The Blast That Tears the Skies (2012) (7 page)

‘
Lawson
?
’ I gasped. ‘But My Lords, it cannot be imagined that Lawson would turn traitor –’

‘He turned traitor before,’ said Arlington relentlessly, ‘traitor to the Commonwealth that he had served so notably, and I have often observed that treason can be addictive. He was also a good friend to some of the fanatic captains who have been left on shore.’

‘But he could have died in the
London
, if he had gone aboard when he was meant to! I was there, my lords! I saw the consequences, as did he! To blow up his own ship, and many of his own kin –’

‘An effective way of diverting suspicion from oneself, perhaps. Or else, of course, the destruction of the
London
might have been but a convenient accident which achieved just that end.’ The Secretary smiled wearily. ‘You see the dangers of my occupation, Captain? Trust no one, suspect everyone – the sad fate of the intelligencer.’

‘Sir John is appointed Vice-Admiral of the Red,’ said Clarendon, who had averted his eyes during Arlington’s peroration but evidently could not bring himself to dismiss it entirely. ‘Thus he holds the second command in His Royal Highness’s own squadron. A position of considerable trust, Quinton. Imagine the consequences if Sir John went over to the Dutch during the battle, and turned his own ship and others against His Royal Highness himself.’

And there was the other reason why Clarendon was reluctantly going along with Arlington’s belief in the plot. For in the Chancellor’s scheme of things a threat to the Duke of York was more, much more, than a mere threat to the heir to the throne; it was the potential overthrow of all his dynastic ambition.

The secretary nodded. ‘That would be danger indeed – especially if Lawson was seconded in any defection by the Rear-Admiral of that same squadron.’

‘Berkeley? Will Berkeley? But he’s one of my oldest and dearest friends! He’s as true a cavalier as any of us, as are all his family! His brother is the king’s favourite! This is madness, My Lords –’

My stomach had tightened and my heart was racing. Was it possible for the plague to be brought on by shock?

I saw at once from the expressions of both Clarendon and Arlington that I had struck entirely the wrong note. Yes, my good friend Rear-Admiral Sir Will Berkeley was the brother of the king’s favourite, the good-humoured but utterly worthless Earl of Falmouth; and throughout history, there has been a marked tendency for king’s ministers to be ousted from power at the whim of king’s favourites. Consequently, the former have ever been inclined to seek ways of preemptively bringing down the latter. Here, then, was something else that temporarily united the Chancellor and the Secretary: an aversion to the House of Berkeley and all its works.

‘I have been as good a friend to the Berkeleys as any man,’ said Arlington, dissembling brazenly. ‘But war has a habit of breaking friendships and testing men’s allegiances, as My Lord Chancellor and I found through bitter experience.’ Clarendon glowered; he had been a noted man on the Parliament’s side before returning to the cause of the first King Charles, a fact that staunch cavaliers like Arlington – and, come to that, the Quinton family – had never forgotten. ‘But you would know this better than either of us, Quinton. Did not your friend Berkeley spend several years at sea under Lawson? Does not the Vice-Admiral have great influence over him? Is he not courting Lawson’s daughter?’

‘T – true, My Lords,’ I said but those are hardly the ingredients of treason –’

‘Probably not,’ Arlington said, essaying a benign smile that actually made his wholly malign face seem even more ghastly. ‘But as My Lord Chancellor has said, it is the responsibility of ministers of state to prepare for all eventualities – to suspect all. Some, for example, might consider such an eventuality to be the loyalty of a man with a Dutch wife.’ He stood unsettlingly close to me and stared into my eyes. My loyalty questioned because of Cornelia? But I could look only at the hideous plaster, and the way it dipped into the deep scar beneath. I shuddered, and prayed that he had not noticed. Then, unexpectedly, Arlington smiled. ‘But I would be the last man to do so, Quinton, for I, too, expect to wed a countrywoman of your good lady in the near future.’ So he did, and to a woman with a rather better pedigree than Cornelia’s: a bastard granddaughter of a Prince of Orange, no less. Arlington stepped away a little and returned to our matter in hand. ‘No doubt you will be proved correct, and Admirals Lawson and Berkeley will play full parts in the great victory to come, earning the applause of their sovereign and nation, garnering honour to their names for all posterity, etcetera.’ His face hardened. ‘But in case it proves otherwise, Captain Matthew Quinton and the great ship
Merhonour
will be on hand. We have prevailed upon His Royal Highness to place you directly behind Lawson’s new flagship, as his second. If –’

‘If Lawson, Berkeley and others defect during the battle,’ Clarendon interrupted, his tone clipped and harsh, ‘you will be in position to fight them. If you have to, Quinton, you must sink them. Destroy the traitors. At all costs, preserve the life of His Royal Highness, my son-in-law.’

