by J. D. Davies
‘The stage? Jesus!’
With that, Larkin fired his own weapon, then bawled the order to the helmsman to bring the boat about. I lifted the musket to my shoulder. Surely there was something about checking the match? But the cord was glowing red, and that was surely right – And should I not check the pan?
A Spanish ball splintered the boat’s wale at my left side, and the fright made me squeeze the trigger.
The musket slammed into my shoulder, knocking me backwards. Only Larkin grabbing my arm saved me from falling out of the boat, and to my death in Sligo Bay. My eyes and nose streamed from the acrid cloud of smoke given off by the shot. I was deaf, the sound of my shot blasting out again and again in my head. But I could just hear a distant screaming, too, and knew it was not my own, nor that of any of the men behind me.
‘If you’re that lucky in war every time, my friend,’ Larkin was saying, ‘then I want to fight all the rest of my battles alongside you, by Christ!’
We were through our turn, and my senses returned as we made headway away from the Spaniard. There was no need to hide our oar splashes now, and the men were straining their backs with the effort. But our progress was slow, and even such a lubber as myself knew why. Rugg had timed the attack so we would go into Sligo Bay at the height of the flood tide. By the time we secured the ship, according to his reckoning, the ebb would have begun, and we would have an easier task of towing her out. But we were coming out of the bay much sooner than he had intended, which meant we were rowing against the tide. And it meant we were in a race against the horsemen we could see and hear ashore, carrying blazing torches as they galloped along the foreshore towards Rosses Point. A losing race, for even by night, a horseman will easily outstrip a row-boat.
‘The next quarter hour will be hot work,’ said Larkin.
So it proved. We were in the very middle of the channel between the Point and Coney Island when the first cannon fired from the shore. I saw the spout of water, perhaps ten yards off to our larboard.
‘Elevated to hit a ship’s hull,’ said the boatswain. ‘They’ll adjust the range downward—’
A second shot –
This time the waterspout erupted barely five yards directly astern. The boat pitched and rolled. Water soaked every one of us. Now the cannon were joined by musket fire, and although the Irish were firing blind, and at the limit of their range, they were still a deadly proposition. There was a cry from the middle of the boat, and I saw one of the men slump against his oar. The man by him felt for a pulse, shook his head, and at once slung the corpse over the side.
I felt no shock. I felt no fear. I knew what I had to do: without Larkin saying a word to me, I immediately stepped over and took the vacant place at the oar. It was on my second or third pull that the boat immediately astern of us suddenly tore apart, wood, limbs and water blown to the heavens, as a cannon shot struck it square on. No more than a dozen strokes later, the fourth boat in our little fleet was struck. In one sense, she had luck; she was only holed, and turned for the shore, where her crew could beach her. But that shore was full of Irish rebels. If you fall into the hands of the Irish, then God help you.
When we got back to the ship, Rugg said not a word to me, but placed in my hand a bottle of the favoured drink of those parts. Whiskey, they call it. And I drank it as though it were the very nectar of the gods.
The Earl of Ravensden:
I could not sleep. This was a rare state of affairs, as I had been known to sleep through entire broadsides. But being back at Ravensden Abbey had a strange effect on me. It was a homecoming, and freedom of a sort. I should have relished the joys of my own home, my own hearth, and my own bed. But all the thoughts I had suppressed during my time in the Tower, or else channelled into the efforts to secure my release, now came pouring out.
I longed to be at sea, to have the command I believed myself entitled to, to be avenged on the Spanish and especially General Spinola and his cursed galleys. I envied Iles, who was at sea at that very moment, in the rough but steady hands of old Griff Rugg. I wanted nothing more than to fight Spaniards, but there seemed but a very distant prospect of that.
I longed for a son. As I dressed, I looked down at the sleeping form of Louise-Marie, and wondered if she would give me that. If she could give me that, after one girl and dead twins; and none of my wives had ever given me more than three children. Or would she go the way of –
Then there was England’s great matter. The Queen wanted the letter by Lady Day; yet if I surrendered the letter, what guarantees did I have for my future, and that of my unborn heir?
