EIGHTEEN
The Henry Grace à Dieu, the largest and most powerful of all the king’s ships, was known more readily throughout England as the Great Harry. Vast and impressive she may have been, but her sheer size also greatly limited her utility. It took so many men to man her that, in order to send her to sea, nimbler, more useful craft would have to be unmanned. Her great draught limited the number of harbours she could enter, and certainly rendered her useless in the shallow waters and confined estuary off Boulogne. So in that summer of 1544, the Great Harry swung, empty and forlorn, at double anchor just off the king’s storehouse and dock at Erith, far down the Thames, waiting for the call to come, for her moment of glory finally to arrive.
It was, then, seemingly perverse of William Gonson to insist that he had to make a tour of inspection of her. Ben Gonson and Will Halliday concurred that a visit to Erith dockyard itself was perfectly natural, if apparently superfluous: the other ships were gone from there, and the storehouse was almost empty. But the older Gonson was insistent. He was determined to go alone, too, but Ben and Will had made a pact that one or other of them would always keep him within sight, in case his wits deserted him once again. The two young men tossed a groat to see which of them would stay in London to deal with correspondence, and which would accompany the old man to Erith. Will called heads, and the coin came up with the unmistakeable visage of Harry the Eighth.
Thames watermen would usually never venture as far downriver as Erith. But by special dispensation of the king – or, more precisely, of Secretary Paget – William Gonson could call on the services of one of the smaller royal barges, generally employed to transport members of the king’s household to Greenwich Palace. As they were rowed past that edifice, a pleasant, red-brick jumble of buildings on the Kent shore, with its formal gardens, tilt yards and the like immediately adjacent to it, Will Halliday attempted once more to strike up a conversation with his master.
‘Still nothing but good news from France, sir, other than the loss of the old Holyghost, of course,’ he said. ‘Do you not concur?’
Gonson seemed to be staring at the ribs of an old hull, protruding from the shore in front of the palace. The tide was still ebbing, aiding their progress downstream. The treasurer of the navy made no response, but his eyes appeared to be welling up.
‘Did you know that ship, sir?’ ventured Will.
Still no response. Will knew that the old man had once owned a veritable fleet of his own, which traded to distant parts on his own account. From time to time, he had put some of these into the king’s service – the Christopher Gonson, the David Gonson, and so forth. Perhaps the wreck on the foreshore was the remnant of one of those. Will saw the eyes of the liveried oarsmen, glancing at Gonson, then knowingly at each other. The only sounds were those of the oars cutting the water, of the river-birds upon the marshes of the Isle of Dogs, and the distant cries of sailors bringing a small merchant carrack down into Blackwall Reach. All the while, the treasurer and storekeeper of the Navy Royal stared into space. He became a little more animated as the boat passed Woolwich dockyard, gazing intently at the frames of the hull upon the stocks, even seeming to smile faintly. But in Barking Reach and Halfway Reach, he became sullen again. The boat turned into Erith Reach, the familiar tower of Saint John the Baptist Church coming into view on the Kent shore. Now William Gonson would have to talk. Now he would have to answer a question.
‘The storehouse or the ship first, sir?’ asked Will.
‘Great Harry,’ said Gonson, almost inaudibly.
The oarsmen brought the boat alongside the great vessel, and a couple of the shipkeepers assisted Gonson in boarding. He stood in the ship’s waist, looking around as though he were a captain assessing his new command. Perhaps that remembrance of the time when he had been an active young man-of-war revived Gonson. His eyes widened, and he seemed to see Will Halliday for the first time since they had left the house in London.
‘Check the bilges, Will, see that she’s not taking on more water. Then the orlop, and the cable tier.’
‘All in order there, sir!’ said the principal shipkeeper, a small, round, bald man, who evidently considered that some slur had been made against his competence.
‘No doubt,’ said Gonson, ‘but as long as I have breath, I have to account to the king for this ship, as you have to account to me. Go, Will. I’ll begin at the great cabin, then the poop.’
