Henry in both their company and their soundness, particularly in the manner of their bearing arms, then you shall direct them to join my flag either in Ireland or at Lisbon, where I have friends, and where they shall find orders from me. Captain Allen –' Rupert had indicated the officer who had boarded the
Phoenix
to summon them to attend His Highness and who seemed to execute the office of a flag captain – ‘Captain Allen will give you written orders to this effect. He will also provide the remainder of you with such instructions as I shall deem necessary for the orders of sailing and battle.'