Destiny's Tide

by Destiny's Tide (retail) (epub)

  The most easterly of the Scots longboats was making for Inchcolm, directly across the path of the Galley Subtile. The latter’s captain eschewed expending powder as his companion had done. Instead, Ryman heard the drumbeat increase its rhythm, and the English oarsmen responded. A few of the Scots, realising their imminent fate, stood and jumped over the side of their craft. A few others raised their hands, as though they could somehow push back the instrument of death that closed upon them with terrifying speed. The bow of the galley struck the longboat, briefly pushing it forward like a stone being swept by a brush. Then the galley drove clean through the hull, throwing the Scots into the water. Those who could swim were picked off by archers from the galley’s deck. Those who could not splashed, screamed, and then sank, the waters of the Firth closing over them as they perished. The remaining Scots boats were redoubling their efforts to flee the scene as swiftly as they possibly could. Thomas Ryman crossed himself, murmured an Ave Maria, commended the lost souls to God, and then offered up a prayer of thanks. The great prize, the Unicorn, remained England’s, and he and John Stannard lived to return to Dunwich.

  Thomas Ryman smiled, and then began to sing the old, familiar hymn of thanksgiving, as he had so often on battlefields and in the church of the Greyfriars.

  ‘Te deum laudamus! Te dominum confitemur…’

  We praise thee, oh Lord.

  There was another voice, joining his, the flawless tenor voice of a much more proficient singer.

  ‘Tibi omnes angeli; tibi caeli et universae potestates…’

  Thomas Ryman, the erstwhile friar, and John Stannard, the erstwhile choirboy, sang their song of victory.

  * * *

  Edinburgh burned.

  From the deck of the Blessing, sailing slowly back out into the Forth with a score of the other ships, John Stannard and Thomas Ryman could see the flames rising from the houses, all the way down the great hill to the old royal abbey of Holyrood, at the foot, which burned too. The wind was south-westerly, and that carried the smells of a city ablaze, the sounds of collapsing houses. But there were also other sounds: the unmistakeable blasts that signified exchanges of artillery fire.

  ‘You wish you were up there,’ said Jack to his old mentor.

  ‘If I were thirty years younger, perhaps,’ said Ryman. ‘But it’ll be a hard business now, Jack. I’ve been in Edinburgh. High, narrow houses, with alleys snaking between them. A killing ground every yard or two. They’ll be fighting from house to house, Daubeney’s lads and all the rest of them, never knowing if there’s a man with a blade round the next corner or at the top of each stair, or someone about to drop a cannonball on you from three storeys up. And then there’s a steep hill up to the castle gate, with the enemy able to fire down on you all the time. Burning houses just makes assaulting it more difficult – gives the Scots gunners clearer fields of fire. Lord Hertford and his generals should know that.’

  ‘But we’ll win?’

  Ryman pointed away toward the city, to the wisps of smoke beginning to rise from the crowded mass of buildings upon the hill.

  ‘There are different kinds of winning, Jack. Flodden was one kind, this another. The city is ours already, but if we don’t take the castle, the Scots will claim a victory of their own.’

  At first, the Scots had put up barely any defence of Edinburgh. Cardinal Beaton’s army made a show at the stream called the Water of Leith, but after a cursory exchange of a few shots, it melted away. The Scots regent, the Earl of Arran, also abandoned his city to its fate, and the English secured the port of Leith, enabling them to land their remaining men, supplies and heavy guns with impunity. Jack had brought the Blessing alongside there, having handed the Unicorn over to a crew appointed by the Lord Admiral, and disembarked Daubeney’s troop, who awaited a new captain. He and Ryman took mass in a chapel that the soldiers chose not to burn, and offered prayers for the eternal souls of Christopher Eagle and the good men of Dunwich who had fallen with him. Jack also paid the priest to say further prayers for Alice. After all, if God ultimately gave the victory to the Scots’ ally, the Most Christian King of France, then perhaps Scottish prayers would be more efficacious at speeding her soul from Purgatory than English ones.

  By the time the English army assaulted the city itself, the Scots were ready to put up a stiffer resistance, and that was what Jack and Ryman could see from the Blessing. Above all, there was the castle, perched formidably on its dark rock, inviolate above the smoke and flames rising from the town below.

