Gentleman Captain

by J. D. Davies

  We sailed out into the broad Firth of Lorne, with the large and rolling Isle of Mull ahead of us, and turned downwind to show ourselves off Oban–a rude fishing town dominated by the Macdougalls–and nearby Dunstaffnage, where the wind-torn standard of the red lion rampant was a solitary but welcome sign of our king's authority. This, the royal castle of Dunstaffnage, was our one gateway to the world we had left behind: letters to and from the Jupiter could pass through the ancient castle gates in the Mail Royal, which maintained teams of riders down the long road to England.

  A clamour of shouted instructions punctuated the afternoon as we tacked to and fro in a westerly direction. We passed the Isle of Lismore. The Jupiters scuttled aloft and down again, rushing hither and thither with a noticeable new enthusiasm–perhaps trying to redeem themselves after the gunnery drill. We showed ourselves next in the Sound of Mull, where gaunt, grey-green hills stretched away on either side of the sea-channel. Duart Castle, at its entrance, stood proud upon a great rock and was the seat of the Macleans, who had been loyal to the king in the late wars. The castle saluted us by dipping her flag. I have no doubt that Maclean had cannon from the wars hidden unlawfully in his cellars, as did all the chiefs of those parts. Of course he did not reveal his hand to the king's ships by firing in salute.

  So we came to Tobermory, a small fishing village at the end of the island of Mull. A great galleon of the Spanish Armada had come to grief here, in Queen Bess's day, as she struggled past this dreadful coast in the forlorn hope of returning to old Galicia. Uncle Tristram insisted that she was one of the very ships my grandfather had attacked back in July 1588. As we passed, so I nodded a salute to the old warrior and those of his honourable enemies who had died in this sea.

  Beyond Tobermory, the wind fell right away again. Within the hour a dense fog had come down, shrouding us so deeply that we could not see Royal Martyr a few chains ahead of us. Only her bell and trumpets told us where she was. Judge shouted that we should warp towards where he believed a safe anchorage to be. Boatswain Ap dropped our boats, and Lanherne's craft took position at the head of the tow. After every few yards the sounding-lead was slung over the side, and shortly afterwards came a shout telling us of the depth of water beneath our keel. 'Four fathoms!' carried eerily through the dank greyness as I huddled in my coat upon the quarterdeck. We spent perhaps an hour in this fashion, inching to safety, as I hoped, and not to oblivion on an unseen shore. Then I heard a sound like the wailing of a hundred dead men.

  'Royal Martyrs,' said Kit Farrell, appearing out of the gloom. 'She's dropping anchor.'

  Martin Lanherne's shout followed almost immediately. 'Ho, the Jupiter! Captain Judge's order! Drop anchor!'

  This time, Landon looked at me before he gave the order. I nodded. The cable was released and our bower anchor slipped into the dark waters. His work done, Landon went below, leaving me to contemplate the strange scene. It was early in the evening, but it may as well have been the depths of night, for there was no sight of anything, beyond the three dim glimpses of light that were Royal Martyrs stern lanterns. There was no sound, once our ship was secure and the men had stood down. No sound at all.

  James Vyvyan heard it first. He was younger than any of us, true, though not by many years; but Vyvyan had never fought in a battle and had his hearing assaulted by the blast of gunfire.

  'Sir,' he said, in the hushed tone that mankind reserves for being in churches or thick fogs, 'I swear I can hear a drum...'

  Then I heard it too. A single drum, beating time, drawing closer.

  My grandfather, who had been there when they slipped Drake's lead coffin into the waters of Nombre de Dios bay, claimed to have created the legend of Drake's Drum: the phantom beat that would rouse the old pirate's ghost from its infernal slumber. For a moment, just one fleeting moment, I thought that here in these waters, where the Armada they fought had come to grief, Drake and the last Matthew Quinton had returned to resume their battle against the great popish crusade.

  The drum grew louder, but now there were two other sounds that accompanied it: water parting rhythmically, and the unmistakeable creak of wood on wood. It was a sound I knew well, from the barges that plied the Ouse and the Ivel as they meandered across Bedfordshire.

  'Oars,' I said.

