Gentleman Captain

by J. D. Davies

  There it was, at double anchor off the jetty at Ardverran. The young Scot had made no mistake. It was not the ship I had seen from Lady Macdonald's birlinn. I squinted my eyes against the sun, which was already well to the west, and scanned the waters and the islands for as far as I could see. Of Royal Martyr and the mystery ship, there was no sign at all.

  But at Ardverran Castle, all was bustle. Three birlinns kept up a continuous ferry to and from the jetty, where a chain of men unloaded large sacks and bundles, passing them from man to man up to the castle gate. There could be no doubt. These were the arms bought in Flanders, supposedly for the cause of Campbell of Glenrannoch. A false intelligence–one fit to bring about a war. For my eyes told me what my heart had known for the past day. The arms were bound for Macdonald, and my lady of Connaught.

  Yet I did not want it to be true.

  'Macferran,' I said, 'did not the countess order a Macdonald guard up here, and on all the other heights round about?'

  He looked puzzled and shook his tousled head. 'No, sir, Captain. All day I have sat here, and in that time I've seen nor hide nor hair of any dampnit Macdonald.' He spat. 'Begging your pardon, sir, Captain.'

  'But the other heights, Macferran. What of them?' I asked.

  'Well, sir, Captain, I can't speak for them all, seeing as I was sat here. My cousin was up Ben Britheamh this morning, though,' and he pointed away to the greater hill to the north, 'and it was bare.'

  As it would be. Protecting the Jupiter was hardly what the countess was about.

  Kit Farrell said, 'If we stay at anchor where we are, Captain, we're in a killing ground. If your mystery ship comes down that channel with the wind in her favour, the Jupiter will be good only for stoking Satan's fires.'

  Back aboard the Jupiter I gave my orders in swift succession, with as confident a demeanour as I could muster. It was not a confidence that I felt within, however. Indeed my stomach seemed to be playing leap-frog with my heart. The pieces were falling into place, but too late; I had not been prepared for this and I was angry with myself.

  I beckoned to James Vyvyan. 'Mister Vyvyan, you will please go down to Ardverran Castle in Lanherne's boat, flying a flag of truce. You will present my compliments to the Countess of Connaught and inform her that Captain Quinton of the Jupiter is pleased to accept her invitation to sup at Ardverran. Immediately.'

  The ship's boat delivered me to the jetty at Ardverran just as the sun began to sink toward the islands to the west. All was quiet. I could hear the gulls, and the splash of the oars. Nothing more. Where I had observed fevered activity when I looked from the old fort, now there was none. The fly-boat lay at double anchor a few hundred yards away, but there was no man to be seen on her. The jetty itself was deserted, as was the path up to the castle. I left my boat crew there, giving Lanherne orders that they should shift for themselves at the slightest sign of danger.

  I felt a strange mixture of fear and determination. Several on the Jupiter had felt compelled to remonstrate with me. Francis Gale and James Vyvyan described my scheme as madness. Kit Farrell begged me to think again. Phineas Musk bemoaned the fact that the imminent slaughter of Captain Quinton would leave him unemployed and prey to the whims of the dreadful Scots. Even the comte d'Andelys urged me to take a stout party of armed seamen for protection.

  I will have protection enough, I told them, and hoped in my heart that I was right.

  I strode into the courtyard of Ardverran Castle and once again took the steps up to the hall. In contrast to my previous visit it was silent and empty. Empty, but for the great table, laid for two; empty, but for the Lady Niamh, Countess of Connaught, who sat at one end.

  I bowed. 'My lady.'

  She wore a gown of imperial purple, cut low in the bosom, with a gold crucifix on a long chain around her white neck. She seemed regal and yet incredibly delicate–as though at one careless gesture she might vanish. She was even more splendid than at my first sight of her, here in the hall of Ardverran. I thought to myself then that perhaps the greatest beauty is always the handmaiden of the greatest danger.

