by Davies, J. D
‘You think our friend Harvey spoke true, Musk?’ Lord Percival demanded suddenly.
‘The Tower and a treason charge can be greatly efficacious in loosing a man’s tongue, My Lord. He had the look and the smell of a man desperate to save his body, whatever he might say about his soul.’
‘Indeed. He seemed so eager to clear himself and please his audience that it would not surprise me if he subscribed to the Thirty-Nine Articles and turned Laudian within the week. That being so, his confession causes us some difficulty.’
‘My Lord?’
‘He knows nothing of any plot by twenty captains, Musk, and he knows nothing of the whereabouts of the ostler. That much is obvious. No doubt we could apply the Tower’s instruments of persuasion, but I doubt very much if they would extract a different tale from him.’ They passed through the gateway of the Bloody Tower into Water Lane, the Traitors’ Gate directly ahead of them. The pikemen on duty stood to attention as they passed. ‘No, Jeroboam Harvey is a puffed-up malcontent with a fondness for his own voice and a deluded belief in the godliness and invincibility of the Dutch. No more, no less. And that, Musk, creates a problem.’
‘My Lord?’
‘The fleet will engage within days, so perhaps it is already too late to expose this conspiracy. Harvey was our last hope, unless we can somehow find the missing ostler – Sutcliffe has no other names, no other hints even as to a direction we could travel.’
‘If there ever was a conspiracy, My Lord.’ Musk’s broad-brimmed leather cap disgorged ever more rainwater onto his shoulders.
‘Yes … if there ever was a conspiracy.’ Lord Percival seemed especially thoughtful. ‘I have been considering that possibility, Musk. Think on this. We live in fevered times. Rumour is everywhere, the drumbeat of each passing hour. The king is dead. The queen is pregnant. Cromwell is alive. The Dutch have landed. The dissenters have risen. The papists have risen. Each new tale excites the rude multitude for a day or two, then fades into the oblivion whence it sprang. So why has this one tale been so persistent, Musk, above all the rest? If it is not true, how did it come into being, and why has it gained such credence? Why have you and I spent weeks chasing shadows, when we could have been about other business entirely – notably the business to which you must return tomorrow?’
They came to the Byward Tower and the blessed dryness of the passage through it. Once more pikes clattered against breastplates as guards came to attention. Musk realised he had no answer to Lord Percival’s question; none but a tiny and dark suspicion, growing ever greater as each moment passed.
‘No, Musk,’ said Lord Percival as they stepped out onto the causeway across the moat to the Middle Tower, ‘our friend Harvey is not quite the last creature we must interrogate. There is one more.’
* * *
The navy royal of England was somewhat en féte. Our outlying frigates had spied a body of ships to northward and made all sail to intercept them. They proved to be a returning Dutch merchant fleet, of which we had received intelligence from Limerick a fortnight before. Hoping to sneak past the north of Ireland and Scotland, then down the Norwegian coast and so through the sea-gates, they had instead fallen directly into our path. The frigates took eight of them: mostly flyboats with prodigious cargoes of wine from Bordeaux and Lisbon, although one was a West Indiaman worth, it was said, some £30,000. How I envied Beau Harris and my former command, the House of Nassau, which played a part in the capture!
The triumph was followed in short order by a council of war which took a resolution to sail for England. The Dutch had not fallen into our trap by coming out to fight us while we were upon their shore, the Duke of York argued, so perhaps they would be more tempted to do so while we were back upon ours. Moreover, the one essential without which an English fleet could not keep the seas was in dire straits. Not gunpowder, for we had used almost none of our store; not sails, for we had not been battered by particularly vicious gales; not even men, although our surgeons were alert to any sign of plague or the more usual sicknesses that beset a fleet at sea. No, far worse than any of these. The fleet was almost out of beer.
This grim reality brought forth a mighty diatribe from Prince Rupert during the council of war. ‘England is a realm awash with beer,’ he cried. ‘How is it, then, that the victualler of the navy can find barely enough to keep us at sea for a month? What, pray, is all the money that Parliament voted being spent on?’
