The Lion of Midnight

Throughout this book, I have rendered Swedish, Danish and Norwegian names as an Englishman of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries like Matthew Quinton would have done. Hence Gothenburg rather than Göteborg, Elfsborg not Älvsborg, Wrango not Vrango, Flackery not Flekkerøy and so forth. The one exception is the name of the King of Sweden. Matthew would undoubtedly have called him King Charles the Eleventh, but to avoid confusion with his own monarch, I have given the name as Karl.

The
Cressy
lurched again, the mighty waves of the German Ocean
tossing
her hull like a cork. The lantern hanging from the beam swung crazily, casting wild shadows over the chart weighted down upon the table. The ship’s timbers groaned in protest. Salt-spray broke upon the stern windows as the icy wind’s howl strengthened once more.

I braced myself anew, extending my feet to anchor myself against the table. I squinted tired eyes at the chart before me. The Naze of Norway:
there
. The Skaw of Denmark:
there
. Our course by reckoning, a confident line bisecting those two promontories before turning
south-east
to Gothenburg, our destination,
there
. But the line was a fiction, and had been for the thirty hours since the storm began. With a raging ocean and black skies above, observations of sun, moon and stars had been impossible, nor had there been any sightings of landmarks. The latter, at least, was a blessing; for in these seas, coming within sight of land might have been fatal to the
Cressy
and the two hundred and eighty souls aboard her. Yet with the wind so brisk and the current running so strongly, pushing us ever further north and east, I knew that we must be drawing more and more distant from our reckoning, ever nearer to the ship-killing shore of the Naze and the cliffs beyond it. ‘Cliffs the size of cathedrals on that coast,’ Seth Jeary had said to me but an hour before, and I had no cause to doubt that worthy old seaman, our ship’s master.
God of England, God of the Quintons,
I prayed,
keep us clear, I beseech thee.
Having survived one shipwreck, and witnessed the deaths of all but a handful of the crew that I commanded, I had ample cause for a rare outpouring of godly fervour.

There was a timid knock on the door of my cabin, and a boyish shout from beyond it: ‘Light ho, Captain!’

‘Where away?’

‘Three points off the larboard bow, Sir Matthew!’

I threw a tar-coated sailcloth cape over my shoulders and staggered to the door, narrowly avoiding being flung against a culverin as a
treacherous
pitch rocked the ship. There in the steerage stood the boy Kellett, the only one of my captain’s servants not to have been prostrated by seasickness, wet to the skin and smelling of brine. Yet he had a cheerful air about him as he saluted me; markedly cheerful, given that his life and mine might be ended by a great rock at any moment. The deck was wet from the waters breaking over the ship. All around us, my officers’ tiny cabins resounded with a chorus akin to that of the lost souls in Hell. The loud groans of our chaplain, the Reverend Eade, were echoed across the way by the unmistakeable wails of Phineas Musk, notionally my clerk but truthfully my guardian, conscience and court jester, all in one. A violent dry retching from the conjoined cabins adjacent to Musk’s tiny space indicated that the
Cressy
’s mysterious passenger had nothing left to spew into his leathern bucket. The sound made my own stomach turn, but after five years at sea I was more a master of my gut than once I had been.

I made my way to the quarterdeck, where two of the hands helped lash me to the forward rail overlooking our main deck. It was a bitter, cold night: despite the gale, the rail was encased in hard frost. The roar of the wind outdid the broadsides of a hundred men-of-war. Kit Farrell, lieutenant, old friend and sometime saviour of my life, handed me his telescope and pointed away to larboard, into what still seemed to be an unforgivingly black night.

‘I see no light, Mister Farrell,’ I cried through the salt-spray breaking over our heads.

‘There, Sir Matthew! A little more northerly!’

I rolled with the ship, steadied my elbows upon the rail, and squinted out into the terrible night. Nothing. But no, I caught a sudden glimpse of a pinprick, there in the trough between two great waves – and again, in the same position –

‘I can’t make out the coast’, I bawled at the men around me. ‘Are we upon the cliffs east of the Naze?’

‘Light’s too low upon the shore,’ growled Jeary in his thick Norfolk speech, the cold giving shape to his breath. ‘If we’re lucky, it’s on one of the islands outside Kristiansand, maybe Flackery itself.’

