Death's Bright Angel

by Death's Bright Angel (retail) (epub)

  ‘As Your Highness says. But I fear my ship is too shattered to play any further part. The French prize, too. Both of us are holed below the waterline, and much shattered in our hulls.’

  We looked out toward the two badly damaged ships. A busy little royal yacht was approaching the quarter of the Jeanne d’Arc, no doubt to take off the estimable Captain Ollivier and bring him to the flagship.

  ‘Losing a ship of such force as the Sceptre will be a grave loss,’ said Rupert. ‘But you are right. There is nothing for it. She and the prize must be sent into the river at once, and then up to one of the dockyards for repair.’

  I bowed my head. I knew the order was inevitable, but hearing it from the lips of my admiral still felt like a hammer striking my chest. England was still in grave danger, there was still a possibility of carrying out some great and glorious service against the French, or the Dutch, or both, and yet Matthew Quinton would play no part in any of it. I would be confined ashore for the remainder of the summer, with nothing to do but to bellow at idle dockyard shipwrights and rage against the endless dockets, musters, and papers that would be demanded by the officious Navy Board clerks.

  Still, I supposed that my wife would be happy to have me at home.

  ‘Tell me, Matt,’ said the Prince, as though reading my thoughts, ‘your lieutenant, young Delacourt. Is he an able man?’

  ‘He is no seaman, Your Highness.’

  ‘Neither were you, once. Neither was I. No, I do not mean able in that sense – I care not whether he can set his own course, or name every sail or rope. Does he have the respect of your crew, Sir Matthew?’

  ‘He does. He proved himself a brave and resourceful fighter in the last battle, and the men took to him.’

  ‘And you have experienced and reliable warrant officers, do you not?’

  ‘I do, Your Highness.’

  My heart lifted. I had a sense of what the Prince had in mind.

  ‘Very well. It seems to me, then, that there is little to be gained, and much to be lost, by Sir Matthew Quinton leaving the fleet, even if his ship must. Besides, there is a little scheme afoot which would benefit greatly from your experience and resourcefulness. A little scheme which would greatly confound our Dutch friends, if it succeeds. I am due to talk with the instigators of that scheme this very hour. Might you be interested in such a scheme, Matt?’

  I knew I was grinning like a schoolboy, but could not stop myself.

  ‘I would be interested, Your Highness.’

  ‘Excellent. And, of course, your remaining in the fleet will quite confound His Grace of Albemarle. When the scout came back with news of your action, he was beside himself with delight. Not at the capture of the Frenchman, but at the thought of you having to leave for England.’

  * * *

  The great cabin of the Royal Charles was palatial, as befitted the ship that had brought His Majesty the King back from exile six years before. As we entered, two men, who were deep in conversation by the stern windows, turned and bowed to the Prince. One of them I recognised immediately. Square of stature, with a great nose, a scarred chin, and remarkably broad and long hands, he was really too old to wear the loose satin sleeves that were then in vogue at court. But there was still more than a little of the roguish young gallant about Sir Robert Holmes, rear-admiral of the Red Squadron, an old cavalry companion of Prince Rupert and an old drinking companion of mine.

  ‘I give you joy of your victory, Sir Matthew!’ he cried with unfeigned delight, stepping across the deck to shake my hand vigorously with his iron grip while slapping me heavily on the back.

  ‘My thanks, Sir Robert.’

  ‘So you’ll be joining our little expedition, then? Taking a great Frog man-of-war not enough to slake your thirst for action, Matt? Good man. Now, let me have the honour to name you to our friend, here. Sir Matthew Quinton – Captain Lauris van Heemskerck, late of the Admiralty of Rotterdam, now as true a subject of King Charles as you or I.’

