Pistoleer: Pirates

by Smith, Skye

  With Anso left in charge of the crews to arrange shore leave, Daniel crossed the city to Holborn and made his second ever visit to Warwick House. What a difference two weeks had made. Rather than being an empty palace where the bored staff kept themselves busy polishing everything, yet again, today it was filled with dinner guests ... by invitation only.

  Even wearing his fine navy blue cloak with matching cavaliers hat he could not get beyond the squad of gatekeepers. If you weren't on their list, and couldn't prove your identity, or at least show an invitation card, then you just did not pass the gate. He couldn't fault such security, not in these dangerous times of plots against parliamentarians, for parliamentarians the guests all seemed to be.

  Luckily one of the arriving guests was William Strode, who owed Daniel his freedom, and perhaps his life. Once he was through the gate, William made straight for the house, and pushed his way into the front of the greeting line. Moments later a valet came running out with instructions to escort a Captain Daniel into the library by the side door. He was in. Instead of saying, "I told you so" to the gatekeep, he flipped him a silver coin and told him to keep up the good work.

  Both Teesa and Britta were waiting for him in the library. Both were exquisitely dressed in silken gowns with matching shawls, which allowed them to show off or to warm their bare shoulders and cleavage depending on the men around them. "Look at him,” Teesa exclaimed, "he is a mess. We'll have to take him up the back stairs and find him something to wear."

  "Oy, this is my best cloak. As fine as any man's here."

  "Yes, but you have to take your cloak off to eat, don't you dearie,” Britta told him sternly. "You take him upstairs, while I fetch one of the valets. I'll meet you in our room." As she turned and left the room, she left behind the faintest scent of spring flowers.

  "Lilies of the valley? In winter?" Daniel said, sniffing.

  "It's the latest thing from Paris. I'll explain later,” Teesa replied. "Now come this way ... to the back stairs before anyone sees you."

  "So you are still happy here? No problems with Susannah, or Britta, .... or with Warwick?"

  "Britta has become Susannah's companion as I have become Robert's. It is a good match. Susannah and Britta talk of clothes, and shopping, and they gossip endlessly about other women, while Robert and I talk of, well, more manly things." She suddenly turned to face him and they bumped into each other. "He took me riding. He almost had a heart attack when I galloped by him standing on the saddle. Susannah would have scolded me had she seen, but he gave me the biggest hug."

  They waited in her bedroom, and she was silent as if she had nothing to say to him, or perhaps she had so much to say that she didn't know quite where to begin. He walked around and touched things and looked at things until he couldn't stand the silence anymore. "So what is this dinner all about?"

  "Um, Parliament has been recalled, so this dinner is to remind each other of who is who. It's very noisy downstairs because of the latest pamphlets posted all over London." She picked up a limp piece of paper from a small table and took it to him so he could read it.

  "The posting was paid for by the Irish Rebel, Phelim O'Neill." she told him. "It is a copy of his commission from the king to raise the Irish up against the Parliament in Westminster. All the noise downstairs is the debate about whether it is true or not. Susannah is livid. She had planned a pleasant fancy dress dinner so the members could bring their wives."

  She watched Daniel inch through the words. He could read better than she, but neither of them were fast readers. "Oh, and you must remember that Susannah has already introduced Britta and I as her nieces."

  "Not nieces,” Daniel moaned. "The men who neglect their wives will be all over the both of you."

  "As her nieces, not Robert's. That is very different."

  Between his two niece-daughters and Warwick' personal valet, Daniel was eventually kitted out well enough for the dinner table, and he then had the great pleasure of walking between the two lasses down the grand front staircase and into the dining hall. Almost as soon as they left go of his arms, each of the girls was surrounded by the single men, or rather, the unaccompanied men.

  Warwick was quick to rescue Teesa from them, but that made things worse for Britta, and she was pulling her shawl tighter and tighter around her neck. One fat old man in particular was drooling over her, so Daniel went and asked one of the hovering maids where Britta would be sat. He was told that Britta was to have Susannah on one side of her, and tonight's guest of honor on the other side. He assumed that he was the guest of honor and plunked himself down in that seat.