  The fog lifted for just a moment and I saw them. First three, then six, then ten: long, low craft, built high at bow and stern, with a single mast and yard, bearing no sail. Instead, they were driven forward by rowers, sweeping their oars in time with the drum on the lead vessel.

  I had called up the wrong ghosts: I had been dreaming that my grandfather and his old friend had come again. These ghosts were just as familiar, though, and should have been more expected in these waters. I had seen them in drawings in some of Uncle Tristram's books, and I knew them for what they were.

  They were the longships of the Vikings, returned from Hell to drag down the souls of us poor mariners of the Jupiter.

  Chapter Thirteen

  I have lived long enough now to know that there are no ghosts, other than the phantoms of our own pasts. There are no ghost fleets, either, and the shades of the Norsemen had not come again in their longships to drag the Jupiter down to fiery oblivion. But I was a young man then, my head still full of the legends from history that Uncle Tristram had drummed into me as a child: of the fury of the Vikings, terrifying all the lands of antiquity from Greenland to Byzantium; of abbeys ablaze, from Lindisfarne round to St David's; of women ravished and men slaughtered. So I stood like a statue, watching the long, low shapes come towards us out of the fog, oars keeping time with the single drum that beat from the leading craft. A giant stood in the bow of the first boat, a bearded giant wrapped in black furs, and I thought of Odin and Thor, of Skjold and Sweyn Forkbeard. My head swam across centuries, and time as I knew it faded away into the fog.

  Then Ruthven the pilot came up on deck, an older man and a Scot. He laughed heartily at the sight of the Jupiters, their captain included, rooted to the deck, staring at a spectacle that had struck terror into our ancestors a millennium ago. These craft, he said, were merely birlinns, the ancient war galleys of Clan Campbell. Frightening they may have been in a fog, but one blast of even our feeble broadside would have smashed them all to driftwood. They were the last relics of a past long dead.

  The first boat came alongside, and the fur-clad giant climbed aboard. Close to, it was plain to see that he was a very modern kind of warrior. Two pistols protruded from his belt, and they seemed to be flintlocks, perhaps even French ones–the best. The giant's left hand was mangled and lacked the middle two fingers. He was Zoltan Simic, he said, attendant upon his excellency General Campbell, who invited us to call upon him at his Tower of Rannoch. Simic's English was immaculate, but tinged with unexpected Gaelic inflections that betrayed a man who had spent years fighting alongside Scots and Irish soldiers of fortune. I pointed out that he was in error in boarding my ship first; he should have paid his respects to Captain Judge, the senior officer, who was bellowing at me across the water in the hope of learning what transpired. But Simic just shrugged, and I had to send Lanherne over to the Royal Martyr to convey the invitation.

  Within an hour, Simic, a soberly dressed Judge, and I were ashore and mounted on the squat, long-haired horses of those parts called garrons. Perhaps thirty Highlanders ran alongside us, bare-legged and clad in swathes of rough cloth; they seemed capable of keeping up with us indefinitely. The fog disappeared as we moved further inland, revealing a dull, cold sky. There were no roads, only harsh, treeless hills and bare moor. The soil seemed to spring beneath our horses' hooves. Every few miles, we saw the smoke or smelled the fragrance of peat fires from cottages that appeared almost to grow out of the land, but no man or woman came out to view us. The light began to fade sooner than it did at Ravensden or Portsmouth, and there was no sign of our reaching our destination. I asked Simic, who had been silent throughout our journey, how much further it would be, for I did not relish the thought of returning
this way in the depths of the night.

  'Beyond the ridge ahead,' he said. 'There lies the Tower of Rannoch.'

  Moments later we breasted the ridge and looked down into the broad valley beyond. I expected to see a gaunt tower-house, very much still the fashion in Scotland in those times, like those that stood sentinel along the shores we had passed. But the Tower of Rannoch confounded me utterly. At the head of a long lake–or loch as the Scots call them–a formal garden had been laid out that would not have disgraced the valley of the Loire. Hedges and bushes that had been set in neat geometric patterns surrounded a low white palace, exactly modelled upon the French style. Torches lined the immaculate avenues, their flames fanned by a breeze that–I noticed just then–was becoming steadily stronger. I could have been looking down on a miniature Chenonceaux, transplanted by some alchemical trick from its warm habitat to this strange, blasted land at the edge of the world.

