Gentleman Captain

by J. D. Davies

  It was evident from their faces that the other officers disliked Stafford Peverell, but there was something more in their eyes, too. Was it fear? Could this unpleasant, arrogant, toadying individual pose a threat to anyone? I thought not, although there truly was something about him that sent a chill down my spine.

  Later, I asked James Vyvyan if Peverell's contempt for his uncle had been reciprocated. Vyvyan's reply was slow and careful, the response of a man who does not wish to take his enemy into his confidence, but does so despite himself. It had been reciprocated, he said, and tenfold at that. Their contempt for each other was so powerful that Vyvyan had even hysterically accused the purser of being James Harker's murderer. But when the first torrent of grief abated, Vyvyan considered the matter again, and concluded that it would have been far more likely for Harker to have killed the arrogant, overbearing Peverell, than the reverse. But my lieutenant's eyes told a different story, and I knew that one day, I would have to find the bottom of this estrangement between my purser and the rest of my officers.

  One warrant officer was missing from the assembly, and at the end of breakfast, as the others trooped out to their duties, I asked Vyvyan, 'So where was the chaplain, Lieutenant? The Reverend Gale, isn't it?'

  Vyvyan shrugged. 'Ashore, no doubt. He'll be back for the Sunday service, sir–or at least, he usually is. Much good that a service from Francis Gale will do for our immortal souls.'

  Ashore, I thought, without his captain's permission? 'And what does Reverend Gale do ashore?'

  'Captain Harker gave him the permission, sir. He thought it best to have him on the ship as little as possible.' Then, for the first time in our acquaintance, James Vyvyan smiled a little. 'As for what he's doing ashore, Captain, well, he does the rounds of the places of worship. Most mornings he's worshipping at the Red Lion. Afternoons, at the Greyhound. In the evenings, if he's still sensible by then, his devotions take him to the Dolphin.'

  A sot, at sea for money, the Duke of York had written.

  I was sorry, but hardly surprised. The navy invariably attracted the worst sort of clerics; men who, for whatever reason, were too feeble to hold parishes ashore–or held parishes so poor that they needed to supplement their meagre tithes with almost equally meagre navy pay. My chaplain on the Happy Restoration, Geddes, had been past seventy and almost stone deaf. He preached on the same obscure verse of Ecclesiastes for five Sundays in succession until I received a round-robin petition from the crew and had to have an awkward, and very loud, word with him. Of all that poor, benighted ship's company, he was one whose watery death was a blessed release for all parties. A few years afterwards, the unfortunate crew of one ship found their immortal souls in the care of one Titus Oates, convicted perjurer, failed Jesuit novice, and sodomite. He later moved on to far greater notoriety as the man who lied to the king's face and almost brought down the monarchy with his fantasy of a 'popish plot' to assassinate Charles the Second. In such company, a drunk like Francis Gale would be harmless enough. How little I then knew.

  Gloomily, I prepared to settle down for one of the endless days of dull paperwork with which naval captains are inflicted. Some assume that command at sea is all glory and drama, sails spread, swords drawn, cannons blazing, bearing down to victory and honour. I had known such thoughts, once. Recalling Uncle Tristram's fantastically embellished tales of my grandfather's career had been one of my few ways of reconciling myself to the bitter disappointment of a commission in the navy, rather than the post in the Guards that I coveted; that, and the knowledge that accepting the commission was the only way I could prevent my loyal and livid Cornelia accosting His Majesty and His Royal Highness at the next opportunity, putting her in imminent danger of being arrested as a Dutch spy. In truth, though, very little of a naval captain's time is to do with action and glory. Instead, it is governed by the inexorable tolling of the ship's bell, every half-hour until four hours are reached, when the watch changes and every man aboard (save the captain, of course) must awake, or slumber, or move to some place else, as his particular station demands. How happy the landsman, whose only fixed points are dawn and dusk, and is free of this tyranny of time which decrees that a man must always be in a certain place at a certain moment! Then again, much of a man-of-war's service is spent at anchor in some dull roadstead, awaiting wind, or tide, or water and fresh victuals. Much of a captain's day is taken up with reading the tedious papers of his subordinates, basing upon them equally tedious reports that he then forwards to his own superiors in turn. Can it be any wonder that instead I sought the splendid uniform and glorious reputation of an officer of Horse, wishing, like my father, to charge to glory on some immortal field? As it was, I sat down at James Harker's sea table and steeled myself to pen long letters to the king, and the Duke of York, and Mr Pepys of the Navy Office (and, informally, to my wife, mother, and brother). I hardened my mind to several hours with the purser, poring over the ship's books. There were countless manifests and musters and pay books, even in those halcyon days before the same Mr Pepys and his acolytes turned the navy into a very purgatory of paper.

