The Blast That Tears the Skies (2012) (3 page)

Fortunately, this rift within the House of Quinton coincided with a marked improvement in my fortunes. Firstly, there was the income I had accrued from six months in command of the frigate
Seraph
; secondly, there were the not insubstantial sums of prize money I acquired during that commission and my more recent service in the
House of Nassau
, which had spent four very lucrative winter months cruising the Channel and intercepting mock-neutral shipping. All of this vied in my mind with the dishonour of having no command at the onset of a great war. After all, if Matthew Quinton had prospered so satisfactorily before that conflict was officially declared, exactly what riches might come his way once we were properly and legally engaged in sweeping Cornelia’s countrymen off the seas? I had in mind the purchase of an estate in Cornwall, where I now had many friends. That, I calculated, was probably about as far away in England as it was possible to get from my mother and sister-in-law.

In the meantime, however, my improved condition had allowed us to set up home in a respectable and relatively modern four-storied house in Hardiman’s Yard, off Harp Lane, far enough from the Tower to be safe if the ordnance store at the Minories blew to kingdom come and far enough from the river to avoid all but the faintest whiff of its dire odour at low tide. It was noisy (especially so compared to
Ravensden
, which was as quiet as an ancient grave), but then, where in the City was not? Even on a Sunday, when the endless rumble of cartwheels and the clattering of hoofs diminished a little, we were treated to the full glory of the bells of London’s hundred and more churches, each of which seemed to keep slightly different time to all the others.

Of course, we were in no position to buy the entire building, nor even to rent it. We had to be content with the three rooms on the second floor, along with a garret room in which we had installed my wife’s servant and my own. Conveniently, these were both named Barcock; the eldest grandchildren of the steward of Ravensden Abbey, whose own prodigious brood was reproducing apace. In practice, this new Quinton property had been rapidly taken under the wing of Phineas Musk, the curious and markedly obstreperous steward of my brother’s London house, who had accompanied me to sea during some of my previous voyages. Musk invariably slept in one of our rooms when he was too drunk even to get back to Ravensden House upon the Strand; this was often.

I found my wife contemplating the purchase of a tapestry for the wall of our main room.

‘Well?’ she demanded as I entered.

‘No command,’ I said miserably, for I had decided that directness was the only way to break the news. ‘And no reason for my dismissal from the
Nassau
.’

Her eyes dampened as the prospects of a tapestry receded rapidly from them; but such selfish thoughts never consumed Cornelia for very long. ‘No command! What madness is this?’ she cried in her native Dutch. She came over and threw her arms about me. ‘Oh, my poor love,’ she said, reverting to English. ‘How can they be so foolish as not to employ you, the finest captain in the king’s navy?’ She held me tightly; but with Cornelia, holding tended to be a time when she also did much thinking. ‘Of course, I see it now – this will be the doing of that Whore of Babylon, our countess.’

One of Cornelia’s many great merits as a wife was her ferocious loyalty to me, although this could sometimes be taken to extremes; having taken some time to reconcile herself to my choice of the sea over the more comfortable – and lucrative – life of an officer in the Guards that I had originally sought, Cornelia was now convinced that I was already amply qualified to be admiral of a squadron. (She had some grounds for this; after all, my good friend Will Berkeley, of my own age, was now both Sir William and a rear-admiral.) Unfortunately Cornelia sometimes clung to her prejudices with the same ferocity, and although I had become relatively sanguine upon the matter of the Countess Louise, nothing could shift my wife in her antipathy towards my sister-in-law.

I lifted her face and looked into those bright, damp eyes. ‘I doubt it,’ I said. ‘She could have prevented my getting the
Nassau
, too. As could the king, who had even better cause.’

‘The king has been deluded by the bitch’s wiles,’ she growled.

‘I think the king has his own perfectly good reasons to be angry with me, after what I said to him.’

‘After all these months, husband?’

‘Kings tend to have longer memories than mere mortals, my love. No, I must do what Sir William advises – solicit for a command, along with the rest of the herd, and pray that the Duke of York sees fit to give me some crumb. But all the best Fourth and Fifth Rates are fitted out and gone to sea already … they will hardly entrust me with a Third … and dear God, if Beau is preferred to me in the
Nassau
, then what hope is there?’

