by J. D. Davies
In part, this was because my ambition to dine with the Reverend Francis Gale was relentlessly thwarted by substantial quantities of port wine, which may have been responsible for the frequent screaming nightmares that Musk reported to me. I had thought of physically entering the man's cabin and ordering him to leave it, but God alone knew what a strong man like Francis Gale–a veteran of the civil wars–would do, even to his captain, if in drink or otherwise deranged. In part, too, the invitation was an attempt to mollify Vyvyan. I thought my favour to Kit Farrell, though necessary, must be hard for a lieutenant, almost my equal in honour and rank, to take; I should be confiding in him by rights, and not in a supernumerary master's mate. Finally, I meant to offer Vyvyan the chance to disburden himself of his thoughts relating to Pengelley's murder. He was becoming too quiet and distracted. The men had noticed, and it would do the feeling aboard the ship no good. I had done my own thinking upon the matter, and hoped that I could talk young Vyvyan out of his state of deep and uneasy suspicion.
So it was that we came together to eat and discuss the question of Pengelley. I filled his cup and bade him drink, thinking to win some confidence and restore his composure. There were footpads enough on any major road in the kingdom, said I; bold highwaymen, too, and roving gangs of rough, masterless men, discharged from the old Republic's army, and who belonged to no parish. Any or all of them would have been attracted to a road out of Portsmouth and the prospect of waylaying mariners newly paid off from the sea, with ample coin in their pockets or saddlebags. The likes of Pengelley could easily have fallen prey to one of their kind. As we chewed on Janks's offering of chicken, I suggested all of this to James Vyvyan, but he was beyond such reasoning. He spoke with blind passion, his eyes wide with excitement and vengeful fury. Pengelley must have been killed, he said, because he knew the truth of his uncle's murder. Pengelley must have been the man who brought the mysterious note, with its precognition of death, into James Harker's cabin. I admitted this could be true; but why, I asked, would a faithful body servant have written a note in the first place–and an anonymous one at that? Why couch his suspicions in such ambiguous terms? And how could he have learned of a plot, if such there was? And why not speak up after his master's death? No, I said firmly. It was queer indeed, but to make any more out of the coincidence was fanciful.
Vyvyan made no answer to any of this. Instead he turned his venom quite unexpectedly upon Stafford Peverell, the purser. It seemed Pengelley served informally as captain's clerk, and in that office he would have been well placed to discover corruption by the purser. Harker and Peverell had often quarrelled fiercely, he said. Peverell was the only officer who was also ashore on the day that Harker died. Peverell was a haughty and insolent man, but he was worse, far worse ... James Vyvyan trailed off, looking meaningfully into his goblet. This was all supposition, I said. Men had been hanged at Tyburn on less evidence than such suppositions, Vyvyan countered, for that was the way of English law.
'Lieutenant, that men argue does not mean that they murder. Besides, Peverell was aboard this ship, at sea, when Pengelley was killed.' Although privately I thought my purser a foul specimen of humankind, I could not countenance such an accusation against one of my officers.
Vyvyan glared at me. 'True,' he said angrily, 'but like the devil, he may have agents elsewhere.'
Against such casuistry there could be no reasoning, and as Vyvyan helped himself to more wine I changed tack and asked him why it was he disliked Peverell so.
'Ha...' he said, and sat swaying on his chair, leering at me.
The wind was strengthening; we already had to brace ourselves at times as my cabin rocked with the motion of the sea. I was uncomfortably aware that Vyvyan had taken more wine than I realized–perhaps he had been drunk when he came to supper–and that he was due to stand a watch not many hours hence.
When speech came, it was sudden and unexpected. 'Sodomite,' he hissed.
This was a weighty charge indeed, for the thirty-second naval Article of War, enacted by Parliament but the previous year, specified that 'the unnatural and detestable sin of buggery or sodomy with man or beast' was to be punished by death. Such rigour applied ashore would have decimated the ranks of the clergy and the court, if not the navy too; and I was not a little mindful of my own brother's inclinations in such matters. But as it related to my immediate question, all of that was academic. A vague suspicion of sodomy was hardly something that would make tough men like Vyvyan, Stanton and Landon fearful of a vain, puffed-up landsman like Stafford Peverell.