  The other man stepped forward, and bowed his head slightly. He was a small fellow with pronounced cheekbones, close-cropped grey hair, and a slightly nervous, hunted air. As well he might have. I had heard of Captain van Heemskerck during the previous weeks, but our paths had never crossed until that moment. My opinion of him had been formed long before our meeting, though. Discontented at his Admiralty’s failure to promote him to the rank he thought his due, and swayed by the amount of gold that my king’s agents offered him, Lauris van Heemskerck had quietly despatched his family to safety in Dover, then deserted the service of the United Provinces for that of the King of England. In short, he was a traitor; and even though we were at war with his homeland, and by rights I should have rejoiced at any defection that benefited our cause against the arrogant Dutch butterboxes, I hated traitors more than I hated nearly anything else on this earth.

  ‘Captain,’ I said, as neutrally as I could manage.

  The Prince must have detected my mood, for he drew us at once to the chart on the table beneath the stern window. I recognised it straight away: the north coasts of the Dutch provinces of Holland and Friesland, including the islands that lay offshore like a string of pearls guarding the approaches to the mainland. Flat, featureless, muddy pearls. My wife, who hailed from the more southerly and sophisticated Zeeland, once told me that the islanders were all related to each other within the canonical decrees, and had six fingers on each hand.

  ‘The Frisian Islands,’ said Rupert. ‘Here, Texel, which we know all too well.’

  He pointed to a large oval just off the northern tip of the peninsula that stretched up the west side of the Dutchmen’s inland sea. Yes, we knew it all right. The Dutch fleet invariably anchored behind Texel, venturing out against us through the sea-gate between it and the mainland. We had spent entire weeks at a time during each of the last two summers cruising off that shore, spying out the masts visible above the low shape of the island, wondering if and when the enemy would come out.

  Rupert’s hand moved north and east, a little closer toward the coasts of the Holy Roman Empire and Denmark.

  ‘The next two islands, Vlieland here, Terschelling here. These are the objects of our current interest, Sir Matthew. Captain van Heemskerck, explain if you will.’

  ‘The islands are undefended,’ said the traitor in a thin, reedy voice, although his English was excellent. ‘Or at least, defended only by small companies of militia and perhaps a handful of small frigates and privateers. High Pensionary De Witt – the devil take him and all his fawning True Freedomers – he believes that if you English decide to attack the coast, it will be somewhere between Den Helder and The Hague. So most of the army is drawn up there, where it can move north or south as needs must. Besides, they believe that the English will not be able to get within the sea-gates, to the waters behind the Frisian Islands, because you do not know the safe channels. But I do.’

  I looked at van Heemskerck anew: perhaps he had not sold his country for forty pieces of silver after all. If he hated Johann de Witt and the craven republican scum who ruled the Netherlands entirely in the interest of Amsterdam and its money-brokers, then he was surely an Orangist – one who sought the promotion to his family’s lost honours of Prince William the Third, our King’s nephew. As was my wife.

  ‘We’ve had scout ships out,’ said Holmes, ‘and there are hundreds of masts behind the Vlie. Not warships, Sir Matthew. They’re merchantmen, including plenty of fat ones. Levanters for sure. West Indiamen, certainly. East Indiamen, perhaps. Rich trades, waiting for the winds and tides to be right for them to get over the Pampus and up to Amsterdam. Destroy them, and all the warehouses their trading companies have on the Vlie, and at the very least, it’ll cause a panic in the States-General, and on the Amsterdam bourse. At best, their losses will be so huge that there’ll be a revolution against de Witt and his coterie. The States-General will have to send for the Prince of Orange, and the Dutch will have to make peace on His Majesty’s terms.’

  ‘And, God willing,�
� said Prince Rupert, ‘we can accomplish this in a matter of days. Certainly long before Beaufort’s French fleet comes into the North Sea and joins with the Dutch. If this scheme prospers, there might even be no Dutch fleet for the Frogs to join with. Who knows, perhaps Beaufort will be isolated, far from friendly harbours, and will fall easy prey to us. If that happens, who is to say that England will not defeat both of its great enemies before the summer is out?’

  I looked at the chart. It all seemed so tempting, so very easy. Yet I remembered something my uncle Tristram had taught me when I was no more than ten or so, when news came that the Scottish royalist army had somehow lost from an impregnable position against Oliver Cromwell at the Battle of Dunbar.

