The Blast That Tears the Skies (2012)

by Davies, J. D

  In the moment that her adversaries’ guard relaxed, Cornelia ceased her feigned tears and lunged forward, scooping up a handful of pepper from its sack and flinging it into the face of the stallholder, who screamed and held her hands to her eyes. In the same movement, she strode toward the sister and unleashed a punch that knocked the harridan off her feet and into the wall, where she slumped to the ground. Cornelia spun on her heel, gripped the stallholder’s knife-hand and pulled it sharply behind her back. The woman caterwauled in agony as her shoulder dislocated; the knife dropped to the floor.

  ‘God save the King,’ shouted Cornelia, confronting the astonished mob that surrounded us, ‘and God save his nephew, the Prince of Orange!’

  I smiled with pride as I stepped forward to her side. Now, at last, I drew my sword, and waved it menacingly toward the mob.

  ‘You heard my wife,’ I said, ‘and she is as good a subject of King Charles as any man or woman here. So cheer with her, friends! God save the King! God save the Prince of Orange!’ The mob complied, albeit with evident reluctance. ‘And remember this – be thankful that the Dutch fleet is not manned by Dutchwomen, for today you have seen how they fight!’

  Despite my bravado, discretion demanded a gentle retreat, back toward the London side of the bridge; but not before Cornelia had appropriated a half-pound of turmeric as recompense for her inconvenience.

  ‘What madness!’ she said. ‘How prone you English are to believe the wildest rumours upon the least evidence, and to form unconquerable prejudices upon foundations of sand!’

  I looked around; rather too many eyes were still turned in our direction. ‘Perhaps it would be better, my love, to be a little more discreet in your words. And in your fists.’

  She looked at me sharply. ‘Are you not proud, then, that I am not a mere damsel to be rescued by a fine knight upon a charger? You know well that I can hold my own, husband.’

  ‘And that, my love, is the very matter of it. Do you not think you will merely reinforce the lumpen brutes in their conviction that all Dutchwomen are she-devils?’

  Cornelia grinned contentedly. ‘Not all, husband. Only this one.’

  It had taken only until our first argument, some six weeks into our marriage, for me to realise just how singular a young woman I had wed: a broken tooth and a bruised eyebrow being the price of that realisation. From the days of her earliest childhood, Cornelia had sought release from the tedium of her parents’ house by playing upon the wharf at Veere, where successive shiploads of bluff mariners and itinerant soldiers had taken her under their wing. Thus by the age of five, my wife could swear in six different languages and knew how to cheat at several card games. By seven, she could aim and fire a pistol, a Danish ship’s captain having delighted in watching her persistent attempts to raise and level the heavy gun with her tiny hand. At nine, she learned how to gallop upon a horse thanks to a cavalryman who had once charged the Cardinal-Infante’s army at Kallo. At eleven, she could hold her genever and brandijwein as well as many a tar of Amsterdam. And from the age of twelve, she accompanied her father as an unpaid clerk upon his trading expeditions to the likes of Bruges, Calais, Lubeck and London. Realising swiftly that the bluff mariners and itinerant soldiers were now taking a rather different form of interest in her, Cornelia persuaded her reluctant twin brother, already a topman in the Admiralty of Zeeland’s service, to teach her forms of fighting that tended not to reach the pages of the formal manuals of warfare. During much the same space of time, she also reacted against her parents’ and brother’s staunch advocacy of the True Freedom, de Witt’s republican ascendancy, by becoming an even stauncher Orangist: a sentiment that could only come into full flower with her marriage to a follower of the prince’s royal uncle, King Charles.

  I was proud of my wife’s somewhat unconventional attributes, and oft reflected that Joan of Arc must have been cast from a similar mould. But I also recalled Joan’s fate, and was thankful that not even England still burned witches.

  * * *

  Sir William Coventry sat at the heart of his astonishing round desk, a folded piece of parchment in his hand. It was the morning after the fracas upon London bridge. His unexpected summons had brought me from Hardiman’s Yard to Whitehall with unconscionable speed; I suspected that a beggar at the Charing-Cross, who was a little too slow to get out of the way of my galloping horse, might have suffered a broken limb or two.

