The Blast That Tears the Skies (2012) (8 page)

‘A curse, Matthew?’ my old friend asked, quizzically.

‘The tattle of the lower deck, Francis. But they are well informed of my history, even if they have conflated the sixth earl with the eighth.’ Henry, sixth Earl of Ravensden, was said to have been a necromancer who had sold his soul to the devil, a story reinforced by the failure to discover a body after his alleged death in a tavern brawl; his satanic visage and unconventional interests had been inherited by my uncle. ‘Tristram would never be able to sell his soul to the devil, for Old Nick would rightly suspect he was being swindled. And if my grandfather’s shade truly haunts the ship, it has not troubled me with a visitation.’

‘But you and I are rational men, Matt. Alas, though, the seaman is not. Indeed, he is the most superstitious creature upon the earth, ever prone to believe in witches, ghosts and the like. If this of a curse is allowed to take hold, and if they identify you and your family with it, who knows what harm it could do when finally we go into battle?’

Francis’s words troubled me; I had been inclined to dismiss the legend of the curse, convincing myself that perhaps my crew would never come to hear of it, or else that as creatures of a modern, rational age, they would not be as fearful a breed as their forefathers. I had also never even considered the notion that I might be seen as a living manifestation of the curse.
Foolish boy
, a visitation seemed to whisper.

‘Then what can be done, Francis?’

‘Naturally I can sermonise upon the ridiculousness of such superstitions – the third letter of Paul to the Romans, verses the thirteenth to eighteenth, will serve the purpose.’ He was contemplative. ‘But if such fails, I suppose there is one other course left to us.’

‘That being?’

Francis smiled and took a long draught of ale. ‘For that, Matthew, I need to write a letter. A very long letter. To the Lord Archbishop of Canterbury.’

* * *

‘Can’t sail with you this time, Captain. Not yet, at any rate.’

Phineas Musk stood a few feet from me in the cramped,
oak-panelled
hallway of Ravensden House, but he might as well have been a world away. This was the last news I had expected: since my second commission, Musk had been as inevitable a part of my services at sea as wind and tide.

‘Great God in Heaven, Musk,’ I said, ‘think of the pay that a captain’s clerk of a Second Rate receives! Think of the prize money that will accrue to all of us in this war, even in a great tub like the
Merhonour
! And all of that additional to what my brother pays you as his steward here.’

For almost no perceptible work, I might have added; even less, now that Earl Charles had largely abandoned our decrepit town house upon the Strand in favour of other abodes.

‘Builders,’ said Musk uncomfortably. ‘Can’t trust builders. Your brother wants them in to shore up this place and make good the back wall. Needs me to oversee them. They won’t fleece me, trying to pass off any old wattle-and-daub as an honest stone wall.’

‘And this must be done now? When the house is barely used?’

‘Best time,’ grunted Musk. ‘Nobody here to disturb, other than me. If it’s not done soon, the whole thing will collapse. Although now I think upon it, I suppose your grandfather did say much the same thing to me back in the year forty-four.’

If I was being even-handed, I had to admit that the case for such remedial work was unanswerable. Above where we stood, the sagging ceiling contained two ominously large cracks; the smell of damp and long-forgotten cesspits pervaded the entire crumbling building. Even so, I could still barely digest the news. Musk had become something of a talisman upon my voyages; an obstreperous talisman, admittedly, but I was about to sail into my first fleet battle, and it would be strange not to have his oddly reassuring presence at my side. But there was another and even more troubling strangeness to the whole business. Musk was many things, and not all of them were entirely reputable. One thing he was not, though, was a liar; at least, not to those named Quinton. Yet I had an unnerving feeling that he was lying to me now.

Concealing my darker thoughts, I clutched at a straw. ‘You said “not yet”, Musk. Then there is hope that you might join the ship later?’

