Death's Bright Angel

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

  ‘My name is Vandervoort,’ I said in Dutch, hoping I had not displayed any hesitation in responding to a ploy clearly meant to catch me out, ‘Adriaan Vandervoort. And I would rather not tell you my story, meinheer. All you need to know is that I have gold, and I can get more once I am landed in Holland.’

  The fellow studied me closely. The mention of gold should have piqued his interest, but he seemed too interested in how I was speaking, rather than in what I was saying.

  ‘You don’t talk like any Dutchman I know,’ he said, ‘and I’ve been in and out of every harbour between Friesland and Zeeland for thirty years and more.’

  ‘I am not from the coast. I am from Assen, in Drenthe, although I lived in Zeeland and Amsterdam for…’

  ‘Drenthe? That’s far inland, ain’t it? Some sort of a bog. Poorest part of the entire republic, I heard.’

  ‘All of that is true, unfortunately. And this is how we talk in Drenthe, the poor bog.’

  He was silent, evidently sizing me up. Somehow, I managed to avoid looking at Aphra or Musk. But I was assessing the distance to where my sword and pistols lay, and estimating just how quickly I could reach them.

  ‘All right, Meinheer Vandervoort, let’s assume for the present that you’re telling the truth. So what I want to know is, how does a Drenthe man like yourself come to be in England in the first place when our two countries are at war, and why does he then want to get out of it so quickly? Because I’ll tell you this, friend. You telling me your story is your only chance of me agreeing to sail you across to Holland.’

  And so I launched into the speech that had been written for me by Mistress Aphra Behn. How I wish I had preserved that piece of paper, given what befell her thereafter; Congreve or Vanbrugh would have paid a fortune for it.

  ‘I serve the banking house of De Hondt,’ I said, hoping I was acting with the degree of boastfulness and indiscretion that we had decided Meinheer Vandervoort ought to display. ‘One of the most reputable in Amsterdam. On its behalf, I have carried out tasks in the likes of Vienna, Madrid and Paris. But this has been the most difficult mission of all, Mister–?’ The fellow made no response, but simply nodded for me to continue. ‘Of course, this war is a decided inconvenience to many in both our countries. To those with moneyed interests in both. You will know, I do not doubt, that many of my nation prosper here in England. We are not far from Colchester, which contains more Dutchmen than my home town of Assen. We may be at war, but there are still countless Dutch in London, and elsewhere in these islands – why, sir, at this very moment, the mayors of your towns of Dublin and Limerick are Dutchmen.’ This was an embellishment of my own; Cornelia had held forth on the matter at our awkward supper. ‘It is important to many of these Dutchmen to continue to have contact with their brothers, cousins and bankers in the United Provinces. For monies to be able to continue to cross the North Sea in both directions, as it were, by means of discreet bills of exchange drawn upon neutral third parties. That has been my part, sir. I have lately been to Ireland, and Bristol, and London, and was bound for Colchester.’

  ‘Nothing untoward in any of that,’ said the fellow, grudgingly. ‘But why do you need to leave England so fast, then, before you get to all your Dutch friends in Colchester?’

  Aphra feigned alarm, and put her hand on my arm.

  ‘You do not need to know all,’ she said to our visitor in English. ‘You know now that my husband can afford to pay you well for sailing us to Holland. Will you take the voyage, or should we seek some other man who will?’

  ‘I thank you, mistress,’ said the fellow, ‘but this is a matter between me, here, and your husband, there.’ He turned back to me, and resumed in Dutch. ‘So, friend, your answer? Why do you need to get out of England, eh?’

  I exchanged glances with Aphra, who was a more accomplished actor than I. It was easy to see why she had proved so useful to my brother, in his role as Lord Percival.

  ‘You will know,’ I said, ‘that the Dutch are not only in England to trade. Lord Arlington, your King’s great minister of state, is married to a Dutch lady. Lord Ossory, one of your King’s favourites, is married to that lady’s sister.’

  ‘Not my King,’ said the fellow, although he had raised an eyebrow at the mention of Arlington. As well he might: at that very moment, the King’s principal spymaster might be poring over this villain’s name on one of his many lists of malcontents.

