Destiny's Tide

by Destiny's Tide (retail) (epub)

  * * *

  Jed Nolloth was originally a Walberswick man, born and raised in the rival village across the Horse Reach, but Jack’s father had noted his talents and bought his services for Dunwich. Nolloth was not content merely to build ships, as so many shipwrights were. He loved to sail them, too, and often acted as helmsman, or even as master, on Stannard voyages, always seeking ways to make his ships sail better, and to learn lessons for the next hull he built. He had very nearly given up going to sea after the voyage of the Matthew in the year ’thirty-seven, chiding himself for months on end both for his weakness in being too human to stand watch for longer than half a day, but also for not being able to persuade Peter Stannard to carry another competent helmsman. But Jack, his fortunes unexpectedly altered in ways that both men still found difficult to comprehend, managed to tempt the old man back. On this voyage to the war, Jed Nolloth would serve as master’s mate under Jack himself.

  ‘Let us be brisk, then,’ said Jack Stannard to the old shipwright. ‘Fetch home the anchor, Master Nolloth! Stand by to stretch halliards, fore and aft! Stand by to loose the courses! Stand by the spanker on the bonaventure!’

  The men were already at the capstan, awaiting the order, and the Blessing’s single anchor rose through the hawse from the bottom. When it was clear of the water, the main courses were loosed and made fast, all to cries of ‘well, well’. On the other three ships of the little fleet, the same scene was repeated. Sails unfurled, and were sheeted home. The ships began to move down Horse Reach, past Walberswick Quay, making for the mouth of the Blyth. Jack could see Dunwich folk standing on the great dunes called Cock and Hen Hills, some waving, some on their knees in prayer. He could just make out a familiar woman’s form standing before Saint Francis Chapel, between the two hills, and thought for one impossible, soaring moment that it was Alice. But it was his sister Agatha, and Jack knew that the two small shapes by her could only be Tom and Meg, the last precious parts of Alice left to him now. He waved toward them, they seemed to wave back, and he returned to the business of the ship.

  ‘Ease main shrouds, there! Well!’

  Jack was too busy barking orders to the men upon the yards and sheets to hear Raker’s shout across the water to his ally Maddox of Walberswick. But Ryman, alone at the stern rail, heard it well enough.

  ‘Behold, friend Anthony, our great admiral has deigned to join us! The Scots will be shitting themselves now!’

  Maddox laughed, and Raker made the gesture of an evil eye toward the Blessing.

  Ryman frowned, but put the insolence of the two shipmasters out of his mind. Southwold might be a den of lagarags and rogues, Walberswick little better, but they were all, at bottom, Englishmen, setting out to fight Scots, and when the time came, that would surely trump the old hatreds between Dunwich and her neighbours.

  And so the four ships emerged from the mouth of the Dunwich river, then passed out of the Blyth, put on sail, and turned their helms northward, toward the war.

  * * *

  The summer previous, the Scots had made a solemn treaty with King Henry, promising to marry their Queen Mary, aged some eighteen months or so, to England’s heir and hope, Prince Edward, aged six. A few months later, with what Thomas Ryman called all the perfidy of their breed, they tore up the treaty, and were now seeking to promise her tiny hand to the French king’s newborn grandson instead, the principal mover in all this being the Scottish Beelzebub who went by the name of Cardinal David Beaton. This was his and their newest affront, as the Scots unaccountably refused to recognise the rightful, God-given overlordship of the King of England, daring instead to count themselves a fully independent nation. Worse yet, the French king, Francis, with whom Harry the Eighth had alternately warred and caroused for thirty years, stirred the pot by sending aid to the obnoxious Scots. This was only the latest, and by no means the greatest, of the perverse stratagems of the Valois monarch. No: that was the cursed, unnatural alliance between, on the one hand, the man who termed himself the Most Christian King, and on the other, the arch-enemy of Christendom, the Ottoman Sultan Suleiman, in order to make war upon their mutual enemy, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles the Fifth. King Henry was no lover of the emperor, whose aunt he had acrimoniously divorced, but he was, when all was said and done, Defender of the Faith, even if he had broken with the Pope, the man who had granted him the title. So now, in the spring of that year of grace, 1544, Henry, King of England, was intent, in God’s righteous cause, upon war against both Scotland and France at the same time: an invasion first of the one, then of the other.

