Destiny's Tide

by Destiny's Tide (retail) (epub)

  Meg frowned.

  ‘But grandfather, if he is such a great and noble king, why do so many fear and hate him? Why do they whisper over their pots in the Pelican and the Lion?’

  Peter Stannard looked around in alarm. There seemed to be no-one within earshot: the other patients were either upon their beds or at prayer, while Franklin was nowhere to be seen. He breathed more easily.

  ‘Dearest Meg,’ he said, stooping as low as he dared, and whispering to her. She came closer; she was accustomed to, and could ignore, the smell of decay. ‘Some lessons that you learn are more important than others, and this is one of the most important of all. Never, ever speak ill of the king. No matter what thoughts about him breed in your heart, suppress them. Promise me you’ll do that, granddaughter, and make sure that your brother does the same, when he’s old enow to understand. Ask me any question you will, accuse me of anything you will, but do not speak ill of the king.’

  She looked at him gravely.

  ‘I promise, grandfather. But why must we do this?’

  Peter Stannard sighed. He knew that with his singular granddaughter, even at her tender age, ‘because I say so’ was as effective as besieging the walls of Rome with feathers.

  ‘First, Meg, for the good of the family, and I trust you know by now that nothing, apart from our duty to God, outweighs the good of our family.’ Hypocrite, Peter Stannard; he could hear the mockery and disgust of half a hundred dead souls, and several living ones. But his granddaughter merely nodded. ‘Second, child, for your own wellbeing. Remember always that the king can do no wrong in the eyes of God. Those things he does which some men think wrong, or to which some object… well, for all we know they are part of God’s higher purpose, expressed through the king, His vice-regent upon earth. The ways of kings are not for the likes of us to judge, Margaret Stannard.’

  Meg whispered, ‘But Miriam Day says the king is evil.’

  She saw her grandfather’s eyes widen.

  ‘Whatever she says, Meg, and whatever you think, you must never say such a thing. Swear to me that you will not.’

  ‘I swear it, grandfather. But grandfather, it isn’t only Miriam Day. I hear men’s whispers, not just in the alehouses, and not just old Uncle Spatchell – they think all children are invisible, deaf, or stupid, so can say anything before them.’ Out of the mouths of babes, thought Peter Stannard, whose own true thoughts upon the doings of Harry the Eighth would have filled volumes. ‘I hear them say that the king is evil for dissolving the monasteries, for renouncing the Pope, for tampering with the true religion, for putting aside his lawful queen. I hear them speak a word, but I do not know what it means. Tell me, please, grandfather – what is a tyrant?’

  Peter Stannard closed his eyes, breathed deeply, and said nothing. Meg was still thinking upon the significance of this when she emerged from the lazar hospital, directly into the path of her aunt Agatha, who had been collecting herbs in the Westwood.

  PART THREE

  THIS ISLAND EMPIRE

  JULY TO SEPTEMBER 1544

  …by divers sundry old authentic histories and chronicles, it is manifestly declared and expressed that this realm of England is an Empire, and so hath been accepted in the world, governed by one Supreme Head and King having the dignity and royal estate of the imperial Crown of the same…

  Statute of Parliament in Restraint of Appeals, 1533

  FIFTEEN

  The sun shone upon Dover and the pride of England. The great castle stood foursquare on its mighty cliff, brooding over all. The royal standard flew from the roof of the colossal square keep, for the king himself was there, preparing to embark. The harbour beneath the cliffs was packed with shipping. Several of the king’s great ships lay furthest from the shore, by virtue both of their greater draughts and so that they could defend the inshore vessels if the French launched a surprise attack. Jack recognised several of them from the Scottish campaign; by some miracle, but at a cost to his health described in Will Halliday’s letters, Master Gonson had managed to bring the ships south, have them repaired and revictualled, and sent back to sea again in ample time for the campaign against Boulogne. Some of the transports had been in the Firth of Forth, too. Yes, it was a miracle – a very English miracle.

  Jack Stannard took in the spectacle from the poop of the Osprey. This time, he had come into harbour without incident: there was no arresting party waiting to take him off into captivity, no malevolent enemy upon any of the ships in his company.

  Simon Bulbrooke joined him on deck.