  ‘My apologies, sir. I, too, am no lover of kings. My bank is staunch for the True Freedom, and the cause of Grand Pensionary de Witt, and against…’

  ‘Yes, yes… But Arlington and Ossory, and their wives? What of them?’

  I feigned reluctance.

  ‘Sir, it is a matter of confidence…’

  ‘If you want me to get you out of England, friend, you’ll share that confidence. And if you’ve got Arlington after you, I think you’ll need to leave this shore as swiftly as possible.’

  I gave a show of considering the matter intently, casting glances at Aphra and Musk (who was lost in a bottle of modest wine), and sighing deeply.

  ‘Very well,’ I said.

  * * *

  ‘Do you think he believes it?’ I asked.

  Aphra seemed more interested in inspecting the small, low-timbered room we had been allotted. If it truly was the best room in Leigh, then the place evidently received precious few visitors.

  ‘It is an irresistible story, Sir Matthew. Mark my words, he believes it, which is why he has promised to find us a ship within five tides. And, God willing, it will draw out Schermer, Goodman and de Wildt, too. A Dutch banker, able to find them limitless credit on the Amsterdam bourse? A Dutch banker with damning evidence against Arlington and Ossory? Yes, they will believe it all, and they will come to us.’

  I was yet to be convinced, although my still-anonymous companion of earlier in the evening had seemed impressed enough by the web Aphra Behn had spun. A tale of scandalously large debts being run up by Ladies Arlington and Ossory at a card table presided over by the Queen, debts that could only be paid off by recourse to assets the two ladies still held in their native Netherlands, sounded utterly implausible to me. But then, I knew the two ladies in question – indeed, Aemilia, Countess of Ossory, was a friend of my wife – and knew them to be dutiful, modest, matrons of virtue. I knew the Queen, too: an insignificant, innocuous creature whose only mark to date upon the history of England had been, not the appropriate, necessary, and politically providential production of a Prince of Wales, but instead the introduction of tea-drinking.

  But as Aphra had said, it would all seem very different through the suspicious eyes of the ever-febrile malcontents. To men like the creature to whom I had spoken that evening, Ladies Arlington and Ossory were unknown quantities, notable only and hated only because they were married to two of the leading lights in the notoriously debauched court and government of the licentious, Popishly-inclined whoremaster Charles Stuart. The very fact that they were wed to two such reprobates would make it possible to believe anything of them. Arlington, of course, was especially hated for his part in driving forward the persecution of those who regarded themselves as the pure, godly body of the divinely elected; or rather, as we cavaliers knew them to be, deluded, canting hypocrites. As for the poor, blameless Queen: she was, of course, a Catholic, and thus by the inexorable logic of the disaffected, she must therefore be one of the principal agents in England of Popery and the Jesuits, who spent day and night conspiring how to slit the throats of all true Englishmen and burn their children upon spits.

  Whereupon, presumably, they would be basted with tea.

  Whether Mistress Behn’s assumptions were correct, and whether her script really would flush out the surviving Horsemen of the Apocalypse, remained to be seen. In the meantime, we had effectively made ourselves prisoners of our enemies, in a place full of hostile and rebellious spirits, with our proposed method of extracting ourselves depending upon…

  ‘One bed,’ said Aphra, diverting me from my th
oughts by suddenly looking up at me in a smiling, questioning way that I found markedly disconcerting. ‘And we are supposed to be a married couple. How do you propose to negotiate that matter, Sir Matthew?’

  Chapter Eleven

  I blushed.

  ‘I shall make up a bed upon the floor, Mistress. I – I am accustomed to sleeping upon decks, when there is a prospect of battle.’

  ‘Is there a prospect of battle tonight, Sir Matthew?’

  She tilted her head, and smiled innocently. She took a step toward me.

  ‘I am a married man,’ I said, my throat suddenly as dry as glasspaper.

  ‘So is the King. Such an upstanding model of marital constancy to us all. But you, too, Sir Matthew, are an upstanding fellow, I see.’

  Another step. She was close enough for me to catch the first hint of her scent.

  ‘I am a married man,’ I repeated, for I could not think what else to say.