'Lieutenant,' I said sternly. 'You forget yourself, I think.'
'Papist,' he slurred, 'and alchemist. A warlock. He has a crucifix and a rosary in his cabin. Andrewartha has seen them. And potions. He knows more of potions than Skeen.'
That an educated man like Stafford Peverell should know more than our profoundly ignorant surgeon was hardly the basis of a charge, I thought. I briefly wondered how young Andrewartha, Vyvyan's servant, knew so much about the purser's cabin, but then realized that this was probably also how his master knew of Peverell's other proclivities. We continued our meal in an uncomfortable silence, with Vyvyan glaring drunkenly into his goblet, or at me. The lanterns swung from the beams to which they were fastened, casting fantastical shadows upon Harker's eccentric panelling. I wondered briefly whether, after all, there might be something in Vyvyan's drunken ramblings. If James Harker really had been poisoned, and Peverell knew how to blend alchemical potions—
I chided myself for falling prey so easily to the predilection of seamen to believe superstitions, and of all humanity to believe the darkest of conspiracies. I thought of Uncle Tristram, contentedly mixing elements in his shambolic Oxford lodgings or at Ravensden, forever hoping to find the philosopher's stone. A different age, and men like James Vyvyan would have had him burned as a warlock. Even my mother had once been denounced as a witch in the market square of Bedford, albeit by a lunatic who thought he was John the Baptist, and on no better ground than her liking for cats. Scratch the surface of men of reason like James Vyvyan (or, God knows, perhaps Matthew Quinton too), and a suspicious bigot often lurks just beneath.
We ended the meal in an ill temper, for Vyvyan was young and convinced of the rightness of his theory. He fell heavily against the bulkhead as he left, and I wondered how he could possibly be fit to stand his watch. For the first time in my life I–still but twenty-two–felt impossibly old and dull, the voice of age and authority calming the hot, irrational passions of youth. Yet for all that, I could not quite forget what he had said of my purser.
After Vyvyan had gone I went up on deck, for I was in need of air and solitude. It was late in the evening, and we were well into St George's Channel, that busy crossroads at the confluence of the Irish Sea and the Bristol Channel. The wind had strengthened and rounded again into a stout westerly gale bearing sharp flurries of rain. For a horrible moment I felt the chill of the Happy Restoration, but even I could gauge the forces of different winds against my face and knew at once that this was not cast from the same ship-breaking mould; but it was strong enough, and I had to move from rope to rope, bracing myself and waiting for each roll of the hull. Lanherne, part of the watch on deck, saluted perfunctorily and in apparent unconcern at both the wind and his saturated, amphibian condition as he turned the glass and rang the ship's bell to mark the passage of another half-hour. Our hull and masts creaked in a loud song of protest against the winds and seas that assaulted them. We had but a few men aloft: I thought I glimpsed the unmistakeable form of John Treninnick, far above me on the main yard. In the furrows between the great waves, I could sometimes just make out the Royal Martyr, to windward of us and well ahead, sailing steadily northward. Like us, she bore only hitched half-sails at her lower yards: reefed courses, the seamen called them, though God alone knew how I had remembered that piece of information. She bore away from us no more than three points, I reckoned. Away to starboard, I could see the distant masts of some half-dozen large merchant hul
ls, no doubt coming down from Bristol, probably bound for Africa or the Americas. They would have to tack often, I speculated, for their course would be almost directly into the wind. Far off to larboard, riding on the great waves like ducks upon a weir, lay a smattering of tiny sails, Cornish fishing craft plying their trade on the shoals that must lie in that direction. Brave souls, to be out in such feeble craft in such a mighty sea; no doubt the kin of some in my crew, many of whom had known that life.
I stood on the starboard side of the quarterdeck, gripping a rope–a shroud, yes, that was it–and swaying with the ship's motion. Despite the effort and the wet and the noise, I found myself almost ready to laugh out loud–for I had needed no reminders of what to look for, or what to sense. It was as though I was new born, and seeing the world around me for the first time, drinking in its wonders and mysteries with the wind and the salt spray.
