The Blast That Tears the Skies (2012)

by Davies, J. D

  A sudden rumble of thunder shook the windows of Sayes Court at Deptford.

  ‘Curious,’ said the house’s owner, the thin and aquiline John Evelyn, opening a window and looking up to a cloudless blue sky. ‘Most curious. Upon a day such as this, whither comes the thunder?’

  His friend Lord Brouncker looked up from the adjacent table and the plate of sturgeon upon it, already considerably diminished, before his dainty hand descended instead upon a large slice of venison pie. ‘It is a time of signs and wonders in the heavens,’ Brouncker said, ‘beginning with the comet, and as all know, however much we men of science analyse them and predict their paths, the truth remains that comets bring inexplicable events and disasters. Always have. So, coming as it does in the comet’s wake, thunder from nowhere is only to be expected, Mister Evelyn. Although no doubt Captain Quinton’s esteemed uncle would disagree, as he disagrees with so many other conclusions of our learned society. Is that not so, Captain?’

  I avoided Brouncker’s penetrating stare and looked out instead over Evelyn’s famous gardens, a veritable English Elysium. ‘My uncle has always ploughed his own furrow, My Lord,’ I said hesitantly, for defending the frequently indefensible Tristram Quinton was hardly my concern.

  Brouncker smiled knowingly. He was pre-eminently a mathematician and scientist, President of the recently established Royal Society, which was how he knew my eccentric uncle, a fellow member and the somewhat unlikely Master of Mauleverer College, Oxford. Brouncker was also newly made a member of the Navy Board, perhaps because the king reckoned that a man who could count might be of some use in the navy, an institution not known for employing the most numerate of men and, perhaps because of that, notorious as a bottomless pit which ever consumed most of the public purse.

  Evelyn finally turned away from the window, clearly still puzzling over the mysterious thunderclap. ‘Your uncle has not favoured you with his opinion of my book of Sylva, perchance?’ he asked. ‘The praise of the eminent Doctor Quinton would be of much worth to me.’

  ‘Alas no, sir,’ I lied, picking some rabbit and anchovies from their pewter plates, ‘I regret that he has not.’ This, I knew, was not the time or the place for the truth of Tristram’s opinion, which was that Evelyn’s attempt to persuade the English of the merit of planting more trees was as worthwhile as a fart in the grave.

  We returned to the table, where Pepys was engaged in a spirited discussion with Lord Brouncker’s brother Harry about the prospects for the impending war against the Dutch. I could tolerate the elder Brouncker, but the younger was quite another matter: an ignorant, flattering courtier of the worst sort, and one of those rabid cavaliers who would gladly have hanged every sometime Commonwealths-man. He was holding forth at some length about the innate superiority of our monarchical navy over that of the malignant republican Dutch, if only the king had not seen fit to recall so many time-serving verminous captains who had once taken Cromwell’s commission. Across from them was Cornelia, who had swiftly made a friend of Mrs Pepys, a vivacious Frenchwoman named Elizabeth; this was unsurprising, for both were foreigners in this strange world called England and both had husbands for whom the navy was the be-all and end-all. The two women were whispering conspiratorially and occasionally laughing indiscreetly. Back across the table from them, Mrs Evelyn, the pious and profoundly intellectual consort of our host, toyed with a morsel of carp, attempting desperately to avoid conversation with Lord Brouncker’s exotically dressed companion, a remarkably buxom and ugly actress named Mrs Abigail Williams. It was an eclectic gathering. Having subsequently hosted many such occasions myself, I have learned that one can swiftly sense whether the assemblage of humanity one has brought together is a success; and this was most certainly not such.

  A case in point was the conversation upon which the party was engaged an hour or two later whilst launching an assault upon a most splendid dessert table of sugar cakes, plum puddings, jellies and more. Our host’s wine was flowing liberally, although Cornelia was speculating on how recently it might have been within the hold of a Dutch prize-ship. Whatever its provenance, it had flowed far too liberally into the gullet of Harry Brouncker, who was now holding forth upon the roguery of Members of Parliament.

  ‘Corrupt!’ he blustered. ‘Self-seeking, to a man! No sense of honour! The sorts of skulking poltroons who count their pennies and record their worthless miserable apologies for lives in diaries!’ Methought both Pepys and Evelyn seemed discommoded by that remark, but I might have been mistaken. ‘Men who will not grant the king enough to support his estate,’ raged Brouncker, ‘nor to wage war properly upon that damnable pack of Fleming butterboxes – ah, my apologies, Mistress Quinton…’

  ‘There is not enough money in the land to fight this war, then, Mister Brouncker?’ asked Elizabeth Pepys in her thick French accent, seeking to deflect the explosion that was threatening to erupt from my dear wife.