Will complied reluctantly. Even by recent standards, there seemed to be a strangeness about Gonson’s mood: a kind of emptiness, indeed, which had been present since the execution at Tower Hill. Nevertheless, William Halliday of Ipswich knew his place, unless the matter related to Mistress Marion Bartleby, in which case he would vault as far above his place as he possibly could. He went below decks, down through the vast, empty hull, devoid of its men and cannon, consequentially riding high in the water. He had just come to the orlop deck, where his senses were assailed by the odour of the bilges, when the senior shipkeeper’s cry reached him.
‘Master ’alliday! ’Tis Master Gonson, sir! Come quick!’
The hairs on the back of his neck pricked up, and he shivered. He mouthed a prayer to Maria maris stella, then turned and ran. He took the ladders two steps at a time, striking his head on beams several times. Out onto the upper deck – a glance toward the fo’c’s’le – empty – then astern.
At last, Will Halliday knew what his master intended to do.
William Gonson stood at the very highest point of the poop deck, far up in the aftercastle of the Great Harry. It seemed as though he was contemplating the ship before him, perhaps imagining sailing her into battle.
‘Master!’ cried Will.
He began to run toward the ladder that led up into the aftercastle, followed by one of the younger shipkeepers.
With surprising nimbleness for a man of his age, Gonson climbed up onto the ship’s wale, his face turned away from Will’s. The young man shouted again, but Gonson ignored him. Instead, he reached his hands toward the heavens, mumbled something that Halliday could not properly hear, and fell forward.
Halliday reached the wale, and saw William Gonson enter the water, far below. He knew the old man could not swim: who could, other than Jack Stannard, who had always been perverse? But Gonson did not thrash about, or fight to stay afloat. He stayed perfectly still, and sank in an instant.
For what seemed like countless millennia in purgatory, but could only have been a few moments, Will Halliday stared down at the place where Gonson had disappeared. When he turned away, he registered the senior shipkeeper’s shouts for a boat, and saw that the watermen were already swinging the bow of their craft around, back into the tideway. Will, no seaman, no rower and no swimmer, could do nothing but stand mutely, and wonder how he would report the death of his father to Ben Gonson. Then it would have to be reported to Secretary Paget, who, in turn, would have to report it to the Lord Admiral; and one of them would have to report it to the king.
But Ben most of all. Death stood at the shoulder of every man and woman alive, taking their parents, their children, each other. Yet natural death was, simply, that: natural, a proper part of God’s expected order of things. Poor Ben Gonson, though, barely Will Halliday’s own age, had now lost two of those closest to him to the most unnatural deaths of all, a brother literally torn apart in a traitor’s death and his father drowning as a suicide. And suicide, of course, was both a mortal sin and a human crime, with dire consequences in both the visible and invisible realms.
The shipkeepers pointed toward an object bobbing in the water, and the boat steered toward it. Will Halliday knew it could only be one thing. He began to sob, both for the old man’s method of dying, and for the one mumbled word of his that Will thought he had made out, just as Gonson began to fall: ‘David’. Although he did not know if it was permissible for a Christian to do so in the case of suicide, Will began to finger his paternoster, and, in his deep, tuneful bass voice, which his stammer never impeded, to sing the praye
rs for the dead: not the prayers of the new and still unfamiliar, unsettling English liturgy, but the old Latin words, that William Gonson would have known and loved long ago, in Melton Mowbray, far away in the middle of England, so very far from the sea.