It is strange the way such things happen in life. We learn, and the lessons pass over us as the waves over a shore, leaving no mark. But when enough tides have ebbed and flowed, the shore is reshaped, and thus it is with mastering a new skill. There is a moment when the matter is too difficult, and we cannot master it. Then, without warning or seeming reason, there is a moment when we have it. The pedagogues will doubtless call this the moment of understanding, or such like. Whatever it was, I felt it and knew it, that dusk-tide on the quarterdeck of the Jupiter. I still feel its thrill in my bones, all these years later; aye, despite all the horrors that it foreshadowed.
I surveyed the scene again with a peculiar sense of contentment: a scene so similar to my nightmare on the Happy Restoration, yet so different. I thought of the kind face of my grandfather on its canvas high on the wall of Ravensden Abbey. This had been his domain, the sea. As I felt the wind suddenly gust a little more southerly, and watched the effect it had on our reefed sails, I finally believed I understood what had drawn him to this sphere. For man to move on the sea at all flies in the face of logic. Any voyage on water, even the transit of a punt across a river, is a miracle, the triumph of man's ingenuity over the most alien environ imaginable, and over his own darkest fears. To be a master of this watery realm must have given my grandfather more pride, and more delight, than all his titles, and lands, and the adoration of a queen. Godsgift Judge and good-brother Cornelis, too, though they were both born to the sea, and thus perhaps took it for granted. But we, the two Matthew Quintons, were landsmen, who had come to the sea as ignorant supplicants to a most demanding mistress. I would not speak for Judge, but I was willing to wager that Cornelis had never experienced the satisfaction that I felt then, as I heard our hull creak and felt our rigging strain in response to the strengthening wind, and watched the grey-clouded April dusk darken to the west, over the grave of the Happy Restoration.
My moment of satisfaction, such as it was, proved short-lived.
***
Malachi Landon had the watch. I had been dimly aware of his presence on the other side of the quarterdeck. Now I noticed that he seemed agitated. He paced the deck, looked across at me, then at the heavens, then at me again, and so he continued for almost a turn of the glass. Finally, he approached me, doffing his plain woollen cap in salute.
'Captain, this voyage,' he said, far more deferential than was his wont, 'it's gone well, thus far. We've had God's grace with the winds. Even this gale–abeam, almost from the quarter, the ideal wind to speed us to Scotland.' I acknowledged it, but Landon seemed morose. 'Sir, I've been casting our charts. They're ominous, some of the worst I've known.'
'What charts, Master?'
The only charts I had seen bore lines that took us west from Portsmouth, around Cornwall, then due north through the Irish Sea to the west coast of Scotland, according to the sailing orders given me by the Lord High Admiral. This, I suddenly recalled, was the 'dead reckoning' that had perplexed me but so short a time before.
'Why, our heavenly charts, sir. The auguries for this voyage, based on the alignment of the heavens at the moment of our sailing from Portsmouth.' Any confidence in my supposed new-found mastery of the sailor's arts evaporated, and witty Poseidon saw fit to increase my discomfort by sending a great wave to soak me with a measure of Atlantic water. Shaking himself and shouting above the gale, Landon continued. 'It's Mars, sir. Mars, the lord of the ninth house. He's retrograde on the cusp of the eighth, sir, thence casting a malicious quadrate to the Lord of the Ascendant. Worse, the lady of the eighth, the domus mortis, is on the very degree ascending!'
I listened to the words much as I would to a speech babbled in Hebrew. 'And this all means, Mister Landon?'
'Why, this all foreshadows great difficulty, Captain. Obstructions and danger lie in our way, sir.' He was wringing water from his cap and looking earnestly at me. 'Death itself, in truth.'
I was shaken by his words; not many can hear a presentiment of death without reacting so. But I took hold of myself and said with some impatience, 'Then what would you have me do, Master? You know our orders. You know that I can answer only to the king and the Lord Admiral. Can I turn this ship round, or put us into port, on a suspicion you may have formed from star-gazing?'
