* * *
Saint John’s was a large building, laid out like a small cathedral with side aisles, transepts, and a tower above the crossing; some said it had indeed been a cathedral, a thousand years before, when Dunwich was the seat of a line of bishops that commenced with Saint Felix, but others like John Day scoffed at this. The congregation within its high walls was larger than it had been for many a year, with parishioners of Saint Peter’s and All Saints joining the usual flock. Men sported their best doublets, women their finest gowns. All of them, and the children too, were looking left, and right, and upward, trying to commit to memory every inch of the ancient church. The wall paintings and the Rood screen had not been cleaned or refreshed for years, but they were still a glorious blaze of colour. Men, women and children picked out, and pointed at, their favourite characters, perhaps John the Baptist, Mary Magdalene, the war-like Archangel Michael, or Saint Nicholas, patron of seafarers. Meg’s favourite was a Saint Christopher who, to her mind, seemed the very image of Jed Nolloth. Candles stood in every corner of the nave and chancel, illuminating the ancient images on the walls and venerating the dozens of saints’ statues in the niches. There were fewer lights now, since the changes enacted by the late Lord Cromwell. Under him, the king was pushed toward the new thinking, and the likes of relics and pilgrimages had all vanished. Even sacred, splendid, Walsingham, whither Jack and Alice Stannard had processed barefoot to mark their marriage, was fallen, its image of the Virgin thrown onto a fire; and with it, the heartfelt devotions of centuries and of thousands. The veneration of Thomas Becket, Saint and Martyr, was also prohibited. The shrine to him within Saint John’s church had gone down, the space where it once stood still pointedly empty. But then Lord Cromwell, too, had gone down, justly brought to the block by his manifold vanities and ambition. Dunwich, like all of England, rejoiced at the fall of the malevolent serpent.
The Stannard party made their way through the throng, toward their accustomed position near the front of the congregation. Jack nodded to Grindal and Clampe, the be-chained and overdressed bailiffs, and others of his acquaintance, principally his fellow Guildsmen, of whom there were many. The Stannards pointedly ignored the Cuddons, standing across the nave, long their rivals to be the greatest merchants of Dunwich.
The church was a cacophony of noise, the bells ringing the last of their summons, the worshippers talking loudly, the wind howling ever more violently and shaking the ancient stained glass in the windows, the waves roaring as they broke against the cliff.
Then all except wind and wave fell silent.
William Seaward came out of the vestry, accompanied by his acolytes, and went to his position behind the Rood. He was attired in a splendid cope that seemed to be made of very gold, over an alb and chasuble that seemed hardly less grand. Meg gasped; she had never seen a costume so utterly glorious.
The young priest made the sign of the cross, and uttered the first of the familiar words of the Christmas Mass.
‘Dominus dixit ad me: Filius meus es tu, ego hodie genui te.’
The Lord hath said to me: Thou art my son, this day have I begotten thee.
The mass proceeded after its eternal fashion, the bells ringing, the censers swinging. The words thrilled Meg, but not as much as the numbers. There were the twelve apostles upon the Rood screen, three Alleluias after the Gradual, two Green Men high up, six acolytes, twenty-two angels flanking the roof beams, thirteen horns upon the head of the Devil of the Doom. Both of her parents, and her brother, had long found it unaccountable that she should look down the columns of figures in the Stannard ledgers and smile at the sight of old friends, rather than recoiling from a burden that no man, and certainly no woman, ever undertook voluntarily.
The acolytes rang their bells again. Seaward faced the altar and elevated the host as the congregation behind him crossed themselves, many fingering their rosaries in their other hands as they did so.
Then the new sound began. At first Meg thought it might be some tiles coming off the roof in the wind. But her father and Thomas Ryman looked at each other. All around the packed nave and side aisles, others were doing the same. Some were already turning, and starting to run toward the west end. In no more than a moment, the sound grew into what sounded to Meg like the galloping of a thousand horses. She reached down and took her terrified brother’s hand. Very young as they were, they were children of Dunwich, which meant they had known and feared this sound since they were in the womb.
