Gentleman Captain

by J. D. Davies

  'Ah, Purser, Purser...' said Gale, moving closer still. 'Would any court in the land take your word over mine? Now who would dare think that a man of God would lie on oath, and testify that he had witnessed things he had never truly seen? And me the firmest friend of the king's own chaplain, too. Any judge, or jury, or court-martial that you know of, Purser?'

  'Let me see if I have the right of what you say, Reverend Gale,' I interrupted. I understood my chaplain's intent, discomforting though it was. 'You claim to have witnessed the purser, Mr Peverell, and the boy, Andrewartha, perform acts in direct contravention of the thirty-second Article of War? Which article prescribes death as the automatic punishment for such a heinous sin? And you are sure of what you've seen, Reverend, and would testify to it?'

  Gale shrugged. 'Who's to say what I've seen and haven't seen, Captain? My recollections come and go, these days.' His face hardened as he turned back to Peverell. 'But be assured of one thing. If this worm presses any charge against the boy'–he stared intently at the cringing man–'then the recollections I put before a court martial will be as clear as day.'

  'The injustice...' Peverell could hardly speak. 'You're a creature of the devil, not of God. I have friends and I will have vengeance on you, you drunken pisspot.'

  'You'll not be avenged on anyone or anything, Stafford Peverell,' said Gale savagely. 'In the old times, the Church gave sanctuary to those who sought it, with God's holy wrath as their defence against pursuit by their enemies. Well, so do I. If Lieutenant Vyvyan concurs, I'll take the lad for my own servant.' Vyvyan nodded. 'In all official senses he now serves me, and thus the Lord Archbishop, and thus God Almighty. So mark this, Peverell. My sword hasn't tasted blood these twelve years, but if you stray anywhere near that lad now he's under my protection, whether it's to convert him to Rome or to do whatever else you might have in mind, then I'll stick you on the end of it like the overripe pig you are.'

  The purser's face was twisted, and I could see veins pulsing on his neck and forehead. For a moment he stood torn between his fear and his anger. Then he turned furiously on his heel and retired to his cabin. Andrewartha looked confusedly between James Vyvyan and the Reverend Gale. The chaplain inclined his head toward the lieutenant, and the boy went to his accustomed master, who saluted me before returning to his place of duty on the quarterdeck. Boatswain Ap, satisfied that murder and equally gross disorder had been prevented on his ship, saluted in his turn, and left the steerage.

  I began to say something in thanks to Francis Gale, but he raised a hand. 'Forgive me, Captain. I have a conversation to resume, and this bottle is proving particularly loquacious.'

  As he turned toward his cabin, I called after him. 'We will talk, Chaplain. You'll not avoid me this entire voyage!'

  'Ah, my dear captain,' he said, 'you'd be surprised how long my avoidances can last.'

  Chapter Eleven

  Kit Farrell scraped the quill across the paper, spilling ink to left and right. Slowly, he completed his unsteady downstroke and turned the pen to the left, drawing something like a hook, as he had been told. He lifted the pen and moved it a little way to the right, where he scratched a shape that vaguely resembled a horseshoe. Further to the right again, he essayed a small circle with a downstroke coming from its left, then a bold single stroke, then a Christian cross. He stopped, looked at the paper, and frowned. With his face a mask of concentration, he drew a horseshoe on its side, and closed it off at the top. Finally he scratched another hook, the mirror image of his first, upright and pointing off to the right of the paper.

  He looked at the finished effort, and said with a little pride, 'Jupiter.'

  Jupiter indeed,' I said. 'You can write your ship's name, Kit Farrell. Be thankful you're not serving on the Constant Reformation.'

  We were a day beyond the confrontation with Stafford Peverell. The Jupiter was sailing northward through the Irish Sea in fine and clear weather. The mood on board had improved with the weather, and there was no further word of Malachi Landon's grim prognostications of doom.

