Destiny's Tide

by Destiny's Tide (retail) (epub)

  With the Blessing and the Osprey, Jack said, none of it would have mattered. Simple transport duty did not require speed, nor even a particularly good trim. But this was a very different ship, intended for a very different sort of campaign. The king’s summons to the ports of the realm demanded only true men-of-war, ships that mounted heavy ordnance and could fight other ships. The only such vessel that Dunwich, or, indeed, any of the ports around the estuary of the Blyth, could send to sea in the summer of the year of grace, 1545, was the new Alice, and it was God’s will that of all the ships Jed Nolloth had ever built, this should be the first failure. Jack Stannard wondered upon the fact that this was the first ship launched at Dunwich since Saint John’s had perished and the Doom was taken down and hidden, but Ryman told him such thoughts were fanciful. If the Doom really was as potent as old folk said it was, then its disappearance would surely be marked by a catastrophe rather greater than a sluggardly ship.

  Nolloth went below decks, and Stannard crossed to where Ryman stood.

  ‘Never known him so pullicking’, said the younger man. ‘Contrary and sullen since the proving voyage, he’s been.’

  ‘Accepting that your child is flawed beyond redemption is a hard thing for a man to accept, Jack.’

  ‘Your meaning?’

  ‘Jed Nolloth, yonder, never married, did he?’ Jack kept his peace about Nolloth’s failed courtship of his sister. ‘The ships he builds are his children, Jack. You’re blessed with your Tom and Meg. Blessed indeed. But what if you’d had five daughters, and your sixth child, the long hoped for son, proved to be a simpleton?’

  Jack thought of Si Bulbrooke, who had indeed been blessed with five daughters, and was now as dead as all of them. Then he looked away, toward the distant church towers of Lydd and New Romney, so prominent above the shingle of Dungeness and the lowland of Romney Marsh behind it. As always, Thomas Ryman had the right of it. And Jed Nolloth was a proud man.

  The old shipwright emerged from below.

  ‘Something you need to see, Master Stannard,’ he said, seemingly more emollient than before.

  He and Jack went down into the hold. The Alice was still a new ship, so the bowels of the hull had not yet acquired the legion of competing stenches that characterised every vessel on the seas. The ship’s stores were piled high against the bulkheads: sacks of bread, barrels of salt, white herring, biscuit, cheese, beef, tar, pitch, and all the rest. But John Stannard knew at once why Nolloth had brought him below decks. He wore no shoes aboard ship, even in the depth of winter, and, even though it was very dark, he could feel the dampness on the soles of his feet.

  Nolloth lifted his lantern, and placed his other hand on the side of a large barrel, low down. Jack stepped forward and did the same. A trickle of liquid ran over his hand. He knew it at once from the smell, but licked his hand all the same, and tasted Valkenburg’s familiar Dunwich beer.

  ‘How much left?’ asked Jack.

  ‘Two days at most.’

  ‘We might make Portsmouth, then.’

  ‘Or we might not, if the wind turns, or if the French fleet’s in the way.’

  Nolloth was right; of course, he was right. And Jack knew better than the shipwright that even if the beer did hold out until they got into Portsmouth, there was no guarantee that they would be able to replenish it immediately. The royal ships would have first call, and the fishermen of a Dymchurch peterboat, with whom they’d spoken early that morning, said it was certain that the king himself had gone down to Portsmouth to encourage his crews and watch the battle to come. If that was so, the royal household would have gone with him, and the Portsmouth victuallers would be overwhelmed.

  ‘Your advice, then?’ said Jack.

  ‘Put in to Hastings. Lose less time than going into harbour at Rye or Winchelsea. Just anchor offshore, send in a boat, buy fresh barrels. I know a victualler there, from when I sailed in the Channel trades.’