A moment after the galloping came something that sounded like a great tearing. Dozens, men and women alike, screamed. The ground shook. Dust fell from the beams supporting the roof. Then one beam came away, fell into the chancel, and pinned one of the young acolytes, the blood spouting from his mouth like a fountain as he was crushed to death. Four or five of the brightly coloured wooden angels fell as the beams supporting them split. The Reverend Seaward turned, his face a mask of utter terror. The floor broke apart a little way behind the Rood, no more than three or four yards in front of where the Stannards stood. The walls of the chancel broke and crashed in a cloud of dust. The east window shattered, and the roof above the chancel fell. As the entire east end of the church fell into the raging sea, miraculously not taking the Stannards with it, Meg caught one last glimpse of William Seaward’s face, his mouth screaming silently as he fell to his death.
Jack and Agatha pulled Meg and Tom away from the new cliff edge. There was panic behind them, every member of the congregation trying to save themselves, a murderous crush pushing toward the west door. Meg saw Miriam Day, but Miriam’s eyes merely stared blankly back at her, the little body crushed to death beneath trampling feet. God’s judgement upon Miriam for calling the king evil? thought Meg, as she sought her own salvation.
Above, by some miracle, the Doom remained in place, at the very end of the ruin that remained of Saint John’s church, above the shattered remnants of the Rood screen. The wind blew hard against it, seeming to make the devil’s great black winds flap. But the devil of the Doom survived, looking down toward the carnage by the west door.
With the east end gone and the body of the church open to the elements, the full force of the blizzard struck the people within.
‘Roof’s holding!’ cried Ryman into the gale, as snow began to cake his shoulders and hair.
‘Sister, save the children!’ shouted Jack, struggling to make himself heard above the wind.
‘How, brother?’ cried Agatha. ‘There’s no way through the west door!’
The Stannards’ rightful place at the front of the congregation in the nave now put them at the very back of those trying to flee the building.
‘With me!’ shouted Ryman.
He ran into the south aisle, where the pillars gave a little shelter, and picked up a fallen statue of Saint Jerome. It was heavy, but as nothing to the loads Ryman had lifted on countless campaigns. He looked into the carved face of the saint.
‘Forgive me,’ he said. ‘In nomine patris, et filii, et spiritus sancti, Amen.’
Upon the ‘amen’, he hurled the saint into the nearest window. The glass shattered, its gaudy fragments falling out onto the cliff. Ryman took hold of one of the stools provided for the infirm, placed it beneath the window, and beckoned to Agatha Stannard. Jack pushed his sister forward. Lifting her skirts, she climbed onto the stool, then took hold of the window frame, and hauled herself up. She cried as she cut her hand on broken glass, but then used her missal to clear as many jagged remnants of the window as she could. That done, she leaped down onto the ground outside.
Jack lifted young Tom high in his arms, stepped up onto the stool, and handed him to Agatha. Ryman, in turn, took hold of Meg and passed her up to her father, who lifted her into the window. Before Agatha could take hold of her, she jumped to the ground, broken glass cracking beneath her feet as she landed. A shard cut her leg, and she screamed. She looked up, and saw folk running in terror through the market square. The Red Lion alehouse, that had stood next to John’s church fo
r years, was gone over the cliff too, as was the house of Shelley, the Comptroller of Customs, on the other side of it. Then Agatha was upon her, tearing another length of cloth from her skirt to make a bandage for Meg’s leg, akin to the one she had fashioned on her own hand.
Within the church, at every window, men were emulating Ryman’s bold act. Stools and saints alike smashed into the ancient stained glass. The crush by the west door eased as more and more parishioners escaped by way of the windows. And still the Doom of Dunwich did not fall; still the devil’s wings stretched out to envelop the people below.
* * *
Saint Stephen’s day dawned bright and clear, the blizzard having blown itself out in the course of the previous day and night. Despite the frawn, as Dunwich folk called the bitter cold, people trudged through the thick snow to stand at the edge of the new cliff, staring down upon the piles of stone and timber on the beach, forty feet below. Others inspected the ruins of John’s church, or of the buildings beyond it. Some burrowed in the snow, seeking pieces of stained glass as keepsakes. Old Tom Melton, the cordwainer, was on his knees, weeping for his wife Margery, buried in the churchyard barely five years before. Most of her bones were gone in the night, fallen into the sea and swept away, but some of her ribs, still encased in shreds of her flesh and winding-sheet, protruded from the new cliff, nearly, but not quite, within Tom’s reach. So consumed were the folk of Dunwich with the latest disaster which had befallen them that many walked past the slumped form of Venison the beggar without a downward glance, not realising that he had frozen to death during the blizzard.