The old rogue shrugged. ‘Can never tell how long builders will take. Law unto themselves, builders are.’ Specially at the moment, with all these great new mansions going up in Westminster and the likes of Lord Clarendon paying over the odds. Not to mention,’ he said, brightening, ‘not knowing how long this war could take. You might have beaten the Dutch and come back wreathed in laurel before the idle buggers even get as far as the plastering.’

I sighed, for there was evidently no remedying the situation; and if Musk truly was lying, then the lie was as elaborately constructed as Clarendon House itself. ‘Well then, Musk, I shall take my leave and ride on to the abbey to say farewell to my mother. I pray that your duties here will permit you to join me in due course, for I sense that a Dutch war will not be complete without Phineas Musk.’

A lying Musk, a cursed ship and the possibility of vile conspiracy in the fleet, cocooned within that evil web named ‘politics’: as I rode for Bedfordshire, I had to content myself with the thought that surely nothing else could worsen the condition of Matthew Quinton.

 

 

 

There was no landscape more familiar to me. The stream where I had played as a boy. The mill and the home farm. The kiln and the blacksmith’s forge. The woodland beyond. The gentle slopes on which the Cistercians had planted a vineyard in the days when England’s weather was more akin to that of Iberia than Iceland. The abbey itself, the ruins of the church projecting beyond the jumble of buildings in the domestic range. The wisps of smoke rising from the chimneys into the spring air. Apart from the last few months in Hardiman’s Yard, my sea-voyages and five years in penniless exile upon the continent, I had lived here all my life.

Ravensden Abbey.

This was home.

I did not allow myself more than a fleeting acknowledgement of the thought that this might be the last time I ever saw it. Although I had fought in a battle on land and in an action between single ships, I had never yet experienced a fleet engagement. But I knew enough men who had;
never expect you will survive it,
they said,
it’s easier that way
. The humblest powder-boy and the greatest admiral are as one when the cannon begin to roar. Witness the fate of Richard Deane, one of the Commonwealth’s mighty generals-at-sea. Greater than Monck, many said. Could have been greater than Cromwell, some said. It mattered not a jot when a cannonball literally cut him in two at the Gabbard fight.

I rode into the stable yard, dismounted and handed my steed to my namesake, Matthew Barcock. ‘Her ladyship’s in the Long Gallery,’ he said; he was undoubtedly the least communicative of our steward’s inexhaustible brood.

I decided to grasp the nettle at once. Allowing no more than an hour for my dutiful farewell to my mother, I should be able to make Barnet, or somewhere nearby, before nightfall. The sixteen pounds and sixteen shillings a month that would eventually accrue to the captain of the
Merhonour
, and against which I had already borrowed quite substantially, meant that I could afford a decent room in a respectable inn, not the lousy mattress in a shared garret that had long been the lot of Matthew Quinton. An early start would enable me to return to Cornelia before the morning was out, giving the best part of one last day with her before rejoining the
Merhonour
on the following day. Through the inner gate into the pleasant garden that had once been the monastic cloister, up the stairs to what had once been the monks’ refectory, remodelled by Earl Edward into a fashionable Tudor long gallery, at the end of which sat my –

Sister-in-law.

The Countess Louise looked up from the small writing desk that had been positioned to catch the best of the spring sun. ‘Matthew!’ she cried. ‘What a truly delightful surprise!’

It was not a delight that I reciprocated. I cursed myself for not having asked Matt Barcock which ‘ladyship’ was in residence; but then, the existence of this new countess was still so new, and so unsettling, that the possibility of him referring to anyone other than my mother simply never occurred to me.

‘My Lady,’ I said, hastily recovering myself, ‘my apologies for intruding upon you. I had sought an interview with my mother, to say farewell before my ship joins the fleet.’

She was half way down the gallery, between the serried ranks of portraits of dead Quintons, advancing elegantly towards me. She seemed to make almost no footfall upon the ancient floor. Whatever else the Countess Louise might have been, she could certainly act the part of a great and stately lady.

