To Serve a Queen

by Josephine Bell

  ‘So ends a futile and costly exercise,’ Felton said to Francis, whom he found leaning on the rail watching the retreating shores of Spain.

  ‘Captain Trodd explains he and his fellow-merchantmen are accused of cowardice that they did not attack those Spanish ships that were here when we came in and did not assist the warships to get the army on shore in time to surprise Fort Puntal and Cadiz. He is affronted by this explanation of our failure.’

  ‘He is both right and wrong,’ Lieutenant Felton said harshly, ‘Reports are going to Buckingham that God’s judgement, sending disease and death, is to blame. But I say the whole ordering of the enterprise was at fault and the toll is not paid yet.’

  Chapter Nine

  The enormous relief and joy Francis felt on finding and rejoining Forager was soon overlaid by the rigours of the return journey to London.

  Not that it became the nightmare suffered by some of the other merchant ships, who were ordered to sail into the Atlantic to waylay the Spanish treasure fleet driving home from the New World with gold and jewels in their holds; or so the defeated soldiers were told.

  They had not spent many days out of sight of land when it was discovered their food was decaying fast and in any case was inadequate for any new adventure. While the army was ashore making its ill-directed and futile attack upon Cadiz, the sailors had eaten their fill of the stored provisions and made no attempt to add to or replace them. The semi-starvation the miserable pressed army had suffered during the summer of waiting in England now recurred upon troops already worn by the exertions of a botched action and hasty retreat. Before a fresh order was made, which could not reach several of the isolated ships, death by real starvation and disease had struck again, as on the voyage out, but in greater force, many ships having to give sea burial to six or seven poor wretches every day the journey lasted.

  Owing to the sturdy common sense of Captain Trodd, Forager’s complement did not suffer to anything like this extent. He had not over-indulged his crew while at anchor in the bay. On the contrary he had dealt fairly and to their advantage with the fishermen who lived near the shore, buying the fish they offered, which he made his men salt down at once, and parleying for grain and the cheap wine of the country, which he got at a very reduced rate in exchange for his ship’s forbearance towards their homes and families.

  Also Captain Trodd could not be persuaded to engage his vessel in any compensatory attempt against the Spanish fleet. Their warships had not appeared in the bay. There had been no naval engagement. He had landed the soldiers he carried from England; he would return them to their native land. His contract went no further than that. He refused to extend it.

  Some of the army officers tried to persuade him to change his intention. Others threatened. But none had any real power. They could not take over the management of the ship. The sailing-master was supreme at sea. It was a measure of their incompetence that they had not secured his agreement to their plans while they were still at anchor, still plotting their concerted attack on Spanish merchantmen, still able to communicate with the other ships, still able to put in a substitute for Trodd if he would not yield to their commands. But they had waited until the whole fleet had left the bay of Cadiz. Upon which Captain Trodd had declared his course was set for Plymouth and he would not alter it.

  As they travelled north and particularly as they crossed Biscay the weather grew colder, unsettled, with fiercer winds and higher seas. But the winds were behind them now and Captain Trodd merely shortened sail and flew towards home.

  Though Forager had left Cadiz later than most of the other vessels he arrived at Plymouth one of the first and disembarked the soldiers as rapidly as possible. They were in fair trim, being in fact the survivors both of the long voyage out and the privations and hazards of the attack on Fort Puntal and abortive march on Cadiz itself. It was remarkable, but not unexpected, how quickly the lower ranks dispersed into the countryside of the moors, never to be found again by the King’s men.

  Nor were the officers much inclined to stop them. They had been a sore disability all through the futile course of the expedition. Seeing and understanding this, young Francis went to Lieutenant Felton to discuss his own future.

  ‘I think you know I am serious in my ambition to serve the King,’ he began.

  ‘King Charles or King Buckingham?’

  ‘The King.’

  ‘’Tis one and the same.’

  Francis was not to be put off.

  ‘In Holland or Denmark. On behalf of the King’s sister, Her Majesty of Bohemia. Or the King’s uncle. In the same cause.’

