Gentleman Captain

by J. D. Davies

  'So, Capitaine, I cannot then convert you to the thinking of Monsieur Descartes? As well, perhaps, that I do not introduce you to his Cartesian geometry, for that is a mystery even to me.'

  I looked into the amused, dark eyes of the Frenchmen, and momentarily thought of clapping him in irons. He was not who he claimed to be, and here he was mocking me. I could interrogate the truth of his identity out of him for was I not the captain? But we are all entitled to our secrets. James Harker had evidently left Roger Le Blanc's well alone, and so, I decided, would I.

  Nevertheless, I said flatly, 'Monsieur Le Blanc, if you are truly a runaway tailor, then I am the Sultan of Turkey.'

  Le Blanc bowed his head and smiled. 'As you say, monsieur le capitaine. But you are a man who knows your history, I think, even if you do not know your natural philosophy. Remember, then, the history of the reign of le Roi François Premier, and the times since. France was ever the best friend to the Grand Turk, and he to him.'

  We left Le Blanc to his strange book and continued our way towards the stern. Past the cable tiers once more and we came to the starboard side of the cockpit, the confined but essentially open space where Surgeon Skeen was tending to a patient on a bier that had been erected on the deck. I stood a little way from this scene, for Skeen's usual odour was complemented by a deathly stench of decay from the patient who lolled there, insensible with drink.

  'Gangrene, sir,' Skeen said. 'Will have to take the leg off shortly.' I looked at the patient, but his face was unfamiliar. 'One of Royal Martyrs men, sir,' said Skeen, in answer to my look, 'sent over to us while you were ashore yesterday. They have no surgeon, only an ill-natured surgeon's mate with strange ideas of treatment.'

  I felt a faint remembrance stirring in my mind; something I felt sure was important, if I could but take hold of the memory and see it clearly. I had no wish to smell any more of that unwholesome stink, let alone witness Skeen sawing off a man's leg. We turned away in relief and continued astern.

  At the very back, Farrell opened a scuttle, pointing out the bread room that lay below, with the fish room next to it. I looked down into the little holds, and by the light of a lantern I could see a pile of loaves stacked against one corner of the room, coming perhaps halfway up to the deck on which we stood. I did not need the mathematics of Le Blanc's Monsieur Descartes to estimate the number of loaves in that space; nor to comprehend the difference between that number and another figure I had been shown but recently.

  There was a commotion on the ladder from the main deck, and Purser Peverell appeared before me, red-faced and breathless.

  'Captain, I had no idea you were making an inspection—'

  'Not a formal inspection, Mister Peverell. Far from it. Merely taking a stroll around my ship, in fact. But now you mention it, Purser, I think that a formal inspection is long overdue. Tomorrow, let's say, at four bells of the forenoon watch. Ten o'clock, if you're not certain of sea-methods, sir. Just after the prayer of terce, if you prefer the watch-keeping of your Roman Church.' That struck home, for like all Catholics who clung on to public office in those days, Peverell was not keen to have the fact trumpeted. I went on, keeping my tone light and enjoying myself immensely, 'You can bring all your papers, and we shall go down to the hold, Mister Peverell. Naturally, the figures that you have shown me so often in my cabin will tally exactly with what we shall find in the stores, but when I next report that fact to Mister Pepys and His Royal Highness the Lord High Admiral, both my conscience and yours will be so much clearer if we have properly compared the one with the other. Don't you think that's so, Purser?'

  To my dying day, I will remember and relish the expression that had come over Peverell's complacent, condescending face. The previous triumph over the loathsome purser had been Francis Gale's. This was mine, and I cherished it.

  ***

  'Thank you, Mister Farrell,' I said, when we had returned to my cabin. 'As you predicted, that was a most instructive lesson. Perhaps more for the purser than me, though.'

  Kit smiled merrily at me. 'I had my suspicions, sir, but then, all seamen have suspicions of all pursers. Rogues to a man, thieving from the king and the common sailor alike. But this one is altogether the worst I've ever come across. I began to make it my business to enquire into Peverell's. Not that I had the grasp of numbers and manifests to do so to any great purpose. But another did.'

  The door flew open as though someone had kicked it. Musk appeared, glowered at Farrell, and said sourly to me, 'You're dining the Provost of Oban, remember. Need to get the table ready.'