  ‘General Leslie should have remembered to put himself in the shoes of the Emperor Xerxes, young Matthew. Even if you’re faced with only three hundred Spartans, it doesn’t mean that victory is assured.’

  And yet, the militias of Vlieland and Terschelling would hardly be Spartans. Perhaps some victories really could be bought so easily.

  ‘The scheme is this,’ said the Prince. ‘Sir Robert, here, will command an expedition to go close inshore. There will be eight of our best frigates, a dozen or so ketches and hoys, perhaps fifty boats. Some one thousand men, divided into ten companies – each company to consist of both soldiers and sailors. A further company of gentlemen volunteers, to be commanded by Sir Philip Howard.’ Holmes and I exchanged glances. Here at last might be some justification for the hordes of titled wastrels who had come to sea for the campaign, hoping for glory and honour, yet who had done little but take up precious space on the ships that bore them. ‘The names of the ships and the proposed commanders of companies are here, upon this list.’ He handed us three identical copies. ‘That will be sufficient, Captain van Heemskerck?’

  ‘More than sufficient, Highness.’

  ‘Very well. Before we discuss the detail of times and dispositions, there is one matter to resolve. The expedition needs a second-in-command. A man of experience, and of sufficient seniority should the admiral fall. Now, Sir Philip Howard is a good man, but he is a soldier, and this is a position for a seaman.’ The Prince did not need to add that Howard was Albemarle’s man, formerly the captain of his personal guard; Rupert of the Rhine would rather have had the King’s latest doxy as second in command than hand a chance of glory to any protégé of the rotund Duke. ‘Sir Matthew, it seems to both Sir Robert and I that the Royal Sceptre’s disability is surely a sign of God’s divine purpose in this matter. You are available for the task, and no man in the fleet is better suited for it. If you are willing to take it, the honour is yours.’

  Holmes was grinning, Rupert serious. For my part, I doubted whether God’s divine purpose had anything to do with the matter. But the prospect of playing my part in an action that might, God willing, put an end to this war, was one that no man with Quinton blood and the Quinton name could refuse.

  ‘I accept, Your Highness,’ I said. ‘And if you and Sir Robert will permit it, I wish to make my choice of my headquarters ship from the frigates listed here.’

  ‘And that would be?’

  ‘The Black Prince,’ I said. ‘Captain Christopher Farrell.’

  Chapter Four

  Dawn on a fine early August morning, a marked contrast to the previous day. The sun began to rise in the east, dead ahead, revealing the two long, low islands barely a couple of miles away. The islands of Vlieland and Terschelling.

  Now was the hour. We were about to invade Holland.

  I stood on the quarterdeck of the Black Prince, a fine-lined Fourth Rate frigate mounting some forty-six cannon, the ensign of the Red Squadron spilling out over her stern. Her captain, a stocky fellow of my own age, wearing a plain russet coat, stood at my side. How matters had changed for both of us since that fateful day, five years earlier, when the young gentleman captain of His Majesty’s ship the Happy Restoration was saved from drowning during her shipwreck on the Irish coast by an equally youthful master’s mate from Wapping named Kit Farrell. A shipwreck that had been caused entirely by Captain Matthew Quinton’s utter ignorance of the ways of the sea and ships. We had come to an agreement that day: Kit would teach me those ways, and in turn I would teach him to read and write. Since then, he had served under me in various ships and posts, latterly as my lieutenant, until his bravery in the Four Days’ battle eight weeks earlier led the joint admirals to promote him to this, his first command. Captain Christopher Farrell still looked about his ship with a sense of awe, as though he could not quite believe or comprehend what had happened to him. And, if truth be told, there was still a part of Captain Sir Matthew Quinton that could not quite believe or comprehend what had happened to the two of us in the space of a mere five years.

  ‘Sir Robert’s hoisting a signal!’ shouted Kit’s boatswain.

  ‘I see it, Mister Kendall,’ cried Kit. ‘The red at the mizzen – the command to fall into the admiral’s wake. We’re forming line!’