  ‘Christian of Denmark? You would fight with them for the Palgrave? He that hath lost kingdom and province, being over-persuaded to this and that course, to his ruin all round? To lose a crown as soon as take it?’

  ‘His misfortune,’ Francis insisted. ‘My uncle does not believe his case is hopeless.’

  ‘So you would go to your uncle?’

  ‘I was on my way with him when the Duke’s men took me off.’

  He spoke bitterly for he felt he had suffered unduly to no good purpose, losing more than half a year in the process. Lieutenant Felton saw, with satisfaction, that the young man had now lost his romantic attachment to the Duke of Buckingham as war leader. He was no fool. While he himself was fully committed to what stood for the professional army, though he seemed to be overlooked continually in the way of promotion, he was ready to help his young companion and said so.

  ‘You have no papers to commit you to our obedience?’ he asked. ‘You cannot be accused of mutiny? Or not legally?’

  ‘I have nothing,’ Francis answered. ‘I was bidden to an audience and encouraged to join the volunteers. There was a written order from the Duke to proceed to Portsmouth, which my uncle the colonel considered I must obey. I have lost it months ago. Together with all the rest of my possessions.’ He lowered his voice to add, ‘Except for a small store of money I have sewn into my belt with which I must get myself a sword or sabre or cutlass – some weapon I must have to replace those arms I lost in the retreat.’

  Lieutenant Feldon smiled. He had guessed the manner of the boy’s loss from the fact that he had returned to the ship with only one companion, Corporal Stubble, who was not of the company he had been given to command.

  ‘Captain Trodd sails to London, his home port, in two days, when his crew is rested and he has fresh provisions. My advice to you is you ask him to take you with him and that great oaf, Stubble, who seems much attached to your person and has no chance of furthering his apprenticeship. I will be totally ignorant of your movements and of his.’

  Francis took this advice, He found the corporal helping the ship’s crew to swill out the filthy quarters the volunteer soldiers had left uncleaned in their haste to get ashore and escape. Together the two went to the captain, who was pleased with Stubble’s present good nature and had always liked the young ensign for his lively courage and endurance in totally unfamiliar circumstances.

  ‘I thank you greatly, Captain,’ Francis said, bowing formally. ‘And on behalf of Corporal Stubble.’

  ‘You had best not show yourselves on shore, either of ye,’ Captain Trodd said. ‘The other ships are coming in now and the King’s men are abroad to round them up, seeing how swiftly the early arrivals have disappeared.’

  ‘I have some business I must execute,’ Francis told him. ‘But it should not take me long.’

  ‘Then have this fellow go with you,’ the captain told him. ‘It is no time to be in the streets alone. The armourer will give you a cutlass, lad,’ he added, turning to Stubble. ‘See you defend your master, who appears to have no weapon.’

  ‘I have this,’ Francis said, flushing and producing the knife he had taken from the goatherd girl.

  ‘Spanish, eh?’ said the captain. ‘Useful, no doubt, but no substitute for your sword.’

  ‘To replace which I must go ashore,’ Francis said, bowing again to end this most embarrassing conversation.
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br />   He took Will Stubble with him, promising the captain to be back on board well before nightfall. In fact it was not more than three hours before he returned, his mission completed, wildly triumphant at the miraculous ways of Providence, that he was ready to put down to the direct intervention of the Almighty.

  For he and his companion had not gone half a mile into the town before they came up a party from one of the newly arrived ships. The poor wretches were starving, it seemed Two had already fallen, upheld though dying on their feet, by a last longing to feel firm ground under their feet. Others were reeling about, gasping and croaking for food and drink, for the love of God, in the name of Christ, in pity, in mercy.

  Francis was horrified, Stubble regarded them with indrawn lips, disgusted but less than compassionate, inclined to surprise at his young master’s attitude. For the latter had taken money from his pocket where he had transferred it from his secret well-preserved store, for use in buying him a new sword. He had turned now to the locals who had stopped to stare at the unseemly tragedy that was being played out before them in their own main street. He begged them to tell him where any ready foods could be found. To direct him to some inn or alehouse where he could with his own means pay for a saving crust or spoonful of broth to save those in danger and relieve the dying.