  Jack Stannard stared at the leaking barrels, deep in thought. He and his father had used barrels from Birkes the cooper for countless years, and none had ever leaked this badly before. But that was a concern for another day. The Alice was already late, very late indeed, for the muster of the king’s Navy Royal at Portsmouth. Any credit Jack had accrued with Lord Admiral Lisle was running out with each grain of sand at each turn of the glass. But that, too, was a concern for another day. The ship needed beer, and she needed it almost at once. True, there was water aplenty, but no sane mariner – no sane Englishman – would drink water, with all the sicknesses that it carried. No beer would mean no crew, and that in the shortest of orders.

  ‘Very well, Master Nolloth, set our head toward Hastings.’

  * * *

  The longboat had been away too long. It was early in the evening, and Nolloth had gone into Hastings beach not long after the noonday bell. Now, at last, the boat could be seen pulling off from the shore, beneath the cliff on which stood a ruined castle erected by the Norman conqueror. But it contained no barrels. Worse, it contained no Nolloth.

  The boat’s crew secured to the side of the Alice and came back aboard. Chever, the boat captain, presented himself before Jack, shaking his head.

  ‘Master Nolloth be gone.’

  ‘Gone?’

  ‘Went ashore, saying he was going to find the victualler he knew. Half hour passed by the church clock, then another. So I goes up into the town. None of the victuallers have seen him. But one old beggar, he hears our voices, says he was once of Stowmarket. For a farthing, he tells me that he’d seen and heard two other Suffolk men meet there, in the market square, just an hour before. And when I describes Nolloth to him, he says one of the two was the very spit. Says they walked out of town together on the road toward Winchelsea and Rye.’

  Chever looked down at his feet, and Jack Stannard knew there was something else.

  ‘Well, man?’

  ‘This beggar. Says he’d been in Rye only on Tuesday. Says there was a Suffolk ship in the harbour, which he thought strange, as our hulls venture this way only chance-time. So he goes down and gets talking to some of the crew, hoping for alms for a fellow countryman.’ Chever took a breath. ‘And he learns it’s a ship of Southwold, and its master is called Stephen Raker.’

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  The French were coming.

  King Francis, outraged by the loss of his city of Boulogne to the English, was intent upon revenge. So, too, were his allies the Scots, still incensed at the burning of Edinburgh. A double invasion, then, the Scots attacking across the border, while the French came against the south coast of England in all their Gallic might and splendour.

  The Most Christian King did not stint in his ambition, nor in his preparations. In the mouth of the Seine, France amassed a great fleet of over two hundred ships, carrying an army of over thirty thousand men. In command overall was the Admiral of France, Claude, Marshal d’Annebault. None, other than King Francis and he, knew his orders, nor his precise destination. In alehouses, though, men whispered that no greater force had been massed against England since the fatal year of 1066.

  For his part, King Henry assembled his men along the shores of Hampshire and Sussex. He ordered his own fleet to assemble at Portsmouth, under the command of the Lord Admiral of England, John Dudley, Viscount Lisle, and went down in person to observe proceedings.

  Thus England waited for the storm to break.

  * * *

  As he lay on the truckle bed in the shipmaster’s captain, Jack Stannard could find no sleep. Nor could he find thoughts of the French, although he knew full well that they should have been his only focus. He fingered his paternoster, mumbled ‘Ave Maria, maris stella, gratia plena,’ time after time, and thought of Jed Nolloth. Of a man that he and his father alike had, many a time, trusted with their lives. Of a man that had been like a father to the young Jack Stannard; the father he wished for, but could never have. Of a man who had betrayed him and Dunwich in the foulest manner.

  You’re not to blame yourself, said a tho
ught that he took to be the voice of his Alice, whispering to him from Purgatory, as the sunken church bells of Dunwich seemed to toll in his imagination.

  The unbalanced hull pitched sharply, even though the sea was light, the breeze gentle. It was the depth of the night, and a single candle, half spent, burned in the lantern swinging from the beam. Jack’s eyes were fixed on it, but his ears seemed to hear the voice of the dead.