Above all: Laszlo Horvath. Where was he? Who was he? How could I have been so foolish as to be gulled by him for so long? Why had he sought to bring me to a traitor’s death?
I went down, and out into the ruins of the chancel. It was a cold, moonlit night, past two in the morning. I walked among the graves, standing in turn before those of my father, that most guarded and enigmatic of men; of his eldest brother Matthew, the fifth Earl, the prodigiously gifted friend and playmate of King Edward the Sixth, but dead at twenty-two; and of their father Henry, the builder of Ravensden Abbey in its present form. Then the graves of my wives: dear Letitia, whose death in childbirth drove me to seek solace at sea; bold Anne, so much older than me, lying alongside our two daughters; and sly, treacherous Mary, next to the graves of our girls and the son she bore me, poor Harry, dead at but four years of age. Three dead wives, all of them devoted daughters of the Church of England by law established. Perhaps marriage to a Papist would succeed where theirs failed, just as it had done for my grandfather, another old warrior Earl who married a very much younger woman. Or was my marriage a terrible mistake, which served only to cast me further into the outer darkness of the Queen’s disfavour?
No inspiration came from the dead, only the recollection of unbearable sorrows and fear of a childless future, of the extinction of the House of Quinton. No answers, only the sense that I was alone, and would go to my own tomb in this place remembered solely as one of the very many whose star briefly shone brightly during the reign of Elizabeth the Great, only to be extinguished just as quickly as it had risen.
I turned to go in, and noticed candlelight in a high window: my grandmother’s window. But that was impossible. Her nurse would have put her to bed at nine, and the ancient Countess never stirred until four, when she woke unfailingly with the stroke of the clock; as she always had for the office of Lauds, in her days as a Gilbertine nun. Perhaps this was the moment, at last, when my grandmother went to meet her maker, to explain to Him why she had forsaken her vows for the bed of Harry Quinton –
I ran up the stairs, and into my grandmother’s room.
‘My Lady! Grandmother!’
She was alive, sitting where she always sat. She must have been watching me, down in the chancel, and now she turned her head, very slightly, to acknowledge my presence.
Then some force, some strange instinct, made me do what I had always done as a child, when the family was riven by the increasingly strange behaviour and prolonged absences of Henry, the sixth Earl. I sat down upon a stool and began to pour out all my troubles to my grandmother, this frail, impossibly ancient creature who had been born when the first Tudor, Harry the Seventh, still sat upon the throne of England. In my youth, of course, she responded to my words, and her particular marrying of blunt good sense with a nearly tangible spirituality always seemed to make things better almost at once. As I grew older, I wondered if this stemmed from her early life in the convent; although the Quintons were Protestant and had, like England as a whole, abandoned confession as a false construct of Rome, there was always a powerful sense of release in opening one’s heart to one who had done nothing else for fifteen years but speak directly to God on high, and whose confession was once heard by Cardinal Wolsey himself.
I told her everything; or very nearly everything, for I judged it inopportune to tell a woman who had buried all her children and all but one of her grandchildren th
at I feared I would never have a son, and would die the last Earl of Ravensden. But I told her of the fate of Gowrie, of my reasons for going to Fast Castle, and of what I had obtained there. I told her of the Queen’s hostility to me, and how all of England blamed me for the calamities of the Invisible Armada and the Spinola galleys. God knows, I even told her how ignorant men in power were convinced that the day of the true-hulled English ship was over, and were determined to replace it with the infernal monstrosities called galleys, as being at once more fashionable and cheaper, as they falsely believed, for even the greenest swabber could have told the greatest minister of state that galleons carry fewer men and more guns, and are thus cheaper by far.
In response to all of this, she made not one sound. The ancient eyes were fixed upon me, but they were blank, merely blinking from time to time to signify that their owner still lived.
Dawn was breaking beyond the ruinous east window of the abbey church.