  The response was the exact opposite of what he intended not recognising his uniform nor that of the corporal, which was not surprising in their tattered state, the local inhabitants turned away in fear and anger, while the survivors from the ships, seeing that Francis had money in his hand, wheeled about to set upon him, to secure it each for himself regardless of the rest.

  In no time at all Will and Francis found themselves at the mouth of a little alley, weapons out, defending themselves with considerable skill and most unwillingly adding to the numbers of corpses piling up in the thoroughfare beyond.

  To the great relief of the two, the sometime soldiers had been relieved, very prudently, of all proper arms before they were allowed to go ashore. But as the attacking rabble thinned, seeing success was impossible, their knife-play being much inferior to that they attacked, especially in their pitiful state, a man appeared, whom Francis recognised, brandishing a sword that he knew.

  ‘Thief!’ he yelled in a fury, springing forward. ‘Villain, I know thee well!

  The fellow, who had always been greedy and complaining, a nuisance to all the rest under Francis’s late command, was so astonished to find his robbed officer leaping at him with blazing eyes, careless of the brandished sword, turned to flee.

  But Will Stubble put out a large foot to stop him and he fell, the sword clattering to the ground, Francis’s knife deep in his breast.

  It was truly his own sword, Francis saw with delight, as he picked it up, restored to him by Divine Providence. He stooped again to wrench the sheath from the dying robber, while Stubble snatched the knife from the wound to restore it, too, to his master.

  ‘Nay, Will, keep it,’ the latter told him, ‘so we shall both be armed when you give back that blade you borrowed. And let us go from this place before the mob recovers its nerve to attack us.’

  For the road before them was empty, though they heard in the distance a bugle sounding, which suggested that trained troops might be on the way to deal with a situation the outraged citizens of Plymouth had no doubt reported.

  Captain Trodd was much relieved when his two passengers went to him at once on their return. He was not surprised to hear of their adventure. It tallied with the account he had received from his own officers who had gone ashore earlier for fresh stores. Being now fully provisioned for the voyage up Channel to London he took Forager to a fresh anchorage further from the main quay and at the turn of the tide set sail, weighed anchor and was away before dawn.

  When Forager arrived in the Pool of London, Captain Trodd took Francis and the corporal ashore with him, thinking they would want to go at once to Alderman Leslie’s house, for he understood the City magnate was the young man’s patron.

  But Francis had other plans. He was unwilling to be beholden more than was needful to the Leslie clan, but rather to the Ogilvys who were his blood relations, whatever the legal state of the relationship might be. He had thought deeply during the quiet, idle days of the short voyage from Plymouth. He had gone over in his mind his whole experience from the time he had gone away from Colonel Ogilvy to this present. In some sense he must consider himself a deserter. He could, he supposed, have put himself under Lieutenant Felton’s orders as he had been at first. But, he had found Felton’s views on the expedition, its ordering, its head of command, though reasonably true, had been expressed too easily and far too loudly, for his approval. Better to be considered lost than mutinous. So he would go to his family home in Paternoster Row, send letters to both his uncles at once and after that visit the alderman to pay his respects and ask his advice as to the best way of getting himself and his servant, the corporal, to Holland, where he would meet his Uncle Arthur and seek military employment for the pair of them.

  So he wrote a short letter on paper the captain gave him, with the captain’s splay-nibbled quill pen, to Master Angus Leslie of Gracious Street in the City of London, to present to him Captain Trodd of the merchant brig Forager, now lying in the Pool, to whom he was very much beholden for his kindness and consideration, who now sought business in the matter of trade abroad, suspended during his contract to convey troops against Spain.

  He presented this letter to Captain Trodd before they went ashore, at the same time insisting upon paying for his keep during the last few days.