It was difficult for any man present to disagree with His Highness’s sentiments. For my part, I welcomed the prospect of our return for two reasons: it would give Thurston and his crew the time and resources to repair the fire damage more effectively than they could at sea, while the mails that hopefully awaited us at Harwich might contain news from home to ease the concerns of the captain of the Merhonour.
We made landfall between Southwold and Hollesley Bays, and skirted the coast of Suffolk down toward the Gunfleet. I was at the quarterdeck rail teaching Cherry Cheeks Russell how to take a bearing, not without an awareness of the irony of it all; not too many years before, I had been the pupil acquiring the same knowledge. A pupil who, though I say so myself, was undoubtedly quicker on the uptake than my sottish young companion.
‘Very well, Mister Russell, we will try again upon Orford Castle, yonder. No, this side, there is but sea on the other. The great brown tower. No, that is Hollesley Church. That great brown tower.’
I pointed. ‘That is a castle, then, Captain?’ asked my reluctant pupil.
‘Quite so, Mister Russell. A mighty keep of King Henry the Second, and the best seamark for miles upon this coast.’
The boy looked at it curiously. ‘One day, I want to be the lord of a castle like that,’ he said, with the sort of determination he usually applied only to the pursuit of a bottle.
I smiled, for the young Matthew Quinton had known such dreams. Indeed, Captain Quinton of the Merhonour was still not immune from them; after all, if Will Berkeley, only a few months older than me, could already be a knight, then why not I?
‘Well, young Cherry Cheeks,’ I said, ‘for that to be so, I think you will have to study long and hard. You can spell barely a single word correctly, and your knowledge of the sea-business seems to extend no further than knowing when the cook is about to distribute food and drink.’
The lad shrugged. ‘Thought it was going to be all battles and glory,’ he said, ‘not this tedious sailing.’
I said nothing, for I could hardly admit that I largely shared his assessment of our situation. Indeed, in one sense I envied young Russell. He did not bear the responsibilities of command, and he did not spend many a waking moment wondering what those whom he loved or hated might be doing in his absence. The evasiveness of Musk, the curious silence of Cornelia, the mysterious decamping of Tristram to Dorset: either those closest to me were engaged in some sort of conspiracy of which I knew nothing, or else distance, the loneliness of command and the imminence of battle had overwhelmed my thoughts, blowing up a few disconnected, innocent facts into a giant web of irrational fears. Was that, perhaps, in itself a manifestation of the curse of the Merhonour?
‘Twenty-two degrees,’ said Russell, interrupting my grave-black thoughts.
‘What?’
‘The keep of Orford Castle lies twenty-two degrees of relative bearing to starboard, Captain Quinton.’
I, too, lined up the ancient keep. ‘Dear God, Cherry Cheeks, you are quite right – you have fixed a bearing correctly for the first time! Perhaps we will make a seaman of you yet.’
The lad grinned. A thought suddenly struck me: I had been so consumed by my own concerns, and overtaken by such events as our failure to join the line-of-battle and the fire aboard, that I had quite forgotten to implement the liar’s punishment upon young Russell. Pewsey had never raised the matter again; and besides, since the fire he had been relieved of his duties and confined to his hastily reconstructed cabin, pending an eventual court-martial. Perhaps Cherry Cheeks Russell would make a seaman after all, fo
r he seemed to have perhaps the most essential attribute for success in the seaman’s ever-uncertain art: luck.
* * *
Hoc loco quo mori miserum esse… So wrote my uncle in his infuriating Latin script. Once more I bring up the ancient vellum to no more than a few inches from my eyes, and attempt to decipher my original pencil translation of more than sixty years past:
This will be a miserable place in which to die, thought Tristram Quinton as he backed slowly up the main street of Chaldon Worgret. In truth, calling this squalid lane a ‘main street’ was akin to calling our American plantations a nation, just as to call the dozen or so inbreds advancing toward him ‘men’ seemed to be stretching a point beyond its limits. They had been cowed briefly by the unexpected sight of the two swords he drew when they surrounded him in the one inn of the village – that is, the stinking thatched hovel a few hundred yards away – but ultimately, not even finest Toledo steel could overcome such adverse odds and deter so many lumpen opponents.