  That morning, I had sat in my cabin with my grandfather's compendium dial in my hand, and looked upon the inscription on the outer face: MQBC 1585. Matthew Quinton, Baron Caldecote. My grandfather. The year before he inherited the earldom. I opened up the device and looked upon its many pages. When I played with it as a child, these were all meaningless to me, and so I thought it would be now, for I had not opened the device properly in ten years. But strange to say, the pages now made a certain sense. That one was evidently a calendar, and that–why, a miniature sundial, surely. One was plainly a compass for taking bearings; Landon and Kit Farrell had larger versions of the same instrument, and called it a circumferentor. I went to the stern window, lined up the device on a distant Irish horse-boat and took a bearing. Another dial resembled the compass, but was scaled in the named months, and twelfths, and thirtieths. A nocturnal, then–the instrument used by the master and his mates to take bearings on the Great Bear! Then there was a table by which a man could tell the time of the tide anywhere on earth. No, not such a mystery, after all! My grandfather had mastered this device, and so would I: MQ 1662.

  The bell had rung then for the change of watch, Kit Farrell came below, and in the blinking of an eye, I turned from student to teacher.

  I had begun instructing Kit in the lexical mysteries by giving him an alphabet on a copy-tablet, and suggesting he recite the sounds of the letters over to himself. Then I had shown him the method of holding a pen properly, and taught him to sign his name–or at least, to write the word Kit, as to a man of no learning, both Christopher and Farrell would be as daunting as a poem by Milton. His second word was ship, though the's and the p took a while to march across the paper in the right direction. Jupiter was his third word. Phineas Musk, who had always been suspiciously literate for a rogue of such dubious birth, had watched my teaching with amusement until he became bored; whereupon he went up on deck to shout insults at the distant coast of Wales. I trusted that the target of his bile would not be mistaken aboard the Royal Martyr, which was sailing parallel to us a few hundred yards to starboard.

  'Well, Captain,' Kit Farrell said, shaking me out of my reverie, 'if seamanship is as hard for you as this of writing is for me, then I think we should...' He stopped, gazing over my shoulder out of my quarter-gallery window.

  'Mister Farrell?'

  'Royal Martyr...' he said, and said no more, for suddenly there was a flash and in the same instant a mighty thunder deafened us both. I turned, and saw the side of Judge's ship engulfed in smoke. She had fired her full broadside. She had fired it at us.

  Men scattered from our path as we ran to the quarterdeck. They seemed startled, but none displayed the panic I would have expected under fire. Why had Vyvyan not ordered our decks cleared? And why had Judge fired at us?

  A second broadside roared out from Royal Martyrs larboard battery. We reached the quarterdeck to find James Vyvyan, hands braced on the rail, looking over to Judge's ship with his face set. Musk had backed against the larboard rail, his face as white as a shroud and his breeches suspiciously damp. It was only in that moment that I realized we had not been hit. Our rigging still stood, our sails were intact, our hull unscathed.

  Royal Martyr's guns were not shotted.

  'Lieutenant Vyvyan,' I said, joining him at the rail. 'What in Christ's name—'

  The foremost gun of Royal Martyrs larboard battery finished my sentence for me. Even it had not, the task would have been accomplished by the next gun behind her, which fired barely moments afterward. Then her next, and the next, and the next after that. And then I knew.

  'She's firing a salute,' said Kit Farrell at that instant. 'She's even hoisting all her ensigns and bunting. A royal salute, Captain.'

  'There's no anniversary today–no cause at all for this,' said Vyvyan.

  'Unless the cause is to impress us with her broadsides, sir,' suggested Kit. 'I make that two full broadsides in less than a fifth of a glass, and this rolling f
ire not long after. There won't be many ships in our navy that can match such a rate of fire. Not many ships in any navy, come to that.'

  I promised myself that I would order a drill of the great guns as soon as it was fitting–which would be a time when the Royal Martyr was out of sight and therefore unable to gloat over our inadequacies–for if Judge's intention was to impress, he had succeeded all too amply. He had told me that almost all his men were veterans who had sailed with him before, learning their trade in the great war with the Dutch. Their excellence explained in no little measure why not even the great butterbox sailors, my own good-brother amongst them, could stand against these ironsides afloat.

  'Martyrs hoisting the signal for captains in company to repair aboard, sir,' said Kit.

  I nodded. 'Well, then. Perhaps Captain Judge will be kind enough to explain exactly why he chooses to waste so much of the king's powder.'