  ‘Perhaps it will be enough to bring them to terms,’ said Jack.

  ‘Perhaps,’ said the old soldier.

  The Blessing moved out into the fullness of the great Firth, Jack setting course for the squadron of royal men-of-war, which lay at anchor off the shore of Fife. There was no need for the Dunwich vessel to sail so close to the great ships, but Jack had two reasons for so doing. He told himself it was not vanity, but he wished to look once more at the Unicorn, the prize that he had been so instrumental in taking. There she lay, shipwrights swarming over her, erecting topmasts and taking down the Scots royal arms at the stern, ready for their replacement by the emblems of Henry of England.

  The second reason became apparent as Jack helmed the Blessing close to Lord Lisle’s flagship, the Rose Lion.

  He thought back to the summary trial in the great cabin of the flagship. To his evidence, so damning. To the testimonies of the other witnesses, notably those who could be considered neutrals – Blakeney men, Corporal Payne, masters of other ships in the invasion fleet. To the supine, mumbled defence put up by the accused. To the wrath of the Lord Admiral against them, and, by contrast, Lord Lisle’s very public and undoubtedly genuine praise for Jack’s skill and courage, echoing his earlier remarks in private, in his own cabin, when he had even raised a glass to toast John Stannard of Dunwich.

  To the chilling finality of the sentence.

  The Blessing took in her topsails and lowered her flag in salute to the royal flagship. A few of the men on her deck looked down curiously at the Dunwich ship, so small and plainly adorned among such proud men-of-war. The Rose Lion did not respond to John Stannard’s gesture of honour. But then, it did not need to: the best salute that Jack could possibly receive dangled upon ropes from the main yard of the flagship, swaying to and fro in the breeze.

  The corpses of Maddox of Walberswick and Raker of Southwold.

  PART TWO

  THE DOOM OF DUNWICH

  MAY TO JUNE 1544

  Oft gazing on thy craggy brow

  We muse on glories o’er.

  Fair Dunwich! Thou art lowly now,

  Renown’d and sought no more…

  How proudly rose thy crested seat

  Above the ocean wave;

  Yet doom’d beneath that sea to meet

  One wide and sweeping grave! …

  Those through each forgotten age

  With patient care will look,

  Will find her fate in many a page

  Of time’s extended book.

  Agnes Strickland (1796-1874)

  NINE

  The Doom painting displayed above the Rood screen of Saint John’s church in Dunwich, on the tympanum at the top of the chancel arch, was renowned far beyond the Palesdyke. Men and women came to look upon it from all over Blything Hundred and the distant parts of High Suffolk, even from as far afield as Norfolk or Essex. Such strangers barely noticed the usual, expected features of a Rood: the Cross itself, and the wooden figures of Christ, John the Baptist and the Virgin Mary. Instead, they were always struck first and foremost by the great devil, its fiery wings outstretched, so huge, so lifelike, so malignant, its brilliant red eyes burning into the souls of the sinners below it in the nave. Women in the congregation had been known to faint, men to fall to their knees, trembling and frantically thumbing their paternosters in fear of the hellfire. To that very day, there was still talk of a Frisian helmsman, stormbound in Dunwich harbour in the old King Henry’s time, who gazed into the eyes
of the Doom’s Lucifer for a little too long and was struck blind upon the spot. But for the parishioners of Saint John’s, who looked upon it every week, the devil was familiar, reassuring, very nearly an old friend. The devil of the Doom had always been there. No: what terrified the folk of Dunwich was the scene behind him, the hell playing out beneath Beelzebub’s long, black wings. The long-dead artist had conjured up the image of a great blue wave, rearing up to Satan’s very shoulders. A vast blue wave breaking on the shore before it, sweeping all away. There were the church towers falling as the inexorable waters struck them, there the ships overwhelmed and sunk, there the tiny bodies of honest citizens drowning in the wall of water, there the souls of the already dead awaiting judgement. It seemed as if the relentless ocean conjured up by the devil was even about to consume Christ, the Baptist and the Virgin, a paradox that had caused many vicars of Saint John’s endless difficulty in their sermons. This was the image that gave the children of the town nightmares, at least until they grew old enough to make their peace with the ancient daubing above their heads.