  When it came time to be seated, the fat drool of a man helped Britta with her chair, and then just stared at the Daniel sitting in the next chair. "Sirah,” he spoke through his bulbous nose, "you are a cad for not rising whilst the ladies were sat, and confound you ... get out of my seat."

  Daniel looked across Britta's closely held shawl and caught Susannah's eye. "Susannah dear, aren't I the guest of honor?"

  "Not tonight Captain,” Susannah replied with a nervous smile. "May I introduce you to yet another Robert. Lord Robert Devereux, the Earl of Essex and my Robert's cousin. Robert, this is Captain Daniel Vanderus, ugh" She was suddenly at a loss for words to explain Daniel without making him her own in-law. "ugh, Britta's current guardian. Danny, be a dear and go and sit beside the Cromwells."

  Daniel looked about and at the far, far end of the table, Betty Cromwell was just being seated. As he stood to change places with Essex he poked a stiff two fingers into the man's ample stomach and hissed, "Her guardian, understand?" The man grunted and nodded.

  As he walked down the length of the table he realized that this table truly had two ends. At one end sat the aristocracy of the House of Lords, and at the other end sat the modest country gentlemen from the back benches of the House of Commons. All of them, lords and gents alike, were followers of John Pym's Reform Party. The Lords were of the Broughton Castle Circle, which included Warwick and his partners in the Providence Company such as William Fiennes, the Viscount Saye-and-Sele, Robert Greville the Baron Brooke, and Edward Montague the Lord Mandeville.

  Close to them sat John Pym, John Hampden, Denzil Holles, and Sir Arthur Haselrig who were currently the most powerful men in the House of Commons. Daniel remembered what Warwick had once told him, that the common thread between all these reformers was the Providence Company. The lowliest of the guests included the Cromwells and the Strodes. Betty eagerly pointed him to the empty chair beside her and stopped another man from sitting in it while he got there. At least Daniel would sit next to Betty, a real person rather than a pompous politician.

  "Britta and Teesa look lovely," Betty told him. "I wish I had known they were in London, especially since we live so close. My father is the James Bourchier who lives at the far end of Warwick's grounds. He is a neighbour and with a connecting gate. We live just two doors down from him."

  Daniel had met old man Bourchier, the wealthy tanner who owned a goodly part of Smithfield livestock market. He was dour enough and penny pinching enough to be a Scot, which was why the lads of Smithfield called him the 'jammy butcher', but never to his face. He hadn't realized how close the Cromwell house was to Warwick House because he hadn't realized that their street ran along the far side of Warwick's spacious grounds. If there was a connecting gate, then Teesa and Bridget could visit together without leaving the safety of the grounds. He couldn't wait to tell Teesa.

  Betty was still speaking, "Bridget has been miserable since we moved here. In Ely she was free to gad about, but in London she cannot go anywhere without an escort. How was the New World? Did our Brownist friends reach Massachusetts safely? How is it there? Would Oliver like it?" She encouraged him to tell her everything.

  They were interrupted by the formal words and prayers that began the dinner, followed by various toasts including one to the hostess, Susannah, who had done nothing to help the staff prepare the meal or the table but graciously accepted all the prais
e. The harvest was in so the meal was of great variety, and hunting season was in progress, so the price of any seasonal food was at its lowest for the year, and that always brought down the prices of all other foods.

  At this dinner it was the ladies who, after eating, retired to the library for sweetmeats and coffee. This was unusual but it made sense because there were but a third as many women as men, and the men needed the long tables of the dining hall for their after dinner discussions. Daniel soon wished he had left with the women, for the men's talk was all politics, which made sense since everyone else at the table had a seat either in the House of Commons or in the House of Lords.