  But as I sat before a sheet of paper on which I had portentously superscribed the words ' Your Majesty, I humbly beg to leave to report, I noticed Lieutenant Vyvyan hovering in the doorway.

  'Was there something else, Lieutenant?' I asked.

  Dislike still painted the canvas of the young man's face, but he spoke, reluctantly. 'Sir, the note that Captain Harker received. Did you think any further on it?'

  I confessed that I had not. Then, to placate him, I took it out and laid it on the table. The words had not changed, nor had my assessment of them. ' Captain Harker. Fear God, sir, remember His grace. Go not ashore this day,' I read aloud, my face neutral and my tone dry. An injunction to dread the Lord and be mindful of His good grace is hardly evidence of murder, Mister Vyvyan.'

  He said, 'Sir, look at the writing. Look at the words Harker and His. Look at the letter H.'

  The hand was unusual, it was true. It looked like the attempt of a schoolboy to disguise his script by using his left hand, so as to pen foul and secret notes to a young girl. I looked at the letter H. There it was. I looked blankly at Vyvyan.

  Vyvyan said, 'It's not a capital, sir. It's not His grace, it's his grace.

  He was right. On closer inspection, the 'H' in 'Harker' and in 'his' were quite different.

  'Yes, "his grace". A duke–and a duke who was not royal, so not entitled to "highness"? The Duke of Albemarle?'

  'If I'm right, Captain, it's a duke long dead. His grace, George, Duke of Buckingham. Done to death, here–in Portsmouth town.'

  'Oh, come, Mister Vyvyan, that's an old story. Far too old and obscure to be a warning of murder, surely.'

  His face was grim. 'For most men perhaps, sir. But my uncle first went to sea with Buckingham: on the La Rochelle expeditions back in the twenties. He was one of his body servants. He was one of those who held the duke as he died. My uncle told me once that Buckingham's blood ran free over his arms and shirt. "Remember his grace." The note means this–Remember that your master Buckingham died in Portsmouth, James Harker, and so shall you if you go ashore.

  During the next three days, with the wind still obdurate against us, I was engrossed in all that taking command of a new ship entailed. I entertained my officers to dinner. These were awful affairs: Stanton and Penbaron could talk of nothing beyond their own concerns, while the vile Peverell's much-vaunted gentility seemed to involve eating and drinking with great enjoyment as much of his meal spilled down his chin. Malachi Landon meanwhile took pleasure in leading me into conversations designed to expose my ignorance of sea-craft, even attempting to convince me that hogging was to do with the ritual slaughter of pigs to bless our voyage.

  On one afternoon I reciprocated Captain Judge's hospitality by inviting him to the Jupiter, where Janks did us proud, albeit not with the scented excesses of a floating seraglio. Chicken we had in full measure, herrings galore too and a fine venison pie, followe
d by bread pudding and several bowls of punch, all served on pewter crockery that bore the monogram 'JH'. Vyvyan proved to have excellent social graces and I came to rely more and more upon his company. I learned that he was at bottom a man of honour, whatever he might have thought of his jumped-up captain; his family were old Cornish gentry, and within living memory they had provided a Bishop of Exeter, an admiral, and several Chancery lawyers. During the repast Judge thankfully confined himself to a few ingratiating questions about my grandfather's time at sea. Instead he spent much of his time talking to Vyvyan, and their earnest conversations on obscure points of seamanship gave me cause once again to recall the depth of my own ignorance, and the death-throes of the Happy Restoration.

