A youth he might have been, his voice still touched by the reediness of childhood, but he spoke with certainty, and an arrogant authority.
‘I am.’
‘Then, John Stannard, I arrest you in the name of the Lord Admiral of England.’
Jack looked across to Ryman, but the old man could only shrug.
* * *
Throughout the crossing to the shore, Jack demanded to know the cause of his arrest, and of any charges laid against him. But the young officer was determinedly silent, and remained so during the forced march along the rough street that led through a narrow village of fishermen’s cottages, huddled beneath a cliff. A few local women glanced their way, but displayed little curiosity. As they walked up toward the headland, through the encamped army, none paid any attention at all. Soldiers were sharpening blades, polishing breastplates, drinking ale and eating bread or pies. The prisoner being marched toward the castle might have been invisible, or no more than an ant upon a dungheap.
Through all the journey, Jack racked his brain to think of any cause for his arrest. The Stannards paid their taxes; or, at least, as great a proportion of their taxes as any other merchants in Suffolk. Their ships engaged in no piracy, or at any rate, none that had ever come to attention of the Lord Admiral of England. They paid their customs duties in full.
Pater noster, que es in caelis—
Jack stopped himself, and changed the prayer in his mind to English, to ‘Our Father, which art in Heaven’. He and his entire family adhered to the letter of every new law in matters of religion that the king and his Parliament decreed. But what if the king had somehow recently changed a central article of faith, and he knew nothing of it? What if all of Dunwich had unwittingly committed a gross offence against some newly adopted orthodoxy? Perhaps even as he trudged toward his fate, royal officers were going through the town, hammering on doors and starting to build the pyres. His sister Agatha, mixing her potions in her remote cottage across Dunwich Heath, would surely be a prime candidate for the stake – perhaps she had somehow incriminated him—
Oh Jesu, forgive us our sins, save us from the fires of Hell.
They came to the great gatehouse of Tynemouth Castle. Built of sandstone, like the towering empty priory behind it, the gatehouse was a mighty square, with a barbican before it and a deep earth ditch stretching away on either side, cutting off the headland completely. Jack walked through the gate passage, staring up at the ancient walls. It was all a mistake, he told himself over and over again. It had to be a mistake. But even now, a part of him wondered if he would ever walk out of this passage as a free man.
Across the open ground of the headland, a party of nobles and gentry, along with several armed, breastplated and evidently very senior soldiers were making their way from the priory toward the gatehouse. Jack recognised none of them, but one in the centre of the group, a man of forty summers or thereabouts, was especially lavishly dressed in black velvet, and sported a finely groomed red beard. Several of those nearby seemed to be competing for a word with him. Even in his confusion and despair, Jack realised that this could be only one man, easily identifiable by the Seymour hair he shared with his nephew, the Prince of Wales: the Lord General himself, Edward, Earl of Hertford.
The party around the great lord ignored the prisoner entirely. John Stannard was marched across the headland. At one side of the west front of the priory church, less grand than it must have been when statues of the saints stood in what were now empty niches, was a thin detached tower, which could only be a belfry. He was taken inside, and marched up three floors of a narrow spiral staircase. Groans, shouts and the stink of shit came from each room that he passed. So this was the gaol of Tynemouth Castle, and at the top of it was a tiny, empty room which might once have accommodated the monk who tended to the bells. Jack was thrust into it, the door slammed behind him, and a key turned in a heavy lock. He thought of Alice, and for the first time since her passing, he thanked God she was dead. At least she could not know his shame, and would not witness what it seemed to presage: the downfall of the Stannards of Dunwich.
FOUR
Ryman watched the boat carry young Jack away. The men of the Blessing crowded at the wale, murmuring to themselves, fearing aloud for their own futures. Jed Nolloth’s face was ashen. Thomas Ryman, though, had no time for emotion, or for worry. He prayed, then he thought, hard and long. Then he got Nolloth to bring the ship’s boat alongside, and to provide a crew to row him ashore.
