The Blast That Tears the Skies (2012)

by Davies, J. D

  Musk had heard enough revelations for one evening, but yet he sought to recover himself. ‘And what is it that you seek, My Lady?’

  She turned from him and walked to the fireplace, above which hung a dust-covered portrait of Earl Matthew’s father, the enigmatic seventh earl. ‘That, I think, is a matter we should come to later, Musk, after I have ensured that you will not betray me to my husband or any other. ’Tis said that every man has his price, so name yours, Phineas Musk.’

  ‘My Lady?’

  ‘What, did you think we would haggle? That is not my way. Note this, Musk – I ask you to name your price before I discover whether or not you have the knowledge I seek. That is how highly I value the transfer of your loyalty to me.’

  ‘You are brazen, My Lady.’

  ‘It is a brazen time,’ she said, ‘especially for women at our most brazen court. And I learned long ago that demureness and naivety are not characteristics that take a woman far in this world. In this England of ours every man’s loyalty is for sale, Musk, even the king’s. If you were a street vendor selling loyalties upon your cart, you would mark up the prices, would you not? So let us be blunt with each other. You know full well who it is that I serve, I think, and you know that he can afford to pay any price you name.’

  ‘Reckon the King of France might have a groat or two to his name,’ said Musk flippantly. ‘But let me give you another case, My Lady. Aye, I’d mark up the price if I had loyalty for sale. But say I was selling a horse instead. I’d not be content with fixing a price, would I, not if it was a favourite old nag. I’d want to be sure any buyer was a fit owner and would treat it well. In short, I’d want to know what that person intended to do with it. So you tell me what you want to know, My Lady, and I’ll see if I care to fix a price for it.’

  It should have been stalemate, Musk thought; if she met his terms, she must be truly desperate for whatever information she thought he possessed.

  She stood by the fireplace, staring up into the blank eyes of Earl Edward. Slowly she turned toward him and said, ‘Very well, Musk. On two conditions. First, my friends in France are keen to learn the identity of an agent of Arlington’s – although some say that it is actually Arlington himself, using an alias. He is an inveterate enemy of our cause, and the Most Christian’s ministers will be most generous towards whosoever exposes him and brings him down. You are said to know London better than any man alive, Musk. You know people of every rank from the court to the gutter. Thus I would have you bring me the true name of this so-called Lord Percival.’

  ‘Odd name, that,’ Musk said. ‘Lord Percival. Shouldn’t be difficult. And King Louis will give old Musk as much as he wants for that one name? You’re not really driving a hard bargain, My Lady.’

  ‘Perhaps more so for the second condition, Musk.’ She approached him and stood unsettlingly close to him. ‘I would have you swear upon oath, upon the Bible and before Sleep as a witness, that if I take you into my confidence and tell you what it is that I seek, you will not then betray my trust to any of the Quintons.’

  ‘An oath is an oath,’ Musk said. ‘Immutable. Unbreakable. Phineas Musk doesn’t break oaths, and he keeps his word.’

  Thus it was that Phineas Musk swore not to betray the confidence of what the Countess Louise would tell him to any man or woman of Quinton blood or name, nor to any greater or lesser than a Quinton.

  With that resolved to her satisfaction, the countess told Musk what she wished to know. Of the whereabouts of Tristram Quinton, a matter that seemed to be of particular concern to her, he could not enlighten her. But upon her chief matter of substance, Musk was surprised that she should be so concerned with what to him seemed but ancient history. Thus with very little hesitation, he named an outrageously inflated price for what seemed to him a most inconsequential answer.

  * * *

  A gun fired aboard the Royal Charles, and her sails were loosed. Upon that, every ship in the fleet emulated her, the Merhonour included, and moved out into the broad channel of the Sledway.