I knew from my waggoner that the isle of Flackery was one of the principal seamarks upon this shore: there were good, deep anchorages all around it, where a ship could ride out the worst of storms. Yet with no sightings and no bearings, we might just as easily have been in sight of
Ultima Thule
itself. And there were two other great dangers, quite apart from our ignorance of our position: the threat of the wind
driving
us onto unseen cliffs behind the turbulent waves; and – if the more credulous of the crew were to be believed – the huge sea-monsters that plucked men directly off the decks, perchance in league with the witches who were said to throng this coast in droves.

‘Mister Jeary,’ I demanded of the rugged old master, ‘are there ever known to be wreckers on this shore?’

Jeary, chosen for this voyage because he had skippered many a
Balticman
through these waters, shook his sodden head in response. ‘I’ve heard of such,’ he bellowed through the gale. ‘They say the
Hopewell of Yarmouth
was lured to its fate in these waters. Ten year back, that’d be. I’ve heard talk of many a Dutchman drawn onto the rocks hereabouts, too. One art the Cornish taught the world.’

John Tremar, on watch as a larboard lookout and part of the Cornish following that had been with me since my second commission, shot him
a glance. The Cornishmen had a mighty name for placing false lights to lure unwary ships onto their rocks, there to be looted by the kith and kin of a large measure of my crew. But evidently the murderous trade was not unique to them.

I weighed our options. The ship pitched and rolled, throwing us all to starboard and port, fore and aft, as it pleased. The cold wind howled about me, icy spray lashing my face and oilskin. I looked up at the few pieces of canvas which we still had aloft. With the wind and current as they were, we could run off a little to eastward under reefed topsails, that was all; bearing away south by east for the centre of the great
channel
and weathering the storm was impossible. So we had no choice but to make a landfall and wait for the tempest to blow itself out, and the distant light offered us perhaps our single chance of doing so. The light might indeed prove false, put on a wrecking shore to lure a lucrative cargo into the clutches of Norwegian ship-thieves. But if it was a true light, and I ignored it out of fear of the other, what were the chances we would then find another lit anchorage further to the east?

I studied the light again, put down my eyepiece and turned. The eyes of all men upon that quarterdeck were upon me. They were true
mariners
all, men born to the sea. Each and every one of them would have his opinion of what we should do. Each of them knew the odds, each of them knew the consequences of the wrong decision. They were silent; there was no need for words. They knew, as I knew, that this was why a ship had a captain. The decision that had to be taken, the responsibility that had to be borne:
that
was what a captain was for. And they all knew full well that this captain had once got such a decision terribly wrong.

‘Very well,’ I said, ‘we shall assume the light is true, and pray that it signifies a landfall at Flackery. Mister Jeary, we shall sound every quarter of an hour! Mister Farrell, summon all hands when we have consecutive soundings of eight fathoms or less!’

That done, I had myself unlashed from the rail. Swaying from side to side like a man sodden with an excess of gin, I returned to my cabin.
There I stared once again upon the chart. If the storm and the wreckers did not do for us, there remained the one other danger: perhaps the greatest of all. Kit Farrell, Seth Jeary, and any one of five score veteran seamen among the
Cressy
’s company could have studied the charts, seen the light, weighed the odds, and made the same decision I did, or chosen another. And every one of those other men would have based their
decision
solely upon the navigation of the ship, their reading of the charts and their knowledge of these seas. But only Captain Sir Matthew
Quinton
, one of the newest and youngest knights of His Britannic Majesty’s realm, made the decision knowing full well that he was ordering his ship onto an enemy’s shore, and knowing also what the consequences of that decision might be.

Dawn, some two hours after we had dropped anchor in five fathoms with good, firm ground, brought both relief and alarm.

True, we were in a wide channel between the frost-crusted shores of two, low rocky islands. The light, its fire now being extinguished in its tower upon an islet a mile away, had been true indeed, guiding us into this haven. The western isle gave us shelter from the worst of the wind, which was in any case diminishing by the hour. All should have been well for the
Cressy
and her captain. But by any measure, it was not.

It had been hidden at first, its bulk swallowed up by the blackness of the islands all around us. It was very nearly concealed entirely beneath the northerly point of the isle to westward. But there it was, and as the grey winter’s dawn slowly illuminated the scene, I gazed out upon it.

‘Big,’ said Phineas Musk, his normally ruddy face pale from two days of sea-sickness. ‘Too cursedly big for my taste.’