Jack Stannard and Thomas Ryman stood within the shattered nave of John’s church, now open to the elements at the crossing. Everything precious or sacred which survived the catastrophe had been taken away by the erstwhile deacons and churchwardens first thing in the morning. The only thing that remained within the empty shell was the Doom.
‘Seaward was a good man,’ said Ryman. ‘A little too eager, maybe, but a fellow of sound faith.’
‘They’re singing masses for him at both Peter’s and All Saints,’ said Jack. ‘I’ll go to Peter’s later, after I’ve spoken with Nolloth about launching the new ship on the next spring.’
‘And I. Mayhap Peter’s is our parish now, Jack. Only two churches left in Dunwich, by Christ’s holy blood. That I should have lived to see it.’
Jack Stannard nodded slowly, as though in a dream. His eyes were fixed upon the Doom.
‘That it survived yesterday,’ he said.
‘Proof of God’s will – Seaward would have been the first to tell us that. Archbishop Cranmer, whom the saints preserve, can ordain all he likes that Dooms be taken down and destroyed. But I tell you this, God has surely ordained that the Doom of Dunwich should survive.’
Just then, Meg limped into the ruined nave. All eyes turned to her. Her father went over, knelt down, and placed his hands upon his shoulders.
‘Child,’ he said tenderly, ‘you should be at home, resting your leg. And this is a mighty dangerous place for one of your years to be.’
‘Nonsense, Father,’ she said, firmly, ‘it was only a scratch. And Joan and Aunt Agatha fuss so, even though Aunt has so many other patients today. But they wouldn’t stop me going to Leonard’s Alley to see Miriam Day laid out in her shroud. And it was but a short step from there to here. I had to say farewell to the Doom, Father.’
Ryman and three Stannard kinsmen, one on Jack’s mother’s side and two on his father’s, were already erecting ladders against the pillars on either side of the nave, immediately adjacent to the Doom.
A thought struck John Stannard in that moment. He stood, took Meg by the hand, and led her closer to the terrible painting.
‘Farewell to it, Meg? What farewell?’
‘But you’re taking it down, aren’t you?’
Ryman was climbing the northerly ladder, Stannard’s kinsman Ned Fletcher the other.
‘Taking it down, aye, daughter. But not because some biggety royal commissioner has come to Dunwich to order it destroyed. The Doom had to come down anyway – we’d have been taking it down today even if there’d been no storm, and the east end was still there, and Reverend Seaward was still alive. He approved it months ago, when the archdeacon, Grindal, and the rest of us, decided that John’s church couldn’t be saved, and we’d have to abandon it to its fate. Good, honest Will Seaward would have been here with us today, up one of those ladders, helping to take it down.’
Ryman was securing a rope around the northern end of the Doom, then set to work to loosen it.
‘Then what will happen to the Doom, Father? Won’t the king’s men come to destroy it anyway?’
‘We’ll hide it, Meg. One day, pray God may it be soon, the king’s eyes will be opened to the truth once more, the new heresies will be sent packing, England will return to the Universal Church, and all men will be content once again.’ From the top of his ladder, Ryman shouted an enthusiastic ‘amen’.
‘And then, perchance, we’ll bring out the Doom from its hiding place, and raise it in glory once again. Perhaps in Saint Peter’s, perhaps in All Saints. Or perhaps in some fine new church we’ll build, that glorious day when Dunwich is great again. How would that be, daughter? Would you like to see that?’
Meg clapped her hands, although she noticed Ryman was shaking his head.
‘Nothing more, Father!’
‘But until then, the Doom will need to be hidden, and it’ll need a guardian.’
‘Where will you hide it? And who will be its guardian? Will it be Master Ryman, there?’