  Boatswain Ap and his crew hauled in our longboat–in these light seas we had been towing it in our wake–and Martin Lanherne assembled his oarsmen. They rowed me over to Royal Martyr, where I was greeted by a full side party, her boatswain's pipe, and the sullen Lieutenant Warrender. Lanherne, Le Blanc and Polzeath stood at my back, dressed as smartly as Le Blanc's hasty efforts would permit; a not unsuitable escort for the heir to Ravensden. I raised my hat to the stern and the royal ensign streaming out in the breeze. As I did so, I noticed with a shock a man that I had not seen since my first night at Portsmouth. My brutal old crop-headed adversary Linus Brent looked me up and down, then turned his back on me and stooped to attend a sailor who lay unconscious upon the deck in a pool of his own blood.

  Leading me to the quarterdeck, his servants close behind, Warrender explained. 'Accident with the recoil, sir. Should have known better than to be standing there, a man with fifteen years' service. He'll only be good for a cook now, if he can get a warrant, or else an almsman's place. May God have mercy on those whose day is done. Those like poor Captain Harker.'

  Warrender spoke these words in a quiet, detached voice that puzzled me. There was no opportunity to dwell on his strange mien, however, for we were already at the quarterdeck stair. Godsgift Judge looked almost military, at least by his own, entirely unique, standards. He wore a red jacket after the Persian fashion, which could have been mistaken from a distance for a Guardsman's tunic. His sword hung by his side, his great wig was capped incongruously by a black turban, and he held a large goblet of wine in his hand.

  'Captain Quinton!' he trilled. 'A very good day, my dear sir. I trust our little salute did not startle you?' With a coy smirk he tapped me on the shoulder. 'I should have forewarned you, perhaps, but I was so impatient to hail the happy news.'

  'News, Captain?'

  'A princess, sir! A new daughter to the Duke and Duchess of York! A cock-boat out of Cardigan Bay brought us the news but half an hour ago. You'll join me to toast the glorious event, I trust?'

  Now, my love of my country and my king was as strong as any man's, but I felt not a little embarrassed as I stood once more in Judge's aromatic great cabin, toasting an infant girl in far-offWhitehall. Surely, I reasoned, this child was hardly worthy of such attention. She would either die in infancy, or she would be supplanted by all the sons the duke would have, and even more by all those that King Charles would have with his new Portuguese queen. It seemed to me that, once more, the exquisite Judge was attempting to prove himself a true Cavalier, the staunchest Royalist. It turned my stomach. His chosen way of marking the royal birth, demonstrating in the process the very real superiority of his ship and crew over my own, doubtless did its part to shape my feelings.

  Such were my thoughts, for we cannot read the future. Neither Godsgift Judge nor I knew that on that day in April 1662 we were toasting the birth of Her Most Gracious Majesty, Mary the Second, who would one day, by the grace both of God and several unlikely turns of fate, find herself Queen Regnant of England and the wife of William of Orange, our late and unlamented Dutch King. A queen twenty-two years younger than myself, yet I saw her buried, and that long, long ago.

  After we had drunk what Judge considered to be an appropriately loyal amount of wine, and he had again nakedly solicited the good offices of the House of Quinton on his behalf, he sat me down at his table and unrolled a sea-chart of the west coast of Scotland. Like our sovereign lord the king, when he turned to matters of life and death Godsgift Judge put aside his outward appearance and superficial mannerisms, and became a very different man, decisive and clear. In truth, he became precisely the sort of man to whom Oliver Cromwell would have given the command of a great man-of-war.

  'So, Captain Quinton,' he said, 'this is what I propose. When we come off the head of Kintyre, we'll send word to Dumbarton for the king's regiment to begin its march toward the coast. You'll take on your pilot for Scottish waters thereabouts–I can manage without any such, of course. Then, we'll make for the Sound of Jura, here, pass into the Firth of Lorne, here, and show ourselves around Mull, Lismore, and the coasts up to Skye.' He pointed at inlets and islands on a coastline that even on a chart looked to be strange and remote. I saw fingers of sea that stretched far into a land of mountains, and marked the many rocks and shoals scattered along our course. 'That should alert Glenrannoch to our coming, and perhaps be sufficient to change his mind before the soldiers reach Oban. We'll call on him, of course, and on some of the other chiefs in those lands. Maclean, certainly, Macdougall of Dunollie too, and some of the Macdonald septs: Clanranald, Glengarry, Lochiel...' He stopped and thought for a moment, drumming absently on the chart with his manicured fingertips. 'And perhaps Ardverran too. Yes, Ardverran, I think. They'll all benefit from a gentle reminder that the king's writ runs even in their black fastnesses.'