  Like most Englishmen, Jack was confident of victory. God and Saint George would fight for England, as they always did. The Scots would be driven down, as they had been at Flodden, and the French crushed, as they had been at Crécy and Agincourt. But Ryman, who had actually fought against both the Scots and the French, seemed strangely reticent about the prospects of victory. Then there was old Spatchell, a fixture in the corner of the Pelican in its Piety, who was the only man in the town to be both so old and so singular that he was unafraid of denouncing the king when in his cups. War against two enemies at once is madness, Spatchell said, and Jack suspected that in his heart, Ryman shared this opinion. All well and good if the king wins, Spatchell said, but what if he loses? Scotland might be lesser than England, but France was greater. Much greater. Worse, both were Catholic kingdoms, still loyal to the Pope, whereas King Henry had broken with Rome and declared himself head of the Church in England. To the rulers of France and Scotland, war with England would be a holy crusade against a heretic kingdom, a realm of apostates from the true faith, the very mirror image of the English king’s reason for fighting them. And what if they were joined by the greatest Catholic ruler of all, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V? Charles was friendly for the moment, Spatchell reminded whatever audience would listen to him, but he, the French king and Great Harry himself had all changed sides in the blinking of an eye over thirty and more years. What if all of Europe came against England, Spatchell demanded?

  He was often challenged by young pothouse hotheads, all beer and bluster, who called him a coward and a traitor. Jack thought him so, too, but kept his counsel. There were two reasons for this. First, Spatchell was Alice’s uncle, and she often spoke of what an educated man he had been in his younger days, of how well he knew the affairs of kings and kingdoms. Second, Spatchell’s grandfather – Alice’s great-grandfather – had been killed at the Battle of Castillon, ninety years before. Englishmen, including, it seemed, King Henry, remembered only Agincourt, his namesake’s great and God-given victory against terrible odds, the triumph about which hymns were still sung and poems written. They conveniently forgot Castillon, nearly forty years later, when the French destroyed England’s army, drove the English out of France, and decisively won what some men called the Hundred Years War.

  What, then, if these new wars culminated, not in an Agincourt, but in a Castillon, or even a Hastings?

  Jack Stannard watched the last glimpse of Dunwich’s shore fall away astern, and shut out such thoughts.

  No: England had God and destiny on its side. It could only be so.

  Revenge and glory for the old king, then, and blood on the blade for Jack. Perhaps the killing of Scots and Frenchmen would go some little way toward assuaging his grief for Alice. And if the ships sailing out of the Blyth haven really did venture forth in God’s righteous cause, and if England brought the Scots and French to heel, then perhaps the king would be content to cease his interminable tinkering with matters of religion, so folk could know harmony again. Perhaps, too, the Heavenly Father would then finally look kindly upon Dunwich once more, especially if Jack and his little squadron distinguished themselves in the war to come. Perhaps He would subdue the relentless waters that threatened every day to overwhelm the ancient town, as they had so often before, and restore it to its ancient glory.

  Perhaps.

  THREE

  The fleet from the Blyth made its way north. This was a familia
r passage for Jack: the very first time he had gone to sea, in his eleventh year, was on a voyage to Newcastle in one of his father’s ships. As he fixed his backstaff on each seamark, and pricked his card to make his dead reckonings, he could still recall a little of the awe and dread his young self felt at that time.

  ‘Cromer, boy,’ his father had said, taking a bearing and checking his meridian compass. ‘When the church tower, yonder, bears thus, bring her round to starboard, no more than four points, your course set for the Spurn. Are you listening to me, boy? You’d best not have a tune in your head – pay heed to me, and me alone, or I’ll have you lashed to the mast and flogged, son of mine or not, you hear me, boy? Good. Now, I’ll tell you this for free, the fainthearts coast further west, and don’t turn to the north until they see Blakeney or even Scolt Head, then run for the Lincolnshire shore. But Stannards aren’t fainthearts, boy.’