  On other days, there were the inevitable duty calls on the dockyard commissioner and the deputy governor of the town, involving much lavish toasting of the king's health. Purser Peverell evidently thought that securing the recommendation of his new captain was best achieved by taking the said captain as slowly and methodically as possible through every minute entry in every single piece of paper relating to the ship. He dealt with me as I had not been treated since my schooldays, when old Mervyn had been at once wrathful and condescending towards the feeble young dullard whose utter failure to master the poetry of Vergil detained them both long after the tolling of the school bell. My dislike of the purser increased, and I began to fear he might be capable of killing a man by boring him to death, or else by breathing on him for some length of time.

  Then there were musters of individual messes and watches, when I went below decks and endeavoured to look earnest as Boatswain Ap showed me defective hammocks and carelessly stowed sea chests, or else denounced a significant proportion of the crew as blasphemers, drunks, or both. One of my fixed tasks was the regular, obligatory reading of the Articles of War to the entire crew, warning them of the dire fates that awaited any who broke the navy's strict legal code. At each of these formalities, I attempted to appear at once splendid and authoritative, but probably succeeded only in resembling a leaf on a branch in an October breeze. I could not seem to avoid catching the eyes of my erstwhile saviours, Polzeath, Trenance, Treninnick, and the rest, who looked upon me with an apparent mixture of pity, contempt, and (in Treninnick's case) utter incomprehension. The black man, Carvell, had a disconcerting habit of whistling silently to himself during the reading of the Articles of War, but remembering the fate that he might or might not have bestowed upon his sometime employer in Virginia, I decided to let the matter pass. As for my mysterious French 'Periwig', the self-proclaimed tailor Roger Le Blanc, he seemed to look upon every one of the ship's proceedings as a matter of considerable amusement, smiling to himself at each recitation of the ferocious litany of floggings and death sentences that formed the peroration of most of our Articles of War. My heart sank a little more at each of these occasions, for earning the respect of my men seemed as distant a prospect as the shore of old Cathay.

  Even so, it was clear even to me that Boatswain Ap and Martin Lanherne had the ship's discipline well in hand, both formally and informally, so when Vyvyan requested permission to go ashore to pursue his investigation into his uncle's death, I saw no reason why he should not. This would give me some respite from his wild suspicions and–worst of all–his calm, unfussy competence, which threw my own abiding ignorance into such sharp relief.

  There was no sign yet of the Reverend Gale. No sign, either, of Kit Farrell.

  There was, however, one (relatively) welcome arrival. I was penning a second letter to the Duke of York when one of the boatswain's mates summoned me to the quarterdeck. A boat was pulling painfully towards us from Portsmouth, rowed by two straining oarsmen. It lay deep in the water, for it carried what I recognized as my long-expected sea chest, one of my (far larger, and thus unexpected) land chests, and a horribly uncomfortable, green-faced Phineas Musk.

  Even after Musk and my belongings had been deposited in my cabin by several perspiring crewmen, it proved impossible to get a word out of him. He sat at my table, drinking only a little boiled water–itself a sign that he was truly ill–and shaking his head softly. The creaking of the ship's timbers and the gentle lapping of the waves on our hull, two of the staple sounds of life at sea, seemed to instil in Musk a terror of imminent doom. Eventually, and without a word, he reached inside his jacket and produced two letters, both addressed by familiar hands, and a third letter in an unfamiliar and shocking script, addressed to 'Capt. M. Cwinton, threw care of the nobble Ld of Rivensdin at Rivvensdin House in Londun.'

  I began with my brother's letter, in which he wrote of the king and duke's satisfaction at my taking command, and which ended, 'Brother, I send you Musk. I think you will need him more than I, for they tell me good servants are rarely found at sea, and whatever his faults, Musk is good enough. Besides, I will probably kill him if he continues to lord it over me here, and a voyage by sea may teach him and his stomach a little more humility. God bless you in what you do, Matt.

  Musk looked up miserably. 'Going to sea, at my age. If Our Lord had meant Phineas Musk to go to sea, he'd have made certain I was born a herring.'

