Gentleman Captain

by J. D. Davies

  I felt stronger by the minute. I asked for some whisky, and took a mouthful of the awful oat patties the Scots are so fond of With my senses regained, I ordered my surviving officers to return to their duties, sending Skeen to attend to the wounded on the orlop deck below. Reassured that I lived, and would continue to do so, my little circle of followers melted away. The deaths of so many had levelled all ranks and created a kind of democracy on my quarterdeck. Kit Farrell, Francis Gale, and Lanherne shared between them the roles of lieutenant, master, boatswain and gunner, ordering men to the most urgent repairs. Already they had cleared the remnants of the dead. Soon I heard Ali Reis's fiddle accompany the unmistakeable voice of John Treninnick in a medley to rouse the hearts of the surviving men of the Jupiter.

  Musk and Cornelis stayed by my side. My good-brother had no need to attend to his own ship. I could see her out of the corner of my eye, lying at an easy double anchor, pristine and almost undamaged.

  'Brother,' I said. It was hard to know what to say to my dour relative, but I had to try. 'You saved us. You saved me.'

  Cornelis smiled again and patted my arm. I tried not to wince with the pain. 'I had my orders, brother Matthias. The saving of you was incidental, though when I first met the general and I found an opportunity to talk–' he noted my surprise and nodded–'yes, Matthias. Glenrannoch was my ally. It was but a few days ago, not long after my arrival in these waters, that he gave me the name of the second king's captain. I have thought much on the will of God and the predestination of souls ever since.'

  Even in victory, and even when receiving my gratitude for saving my command, Cornelis could turn it all into a dull Calvinistic sermon. Yet I thanked him again, and pressed his hand, and meant it.

  'I must write to your sister,' I said, pleased with my diversion, 'but I think my writing hand will be of little use for a good while. If I dictate the words, brother, will you write them? She'll believe what we both put down.' Cornelis nodded. 'Musk,' I called, 'I'll need to write to my mother, too.'

  'She won't believe a word of what you tell her, if it's in my hand,' said my faithful retainer, shuffling away.

  I thought of General Glenrannoch, and of the truths at which I could hint. 'Oh, they'll be words she'll believe, Musk, have no fear. But stay,' for he was slinking off, 'I'll also need a scribe for the letters I must write to the Duke of York and to the king. Lowly work for the acting purser of a king's ship, but perhaps you'll permit the imposition just this once?'

  Musk's eyes widened. As I had calculated, the old rogue was overwhelmed in equal measure at the prospect of his writings lying in the hands of the king, and his sudden and unexpected promotion to the exalted rank of an officer of the navy. But he managed a gracious nod, and then the acting purser of the Jupiter strutted away proudly to fetch pen, ink and paper.

  I looked over to Ardverran Castle. Lady Niamh's fortress swarmed with Campbells, while the king's regiment held the jetty and guarded the bedraggled prisoners from Judge's Republic. I could see the general on the roof of the great tower, that same vantage point from which, so few hours before, the countess and I had watched Judge's ship bear down upon my own. He was illuminated by the firelight of the beacon that served as the castle's night-time seamark. He seemed to be looking directly at me and for a moment I was tempted to raise my hand in greeting. But then he turned to watch as the black-and-gold clan banner was raised proudly over this new Campbell fortress.

  It was the last sight he saw. At that moment, a great explosion tore the tower apart. I saw, first, its walls vanish, replaced in an instant by a vast column of smoke. In the next second came the sound of a blast as loud as any of our recent broadsides. Huge stones from the castle broke the surface of the water like a hail of cannon balls, and fragments even struck our shattered hull. Flames roared up into the gap where the walls, the floors and the roof had stood.

  A long, slow fuse, concealed deep in the bowels of the castle, had finally detonated. Ardverran of the ages was gone. General Colin Campbell of Glenrannoch was gone, and with him, whatever mysterious secrets of state he shared with my mother. My Lady Niamh, my beautiful, treacherous countess, had taken her revenge, and taken it in full measure.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  We lay under the shattered, smouldering ruins of Ardverran for over a fortnight. The first task, of course, was to bury our dead. Francis Gale took upon himself the task of organizing the burial up at the tiny chapel upon the headland. Our remaining able men were sent up to dig a mass grave. They toiled through the next two days, almost without ceasing, until every last body had been carried tenderly to its last resting place. I thought that with the soft wind carrying the scent of early gorse and the sea sparkling below, it was a peaceful place to leave our dead. Nothing could be done for Glenrannoch and his kin, and that grieved me; but perhaps the ruins of Ardverran Castle were a fitting mausoleum for a great warrior.

