The Blast That Tears the Skies (2012) (13 page)

‘
Ah, une autre prostituée de mon fils
,’ she murmured to my mother, and promptly turned upon her heel, gesturing to Kit to follow her as she made her way toward her son’s throne.

Thus rumped in the most public fashion by the Queen Mother of England, Louise, Countess of Ravensden, stood before us: in a room filled with hundreds, a woman entirely alone. She fought back tears, her face a canvas of anger and humiliation. Aye, and of something more elusive, too, but present nonetheless. Deep in my good-sister’s eyes was the wild desperation I had sometimes seen in the eyes of a deer at the denouement of a hunt.

 

 

 

The tow-boats slipped their cables. The ten accursed miles of the winding Medway were done, the marshland and mudflats of Sheppey and Hoo fell away on either side, and ahead lay the sea. We had a light breeze from west by south. The clouds were low and grey, but seemed unlikely to bring rain. We had a light swell, the tide nearly upon the turn. Far ahead, the waterway of the Thames estuary was as busy as ever: four or five big, heavily laden Baltic traders were outward bound over toward the Essex shore, a veritable bevy of fishing craft and coasters thronged the approach to distant Leigh-on-Sea, while what appeared to be a big Indiaman was wearing ship proficiently in the Yantlet channel. Our ketch, the
Bachelor’s Delight
, was off to larboard. Each of the great ships had its own tender, and this was ours, a trim little craft skippered by a cheerful Sussex man named Roberts, its name a constant reminder of marital conditions and thus of my recent leave-taking from an emotional Cornelia, who was at least half convinced that she would never see me again. Yet for all that, there was something else in Cornelia’s mood, too, something I had never witnessed when setting out on my previous voyages: a sort of impatience, a sense that there was something else she wished to be about. Seeking some explanation for this, I even wondered whether she might be pregnant. Yet would she have concealed such a thing from a man who might be going forth to death in battle, never to see his child?

The
Merhonour
was already under topsails, but now her courses and topgallants fell, and as we passed Sheerness the great ship finally moved upon the sea again. The yards and shrouds sang as the sails strained in the breeze. Upon my command, our vast red ensign broke out at the stern and the matching pennants at the mastheads. White water began to spill from our cutwater as we picked up speed. Roger, Comte d’Andelys, stood a little ahead of me at the starboard rail, looking out toward the bleak ruins of Queenborough Castle. He was making notes in a little book, and I prayed to the Anglican God of the Quintons that if we were ever invaded by the unstoppable legions of Marshal Turenne, they did not make landfall on the hopelessly undefended Isle of Sheppey thanks to the intelligence gleaned by an illustrious member of the
noblesse d’epée
during a cruise aboard the
Merhonour
.

‘Should make the Gunfleet by dusk, sir,’ reported Yardley, the master; a thin, grey Kentish man who had served as a midshipman on this very ship in the year twenty-eight.

‘Very well, Mister Yardley,’ I said, a little testily. I was looking about me, and was aware that all was not as it should be. The sails were a little too loose, especially on the fore. There were too many slack braces and halyards, too many slovenly tackles and garnets, too many cables heaped untidily upon the deck. Too many men were standing around, staring aimlessly at their officers and at each other. There were scowls aplenty, and arms folded defiantly. I saw the bearded Welshman, whom I had noted upon the quayside at Chatham. He was staring at me. If I had been a man of superstitious bent, there aboard a ship allegedly cursed, I might have sworn that he was giving me the evil eye. I returned his stare with what I took to be my finest expression of aloof condescension. These are the 1660s, I thought to myself; such idle fancies have no sway in our times. But I felt a sudden chill, even though it was unseasonably humid.

Treninnick ran hither and thither, jabbering in Cornish, pointing at this capstan or that halyard, and occasionally shoved a man or two in the direction he had indicated. I could see Lanherne, far ahead on the forecastle, cudgelling a stout, hairy brute to make his point. Fatally, though, Pewsey – the officer who should have been dictating the discipline of the ship – stood amidships, occasionally gesticulating ineffectually but otherwise merely shaking his head impotently.