  ‘And you have never been unfaithful to your wife? My God, Sir Matthew, for a man of your rank, you will be unique in England if that is the case.’

  Part of me wanted to scream I have never been unfaithful to my wife, but the other, rather larger, part knew that for the lie it was. Admittedly, I had never been unfaithful to Cornelia in England. In all, since our marriage, I had slept with five other women, but all of them had been abroad – one, indeed, at sea – and all of them after inordinate periods of absence from the wife for whom I loved and longed. I had deluded myself by applying my satyr-like uncle Tristram’s dubious logic, namely that Protestant marriages were deemed invalid by the Papists and the Mahometans, so fornication in any land under the sway of those faiths (that is, the great majority of the known world) could not possibly be adultery. But there were no possible legal or moral grounds that could permit an extension of this principle to Essex.

  She was very close now. Very close indeed.

  She was utterly beautiful. And, since I had learned Cornelia was pregnant, I had not – we had not…

  The likes of Robin Holmes and, God help me, the King of England, would have been shocked by my restraint and prudishness, had they known of it. But I could not suppress my memories of childhood escapes to the mill and the smithy, and overhearing what the goodwives of the local villages said to their lusty boys and their wenches: of how doing it to a wife with child damaged babies in the womb, made them soft in the head, and other such nonsense that the brother of an Earl, even one barely breeched, should have dismissed as arrant superstition and foolery.

  Superstition and foolery that, twenty years later, made Sir Matthew Quinton reluctant to lay a hand on the wife who might be carrying the future Earl of Ravensden, despite that wife being eager enough. For some reason I had a sudden image of Captain Ollivier, and felt my heart chill, just as another part of me warmed unbearably.

  I gripped Aphra’s shoulders. I could still have pushed her away, still proclaimed my constancy to my wife, still been faithful. If I had only shared Cornelia’s steadfast belief in predestination, I could have argued –

  Argued what?

  For predestination was the most elusive of masters. Perhaps it was predestined that I should reject the advances of this skirted would-be Shakespeare. Or perhaps it was predestined that I should take her bodily, there and then.

  Who knew?

  As it was, I looked into Astraea’s eyes, and saw dark, bottomless pools of lust. My hands slipped from her shoulders, down to her breasts.

  She sighed.

  ‘You are brazen, Mistress Behn,’ I said, at last.

  She slipped her hands inside my shirt.

  ‘Ours is not an age that values chastity and modesty in women, Sir Matthew,’ she said.

  I kissed her, and her tongue responded enthusiastically. We moved to the bed, our hands moving urgently over each other’s bodies, pulling off clothing. And then we gave ourselves over to sin – to warm, moist, blissful, guilty, predestined sin.

  * * *

  I slept little, and rose before dawn. She was still asleep, her bare arms lying free above the blanket, a peaceful smile on her lips.

  I walked down to the foreshore, breathing in the smells of the sea and the mud. It was starting to get light in the east, where the fleet was still at sea. A fleet I should still have been with, seeking out Dutch or French men-of-war. In the creeks within the marshes, and at the wharves within the villlage, fishermen were already at work, preparing their boats and their nets prior to setting out. A large merchant hull, a prize fly-boat by the looks of her, was newly hauled up high on the beach, so high that it would surely only be possible to float her off upon a spring tide. A sheet of canvas covering a patch of hull below the waterline suggested that she had been holed, and been run ashore for repairs. A young man, some three or four years younger than I, stood next to the ship, upon the mud of the estuary, looking up at the piece of canvas. He saw me, and nodded in silent greeting. A member of the carpenter’s crew, contemplating the day’s work ahead. Or so any observer would have assumed.

  The sun came up, and bathed me in new-born guilt. I felt pain in my bones, in my head, in my blood. I had slept with Aphra Behn. I had betrayed Cornelia. I had sinned against my marriage vows. In England. In Essex. What, in God’s name, had I done? What if I had made her with child? She had assured me it would not be so, but women’s assurances upon that issue had been found wanting by mankind since the beginning of time. What if a bastard child lived, and the legitimate child, the heir to Ravensden that my wife might be carrying, perished? I thought of the old Mennonite woman’s curse. What sort of retribution – what might befall Cornelia, our child, if it was ever destined to be born and to live, our very world?