Ryman smiled down at her, and waved.
‘Well, Meg, if you wanted to hide a tree, where would you put it?’
The girl screwed up her face in concentration. An answer came to her at once, but it was so simple, so silly – and yet…
‘In a forest, Father?’
‘Good girl. Yes. A forest.’
With Ryman and Stannard’s cousin George Beeching holding the ropes secure above the Doom, the men on the ground began to haul. Slowly, gently, the great devil began to descend toward earth.
‘So, then,’ said Stannard, ‘where would you hide the Doom, Meg?’
She looked into the eyes of the devil. She had never seen them so close, had never realised how very red they were. And yet, the veins of the wood were clearly visible behind the paint. The devil, and the whole Doom, was naught but paint upon timber, just like any boat in Dunwich river.
Any boat in Dunwich river.
‘I would hide it in the harbour, Father. Where better to hide timber than in a shipyard?’
Jack Stannard kissed his daughter. The shade of Alice was especially alive in her today, he thought.
‘Your mother would be proud of you,’ he said. ‘But you’re wrong about one thing, Margaret Stannard.’
‘Father?’
‘Master Ryman, there, can’t be the guardian. He and I are for the war again when the spring comes, and once the war is done, who knows where he’ll find himself? And I can’t be the guardian, because when peace comes, I’ll be voyaging, so that we can live a good life and Dunwich can prosper. Besides, it may be that our prayers go unanswered, and the king won’t turn back to the good old way, and it may be many years before England is restored to true religion. So the guardian needs to be someone young, one who’ll carry the memory down the years, who’ll be ready to raise high the Doom when the right time comes.’
‘Father?’
‘It can’t be Tom, because when he’s old enough, he’ll be voyaging with me. So it can only be you, dear Meg. You will be the guardian of the Doom.’
PART FIVE
MARY ROSE
JULY 1545
Here lies a member of the Ship’s Company of the Mary Rose.
The King’s ship Mary Rose was lost in the Solent on the 19th July 1545 and was recovered on the 11th October 1982.
May they rest in peace.
Gravestone in Portsmouth Cathedral
TWENTY
-SEVEN
‘She is a pig, Master Nolloth! You have built us a crank pig! A crab-sided thing!’
Jack Stannard jabbed his finger at the shipwright. The deck upon which they stood, the sterncastle of the Alice of Dunwich, was heeling noticeably to starboard, despite the breeze east of Dungeness being only light. The bow wallowed through the gentlest of waves.
‘Guns bugger the trim,’ said Nolloth, angrily, nodding toward the four demi-culverins upon the deck. ‘Make a hull gripe. A score of other faults. Told you that a hundred times. But no, you had to have those guns. Should have waited for fawcons or port pieces out of the Tower, but no. Demi-culverins, on a hull this size. Too fucking heavy for the deck. Told you that, Master Stannard. Told your father.’
‘’Tis more than the guns, Nolloth!’ cried Jack.
The helmsman, George Chever, and a few of the men within earshot, glanced around, or turned their heads slightly. Thomas Ryman, standing by the stern rail, watched the confrontation, but did not intervene. This, after all, was a matter for seamen. It was the fourth or fifth such quarrel since the Alice sailed from Dunwich, bound for the king’s fleet at its appointed muster anchorage in Portsmouth. Ryman learned from some of the men that there had been other open arguments between young Jack and the old shipwright during the proving voyage to Sluys, where the Alice embarked the guns that the Stannards had purchased from a Flemish gunfounder; just as they had purchased the services of the hard, bitter Flemish gunners who mingled uneasily with the Suffolk crew. The ship did not sail well from the very start, or so Jack Stannard said, and despite all Nolloth’s attempts to adjust her ballast, and the stepping of her masts, and the shape of her beakhead, or whatever else it was that shipwrights did, she was even worse during this, her second voyage. They had been forced to put into Maldon to stop a leak, then into Dover to shift ballast yet again. The Alice fell away to leeward, as the seamen put it, and stubbornly refused to steer anything resembling a straight course. In a nutshell, she was slow and cumbersome, when she was intended to be fast and fleet.
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