‘Oh, poor Matthew,’ she said, ‘you will be so disappointed. And your loving mother will be too, of course.’ Either she did not know how things stood between my mother and I, or else she did and was a consummate dissembler. ‘The Dowager Countess departed but this morning. She must have taken a different road to Whitehall, else you would have passed her on the way. She has gone to court, you see.’

This news was almost as troublesome as the presence of this cuckoo in the nest of my ancestors. My mother had not been at court in a quarter-century. My mother despised the court, and all to do with it. My mother being at court was as likely as King Charles taking a vow of chastity.

The Countess Louise was before me now. She was dressed more plainly than I had ever seen her, eschewing jewellery or any colourings. She was not disguised by the scent of expensive perfumes, as she had been whenever else I had met her. She wore only a plain black smock, such as countrywomen wear; one could have taken her for a Quaker.

‘In that case, My Lady,’ I said, ‘I will not detain you…’

She reached out and touched my forearm. ‘Stay a while, Matthew, please!’ Her touch sent a shudder through my body.

‘As Your Ladyship pleases.’

‘Louise, as I have told you before, Matthew.’ She had a way of staring into a man’s eyes for just a moment longer than most people do.

‘As you say, My Lady. You are not in company with my brother, then?’ They were in company precious little these days, as I well knew, and my comment was intended to sting.

‘Charles is unwell. His wounds give him more trouble. Even now, he takes the waters at Bath. And … and he has been distant – the nature of my annuity concerns him…’ A delicate euphemism indeed for the pension paid by France to one of its agents! ‘But I will not inflict my worries upon you, Matthew. When all is said and done, you have lived with the knowledge of Charles’s infirmities for so much longer than I.’ She sighed. ‘Perhaps you will be Earl of Ravensden very soon, and then you will have no need to concern yourself with me any longer.’ She looked at me curiously. ‘Although, of course, there are precedents for a man marrying his brother’s widow. Harry the Eighth, for one.’

This was monstrous. It was unspeakable. The bitch was proposing that I wed her –

‘Not a happy precedent, madam,’ I said, struggling with great difficulty to maintain my temper, my dignity and my honour. ‘And even if my brother were to die, remember that I am married.’

‘As was I, Matthew. Twice, now thrice. Marriages are so … transitory, I find.’ Suddenly and unexpectedly, she broke into a wide grin; I had never seen her smile so. ‘I jest with you, good-brother. I know I should not, on such a serious matter, but the sight of your face – ah, it is a shame that no-one has seen fit to place a mirror in this room, that you could see your expression!’ And with that, she tapped my hand playfully.

I was discomforted beyond measure. I was unused to such subtle and dark humour in a woman: Cornelia was more direct, the women I knew about the court merely laughed reflexively at the jokes of the rakes they sought to bed, while my mother had buried whatever sense of humour she had once possessed alongside the corpse of my father.

Countess Louise stepped past me and looked up at the somewhat fanciful portrait of a man in armour: a long-forgotten Tudor artist’s imagining of what the first Earl of Ravensden might have looked like, a century before that.

‘I am studying the history of the Quintons,’ she said, apparently serious again, ‘the better to pass it on to the son that Charles and I will have.’

Which Charles?
And the absence of any child after nearly eighteen months of marriage, despite the best efforts of a monarch notorious for his ability to impregnate women in about as many seconds, made the countess’s sudden interest in genealogy doubly unexpected; suspicious, even, if one had a mind that was thus inclined.

‘You spring from such a great race, Matthew! Such an unbroken record of service to the crown. You must be proud to come from such a line. To have all these’ – she gestured toward the portraits lining the gallery – ‘as your ancestors.’

‘Proud – yes. And ashamed, madam, at the dishonour you have brought to this noble house.’

She shrugged off my jibe, which in truth was entirely unmannerly and peevish on my part; her presence was unsettling me greatly. ‘Is it really dishonour to the House of Quinton to have its line revived by a dash of royal blood?’ No dissembling, then; but she knew full well that I knew of the perverse arrangement between her, my brother and the king.