  I asked, 'So who cares for my brother, and Ravensden House?'

  'He's gone to the abbey, and your mother. Captain van der Eide has gone back to his ship, so he won't have to deal with all the boundless excitement from Veere. The earl wants to go through the estate rentals with old Barcock, too. Says he'll tolerate some of the goodwife's cooking for a fortnight or more, and in due course he'll take one of her sons back with her to train him up in the duties of the London house. Expect he thinks I'll die on this voyage, and judging by that boat out from Portsmouth, he's probably right.'

  I laughed, and summoned the purser. Peverell shook his head and licked his lips, seeming to regard the matter of entering Phineas Musk as captain's servant on the ship's books as a task equal to all the labours of Hercules. If Peverell's look could have killed, I would have been as dead as James Harker. Finally, after much protest and several admonitory mentions of the names 'Pepys', 'the Duke of York' and 'King Charles', he skulked away to begin work.

  I opened the second letter, which was from Cornelia, written in the flowing, loving hand and awkward style of a Dutch woman who had not known a word of English until she was seventeen. There was more talk of my mother's waspishness, of the Barcocks, and of Cornelis, who had received urgent news which caused him to return suddenly to his ship. He had already sailed from Greenwich Reach, she wrote, on the same strong westerlies that continue to trap the Jupiter at Portsmouth. She eschewed platitudinous comments about missing me, though I knew she did, just as I missed her. But she could not refrain from reciting her concerns for my safety, just as she ever had. I was barely eighteen and had met her but once, at her uncle's house in Bruges (he and my mother, our matchmakers, being dimly acquainted of old), before I went off in all my finery to fight for the Duke of York and the Spanish on the dunes before Dunkirk. We were not even betrothed, but she had berated me almost from dawn to dusk until I promised not to hazard myself foolishly, and to return to her unscathed. Which I had, but for a few scratches and a slash across the ribs: no mean feat in that Battle of the Dunes, which was as one sided as any since Cannae. We had run before the incongruous alliance of the turtle-helmeted fanatics of the New Model and the French Mousquetaires du Roi, crossing each other as their mass-priests paraded relics of the saints before them, to the evident distaste of their allies.

  My escape satisfied Cornelia: while our tiny Royalist army disintegrated in the twin whirlpools of penury and recrimination there was no employment for my sword. I could be safely married. Yet despite being on every other count the most sensible and practical wife any husband could wish to find, Cornelia remained incorrigibly convinced that the moment I left her sight I was in mortal danger. She cried for days when I went off to command the Happy Restoration, believing that we were bound to encounter an Algerine corsair (which would have been preferable to our encounter with the rocks of County
Cork, if truth be told). She once even pursued me all the way to a horse-fair in Royston merely because she dreamed I would be murdered there by a one-eyed Chinaman.

  'God guard and keep you dearst love, she concluded her letter. ' Little we know of yr voyage but Charles tells there may be some dangers. You know how fearful I am, thinking yr schip shatterd once more upon a black shore. Or pounded by the guns of mighty enemy. Cornelis told me foolish, and perhaps he has rights. So be careful at once and glorious, if it is possible to be both. Remember always that here at Ravensden, you are rememberd and loved. From my heart to yours, for ever, Cornelia.' She had written a postscript on the reverse. 'On hearing your schip was ordered for west of Skotland, your mother seemd agitate. I asked for why, but she is telling me not. She startd a letter to you, then threw it on the fire.'

  This postscript perplexed me more than Cornelia's anxiety. Irascible she may have been, but my mother was rarely agitated, beyond the scope of her usual hates and an occasional oath at her inability to move as quickly and freely as once she could. As far as I knew, too, she had no particular connection with Scotland; at least, none greater than was usual for someone who had been about the Stuart court for years, and was thus bound to know many of the Scots who had come down with their king when the crowns united. I asked Musk if my mother seemed well at his going from the abbey with my belongings, and he said she seemed to him the same as she ever was. On reflection, this was little surprise. My mother was not a woman to betray such emotion before Phineas Musk, whom she had kept on at Ravensden House for years despite detesting him almost as heartily as she had Oliver Cromwell.