by J. D. Davies
'Well?' asked Cornelia, looking up from the gruesome illustrations in Galen just as a particularly vicious gust of wind carried a dead bird and some branches hard against the window.
'Roger's thinking of taking a command at sea,' I said, summarising the letter to rather less than its bare bones.
'Oh sweet God, not another one,' my wife said. 'Another sea-captain. Thirty years from now, there you will be, husband. You and Roger and my brother, the admirals of England, France and Nederland.
She chuckled, and took up another book from the table: Foxe's Book of Martyrs, a fine source of potentially grisly fates for the Lady De Vaux, most of them involving searingly painful immolations. Within moments, she was engrossed.
I returned to Roger's letter. 'He is convinced that he has two certain routes to the Grand Master's throne. One is to be the discoverer of an unlimited source of wealth, either the philosopher's stone of the alchemists or a great golden hill that is said to exist somewhere in Africa, or better, both.' I felt a sudden chill as I read that sentence. 'The other is to bring about the restoration of the Order's English and Scottish lands, lost during what you call your Reformation. Thus he takes a close interest in the affairs of your country, Matthew; almost as close an interest as he takes in promoting his dark ambitions. Indeed, it is said that he has an agent or agents in England even now. So beware of this man and those who serve him. From what I have gleaned of him, it would not surprise me if he sought to burn the entire population of England as heretics, whether or not they stand between him and his goals. But while England has such gallant swordsmen as Matthew Quinton to defend her, she need never fear... (There were several more paragraphs in this vein before Roger eventually reached his valediction.)... May both the Catholic and Protestant Gods watch over you, old friend, and my undying love to your dear Cornelia.
d'Andelys.'
I closed the letter, and as the wind again rattled the windows with a fury carried from the gates of Novgorod, my wife looked up with interest and anticipation.
'Well?' she demanded once more. 'There must have been more than him seeking a command, surely?'
'He sends his love,' I said.
My first moment of reckoning had come. A few days after the arrival of Roger's letter, a nondescript summons from Pepys took me to the Navy Office for a meeting to discuss the progress of preparations for the Guinea expedition; a meeting that would be attended by my new commanding officer and by the man who had inspired the entire scheme, the repugnant O'Dwyer himself. Thus it was a wholly miserable Captain Matthew Quinton who rode the short distance from Ravensden House on the Strand (whither I had moved to oversee the fitting of my ship) to the Navy Office, then housed in a rambling warren of buildings at Crutched Friars on Tower Hill. A torrential downpour in the shadow of Paul's Church did nothing to ameliorate my temper, for it brought to mind a troubling daydream of the Lady Louise standing at the altar within, waiting to be wed: not to my brother, but to me. Nor did the fact that almost an hour after the time specified for the start of the meeting, we were still awaiting the two men without whom it could not proceed. I occupied the time by making polite and inconsequential conversation with Pepys, but stole more than a few glances at his colleagues, the others of His Majesty's Principal Officers and Commissioners of the Navy. There, at the head of the table, sat old Sir John Mennes, the Comptroller of the Navy, a man so venerable that he had even commanded ships under my grandfather. Mennes had apparently been quite the handsome peacock in his younger days, or so my mother said, and he still had a face and eyes that betold the shadow of a witty, lusty man. He was a man of poetic bent; a rarity among our sea-officers, most of whom could barely tell one end of a quill from the other. Alas, time and the civil war had not been kind to John Mennes, who could now barely comptrol his own bowels, let alone the King's Navy. He was engaged in conversation with the man who ever led him by the nose, namely Sir William Batten, the Surveyor, a crafty, foul-mouthed old scoundrel who had defected from the Roundheads in the great revolt of the year forty-eight. Every now and again, Batten cast a hostile glance towards Pepys, whom he detested (chiefly because the righteous Pepys was particularly astute at exposing the Surveyor's embezzlements and incompetence alike). Pepys, still relatively inexperienced and in awe of the company, smiled nervously in return, especially when the talk of the great men turned to the growth of buggery amongst our gallants, so much so that pages began to complain against their masters for it.