‘Sir William?’ Cornelia was momentarily confused. ‘Ah, of course, Coventry. The king has knighted him. He bestows knighthoods galore on mean clerks like that, and on avaricious merchants aplenty, yet his worthy swordsmen are ignored.’ Of course, she meant just one worthy swordsman. ‘So, Sir William Coventry, then, he is the man. You did not offer money?’ Cornelia asked. ‘Jennens’ wife says that Coventry takes money for commissions and warrants. This is your England, Matthew – surely this is how a man obtains office, by buying it? If you are too shy, then I shall approach him –’

‘
No
, Cornelia!’ I said emphatically, pushing my wife away to arm’s length. ‘Even if what they say of Coventry is true, I would rather starve ashore than besmirch my honour by paying a bribe for a commission –’

‘Oh, honour is all very well,’ she said, reddening in sudden anger, ‘but will honour buy our food, husband? Will it pay for these rooms?’ The tears began, and I held her tightly. I said nothing, for I knew she spoke only the truth; at the present rate and without any further employment for me, our money would probably run out just as winter began. True, we could move back to the abbey, but I dreaded the thought of broaching that option with Cornelia. ‘And then I fear for you and my brother, now that it is war between our countries,’ she sobbed. ‘On different sides. God forbid that you should kill each other. Perhaps that is what the comet foretold.’

Cornelis van der Eide, a notable sea-captain for the Zeeland Admiralty of the United Provinces, had providentially been on hand to save my life during a previous command. We had learned that unlike his good-brother, Cornelis had found no difficulty whatsoever in obtaining a command: indeed, he had been given his choice of several ships, each larger and better than the last.

‘I rather doubt that a great star shot across the heavens to foretell the fates of Matt Quinton and Cornelis van der Eide,’ I said, smiling to reassure her. ‘And besides, for there to be any chance of us meeting each other, I would need a ship, and we now know that the chances of that are slim. Even if I were to get one, these will be truly vast fleets, my love – a hundred ships and more on each side. The chances of
Cornelis
and I facing each other directly are minute, thanks be to God.’

She looked at me tearfully, then smiled a little. She reached up and kissed me on the lips. Then, slowly and softly, she nuzzled my neck.

‘I think,’ I said breathlessly, ‘that we had better send the Barcocks out for provisions.’

An hour or so later, as we lay naked upon our bedraggled bed, she lifted her head from my chest and prodded me from my exhausted reverie. ‘Perhaps this time … I feel it within,’ she said softly.

I sighed. Cornelia still prayed that each and every lovemaking bout would make her pregnant, despite the contrary evidence of seven years of childless marriage. I stroked her head. ‘Ah,’ I said, ‘perhaps
that
was what the comet portended.’

She looked at me seriously, then saw my smile and pushed me away. ‘I will never stop hoping and praying, husband,’ she said.

‘Nor I, love, but mayhap one day we will have to reconcile ourselves to the will of God –’

She stared hard into my eyes, and for a moment I thought she was going to burst into tears or launch into another diatribe upon the unfairness of our childlessness or the iniquities of the Countess Louise. But at bottom, and despite her occasional moods and flights of fancy, Cornelia was a deeply rational woman. ‘The condition of Matthew Quinton must be truly bleak if he, of all men, is conjuring up the will of God as an excuse for his woes,’ she said reprovingly. ‘And when all is said and done, who is the predestinarian here, husband?’ She clambered out of bed, naked as Eve, and reached for her shift. ‘But I almost forgot,’ she said, matter-of-fact once again, ‘we have an invitation to dinner, three days hence, albeit in Deptford, of all the foul holes this land has to offer.’

‘Indeed? Who has invited us?’ This was unexpected; most of my friends were at sea, and most of Cornelia’s were in the land with which we were now at war.

‘A man with one of your unpronounceable English names – Ye Vlin, or something of the sort. A friend of that proud little man who orders you about. The one at the Navy Board. The one with that other silly name. Pips? Peppis?’

‘Pepys,’ I said. ‘Mister Samuel Pepys. The Clerk of the Acts.’