‘But there is one matter that strikes me in the heart more than any of these, grandmother. I placed my trust in one who betrayed me – who sought, indeed, to destroy me, by bringing a charge of treason against me. If he had succeeded, this very house and the title itself might have been lost to us by attainder.’ I hoped the notion of the House of Quinton losing everything might provoke some reaction, but the ancient face remained entirely impassive. It was like speaking to a statue. ‘This man is a stranger in the realm, an alien, who can have no possible grievance against me. So before we both attempt to find our second sleep, let me tell you how I took him in, and how he proved false – this Hungarian, this man who calls himself Laszlo Horvath—’
I continued, my eyes fixed upon the floor rather than looking into the fixed expression of the gargoyle that my grandmother had become. But then a strange, rasping sound made me look up. Katherine, Dowager Countess of Ravensden, who had not spoken in over ten years, was clearing her throat. The ancient face was contorted with effort. I moved toward her, convinced that this was her long delayed death-apoplexy.
Instead, another sound emerged from her mouth. A word.
‘Horvath,’ she said, her voice a barely audible rasp.
I was astonished; I had thought never to hear her speak again. But this was no cause for rejoicing. After all, many a dumb avian can simply repeat the words of its owner.
‘My Lady?’ I said, cautiously. ‘Grandmother? You are well?’
‘Horvath,’ she said again. The mouth opened and closed without a sound. Then, unbelievably, it formed an entire sentence, as her ancient eyes bored into the very depths of my soul. ‘What a fool you have been, grandson, to nurture that viper in your bosom.’
CHAPTER NINETEEN
1601-2
The Earl of Ravensden:
A swaying deck beneath my feet. Spray spilling from the cutwater. A cold sea breeze ruffling my hair and straining the medrinacks and poldavy canvas of the sails overhead. The shrill call of the boatswain’s whistle. The shouts of the men in the tops. The Merhonour, sailing west with a squadron of our fellow race-built galleons, the crosses of Saint George streaming proudly from our staffs. A squadron with Matthew Quinton, Earl of Ravensden, as its vice-admiral. A squadron sailing to do battle with the Spanish. The only thing that could have made life better was for a mighty sea-monster to rise from the vasty deep and devour all of those upon the quarterdeck of the flagship, the Warspite, especially our illustrious admiral, Brick-Beard Leveson, the finest seaman ever to come out of Wolverhampton.
There was a rare urgency about our voyage, despite the fogs and then easterly winds that had delayed our passage from the Medway. In addition to our two flagships, we had the Defiance, Garland, Swiftsure, Crane, Nonpareil, and six victualling ships, all upon a mission of the utmost importance. For the Spanish had landed an army at Kinsale in the south of Ireland, fortifying the town and threatening to use it as a base to drive the English out of the entire country. My friend Lord Mountjoy, the Lord Deputy of Ireland, was moving to besiege it, but his forces were overstretched. Worse, the two rebel armies in the north of the country, those of O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone, and O’Donnell, Earl of Tyrconnell, were marching south to join the Spanish and to trap Mountjoy between them, as though in a great pincer. The fate of English rule in Ireland hung in the balance; and if Ireland fell, there could be little doubt that the Spanish would use it as a platform for an invasion of England itself. There would be no Invisible Armada this time, and no Invincible one either, for no Armada would be needed. If need be, on a calm and clear day, the Spanish could simply row themselves across the Irish Sea.
So we were sailing to besiege Kinsale from seaward, to attack the other forts the Spanish were garrisoning along the Irish coast, and to fight the squadron the Dons had stationed in those waters to support their army. It was a most glorious prospect, despite my being under the command of a coxcomb -
But it was no time to be churlish, I chided myself as the cold Irish rain stung my face. The Queen had been at once merciful and generous, in restoring me not only to my freedom but to a high command at sea. All this, despite the considerable awkwardness of my private meeting with Her Majesty at Greenwich Palace on the day appointed for the transfer of the Casket Letter to her.
‘This is the original?’ she demanded.
‘You have my word of honour upon it, Your Majesty.’
‘Matthew Quinton’s word of honour. Well, then. Remember, My Lord, that I have encountered your “word of honour” before. For instance, your word of honour about the scale of the profit that would accrue to me from your various voyages. Your word of honour is not worth a fig, Lord Ravensden.’