  With the Doom of Dunwich.

  * * *

  Jack Stannard thought upon the Doom as he stepped out of his house, the home he had formerly shared with Alice. Joan Cowper, the thickly-built, square-faced housekeeper to the Stannards, warned him of the folly of going out on such a day, but he had been ignoring Joan’s advice for as long as he could remember. Even so, she was right in one thing: the rain was parney, as Suffolk goodwives like Joan termed a torrential downpour, the rapidly growing puddles possibly concealing God knew what treacherous holes in the road, but that was not the only reason why Jack dared not look round. He knew Meg would be at the window, squinting through the broken shutter slat, staring after him accusingly even as she stroked Tiberius, the large, shapeless and pungent Stannard dog. Unlike her brother, Meg had no fear of their grandfather, saw no reason why she should not accompany her father to visit him, and saw through Jack’s feeble lie, parroting Joan Cowper, about the conditions underfoot and the risk of catching a cold from the deluge.

  Instead, all Meg Stannard’s fears were for the Doom.

  ‘Miriam Day says the Doom is ungodly,’ she had said that morning, as they left Saint John’s after Mass, wrapping stoles around them against the rain. ‘Miriam Day says they’re taking down Roods in Kent, and burning them. Miriam Day says Candlemas and creeping to the cross on Good Friday are sinful, too. Miriam Day says—’

  ‘Miriam Day listens too much to her brother,’ said John. ‘And whatever they do in Kent, or whatever Jack Day hears in London, doesn’t mean it’ll happen in Dunwich.’

  ‘But Miriam Day says—’

  There was a time when Jack Stannard had hung on every word John Day said, too, even though his friend was younger than him. When they were children, the two Jacks spent many hours at the Dain Quay or the East Quay, playing hide-and-seek amid the bales and in the warehouses, watching the ships as they loaded and unloaded. They approached sailors, eager to pick up words of their many languages, to beg for scraps of stockfish or swigs of ale and wine, and to question them for news from the lands beyond the sea. But whereas Jack Stannard always sought news of the wars, and the doings of the Emperor and the King of France, John Day craved only word of Luther’s latest protestations. The day when a Bremen cog berthed at the East Quay, and a sailor from her gave John a copy of the rogue monk’s Small Catechism, was the happiest Jack Stannard had ever seen his friend. At ten, John Day could hold forth on the falsehoods of transubstantiation with the ferocity of a hell-fire Lollard. Now, years later, he printed those ideas upon a press in Saint Sepulchre-without-Newgate in the city of London, always somehow staying just on the right side of the law. But from time to time he came back to Dunwich to visit his widowed mother, to infect his much younger siblings with his heresies, and to rail against the great Doom painting in Saint John’s church.

  Jack Stannard’s house lay just behind Cock Hill, half way along the road that ran from the market place, in the very middle of the little town, to the Dain, the harbour at the northern end of it. This day, though, he took neither familiar direction. Instead, he walked west, along Maison Dieu Lane, in the shadow of the low hill of the same name. The house that adjoined his own was but newly ruined, the Woodthorpes having removed themselves to Lowestoft no more than five years past. Gulls now sat in its empty windows, watching him malevolently as he passed. Beyond that, the house that had once belonged to Alice’s family, the Easeys, was no more than its bare walls, and on the other side of the lane, on the lower slope of the hill, the only traces of the houses that once stood there were overgrown mounds and the forlorn fruit trees that were once the pride of several gardens. As a child, when the Iceland fishery was its height and Dunwich seemed reborn, he could remember this street full of houses, and crowded from end to end with carts and wagons. Shopfronts stretched almost down to the Bridge Gate, their gaily painted signs swinging noisily in the breeze, their smells by turns intriguing and disgusting to a young child. But there were no shops here now. Even the Maison Dieu itself, the ancient half-timbered hospital that stood beneath the hill named after it, under the northern slope of Dunwich Cliff, was decayed, with great holes in its thatch from the last storm sealed only by thin canvas, and its small chapel all but a ruin.