  ‘Ready below to take on our cargo, Jack.’

  ‘Very good. We’ll edge inshore on the next tide, try to get alongside one of the wharves before the morrow.’

  ‘Why so eager? We’ll only be carrying cask ale, not soldiers. Won’t matter if we don’t go over to Calais with the vanward. Look around, Jack. Most of these will be stragglers.’

  ‘True enough, cuz, but I’ll not have it said that a Dunwich ship was tardy. A Stannard ship. God willing, Si, we’ll sail over with the flagship, under the eyes of the king and the Lord Admiral.’

  Bulbrooke said nothing, but the scowl on his face told its own story. A man thwarted in his own ambitions, he no longer understood them in others. For his part, Jack, too, was disappointed that the Osprey had not been ordered to carry troops. But unlike the Scottish campaign, this was not the expedition carrying England’s main force to the war. That had already crossed, weeks before, and was now divided into two vast armies, the Duke of Norfolk besieging Montreuil, the Duke of Suffolk investing Boulogne. The fleet assembled in Dover harbour was tasked with taking over to Calais troop reinforcements and victuals, the latter intended both for those troops and for the Calais garrison itself. Above all, though, it would carry to France the new commander of the army besieging Boulogne: King Henry the Eighth.

  From their position in the southern part of the anchorage, Jack and Simon could hear the distant cheers upon the shore, and the firing of guns. At such a distance, the smoke from the cannon on the castle walls appeared minute, like tiny fragments of gossamer. Then the great ships, hard under the lee of the castle cliff, began to fire too, and cheering broke out from men lining their decks or hanging from their shrouds. More and more bunting broke out from mastheads.

  Jack turned to his cousin, smiled, then turned to the eager young lad nearest him.

  ‘Run up the colours, George, and ready larboard guns for the salute!’

  Young George Vincent grinned, and went to the task.

  Just then, through a gap between the nearer ships of the fleet, Jack saw a flash of oars. A low, gilded craft was cutting through the waves, and from its ensign staff flew a huge green, white and red banner, far too large for the little vessel.

  The row-barge had a platform at the stern. Jack could just make out the chair upon it, and the vast figure – obviously vast, even at such a distance – that occupied it. And in that moment, John Stannard knew he had his first sight of that most famous prince, Henry, eighth of the name, by God’s grace King of England and Ireland, rightful King of France, Defender of the Faith.

  He glanced skyward.

  ‘Behold, beloved,’ he whispered to the soul of Alice Stannard, ‘your Jack looks upon the king.’

  Then the barge passed out of sight, behind the host of hulls, and the moment was gone. On Jack’s command, the Osprey’s two little fawconets fired, making their tiny contribution to the thunderous chorus that echoed and re-echoed off the towering white cliffs. Merrily, Jack sang the first words of Pastime with Good Company, the song written by the king himself, and the rest of the crew joined in enthusiastically, if not as tunefully as their leader. Simon Bulbrooke shook his head and looked away.

  * * *

  Thomas Ryman had been detained at Kenninghall for fourteen weeks. At first, he wrote letters: to the sheriff, to the Earl of Surrey, to the Duke of Norfolk. He even wrote more than once to Peter Stannard at the leper hospital in Dunwich. But even as he wrote them, he knew in his heart
of hearts that Bleasdale or some other, acting at the Duchess of Richmond’s behest, would destroy them as soon as they left his hand. He saw next to no-one, other than the occasional kitchen hand or groom bringing him his food or taking away his slop pail, and they had clearly been instructed not to speak to him. Requests to speak to the duchess, whom he presumed was still in residence and to whom he was now prepared to abase himself in as humiliating a manner as possible, were ignored; and as he knew from both experience and reputation, Mary Fitzroy had both a long memory and an unforgiving nature. But as the days passed, and then the weeks, Ryman found that a strange thing happened. The rage, and the impotence, and the anxiety, all dissipated. Even his concern for how the war progressed subsided. He did not know if Jack Stannard, or his employers the duke and earl, lived or died; and after a while, he stopped asking those who came to feed him. The solitude of his room – and it was his own room where they had decided to hold him, a small cell high up in the service wing – this solitude gradually took him back to the Greyfriars, and to the monastic life he had so relished before he was forcibly torn from it by royal whim. Ryman had his Bible, and returned to contemplation of it. He had Thomas Aquinas, and Augustine, and a few of the other fathers of the Church, and revelled in rediscovering their teachings. Before his confinement, he had been much troubled by thoughts of his increasing age, and an awareness of mortality that had never concerned him in all the years when his life had been in mortal peril in every waking moment, be it from a Frenchman’s knife, or from an Italian’s crossbow quarrel, or else from camp fevers on the Scottish border. Timor mortis conturbat me, as all the poets had it: fear of death disturbs me. But, for Thomas Ryman, no longer, thanks to the unlikely agency of Mary Fitzroy, Duchess of Richmond. Instead, the tolling of the clock in the stables of Kenninghall Palace allowed him to resume the observance of the monastic hours, and although he was alone, he somehow felt the presence of all the Grey Friars who had gone before him, and those with whom he had known good fellowship at Dunwich. They prayed with him, they sang with him. Ryman had no doubt that if Bleasdale, or the duchess, or anyone else, chanced to hear him at his devotions, they would have thought he had gone entirely mad.