  A fleet putting to sea is one of the most wonderful and dreadful sights upon God’s earth. Great swathes of canvas billow, ensigns unfurl proudly, mighty hulls turn to seek the best conjunction of breeze and tide. Yet all these years later, it is the sounds that return to me most readily: capstans turning, the groan of protesting anchor cables at the hawses, the creaks of timber straining in water, the strange shriek of wind amid rigging, the thunderous cracking of the sails, the cacophony of ancient sea-songs aboard a hundred ships as crews went about their business. But one ship, and one alone, had no song of its own. My loyal men were dispersed to watch stations all over the hull to leaven the ranks of the lubbers and the recalcitrant; thus no song of Cornwall could issue from the deck of the Merhonour, for there were too few Cornishmen in any given quarter. The Welsh could sing, I had always been told, but these Welshmen of ours showed no inclination toward song, and precious little toward work either. I caught a glimpse of my bearded foe, just behind the forecastle and beneath the ship’s bell. An observer might have thought him an officer, for men evidently did his bidding and took upon themselves any task allocated to him. I vowed that I would have to come to a reckoning with this creature, and sooner rather than later.

  It was a hot April day, with a steady wind from the south-southwest. The Bachelor’s Delight was to windward, trim and easy upon the breeze. It took us an eternity to take up the station specified in our sailing orders, upon the starboard quarter of Lawson’s Royal Oak, and to achieve a feeble approximation of close-hauled. We were near enough for me to be able to see the vice-admiral, there upon his quarterdeck, without the aid of my telescope. I was still shaken by his words to me on the previous day, and had spent a sleepless night in my sea-bed, pondering what to do. Lawson knew of the suspected conspiracy, and had made sure that I knew it; which surely meant he had to know of the part that had been assigned to me, to guard against his defection during the battle to come. It was my duty to go at once to the Duke of York to warn him of this terrible new truth. Yet as I tossed and turned, there was a part of me that still urged caution. Lawson had been far into his cups, and after speaking to me of the vast bribe that had won his loyalty, he had turned away from me to talk with Jordan, to his left. When he and I spoke again, it was as though the previous conversation had never happened: instead, he wished to know my opinion of Will Berkeley as a prospective son-in-law. I could hardly offend against the hospitality of his table and the respect due to him as my senior officer by raising the subject again. So had Lawson’s mention of twenty captains been merely a strange coincidence, an accountable chance remark by a man in his cups? Or was it a subtle way of telling me that although twenty captains had been offered inducements to desert their loyalty, they had refused them? The admiral’s strange remark had no clear meaning, and thus it presented me with no clear course to follow. God alone knew what damage it would do to the fleet’s prospects in the imminent battle if the Vice-Admiral of the Red and nearly two dozen other veteran officers were to be summarily dismissed upon the unfounded suspicions of Matthew Quinton. I had a peculiar vision of His Grace of Buckingham installed in Lawson’s place, and shuddered at the thought.

  I could tell no man on the Merhonour of my dilemma, not even my dear friends Kit Farrell, Francis Gale and Roger d’Andelys. The latter two stood with me upon the quarterdeck as we struggled to hold our station on the sleeker and better crewed Royal Oak; I could see Kit upon the forecastle, endeavouring through Treninnick to explain to some Welshmen the correct way of tying a bowline knot. I sensed that Francis and Roger knew not all was well with Captain Matthew Quinton. Roger probably suspected the consequences of too much Hull ale. Perhaps Francis sensed there was something deeper, but he was too tactful to pry.

  The great fleet stretched away on either side, ahead and astern, in its three squadrons of Red, White and Blue: the entire ocean seemed to be carpeted with stout English oak, rising and falling majestically upon the grey swell. But I took no p
leasure in the sight and returned gloomily to my cabin. I lay upon my sea-bed and thought for a long while. I reflected upon a battle I once fought against a Commonwealth captain who had ostensibly embraced the Restoration, only to plot its overthrow and cunningly conceal his true allegiance. Perhaps that example was too heavy upon my mind, too weighty an influence in my thinking about Lawson and his kind. But then, perhaps it was also being given too much weight by the likes of Clarendon and especially by the devious Arlington; and young as I was, I was already learning not always to trust the words of princes and potentates alike. Politics, I reflected; God preserve me from politics. As if such concerns were not sufficient, I fretted about what might be happening elsewhere in my absence. I strongly suspected that something of import to my family was afoot ashore, of that I was certain, but I was in no position even to scratch at its surface. The victuallers that came out daily from Harwich or Bridlington to supply the fleet brought a steady stream of letters from Cornelia, but whereas she was usually the most prolific of correspondents (twenty-seven pages on one occasion during my first voyage), her letters were now inexplicably terse, filling barely one side of a small sheet and revealing next to nothing of her activities. I contemplated pregnancy, miscarriage and a host of less plausible explanations, and found none of them reassuring. Most alarmingly of all, there was almost no mention of the doings of the Countess Louise, or of the fragile health of my brother. The one letter I had received from Tristram was similarly silent upon the matter of my good-sister. Add the strange evasiveness of Phineas Musk, and dark suspicions overwhelmed my thoughts. Above all, I was increasingly alarmed by the reports of plague in London, and concerned for Cornelia’s safety. She would have dismissed both my fears and the plague itself in short order, but that knowledge did nothing to lighten my spirits.