Ryman had three names in mind. It took him four alehouses and nine coins to establish that one of the three had been killed at the Solway Moss fight, one of only seven Englishmen to perish in a victory so great and so humiliating for the enemy that the Scots king promptly turned his face to the wall and died of shame; but then, the man Ryman had known of old was always notoriously unfortunate. In the same breath, he learned that the second of the three was in the Pale of Calais, making the lives of the garrison of Guines an utter misery, as he had once made Ryman’s.
That left the third man, who sat alone in the fifth alehouse, staring deeply into a wooden tankard.
‘Petty Captain Vaughan,’ said Ryman. ‘You’re a difficult man to find.’
Vaughan looked up, screwing his eyes to try and make out the man who addressed him from the doorway. Slowly, recognition came to him.
‘Thomas Ryman,’ he said, his accent still bearing the unmistakeable stamp of his native Wales. ‘Y mae dafad ddu ym mhob praidd, indeed it does. Every flock has its black sheep, and here you are to become ours. Last I heard, you’d adopted a tonsure.’
‘Tonsures have fallen out of fashion, Gwynfor Vaughan, in case you hadn’t heard. Swords, though – ah well, they seem to have fallen into fashion once again.’
‘They never fall out of it. So which lord do you serve now, Sergeant Ryman? And what brings you to share my table?’
Ryman took that as an invitation, and seated himself on a stool opposite Vaughan.
‘No lord, in this matter. In others, the Duke of Norfolk.’ Vaughan raised an eyebrow. ‘As for sharing your table… let’s say a remembrance of times past. Of debts owed.’
‘I owe you no debts, Thomas Ryman.’
‘We could argue that into the small hours, perchance. But no, your debts don’t concern me, Welshman. But the debts of another who’s known to us… that’s quite another matter.’
* * *
Jack was in the prison for three days. For much of the first day, he spent every waking hour continuing to convince himself that this could only be some sort of mistake, that he would be released before the next hourly tolling of the priory’s tenor bell, directly above his cell, his innocence fully established. He tried to shut out the cries of the three men in the room below his own: soldiers, blaming each other for the insolence to an officer that had brought them to this pass.
During the second day, he tried to remember every aspect of his life in the last two or three years, thinking to identify anything that might have been reported as a crime. He had been very drunk at Martinmas, the year before, having been persuaded by his bibulous cousin Simon Bulbrooke to celebrate the success of the herring season; had he then spoken against the king while in his cups? But he had confessed the sin of drunkenness to Reverend Seaward at Saint John’s, and surely any arrest for treason would have come sooner, and at Dunwich. He had been faithful to Alice, even after her death, so surely he could not be charged with fornication, certainly not with fathering a bastard. He said his prayers by morning and evening, and paid amply for masses for the soul of his dead mother, as he would also do for his dead wife upon his return from this campaign. Surely he was a good man?
But his father was not. Had the sins of the father been visited, after all, upon the son?
By the third day, Jack was sunk in despair, offering up the same prayers over and over again, begging Alice for forgiveness, praying to her to intercede with the Virgin and all the saints on his behalf. He did not know who accused him. He did not know
what he was accused of. He had been forgotten, and would languish in this prison until he died of the sickness consuming one of the men in the room below, whose coughing and spewing kept him awake half the night. He would never see Dunwich again, never weep at Alice’s grave, never see Tom and Meg grow up.
Salve, Regina, mater misericordiae…
Hail, Holy Queen, the mother of misery.
The gaoler came a little after three in the afternoon of the third day, unlocking the door and crying ‘Stannard! You John Stannard?’
He rose, and nodded his head. The gaoler beckoned for him to come forward, and placed him in the custody of two guards. They took him up out into the open ground of the headland, to the light and the air. Jack breathed deeply, felt the sun on his face, and thanked God that he still lived.
The guards led him across to the gatehouse, up two flights of broad stairs, into a large room directly above the gate passage, filling what seemed like nearly the whole width of the building. Tapestries with scenes of Roman emperors hung on three sides. Through the windows of the fourth, the west wall, John could see the fleet at anchor in the estuary of the Tyne. The sun glinted on the helmets and breastplates of soldiers, many hundreds of them, aboard row-barges going out to the ships. The army was embarking, so the expedition was under way. The Blessing would be out there somewhere, Nolloth making her ready to sail and working to stop her leaks.
