“Will the bitch-whore Margaret Tudor still rule in Scotland at the year’s end?” said Albany, gripping the chair’s arms with whitened knuckles.
“Answer Demon Abrasax!” commanded Thomas and he stroked the bird a third time but now the cockerel was silent.
“Abrasax answers no. Now my Lord de la Pole you too are permitted three questions but no more,” said Thomas.
“Will the Tudor usurpers prosper?” said de la Pole eagerly. The bird was silent.
“Will I regain my crown?” he asked. The bird squawked.
“Do you speak the truth?” he said. Again the bird squawked. De la Pole begged to be allowed a fourth question but Thomas refused and shut the door of the bird’s cage.
“You’ve answered well Demon Abrasax, I shall now release you until I summon you again. Return from whence you came and rejoice that one day the love of the Lord Jesus will free you from your torment forever,” said Thomas soothingly and he snapped his fingers. The cockerel revived from its trance and apart from a few charred feathers seemed to be none the worse for its ordeal.
“Are you satisfied Albany? Even the powers of hell are certain I will regain my throne!” cried de la Pole triumphantly.
Albany did not know what to think. Had the chicken really been possessed by a demon from hell? Or was the necromancer standing before him merely a crude mountebank who had duped the credulous White Rose by telling him exactly what he wanted to hear? All that was certain was that Richard de la Pole was a madman and only a fool argued with a madman.
“I should report you to the Holy Inquisition for your foul heresy but even King Saul consulted the Witch of Endor. Very well, let Master Thomas construct his underwater ship. When it returns from the deep safely, I shall be convinced of the truth of what I’ve seen in this chamber. For now, it’s late and I wish to retire to my bed. Please release me from this diabolical place or do you mean to hold me here by spells and enchantments?” said Albany.
“You’re free to leave, Abrasax has returned to The Pit and all danger has passed,” said Thomas. With great sigh of relief Albany rose from his chair and left the room with as much dignity as he could muster. Thomas and de la Pole listened to the sound of the Duke scurrying down the tower’s stairs as fast as his noble legs would carry him and laughed. The White Rose felt utterly elated, as if he’d finally conquered a chaste maiden. Not only had he confounded the Duke of Albany, he was certain the illustrious name of Richard de la Pole was now known and feared in all nine circles of Hell.
“You’ve done well my friend and when I am king I shall make you Archbishop of Canterbury!” he said, clapping Thomas on the back.
“You do me great honour, My Lord, but to serve my lawful king is reward enough,” Thomas replied with a polite bow but beneath his hood he smiled to himself. Sending chickens into a trance using only his fingers was a trick known to every peasant poultry farmer whilst the needle concealed in his satin glove’s fingertip had been sufficient to make the creature squawk on demand. Incredibly these simple devices had deceived not one but two princes of the Royal Blood.
After the success of the ritual to summon Abrasax, the White Rose immediately appointed Thomas his official court astrologer and alchemist at a generous salary of twelve guilders a month. He was given new clothes, lavish apartments and all the paraphernalia a student of the Secret Arts required. In just a few short days, Thomas had recovered all he’d lost and all he had to do in return was build Leonardo da Vinci’s underwater craft as soon as possible. The only cloud on his horizon was the fact that he still couldn’t decipher the complex code that held the secrets of the boat’s construction.
During The Steffen’s journey up the Moselle Thomas had continued to try to make sense of the strange symbols that the great artist had scrawled across the margins of The Munich Handbook but Leonardo’s mysterious language had remained as impenetrable as Egyptian hieroglyphics. At least de la Pole had given his new alchemist a week to prepare the drawings the shipwrights who’d build the vessel would need so, alone in his chamber, Thomas carefully laid out the unbound pages of The Munich Handbook on a table and prayed to the ghost of the great cryptologist Johannes Trithemius to help him crack the da Vinci code.