'Captain Quinton,' whispered Pepys, 'I hear much mention of this word "buggery", but I have no notion of its meaning. Do you, sir?'
That a man perhaps seven years older than myself should be so ignorant (and innocent) was remarkable indeed. 'A matter best kept for another time, I think, Mister Pepys,' I said, as charitably as I could.
Across the table sat Sir George Carteret, Treasurer of the Navy. Sir George was sumptuous in every way: he still affected the dress of a young Cavalier, although he was well past fifty, and both his trim little beard and unwigged locks suggested a man trying desperately to preserve the fading remnants of his youth. He had been little better than a pirate in the civil wars, I had heard, and evidently prospered sufficiently to acquire a parcel of forest in the Americas, which he then somehow managed to elevate into a royal colony. He named it after the Channel island of his birth, from which he had plundered indiscriminately the trade of all nations; but they say it is never likely to prosper, this 'New Jersey' of his creation. Next to Carteret was the most distinguished of the company. This was Sir William Penn, no less, one of Cromwell's legendary generals-at-sea, now all too evidently chafing at the tedium of his shore-bound role as a commissioner of the navy. Penn was still quite a young man, barely forty (although impossibly ancient to my twenty-three-year-old self), and had the nondescript broad face of a provincial choirmaster. Yet he had been a hero of the Commonwealth's war against the Dutch, almost ten years before, and later commanded a mighty expedition of conquest into the Caribbee, duly liberating Jamaica from the tyrannical yoke of Spain, placing it under the tyrannical yoke of Cromwell instead. A timely defection to the royalist cause just before the Restoration ensured Sir William's place as one of the most valued naval advisers to our King and Lord High Admiral. On this day, though, Penn's features were creased with anguish. This might have been due in part to his annoyance at the delay of our proceedings, but it was more likely thanks to the gout; his foot was bandaged and resting upon a stool, and even the slightest movement made him wince as though he was skewered by a death-wound.
There was a disturbance beyond the door. I heard the voice of one of the clerks, low and respectful, followed by an almighty explosion of Irishaccented wrath: Hell's arse, boy, do you not know who I am? The door was thrown open with great force. Framed within it was an embarrassed clerk (young Hayter, who would become Secretary of the Admiralty) gripped at the ear by a square-shouldered, sharp-nosed man of forty or so. His chin was scarred and he sported a great wig, but the most remarkable thing about him was his hands, which were truly vast in proportion to the rest of him. Penn said mildly, 'You're late, Major Holmes.'
The commanding officer of the Guinea expedition released the clerk, who retreated in disarray, and bowed to the assembled company. 'I crave your indulgence, esteemed sirs all. A matter of honour. A wholly impudent captain of the dragoons. Just ran him through in the Convent-Garden.'
Only Mister Pepys was discomforted by this information—remarkably so, for his cheeks lost all their colour. The rest of us were, at bottom, swordsmen, albeit of the maritime variety, and we could all appreciate and sympathise with the veritable host of reasons that a gentleman like Major Robert Holmes might have had for fighting a duel with a fellow officer (albeit in express disregard of all the dire injunctions against duelling issued by the monarch whom we all served). This Holmes was already a legend among the Cavalier fraternity, although my brother and I looked upon him with a certain ambivalence: for he had always been the loyal lieutenant by land and sea of Prince Rupert
of the Rhine, the King's cousin, the very man that our mother blamed for our father's death on the battlefield of Naseby, eighteen years before. Even so, I had got to know him well during the summer, when his Reserve had been in the Middle Sea at the same time as my Wessex. My initial wariness had evaporated upon true acquaintance; indeed, we had got memorably drunk together at Leghorn. Thus I knew, as Pepys did not, that for all his blustering arrogance and hubris beyond measure, Robert Holmes was a man who would stand and fight for his friends, his country and his king to the last drop of his blood. Better, he had the rudest humour of almost any man I ever knew.