* * *

I rode toward Hardiman’s Yard in a dark, vicious mood, a condition not improved by the travails of my journey. The Charing-Cross was clogged with people, the Strand beyond it little better, and when I finally reached the Lud Gate, a heaving and immobile crowd was jostling to find a way past a great cart that had lost a wheel in the very gateway itself. Tempers were rising, and as they did so, the veneer of a land at peace with itself swiftly evaporated.

‘Charles Stuart is nought but a papist and a whoremaster!’ cried one voice.

‘Rebel scum!
Vive le roi! Vive le roi
!’ came an answering shout, which was joined in short order by many others.

‘Christ will reign upon earth, for the old cause rises again! The comet foretells the death of kings!’

‘For the King and the Church!’ At that, part of the crowd surged. I saw a flurry of fists, and heard the first clash of steel upon steel. The first scream of pain followed hard on its heels.

Once, I would have launched myself into the fray on the side of the stout cavalier lads, but though little older, I was distinctly wiser. With difficulty, I manoeuvred my horse out of the crowd and made my way up to Holborn Bar, thence into High Holborn itself, steering my horse through the foul hordes of lawyers and their clerks. As I did so, I fell to contemplation of my condition.

My pride in the command of the
Merhonour
had largely evaporated, for I could see only the vision of her standing broadside-to-broadside with Will Berkeley’s
Swiftsure
, Englishman against Englishman, friend against friend. Did Clarendon and Arlington really reflect the will of the king in this business, I wondered? Somehow I had been sucked into the blackest place of all, that foul, vicious world which men call ‘politics’, and I hated it. Clarendon and Arlington had sworn me to silence, so honour dictated that I could not approach my brother, one of only two men who could have steered me safely out of this seething pit; and even if I was prepared to lay my honour to one side, the gulf between Charles and me upon the matter of his dubious countess was surely too wide to be bridged. For the same reason, I could not go directly to the only other man on earth who could have attested to the truth of the great ministers’ assertions and set my conscience at ease. King Charles was still unlikely to look favourably upon an approach from the man who had accused him of being gulled into the bed of a murderess in the pay of France.

And yet … and yet.
Someone
had recommended me for the command of the
Merhonour
; it could not have been Clarendon, who was ignorant of naval affairs and thus eschewed naval patronage, and it would hardly have been Arlington, who was no friend to the Quinton family. I considered the great men of the navy, and discounted most of them at once. The Duke of Albemarle I barely knew, and he was known not to favour young gentlemen captains. Pepys’s patron, Lord Sandwich, was almost equally unknown to me. Then there was Sir William Penn, whom I had met at the Navy Board: but he, too, was a favourer of bluff old tarpaulin captains, and was the man most responsible for the recall of all the Commonwealth veterans.

Finally there was Prince Rupert, cousin to the king and duke, but he was anathema to we Quintons, for we blamed him for the death of my father, Earl James, at the Battle of Naseby. On that desperate June day in 1645, Rupert’s cavalry swept the enemy before them but then galloped off the battlefield in hot pursuit rather than turning in against the Roundhead infantry. Only one of Rupert’s officers had halted his troop’s charge in order to fall upon the footsoldiers of the New Model Army; but without support, the ninth Earl of Ravensden and his men were swallowed up and hacked to pieces. Thus the devil was a more likely friend for Matthew Quinton than the Prince Palatine of the Rhine.

Which left one, and only one: the Earl of Clarendon’s son-in-law.

At the time of his brother’s restoration, James, Duke of York, who would one day reign briefly and ingloriously over his Britannic realms as King James the Second and Seventh, was the heir to three kingdoms and thus one of the most eligible bachelors in Europe. But he had thrown away the valuable diplomatic card of his marriage by secretly wedding one of his sister’s maids-of-honour, a plain, witty girl who was eight months pregnant by him when they belatedly reached the altar. How history is dictated by the unanticipated rise of a male member at the sight of an inappropriate woman’s shapely leg or bosom! For fate dictated that the royal bedfellow was the daughter of Edward Hyde, the man whom the duke’s elder brother had just made his chief minister and Earl of Clarendon. To those who favour conspiracy over coincidence, this was damning: surely the evil minister had used his daughter’s charms to ensnare the heir to the throne, thus furthering the nefarious purposes of the said evil minister? Hindsight poured yet more oil onto the flames; yea, an entire ocean of oil. The king’s marriage to the Portuguese princess Catherine proved childless, and it did not require too fertile an imagination to conjure up a dark tale of Clarendon arranging a match to a barren queen in order to ensure that his own grandchildren would one day ascend the thrones of Britain. (This they duly did, in the stolid shapes of Queens Mary and Anne; but their accessions required a series of alterations in the state that would have boggled the mind of any man alive in that year of
sixty-five
, myself and their grandfather included.)