The countess moved along the south wall, gazing upon the Quinton portraits. ‘Consider our proud English nobility, Matthew,’ she said. ‘How many great lords are truly the sons of footmen or stable boys, brought in to a ladyship’s bed to hatch an heir when the husband’s member would not suffice?’ She had a way of suddenly lifting her head to emphasise a point; it was not unappealing. ‘This matter touches thrones, too. Was not King James said to be the son of Davey Rizzio? Do not many still find it curious that the present King Louis was conceived after his parents’ marriage had been childless for twenty years, and at a time when there was about that court a particularly fetching captain of the guard? Legitimacy in great lineages is a moveable feast, Matthew Quinton. Very moveable indeed.’

‘Perhaps, My Lady. But for these speculations to have any effect in this place, you must bear a child. A task you have not accomplished with any man in nearly twenty years, and which you have thus far failed to accomplish in eighteen months of being serviced by the most virile man on earth.’

For any lady of honour, this would have been an unbearable insult. Surely it was ample to drive any woman into a paroxysm of tears. But the Countess of Ravensden merely narrowed her eyes for a moment, then smiled. ‘Ah, well, Matthew, I know what the court and all of England says about our sovereign lord. Our wits can pun all they like about his mighty sceptre, but I can assure you that His Majesty’s performance is, shall we say … over-rated?’ She walked to the window and looked out over the parterre. ‘Of course, it is possible that by the time he reaches me he is exhausted from his bouts with Barbara Castlemaine – they say the bitch is insatiable. And I am told that he still sleeps with the queen from time to time, for the sake of form and our alliance with Portugal. As is only right and proper.’ She turned suddenly and faced me directly. ‘Why, Matthew Quinton, I do believe you are shocked! Are you not used to hearing women talk thus? Truly, sir, for all your Cavalier pedigree I think you must be a secret Puritan at heart!’

I was profoundly discomforted, both at the directness of her speech and at the growing realisation that I was being toyed with. ‘It is – it is unsuitable, madam. Inappropriate.’

‘Indeed? I’ll wager it is as nothing to the discourse you have with your friends and fellow captains in the tavern. Seamen are not known as monks or shrinking violets, are they, Matthew? And I cannot imagine your beloved and, I may say, refreshingly forthright Cornelia is reticent upon such matters.’

‘You will
not
mention my wife!
You will not
–’ I raised my hand to strike her. Rather than flinching, she presented her cheek for the blow, smiling as she did so. I stayed my open hand, closed it into a fist, and brought it back down to my side as my face burned with shame and anger.

‘I apologise, Matthew,’ she said, with apparent sincerity. ‘I have spent too long at court, where the quip and the hurtful jest are praised above decorous conversation.’

‘What is it that you do here, madam?’ I snapped.

She evidently misinterpreted my question; to this day, I do not know if she did so deliberately. ‘I have been studying the papers in your family’s muniments chest,’ she said, ignoring my rather wider meaning. ‘Fascinating, quite fascinating. The letters in French between your grandfather and grandmother – so loving, so gallant! What times they must have had.’ I glanced at the portrait of my dearly remembered grandmother and wondered what she, the grand and eccentric Countess Louise-Marie, would have made of this interloper, her
near-namesake
.

The current Countess of Ravensden continued her perambulation of the gallery. ‘And yet, so many unanswered questions. Take the fate of this gentleman, for instance.’ She stopped before the portrait of a hard-faced man with a short, pointed brown beard and dressed in the fashion of the old queen’s time: my great-grandfather, Edward, seventh Earl of Ravensden. ‘An inscrutable face. I am glad that you did not inherit it from him, Matthew – your face is an open book.’ She smiled playfully. ‘Such an intriguing man, the seventh earl. There are hints in his letters of a falling out between him and his mother, the formidable Countess Katherine – and what a life hers would have been! To have been a nun, and to have outlived all her children…’