Mennes suggested that Holmes might wish to take his seat for the meeting. The major grunted, looked around in irritation and shouted, 'O'Dwyer, you pox-ridden renegade turd! Where the hell are you, man?'
My heart sank as my old prisoner appeared in the doorway, grinning broadly. He had buried Omar Ibrahim as entirely as he had once buried the young Brian Doyle O'Dwyer. He wore a red military coat with an opulent black baldric; his swarthy face was capped no more by a turban, but rather by a fashionable periwig. 'Pox-ridden renegade turd of a colonel if you please, Major Holmes!'
My heart now had no further to sink, but still it made the forlorn effort to batter its way out of my heel. Holmes and O'Dwyer had become friends. Of course they had. Two godless Irish rogues, out for themselves and the mountain of gold; the only surprise was that I had not anticipated it.
Fortunately, Holmes sat down between me and O'Dwyer, but not before the renegade had greeted me with insufferable good cheer: 'Captain Quinton! My saviour, no less! It truly gladdens my heart to see you, sir, and to know that we will be comrades-in-arms on this expedition.'
I bowed my head (for he was my superior officer, after all) but made no reply; it is always advisable to say nothing when there is a danger that opening one's mouth might project a torrent of vomit over the assembled company.
Thus the meeting finally began, although at first I was too engrossed in my own discomfort to take much notice. Batten insisted on reading out a long account of the condition of my Seraph and Holmes' Jersey, although we all knew that these were merely the reports from the master shipwrights recited verbatim, and that as there were no defects of note in either ship, there was precious little point in detaining the meeting with such an account. But Batten would have his say, for was he not His Majesty's Surveyor of the Navy, and should not such an elevated gentleman say his piece at such a meeting? I caught Penn's eye more than once, for he, the most distinguished and recently active seaman at the table, evidently felt as I did (perhaps because Batten's droning seemed to exacerbate his gout, causing him to fidget and shuffle in his chair). Holmes, too, thought thus; that much was clear from his frequent fidgeting, farting and picking of lice out of his wig. O'Dwyer, though, appeared serene, nodding sagely as Batten spoke, seemingly unaware of the fact that every man in that room would have gladly run him through if the King would but turn a blind eye to it.
Then it was Carteret's turn, and thankfully, he was briefer. But after all, Sir George had ten times Batten's intelligence and at least a hundred times his purse, so he had less need to assert his distinction. Penn, too, spoke briefly and to the point, for his interest was entirely in the military side of our expedition. With a large map of West Africa laid out upon the table, he leaned forward awkwardly to point a stick at a long estuary, almost half of the way down the west coast.
'I see the need for Captain Quinton's passage up the Gambia river,' he said, 'if Colonel O'Dwyer's mountain of gold is, indeed, but a few weeks' march from the navigable head of it, as he says.' Penn's glance at O'Dwyer expressed a boundless well of scepticism, but the ruddy Irishman merely nodded contentedly. 'My concern would be with the fort, here—' Penn pointed at an island, some miles up the river and in the very middle of the great stream. 'Do we know its current strength?'
Holmes said, 'I know that fort, Sir William. Sailed past it back in the year fifty-one, when the prince and I first got wind that there might be such a thing as this mountain of gold. Before we had the advantage of Colonel O'Dwyer's services, here.' He smiled at his fellow Irishman, who bowed his head in acknowledgment. I felt a surge of bile in my throat. 'It was still ruled by the Duke of Courland, then, before he sold it to the Dutch—although I hear he now disputes the validity of that sale. Jakob's fort, it was called. But I'm told the garrison hasn't changed much, if at all. A rag-tag of Dutchmen, Courlanders, God knows what. Hardly a concern to us. And if they challenge us—well...'