  James Vyvyan, as a commissioned officer and the scion of an ancient Cornish line, deserved better. For such a young man, he had been surprisingly thoughtful on the subject of his own mortality; had talked often on the nature of the funeral he would prefer, or so Gale said. It was almost as though he had lived in the certainty of his imminent demise, this brave and noble young warrior, whom I had maligned so unjustly. Thus it was that on a splendid, sun-filled Scottish day, we committed his body to the deep of the sea-loch before Ardverran. We shrouded his corpse in the flag of Saint Piran, and as his body slipped into the waters, weighted by cannonballs at head and foot, John Treninnick sang an old song of Cornwall, a lament for another time and another place: My agaran rosen wyn mar whek mar dek del dyfhy. Coxswain Lanherne kept up a translation: 'The first time I met you, my love, your face was as fair as the rose, but now your dear face has grown paler, as pale as the lily-white rose.' The men of the Jupiter, lining the sides and manning the shrouds, took up the refrain in their own tongue:

  'I love the White Rose in its splendour

  I love the White Rose in its bloom

  I love the White Rose, so fair as she grows.

  'Tis the rose that reminds me of thee.'

  It was eery and beautiful music. I saw tears running down not a few faces, for young Vyvyan had been dear to many of these rough, weather-beaten tars. I mourned him hard then; mourned the friendship that might have grown between us. I do not know–perhaps I wept too. As the Cornishmen's song of farewell died away, the Jupiter's muffled guns began their salute, joined in thunderous echo across the loch by those of the Wapen van Veere, then by the guns of the ship named by her temporary captain as Le Martyr Royal.

  With due respect paid to the dead, we, the living, made our repairs. Cornelis and the mourning-clad stewards of Glenrannoch sent men to assist, but in a land with virtually no trees, it was inevitably slow and difficult work. For me, there was little to do beyond encouraging the carpenter's crew and the other work parties, for Penbaron was still too weak to do so. Almost every day brought a letter from Cornelia, full of anguish and advice concerning my recuperation; several posts brought parcels containing increasingly foul-smelling potions that she swore would expedite my recovery. I later learned that only a direct command from my brother had prevented her riding post-haste for Scotland, alone, to act as my nursemaid. As it was, my wounds healed, the musket graze to the thigh more rapidly than the deep gash in my arm, whose scar I bear to this day, and which occasionally sends forth an unexpected pain to remind me of that long-ago battle off Ardverran's shore.

  In the early days, too, there were interrogations of the survivors of the Royal Martyr. From them I learned how Godsgift Judge had carefully chosen his crew from men he knew to be loyal to what they called the Good Old Cause, all fanatics committed to bringing down the monarchy and making Britain a Puritan republic once more. All, that is, except one, for Judge had not been able to get his candidate for lieutenant approved, and had been forced instead to take Nathan Warrender; a man as devout as any of that crew, but divided in his loyalties and his sense of honour be
tween the cause that he had served for so long, and the royal authority that had newly commissioned him.

  Warrender, it seemed, had been deeply troubled to learn of the plot. Himself a man of honour and conscience, he had strenuously objected to the stealth and disloyalty of their plan. He had remonstrated with his shipmates, with Judge, but to no avail. And so, although he doubtless knew he was placing his own life in jeopardy, he had arranged–presumably with the help of his cousin on the Jupiter, Pengelley–to meet Harker ashore and expose the conspiracy to him.

  It would remain a mystery to me whether they did or did not meet. It must have been hard for Warrender to get away. I had a sudden memory of the two sullen men who had been his constant shadows. Not attendants, as I had thought, but guards. And then of course there was the anonymous note found upon Harker's person. Go not ashore this day... Was it penned by Pengelley? A fervent Royalist, he may have distrusted this kinsman who had fought against the king he loved. Or perhaps Warrender had belatedly discovered Harker's death to be part of the plan and was warning him to stay aboard? Either way, Harker had fatally ignored the warning and gone ashore. And there he was somehow poisoned by Judge's creature, Linus Brent, and shortly thereafter died, in full view of his men aboard the Jupiter. Pengelley, then, had fled for his life, but he had not got far. He, too, was dealt with.