‘Now, my good people,’ said Tristram, ‘I am a man of peace. I am a man of science. I am the Master of Mauleverer College in the University of Oxford.’
‘Warlock,’ hissed a foul, unshaven creature at the front of the pack.
‘Warlock!’ echoed two or three of the others.
‘Not so, my friends,’ cried Tristram. ‘As I said at the inn, I have merely come to your fine town to learn the truth of an incident that occurred in these parts –’
‘Aye, the old Lugg business!’ cried the foul one, who seemed to be both a ringleader and to have a better grasp of the English language than the rest. ‘Ye’ve no concern with that, stranger, other than ye’ll share her fate! Burning!’
‘Burning!’ cried the man’s chorus.
‘My dear friends,’ said Tris soothingly, still endeavouring to placate but still keeping his swords extended and occasionally twirling the points menacingly, ‘I have no interest in reopening old wounds –’
‘And they say ye’re a friend of the vicar at Hardingford, that’s a Papist!’
‘Roger Falcondale is a former student of mine. It may be true that he is a little too inclined to the persuasion of Arminius –’
‘And ye talks with a warlock’s long words, that we may not understand thee!’ snarled the ringleader. ‘And ye dress strange, and offer money to tell ye how the Lugg bitch came to burn! And ye tried to get under Jen Cooper’s skirts at the inn!’
The mob surged forward menacingly at that. ‘That,’ said Tris uncertainly while glancing quickly behind him, ‘was a mere misunderstanding, my dear friends! I am, as I say, a man of peace, and I shall prove it to you.’
With that, he raised his two swords, plunged them into the soft earth before him, and stepped back, bracing himself against the barn wall behind. With his right hand, he reached within his frock coat – an item of clothing unknown in that part of Dorset until that day – and made much of locating and producing a kerchief, with which he proceeded loudly to blow his nose.
‘Warlock!’ screamed the ringleader, raising a billhook above his head as he ran directly for Tristram.
In the blink of an eye (or so my ever-immodest uncle proclaims), Tristram reached back into the frock-coat with his left hand, produced a flintlock pistol, aimed it at the ringleader’s ribcage and fired. Tristram put the kerchief fastidiously to his lips as the man was blown backwards, a great fountain of blood spouting from his torso as the lead ball flattened and exited.
Casually, Tristram again reached inside the coat, this time with his right hand, and drew out another pistol. He described an arc with it, pointing it at each incredulous face in turn. Then he reached out and plucked one sword from the ground with his left hand.
‘Never, ever, assume that you face a right-handed assailant, my friends. Now, let us return to the matter in hand. The Lugg business. The burning of a witch in this place, more than thirty years ago. As I said at the inn, I have an amount of honest coin of the realm – a goodly amount – to bestow upon whosoever tells me the truth of that affair. Or, of course’ – Tristram gestured toward the still twitching remnant of the man upon the ground – ‘we can conduct matters differently. But remember that I am, as I say, a man of peace.’
A cowardly spirit must not think to prove a seaman bold,
For to be sure he may not shrink in dangers manifold;
When sea-fights happen on the main, and dreadful cannons roar,
Then all men fight, or else be slain, and braggarts proud look poor. [Chorus]
A seaman hath a valiant heart, and bears a noble mind;
He scorneth once to shrink or start for any stormy wind.
~ Anon., The Jovial Mariner, Or the Seaman’s Renown
(17th century)
Cornelia Quinton and Phineas Musk made their way past Saint Helen and Saint Ethelburga, and so out into Bishopsgate. This was ever one of the busiest streets of London, full of coaches, carts and horsemen bound for the north or for the City itself. Yet now it was eerily quiet. The doors of several houses bore the plague-cross.
Cornelia and Musk had taken all essential precautions against infection. Cornelia wore a kerchief around her lower face; concealed within it was a posset emitting fragrances that were held to ward off the plague-bearing miasma. Musk trusted to his pipe, puffing out a cloud of tobacco smoke to repel any noxious air.