And for his captain’s. It was big indeed, this great three-decked
man-of-war
, barely half a mile from our anchorage. The ship had already broken out her ensign at the stern: the white cross upon red of Denmark. And as Denmark encompassed Norway, this ship had a perfect right to
be where she was, in her own home waters. Whereas the
Cressy
was an interloper. Worse, we might very well be an invader, for when we left the Nore the Danish king’s declaration of war against us was expected daily. We should have sailed weeks before, but had been delayed by the endless prevarication and incompetence of the victuallers, and the ordnance, and the flibbertigibbet clerks of the Navy Office or the Lord Treasurer. Our mission was to escort back the mast-fleet from Gothenburg, the safe arrival of which was essential to our fleet’s ability to sustain the war against the Dutch. England obtained most of the lofty pinnacles of pine that became the masts of men-of-war from the Baltic lands,
Sweden
above all. No masts, no ships, no victory: it was a simple equation, but the very stuff of life and death. The mast-fleet should have come home four months before, but had been forced to winter in Gothenburg because someone – unidentified, as is always the way in such things – had forgotten to send a ship to convoy them. Such, alas, is how England ever fights its wars.

The
Cressy
was a powerful ship – one of the largest fourth-rate frigates in Charles Stuart’s navy. She mounted fifty-two guns, ten of which were demi-cannon firing thirty-two pound shot, along with twelve culverins firing eighteen-pound shot. But the leviathan beyond the island had an entire extra gun deck, and would be carrying at least seventy pieces of ordnance. The only saving grace was that the Danes, like the French and unlike ourselves, preferred not to cram enormous guns into every conceivable space: an English ship of that size would have mounted eighty or more, and would thus have sat several feet lower in the water.

There were men upon her upper deck. Many men. I did not doubt that they were at their quarters, awaiting their captain’s commands to climb the standing rigging and unfurl her sails. If she had seen us first, she might already be cleared for action, her guns primed and ready behind their ports.

I lifted my telescope once more, and surveyed her quarterdeck. Ah yes, there he was, his own telescope levelled upon me. My counterpart,
my alter ego, my enemy – call him what you will. The Danish
captain
, at any rate. A stout man, quite young, with his breastplate already fastened upon him. A man expecting a battle, then. Did he recognise me, perchance, from the pamphlets bearing my image that had flooded the market since my success at the Battle of Lowestoft, eight months before? Unlikely, for even if such had reached Denmark, the
resemblance
between the figure in the pamphlets and the captain of the
Cressy
was akin to that between a flea and an elephant.

‘A three-decker,’ said Kit Farrell, at my side, almost to himself. ‘At sea in February. That can only mean –’

He was interrupted by a sudden flurry of fur upon the stair from the steerage. A tall, stout man of sixty years or so, sporting a vast and utterly unfashionable beard upon his square, florid, pitted face, and clad in an extraordinary wolf-fur coat, strode purposefully onto the quarterdeck. He looked out toward the great ship and the Danish colours flying from it, shook his head thoughtfully, and turned toward me.

‘Well, then, Sir Matthew. This, perchance, seems to be the moment when we discover whether or not the Dane has finally declared war upon us.’

Our passenger, Peregrine, Lord Conisbrough, showed no sign of the indisposition that had laid him low for three days. Compared to the visage of his page, who followed slightly behind him – a callow youth named North – and to the ghastly countenance of Musk, the noble baron seemed the very picture of health. His passage in the ship had been announced by an urgent order from the Lord High Admiral
himself
, while we lay at the Nore, and awaiting his arrival was one of the many matters that had delayed our sailing. Conisbrough owned great estates in Sweden, it seemed, acquired while he served abroad during the late wars. There was no indication of which wars exactly (the last half century having seen more wars in Europe than there were countries, or so it seemed) and even less of whom he might have served. But one does not question the direct order of the king’s brother.

In truth, Lord Conisbrough caused little trouble to the captain and crew of the
Cressy
. He graciously refused the captain’s offer of his own cabin, making do instead with a double-cabin in the steerage – a notable sacrifice for such a large man, for even joining two officers’ coops into one created a space no larger than ten feet by six. He dined with me on every night of the voyage, at least until the ever-increasing size of the waves did for his stomach, but although he was exceedingly good
company
, with a range of conversation upon every topic from the efficacy of ratsbane to the whoring of the French king, he was notably elusive upon the subject of his own past. Indeed, he was equally so upon the subject of his present: quite what had prompted a peer of the realm to examine the condition of his estates abroad in the depths of winter, and in the midst of a war, was never volunteered, and the honour of our respective stations prevented me from pressing him.