  Jack turned right and made his way out of the town proper, onto Saint James Street, the last vestige of the Roman road that ran due west from the fort those mighty legends of old established at Dunwich. There were many more buildings here, the homes and businesses of those who thought that this far inland, at least, would be safe from the sea until Doomsday. The rain was easing, and folk were appearing from their doors, resuming their normal trades and activities. He doffed his woollen hat to Goodwife Vicary, who was preparing to beat a sodden mat upon the step of the Pelican in its Piety. Her early customers, old Spatchell included, would already be quaffing their wooden pots of ale, no doubt having made excuse of the need to shelter from the rain. Jack stopped and exchanged a few words with Valkenburg, the Brabanter who brewed Dunwich’s beer, a jolly and well-liked fellow whose English was better than many of those who were Dunwich born and bred.

  Jack realised he was slowing his pace, pausing to look at stalls from which he had never bought and never would. He knew why. Every step nearer to his father was a little purgatory, a very little way closer to discovering which Peter Stannard awaited him this day. But no matter what mood the old man was in, one thing above all was certain: they would disagree about something. Jack sighed loudly enough to attract a curious stare from the cobbler whose wares he had been examining for a fraction too long, and moved on.

  A little further down the street, and despite the sodden ground, Venison sat in his usual place, on the step by the water-trough, emitting his familiar stench.

  ‘God’s blessing upon you, Master Stannard,’ said Venison.

  This little miracle always intrigued Jack; no matter how silently he approached, or how recently he had washed, the ancient blind beggar always knew it was him.

  ‘And upon you, Venison.’

  ‘So you’re set for the war with France, then, your uncle Spatchell says.’

  Dunwich had no secrets, not even from its beggars.

  ‘That’s why I go to my father.’

  ‘They say, though, that the Scots haven’t been defeated. They say we may have burned Edinburgh and half their borderlands, but our army has withdrawn, their regent still rules, their queen is still set fair to marry the little French prince, yet our king is still determined to invade France instead. Would that be the weight of it, Master Stannard?’

  Jack stifled a laugh.

  ‘You should be at Greenwich Palace, Venison, counselling the king. You’re wasted upon Dunwich.’

  ‘I ponder upon the injustice of that in every waking hour, good sir. But would you bestow your bounty upon me this day, Master Stannard, just as your late wife was good enough to bestow alms on me in her will?’

  Jack smiled at
the memory of Alice’s kind-heartedness. There were fewer beggars now than in the Dunwich of his childhood, when the short-lived prosperity of the Iceland fishery brought a steady stream of them into the town. But then the king closed the monasteries, far and away the best market for Friday fish, and both the beggars and most of the peterboats vanished almost overnight. Venison was the only one who still remained in Dunwich all year round, never chancing to the greater fortunes of Yarmouth, Lowestoft or Ipswich. Alice had always shown a particular kindness to him; as she said, the saint after whom she was named was the patron of the blind, so it was only proper for her to regard Venison as her charge.

  Jack reached into his purse, pulled out a farthing, and bent down to give it to the old man, who turned the coin over and over in his hand.

  ‘Not clipped,’ said the beggar. ‘Bounty indeed, then. Bless you, John Stannard, and my respects to your father.’

  Jack nodded, even though he knew the blind man could not see the gesture.

  He walked on, struggling through a flock of sheep being driven down from the edge of Westwood to the market square. But that was not the only reason why his pace slowed as he neared his destination, nor why his heart seemed to weigh heavier with every step he took. One thought was in his mind; or rather, one question. A question he had asked himself countless times, from the time of his very first memories. A question that had gained a new and terrifying currency since the onset of the most dreadful and Biblical of afflictions.

  What was his father’s temper today?

  TEN

  Jack Stannard went through the doorway of the place that had been his father’s home for six years. It was a large building, shaped like a church with an apse at the east end, but it was no longer what it had been. The western range was in ruins, and the only figure in sight was that of the porter, Franklin, a corpulent creature with the look of a stuck pig. He said not a word to Jack, merely nodding his head toward the door into the infirmary hall, at the east end of the church building.