If she had been a man, and not the Lord’s Anointed, I would have issued my challenge there and then. Indeed, I felt my fingers twitch, instinctively seeking my sword hilt. But the perversity of Elizabeth Tudor being at once a woman and England’s divinely ordained sovereign gave her a licence in what she said that would have been intolerable in any man, even in a king. I believe that Edward the Second had a red-hot poker stuck up his arse for insulting his nobility rather less often and less violently than the Virgin Queen insulted hers.
‘Your Majesty, what possible reason could I have for keeping the original from you?’ I said, as mildly as I could manage, all the while endeavouring to suppress the regicidal twitching in my fingers.
She looked at me – through that ghastly, fixed white-paste mask, which visibly cracked if she showed too much real emotion – and for a moment, just one moment, I wondered if she knew. If the legend of Gloriana’s omniscience was, in fact, true.
‘No,’ she said at last, ‘no man who desires a return to court and to a command at sea would be so foolish as to deceive his Queen.’
I bowed. ‘Indeed not, Majesty. Then the return to court and to a command—’
‘We shall think upon it, Lord Ravensden.’
With that, she waved her imperious hand, and ended the audience.
It took several months for the Queen to think upon it; a markedly rapid decision, by Her Majesty’s standards. In the meantime, I lived with my wife at Ravensden Abbey, trying and failing to conceive the heir to Ravensden, while also brooding upon the astonishing revelation that had fallen from the ancient lips of my grandmother. Thanks to her, I now knew exactly who the man calling himself Laszlo Horvath really was, and why he wished to bring me down. He was beyond my reach, but only for the time being. I would have my reckoning with him – I had sworn it in the ruined chancel of Ravensden Abbey, before the graves of countless dead Quintons – but in the meantime there were Spaniards to fight, and a kingdom to save.
Nicholas Iles:
‘Did you ever think you’d see the day, friend Nick?’ said Griffin Rugg. ‘The red and gold of Spain, flying over the soil of the Queen’s own dominions. At least now we know why that fucking galleon was up at Sligo, those months ago. To tell the traitor Earls that their Castilian friends were coming.’
I remembered. A few days after the failure of our cutting-out expeditio
n, Rugg ordered the Halcyon to abandon its anchorage close to the mouth of Sligo Bay, and to move several miles out to sea. We were upon a hostile shore and running desperately short of victuals, so he hoped that, by offering the Spaniard searoom, he would tempt her to come out. Which she duly did.
And outsailed us with an easy, mocking grace and speed which caused Griffin Rugg to remark, ‘I’ll tell you one thing, young Nick. The Dons won’t have sent a ship that good to these parts just to deliver King Philip’s respects to Red Hugh, or to send him a few bottles of Jerez. Mark old Rugg’s word on it – something’s afoot.’
The Halcyon now lay in the mouth of Kinsale harbour. Despite the relentless, bitterly cold rain, we could clearly see the Spanish colours streaming out from the towers of Ringcurran Castle. This fortress guarded the eastern approach to the town itself, out of sight beyond a great turn in the river. It had been the same story as we sailed along the south coast of Ireland: Berehaven, Baltimore and Castlehaven, together with Donneshead and Dunboy Castles, were all garrisoned by the Dons. But their main strength was here, at Kinsale, where General Don Juan del Aguila and some 3,500 men awaited the arrival of the armies of the Irish earls, said to be marching down from the north of the country.
There was a puff of smoke on the hillside above Ringcurran, then another, followed by the distant booms.
‘Lord Mountjoy’s guns are active today,’ I said.
‘Much good it’ll do them,’ said Rugg. ‘Even if the castle falls, Mountjoy hasn’t got the strength to take the town itself. And once the rebels get here, God alone knows what the issue of it will be.’
I looked out at the gloomy prospect: one of the Queen’s own castles, and one of her own towns, under the heel of the murderous papist Spanish invaders. It was the stuff of a play, if I had but the inclination to write it.
‘Sails, ho!’ cried the lookout.
‘Where away?’ demanded Rugg. He knew, as did we all, that sails from the west could only be Spanish reinforcements, but sails from the east meant the promised relief from England.