  I felt the ship rise and fall in the light swell. I heard the groans of the ancient timbers, and for a moment imagined them to be the legion of dead Quintons crying out from their tombs. There even seemed to be one particular timber that creaked with the voice of my grandfather: Believe.

  Aye, My Lord of Ravensden, but believe in what?

  With heart and mind in turmoil, I took a sheet of paper, dipped my quill in the ink, and began to write.

  ‘In the name of God, Amen. I, Matthew Quinton, Captain of His Majesty’s ship of war Merhonour in the present expedition against the Dutch, being of sound body and mind but conscious of the transitory nature of life and of the manifold dangers of the service upon which I am now engaged, do make this, my last Will and Testament…’

  * * *

  ‘The island, yonder,’ said Kit, pointing to a grey line upon the horizon, ‘is Texel. There, to the south of it, is the Helder, the north tip of Holland. Between them is the Mars Deep sea-gate – the main passage into their Zuider Sea and thence to Amsterdam.’

  I studied the low shores, so like those of Essex or Suffolk. It was difficult to distinguish the two land masses from the channel that separated them. Only the occasional tower of a church or windmill broke the monotonous flatness. But as I stared more intently through my lens, I spied another sight: there, behind the Texel shore, rose the very tops of a forest of masts. ‘Then that, I take it, must be the Dutch fleet. Lord Obdam himself and his myriad of flagmen.’

  Kit studied the sight. ‘Only sixty or seventy sail, I’d reckon’ – God alone knew how he could make such an estimate at such a distance – ‘which means the Zeeland and Rotterdam ships haven’t joined from Hellevoitsluis. No surprise, that. We’d have had intelligence of it if they’d put to sea.’

  ‘And that,’ said Roger, who stood at our side upon the quarterdeck that day after the sailing from the Gunfleet, ‘they are surely unlikely to do while your fleet sits here, between their two contingents.’

  ‘Aye,’ said Kit, ‘they’ll have learned their lesson from the year fifty-three, when Monck was upon this very shore and yet they came out separately. They took the devil’s own hammering that day.’

  Roger lowered his telescope. ‘So if the Dutch will not come out while your fleet lies off their shore, gentlemen, what in the name of the bon dieu are we doing? Surely we are in stalemate, with no battle in prospect.’

  ‘It is called blockade, My Lord,’ I said. ‘The Dutch will not come out, nor, while we hold this latitude, can they go in. And the Dutch live by their trade. Their return-fleet from the East Indies is due within weeks, carrying spices almost beyond value. If we take those ships, and cut off the rest of Holland’s trade, the Amsterdam bourse will eventually collapse. Then De Witt and his cabal will have to send Obdam to sea, to attempt to break our stranglehold. Instead, of course, we will destroy him. Either way, the Dutch republic is finished.’

  I said the words with a confidence I did not feel in my heart; but who was Matthew Quinton to quibble with the expressed opinion of the Duke of York, Prince Rupert, Sir William Penn and all the rest of the great seamen?

  ‘It does not seem an honourable course,’ said the Comte d’Andelys. ‘The great ships of England, all her mighty princes and her proud lords, content to prevent the passage of some mean merchant hulls – not fit work, mes amis. If this was a French fleet, now, we would force the sea-gate, there, sail into their anchorage and burn Obdam’s fleet at anchor. Now that is an honourable course.’