‘Stannard of Dunwich’, said a man of forty or thereabouts, sitting behind a large oak table at the end of the room.
His clothes, an elaborate confection of velvet, sable and cloth-of-gold that must have been far too hot for the season, indicated a man of very high rank. His beard and hair were a very dark brown, the former small and neatly pointed; but the most remarkable things about him were his eyebrows, high, dark and arching, which gave him a look of permanent amusement.
‘My Lord,’ said Jack, certain that the man could only be a lord, and having a shrewd suspicion of exactly which lord he was.
‘You are accused of many things, John Stannard,’ he said gravely. ‘Endangering the squadron from the Blyth by incompetent seamanship, for one.’
‘My Lord—’
The proud figure seated before him ignored the interruption, continuing to fix his eyes on the paper in his hands.
‘Bribery of customs officers, for another. Then, it seems, misappropriation of royal stores. False musters, too.’
Jack saw his entire future unravel before him. It was as he had feared during the long hours in the cell at the top of the bell tower: charges that were both inherently plausible and exceedingly difficult for him to disprove.
‘And here, I see, you are charged with heresy.’
The word struck like a gale against Dunwich cliff. Heresy was, perhaps, the most dreaded charge that could be brought against any man or woman. Heresy, if proved, meant burning at the stake, the flesh literally roasting to a crisp even as the accused still lived.
‘My Lord, I beg you – I am true to the Church—’
The lord raised a hand.
‘Heresy, I say.’ The lord paused, and looked again at the paper in his hand. He shook his head. ‘But not just heresy, it appears. There is a charge here of manslaughter.’ He frowned. ‘Another of affray.’
‘My Lord—’
But the hand rose again, and the lord returned to the paper, taking a draught of ale from his pewter tankard as he did so.
‘Sodomy. Witchcraft. Even High Treason. That is quite a catalogue of crimes, Master Stannard. Indeed, I think I can safely say that no single man in England has probably ever been charged with quite so many heinous offences. So many capital ones, at that. Certainly not in the reign of the king’s present highness.’
The lord leaned back, the eyebrows seeming to laugh, and steepled his hands. For his part, Jack looked around in bewilderment. Several men were over against the far wall, beneath a tapestry of a triumphal procession. Some seemed amused at his predicament, others were entirely impassive – and then there were two others, who seemed to shrink back into the shadows thrown by the afternoon sun—
Raker and Maddox.
Everything was clear now. Oh, so very, very clear.
‘Now,’ said the lord, ‘of this vast sheet of charges that has been brought against you, Master Stannard, many do not fall under my remit as His Majesty’s Lord Admiral of England.’
John turned back to face the man he now knew for certain to be John Dudley, Viscount Lisle, privy councillor and Knight of the Garter, one of the great men of Henry the Eighth’s kingdom.
‘My Lord,’ he said, his faith and confidence flowing back into him like a flood, ‘I will make answer to each and every charge that my accusers have brought before me. Ample answer, indeed, with witnesses aplenty. But, My Lord, if I may beseech you most humbly – how was it that these charges came before you?’
The Lord Admiral looked at him steadily, assessingly.
‘By letter, Master Stannard. From your little fleet, when it lay in Bridlington Bay.’
Jack nodded, then turned to face his accusers.
‘Not brave enow to challenge me back in Suffolk, eh, boys? A sawny game even for Southwold and Walberswick men, to sarnick along like a bargain of dauzy hodmadods.’ Jack saw Lord Lisle raise an eyebrow, but the Suffolk invective, comparing Raker and Maddox to a gaggle of demented snails, was aimed at a different audience. ‘Wait ’til we were at sea, then hope that martial law would do your business for you? Poor, boys, poor. And you’ll pay, on the word of John Stannard.’
Raker and Maddox exchanged glances. The former took a step forward.