  Even as I looked at her she studied me with her green eyes; eyes as cold now as they had been bright, penetrating and playful during our last afternoon together. After a long, silent moment she bade me sit, and two attendants emerged from the curtains at the end of the hall to serve us.

  'Captain Quinton. Your belated acceptance of my invitation was unexpected, if I may say so. And on Good Friday. I would have expected you to be busy with the offices of the cross, sir.'

  'A thousand pardons. I trust that I have not torn you from your devotions?' She smiled coldly at that but said nothing. Her servant laid the choicest morsels on her plate with tortuous circumspection, then retired, bowing.

  I looked around the hall, at the old armour, swords and pikes that adorned the wall. My attendant laid a dish of rabbit before me and filled my glass with wine. If she wanted me dead, I thought, this was the moment for poison. But I had come too far to baulk now, and I still believed my reading of this woman.

  'A fine display of arms, my lady. But I see your latest weapons are not for public display.'

  I drank, took a mouthful of meat. The rabbit was well cooked and in no way lethal, the wine tolerable and not fatal.

  'You are speaking in riddles, Captain,' she said, guardedly, 'and I have no time—'

  'Enough, my lady.'

  To interrupt was an unforgivable rudeness back then, though it is common enough these days. The countess did not betray the slightest discomfort, however. She merely drank from her goblet then laid it back upon the table, watching me.

  'It is time for plain-speaking between us, and you have deluded me long enough, I think. I shall be your fool no more, my Lady Niamh.' It was the first time I had used her true name, and she startled. I pressed on. 'I know about the cargo that ship at your jetty has brought you. Five thousand muskets, two thousand pikes, swords and cannon. Enough for an army. For your Macdonald army, my lady. Paid for by your uncle, Cardinal O'Daragh, and his close friend, the pope.'

  She seemed to look at me anew, then. Her radiant face was impassive and calculating. 'You are better informed than I had expected, Matthew.'

  'Not informed enough, my lady. You sought to kill me, along with Campbell of Glenrannoch, this morning—'

  'That was not done by my order!' and she brought her fist down hard, striking a platter which skittered loudly across the table. Her retainer stepped forward nervously at that, but she waved him away without turning her head.

  'And to what purpose? To bring down Clan Campbell, and take back all the lands they once took from you? Do you really think the king will allow you to do that? Oh, it will take him time, my lady. But he will call up the militia, and send a far greater fleet than just these two ships. You will be brought low—'

  She laughed in scorn, shook that flame-red hair of hers, and cried mockingly, 'No, not informed at all, Matthew Quinton! Mary, Mother of Heaven, forgive me! Do you truly believe I would risk so much just to overthrow the Campbells? Do you truly believe I would risk so much if I thought that Charles Stuart could snap his fingers and bring us low as you say?' She stood up and grasped the edge of the table, then leaned towards me, knuckles whitening. 'There are far greater things afoot here than Macdonald against Campbell, Captain. Far greater things than Charles Stuart knows, or can prevent.'

  Then she began to walk slowly down the hall towards me. I watched her, trying hard not to be touched by her beauty. That calm face, the proud bearing, the hair touched by gold in the firelight. It was a bewitching sight.

  'The Lordship of the Isles will be restored, Captain. My son's inheritance, confirmed as an independent state by the pope, under the protection of the Dutch.'

  I stared at her. The Lordship of the Isles? The pope and the Dutch? This was impossible. Her words had no meaning. She was mad, or I was mad, or else I had dreamt the entire voyage of the Jupiter. Yes. I would awake in my bed in Ravensden Abbey, with the rain leaking through
the ceiling as it always did, and Cornelia lying by my side as she always did, and all would be well again.

  I shook my head. Thoughts raced against others, thoughts that proclaimed me awake, and sane. The pope and the Dutch, Catholic and Protestant, would never combine to put a new state here, on the edge of Europe, I thought. I tried to comprehend the enormity of her words, her ambition. The Lordship of the Isles was long dead, a corpse in its grave, far beyond resurrection, and for most of the last one hundred years the Dutch had fought for their very survival against Catholic armies that sought to annihilate them; armies sanctioned, and sometimes paid for, by the pope. No. No, my sense argued, looking at the impassive, beautiful face drawing closer and closer, this was not merely impossible, it was an affront to everything I knew to be true: the pope and the Dutch.