Thus as I rode into Hardiman’s Yard and endeavoured to assume an air of levity – of celebration, even – with which to break the news of my command to Cornelia, I conceived a list in my head.

Item – the said Matthew Quinton commissioned through the patronage of the Duke of York, who in our eight years of acquaintance has barely noticed the existence of said Matthew. To what end, pray?

Item – the said Matthew Quinton to do the bidding of My Lords of Clarendon and Arlington, respectively the most hated man in England and the most sinister. Two men known for their utter detestation of each other, yet who seem to have found common ground solely in concurring that…

Item – the said Matthew Quinton to be the principal means of preventing the overthrow of the crown in a great naval rebellion.

Item – the said Matthew Quinton to achieve such ends in a ship so ancient that it was built before its erstwhile commander, the said Matthew’s own grandfather, was born…

The ship.

A memory came to me, as clear as if I had been transported back in time to be once again an eleven-year-old boy in the library of Ravensden. A memory of my uncle Tristram, describing to me my grandfather’s own illustrated list of the ships that he had commanded during his long and controversial career as one of the great Elizabeth’s sea-dogs.

‘There, the
Constant Esperance
, in which he fought the Armada … the
Gloriana
, in which he sailed against Lisbon in ’89, and of course his own ship, the
Ark Ravensden
… ah, and the
Merhonour
, in which he sailed against Cadiz. Always an unlucky ship, the
Merhonour
, your grandfather said. Not merely unlucky. Cursed.’

 

 

 

A row-boat upon the Medway, Upnor Castle to larboard, a chill north-easterly whipping up the muddy water of the river. Most of the moorings were empty, the great ships that secured to them long departed to sea. But one of the greatest of all remained, and lay dead ahead in mid-stream: the
Merhonour
. The splendid stern bore witness to her antiquity. Although a royal arms and cipher had been set up, the new wood and bright paint contrasted with the rest of the decoration, which belonged to Cromwell’s time or even earlier. There were not a few coats-of-arms of the Commonwealth set among the elaborate panoply of laurel wreaths and lions that scrolled around the windows of my great cabin, and as we drew nearer I even spotted an ‘ER’, the old queen’s cipher, upon the gunport-lids on either side of the rudder. Broad in the beam compared to some of the newer ships, the ports along her starboard side were in irregular lines, a tell-tale sign that extra guns had been crammed into her over the years, new ports being cut in the hull to accommodate them. A three-decker, albeit a small one, her great hull towered above us. Some of the older timbers still bore the scars of war: dents from cannonballs or the tell-tale
pepper-pot
marks of grape and musket fire, most of it probably dating from the last war against the Dutch but some of it, perhaps, going back to my grandfather’s day. She was ancient and she was allegedly cursed, but great God, she was mine. I had seen elephants the year before, during my voyage upon the River of Gambia, and my ship reminded me of nothing more than a great old bull-elephant, torn and bruised after too many fights: almost ready for that last journey to the graveyard, but still with one final fight left in it against the impudent young incomers from a rival herd.

Upon a conceit, and despite the fact that I had been aboard her several times already, I ordered my crew to row me all around my command. We passed beneath the stern and the old-fashioned Jacobean windows of my cabin, then down the starboard side. The guns were in, and the ship looked suitably warlike; the masts and yards were up, and although we had but half a crew, men were about in the rigging, making clewlines and halyards shipshape. As I looked up at the wooden wall which towered over me, I felt once again the strange conflict of emotions that had assailed me more than once on the road from London to Chatham. Pride, yes, that this great ship was mine; but with it came doubts that did not merely nag; they gnawed at the very essence of my soul. She was so much larger than anything I had commanded before, and in my blacker moments I wondered whether I might have been promoted far beyond my experience and competence. In ordinary circumstances my responsibilities in commanding her would have been weighty enough, for the great ships were meant to bear the brunt of battle and thus carried most of our king’s and our people’s hopes of victory upon their broad gundecks. But my secret orders doubled those responsibilities, and doubled them again. For the
Merhonour
and her captain were to be the first and strongest defence against a possible rebellion in the fleet. Upon this ancient ship and her very young captain might depend the fate of the heir to England and ultimately that of his brother, the king. And all of that was before one considered the small matter of the alleged curse.