  Musk set about his task with his usual infinite bad grace. As I watched him, it dawned on me that somehow the hatred he had displayed toward Kit Farrell since his first day on the Jupiter had been replaced by something else, something that I could not quite grasp. Understanding, when it came, was as welcome as it was unexpected.

  'Well, Musk,' I said, 'I think you have been assisting Mister Farrell? Investigating our purser's frauds against the king?'

  Musk grunted. 'Someone had to,' he said, 'and most seamen can't count.'

  I remembered my brother's comment on sending Musk to me, that the old rogue was 'good enough'. In truth, he was much more than that. His immaculate command of the domestic and estate accounts of the London house was the reason why my mother, and now my brother, had kept him on all these years. It seemed out of character in one so churlish, so villainous in appearance. But perhaps it was not so out of character. For who better to keep a set of accounts than the man who understood every fraud that could possibly be committed against them?

  Farrell and I sat in my stern gallery, talking of the means by which a captain could check the activities of his warrant officers without causing them to take umbrage. I heard the bell toll seven times; but half an hour to the changing of the watch. As we talked, Musk went grumblingly about his business, preparing a lavish reception for this Provost of Oban, protesting now and again at the workload that, in truth, he imposed upon himself. The tide was ebbing and our ship had swung on its single anchor, its bow to the shore. I knew such things, now; felt them, rather. From my windows we looked out onto the bleak shore and, through the channel behind us, a glimpse of open sea.

  I could see a small boat coming out from the shore of Ardverran. I thought nothing of it, for we were visited daily by at least a dozen such craft, most of them manned by curious Scots or cunning rogues come to peddle their wares–say, overpriced whisky–to the king's gullible mariners. But as I idly looked upon it, I noticed with a start that this boat's passenger had an unmistakeable and vast beard.

  Minutes later, Macdonald of Kilreen came aboard and was shown to my cabin. There, he delivered an invitation to the esteemed Captain Quinton to join the Lady Macdonald the next day, for a short cruise. My acceptance may have been a little too rapid. When I turned I caught, for just a moment, the trace of a knowing smirk upon the countenance of that old rogue, Phineas Musk.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The Macdonald birlinn came alongside us just before noon, shortly after I had concluded a revealing and (from his viewpoint) acutely discomfiting inspection of Peverell's accounts. There were twelve rowers, six on each side, all in extravagant tartan finery and plumage; a servant girl and a helmsman completed the entourage. Close to the stern, cushions had been heaped into a comfortable divan, and on them reclined the Countess of Connaught. She was dressed soberly and practically in a masculine jacket, cloak and long, encompassing skirts, for although the sun was shining, the wind was still from the west and fresh enough to be counted cold.

  A disconcertingly large number of my crew had found an excuse to come to the starboard side to observe the spectacle, and to offer advice in tones quite clearly audible to their captain on courses of action to take with his visitor. Boatswain Ap circled menacingly with his cudgel and growled something about being more respectful to the captain and lady, but his heart seemed not to be in it. Perhaps he had abandoned me as a lost cause of undue leniency.

  Ignor
ing the ribaldry I climbed down into the galley. The countess smiled, raised her hand to be kissed, and bade me sit down alongside her. The craft pulled away from the Jupiter's side moving with easy strokes right into the wind, a course that no sailing ship could take.

  'So, Captain Quinton,' she said, and I was struck anew by the flinty tones of a voice so at odds with her beauty. 'Here you are, after all. Kilreen reckoned you wouldn't have the wit for it, in full sight of your crew.'

  I rejoined that I was a married man merely accepting the generous invitation of a noble lady–one whose rank made refusal impossible. She asked, half-mockingly, if that meant I was there only out of duty rather than pleasure, and I made some silly, gallant remark about how the two could coincide quite happily. She smiled at that, and fed me some small, flat Scottish cakes that she claimed were of her own making. The servant girl, a young islander who spoke no English, poured us some passable wine.

  The birlinn took us close among the islands, through channels that would have been impassable for a ship. This was Ardverran land, she said, what was left of it. She proudly pointed out this farmstead and that fisherman's cottage, taking pleasure in reciting the names of places and people in the singsong Scots tongue, so like her native Irish, she said.