  We rode down, dismounted at the foot of a grand sweep of steps, and were led inside by Simic. A fine hallway, furnished with classical statues and vases, gave no sign of the military inclinations of its owner. There were no racks of swords or pikes, no carefully mounted muskets. Instead, the walls were papered in the very way the fashionable of Whitehall adorned theirs. There was a fireplace on the right, and above it hung a picture of a handsome young gallant in the court garb of King James's time. At the end of the hallway, two servants opened a pair of imposing doors with a great flourish. We stepped over the threshold and entered an astonishing room that seemed to be walled entirely with glass.

  Judge and I paused and looked around in silent amazement. Great windows stretched from floor to ceiling on three sides; the fourth was taken up with mirrors and two small fireplaces. Flames danced from glass to glass, window to window, creating nothing like enough heat to warm the room. It was only then that I noticed the figure sitting on a high-backed chair at the centre of the room. He was a little man–barely taller than John Treninnick–grey-haired, thin, perhaps of sixty years or so, with a small pointed beard that had been the fashion at the start of the last king's reign. An old but still livid scar ran down his left cheek to his jaw, and had evidently almost cost him his eye. His clothes were plain, and they too were of an older, altogether different time. He seemed utterly insignificant, and but for that great scar, the image of a dull market-town notary.

  He rose and extended his hand to both of us. We approached and I found myself towering over him.

  'I am Glenrannoch,' he said simply, his eyes holding ours fleetingly as is the way with timid men. 'Welcome to Scotland, gentlemen, and welcome to this, the Tower of Rannoch.' Judge shook first, then I. Like his gaze, the great general's grip was weak, like a young girl's. 'Captain Judge. Captain Quinton.' He held my hand for a moment, and his eyes seemed to search my face intently. Then he turned away and signalled for chairs. Two boys, dressed incongruously in the height of London fashion, scurried forward and positioned them before the general.

  Judge looked about him in ostentatious admiration. 'A most impressive home you have, sir,' he enthused. 'I had heard of it, of course, during my last commission in these waters, but the opportunity to visit never arose–you were abroad at the time, and I had other matters in hand.'

  Glenrannoch shrugged, and said but one word. 'Madness.' In the pause that followed I pondered the ambiguity of this remark. Then he waved his hand at the glass that surrounded us. 'Utter folly, Captain Judge,' he continued. 'There was a strong old castle on this site. The true Tower of Rannoch, where I grew up. It was centuries old with thick walls that made it warm in winter and cool in summer. But my father served thirty years with the King of France's Garde Ecossaise, escorting the late King Louis from one splendid fantasy in the Loire to another, and he took a fancy to having a chateau of his own. So down came the old tower, and up went this in its stead. In winter you can scrape the ice off those mirrors, and in summer I could put an egg on this chair and fry it. I was campaigning somewhere in Brabant at the time, and could not stop him. He died a week before the infernal place was finished. As the preachers tell us, the Lord moves in mysterious ways, but few are as mysterious as the ways by which those of us who reside here stay alive.'

  Glenrannoch's conversation was so soft that I had to strain to follow his words. There was almost no trace of the Scots in his voice, but an occasional vowel betrayed the long years that he had spent in the Dutch service. The longer he spoke, though, the more the initial impression of smallness and weakness dissipated. Some say that the greatest generals fight as sparingly as they can, kill as sparingly as they can, and speak as sparingly as they can. But when they have to fight or kill or speak, they do it ruthlessly, and with clear intent. I wondered whether this was the case with Colin Campbell of Glenrannoch. The simplicity of his demeanour discomforted me, for something seemed to lurk beneath it.

  The general nodded to Simic and spoke some words of a harsh and guttural language. This must be the language of Simic's people, from far to the east of the Rhine. The huge mercenary brought forward three goblets of wine and I thought how strange it was to see the great giant dancing attendance upon the tiny general. When he had retired I sipped my wine, which proved to be a more than acceptable claret, and turned back to Glenrannoch, who was speaking.

  'Well, gentlemen. Much as it delights me to have such rare guests, I have to ask what it can be that brings two of His Majesty's men-of-war, and two such illustrious captains, to such an obscure quarter of his dominions?'