‘Requiem aeternam dona ei, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat ei. Requiescat in pace. Amen. Requiem aeternam dona ei…’
NINETEEN
The English army completely encircled Boulogne. From every quarter, even from across the estuary of the Liane river, King Henry’s artillery pounded the lower town, the smoke rolling over the countless flags of Saint George that flew from the English positions. Sometimes, from the deck of the Osprey, Jack saw a great cannonball strike a church tower and bring masonry crashing to the ground, or a mortar round plunge through the roof of a tall building. He imagined the scene ashore easily enough: all he had to do was envisage Dunwich under siege in the same way. He could picture the vast mortar balls shattering walls and roofs, or crushing men, women and children as they ran in terror down the streets, desperately seeking safety. There would be no respite when darkness fell, either. Night after night, along every part of the walls of Boulogne, troops of English archers, hackbutters, billmen and pikemen probed at the defences, wearing down the Frenchmen on the walls. Fires broke out in the lower town as fireballs or fire-arrows struck home, the flames illuminating the night sky and lighting up the walls of the upper town and castle, still defiant upon the great hill.
In the harbour, though, all was quiet. Since the sinking of Valente’s command, the French had not attempted to run the blockade in either direction. This gave Jack and the returned Simon Bulbrooke time to attend to the repairs of the Osprey, although it was clear that the ship would have to be docked or beached properly to make good the damage beneath the waterline. Bulbrooke was sullen, and drinking heavily. He blamed Jack for his head and leg wounds, still swathed in bandages; for the deaths of young Stephen Ball and George Vincent; and for the damage to the ship. But he also knew the Stannards well enough to know that old Peter, the leper, would always support his own son against his sister’s child. Jack knew it, too, and avoided his cousin’s company as much as he could, difficult as it was in such a small hull. All the while, though, Jack thought on Valente’s words. The Genoese was gone. Lisle proved forgiving, and Valente had said he was returning to London to secure his back pay and petition for a new command. At least, that was the story he had spun to Jack. The younger man had a suspicion that Valente sought a very different harbour, and was gone off to sail and plunder with the Huguenot Roberval. But although their encounter had been only fleeting, Jack still thought much on Valente’s words. By night, indeed, he found himself dreaming more and more often of distant shores, of blazing sun beating down on golden beaches, of gold itself.
Then, one morning, the great bombardment fell silent. The report came out from the shore to one of the closer ships, and was then shouted from hull to hull.
‘A truce!’ The cry reached the Osprey. ‘A truce! A parley!’
A few hours of uncertainty passed. Then, toward evening, Jack saw a small party ride across the bridge into the lower town. A little later, the cross of Saint George broke out upon the gate tower. Cheering broke out throughout the huge encampment, then on the ships in the harbour.
Simon Bulbrooke came up from the hold. He looked around, askance.
‘What’s to do?’
‘They’ve surrendered, Si! We have Boulogne!’
The older man glanced across the water.
‘No,’ he said. ‘Fleur-de-lis still flying in the upper town, and on the castle, yonder. Lower town only has surrendered, as it always would. Indefensible. Full of the lower sort of people – not the sort worth fighting for. But the upper town… that’s a very different case. Very different.’
Bulbrooke was slurring his words, and Jack suspected he was replenishing his tankard frequently below decks.
* * *
The damaged Osprey was out of the water. Following the fall of the lower town, Jack had requested, and been granted, permission to bring the ship upstream, under the shattered outer wall of Boulogne, and run her ashore, so that repairs could be effected more easily. Simon Bulbrooke continued to disappear for hours on end, no doubt into the taverns of the lower town, but Jack still made no attempt to reprimand him. Si had made an almighty effort over the temporary repairs during the more difficult time when the Osprey was afloat in the harbour; now that the hull was aground, it was easy for Jack and a work party to repair the hull from the outside, untroubled by constant leaks, every hole, rotten plank, and failure of caulking, easily visible. If Bulbrooke thought that he had earned a long and drunken respite, one in which he could avoid the young cousin whose impetuosity had brought them to this pass, then he was probably right.