  She asked me of my family, and within an hour she had it all: my comely wife, my embittered mother, my heroic father, my elusive brother, my piratical grandfather, my French grandmother, my dead sister and my living one; the whole Quinton history. She learned of the death of Captain Harker, of my sudden appointment as his replacement, and of my tortuous dealings with the Jupiter's officers. Of her own history, she said not a word.

  In my turn I asked of her late husband, seeking to learn more of Godsgift Judge's part in his death. She would say only that her husband had been a strong man and loyal to his king. She spoke animatedly only of her son, and of how she would see him enter into his inheritance. Then, perhaps, she would retire to her native Ireland; though she was told it was much changed, with many of her people thrown off their lands by Cromwell's men and the speculators who came in their wake. 'Hell or Connaught', the saying went; thus her own title had become an abomination, though the lands of Connaught were none so bad, she claimed. It was clear from her passionate way of speaking that the distance between the Connaught lands and their countess, whose family had lost them, made them all the more desirable.

  We came by a ruined fortress on the shore. This was not as ancient as the one I had explored with young Macferran the day before; it seemed to date from the days when England and Scotland fought for possession of this entire land. I asked her if this was so, and her eyes flashed–though whether in disgust at my ignorance, or something quite other, I could not tell.

  Not so, she told me. 'This was a seat of the Lords of the Isles, my son's ancestors. It was a great sea-kingdom over all these islands, the Inner and Outer Hebrides, and the mainland fringing this sea: Ardnamurchan and Kintyre, and such places. Their chief palace was at Finlaggan on Islay, but they sometimes came down to these waters for calmer weather and the hunting.'

  This was a history of which I knew nothing. I asked her to tell me more of it. For a moment she ran her fingertips through her long red hair, seeming lost in thought. Then she turned to me.

  'This is no ancient history, Captain. The last Macdonald Lord of the Isles was illegally deprived of his lands and titles by King James the Fourth of Scots in 1493, less than one hundred and seventy years ago. When I first came to Ardverran, as my husband's child-bride, there was an old retainer, long past his ninetieth year. His own father had married late in life, when he was almost at his three score and ten, to a wife half a century his junior. As a boy, Captain Quinton, the father was a scullion to Alexander, the last Lord of the Isles. He witnessed the fall of the lordship. He saw the soldiers of King James ride up to that tower, there, and burn it. He relayed the story to his son, who relayed at to me, as vividly as if I were witnessing the event myself. Two lives back, Captain, and you and I are here, on the edge of living memory.'

  Aye, as am I, now. Here I sit, in the London of the second George and that scabrous thief Walpole, and yet in my mind's eye I can conjure up the image of an old man I once knew; an old man who sailed against the Invincible Armada and danced with Queen Bess. An old man whose own venerable childhood attendant hacked that same King James of Scots to death at Flodden Field. Such are the tricks and mysteries that time perplexes us with. And the older a man gets the more he is drawn to his memories, and the more of a fool he finds himself to be.

  This lost heritage evidently mattered deeply to the countess. She turned her long neck and hid her face in contemplation of the ruins while the serving girl refilled our goblets. I sat in silence, watching the hundreds of gulls that wheeled around the great crags of the headland, calling out in their wild, harsh voices. Suddenly my lady bestirred herself, bending close with a smile to ask whether my wife and I had children. When I answered none, and that after three years of marriage, she frowned a little.

  'But matters between you, Matthew–yes, I shall call you Matthew, I think–matters are as you would wish them to be?' She paused, as though choosing her words with care. 'You are close to your wife, Matthew?'

  There, on a warm afternoon, with good wine inside me and this beauty of all the world only inches from me, it was easy to imagine the matters to which she referred. Too easy. I felt my neck grow warm as I looked at her face, at the mocking smile on those perfect lips. I answered awkwardly, a little breathlessly, that 'matters' between Cornelia and me were satisfactory–and so they were. So satisfactory, indeed, and so frequent, that our failure to conceive a child was a mystery to us both. It was less of a concern to Cornelia, whose parents had produced children but twice, ten years apart, in forty years of marriage. But I was the heir to Ravensden and in danger of becoming the last heir; the last of the Quintons. My brother Charles, the earl, was hardly likely to marry and even less likely to be a father, for such of his inclinations that had not been shot to pieces in the Worcester fight lay elsewhere. That left Uncle Tristram, over thirty years my senior. Although he, like our king, had sons enough around the kingdom, he had never married any of their mothers, again like our king. Every other Quinton line had ended in daughters or still-borns or impotent lunatics. My mother was tactful enough not to remind Cornelia or me of this appalling fact, or of the responsibility upon us to produce a new heir–or not more than three or four times a week, at any rate.