  Then I recalled my own years as a guest of Holland. I thought about what I had learned from the van der Eide family and their neighbours. The Dutch saw no dilemma in tolerating Catholics within their borders, or in forming an alliance with the pope himself, as long as those actions brought them profit. For with the Dutch, business was all; and with all its wealth, the Church of Rome was an attractive business partner. His Holiness Pope Alexander the Seventh, of the great banking house of Chigi, would be doubly so, perhaps. That being the case...

  'The Dutch would gain havens for their trade and fisheries, safe harbours in the event of another war with England,' I said slowly, thinking aloud. 'A base from which to attack deep into the king's lands in any future war between us. And if they gain all that, the Dutch will not care a jot whether their puppet Lords of the Isles are Catholic, Protestant, or Mahometan.'

  My lady nodded and smiled, as a teacher does when a particularly backward pupil has finally grasped a fundamental notion.

  The Lords of the Isles restored. It seemed madness–but then, that truly was an age where madness was in vogue and where new states were being born every day. I thought of Portugal, the newest kingdom in Europe, a folly that would nevertheless shortly give England its new queen. Back then, I remember now, Brandenburg was a mere swamp amid the dank forests in the east of Germany; today they call it the Kingdom of Prussia, and our present fat King George fears its armies more than he fears the horsemen of the Apocalypse. Even then, as a young man, the map of Europe had been drawn and redrawn several times over in my short lifetime, in treaty after treaty. New kings had risen up, old lands had vanished, and new states had been born–all because the likes of the pope and the Dutch willed it so. Just as they now willed a kingdom for the Lady Niamh's son, it seemed. No ... it was not total madness.

  'But the king will not stand for such an affront,' I said, for I had to speak, to say something. 'You could hardly give him better cause to start the war against the Dutch that he seeks—'

  She was standing by me now, only inches away; I could smell the scent of her body, sweet like gorse, salty and fresh. I looked up, and in the flickering light of that hall she seemed two different people. One was imperious and magnificent, every inch the future Queen Regent of this new land. Then the shadows would pass over her firegold hair and pale, smooth skin and she would seem, all at once, a creature fey and unnatural.

  'Let me offer you an alternative history, Captain,' she said, her voice as harsh as the gulls that wheeled and called outside her castle. 'Your King Charles is already weak. A foolish man, he has alienated his own supporters, the Macdonalds among them.' She paused, raised her hands angrily and then dropped them, sighing. 'It is so much more than a matter of who has or has not got back their land, Matthew. Many compare your king with the great days of Cromwell, and find him wanting. You know this. Cromwell made Europe tremble. Charles Stuart is its laughing stock.' Her words were hideous, unbearable; doubly so, that I knew them to be true.

  'Can you imagine what they will do in Whitehall and London when our little scheme comes to pass, Matthew Quinton? You know the politics there better than I. We succeed, and a Catholic state, protected by the guns of the Dutch, is carved out of the west of Scotland.' She bent close to me and I felt her breath against my ear. 'Think of the humiliation, the disgrace. A Stuart king who cannot even preserve intact the Scottish kingdom that he inherited? The old Puritans, those who served Cromwell–many others will rise up. There will be a great host, Matthew. All those who look on your king as a whoring incompetent, and I'm told that's most of the people of England. They will throw him back across the sea, Matthew, or send him to the block, as they did his father.'

  I knew there was truth in what she said. I knew it in my heart as well as my head. But my father had fought and died for a Stuart king; a man who was weak, inept, but still the king. Perhaps it was my turn to do the same. Yes. I knew in that moment that I would fight for my king until my dying breath, just as my father had. What else could I do? It was my duty, my being, and my God-given honour. It was my family and it was my life. I had no choice. And yet, at that instant, I chose.

