by Ross King
Sir Ambrose had taken exception to this particular line of reasoning. He claimed that the men were looting the crates, though Captain Quilter failed to understand why anyone-even someone who kept in his locker the caul of a newborn child-should wish to avail himself of those grisly treasures. But in the end he supported the claims of his passenger, ordering that the ninety-nine boxes stay in the hold. They would yet provide ballast for the ship if moved-but quickly, quickly-to the port side.
So for the next half an hour, as the noxious water crept steadily across the deck of the hold and collected foot-deep in the corners, a team of men laboured to shift the crates to higher ground. They were resealed after their gruesome contents had been replaced-a horrifying task, one before which even the boldest of sailors queasily shrank-and then carried to the port side, stacked on pallets, lashed tightly together and packed with shattered timbers and other bits of dunnage scavenged from the deck. Another team of men was assigned the task of cutting scuttles through the decks so that a third team with canvas buckets at the ready could begin the job of bailing. But all of these frantic efforts were for naught, Quilter realised soon after he and the other half of the crew had scrambled up the ladders to the fo'c'sle, for the Bellerophon was listing as badly as ever. It was only a matter of time, a few minutes at most, before she went down, cargo and all.
The rain had ceased at last, but the northeaster was blowing as hard as ever. Humpbacked waves were rushing at the ship with their white scythes of foam. Pinchbeck and a handful of men were gathered on the fo'c'sle deck, attempting to stanch a leak in the starboard bow. Two of the hands were plunging a canvas-wrapped basket into the water near the hole, using a long pole, hoping to get the basket close enough to the breach for the rope-yams inside the basket to be shaken loose and drawn inside to plug the leak. Pinchbeck had already tried, without success, to pass a sail under the bows of the ship. Now the canvas was floating helplessly away from the port quarter, an enormous squid billowing its tentacles and returning to its subterranean lair. Three men had been sent to the sail-locker for another, but Quilter could see how hopeless all of it was. He could make out, a short distance away on the leeward side, an enormous sandbar, the Margate Hook, half-exposed by the ebbing tide. There was no hope now, he realised. The ship would break apart on the reef by the time the men returned.
'Not nearly enough water, Captain,' the bo'sun screamed over the howls of the wind as the basket was thrust below the water for the tenth time. 'Low tide! Barely four fathoms! We've run aground! Couldn't get the sail to pass under her! Too much wind!' He paused to point to where the men, their hands red and stiff in the cold, were grappling with the basket. 'The basket neither!'
'Keep trying!'
Quilter held his breath as the basket disappeared from view with a muffled splash. The Bellerophon had tipped further sideways by now, her foremast, bent awry at the top, was almost touching the water. It was impossible to stand on the mountainous slope of the slick fo'c'sle deck without clutching something for support. Already the first waves had begun flooding over the starboard gunwale. The shore wavered and beckoned on the port side, dangerously close. Quilter could hear the call of gulls and thought he smelled the scent of pastureland. So was this where death would claim them, no more than a musket-shot from shore? Within sight of trees and in view of flocks of sheep calmly chewing their cuds? A few seconds later the basket bobbed uselessly to the surface to a chorus of curses.
'There's no hope, Captain!' Pinchbeck had straightened and was wiping at his brow with a bloodied handkerchief. 'I say we abandon ship.'
But Quilter had turned away and was watching with dazed detachment the clouds piling up in the east and beginning their fleet journeys inland. His fingers and cheeks were frozen, his feet now half submerged in water. The Margate Hook was even closer now, the beacon winking palely in its ancient timber lighthouse. In a minute at most they would be driven by the waves on to the reef.
'I say we abandon ship!' Pinchbeck repeated, turning to the men on the fo'c'sle when Quilter made no reply. 'Prepare the longboats!'
'There's no time,' muttered Quilter to himself as a couple of hands started aft towards the boats suspended in their hammocks. But before they could take a half-dozen steps they were interrupted by a cry from the waist.
'Captain!' One of the sailors, a topman, was gripping the foremast with one hand and pointing astern with the other. 'Look! A ship! There!'