The leaves of vellum had acquired a few more stains during their journey to Metz but the sepia symbols and drawings were still clearly visible. The sketches of the undersea boat showed the craft as if it had been taken apart, as well as complete, but the pictures gave no clue as to how the different parts fitted together. The diagrams either omitted crucial details or showed things that were so evidently wrong Thomas assumed the errors were deliberate and just another way Leonardo protected his secrets. The more he stared at the pages, the more he appreciated the enormity of his task but he refused to be discouraged.
He decided to begin with first principles so he drew simple charts to show the frequency of each symbol in the hope he could discover the signs that represented common letters such as ‘e’ and ‘s’. During his travels, Thomas had learned French, Latin, Italian and several other languages but after two days he had to admit defeat. If the original language was Italian, the code seemed to use a dialect that was completely unknown to him. Next he tried to apply Trithemius’ Tabula Recta and when this failed he moved to Polybius’ Square but nothing seemed to work. The days slipped by and by the end of the week he was no nearer to unravelling the code than when he’d started.
For the first time since he’d left London, Thomas began to feel desperate. If he couldn’t read the code, he couldn’t build the boat and kings, even in exile, usually punished those who failed them with extreme cruelty. By the morning of the last day he could think of nothing except that the cipher’s key might be written in invisible ink and that this ink would be revealed by the bright morning sunlight. Hardly daring to hope, he held one of the vellum pages up to his chamber’s window and, like St Paul on the road to Damascus, the scales fell from his eyes. There was no secret ink, there was no cipher, there was only the reflection of the page in the window’s glass and it was that which showed that the da Vince code was nothing more than mirror writing.
For a moment Thomas could scarcely breathe he was so excited but he quickly recovered his wits and sent a serving wench to fetch a proper mirror. Ten agonising minutes later, the maid returned with a looking glass. Thomas snatched if from her hand, tossed the bewildered girl a penny and dismissed her from the room. As soon as he was alone he held the polished surface over a page of the book and the code melted away like a debtor’s friends. Thomas could now look into the mind of Leonardo da Vinci and the first thing he read confirmed that the code and the misleading drawings were designed to protect the secret of the master’s inventions. In a note scrawled beneath the undersea boat, da Vinci informed his students that he did not wish to make war more terrifying or allow men to make their assassinations on the bottom of the ocean.
Thomas ignored the warning and gradually unravelled the secrets of constructing the marvellous boat. Just as he’d told Albany, Leonardo had designed a watertight shell with two long, thin bladders that could be filled with air. Inflating or deflating these air bags would allow the vessel to float just below the surface. The turtle shaped craft had a squat tower, which remained above the water so the helmsman could see where he was going, and was propelled by two paddles shaped like a frog’s webbed feet. There was also a rudder at the stern and a pair of square boards projecting from each side of the bow like a seal’s flippers. According to the decoded notes, altering these flippers’ angle of pitch would drive the vessel deeper under the waves or back to the surface.
The paddles, rudder and flippers were operated by a system of cranks and levers that filled most of the boat’s interior, however another drawing showed a different method of propulsion using oars protruding from the hull through waterproof gaskets. Thomas reckoned these would be much easier to make than the paddles, and create more room inside the vessel to carry fully armed soldiers, so he decided his vessel would use
oars.
Besides construction and propulsion the greatest problem of underwater travel was how to let men breathe beneath the waves so Leonardo’s boat showed a system of flexible snorkels attached to floats on the surface of the water. The ends of these airlines were disguised as a driftwood but the more Thomas considered this solution, the less convinced he became of its practicality. Leonardo had designed his craft to attack Turkish ships threatening Venice and whilst such a device might work well in the still waters of the Venetian lagoon, in a fast flowing river like the Thames a large log floating upstream would be spotted immediately.
For this reason, Thomas decided to discard the helmsman’s tower and the leather air bags as these would be far too visible from a riverbank. Instead he decided to incorporate two lead lined tanks in the upper hull, just above the line of oars. These could be fitted with simple brewer’s taps and filled by the pressure of the surrounding water when necessary. Once full, the tanks’ weight would submerge the boat but careful calculation would be needed to ensure it sank to the required depth, not plummet to the bottom. There’d be no way to empty the tanks once underwater but Thomas was certain he could devise a way to use detachable stone ballast to refloat the vessel.