  Jack had nodded as gravely as he could, but he still clearly remembered the shock of it all: the pitching deck, the smells, the noises, the countless ropes whose names had to be learned, the mysteries of courses and bearings, the strange shouts and words of the seamen, the eternal tyranny of the four hour watches, the back-breaking voyages to the Iceland fishery before his sixteenth year, the vicious beatings from his father when he made the slightest mistake, the infinity of the grey sea. Only a few months before, his life had been set on a very different course. He was singing Kyrie Eleisons in the choir of Cardinal College at Ipswich, alongside Will Halliday, when word came that his elder brother, Adam, was dead, killed on a voyage from Dunwich to Dokkum by a loose clewgarnet block that drove in the side of his skull. Within weeks, the college itself was gone, dissolved in the wake of its founder, the opulent Cardinal Wolsey, fallen because he had failed to find a legal way for the king to marry Mistress Anne Boleyn; and that meant his glorious vision, of a school in his home town of Ipswich which would enable poor boys of the town and district to rise from lowly origins, just as he had, came crashing down. John Stannard of Dunwich was no longer a second son and no longer a scholar, bound for the law or the Church, the careers which his father had seen as vehicles certain to enhance the family’s status and connections, and which he had seen as high roads by which he could escape the tyranny of Peter Stannard. In his own dreams, though, Jack wished for nothing more than to write a Western Wynde mass exceeding that of Taverner, and for that briefest of moments, the choir school of Cardinal College seemed to offer him the opportunity to follow his dream. Instead, his brother’s death meant that one day, and no matter how often or how loudly his father raged against the injustice of it, all the Stannard ships, ship-shares, warehouses, monies and interests would come to him, and him alone.

  That day had dawned much sooner than he expected, in a way he could hardly have envisaged. Looking back, he thought of the voyage home from Emden in the old Matthew, especially his steering her safely into harbour, as the moment when everything changed; the moment when both Peter and Jack Stannard realised their new destinies.

  You’ll never be your brother, boy.

  True: but not in a sense that Peter Stannard could ever have imagined when he uttered those words.

  From the Spurn, the four ships made their way along the Yorkshire coast, both the Grace and the Virgin constantly falling off to leeward. Neither Raker nor Maddox were such bad shipmasters, nor their ships so foul; Jack knew they were doing it deliberately, giving too much bunt to the sails and a dozen other sly tricks, all to make the squadron’s commander look a dolt. But he could never prove it, so he shortened sail repeatedly to wait for the sluggards. The squadron spent two days and nights sheltering from a northerly gale in Bridlington Bay, whence they sent letters back to Suffolk, then weathered Flamborough Head and continued their voyage northward. Despite running repairs at Bridlington, the Blessing’s leaks multiplied by the hour. She was an old ship, there had been insufficient time to caulk her anew after her return from a voyage to Antwerp, and Jack prayed that she made it through the campaign. Then, God willing, she could be replaced by the new ship that he was having built: a ship that would be finer than any other set out from the east country of England.

  All the while during their passage northward, Jack and Thomas Ryman talked of much, both on deck and over pots of ale in the tiny, stinking space that did duty as Jack’s cabin. They talked of Jack Stannard’s father, and of what he had become. They reminisced about Alice, of her good humour and her many kindnesses, with Ryman reminding Jack to hold fast to Revelation Twenty-One. They talked of the many Dunwich people they both knew. They talked of the war, of Ryman’s part in the Duke of Norfolk’s ruthless campaign in the Scottish borders after the Solway Moss fight, of the erstwhile friar’s dismay and anger at the duke’s inexplicable decision not to take him on his much greater campaign in France. Above all, they talked of the duke’s household at Kenninghall, which was, it seemed, a hotbed of intrigue, where the very latest rumours from court were discussed, mulled over, and argued about into the early hours. But even there, no man or woman was certain whether their lord and his conservative allies, the likes of Lady Mary, the king’s elder daughter, and Bishop Gardiner, were rising or falling, winning or losing, in the endless battle for the old king’s ear. The new queen, the sixth of the reign – the former Lady Latimer, once mere Mistress Parr – was said to be a reformer, and a friend of Cranmer, the archbishop, who favoured many of the radical ideas coming out of Germany, where the old firebrand Luther still spouted his bile. The last monasteries had gone four years before – they stared in silence from the larboard rail at the great shell of Whitby Abbey, gaunt and empty upon its headland – and none knew what might be next. There was talk, Ryman said, of an end to chantries; and the old friar shook his head, as he had always done over wayward pupils. But the king kept his own counsel, and none truly knew His Majesty’s mind. Yet of one thing, every man in England was certain. At that moment, Henry the Eighth, whom God preserve, wanted one thing more than any other, and that was to crush the perfidious Scots.