  ‘Also a desperately dangerous course, My Lord,’ Kit said. ‘No more than one ship at a time can pass through the sea-gate – I have sailed through it enough times, on hulls bound over the Pampus to or from Amsterdam. It has grown worse of late, and you’ll not find more than three fathoms at the best of a spring tide. You have two miles to run in such conditions, My Lord. The Dutch have forts on both shores, too, and the channels shift constantly, like ours in the Thames, so even our newest charts are probably worthless. And of course it is a lee shore, with all the dangers of coming off it safely again.’

  Roger, the former captain of the Most Christian King’s great ship Le Téméraire, looked at Kit in some puzzlement. ‘My sailing master used to make much of that term, especially when we were coming between Bertheaume and Camaret into the Road of Brest. Remind me again, gentlemen: what is this “lee shore” of which you speak?’

  Kit and I exchanged an amused glance, tinged with the knowledge that only a few short years before, it would have been Matthew Quinton asking that self-same question.

  The grand fleet of England duly commenced its blockade of the Dutch coast. During the next days, we stood out to sea or came closer inshore, depending upon the winds and our frequent soundings, for the shoals in those waters were notoriously treacherous. Our scouts, like Harris’s House of Nassau, would sometimes dart up almost to the mouth of the sea-gate and fire a few guns in defiance before coming off again. Then we made a grand promenade down the featureless coast as far as Scheveningen, watching the alarm bonfires spring up upon the dunes and listening to the distant noise of church bells proclaiming that the English were coming. Such was our purpose, of course: to spread panic among the honest burghers of The Hague, perhaps inducing them to force De Witt’s government into a humiliating surrender. We fired the Merhonour’s guns for the first time, albeit unshotted, off the shore near Zandvoort, again to intimidate the local citizenry. Having seen the performance of my truly motley crew upon the yards and sails, I was quite prepared for a fiasco. Yet the battery of the Merhonour more than held its own; not quite up to the mark of the truly crack ships like my old colleague Robert Holmes’s Revenge or Val Pyne’s St Andrew, but respectable enough. Despite being ancient and deaf, Webb our gunner clearly knew his business. He had decent quarter-gunners under him, and even the most lubberly Welsh generally knew how to fire an artillery-piece: many had fought during the civil wars, or else had served aboard colliers or other craft that carried a gun or two. Some, Treninnick had learned, seemed to have served on ships that might or might not have had formal letters of marque permitting them to wage war upon the trade of other nations. Kit Farrell was too discreet a soul to employ the word ‘pirate’
, but nonetheless, his opinion on the matter was clear enough.

  My Lord of Andelys fulminated against the dishonour of all these activities, too. He was all for landing on the broad, tempting beaches of North Holland, marching in triumph into the Binnenhof itself and stringing up the Grand Pensionary of Holland from the nearest tree.

  But as the fleet made its serene way upon the North Sea, sailing hither, then thither, and so inexorably wearing or tacking back to hither, the concerns of Captain Matthew Quinton multiplied. True, with no immediate prospect of battle there was equally no immediate alarm over the intentions of Lawson and the hypothetical twenty captains. For good or ill, I had not reported his ambiguous speech at dinner to the Duke of York; thus that particular die was cast. But as that apprehension faded, others sprang forth to take its place.

  Quite apart from my troubled thoughts about what might or might not be happening ashore, there was my abiding concern for the crew of the Merhonour. Despite their surprising competence upon the great guns, they were evidently still very far from being a fighting unit capable of putting the fear of God into the proud butterboxes. The Welsh continued to be obstreperous; more so now that word of the curse of the Merhonour had got amongst them, for there is only one creature more superstitious than a seaman, and that is a Welshman. Pewsey reported frequent fights between the decks; reported them, but evidently did nothing to restrain or prevent them. His sole essay at disciplining a member of my crew came one morning in my cabin when he presented me with that notorious defaulter and likely ringleader of mutiny, Cherry Cheeks Russell. Presumably even the timid Pewsey reckoned that the management of a thirteen-year-old youth was within his powers.