  He turned onto his side, thinking he should tell Alice that if he did not blame himself, who could he blame? But none can talk to the dead, other than by the intercession of the saints.

  A well laid plot, said the half-memory of Alice, using the exact words that Thomas Ryman had spoken as the ship Alice weighed anchor off Hastings.

  A well laid plot indeed. Stephen Raker and his uncles must have begun working toward it within days of the news of their kinsman’s death reaching Southwold. First, they must have tried to suborn Simon Bulbrooke, thinking that his debts, known the length and breadth of Suffolk, would compel him to betray his own town and his own kin. Such were Jack’s suspicions at Boulogne, after discovering the money and the letter in Bulbrooke’s sea-chest. But he had wronged his cousin: whatever his faults, whatever the scale of his discontent at the Stannards, he had remained true to his dying day. That must have been what he wished to confess to Jack on the night he was killed. So the Rakers and the other men of Southwold must then have cast around for another potential target, another member of the Stannards’ close circle whose allegiance they could buy. That must have been when they remembered, or were reminded by one of their brethren across the Blyth, that Nolloth was originally a man of Walberswick, whose service had been bought long ago by Peter Stannard. By some means – gold, a better house, a wife, perhaps all of them, God knew what – the Rakers must have bought it back again, their task eased by whatever secret anger Nolloth felt at the old leper’s contemptuous rejection of his offer for Agatha Stannard’s hand. In that sense, Stephen Raker’s attempt upon Jack’s life in the ruins of Blythburgh Priory had been at once an aberration and an opportunity, presented by a dying woman’s confession. Stephen Raker, whom he could still not think of as his brother, had lost patience with such long, slow stratagems, as he had said to Jack at Blythburgh: but that did not mean he would abandon his last, best revenge of all. Whatever the outcome at Blythburgh, Stephen Raker and Southwold would still triumph in the fullness of time, when the ship Dunwich sent to the war, the ship built by a man who had sold his soul, proved an utter failure.

  No, the Alice was not a simpleton, the runt of Nolloth’s litter. She was his masterpiece. Although her keel was laid long before the Scottish campaign, Nolloth would have had ample opportunity to adjust the design here, to modify her lines there. To ensure that the Alice was, indeed, a pig of a ship.

  Now Jack thought on it, as he tossed and turned upon his bed in the dark small hours of the morning, he recalled Meg prattling on about how Nolloth was altering the keel, and the futtocks, and God knew what else. He had dismissed it out of hand: what could a child, and a girl at that, possibly know of such things?

  A well laid plot, said the creaking of the lantern as it swung from the beam, the drowned bells of Dunwich tolling far beyond it.

  Well laid beyond measure. To have Nolloth himself dare to bring the ship so far, thus ensuring that Jack Stannard had no experienced steersman to take her onward, into a certain war. To arrange in advance, as he and Raker must have done, that Nolloth would damage the beer casks, allowing him to put forward the perfectly plausible suggestion of going into Hastings to replenish. If Nolloth really did know these havens from his days at sea, he could have told the Rakers to have one of their ships awaiting him at Rye, to the east. Stannard would be unlikely to try and beat back against the wind, especially because doing so would make him even later to the war-muster at Portsmouth.

  Ave Maria, maris stella, gratia plena…

  Why go to the trouble and expense of sending a Southwold ship to Sussex, when Nolloth could simply have returned overland to his new home?

  Hue and cry, the shade of Alice seemed to murmur.

  Jack Stannard shuffled on the bed, as though he were trying to fend off the thought. He was the sea-merchant of a ship taken up for the Navy Royal, by virtue of the king’s commission. That made Nolloth a deserter, and Stannard could have insisted the Sheriff of Sussex call out a hue and cry. But the Sheriff of Sussex was at Lewes. If Nolloth made his way north on foot, the posse comitatus might, perhaps, take him before he reached the border; Sussex was a large shire, or so Stannard had learned as a child. But Jack could never have got word to Lewes, and the posse could never have set out, before the Raker ship sailed from Rye, no matter how contrary the state of wind or tide – and both can only have been favourable, by his judgement of the conditions a little further west. All of which assumed the sheriff did not simply dismiss such a request out of hand. After all, Sussex was the front line against the imminent French invasion, and undoubtedly had more urgent concerns.