Quilter squinted into the wind. The vessel had appeared on the starboard quarter, her bowsprit and foremasts missing, the rest of her poles bare or else wrapped in shreds of canvas. She was hopelessly adrift, with her hull riding low in the water and one of her yards pivoting like the sails of a windmill. When Quilter narrowed his eyes he was able to make out a few men on her quarterdeck, another group struggling to lower one of the longboats into the sea leaping about her waist. Even from this distance he could read the name inscribed on her bow. The Star of Lübeck. A second later he saw that the three men on the quarterdeck were dressed in black. Through the mist they looked no more than shadows.
But then the view was lost, for at that moment the hull of the Bellerophon struck the submerged edge of the Margate Hook and began breaking apart. She slid along the reef for half the length of her keel, timbers screaming and masts toppling before she reached a shuddering halt with her stem and bowsprit nosing downwards into the exposed shingle. Then she tipped agonisingly to starboard with the bowsprit snapping and the hull rupturing as its planks bowed and cracked and their treenails popped free like corks. Roiling water crashed across the splintering decks a few seconds later, and Captain Quilter and his crew were flung into the grey jaws of the sea.
Chapter Eleven
The Navy Office was casting an enormous shadow across St. Olave's when I returned to Seething Lane. The building appeared even larger in daylight, a massive structure that with its jettied storeys and tarred timbers looked like a huge frigate that had run aground in the middle of London. This impression was strengthened when I slipped past the porter's lodge and stepped through the heavy oak doors that had been unbattened a moment earlier. Dozens of clerks and messenger boys scurried about the wooden floor like deckhands making ready for a storm, and through the open door of a large office I glimpsed two or three captains conferring over a map whose corners were pinned to a table by anchor-shaped paperweights. The sight of their handsome faces raddled by tropical suns reminded me that, while I stayed home in my shop, other men were sailing to the ends of the earth, exploring new continents and navigating mysterious rivers. I felt hopelessly out of place.
Two days had passed since my shop was sacked. By the middle of the previous afternoon Nonsuch Books had been restored to normal, or nearly so. There is no disaster so great, in my experience, that it cannot be mended with a folding-stick, a gimlet and a sewing-frame. For hours on end the shop had gonged and echoed with the reports of frantic and unremitting industry. A joiner repaired the green door and restored it to its hinges, while a locksmith replaced the lock with an even stronger one. The joiner also measured and hung five new walnut shelves, which I quickly lined with books. Monk and I had collected the remainder of them from the floor and then set about refurbishing the most damaged ones. I estimated that we would be ready for business in a day or two at most.
This morning I left the shop in Monk's care and returned to Seething Lane-not to creep into St. Olave's churchyard but to make enquiries at the Navy Office, which seemed as likely a place as any to investigate Sir Ambrose's voyage to the Empire of Guiana. I had decided that I might learn more about my mysterious antagonists-perhaps even about Henry Monboddo-if I knew more about Sir Ambrose. I was hoping the log book for the Philip Sidney might still exist, or perhaps its collection of sea-cards or some other memorabilia. I also thought it might be possible to lay my hands on a copy of the Lord High Chancellor's report on Raleigh's disastrous expedition of 1617-18.
But after two hours at the Navy Office I found myself none the wiser. I was
kept waiting on a bench as the bells of St. Olave's struck nine o'clock, then ten. The captains came and went with the rolled-up maps tucked under their brocaded arms. The clerks squeaked across the floorboards or bent over their desks, quills waggling briskly. It was eleven o'clock by the time I was summoned forward, only to find myself traipsing from one cramped cubby-hole to another. Not one of the clerks claimed to have heard of a captain named Sir Ambrose Plessington; nor could they think where either his ship's log or the Chancellor's report might be found. One of these manikins suggested the office's old quarters in Mincing Lane, while another plumped for the Tower, which he claimed housed some of the Chancery records. A third explained that the Navy Office was in a state of upheaval because Cromwell's old commissioners had been sacked and the new ones appointed by the King were unlikely to locate forty-year-old records, since they had not yet learned how to find their desks without getting lost.
Noon had arrived by the time I left the Navy Office, resolved that it was time to search elsewhere for Sir Ambrose. I threaded my way through the crowds to Tower Wharf, where dozens of lighters and pinnaces were gathered beside the quays like herds of patient livestock. For ten minutes I tramped up and down the wharf, bumping into dockers with their booming casks and cursing under my breath, before I finally found an empty scull and clambered inside.