  Lord Brouncker waved a hand, thereby stifling the response that his inebriated sib had been about to venture. ‘Parliament has voted two-and-a-half millions for it. With respect to my dear brother, such a sum has never been known, my dear lady,’ he said, scowling at his dear brother as he did so. ‘And if as all men expect, men like Captain Quinton here drive the Dutch off the seas before the summer’s end, just as Monck, now His Grace of Albemarle, and the rest of them did in the last war – well then, we will have a peace treaty that brings us all the trade that they currently have, and we will place young Prince William upon their throne to do his uncle’s bidding.’ Brouncker nodded toward Cornelia, who raised her glass to him in return. Cornelia had ever been an Orangist, one of those who resented the coup in Amsterdam that brought to power the republicans under her bête noire, Johan De Witt; but these monarchist principles had formed initially to spite her glum republican parents and dour republican twin brother. ‘Think of Britain as a great eagle, my dear, or a vulture, perhaps. Once the war starts, the Dutch will have to keep up their trade with the outside world. Trade is their lifeblood. Without it, they will perish. But there we are, the great British vulture, astride their only sea routes. They try to run their trading ships through the Channel, and we pounce on them. They try to run them around Scotland, and we pounce on them. All their trade, swept up by our brave ships. Riches beyond imagination for old England, and our king a veritable Midas! Halcyon days, my friends!’

  Cornelia bridled and, under her breath, she swore in Dutch with a quite exceptional degree of obscenity. After all, she had been brought up in a Dutch seaport by a Dutch merchant whose prosperity depended exclusively upon the wellbeing of Dutch maritime trade. Consequently Cornelia had learned the ebbs and flows of the Dutch shipping industry before she could walk, and needed no lessons in it from My Lord Brouncker.

  Mrs Williams suddenly caught my eye. Quite loudly, she cut directly across the company and said, ‘Captain, I have not seen your brother lately. He has ever been a devotee of the playhouses – we miss his patronage.’

  ‘Indeed, Mistress. Marriage has provided my brother with attractions other than those of the stage, alas.’ I attempted to make the remark sound as light as I could, rather than expressing my true feelings upon the matter of my brother’s condition.

  ‘Aye,’ slurred a leering Harry Brouncker, ‘but his wife has found attractions other than those of the marriage, too!’ His arrogant self-regard and broad smile left little doubt that these ‘attractions’ were, in fact, his own.

  Both of the Evelyns were scandalised, although Abigail Williams grinned bawdily. I frowned at the rogue and began to rise from my stool, despite Cornelia’s restraining hand upon my arm and her urgent whisper of ‘Nee, betalen geen acht!’ (‘No, pay no heed!’). I pushed her hand away. For here was a matter to pursue, by God: I had no love for my good-sister Louise, but for good or ill she was Countess of Ravensden. The honour of my ancient house demanded a defence, or else the exposure of any dishonour that she might bring to it. But Lord Brouncker had gripped his brother’s shoulder and was whispering
angrily into his ear while raising a hand to me to stay my advance. In that moment, too, a young man whom I recognised as one of the clerks of Deptford yard was admitted to the room by Evelyn’s maid, thus distracting the party. The clerk walked up to Pepys and whispered hurriedly to him. Pepys’s mouth suddenly gaped, and he swayed. He asked another question of the clerk, who nodded vigorously.

  Finally, Pepys turned to the rest of us. Some instinct had made us all fall silent at once. For some reason, in that moment I thought upon the comet.

  ‘It – it was not thunder that we heard,’ said Pepys, an unsteady note in his voice. ‘The king’s great ship London, coming from Chatham into the Hope – Sir John Lawson’s flagship – oh dear God…’

  Elizabeth Pepys ran to her husband’s side and gripped his arm tenderly. ‘Courage, husband!’ she cried.

  Samuel Pepys looked at us with tears in his eyes. ‘The London is no more,’ he said. ‘She has been blown apart by a great explosion.’