The Osprey was beached just downstream from the lowest bridge into the lower town, a position which gave Jack an unrivalled view of the activity ashore. A steady stream of traffic crossed the bridge, bringing the English army across from its original siege positions and encampments on the other bank. Troops of soldiers, billmen, archers, hackbutters and other sorts, tramped across into the lower town, singing songs that ranged from the religious to the scatologically profane. Jack joined in with some of them, and earned more than one curious glance across to the possessor of a voice finer than any that the army seemed to possess. A sound much akin to thunder presaged the slow progress of cannon and mortars, their wheeled carriages rumbling as teams of oxen pulled them across the bridge toward their new positions in entrenchments at the base of the hill upon which the upper town stood. Jack could hear, and sometimes even see, houses being pulled down to create better fields of fire for the artillery. From time to time, a high-ranking officer rode over the bridge on horseback, his splendidly uniformed escort at his back. One particularly impressive retinue attended a man whom Jack recognised, for he had seen him, once, when he was on the Blythburgh road. Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, was very old now, even older than the king, his closest friend and erstwhile brother-in-law, but he still carried himself splendidly upon a horse, and was still every inch a mighty warrior. He did not see Jack, and would not have recognised him, but this duke had been a good friend to Dunwich, in part because Peter Stannard, and Peter’s father Adam before him, had once been trusted men of business for His Grace.
Jack thought he would never see a greater personage than the Duke of Suffolk, nor a greater retinue than that which accompanied him into the lower town; but in this, he was mistaken.
The distant sound of trumpets gave Jack his first inkling. Then he saw soldiers running toward the road, jostling with each other for the best view. Cheering went up on all sides – ‘God save the king!’ ‘Vive le Roi!’ ‘God save your highness!’ ‘God for Harry and Saint George!’
Jack saw the vanward of men-at-arms march onto the bridge, their spearpoints gleaming in the bright sunlight. The bridge was too narrow for any but the escort; any who attempted to line its sides were brusquely swept out of the way by the armed men. That meant Jack had a nearly uninterrupted view of the spectacle crossing the bridge.
Behind the men-at-arms came a party of demilance cavalry, heralds and trumpeters at the head of them, resplendent in glorious tabards. Then came one man, one single rider, on by far the largest horse Jack Stannard had ever seen – and for a man of Suffolk, renowned for its colossal punches, that was no mean claim. But even such a huge steed was very nearly not sufficient for the man upon its back. With his broad girth and square white beard, he bore a passing resemblance to the Duke of Suffolk: but whereas the duke’s bulk still gave the impression of muscle, that was not the case with this man. Although his gambeson and half-armour could probably have accommodated two much smaller men, they were still barely sufficient to encompass the amount of flesh contained within. Great folds of fat fell out over the man’s paunch and sides. He wore no leg armour, and from his unique vantage point, Jack was close enough to see why: one leg was bandaged all the way from the ankle
to the groin. Even so, yellow patches were seeping through the bandages, and the north-easterly breeze brought the faintest trace of a strange, sweet odour.
The man had to be in agony. Every few moments, he slumped a little, and it seemed as though nothing could prevent this enormous mound of flesh falling from his mount. Jack had a terrible presentiment of the vast figure going over the side of the bridge, into the river; and although Jack could swim, and duty would demand that he dive in to try and save this most special of lives, he did not doubt that the decaying colossus would sink like a stone long before he could reach him. But by what must have been both a tremendous effort of will, and the remembrance of the consummate horseman he must have been in his youth, the man stayed astride his steed. But he dared not take his hand from the reins to acknowledge the cheers of the men who lined his route.
As he came level with the Osprey, he turned his head slightly to study the spectacle before him. For just one fleeting moment, his gaze seemed to be directly upon Jack Stannard. From his father’s description of that one occasion, twenty years before, when Peter Stannard had seen the King of England, Jack expected to look upon the face of an Adonis, the lofty, red-headed demigod whom Erasmus, Thomas More, and even Pope Leo, had extolled. Instead, the face of Henry the Eighth was a frightful mask of decay. The eyes were no more than slits, insignificant between the unnaturally puffed-up cheeks and the high, sweating forehead. From certain angles, even Jack’s father looked healthier. But even in shock at the sight before him, Jack still knew his duty, and bowed deeply to his sovereign.
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