  I was guarded, and feeling not a little resentful of Judge that day. Not at all put out, he leaned back on a chair that would not have been out of place in a salon, and shook his head slowly.

  'Blood feuds, Captain Quinton. Endless blood feuds, these clansmen indulge themselves in. Generation after generation, century after century. God knows, when I was there last, I came to feel that many of them looked on our great civil wars as but a trivial and annoying diversion from their business of avenging themselves on each other for all eternity.'

  'So what should I know of these lands and these people, Captain,' I asked, 'before we reach our destination?'

  He smiled. 'More than I have time to tell you, Matthew, and more than you want to learn. Trust me in that. I was in those waters a whole year, and learned but a fraction of it. These people are a century or more behind us in manners and warfare alike, and their feuding makes the Italians look like saints. But it will work for us. For instance, if we but hint to the Macdonalds that the Campbells are rising under Glenrannoch, they'll likely do our work for us, at no expense to the king. Campbell against Macdonald, Captain Quinton. Forget all the lesser names, and the lesser feuds. Once, the Macdonalds had a kingdom in those lands, the Lordship of the Isles as they called it, but then the Kings of Scots and the Campbells brought them down. So in the late wars, when Campbell sided with Parliament, Macdonald fought for the king. They suffered harshly in those times, of course, but now, with the king restored and the Campbell Earls of Argyll brought low, the Macdonalds have risen again in the world. They'll not want to see Glenrannoch with an army, Captain Quinton, for though his aim is to conquer Scotland, you can be certain that somewhere along that road he'll use it to slaughter every last Macdonald.'

  I asked, 'You knew Glenrannoch, when you were there before?'

  'No, he was still abroad then. But I dealt with all the rest of the Campbells–and old Argyll, of course, Glenrannoch's cousin and chief, in name at any rate. He was still holed up at Inveraray after betraying every side he ever joined. Glenrannoch's name was everywhere, though, from Galloway up to Shetland. "When Glenrannoch comes back to his own," they'd say, as if he was some sort of Arthur returning from Avalon. They made him out to be the greatest general that ever lived: a cross between Gust
avus Adolphus and Noll Cromwell. "Clan Campbell wouldn't be brought so low," one told me, "if Glenrannoch was here, and in Argyll's stead." All so much vainglorious Scots bluster, of course. We'll bring him low in his turn, Captain Quinton.'

  Judge raised his cup to me. His rings sparkled in the sun, and I saw he was his simpering self once more. 'So, sir, I give you a swift and prosperous outcome to our mission.' He sipped his wine and dabbed delicately at his lips, all trace of the warrior gone. 'And then, who knows what beneficence we might expect from His Majesty, eh?'

  My boat's crew was sullen as they rowed me back across the calm Irish Sea towards the Jupiter. It was Le Blanc, with that unfailing capacity of the French to disregard the moods of the English, who finally broke the silence.

  'So, monsieur le capitaine, shall we, too, salute l'enfant royale?'

  Lanherne glared at him for his impertinence and I made no answer, but Le Blanc's question reflected my own thoughts. We would have to fire a salute, of course, but I knew full well that we could not hope to match the speed or immaculate coordination of the Royal Martyr's broadside. Judge and his men might laugh our efforts to the skies, and that would be a humiliation too far for these proud Cornish lads and their captain.

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw Le Blanc engage in a whispered conference with Polzeath and Lanherne. With a dismissive gesture at the Royal Martyr, Polzeath then turned to Treninnick. The simian oarsman's face broke into perhaps the most terrifying grin I ever saw and then, quite suddenly, he began to sing. For such an ugly creature, his voice was soft, almost feminine. I had encountered good singing many times, of course–only the previous winter, my brother Charles and I had encountered Desgranges, the great French bass, sing in London–but I never heard any, no matter how cried up, who could frame a tune as John Treninnick did in the Jupiters longboat that day. It was an old, old song, Lanherne said, of King Mark of Cornwall and the loves of the fair Isolde, and it was in the Cornish tongue. Treninnick finished the last verse just as we came alongside the starboard side of the Jupiter, and as he shipped his oar, Roger Le Blanc turned to me.