I had served long enough as a captain of king’s ships, and had thus learned enough of the sea, to be somewhat alike a new pedagogue, suddenly deposited in front of a schoolroom of obstreperous boys. The pedagogue knows the theory of his subject well enough, and has sufficient awareness of his surroundings to realise that his words are having no effect and that he has no control of the class; but he does not yet have the faintest idea of how to regain that control.

With Giffard strutting upon the waist, bellowing orders ineffectually, and Yardley focused solely on the navigation of the ship, I summoned Lieutenant Christopher Farrell to the quarterdeck.

‘Damnation, Kit,’ I grumbled, ‘it’s like a rabble at a may fair! What is the matter with this crew?’

Kit was ever philosophical in the face of adversity. ‘Any crew of a great ship takes time to come together, sir, and we’ve had far too little time to mould this one. We have a good, sturdy core of men in the Cornish and some of the drafts out of the river, it’s true, but they’re only a fraction of our complement.’ He shook his head. ‘Alas, Captain, we also have a share of landsmen who have no notion of what to do, and another share of pressed rogues who might have the notion but have no intention of doing it. Some of the Welsh, especially, though whether out of spite, fear of the curse or plain ignorance isn’t easy to tell.’ Kit grimaced; he was a man who liked being about solutions, not recounting problems. ‘Despite all Treninnick’s good work, he cannot be everywhere at once, so you have Welshmen all over the ship who can’t understand a word of the commands they’re given. Or claim they can’t, at any rate.’

‘Like the Bretons,’ said Roger. ‘Good seamen, but the very devil to command. If God had meant the Welsh and the Bretons to keep their incomprehensible tongues,
mes amis
, do you really think he would have allowed them to be conquered by the English and the French? I think not. It is unnatural. On
Le Téméraire
, I had them whipped if they spoke Breton. “French is the language of the angels, you miserable bastards,” I told them, “so in the name of
le bon dieu, Saint Denis et la France
, you will damn well speak it if you want to keep the skin on your worthless stinking Breton backs.” Amazing how quickly men can learn a new tongue when they have such an incentive before them.’

‘Just so, My Lord,’ said Kit, who was adjusting with some difficulty to granting due deference to this man who had once been a mere sailmaker’s mate, and thus by many degrees his subordinate, during our previous voyage in the
Jupiter
. ‘But even when Treninnick explains matters to them, our battle is not yet done. It seems the men of north Wales detest the men of south Wales and will not work with them, just as the men of Cumberland will not work with what they call a pack of addled Westmorland rogues. Then some of the Welsh will not work with men from the next valley or the next village, and some of the Cumbrians with the men from the next dale.’

‘Will not work with!’ I exclaimed. ‘I am not concerned with their petty jealousies, Lieutenant! Damnation, this is a royal ship! Men work with men at their officers’ command, or else it is mutiny!’

‘Aye, sir. But surely it can only be mutiny if the men understand the commands in the first place, and in our case, we also have the problem that discipline among the men is – well, is entrusted to – begging your pardon, Captain…’

‘Quite, Lieutenant. I take your point.’ Kit was learning the discretion of the quarterdeck, namely that one did not denounce a fellow officer in public. He did not need to, of course: it was obvious to all that Boatswain Pewsey was about as effectual as wet gunpowder.

Kit returned to his station in the forecastle, and I went up onto the old-fashioned high poop deck at the very stern of the
Merhonour
, there to be alone with my thoughts. Of course, our problems were chiefly a consequence of our late setting out; most of the other great ships had been at sea for a month or more, and many of them had crews composed chiefly of volunteers from the maritime counties. Most also carried large drafts of soldiers, including some from the new-fangled Marine Regiment raised by the Lord Admiral. I had come to regret my prejudice against completing my crew with soldiers. A troop or two aboard the
Merhonour
would have been doubly useful: for one thing they could easily have cowed the recalcitrants, and for another, one of the first things I had learned in my naval service was that nothing unites mutually suspicious seamen better than the presence of the hated redcoats. Moreover, most of my fellow captains would also have had ample time to exchange any inept warrant officers for better ones; but that option was hardly available to me, for there were virtually no ships left in harbour with which to exchange an incompetent boatswain or an antediluvian carpenter. A raw and fractious crew, then, yet within weeks – perhaps even days – we would be in battle with the Dutch, and perhaps with some of our own countrymen, too. I looked out across the mud-brown waters of the Nore anchorage toward the distant, flat shore of Essex, and offered up a silent prayer for the
Merhonour
and her captain.