‘Woe for London,’ said Cornelia. ‘I pray it does not assail us as terribly as Amsterdam, last year. My brother says a tenth of its people died, and it still rages there.’
‘Aye, madam,’ said Musk. ‘No leveller like the pestilence, that there isn’t. I recall the plagues here, back in twenty-five and thirty-six. The former took away over thirty thousand, they say, two of my sisters among them.’
‘You had sisters, Musk?’ Cornelia Quinton had known the steward of Ravensden House for the best part of seven years, but had never actually heard him speak of his family.
‘Brothers, too. They’ve only hanged one of them, far as I know.’
The unlikely pair passed through the square, brooding Bishop’s Gate itself and entered the Moor Fields. Those broad spaces were empty of their usual clientele of hawkers, vendors, jugglers and whores. A few stray cattle grazed forlornly; an occasional horseman or pedestrian scurried along one of the paths criss-crossing the fields, hoping by haste to avoid any potential source of infection, such as the man and woman making for a decaying, narrow house almost in the shadow of the Moor Gate itself.
In ordinary times, this building was known for the openness of its door; or at least, its openness to men of all ranks and conditions with sufficient coin to purchase the wares within. Now, though, the door was marked with the tell-tale red cross.
‘As we feared, mistress,’ said Musk. ‘Time to go back, I think. You’ve done all you could. My Lord wouldn’t expect more of us, going into the way of the plague and the like.’
But Cornelia Quinton was to be daunted neither by Musk’s entreaties nor by the regulations to prevent the spread of the plague. With barely a sideways glance to see whether or not she was observed, she strode to the door and hammered loudly upon it.
‘Have we come so far to be deterred by some paint on a door, Musk?’
They heard steps upon the flagstones within. Someone came up to the door, stopped, listened, but did not move away. Cornelia hammered again.
‘Begone, in God’s name!’ cried a quivering woman’s voice from within. ‘We’re closed for business. Three cases of plague within – may God have mercy upon all our souls. And besides, you’ll be arrested –’
‘We seek one of the bawds – one of the girls. She uses the name of Lugg, or did when she was at the Spanish dame’s establishment in Drury Lane.’
There was silence behind the door; for even in plague-time, a brothel keeper remained alive to the possibility of turning a profit. ‘Lugg, you say? And what would you be doing with her?’
Musk nudged Cornelia. ‘Constable,’ he said, nodding in the direction of the Moor Gate.
Cornelia turned and saw three men checking buildings, alleys and outhouses. The bastions of the law had not yet seen the man and woman concealed within the archway of the house further up the street, but it would be only moments before they did.
‘Admit us, madam,’ hissed Cornelia, ‘and we will pay you five guineas at once.’ Musk shook his head vigorously and gripped Cornelia’s arm, but she shrugged him off. ‘Another five if you can show us the girl. And if she is the one we seek, much more to carry her away with us.’ There was a silence of calculation behind the door. ‘We have no time, madam! Is it yes or no?’
There was a sound of a bolt being drawn back, and the door opened. Cornelia and Musk stepped within, and the door was smartly locked shut behind them.
‘Five guineas, then,’ said the woman’s voice. ‘Let’s see it, Dutch-woman.’
Seeing anything at all took some moments, for with all the windows shuttered and no candles lit, the hallway was in almost complete darkness. The house stank of decay and a strange, indefinable yet revolting sweetness. Somewhere upstairs, a girl was sobbing.
Gradually, Musk and Cornelia made out the shape and something of the appearance of the creature in front of them. A short, bent woman, it was clear, but it was impossible to tell her age; she wore a mask over her head, obscuring it entirely but for two slits cut for her eyes.
Cornelia took out a heavy purse and handed it to the old whoremistress. ‘You’re running a mighty risk, Dutchwoman,’ she said, opening the purse to estimate the amount of coin within. ‘Double risk, indeed – catching the plague or being arrested for breaking the plague laws. Or both. With a war on, they could probably hang you for treason, too. You must want my girl mighty badly, so I think you can’t be seeking her for the usual reasons, are you?’
‘Show her to us,’ demanded Cornelia.