  A reckoning, whispered Alice, or the wind, or Saint Michael, or whatever half-dream had lodged in his head.

  Oh, there would be a reckoning, once the war was done. In the winter, mayhap; if not, then perhaps in the following year. Or the year after that. However long it took, Jed Nolloth would pay for his betrayal. Southwold may take him into his bosom, may think to protect him in its midst, but Dunwich would be avenged. Stephen Raker, Jack’s unlooked-for brother and Nolloth’s Lucifer, would pay, too, as his nominal father had done. But none of this vengeance would imperil Jack’s immortal soul. He would not know, and would not seek to know, what was intended for his enemies. There would be no blood on his hands. When it came to vengeance, one thing was as sure as the ebbing and flowing of the tide. Peter Stannard, with nought else to do in the lazar house of Saint James but contemplate God’s judgement upon him, beg forgiveness for his manifold sins, and devise intricate revenges upon his enemies, would think of some way to accomplish it all, no matter how long it took, for time was now of no consequence to the old leper. Nor was money, within reason. He already had another such case in hand, the consequence of a request from Jack’s old schoolfriend Will Halliday; this, though, was not on Will’s own behalf, but on that of another, well known to him. Peter Stannard had no worries for the fate of his own soul, for as he told his son – his acknowledged son – often enough, he had been damned long, long ago.

  Aye, Nolloth and Raker – and Peter Stannard’s other target, too – had better pay for masses aplenty, for they had one foot in Purgatory, the other already burning in hellfire.

  At long last, as the lantern continued to swing to and fro, John Stannard’s thoughts turned to the prospect ahead. To the French, massing across the Channel and due at any hour.

  * * *

  A splendid, flaming dawn was just breaking, but no man aboard the Alice stood at the stern rail, watching the golden beams striking out from beyond the distant shore of France. Jack and Thomas Ryman stood upon the fo’c’s’le, looking away toward the west. A great mass reared up from the sea, several miles ahead, off the larboard bow.

  ‘The Isle of Wight,’ said Ryman. ‘I was there once, before the campaign of ’twenty-two. Miserable place. The women stink like rotten mackerel.’

  The mainland lay off the starboard bow, the fires still burning in the beacons along the shore. Nolloth had, at least, left behind his portolan charts, and from them, Jack Stannard could take bearings on what he took to be Pagham church and Selsey.

  As the sand ran through the glass, the day brightened, and it was possible to see shapes upon the water, before Wight and between the isle and the mainland.

  ‘A mightier fleet than we had in Scotland,’ said Jack. ‘We’ve not missed the muster after all, God be praised.’

  ‘Wait, Jack,’ said Ryman, his voice tentative as he screwed up his eyes to peer into the far distance. ‘I know the Spithead. Sailed out of it, and back into it, with the king’s army, over twenty years past. Something’s a
miss here. Very amiss.’

  Still more sand passed through the glass. The distance between the Alice and the fleet off the Wight closed.

  ‘Jesu Maria,’ said Jack Stannard, at last.

  ‘Amen,’ said Ryman.

  With only a few exceptions, the ships ahead were stern on to the Alice. That might have been expected of the English fleet if it were at single anchor, and the tide was running out of the Solent. But the tide was flooding; and in any case, any English fleet should have had its bows to the south-east, facing the enemy.

  Now it was possible to see flags, too, although they were limp in the negligible breeze. There were white crosses upon burgundy, white crosses upon green, and many, many banners with white emblems upon blue. More and more blue, from more and more masts. Not a sign anywhere of the red cross upon white, the banner of Saint George.

  The fleet was French.

  The invasion of England had begun.

  TWENTY-NINE