On the incoming tide it took almost thirty minutes to reach Wapping. The hamlet stood a mile downstream from Tower Wharf and consisted of little more than a row or two of stilted houses that overhung the banks of the Lower Pool. From my turret-room I could sometimes see its timber-yard and the steeple of the church, but never had I set foot there. This morning, however, I hoped to find an old man named Henry Biddulph, who had lived in Wapping for the best part of seventy years. He had been Clerk of the Acts for the Navy until 1642, at which point most of the ships in the fleet had defected to Cromwell, and Biddulph, faithful to King Charles, had lost his job. Since then he had occupied himself by composing a history of the Navy from the time of Henry VIII-a gargantuan work that after eighteen years and three volumes had failed to reach the Spanish Armada of 1588. It had also failed to sell many copies, though I dutifully stocked all three volumes, since over the years Biddulph had become one of my best customers. He visited Nonsuch House several times a month, and I tracked down dozens of books for him. He knew as much about ships, I suspected, as I knew about books, and I was now hoping that he might give me some information in return.
'Captain' Biddulph (as he was known to his neighbours) appeared to be a man of mark in Wapping, though the house to which I was directed from the hamlet's lone tavern was a humble affair, a tiny timber cottage with a prolapsed roof and an overgrown garden. Two windows at the front overlooked the river, two at the rear a timber-yard from which there arose a terrific clamour of hammers and saws. But the noise failed to disturb Biddulph, who was at work on volume number four when I tapped at his door with the tip of my thorn-stick. He recognised me at once and I was quickly invited inside.
I had always liked Biddulph. He was a spry old man with merry blue eyes and a monkish fringe of white hair that stood erect over his ears like the plumicorns of an owl. And as I surveyed the clutter of his study I was pleased to see that he was a man after my own heart. All of his money appeared to have been spent on either books or shelves to hold them. Indeed, most of the volumes in their morocco bindings looked better attired than their owner, who was wearing a pair of scuffed breeches and a tattered leather jerkin. Having seen him only in Nonsuch House, in my own environs, it was strange to meet him on different ground, here in his own little nest with its yellowed engravings of ships pinned to the wall. As I watched a ginger tomcat crawl through the window and on to his lap I reflected with a pinch of sorrow how poorly I knew even my most faithful customers.
After he served us a dinner of spitchcocked eels cooked on a gridiron, we retreated to his study, where he urged me to sample a new beverage called 'rumbullion', or 'rum' for short. It was a hellish fluid that seemed to scald the gullet and cloud the brain.
'Twice as strong as brandy,' he chuckled merrily, noting my grimace. 'Sailors in the West Indies call it "Kill-Devil". It's distilled from molasses. A captain I know smuggles the odd keg back from Jamaica for me. He drops it in Wapping before his ship docks at the Legal Quays.' He chuckled again, but then his blue gaze turned serious and enquiring. 'But you have not come all the way to Wapping to drink rum, Mr. Inchbold.'
'No, indeed,' I murmured, trying to catch a breath that the drink had pummelled from my chest. 'No, Mr. Biddulph, I've come to enquire about a ship.'
'A ship?' He seemed surprised. 'Well, well. And which one might that be?'
At first neither the Philip Sidney nor her captain meant anything to Biddulph. But as I explained why I believed that the ship had sailed on Raleigh's final voyage, he proceeded to squint at the plumtree timbers overhead and chant softly under his breath, 'Plessington, Plessington,' as if the name were some sort of charm. A moment later he clapped his hands together, startling the ginger tom.
'Yes, yes, yes-now I remember. Of course, of course. Captain Plessington! How could I forget?' He had lodged a quid of tobacco in his cheek and now paused to void a stream of juice into a pot between his feet. 'It's just that these days I live in another century,' he said, pointing at his tiny work-table, on which I glimpsed among the pile of volumes a copy of Fazeby's True Report of the Destruction of the Invincible Armada. So the decisive events of 1588, I realised, had at long last been reached. 'I spend so much of my time in the reign of Queen Bess that sometimes my tired old brain gets fuddled. But Captain Plessington-yes, yes, I remember his ship.' He was nodding his head vigorously. 'Indeed I do, Mr. Inchbold. Very well.' But all at once he ceased his nodding, and his merry blue eyes narrowed once more. 'What is it you wish to know about her?'