* * *

In ante discessum…

As I contemplate the peculiar paper in my hand, I consider once again the sheer perversity of my uncle Tristram. Dear Lord, even all those long decades ago, in the year of grace 1665,
Englishmen did not make their depositions in Latin
. Well, none but one, at any rate. The same one who would leave it all to his nephew to translate. My pencil annotations are almost illegible now, except in the (many) places where my younger self struggled for the right word, or the right tense, and scored through abortive efforts with steadily mounting degrees of frustration. But I can reconstruct enough of it to establish the sense, albeit by indulging myself a little in the art of Defoe, so inexplicably popular in this fanciful new century. So, then:

The Tudor quadrangle of Gresham’s college on Bishopsgate was an appropriately august home for the new Royal Society, and it was here, as the
Merhonour
made her painfully slow way to the fleet, that Doctor Tristram Quinton concluded his demonstration of the Florentine poison.

‘Thus let us observe the effects upon the creatures employed in our experiment,’ said Tristram in his fluent Latin. ‘I would suggest that the hen gives every appearance of being drunk.’ The august Fellows contemplated the bird staggering around the stage and nodded sagely to each other. ‘The dog has vomited, but seems otherwise unaffected.’ A miserable-looking cur glanced up at Quinton and retched another gut-full of black bile onto the flagstones. ‘Whereas the cat is evidently dead.’ Lord Brouncker, chairing the meeting as the society’s president, prodded the erstwhile creature with his foot and bowed his head in concurrence. ‘Thus, honoured Fellows, I believe I have demonstrated conclusively that the Florentine poison, named after the mysterious substance recently presented to His Majesty by the Grand Duke Cosimo, is misnamed. Not unnaturally, and given the reputation of that illustrious city as a den of poisoners, I think we all expected this to be the most lethal substance ever known to man. However, I believe I have demonstrated beyond all doubt that this Florentine poison is nothing more than a distilled oil of tobacco, and as my experiments today have shown, it is therefore unlikely to kill anything larger than a cat.’

Tristram bowed his head slightly in conclusion, and was rewarded with half-hearted applause from his peers. Mister Pepys, some sort of connection of his nephew in the navy, was enthusiastic in his approbation, but Tristram recalled that Pepys’s knowledge of science was as substantial as his own of the language of Mongolia. Still, at least Pepys had laughed at the drunken chicken. Then Tris overheard Boyle’s soft Irish lilt make an exaggerated stage whisper: ‘Merciful heaven, two hours to kill a cat … but tell me, Wren, how’s that theatre of yours in Oxford coming along?’

Tristram made to accost Boyle, whom he disliked (both too godly and too chymical for the Master of Mauleverer’s taste). Moreover, he had been made particularly peevish by an unexpected and unwelcome recent visitation to his master’s lodgings in Oxford by his good-niece the Countess Louise, who seemed to have developed a suspiciously detailed knowledge of, and interest in, some of the more arcane and secret recesses of the Quinton family history. Perhaps fortunately, Tristram’s passage toward Boyle was prevented by the timely intervention of Brouncker, who offered his profuse congratulations upon Tristram’s most splendid contribution to the advancement of human knowledge, etcetera, etcetera. By the time he had freed himself from the noble lord, relatively few of the Fellows were left. Fortunately, one of these was his old friend Sir William Petty, sad-eyed and increasingly ruddy in the nose, a man whose range of interests was almost as catholic as Tristram’s own.