  I took a draught of the wine and looked hard into Niamh Campbell's blazing green eyes. Time to begin that fight; time, at last, to confront her, and the full depth of her dread conspiracy.

  'Is that what Captain Judge has led you to believe, my lady?'

  She stepped back, her eyes wide and her lips parted.

  'Is that informed enough for you, Lady Niamh?' I stood and drew myself up to the considerable height that came with the Quinton blood. 'Oh yes, I know Godsgift Judge is a traitor. But there's one thing that stopped me believing it, and not even your tale of the Lordship of the Isles reborn explains it. Whatever kind of foul turncoat Godsgift Judge may be, my lady, he's no papist. If he's still a Commonwealth's-man at heart, and a fanatic, who fooled us all with his clothes and his flattery, then so be it. But a man like that will not aid your cardinal uncle, nor truck with the pope, his friend, to set up a papist state in these parts.'

  There was a moment of utter silence. Then she looked at me levelly, calmly. When she spoke, her voice was quiet but strong.

  'What man would not seek a kingdom for his own son?'

  Chapter Twenty

  His own son.

  A wave of nausea drove my senses into the pit of my stomach. I reached for the arm of my chair, found it at the second attempt, and sat down. Lady Macdonald stood in front of me, at once more desirable than any being I had ever known and more treacherous. And she spoke.

  I heard her words, not hostile, not triumphant, as she told briefly of her hopeless marriage. Sir Callum Macdonald of Ardverran had brutalized her. At first it had been occasional, almost accidental. But as time passed, it seemed to become his means of raging against her failure to give him an heir. The oldest and proudest bloodline in all of Scotland would die because of her, he claimed. His anguished revenge took many forms, and she endured them all, whether mental or physical. She had been so very young–so full of hope and life–when she arrived at Ardverran. She thought she would change her husband, or that she would get with child and become, suddenly, the cherished mother of the Macdonald heir. But after many years darkened by barrenness, cruelty and violence she came to understand that life as Macdonald's wife would forever be unendurable.

  Then Glencairn's rebellion against Cromwell began, and Macdonald went away to fight in the south of Scotland. Only days later, an English naval squadron sailed into the sea off Ardverran to act against that same rebellion, and an English naval captain came to pay his compliments at the castle. Godsgift Judge, without his false trappings of foppery, was strong, attentive and kind. He warded off a raid by the vengeful Campbells and protected and comforted the Lady Niamh. A bond grew between them, the Puritanical sea captain and the papist countess, thrown together by fate in a castle at the edge of the world. Whether that bond was ever love, she was not certain; or so she said. But for two people far from their own homes, in a place where hostile forces ranged against both of them, it was sufficient. And before long there was conclusive proof that the Lady Niamh's failure to conceive an heir to Ardverran was entirely the fault of her husband.


  Judge's ship was cruising some miles to the south when Sir Callum Macdonald returned to Ardverran. He had been wounded as Glencairn's forlorn cause collapsed against the invincible armies of the Lord Protector. Too weak to beat his wife as his healthy self might have done, Ardverran raged impotently against her. Only the discreet loyalty of Macdonald of Kilreen, the only man who knew what had passed, kept her safe. Fearing for her unborn child when her condition became clear, she got word to Judge. He decided, in the name of Cromwell and with his heart bent upon the preservation of his woman and child, to deal once and for all with that known malignant, Sir Callum Macdonald. Judge's story of the fight at the gun battery was true enough, she said, except for one vital detail.

  'Callum's death was no honourable death. His battery had already surrendered, expecting quarter. But Godsgift Judge was determined that Macdonald of Ardverran would die that day. He executed him, Captain. In the name of the Republic. But in truth, it was a punishment for the wrongs done to me, and to protect our unborn child.' Her eyes were deadly cold yet I saw tears there. Tears that remained unshed. 'I forgave what he had done, Captain,' she said. And I have thanked him silently for it every day that has passed.'