  The precise means by which King Henry intended to achieve that aim became apparent as the four ships from the Blyth edged north-west at dawn, their course set for a light burning high in a great, dark building upon a headland. As the sun rose, and Jack offered up his daily silent prayer in memory of Alice’s last words, he and Ryman could see the location of the light: the corner tower of a huge sandstone priory church, empty like all the rest, but a church that stood within the bounds of a fortified enclosure encompassing the entire headland. From the ramparts flew a host of banners of Saint George, while on the level ground before the large gatehouse, campfires, flags, and hundreds of colourful tents, betrayed the presence of a mighty army. The roadstead inshore of the headland contained five or six dozen ships of varying sizes, most at anchor, a few moving into or out of the Tyne. Like the Blessing, they were drawn from the ports of the kingdom, as had been the way of forming a navy in England since time immemorial. A war against Scotland placed the burden firmly upon the east coast, so in addition to the Dunwich contingent, there were ships from the likes of Yarmouth, Lynn, Lowestoft, Scarborough and Hull. Over toward the north shore lay a dozen or so of the king’s own ships, pennants streaming from their mastheads. Their vast hulls towered above everything else in the anchorage, the high, colourfully painted sides of the carracks surmounted by elaborate wooden castles fore and aft.

  ‘Good thinking, this,’ said Ryman, ‘whoever conceived of it – be it the king or Lord Hertford. The latter, I’d reckon. Avoid any prospect of another Flodden, come what may.’

  ‘You won at Flodden, Master Thomas.’

  ‘Aye, but should have lost. The Scots outnumbered us. They had the higher ground. The bigger and better army. The better weapons. Only their king’s stupidity saved us that day, Jack, and I doubt if Lord Arran, or whoever they’ve got in command, will make the same mistakes again. Besides, you can beat the Scots all you like in the borderland, but you’ll have taken heavy losses of your own, and there’s still t
hree days’ march to Edinburgh, with them harassing you every inch of the way. No, this I like. This I like very much.’

  It was, indeed, a simple scheme. If the Scots had an army at the border, then let its men kick their heels. The host of England would simply take ship and sail round them, directly for the Forth. The Scots, bankrupt and beset by feuding between Cardinal Beaton and his opponents led by Arran, could not send a navy to sea; but King Henry, his treasury awash with the proceeds from all the dissolved monasteries, certainly could.

  The Blessing and her consorts came to an anchor in the Narrows at the mouth of the Tyne, in the midst of a number of Yarmouth ships. Skiffs, longboats, and pinnaces, thronged the river, taking men and provisions from shore to fleet, and between the ships.

  Jack Stannard went below to change out of his sea-gown into his best doublet and hose. After all, Dunwich’s commander could not pay his compliments to his squadron’s admiral in what was little better than a tar-stained smock; and Jack could imagine Alice fussing and fretting over his appearance, trying to give some semblance of a shape to his hair—

  He was aware of heavy boots upon the deck above his head, and of raised voices. Thomas Ryman’s raised voice, above all. He went back up on deck to see the old man remonstrating with a junior officer, no more than seventeen or eighteen by the look of him, clad in a gown of black fustian bearing a coat-of-arms that Stannard did not recognise. Gathered around their officer like a phalanx were four billmen, the blades of their weapons gleaming in the sunlight.

  ‘What’s to do?’ said Jack.

  ‘You’re John Stannard of Dunwich?’ said the officer.