He also decided to provide a Gutenberg periscope for the helmsman. The famous printer had invented this device to allow pilgrims to catch a glimpse of sacred statues being paraded around the streets of Bamberg during religious festivals and Thomas reckoned it would be a simple matter to incorporate one into his vessel. However, Gutenberg couldn’t help with the problem of air supply.
If Thomas’ boat couldn’t use snorkels, his only other option was to find a method to produce the clean air that all land creatures needed. How to do this was a question that had perplexed students of the Natural Sciences for centuries and during his apprenticeship Thomas had assisted Agrippa in several experiments designed to isolate this ‘quintessence of air’. By placing rats and mice in sealed glass jars and watching them expire, they’d deduced that the act of breathing must extract something from the air and once this substance had been exhausted what remained was toxic to life. They’d repeated their experiment, placing various concoctions in the jar with the rats, in the hope these elixirs would purify the air but the animals continued to suffocate.
Thomas felt sure that Leonardo must have been aware of this problem and had devised some way to overcome it other than a snorkel. If da Vinci had indeed discovered the secret of purifying air, then it had to be contained in his notes so Thomas returned to the pages of The Munich Handbook. He studied the diagrams and text until he found the answer in a short monograph on mining. For some reason, Leonardo had turned his skills to the problems of rescuing miners from deep shafts where the air had become foul and had suggested heating saltpetre would release the fabled ‘quintessence of air’. The saltpetre, Leonardo claimed, would not only produce clean air to breath, it would remove the poisoned atmosphere from a mine – or an underwater boat.
Thomas could barely believe his luck and resolved to test the theory without delay. He sent for a flask of saltpetre and, as this mineral was used to make gunpowder, de la Pole’s gunners had a plentiful supply. He also called for two rats, two wide-necked glass wine jars and a length of twine. Again the castle had no shortage of rats, jars or string and these were delivered to Thomas’ chamber within the hour. He placed the caged rats and the other items on a table and covered them with a red cloth and when all was ready, he sent for Bos, Quintana and Prometheus.
Exactly as Nagel had promised, Thomas’ companions had been welcomed by de la Pole, and had been appointed sergeants in the Black Band, so he was not surprised when the three men appeared at his door dressed in the black livery of their new employer. Chillingly, Quintana and Prometheus looked perfectly at home in the garb of ruthless mercenaries and even Bos had reconciled himself to wearing the uniform of his hated enemies if it served a higher purpose. The men greeted each other warmly and were in good spirits until Thomas began to explain the White Rose’ plan to row an army up the Thames in boats that could travel underwater.
“By the big black beard on the Queen of Spain’s mother surely you jest?” said Quintana incredulously.
“Have you lost your wits in the few days you’ve been absent from our sobering presence?” Prometheus added.
“Are you planning to use witchcraft? I’ve warned you before Englishman, I’ll have no part in any compact with Satan or his servants. Have you forgotten that the Lord Jesus preferred to walk over stormy seas, not under them?” Bos said disapprovingly but Thomas insisted such a thing was possible and did not require anyone to sell his soul to The Devil.
“I can assure you witchcraft has nothing to do with building an undersea boat. When a barrel of wine falls off a quayside and floats just below the water’s surface is it magic or the work of Satan? No, it’s simply the nature of things. All we need to do is build a barrel large enough to take thirty men into the heart of London and seal it so water cannot enter. Can that be so hard?”
“If water cannot enter then neither can air and after a few minutes, anyone inside your ship of fools will die,” countered Bos.
“The Frisian is right, no man can remain alive for long once he’s been shut inside a barrel. Have you forgotten that the infidel Turks use this as a way to execute those who have offended their Sultan,” said Prometheus sternly.
“But I can show you how it can be done” said Thomas with a smile. The others looked at each other in disbelief as their friend went to the table at the far end of the room and removed the red cloth that covered the cages with a flourish. The rats squeaked at the sudden arrival of daylight and began to scrabble at the floors of their tiny prisons.
“Rats, glass jars what’s all this junk?” enquired Bos, looking at the equipment suspiciously.