  Everyone was politely quiet while John Pym spoke, for the man was poorly and short of breath. He proposed that Parliament be completely uncooperative to Charlie and his Cabinet on dealing with the Irish Rebels. His faint words were met with a rousing acceptance, but the effort so exhausted him that he asked Oliver to speak the rest of it for him.

  Oliver's booming voice announced that some document called The Remonstrance was finished and ready for him to introduce into Parliament. "If it does not pass," he grumbled, "I will surely leave this kingdom and go and live in Massachusetts." From the little that Daniel understood, it was a list of actions that Charlie had taken during the dozen years that he had ruled without calling Parliament, or more likely a list of his actions that needed correcting. The men showed their support for the document by pounding on the tables.

  When Oliver opened the topic of the charter published by the Irish Rebels, the one that Teesa had the pamphlet for, everyone began shouting at once. One view was that the charter was a clever forgery by the rebels and a tactic to keep Charlie at odds with Parliament so that confusion and inaction would slow any response to the rebellion. Another view was that since the leaders of the rebels, like O'Neill, were Catholics newly returned from serving in the Imperial armies, then this rebellion was a papist conspiracy. It was against not only the Protestant Irish Lords, but also against the Presbyterian Lords of Scotland who now had plantations in Ireland.

  While everyone else was having their say, Daniel was fuming. It was that word 'plantation' and its two meanings: the innocent meaning where it was used in place of 'settlement' or 'colony', and the other meaning where it was a foreign estate owned by absentee Lords, run for profit by hired managers , and was dependant on forced labour.

  At the next break in the discussion, Daniel stood up and said as much in his most formal English. "I suspect that what is behind this Irish rebellion is not a papist plot, though Rome would be foolish to miss the opportunity of encouraging it. What is behind it is the continuous destruction and enslavement of a people, namely the Gael Irish. These are the original people of Ireland from before the time of the Vikings and the Normans, and their clans live in the peasant villages that are standing in the way of company plantations."

  "Sit down,” Oliver, a few seats away, warned him with a hiss, "most of these men have investments in Irish plantations."

  "My friend Oliver has advised me to sit down, but not until after I have told him that Ireland is just one example of plantations running folk off their traditional lands for no other reason than quick profit. I have seen it in the Americas and in the Fens of Lincolnshire, but I am told that it is happening everywhere that local clans still hold their land communally.

  What is worse is that in Virginia the plantations are experimenting with breeding a new race of slaves from Negro fathers and Gael Irish mothers. If you want peace in Ireland, then ban plantations, before they spread their evil ways and turn Englishmen into slave-owners like the Spanish." He sat down to a silence from the table. He would have preferred a loud outcry. The silence meant that they were ignoring both he and his advice.

  Warwick was signaling to Oliver, and Daniel only noticed it because he was sitting beside him. He knew signal. It was to ask Oliver to hurry on to the main topic of the evening. Oliver stood and said, "I propose that on behalf of both houses of Parliament, the Earl of Essex take immediately control of the armed forces of southern England."

  There it was, Daniel thought, the reason why Essex was the guest of honour. Essex was one of the few Lords who, like his cousin Warwick, was in opposition to Charlie. At least Essex had long experience fighting for the Dutch against the Empire. Daniel wondered if Charlie's decision to choose the Earl of Lindsey as his captain-general rather than Essex was the real reason that this man had become friendly with the Reformers.

  "This decision was not made lightly,” Cromwell continued saying what Pym would have said if he hadn't been poorly, though the words would have been scripted by John Hampden for Pym. Pym the orator, Hampden the brains, and Warwick the money behind the Reformers. "Lord Devereux is a seasoned veteran of military campaigns." Cromwell bowed to Essex as the thumping of hands on the table grew to a thunder.

  As if on queue, other men began to speak out in favour of Essex, and Daniel took the opportunity to whisper to Oliver, "So why is Warwick supporting Essex as the general when he could do the job better himself?"