  ‘Indeed, Captain, I am exceedingly grateful for your consideration, but I will not be beholden for my sustenance, nor that of my man. Remember I was prepared to pay for the purchase of a sword in Plymouth and was not obliged to do so, as I found my former weapon and retrieved it. I cannot, on my honour, allow this question of money to stand between us. Use it on behalf of your crew if you will. But discharge me of the obligation, I pray you.’

  Captain Trodd indulged the boy, whose effort to achieve gentlemanly behaviour he found pathetic, rather than offensive, as he might have done in any other bastard son of less high-ranking forbears. For though Francis had never revealed his birth to anyone, his condition had been known, seeping down through Buckingham and the Duke’s men to the army officers who had dealt with him and to Lieutenant Felton and those others on board his ship.

  Francis was welcomed at the house in Paternoster Row by Young Giles and his wife, who were astonished at his arrival, for they had heard nothing from him since he left London with his uncle in the previous May.

  Will Stubble was another matter. The caretaker regarded him with great suspicion at first, increased rather than allayed by the fact that although Will was a Londoner he made no attempt to get in touch with his own family nor even his former friends.

  A few conversations, added to the young master’s accounts of loyal service and help in several crises, soon altered this. Master Francis wanted to take the big lad abroad again, so Giles would make no move to hinder the plan by betraying the runaway apprentice to his injured principal, nor any other authority.

  Francis wrote his planned letters, visited Master Angus Leslie, who with Mistress Leslie made much of the young man as one returned from the dead, and offered to arrange a passage for him and his man to Holland just as soon as he gave an approximate date for his going. Also, seeing the sorry scarecrow state of Francis’s clothing, Mistress Leslie prompted her husband to offer a loan, both in money and in kind for the necessary replacements.

  ‘It is no gift,’ Alderman Leslie said firmly, anticipating refusal. ‘You have received no pay for your services in the army, nor are you likely to do so, though you have earned it. On the other hand we of the City are constantly deprived, one way. or another, of sums called gifts which are by no means given voluntarily. I shall advance you what the King, and his council, in other words what His Grace of Buckingham demands, and see to it this is accepted as
my contribution to this failed expedition. All shame to its mismanagement and losses.’

  In the weeks before he sailed again, Francis, having equipped himself once more as a private individual, and put ex-corporal Stubble into the livery of a gentleman’s servant, found time enough, or rather more than he wished, to think over all he had learned in those months of strange experience, of violent action, of hard and dangerous living. And of the essential brutishness of mankind, cruel, stupid, cunning, treacherous, as also of the rare courage, even heroism of a few souls such as those fishermen of Bosham, a soldier at the breach of Fort Puntal, the Spaniards who had defied him and his men in their beleaguered house. And perhaps the girl with her goats …

  Sitting in the library at Paternoster Row, waiting for an answer from Oxford to his own letter to his Uncle Richard and looking out on an empty winter garden, Francis thought more than once of his amorous encounter. His easy success and swift, uplifting, heart-shaking pleasure had not been sullied with any thought of black suspicion. For him that symbol of total union, though unhallowed, had been pure. Far more significant, more real, in his desperate circumstances, alone in enemy country, unarmed, than his light-hearted experiments only a year before at St Andrews. A sin, according to his easy belief, but a minor one, though his cousins, his non-cousin, Kilessie, professed a sterner doctrine and had made him pay for it.

  But then, on the very height of joy, the climax of satisfaction, the pit had opened. The hidden knife, the savagery of that thwarted revenge, the dark soft beauty turned into a raging devil. A fresh, very personal disillusion to add to the rest.

  It turned him, looking out at the little arbour with the bare twisted thorny branches, to thoughts of his sadly used mother, sitting there among the roses, beautiful, gentle, betrayed. It came to him that Holland was the country to which she had meant to journey. So those friends they all spoke of, but never named, must have been in Holland, perhaps lived there still. He must make it his business to seek them out and so learn more of the mother he would always mourn. He would find them and dispel the mystery that lay about her name.