'Anything you might tell me,' I said with a shrug. 'I believe Plessington was granted a charter to build her in 1616. I'm curious about her voyage, if in fact it ever took place.'
'Oh, it took place, Mr. Inchbold.' Biddulph was nodding again as he stroked the cat, which had draped itself across his knees. 'And you're in luck, for I can tell you about the charter. That and much more, if you so wish. You see, I was in the Navy Office at the time, assistant to the Clerk of the Acts, so I saw all of the various contracts and bill-books for the Philip Sidney.' He cocked a white eyebrow at me. 'And a strange tale they told, Mr. Inchbold.'
For a moment the woodpeckering in the timber-yard seemed to fade, and I heard the waves slopping at the supports of the house. I tried to sound casual as I fumbled with my cup. 'What strange tale might that be?'
'Well, the entire expedition was a strange one, Mr. Inchbold. As I have no doubt you're aware. But bear with me, please…' He was squinting at the timber-beams again and slowly working the cud in his bulging cheek. 'Old men must take things one step at a time. It's so easy for an old brain to confuse one thing with another.'
'By all means, Mr. Biddulph.' I could feel a pulse beating in my throat now, slowly and thickly. I reclined in the chair and tried another scorching sip of rumbullion.
But Biddulph's old brain was sharp as ever, and details were not long in coming. 'The charter was granted, so far as I remember, in the summer of 1616,' he explained after a short rumination, still studying the cracked beams. 'Just after Raleigh was released from the Tower. Construction on the ship began soon afterwards. She was built at the dockyard at Woolwich, where all of our finest warships have been built. The Harry Grace à Dieu was built there for Henry VIII, and the Royal Sovereign for the late King Charles. God rest his soul,' he added after a short pause.
'And the Philip Sidney?' I prompted when another reflective silence threatened to grow between us.
'Ah, yes. The Philip Sidney. She was built by the master shipwright, Phineas Pett. Quite a task, even for a man of Pett's abilities. Six hundred tons burden with better than a hundred guns on her decks. She was even bigger than the Destiny, which was also built at Wool
wich. It was a good eight months from the day the team of horses dragged her keel timbers into place until the night when she lurched down the greased slipways and on to a spring tide. I was at the dockyards that evening. Prince Charles himself performed the honours with a goblet of wine. Scarcely more than a boy at the time. "God bless her and all who sail in her…" Well, that's a wheeze, is it not,' he muttered darkly, 'considering all that happened. I remember thinking that it was a wonder she was ever ready to sail in the first place.'
'Because of her size?'
'Not only that. You see, none of us in the Navy Office expected she would ever be finished. The whole Raleigh expedition looked like folly from the start. Sir Walter was a braggart, everyone knew that. First there was the business of founding colonies in the swamps of Virginia. Then he spent a baker's dozen years in the Tower hatching his crack-brained schemes about discovering some mine in the middle of the Guianan jungle. Sheer folly, I say. After all, the white spar from the Lion's Whelp tested at Goldsmiths' Hall by the Comptroller of the Mint-'
'Excuse me,' I interrupted. 'The Lion's Whelp…?' The name sounded familiar.
He nodded at one of the engraved ships pinned to the wall above his desk. 'Raleigh's ship on his first voyage to Guiana.'
'Ah… yes.' I remembered Raleigh's Discoverie of the large, rich, and beautifull Empire of Guiana, a slim volume that I stocked on my shelves, and one I had seen on Alethea's list of books missing from Pontifex Hall. One that had gone missing along with The Labyrinth of the World. 'Of course.'
'As I say, the white spar brought back from Guiana in 1595 showed as little as twenty ounces of gold per ton of ore. A risible amount, one hardly enough to make digging a mine in England worthwhile, let alone one thousands of miles away in the middle of the jungle. Then there was also the fact that the waters of the Orinoco had never been reliably mapped, not even by the Spaniards, even though the best engineers from the School of Navigation and Cartography in Seville had been tramping through the Guianan forests for decades. As far as the gold mines went, the Spaniards had only the word of a few tortured savages to rely upon, and everyone knows that a victim always tells his torturer whatever fantasies he wishes to hear.' He paused to take another recourse to the spittoon. 'Worst of all, though, was the Spanish Ambassador.'