  "Shhh," Oliver hushed him while looking to see who else may have heard this seemingly obvious question. He replied in a whisper, "Warwick doesn't want it. He already has the London Trained Bands in his pocket, and that is enough for him."

  Of course Daniel already knew this, for it was his musket deal with Warwick which had brought the Trained Bands over to the Earl. His next question of Oliver was, "Why are you speaking ideas that obviously came from John Hampden?"

  "Because Pym is too short of breath of course,” Oliver began, but at Daniel's bent eye he added. "John Hampden is my cousin. His mother is my aunt."

  Daniel sighed at how inbred this group of powerful men were, and all of them revolved around Warwick and his Providence Company. Even the Queen's current favourite advisor was the Earl of Holland, who was Henry Rich, Warwick's younger brother. Oliver was whispering in his ear and he had to concentrate to hear the low words in the midst of more table thumping.

  "Warwick must be kept in reserve for command of the navy, after all it is he navy which is the kingdom's protective wall against the Papist Empires on the continent and their supporters in Ireland."

  "Ahh,” Daniel smiled knowingly, "so in order to stop Essex arguing over who will be the general of the navy, you will first make Essex the general of the southern army."

  "You are too canny by half, Daniel Vanderus,” Oliver hissed, "now swear to me to keep this to yourself, and far away from Essex."

  "Not a word will leave my lips,” Daniel promised. "No one wants Warwick in charge of the navy any more than I do. Is there anything I can do to help?" His mind was leaping through everything that Warwick had ever told him about his companies and his ships and his privateers. With Warwick in charge of the navy England would have two governments. The king and the Providence Company.

  Warwick had a deep personal hated of the Spanish Empire, so his navy would sail under a foreign policy that would take advantage of the loss of the Spanish fleet to the Dutch last year. English colonies and privateers would work together and would boom. He may even ally the English Navy to the Dutch Confederate Navy. It would be a very good time, a very good time indeed, for his clan and his ships to have a license to settle and trade in the New World signed by Warwick himself.

  The talk at the table was becoming more and more boring. It had switched to the diplomatic strategies that these men would use to get all the things they had just discussed passed through the votes of the two houses of Parliament. The big hurdle, as always, was getting the House of Lords to make a decision, any decision at all, especially while the king was away in Scotland.

  With a smiling bow to his host, Daniel excused himself and went to relieve himself. Actually he had to relieve himself twice by the time he had shared two jugs of ale with the various guards who were sitting on a bench just outside the back door to the kitchen. These were the personal guards of the various lords who were in the meeting. Gone were the days when critics of t
he king could travel alone in safety.

  After his second pee, he decided to join the women who had retired to the library. They welcomed him, after all he was tall and comely and would rather speak to them about what new fancies the women were spending money on, than about politics. Unfortunately, Essex was already in the library, and hovering around Britta. Hovering was the wrong word for he was slowly herding her into a corner. When Britta threw him a pleading look, Daniel smiled at the older women he was speaking with and moved slowly towards her and the hovering Essex. Essex was not amused. Words were exchanged, which became heated.

  "Sir, your rough company is not fit to be in the same room as this angelic damsel,” Essex eventually told him. "Remove yourself from her company. What is more, remove yourself from the women's company until their husbands have joined them."

  Now if Britta had been trained in the courtly manners of high born women, she would have uttered some nonsense to diffuse the growing row between these two half-drunk men. Instead she encouraged it hoping that Daniel would thoroughly thrash this fat old prig so she would no longer have to smell his foul breath, or put up with his drooling down her cleavage, or with his tiresome attempts to talk her into his bed.

  Other women were noticing that the only two men in the room were nose to nose and arguing over one of the hostess's fair nieces. Susannah wandered over with the intention of calming the two men, but just then Warwick entered the library with a pale looking Pym leaning heavily on his arm. They were all witness to Essex pulling his formal gloves out from under his ample belt. His intentions were clear to every eye watching. He was about to slap the young captains face with them and challenge him to a duel.