  It took my lady of Connaught but a short while to prise my fears and hopes from me. She, whose own marriage of some ten years had produced only one child, was sympathetic, and plied me with more cakes and wine. Emboldened by good Rhenish, the dazzling sun upon the water, and my proximity to those half-laughing, half-serious green eyes, I asked whether she had not been tempted to remarry. Widowhood in these parts, especially in the winter, must have been an ordeal of solitude.

  She could and perhaps should have damned me for my impertinence. Instead, she said equably, 'Oh, I have had proposals, Captain. A title, even one with attainted lands and no royal patent, draws a certain kind of man like a moth to a flame. Macdonald of Glenverran, my late husband's kinsman, proposes to me annually, every Christmas Day, but he is a man who has never known soap. Even Campbell of Glenrannoch proposed to me, when he first came back from the wars.' This was news indeed. The countess noticed my look of surprise. 'His own German wife died many years ago, and his son prefers the fleshpots of Amsterdam to estate husbandry, they tell me. His is an isolated existence. But for a Macdonald to marry a Campbell–even if she is only a Macdonald by marriage–why, Captain, that would be like France marrying England, but with less chance of success.' She looked out over her waters. 'Besides, I think I scare men away. I believe I speak too plainly for most. A failing both of my family and my race. But I am well content alone, with my son.'

  She asked me of my own plans for the future, and I found I could not answer with any certainty. 'As an heir, I suppose all my plans mu
st be tentative...' I faltered. 'They all depend–that is to say, they all suppose—'

  'That your brother does not die? And is he like to die, Matthew Quinton?'

  'Charles–the earl–he was wounded, in the wars—'

  'Ah. As the cynics in my old country say, Captain, we are all dying, even babes in arms. The only issue is how long we take over it. Your brother has perhaps taken long enough?'

  Her suggestion startled me. It was not the coarseness of it. I had encountered enough plain-speaking amongst the whores who thronged the court of Whitehall, and Jane Barcock of Ravensden could be as direct as the plainest dealer when suggesting what she would like to do with the Honourable Matthew. But the falseness, the presumption of her suggestion—

  'I do not wish my brother to die, my lady. I do not wish to be an earl.'

  She smiled, raised an eyebrow. 'Ah, Matthew. Poor, poor Matthew. I did not wish to be the titular Countess of Connaught, but somehow my father died. I did not wish to be mistress of Ardverran, but somehow my husband died.' A strange expression I could not read passed over her face. 'Sometimes, in the winter, when we know it is day only because the rainclouds become a little lighter for a few hours, I find myself with little to do but read. A while ago, I read a canting, ugly book which states that life is but solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. I have thought much on that phrase, Matthew. Solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. The truth of it is what has brought me here, and who knows where it will take you?'

  Our craft rowed along an empty shore. Here and there, a ruined tower or cottage stood forlornly. My lady was silent, looking out to the sunlit lands beyond the foreshore. At length, she gestured towards them with a slender arm.

  'Lost Macdonald lands, Captain,' she said. 'All this, as far as you can see, once belonged to my husband's sept. Ardverran's lands stretched almost to Kintyre. Now all is Campbell property. To the north, there, is Glenrannoch's soil, all of it once Macdonald territory. Everything south and east is Campbell of Argyll's, though Argyll be dead. Tell me, Captain Quinton. You know the king, I take it? Your brother is one of his oldest friends, I've heard?' I admitted it. She said, 'Then explain this to me, Captain. The Macdonalds, my husband among them, fought for this king. The Lord Argyll humiliated him and betrayed him, and the king has rightly stuck his head on a pole at the Edinburgh tollbooth. Now, would not natural justice suggest that the lands of the traitor, Campbell of Argyll, should go to the loyal, to the Macdonalds, whose soil after all it rightly is from time immemorial?' Her eyes locked on mine, her expression hard to read. 'So where is your king's justice, Captain Quinton?'