  Thus when Coventry presented me with the commission, I nearly snatched it from his hand. ‘My congratulations, Captain Quinton,’ he said. ‘I wish you joy of your command, sir.’

  I mumbled perfunctory thanks and broke the wax seal with unseemly impatience. The words were in the familiar form: James, Duke of York and Albany, etcetera etcetera, Lord High Admiral, etcetera etcetera, to Captain Matthew Quinton, captain of His Majesty’s ship the –

  The room swam away from me, swirling into a myriad of whirlpools. I could feel my heart hammering inside my skull. Dimly, I heard Coventry asking me if I was well. I read the impossible word again, looked at him, looked back at the word, and nearly fainted away. ‘Sir W– William,’ I stammered, ‘there is a mistake, sir. This commission must be meant for another.’

  He grimaced. ‘A mistake? With respect, Captain Quinton, neither His Royal Highness nor I are in the habit of making mistakes.’

  (There was truth in this; both men had a pride in method that was already a byword.)

  ‘But sir, this is a commission as captain of the Merhonour! A Second Rate! One of the greatest ships in the navy!’

  Coventry shrugged. ‘And the oldest, and the most sluggish. She would have been condemned last summer but for the prospect of war. What of it, Captain?’

  ‘N–nothing, Sir William.’ I recovered myself, and also the recollection of my duty. ‘I am deeply grateful to you, sir. And to His Royal Highness, of course.’

  Coventry looked at me curiously. ‘You might not be so grateful, Captain, when you learn who has truly been responsible for obtaining this commission for you, nor the purpose that underpins it.’ Coventry leaned back into his chair and grimaced. ‘These are strange times, Captain Quinton – stranger than you know. For instance, I believe it is common knowledge that I have not always been the closest friend of our illustrious Lord Chancellor. Nor has the Secretary, my good friend. Yet in this matter, we three are in perfect accord, for this concerns the good of a kingdom that is under greater threat than you can imagine. Thus by their command, I send you to them now, at Clarendon House.’ Coventry relaxed and smiled. ‘You should feel honoured, Captain Quinton of the Merhonour. You will be one of the very first men to set foot in the new palace of King Edward.’

  But damn’d and treble damn’d be Clarendine,

  Our seventh Edward, and his house and line!…

  And that he yet may see, ere he go down,

  His dear Clarinda circl’d in a crown.

  ~ Andrew Marvell, Second Advice to a Painter

  I rode north and then west in a waking dream. The Merhonour. Sixty-four guns, nine hundred tons burthen. Twice the size of the largest ship I had commanded thus far in my career. A crew of three hundred and eighty men. A veritable leviathan upon the ocean – aye, and one of the most famous ships of proud Albion! The Merhonour was so very old that she had been built when England was still Catholic and still possessed Calais. Her first captain was an aged bastard of King Richard the Third. She had fought against the Invincible Armada. Rebuilt and repaired many times, she had fought the corsairs of Algiers for the first King James and the Dutch for Noll Cromwell. ‘Matthew Quinton, captain of the Merhonour!’: I was in a transport of delight as I repeated that most glorious sentence over and over in my head. My satisfaction was multiplied by the knowledge that I was not the first of my name to command that great ship. For in the year 1595, she was the flagship of my grandfather, the eighth Earl of Ravensden, in Essex’s expedition against Cadiz. I even thought I could hear the old swashbuckler’s voice in my head: ‘You take good care of my ship, la
d!’

  Thus it was an inordinately pleased young man of twenty-five who rode out of the confines of Westminster into Pickadilly, said to be increasingly the most sought-after district of the city: great new houses were going up on the north side, where they were still surrounded by fields. A small herd of deer, grazing contentedly on the edge of Saint James’s Fields to the south, watched me curiously as I rode by. It was an idyllic day. Perhaps I should have reflected that the greatest happiness often precedes the greatest horror, but I was oblivious to such dark thoughts.