  Such an opinion of his sanity might have been strengthened if his captors had been privy to his dreams and nightmares. There were the usual ones that had tormented him for twenty years and more: the burning churches and villages, the screams of enemies and innocents alike, the feel of his blade running through flesh or striking bone, the fear, the stench, the delirium of victory. But one dream recurred, more and more often. He was a boy again, on the cliff at Dunwich. Son of one bailiff of Dunwich, intended soon to be apprenticed to the other, his father’s friend Adam Stannard, young Jack’s grandfather, a brutal, arrogant man who had lost his right arm in the Tewkesbury fight. Ryman saw the ship again, as he really had seen it that day over forty years before. He saw the tattered sails and the shattered bonaventure, just as they had been on the day itself. A ship torn by the recent storm, forced to seek refuge in the nearest safe harbour. He watched it make for the mouth of the Blyth, and ran over to the summit of Cock Hill to watch its progress up to the Dain Quay. It was a dream, of course, so this ship, unlike the real one, could move with no need of wind nor tide, and could make a passage that might have taken many hours in reality last no longer in his mind than several blinks of an eye. He could see halberds, swords, and armour glinting in the sun. These, said his father, were part of the escort of England’s Princess Margaret, being sent by sea to Berwick ahead of the overland procession taking her to her marriage with the Scottish king.

  The young Thomas Ryman had never seen soldiers before, and thought he looked upon gods. He had never seen one, let alone talked to one, but in that moment, he knew that he would become a soldier, and not an apprentice to the foul Adam Stannard. He looked up to tell his father so, but in that moment, his dream passed from memory into nightmare. His father had turned into a skeleton, and crumbled into dust even as he still held his son’s hand. When Thomas turned to look back at the ship, all of the soldiers were turning to skeletons, too, their brilliant armour rusted and streaked with dried blood. Yet still he wanted nothing more than to become one of them.

  Even as he had the thought, Thomas Ryman saw the flesh crumble from the bones of his hands, and knew that if he looked into a mirror, he would see only a skull.

  * * *

  William Gonson had been studying the paper in his hands for several minutes, his eyes seemingly blank.

  ‘Master?’ said Will Halliday, for the third time.

  Gonson finally raised his eyes. He stared at Will, but there was no spark of recognition. Then, slowly, he came back from the far distant place where he had been, and waved the letter in front of him as though swatting away a fly.

  ‘A summons to the Tower,’ he said. ‘By order from Secretary Paget. There is some new problem with the ordnance stores, it seems.’

  ‘You wish me to accompany you?’

  ‘No, Will. Continue with the despatches to Portsmouth and Woolwich. They need to be on the road as soon as possible, and God knows how long I’ll be kept waiting at the Tower.’