  ‘Give you joy of the morning, Meinheer Vandervoort,’ said a familiar voice behind me, in English. ‘You are about markedly early, this day.’

  Lost in my thoughts, consumed by guilt, I spun around with a start, and the words of an English reply framed in my mouth –

  Only to come out, by some miracle, in Dutch.

  ‘Your pardon, Meinheer, I do not understand you.’

  He repeated his previous words, this time in Dutch.

  ‘As are you, my friend,’ I replied.

  ‘Sallows,’ said the fellow. ‘Daniel Sallows. If I know your true name and business, Meinheer, there’s no good reason for you not to know mine, now is there?’

  A gesture of fellowship. But we both knew that his first addressing me in English had been one more attempt to catch me out.

  ‘And how goes your business, Meinheer Sallows? Will our ship be here in five tides, as you promised? The day after tomorrow?’

  ‘That it will. You have my word on it, Meinheer Vandervoort, and I’m ever a man true to his word. But there are other men, also true to their words, who are keen to talk with you.’

  I feigned alarm.

  ‘That was not part of our agreement.’

  ‘It’s a part of it now. Oh, these men won’t delay your sailing, Meinheer. But they have propositions to put to you. It will be to your advantage to listen to them. Tonight, at eleven. At the church. And to display their bona fides, they won’t insist on you coming alone. Bring your man, if you wish, as a safeguard.’

  ‘I do not like it.’

  Sallows stepped closer.

  ‘Meinheer, if you want to get out of England, you’ll be at the church tonight. Leigh is mainly true to the Old Cause, but even a place like this has its share of malignants, and not a few who’d inform on you to one of the Essex Justices if they were to receive an anonymous information. And if you were to be arrested by a constable or the militia, Meinheer, how long do you think it would be before you were taken up to London? I’d reckon Lord Arlington would be very interested in your story, especially as it concerns his wife. Wouldn’t you agree?’

  ‘Very well, Meinheer Sallows, it shall be as you say. Eleven at the church.’

  * * *

  We walked out later that morning, looking for all the world like ordinary travellers taking a
tour of inspection of the village. Aphra looked every inch the demure Puritan maid, and Musk dawdled dutifully a couple of paces behind us. I struggled to make conversation. I feared that any words I uttered would betray to the whole world – worse, would betray to Phineas Musk – the guilt of my adultery with this woman. As it was, I could have sworn I saw a knowing, condemning look in Musk’s eyes. I tried to chide myself. That, after all, was surely nothing more than the way in which Musk always looked upon the world. Yet it also seemed as though the gulls, swooping above us while searching for rotten fish to devour, were shrieking ‘Sinner!’

  We proceeded past the strand and the jumble of meanly-built, lath-and-plaster houses clustered around the street and the foreshore. Many of the mariners may have been away at sea, but there were still many fishermen at work on their nets and the hulls of upturned boats pulled up onto the shore. These were curious affairs, double ended, with pointed sterns and a wet well in the middle of the boat where the catch could be kept alive. I wished to learn more of these ‘peter boats’, as I later discovered they were called; but I was a monoglot Dutch banker, not a captain of the Navy Royal, so I had to feign ignorance of everything I saw and heard.

  Finally we were well out of earshot of any bystanders, climbing the steep path that led uphill, from the main street of Leigh to its parish church. This, dedicated to Saint Clement, stood near a substantial old stone-fronted, three-bayed house, which appeared to be empty. The graveyard was full of headstones for long-dead mariners; of the living, there was no sign.

  ‘Good place for a secret meeting,’ growled Musk from behind us.

  We stopped and turned, pretending to take in the view. This was impressive. It was a fine, warm morning, with the Kent coast clearly in view, and several large merchant hulls outbound upon the newly-turned tide and south-westerly breeze. What appeared to be a Second or Third Rate lay at the Buoy of the Nore, presumably just come in from the fleet, but she was too far away to make out her identity. Victualling hoys, outward bound, were coming out of the Thames mouth. Closer at hand, several fishing smacks and cockle boats of Leigh lay at anchor in the roadstead. The flyboat was still aground a little further along the beach.