Even more unexpected. Mister John Evelyn, one of the great polymaths of our age, I knew not at all, although he was well known to my uncle Tristram. Moreover, almost all of my meetings with Evelyn’s friend Mister Pepys had been in connection with the business of my ships, although I had encountered him at the theatre or occasionally in a tavern. I hardly counted him as a friend; but, I reflected, Pepys was probably the sort of man who would brag mightily if he could attract an earl’s heir to a dinner company. And with no commission in prospect, and thus no pay, a free dinner was not to be refused.

* * *

A man may be in only one place. This is one of the immutable truths of the human condition, but it was a damnable inconvenience to me in that year of 1665, when I often found myself needing to be in two – or three or more – places at once. Being unable to divide myself or to take on divine form and thus be omnipresent, I witnessed with my own eyes and ears only a part of the unfolding of the strange events that transpired in that spring and summer. But young as I was, I already realised that those events demanded to be written down; indeed, it was essential to do so, lest one day others seeking vengeance challenged or distorted the record of all those things, good, bad and desperate, that were done in that time. Thus, as I leaf through the yellowing, legally-attested depositions made soon afterwards by the likes of dear Cornelia, my peculiar uncle Tristram, and the rest, I realise to my discomfort that, for the sake of keeping the flow of my narrative, I must now turn author and emulate that monstrous rogue Defoe, whose
Robinson Crusoe
seems to have been read by every preening jackanapes and idle wench in the realm. What does it say for modern, gin-sodden England that such a slight tale should make a talentless oaf a very rich man indeed? Great God, a man wiles away his time upon an island – is that not the condition of
every
Englishman?

So firstly, I take up and contemplate the account of Phineas Musk: long-time retainer to the Quinton family and more recently my clerk and unlikely guardian during my first commissions at sea. The bald word ‘account’ does insufficient justice to it; beneath Musk’s laconic mask lurked an imagination far outdoing that of my talented young neighbour, the Frenchman Arouet, who scribbles poetry, prose and what he terms ‘philosophy’ at a prodigious rate. (France being France, of course, he has to write under an alias – Volteer, I believe – but even that has proved insufficient to spare him exile upon our more tolerant shore.) Let us call it Musk’s narrative, then: the atrocious spelling corrected, the grammar made intelligible, the obscenities, digressions and tirades largely excised, by an entirely objective commentator, namely myself.

With my brother Charles absent from London for his health (no-one seemed quite certain where), and his increasingly estranged countess withdrawn to her Wiltshire estate, or so it was said, Musk had almost no domestic duties to speak of. Although of course he omits to mention this in his account, boredom was a condition welcome to Musk, for it gave him the excuse to wile away his hours in alehouses, pontificating to all and sundry.

‘It’s all the fault of the French, this war, just mark my words,’ he said authoritatively. ‘Think on this. England’s a Protestant nation. Holland’s a Protestant nation. Between us, we have most of the trade of the world. After all, we’re told that’s why we’re fighting the
butterboxes
in this new war: the trade of the world is too little for us two, so one must down. Fair enough, I say.’ He took a draught of his ale and looked at the four sturdy craftsman who sat around the table with him. ‘But then you’ve got France, a Catholic nation. And it has its eye on the trade of the world, too. So what could be better for King Louis than for us and the Dutch to blast each other to Hell and back, leaving him to step in and pick up the pieces? We fight, but France gets the prize and puts the Pope back into England and Holland to boot. That’s what I think, any road.’

A saddler of the Ward of Saint Katherine Cree demurred. ‘You see the French behind everything, Phin. I reckon the demons in your nightmares must be French.’

‘Aye, well, maybe they are,’ said Musk. No doubt he was reflecting upon his nominal mistress, the Countess of Ravensden, who had been exposed as an agent of King Louis, and upon a diabolic Frenchman, a Knight of Malta named the Seigneur de Montnoir, who had so nearly brought disaster upon us during a previous voyage.

‘Don’t make sense to me,’ said a farrier of Cheapside. ‘They say King Louis is trying to stop the war. He’s sending a great embassy to our king.’

‘Flummery,’ said a scrivener of Southwark. ‘The French have a treaty with the Dutch. They’ll come into the war on their side, mark my words. And then it’ll be all up with poor old England, when a combined French and Dutch army marches over this bridge, here.’