  My destination loomed before me. It would be a truly vast palace, that much was clear; but it was yet newly begun, and only the tall, graceful central block was complete to its full height. Two wings stretched away on either side, but that to the left was barely above its foundations and that to the right was a mass of scaffolding. As I drew nearer, I was treated to the full chorus of hammering, sawing and swearing that attends any work of building in England. But unlike any other work of building in the land, this one was surrounded by a ring of fearsome, red-coated and heavily armed troops. These, I knew, were present day and night, regardless of whether or not the owner was within; for there were many in London who would gladly have burned down this monstrous edifice to one man’s ambition and vanity. As I rode through the cordon, I saw not a few scowls upon the faces of those who traversed Pickadilly.

  I dismounted at the foot of the half-finished grand stairway that swept up to the door. With not a little pride, I informed the lackey on duty there that this was Quinton, captain of the Merhonour, for audience with the Lord Chancellor and the Secretary. He pointed me toward the half-finished left, or west, wing. I struggled across uneven ground made even more treacherous by a clutter of broken bricks and stray timbers, entered through a great hole that would eventually become a fine south-facing window, and heard the Chancellor’s familiar, booming West Country voice long before I saw him.

  ‘– and I intend a nursery there, Bennet, for when Anne comes visiting with my grandchildren.’

  ‘A splendid prospect indeed,’ replied a voice that was deepest Suffolk; but even from a distance, I could detect that beneath the accent lurked several layers of profound sarcasm.

  The two men hove into view, and I made my salutations, bowing deeply as I addressed the older and significantly more rotund first: ‘My Lord Chancellor.’

  Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, bowed in return. ‘Captain Quinton.’ This, then, was the greatest man in the kingdom after the king; or perhaps the man who was greater than the king, in the eyes of his legion of critics. Charles Stuart’s political mentor in exile, the magnificent Clarendon was said to pull our monarch’s strings (apart from those attached to the royal member, which were pulled by others) while ensuring that the Earl of Clarendon profited mightily. Clarendon House, this very building in which we were standing, was already by-named Dunkirk House, it being commonly assumed that the proceeds of the sale of that town to France had paid for the Chancellor’s grand new residence. Although it was far from finished, nocturnal riots before it were already regular occurrences; hence the ring of armed guards. But that was not the principal cause of the universal hatred of the Lord Chancellor of England. Far from it.

  I turned to his companion, a sharp-featured man in his mid-forties. The most remarkable thing about him was the large black plaster stuck across the bridge of his nose. ‘My Lord Arlington.’

  The newly ennobled Secretary of State nodded. ‘Quinton. Good. You’ve seen Coventry, then. Pleased with yourself, I don’t doubt. Relish it, Quinton, for I regret we are to disabuse you.’

  I made a conscious effort to avoid staring at Arlington’s nose, but it was impossible; which, of course, was precisely what he intended. The plaster concealed a deep scar, inflicted on him by a rebel’s sword in an obscure skirmish during our late civil wars, and the Secretary (who had done precious little fighting apart from that once) ensured that his wound was displayed as prominently as possible, thereby bearing witness to his personal suffering and, by extension, to that of all his cavalier brethren. My uncle Tristram confessed that he always had a great urge to amputate the rest of Arlington’s snout and replace it with a vast artificial proboscis to outdo even that of old de Bergerac.

  Clarendon led us into the completed part of the building, into what would soon be a grand reception room facing west, across the fields towards the miserable village of Kensington. The room was not plastered and the floor was incomplete; the similar state of the chimney ensured that the fire remained unlit, so the room felt almost as cold as the bitter air outside.

  We stood, for there were no chairs. Clarendon kept well apart from Arlington; these two loathed each other, and I wondered what great crisis of state, alluded to by William Coventry, could possibly have brought these bitter rivals together.

  Arlington took the lead. This was unsurprising, for matters of intelligence were fundamental to his role as Secretary. Arlington was also known to have a sounder grasp of naval affairs than the Chancellor, whose ignorance of such things was a byword: my old friend Will Berkeley once told me that in his hearing, Clarendon asked where Sheerness was.