Landon's expression twisted as if with pain but his voice was angry. 'Never seen charts this bad. No captain who knows the sea would ignore an omen this clear...' He must have sensed he had strayed too far, for he became quieter, almost imploring. 'Sir, there are countless ways to delay or prevent a voyage–a leak could be discovered–Penbaron's precious rudder cannot hold forever...'
He stopped quite suddenly, looked at me as though anew, and shook his head. He must have known that, ignoramus though I be, I could not in all honour sanction such a gross deceit on our king. Then he scowled, saluted loosely, and returned in bad grace to the other side of the quarterdeck, bracing himself against a cannon as another wave broke over our side. As I mused on the strange scene, I realized that for Malachi Landon to have approached me in this manner, to have confided in me thus, and to have even dared suggest the desperate stratagem of ignoring the king's express order, was proof of the dark, Hades-like depths of his concern. These charts of his had alarmed him beyond measure; so powerfully, indeed, that his fear of them had even briefly displaced his hatred of me, and his duty to the king. Landon and Harker argued often, Vyvyan had told me, and now that I had seen the quality of Landon's rage, and his servitude to this mysterious knowledge of the old necromancers, I found I could cast him quite easily in the part of Harker's murderer. Or, indeed, of my own—
There was a sudden noise, like the felling of a great tree. I heard Lanherne's desperate shout–'Mizzen's sprung!'–and looked across to see a great crack near the base of the mast.
That slightest of movements saved me. I saw the block from the corner of the eye, felt it graze my hair as it passed my temple at skull-breaking speed. I looked up, and saw ropes strain and break as the mizzenmast trembled in the gale. More blocks flew off crazily into the air. Lanherne screamed orders to Treninnick and his companions on the main yard, while the men on deck laboured to secure the great rope called the mizzen-stay. Then I looked across the quarterdeck and saw Malachi Landon's face; it was twisted in what might have been a smile.
As I stood, paralysed by horror, one of the mates ran forward across the main deck to the belfry on the forecastle and began to ring the ship's bell with a vigour that could have summoned the dead at doomsday. Kit Farrell and Musk were on the quarterdeck within moments, but of my lieutenant there was no sign: presumably the drink had consigned him to oblivion along with my chaplain. As each man emerged from below, summoned by the bell and the quartermasters' desperate cries of 'All hands!', he made for the shrouds or his work station. Even a land-captain could see that all now hinged on keeping the mainmast safe, for if that sprang as well, pulled out of alignment by the rope–or rather, stay–that secured it to the mizzen, the wind would push us up the Bristol Channel and onto the lee shore. I had no desire to relive the wreck of the Happy Restoration on some cliff of Gower or Lundy Isle, so I urged th
em aloft with the sort of bellowed imprecations that I felt my grandfather might have used–'God speed, my brave lads! Climb as though the devil's on your tail!' Musk gave me the look he normally reserved for madmen, beggars and Members of Parliament. As it was, my encouragement was superfluous, for each man went aloft faster than a squirrel escaping a fox. They knew all too well what they had to do, and were about their business with no need of urging.
Of no man was that more true than John Treninnick. Quite suddenly, with the ship rolling and pitching, with the gale screaming through our rigging, Treninnick took hold of the mizzen stay and stepped out into space. Lanherne had told me of this skill of his at our first meeting, but Lord, what a sight it was! Arm over arm, he hauled himself at speed from main to mizzen, his short legs kicking wildly in the air.
'Thank the great God that you have him, sir,' said Kit Farrell by my side, as Treninnick reached the mizzen and began to attend feverishly to the binding of ropes at the topmast head. 'He'll make sure the backstays hold, now. The mizzen should be secure, and the main with it.'
Penbaron, the carpenter, appeared before me and saluted gravely. 'Permission to fish, Captain?' he said.
At first, I thought I had misheard; next, I thought that the block had actually struck me, and that I was senseless, dreaming all that had passed since it struck. Here we were in a gale, with the mizzen useless, and the officer responsible for its repair was seeking my permission to cast lines for herring. 'What in Jesu's name—' I began.
Kit Farrell stepped closer to my side and whispered, 'Fishing, Captain. It's the method of repairing a sprung mast.'