He left the sentence unfinished, for all in that company knew the ending full well. It was the ending that I had discussed with my serpentine good-brother, Sir Venner Garvey. The mountain of gold was not the only objective of our present expedition. If the fort in the river challenged us, we would take it. Meanwhile, Holmes was to sail along the coast, ostensibly to give all possible assistance to the trade of the Company of Royal Adventurers for Africa. This innocent-sounding instruction concealed a very labyrinth of subtleties. For the head of the Company was the King's brother James, Duke of York, the Lord High Admiral; its directors and shareholders were the greatest ministers and courtiers in the land. In other words, the Royal Adventurers were the political elite of the state masquerading as an innocuous private company. Moreover, no man attending that meeting in the Navy Office had any illusions about the nature of the 'assistance' that Holmes was to offer the Company, which had been granted possession of almost the whole coast of Africa, from Morocco down to Good Hope, for a thousand years—regardless of whether anyone else was already in occupation. Consequently, Holmes was to take every Dutch fort and ship that he could, all the way down to Cape Coast and beyond. If the Dutch objected, the outcome would be that desired, not-so-secretly, by most good and true Englishmen from King Charles down to the humblest street urchin. We would give the Dutch a war, and this time, we would finish them off.
O'Dwyer, who had been quite silent during all the seamen's talk, finally asserted himself. 'The fort's the least of the concerns, Sir William. The kings of those parts, and the Portugee f- factors who sell their slaves for them; they're the men.' His Irish lilt faltered from time to time, as though he was searching for an English word that he might not have spoken in thirty years. Quite suddenly I saw him as a mere boy of twelve or thirteen, snatched from his native shore for ever; I felt what might even have been an unsought glimmer of sympathy. 'Armies fifty thousand strong, some of them have got, and we're going up there with two ships. I said to the King, I said he should send at least the Sovereign of the Seas and a fleet of fifty—'
'Quite so,' said Holmes, 'but from what I observed, Colonel, all the kings of those parts are at each other's throats, and hate the Dutch, who hate the Courlanders, who hate the Portuguese, and so forth. Divide and conquer is the method, sir. And a gratifyingly cheap method it is, at that, as His Majesty had cause to say to me.'
'With respect, Colonel O'Dwyer,' said Pepys, 'I have read not a little about those parts, and have discoursed with some who have sailed in those waters, and I have never heard of one of the kings having an army as great as fifty thousand—'
Holmes flashed his most terrifying scowl in the direction of the Clerk of the Acts. 'Why, Mister Pepys, if the good colonel here talks of armies that large, then it must surely be true. Must it not, Mister Pepys?'
The Clerk glanced nervously from Holmes to O'Dwyer and back again, muttered something about it being so indeed, and blushed prodigiously before staring down at the floor. I felt not a little sympathy for him, partly because I, too, had drawn a similar conclusion from O'Dwyer's confident speech. Moreover, I could not forbear to wonder why such powerful kings as the renegade spoke of, with such large numbers of armed men and slaves available to them, had not long ago found and mined the mountain of gold, especially if it lay so little distance from the Gambia River. But this seemed to have occurred to no-one else, not even our supposedly omniscient sovereign, so I held my peace. Indeed, I had done little else the whole meeting; like Pepys,
I was more than a little in awe of these great men with their grand titles, and I was but the second in command of the expedition, or perhaps even third: the King's instructions, so precise on such matters as how the gold was to be mined and shipped back to England, were disconcertingly vague on the matter of the relative authority of Brian Doyle O'Dwyer and myself.
Penn returned to the perusal of his map, and pointed his stick slightly further north. 'It is indeed a complicated region, gentlemen,' he said. 'Dutch and Portuguese, as we have heard; Courlanders, and all the rest of them. And these native kings, of course. But I have a somewhat greater concern. Look here. Fort Saint Louis, an outpost of the Most Christian King. Not so many miles from the mouth of the Gambia. We would do well to avoid—eh—entanglements with the French, whatever we might do to the Dutch.'