  Gonson stood, donned his overgown, took up the stick which supported him as he walked, nodded to Will, and left. The clerk felt a moment of concern, but it swiftly passed. The Tower was not a long walk, and perhaps the exercise and the air would do the old man some good. In the last few days, he had seemed more content, his mind less inclined to wander, the night terrors diminished. With the Scottish campaign done, and the fleets for France despatched, the work of the office was a little diminished: or at least, it was confined largely to the tedious business of despatching victuals and paying off, matters that could largely be delegated to Gonson’s clerks. Unfortunately, such delegation meant that Will had no time to pay his respects to Marion Bartleby. He feared that if he did not advance his cause, her father would soon make a match for her with the insipid son of a vintner, or a clothier, or some such. City liverymen were notoriously clannish, and in his wiser moments, Will Halliday had little doubt that he, as a mere clerk to a man whose primary title was that of a mere storekeeper, stood only the slimmest chance of acceptance by a man who aspired to membership of the Common Council.

  No, not the slimmest chance: no chance at all, in truth.

  An hour or so later, Will Halliday’s colleague returned from an accounting expedition to the victualling agent at Cheapside. Benjamin Gonson, his father’s fifth son, was a pale, thin, unassuming fellow, a year or so younger than Will.

  Ben nodded to Will, then said, ‘Where’s father?’

  ‘Gone to the T-T-Tower. Some issue with the ordnance stores.’

  The younger Gonson turned in alarm.

  ‘The Tower? You’re certain?’

  ‘Aye, B-Ben, that’s what he said. Why? What’s amiss?’

  ‘Did you not hear, Will? Don’t you know what happens today at Tower Hill?’

  Will Halliday shivered. He knew, as every man, woman and child in London knew; but he had forgotten.

  ‘He will know too,’ said Will slowly. ‘He’ll know what happens there. What if he’s taken it into his head?’

  He picked up the paper upon Gonson’s table. It was no order from Secretary Paget, no direction to the Tower at all, merely a list of stores to be sent to Woolwich yard.

  Ben Gonson needed no words from his colleague; Will Halliday’s face told its own story. The two young men turned and ran out into the bright London day, making for Tower Hill.

  * * *

  As they got nearer to the forbidding walls of the old fortress, the throng of people grew larger by the yard, eventually blocking the highway entirely. The two young clerks pushed and jostled their way through the crowd, prompting cries of derision. But their own shouts of ‘the Navy Royal’s business! the king’s business!’ quelled most protests. They made their way slowly through the mass of people in the shadow of the Tower. As they came closer still to Tower Hill proper, they c
ould hear the intermingled cheers, groans and jeers of those who could actually see the spectacle taking place there.

  A scaffold had been erected in the open space to the west of the Tower. Upon it, five men were condemned to suffer the fate assigned to traitors: hanging, drawing and quartering.

  ‘Perhaps he didn’t c-come for this,’ said Will, hopefully.

  ‘I pray he – no, Will! He’s there! There, by God!’

  In the very front of the crowd, directly facing the scaffold and the Tower behind it, an old, bearded man knelt on all fours, his head touching the ground. As Will and Ben Gonson struggled to get through to the front rank, the old man raised his eyes to the spectacle in front of him. His face was awash with tears, but still he looked at the sight.

  The first of the traitors had already suffered his fate. The four quarters of his body were being taken down from the scaffold, blood smearing the timber, and then flung unceremoniously into the cart that would take them to the destinations specified for them, the head being reserved for the most potent place of all, the south gate of London Bridge. Now the second man had the noose around his neck, and despite themselves, Will and Ben paused, unable to look away from the dreadful scene.

  The stool upon which the man stood was kicked away, and a great cheer went up from the crowd as he kicked vainly at the air. His face turned purple, the tongue protruding, and the man’s breeches stained as he pissed and beshat himself. The executioner, standing at the top of a ladder next to the dangling man, judged his moment, then leaned forward with his knife and severed the rope. Four attendants rushed forward, seized hold of the traitor, and lifted his twitching body onto a broad table. The executioner took up a large blade, the sort that butchers use to carve carcasses. It was still bloodied from the first victim, although a perfunctory attempt had been made to clean it. The executioner held it up for the crowd to admire, and was greeted by more cheers from his audience. Children squealed and clapped in delight. Then the executioner sliced deeply into the belly of the doomed man, whose strangled throat could muster only a feeble succession of screams. The executioner reached in and pulled out the entrails, raising them for the crowd to see. There was a roar of approbation.