  ‘I won’t dissemble, Quinton – we have no time for casuistry and procrastination. A war creates a mountain of business of all kinds, and we also have to prepare for the reception of the ambassadors of the Most Christian King.’ If that was so, I wondered why the realm’s two most powerful ministers were taking the time to inspect an unfinished building. But perhaps Clarendon’s notorious pride made him unable to resist the urge to show off his opulent new home to his arch-enemy, whose own Arlington House was so much more modest; so modest, indeed, that it is now but one wing of the present Duke of Buckingham’s residence upon the Green Park. ‘It is no secret, I think,’ Arlington continued, ‘that not all of His Majesty’s subjects hope for the success of his arms in this war against the Dutch. There are still many who are loyal to what they call the Old Cause – to strange fanatic ways in religion, to doing away with kings, to levelling all the orders of society. They wait their moment, Quinton, and many of them think this war is that moment. Here in London above all, the creeping multitude of Ranters, Diggers, Levellers, Seekers, Muggletonians, Quakers and God knows what other strange manifestations of untruth pray for a Dutch victory in the battle to come, for they believe that will trigger a new revolution in this nation.’

  ‘It is possible, of course, that many of these fears are exaggerated, and that the numbers of the disaffected are actually very small,’ said Clarendon. Arlington scowled at him; the tension between the two was palpable. ‘But as you know, Captain, many are undoubtedly discontented with His Majesty’s rule on … certain other grounds. Even some of the cavalier breed express dissatisfaction with, shall we say, the moral tone of this age?’

  A splendid euphemism for the king’s flagrant waste of his time, money and abilities upon a succession of worthless, brazen women, my good-sister included, I thought. Perhaps Clarendon referred to himself, too, for there were not a few cavaliers – Arlington at their head – who would have delighted in the downfall of the opulent and, in their view, overly lenient Chancellor.

  ‘Indeed, My Lord,’ said Arlington neutrally. ‘Now, this brings us to the delicate matter of command within the fleet. His Majesty the King and His Royal Highness the Duke of York have thought fit to employ many captains and flagmen who served the late republic, a number of whom have not served since the Restoration.’ Arlington’s tone suggested that this was a policy with which he did not concur, thus confirming Beau Harris’s aside to me aboard the House of Nassau. ‘Some others refused to serve, or were left ashore because their views were believed to be too – irreconcilable, shall we say? But we have to face the possibility that some of those recently granted commissions might not be entirely loyal to His Majesty.’

  Clarendon moved to stand by his unfinished window and gazed out over the rough pasture that would soon be an immaculate parterre. ‘The King and the Lord High Admiral are entirely c
onvinced of their loyalty,’ he said.

  Arlington all but sneered. ‘Quite. But, Quinton, it happens that we have some pieces of evidence pointing toward an active conspiracy and we, as ministers of the crown, always have to act upon such evidence.’ Another furious glance from Clarendon. ‘For instance, we have the words of a murdered man, recorded by a reliable witness in a sworn deposition, claiming that twenty captains will go over to the Dutch in the midst of battle. Other whispers to the same effect.’

  I stood there, in the midst of the great shell of Clarendon House, unable to believe what I was hearing. Here were all of Beau Harris’s wine-born suspicions and night-terrors writ large, but uttered by the two greatest ministers of the crown! Twenty captains – God in Heaven, if it were true that would mean no less than a fifth of the commanders in the entire fleet – and if these men were veterans, they had probably been given the best commands, so precisely how large a proportion of the great ships of the fleet, the ones upon which the whole outcome against the Dutch depended, might be disabled by this treason?

  ‘His Royal Highness will not hear of it,’ said Arlington. ‘He prefers to believe that no true-born Englishman would fight alongside the Dutch against his own people.’

  ‘We pray that he is correct,’ said Clarendon, who had particular cause for praising the Duke of York’s prescience. ‘My Lord Arlington’s “evidence” is likely to be nothing more than the tupenny tittle-tattle of the streets, Captain. But … but as he says, a wise minister should not entirely dismiss such talk out of hand.’

  And there was the nub of it, I thought. For all Clarendon’s doubts about the tale of a plot, and his evident distaste for Arlington’s reading of the evidence, he simply dared not reject the secretary’s interpretation out of hand. He was, after all, the chief minister of England, and if this heinous conspiracy proved true and was allowed to play itself out, to whom would the blame cling? Still shocked by the revelation of the potential extent of conspiracy in the fleet, I found myself in a place I had never expected to be: entirely agreeing with the Earl of Clarendon, and praying to God that he, not his rival, had the right in this.