‘You’re unfit to command, Stannard. Too young. Only put over us by old Gonson because of who your father and grandfather were, and what Dunwich was. That’s all your dungy little town has left now. History. Hopeless dreams.’
‘Jealousy of a young commander, sirrahs?’ said Lord Lisle. ‘Then what of the charges you have brought? Of treason? Of heresy? Of all these other great crimes?’
‘We’ve witnesses to them all,’ said Raker.
‘These witnesses,’ said Jack. ‘Might they all be men of Southwold and Walberswick, perchance?’
Raker opened his mouth, but no words came.
‘Speak, Captain Raker,’ said the Lord Admiral. ‘Whence do your witnesses hail?’
‘One of them is an Ipswich man,’ said Raker, his voice now much less certain. ‘Another of Blythburgh.’
‘And the rest as Captain Stannard charges?’
Raker nodded, his eyes cast to the floor.
‘Well, then,’ said Lisle. ‘Even when I was a young boy, growing up in Kent, I knew the tale of Dunwich and its rivals. The ancient, decayed city with all the privileges, the newer ports round about that had none. The vicious little pups snapping at the heels of the ancient lion. Would that be the sum of it?’
‘Southwold and Walberswick have long sought to bring Dunwich low, My Lord,’ said Jack. ‘And my father had bad blood with Raker, there.’
Bad blood indeed: cargoes destined for Southwold that somehow berthed at Dunwich instead; harbour duties owed to Southwold that were paid, instead, to Dunwich; and, yes, a woman once betrothed to Martin Raker, who somehow spent twenty years in the marital bed of Peter Stannard.
‘Aye, that he did, right enough,’ cried Raker, with a sudden burst of passion, ‘but look how bad your father’s own blood became!’
He stepped forward angrily, making for Jack. Lisle waved a finger, and Jack heard the sound of a sword being drawn from a scabbard, behind him. He turned, and saw Thomas Ryman, his blade in his hand. Two of Lisle’s guards stood behind him, levelling their halberds toward Raker.
The Lord Admiral rose to his feet.
‘Great God, enough of this mime, this play-acting! We have hard business ahead of us – the beating of the Scots. And you men trouble me with this? I need every ship, every man, and I will waste not another minute on trumped-up charges and the petty jealousies of one pitiful little Suffolk port for anothe
r. The ancient grievances of one man against another’s father? I should have you flogged, Master Raker, or else hanged, both for your false witness and for assuming that I, a Dudley, could be so easily gulled.’ The Southwold man blanched. ‘But as I say, I need your ship, and as we need to sail at the first opportunity, that means, alas, that I need you, too. So be obedient to Master Stannard, here. He is well spoken of, whatever his age, and he commands your squadron with my authority, in addition to that with which you originally sailed. I will have no more of this foolery. Should there be more of it, bodies will swing. Necks will break. You have my promise upon it.’
With that, Lord Lisle turned and strode from the room, the entire gathering bowing to him as he left. Raker gestured angrily to Maddox, who followed in his wake. They seemed to make to leave, but then paused before Jack and Ryman.
‘This is not done with, Stannard,’ hissed Raker. ‘Lisle will see. They will all see, when we get to Scotland, that ye’re nought but a worthless hobbledehoy, the son of a murderer and a whore.’ Jack stepped forward, his hand raised in a fist. Ryman gripped his arm urgently, and nodded toward the nearest guard, who was grasping his halberd. ‘Oh, we’ll make them all see through you, John Stannard,’ said Raker, jabbing a finger, ‘I swear it upon the holy blood of Saint Edmund, king and martyr.’
He turned, Maddox with him. They brushed past Ryman on their way to the other door, Jack still straining to go after them.
‘Steady, lad, steady,’ said the older man.
‘No man speaks so of my father and mother—’
Jack stared hard at Ryman, his eyes wide with anger.
‘Aye, true, a good son should always say so. But a thinking son will wait for his moment.’
Jack nodded slowly, and even managed a slight smile.
‘When you were in the friary, Thomas Ryman, you would have told me to turn the other cheek. You often did – that time with Mark Cuddon, for one—’
The sometime friar laughed.
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