I looked up and saw a familiar face upon the quarterdeck: Giffard, the lieutenant, raised his hat in salute. He had been stiffly formal at my first coming aboard, and I had not yet managed to take his measure. He was a sour-faced old Jerseyman with skin like leather, one of Carteret’s cronies who had led the Parliament’s navy a merry dance in the civil war. He seemed a competent seaman, albeit too set in his ways for my liking. His main concern, and indeed mine, was the fact that we were being set out so late, long after the main body of the fleet had been manned with the best drafts of men from the Thames and the east coast. This meant that we would be left with the dregs from the outlying parts of the kingdom: God alone knew when they would arrive and what they would be like. We could not sail until we were approximately manned, and I prayed that the war was not already over by the time we were.

Around, under the bow where the golden lion figurehead roared defiance against the Dutch
hogen-mogen
butterboxes, our implacable foes. Above, the union flag fluttered from the staff upon the bowsprit. And so down the larboard side, with Giffard moving across the quarterdeck to continue to watch his captain’s progress. Strictly speaking, he was now the
first
lieutenant, it being a new innovation by His Royal Highness that two lieutenants should be allowed to the greater ships of the fleet; nominally to improve the captain’s control of his ship, although we all knew that it was but a ploy to satisfy the insatiable demand for commissions in the navy. How the old seamen of the time roared and ranted against this monstrous innovation, declaring it to be beyond wonder and against all the customs of the service! Aye, and how they would spin in their graves if they could see a modern First Rate and its legion of six lieutenants, tripping over themselves as they scurry to impress their superiors. But then, in the year sixty-five, I had made a recommendation for the vacant post of second lieutenant with little hope of seeing it implemented; there were so many disappointed candidates for office (as I had been until so recently) that I was certain His Royal Highness would soon appoint a brash young courtier or the scion of some great noble house.

My boat came alongside, and I boarded my command. The boatswain, an aged and ineffectual Essex man named Pewsey, piped me aboard, and I was reassured to see that the makeshift side party contained several of my personal following, including Macferran, Treninnick, Carvell and the renegade Moor Ali Reis. Beau Harris had been good to his word and released them once his own complement was made up. The
House of Nassau
was already with the fleet and dashing about the sea on scouting duties, a fact that made me not a little jealous: ordered to sea almost as an afterthought, the
Merhonour
was still very far from being in a fit condition to sail. At least the reassuring presence of my own following made up to a certain degree for the evident inadequacies of the ship’s warrant officers. The
Merhonour
had not left her mooring in twelve years, and as her shipkeepers, the standing officers had all too evidently seen their places as sinecures. Pewsey, the boatswain, was decayed and ineffectual; I wished I could lay him aside to put in Kit Farrell or Lanherne, but feared that would not be allowed. Thurston, the carpenter, was seventy-three; Faraday, the purser, was nearly blind; Webb, the gunner, was nearly deaf from too many broadsides, and prayed loudly to Saint Barbara, the old patron of his kind. Great God, we even had a supply of bows and arrows in the armourer’s stores that must have been left aboard since my grandfather’s day. Old men, an old ship and old weapons: perhaps
that
was the curse of the
Merhonour
.

As I stepped onto the upper deck and raised my hat to salute the ship, Lieutenant Gideon Giffard saluted me stiffly in return. ‘Captain Quinton. Welcome back aboard, sir.’

I returned the courtesy. ‘Mister Giffard. Still no sign of our men, I take it?’

‘No, sir.’ I was still having difficulty with his Jersey accent, which sounded like a strange hybrid of French and Dorsetshire. ‘There’s talk of a hoy coming up the river, though, so perhaps they will be aboard that.’ We were over a hundred men short of our complement; without them, the
Merhonour
could never leave its mooring, let alone join the fleet. ‘But the new chaplain has come aboard, Captain.’

I went below, steeling myself for an awkward meeting. The fleet was now so large, and both the number and quality of those who wished to minister to its spiritual wellbeing was so low, that naval chaplaincy was a byword for the dregs of the Church of England, and I wondered what sort of mediocrity, dissenter or sodomite might have been visited upon me. The chaplain’s cabin lay on the lowest gundeck, almost at the very stern of the ship. Like all the officers’ cabins, it was a precarious timber and canvas affair with no natural light, no more than six feet by five, which would clearly be a constraint upon the stocky man who now turned to greet me –

‘Francis!’ I cried in surprise.