  'Sir, His Majesty ever has a care for all of his dominions,' Judge replied smoothly.

  'That may well be. But he has been happily restored to his thrones these two years, Captain Judge, and in all that time we have seen not even a ketch of the king's in these waters. Nor have we seen a single soldier west of Inveraray, where, it must be said, they pester my kinsman Lorne quite mercilessly.'

  Judge sipped his wine and nodded. 'His Majesty is concerned to protect these waters from any mischief the Dutch might attempt, sir. He also seeks to ensure that the very absence of his forces from these lands does not encourage malcontents to stir up trouble.' Judge was looking at Glenrannoch impassively. 'Then again, I suppose there may even be some discontent amongst your own clan, following the execution of your late chief, Argyll.'

  Glenrannoch smiled politely at that. 'Not from me. Archie was that most dangerous of combinations, Captain: a man at once utterly devious and exceptionally stupid. He could have ruined Clan Campbell with his absurd posturing. None of my sept shed a tear for him when his head came off, me least of all.' Glenrannoch had not drunk from his wine. Now he placed the goblet carefully on a table beside him. 'But another Dutch war would be a different matter, as you say. I know more than a little of the Dutch, of course, having served their high mightinesses of the States-General for a quarter-century.' He looked steadily at us. 'Pray tell me, gentlemen. Why do you suppose His Majesty expects the Dutch to come vapouring on these coasts? If I was Grand Pensionary de Witt or Lieutenant-Admiral Lord Obdam, gentlemen, I would aim straight for the Thames, hard and fast, and starve London into surrender while you have no defences. I would not worry myself with such godforsaken wilds as these.'

  Campbell's manner indeed belied an unexpected sagacity. 'Sir,' I said, leaning earnestly towards him, 'in the last war, the Dutch sent many ships around Scotland to avoid our fleet in the Channel. They regularly use the harbours on this coast to shelter their fishing fleets. These waters are important to them, sir, so they may seek to secure them ahead of another war.' Judge looked at me curiously, perhaps surprised that such an insight could come from such an ignoramus. In truth, it came from an unimpeachable Dutch source. My good-brother Cornelis seemed to have spent most of his career fretting after the return of fat Amsterdam fly-boats sailing around Scotland–achteroom, as he called it–and protecting the fishermen who pursued the herring shoals wherever they migrated. 'We are but a deterrent, sir, to remind the Dutch–and anyone else–that the King of England's writ runs in these parts.'r />
  Glenrannoch smiled tightly. 'The only writ that runs in these parts, Captain Quinton, is that of the King of Scots. Even if he chooses to spend all his life south of the Fens and treats his native kingdom worse than the meanest of his English counties.' I shifted uncomfortably on my chair, embarrassed by my schoolboy error. 'But I wonder,' Glenrannoch went on musingly, 'whether two ships alone would be a sufficient deterrent for anything? Even with the help of the brave regiment that set out from Dumbarton yesterday. Four hundred men and four cannon, I'm told, under Colonel Will Douglas of St Bride's. A man, incidentally, I dismissed for incompetence at Breda back in '37.' I glanced at Judge, but his gaze was fixed steadily on Glenrannoch's face. He knows of the regiment? And news of it has come to this fastness in just a day?

  A deterrent, gentlemen,' said Glenrannoch, 'must be strong enough to make an enemy think again, for otherwise, why should he be deterred? But just two ships, in these fatal waters? Just one regiment, commanded by an ignorant old buffoon like Will Douglas, travelling many miles over land it does not know, through glens where it would be so easy for a knowing commander to lay an ambush? Does Charles Stuart really call that a deterrent? But then, I'm told King Charles has precious little money, so perhaps empty gestures are all he can afford.'

  I struggled to think of a loyal riposte, but was too appalled by the implications of Glenrannoch's words. He knows. He has made his plans. He will ambush and destroy the regiment. We are on a fool's errand, and our mission is doomed.

  Judge, though, seemed unperturbed. He said blandly, 'All hypotheses, with respect, sir. We expect no trouble, and seek none. For my part, I look forward to renewing old acquaintances.'