“Now gentlemen, for the first time in history, I shall demonstrate how rats may survive in a sinking ship,” said Thomas with a broad grin.
The experiment was relatively simple. First, Thomas took a small copper jug and heated it in the fire, before filling it with some saltpetre. The hot metal caused the grains to give off barely visible fumes and Thomas quickly placed the jug in one of the glass jars with one of the rats. So the animal didn’t knock over the jug, Thomas tied one end of a length of twine around its belly and the other to the jar’s cork so the creature hung in mid-air over the jug of smouldering saltpetre.
In the second jar, he placed the second rat suspended from its cork like the other but without the saltpetre. He then sealed both jars with candlewax poured over the corks. When all was done, Thomas and the others settled down to watch. At first both animals writhed and wriggled as they tried to free themselves from their glass coffins but gradually the movements of the second rat became sluggish then stopped. The dead rat hung limply from its rope like a hanged man but the first rat continued to struggle long after the demise of the other.
“What sorcery is this, why does one of these vermin die and the other live?” Bos gasped.
“The saltpetre releases the quintessence of air when heated,” explained Thomas but even he could scarcely believe the success of his experiment. He’d duped both de la Pole and Albany with his faked necromancy but here there was no trickery or deceit. He’d managed to make fresh air and with this secret he could sail a vessel underwater all the way to the New World if he wanted.
“My God Thomas, you are indeed a marvel, with such knowledge think what we can steal,” said Quintana appreciatively
“Then you’ll all join me?” Thomas asked.
“I’ve no love of the water but the poet Virgil teaches us that fortune favours the brave,” added Prometheus.
“And God said unto Noah build me an ark, for you alone are righteous in this generation,” said Bos.
11
THE BOAT
The White Rose needed no experiments or justification through scripture to convince him that his plan could not fail. He’d already made detailed plans for his subma
rine fleet and his strategy called for at least four boats, each capable of carrying thirty men beneath the Thames.
The crew of one boat would seize the king’s palace at Greenwich whilst the second proceeded to Westminster to capture Henry’s seat of government. The men in the third boat would lay siege to The Tower of London, to prevent the garrison coming to the king’s aid, whilst the crew of the fourth vessel would seize St Paul’s Cathedral and proclaim the restoration of the House of York. With the centres of Tudor power neutralised, de la Pole and the rest of his invasion force would proceed up the Thames in normal ships and arrive a few hours later.
As soon as Thomas presented his design for the underwater boat, the delighted de la Pole ordered work to begin. The wooden stalls of Haute Pierre’s stables were removed to create workshops and the best shipwrights and chandlers hired from the city’s boatyards. The workmen looked at each other and rolled their eyes heavenward as Thomas explained his drawings. To a man, the carpenters and tanners believed the boat would be a death trap but if a group of crazy Englishmen wanted to drown themselves in the Moselle who were they to try and stop them? De la Pole paid well and had promised every man an extra purse of florins if they finished the boat by St Benedict’s Day.
Besides paying generous wages, de la Pole tried to keep his plans secret by making his workmen swear terrible oaths but there was little that could be done to disguise the sounds of hammering and sawing that the echoed around the castle’s wall. Worse still, the White Rose’s neighbours began to complain to the city authorities about the foul smells that came from the vats of boiling glue and pitch set up in the castle’s courtyard. De la Pole had to resort to colossal bribes and threats of retribution from the French king to quieten the city council but in spite of these problems the boat slowly began to take shape.
Surprisingly, building the vessel proved to be quite simple and even fitting the buoyancy tanks required no greater skills than those already possessed by any competent boatbuilder. The vessel’s frame was a series of circular wooden ribs of diminishing sizes fastened to two curved keels, an upper and a lower, with the largest of these ribs in the centre. Planks were steamed, bent to fit around the ribs and nailed ‘clinker fashion’ to the ribs. These ‘strakes’ were caulked with oakum, and covered with a leather skin before the whole structure was coated with pitch. This created a watertight cylinder fifty feet long with tapered ends at the bow and the stern.
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