‘Captain Quinton,’ said the Reverend Francis Gale.

‘Great God, man, you should have written – I had no idea you were even thinking of serving at sea this summer.’

Francis, a man of God who was as dexterous with the cutlass as the catechism, had first served with me aboard the
Jupiter
three years before, and after we had exorcised the very personal demons that afflicted him, he had become a close friend. He was made rector of our local church upon my recommendation, but had taken leave to serve with me aboard the
Seraph
during its voyage to Africa. That, he had assured me, was to be the end of his seafaring.

‘I have reflected much upon the will of God,’ he said. ‘I asked him whether I served Him best by tending to the farmers and peasants of Ravensden, or by watching over His servant Matthew Quinton in the dreadful fights to come. And the Lord spake unto me, and he sayeth, “Get thee to sea, Francis Gale, and kill as many avaricious
cheese-stinking
Dutchmen as come within reach of thy sword.” Or words to that effect. Thanks be to God, for his wonders are manifold.’

‘But my mother and my brother – surely they cannot be content that you have forsaken your parish duties?’ I said. ‘Yet again.’

‘Your brother has been absent from Ravensden for many weeks. Some say he is at his Northumberland estate, others at the countess’s estate in Wiltshire, yet others taking the waters at Bath. He is a sick man, I fear – sick in body and sick in heart, for he now sees the folly of his unnatural marriage.’ I shuddered, as I often did when the truth of my situation came to me: that I was but one feeble heartbeat away from the earldom of Ravensden and all the dread responsibilities that came with it.

Francis sensed my concern and raised a hand in sympathetic benediction. He had been an opponent of my brother’s marriage, and endeavoured to discover something of the mysterious past of my sister-in-law, the Lady Louise. To no avail, alas; all of the enquiries that he and my uncle Tris had conducted seemed to have ended at brick walls. ‘As for your mother, she was sympathetic to the argument that you should have a friend at your back. Besides,’ said Gale, ‘I think I am growing old, Matthew, and it will be good to fight another battle or two before I allow senility to overtake me.’

I was mightily glad to have Francis alongside me, for I knew from experience how useful he was in a fight. I took him around the ship, along each of her three broad gun-decks, and everywhere we went, the lads who had sailed with us before smiled and nodded greetings, for they had shared much with the Reverend Gale and respected the man profoundly. My own following, those who would volunteer to serve under me in preference to any other captain, now numbered nearly a hundred, and included Bristol and London men from my commission in the
Seraph
as well as my Cornish coterie from the days in the
Jupiter
. But the rest of the crew included a fair number of pressed men, chiefly scrapings from the Thames and inward-bound merchantmen, resentful at being kept from their families and their pay. I saw a few scowls as we passed, and heard the growling speech of a malcontent, hastily concluded when the speaker became aware of our approach.

‘…that you’ve never heard of the curse on this benighted ship? They say every living soul aboard her perished of the plague in the year twenty-five – every living thing save the ship’s cat – and they say the ghost of the captain’s grandfather prowls the decks, and he’d made a pact with the devil, that he had, just like the captain’s uncle –’

Francis frowned and glanced questioningly toward me. I merely shrugged, for there was no privacy upon the decks. So we went up to my cabin, a lavish space that was larger than the main room I shared with Cornelia at Hardiman’s Yard: the
Merhonour
had been built as a flagship, and thus had two great cabins, one at the stern of the upper gundeck and one upon the middle, an unusual luxury in a ship of that vintage. For the time being I had the run of both, although the enthusiasm of every idle courtier and nobleman to get to sea and impress the ladies was so great that I was certain I would soon have some pompous nonentity inflicted upon me.

We settled ourselves upon fine oak chairs which had once adorned the long gallery at Ravensden Abbey. My little retinue of Barcock, Castle and Scobey, delighted and amazed to be in service aboard so great a ship, scurried to provide us with tankards of good London ale. Then we two men looked out at the spectacle beyond the stern windows: the storehouses, slipways, cranes and ropewalk of Chatham yard, the distant mass of ruinous Rochester Castle next to the spire of the cathedral. I longed to confess to Francis my other overarching concern, the secret orders given me by Clarendon and Arlington, but my honour prevented it; besides, we had another pressing matter to discuss.