  As for Warrender, Godsgift Judge was no fool. Knowing full well that another death early in the mission would appear suspicious and bring down an inquisition from above, Judge kept Warrender under a close guard until he separated our two ships off Ardverran's shore, and no longer needed to maintain either his charade or Nathan Warrender's life. Why Warrender did not rebel against the masquerade that Judge forced him to play out is a mystery that I ponder to this day. Perhaps he thought that if he at least remained alive, he could find some way of destroying Judge's plot from within. Or perhaps he simply sought to cling to life for as long as he could, in the hope of escape. Who knows how each of us will react if we become but a dead man walking?

  When I was a boy, I once witnessed one of old Jermy's curates at Ravensden sitting on the floor of the transept in our church. He was surrounded by thousands of pieces of stained glass that had been smashed by a fanatic mob bent on cleansing every last trace of so-called popery from our part of Bedfordshire. I remember the painstaking way in which he slowly reassembled the pieces into the precious pictures of saints that they had once formed, until at last the whole was there again, broken but plain to see. In those days at anchor before Ardverran, I felt much as our curate must have done, as more pieces of the great picture fell into place, and at last the whole foul plot became clear to my view.

  I dined frequently with Cornelis in the fortnight before his ship sailed for home. Grateful as I was, I found that such frequent communion with my good-brother still stretched my patience to its bounds. Still, I had begun to suspect that perhaps this spoke more about my limitations than his; and meanwhile I was glad to learn from him how the Dutch side of the conspiracy unravelled. He told me that he had been secretly commissioned by Grand Pensionary de Witt. His mission was to obstruct the crypto-Catholic elements within the city of Amsterdam, who sought to gain great trading concessions from the Pope and his family; all this had occurred long before Cornelis learned that I had been hastily commissioned to King Charles's complementary mission. As the king's spies had learned of the arms shipment, so had De Witt; but he, with his penetrating intelligence and suspicion of all men, had learned far more than our king. He knew the full scale of the plot and sent one of his best men to ensure that the Amsterdammers and the Catholics were prevented from accomplishing their goal.

  We talked of Simic, the would-be assassin of Glenrannoch. They must have paid a high price to suborn him from his master. Glenrannoch would have had to die anyway to clear the way for the Macdonald army, but inadvertently we had presented our enemies with a far greater opportunity. Killing the general while Roger d'Andelys and I rode in his company would have allowed them to blame the death upon us, the king's men, with our dead bodies conveniently incapable of arguing any other case. Such a stratagem would undoubtedly have confused and divided Clan Campbell, turning them against the king and weakening them ahead of the Macdonald onslaught to come. Such a stratagem could have come from one of only two minds, those of Godsgift Judge or Countess Niamh. Out of misplaced chivalry, or perhaps some other emotion, I preferred to blame the former.

  I spent much time with the newly abstemious Francis Gale. His terrible ghosts seemed to have been exorcized by the opportunity to cleave his avenging sword into so many Commonwealth's-men. He talked much of new ambitions for a quiet country parish, or perhaps a rural deanery, enthusing often over his schemes for young Andrewartha's schooling, whose intelligence and potential for a career in the Church would one day far outdo his own, or so he said. For my part, I found myself speaking openly to him of my own ghosts and demons. His conversations, both secular and spiritual, were a solace, for the deaths that had occurred under my command, both in the present and the past, weighed heavily upon me.

  The comte d'Andelys, the sometime Roger le Blanc, eventually sailed with Cornelis for the Netherlands, there to sound fellow French exiles who had offended one or other of King Louis's ministers or mistresses about the feasibility of returning home. At our parting, he swore his undying affection and respect for me, kissed me after the French way, and exclaimed that we would meet again; as, indeed, we did, many times, and always to the peril of ourselves and the crowns we served.