  Holmes had shifted his flag to the Tyger, a frigate of similar force to the Black Prince, in which he was leading the rest of us towards the channel between the two Dutch islands. This followed the previous day’s debacle, when, as Holmes later told me, Lauris van Heemskerck had listened to each successive, troublingly shallow, sounding by the Tyger’s leadsman, shaken his head, murmured that the sandbanks must have shifted since he was last in those waters in April, and avoided Sir Robert’s furious gaze for the rest of the day. Fortunately, a small Danish craft, approaching the sea-gate and blissfully unaware of the presence of our squadron, had blundered directly into the path of the Garland, and her skipper proved eager to win his release in return for piloting us into the anchorage.

  Kit Farrell took up a voice trumpet and began shouting orders to his crew. Many more orders than I would have issued myself. I inclined to the view that if a captain had faith in his warrant officers, they could be left to issue the great majority of commands; and perhaps there was still a part of me that secretly sympathised with the views of my friend and fellow gentleman commander, Beaudesert Harris. Beau was by no means alone in his belief that captains of good birth should not sully themselves with such artisan tasks as mastering the name and purpose of every rope and timber on the ship, with writing up their own journals, or with checking the gunner’s and carpenter’s stores. Instead, he contended, they should adhere only to the traditional role of the warrior-knight, namely that of leading by example in battle. Or, as we both put it when we were in our cups, standing fearlessly upon an exposed deck, waving a sword, shouting very loudly, and being shot at.

  ‘A fair wind for it, Sir Matthew,’ said Kit, who knew every rope of his ship, every timber, and everything else to do with it. ‘South-westerly, not strong enough to trap us behind the shoals when we want to come out again.’

  ‘Let us hope it remains so, K – Captain Farrell,’ I said.

  One had to maintain formalities in the hearing of his own crew, especially as I had seen the looks in the eyes of some of his men: the jealousy and resentment of those who knew full well that their captain was drawn from the same social rank as they were, but had risen much faster, and at a much younger age, than any of them. We had discussed it at dinner in his great cabin, the previous afternoon, shortly after the shattered Royal Sceptre had left the fleet, taking with her Francis Gale and a bitterly complaining Phineas Musk, who’d seemed convinced that I would be killed as soon as I was out of his sight.

  ‘You have the advantage of birth, Sir Matthew,’ Kit had said. ‘Even in our time on the Happy Restoration, the men respected you as the brother of an Earl, a man of birth to whom they would naturally defer, despite –’

  He blushed, and took a sip of wine instead of completing his sentence. He still lifted his glass cautiously, as though he were not entirely sure of this unfamiliar drink and the refined manner in which commissioned sea-captains of the King were expected to drink it.

  ‘Despite the fact that I knew less of the sea than the rats
who plagued our orlop on that unhappy ship? You have the right of it, Captain Farrell.’

  He smiled.

  ‘And now, they respect you as a brave and famous commander, and a knight of the realm. Sir Matthew Quinton, who has the favour of Prince Rupert and whose brother is a friend of the King. Whereas as far as they’re concerned, I’m just plain Kit Farrell, a mere tarpaulin from Wapping, an alehouse landlady’s brat who just happens to have had more luck than they have.’

  ‘Nonsense. Oh, nonsense, man!’ Kit rarely stooped to self-pity, but when he did, it irritated me beyond measure. ‘The heroism you displayed in the late battle is a byword in the fleet, and seamen always respect a captain who knows his business. Besides, Kit, you’re an example to them. They’ll all be out there in their messes, or at their stations, thinking to themselves that if you can do it, then so can they.’

  ‘If they don’t mutiny and fillet me first, that is.’

  ‘I’d worry about the Dutch rather more than about your own men, Captain Farrell.’

  He frowned, as though still not entirely convinced, but then looked back at me, and his mind seemed to be more at ease.

  ‘Amen to that, Sir Matthew, amen to that. Now tell me, in confidence – is this good wine or no? With ale, one sip is enough to tell me its origin and its quality. But wine… I fear I will never become a judge of it.’