  Aboard the Jupiter, Phineas Musk revelled in his new status as acting purser, and delighted in the challenge of replenishing our battered storeroom at negligible cost to the king. Then he took a shore leave to which he was more than amply entitled, and disappeared for some 'refreshment of the spirit'. When he returned three days later, somewhat the worse for wear with his pocket torn off his coat and a black eye, he told a garbled story about a remarkably buxom woman in Oban and a complex misunderstanding with her many brothers. The effect was, surprisingly, to warm the crew to the old rogue, and despite his news airs and graces and his menacingly tight control of the ship's commodities, he seemed to find his own place, quite comfortably, in the hierarchy on board.

  I spent long hours with the new and deeply self-conscious Lieutenant Farrell, who now held an acting commission from me. I did not doubt that such a promotion was illegal, but, as he said, by the time that news of the inevitable countermand got back to Ardverran's shore, several new forests would probably have grown on the hills of Mull.

  By the end of that month, I had memorized the name of every mast, sail, and yard on the ship, if not quite of every rope or line. Far more important, though, I knew the name of every man in the crew, and passed easily from mess to mess every day, receiving nothing but respectful salutes and smiles. Several requested certificates of their good conduct, and I was happy to oblige; but many said that they would willingly follow me to another ship, if I obtained one, before they would seek berths with other captains. This gratified me in a way that I had never known, and I thought much on it. At other times, I pored over charts and waggoners, and could soon lay a course–on paper, at any rate–from Ardverran to Portsmouth, or Chatham, or Smryna. Kit, in turn, could spell correctly his full name, and mine, and could write any number of other words in an eccentric variety of ways, occasionally placing them into something approximating the correct order.

  On what would prove to be my last day aboard the Jupiter, I was on the quarterdeck with Kit, who was pointing out the tides and currents of the sound, telling me how I could read them by sight alone, when I noticed a small boat coming out towards us. I assumed it was yet another fisherman or tradesman selling their wares and ignored it. A little later, however, I was called down to the newly repaired steerage by our acting boatswain, Monkley–the best of poor Ap's mates to whom I had given a temporary promotion. An immaculately dressed blond boy, younger even than poor dead Vyvyan, saluted me extravagantly.

  'Cap
tain Quinton, sir,' he piped. 'I am Bassett, king's messenger. I bring you the congratulations of His Majesty the king, His Royal Highness the Duke of York, and his highness Prince Rupert. His Majesty conveys his particular compliments, sir, and asks if you would be so good as to attend him at Hampton Court on the first of next month.'

  As I stepped off the deck of the Jupiter for the last time the crew gave me three hearty huzzahs. I returned their salutation by doffing my hat. As was his duty, Martin Lanherne commanded the crew that rowed me ashore, a crew that included George Polzeath, John Treninnick, Julian Carvell and young Macferran, all of whom grinned inanely at me for the entire passage to the shore. I left Kit Farrell in acting command of the ship, which, as he said, must have constituted one of the most rapid promotions in the whole course of naval history. My last sight of him on that voyage was seated behind the desk in my cabin, writing the proudest of superscriptions on the first letter that he had ever written in his life, addressed to his mother: His Majesty's Ship the Jupiter, at ankur, Ardverin Casttle, Skottland; from Leftenant Christopher Farrell, Acting Captain. His mother, whose own spelling was, of course, equally execrable, would no doubt be in raptures for a month. In fact, as Kit informed me later, she joyously served free ale to all her customers until the crowds flocking into Wapping forced the Middlesex justices to close her down temporarily after a man was trampled to death.

  Meanwhile, king's messenger Bassett, Phineas Musk and I travelled light for the south. An escort of Campbells took us past Inveraray to the head of Loch Goil. From there a Campbell birlinn, still flying black ensigns to mark the passing of its chief, took us down brooding sea-lochs, past dark sea-girt Campbell towers that saluted us as we passed, across the broad Firth of Clyde and upriver to Glasgow. There, we took leave of our last party of Campbells. Of course, history tells us that the matter between the Campbells and the Macdonalds still had many hands to play out, most notably the massacre of Macdonald by Campbell that took place in the snowy wastes of Glencoe during the third year of the late King William's reign. Knowing nothing of such a future, only of that which awaited us in distant London, we took horse and rode down Clydesdale and Liddesdale, staying at wild Scots inns where we were looked on as kin to the men in the moon.