  * * *

  Barely two hours later Pepys and I were bound downstream with full sail set. We had ridden post-haste from Sayes Court across the fringe of Greenwich marsh to the royal dockyard at Woolwich, where all was frantic activity. Every skiff and wherry the yard could muster was being manned for the long haul down to the outer reach of the Hope, where the stricken London was said to lie. But the arrival of one of the Principal Officers of the Navy was as the parting of the Red Sea, every man of that cramped little dockyard falling over himself to impress the mighty potentate that they perceived in Samuel Pepys, who was evidently more than a little pleased to be so received.

  Urgently, I looked about the yard. Any of the oared craft would take an eternity to reach the wreck, even with the tide now on the ebb –

  But there was one vessel that would suit, moored just a few yards off the wharf: a trim little hull, elaborately gilded, with dainty raised cabins astern and amidships as well as lee-boards after the Dutch fashion. Aboard her, men were making hurried preparations for sailing.

  ‘Ahoy, the yacht!’ I cried.

  ‘Who seeks her?’ bawled a stout creature upon the forecastle.

  ‘Captain Matthew Quinton and Mister Pepys, the Clerk of the Acts!’ I could have sworn the man made to genuflect, but then thought better of it. ‘Where’s the captain?’

  ‘G – gone up to the Navy Office, my lords!’ stammered the man, presumably the senior mate.

  ‘You sail without authority or a captain?’ Pepys demanded.

  The man was abashed. ‘Aye, sirs – to save poor souls on the London, if we can!’

  Pepys and I exchanged a glance. ‘Well then,’ cried the Clerk of the Acts, ‘you have all the authority you need, my friend – aye, and a captain, to boot!’

  A skiff took us out to the vessel, which proved to be the Mary Yacht. Thus for the first and only time in my life I found myself in command of what was then still seen as a new and un-English innovation, a royal yacht. Our sovereign lord had fallen greatly in love with sailing during his exile, and at his Restoration the Dutch gave him a gift of the Mary, the first of many such craft that would soon adorn the royal inventory. Older seamen scoffed (privately, of course) at the notion of any man in his right mind desiring to sail for pleasure, of all the lunatic notions. But as the Mary went onto a close-hauled beam reach in Long Reach and I took her tiller from the helmsman while the yacht’s practised crew took pride in showing off the skill and speed with which they could adjust the set of her sails, I felt the thrill that appealed so much to Charles Stuart.

  Pepys was evidently less of an enthusiast. He clung grimly to the larboard rail, especially when our yacht heeled hard over in the breeze, and proceeded to utter not a word during our voyage, as though opening his mouth to the slightest degree would disgorge the entire contents of his body. I was relieved at this, for Pepys could be something of a pontificator; but his silence allowed free rein to my own thoughts, and they focused above all on two things: what we would find ahead of us, and the meaning of Harry Brouncker’s unguarded remark about the Countess Louise.

  The first mystery was resolved in short order, for with the wind south-westerly and a strong ebb running, the speedy Mary made quite exceptional progress into the estuary of the Thames. There were more ships than usual moored before Tilbury blockhouse and thus obstructing the main channel, for this was where vessels from Amsterdam had been laid up in quarantine because of the prevalence of the plague in that city. Now, with war declared and their time served, they were duly cleared of quarantine, only to be immediately impounded as enemy hulls. With them behind us we veritably raced down Gravesend Reach, and there were still perhaps two hours of daylight remaining when, over toward the Essex shore and the isle of Canvey, an appalling spectacle began to unfold before us. At first I blinked, for in the distance I seemed to see nothing less than an aquatic Calvary: three crosses, protruding above the water. A moment later, I recognised them for the masts of the stricken London, still shrouded in smoke from the vast explosion that had destroyed the great ship. It was another mile or so before I could make out the remnants of upperworks beneath the farthest cross. The roundhouse and quarterdeck of the London still remained above the surface of the Thames, although no such evidence of the forecastle could be seen. The water around the wreck was full of debris: timber and planking, the remnants of flags and sails, the detritus of all those who had lived and died aboard her. The air reeked of gunpowder, burned wood and burned humanity. All around the remains of the London were craft of various sorts, wherries, yawls and the like, as well as a big Levanter. Aboard all of them, men were peering into the waters. Occasionally arms pointed excitedly, and what appeared to be large lumpen shapes were pulled from the Thames.

  ‘Sweet God,’ said Pepys, ‘the poor, poor creatures. God rest their souls.’

  I had no words, for I was numbed by the sight and the awful, overpowering smell. We slackened sail as we came toward the throng of vessels around the wreck of the London. One craft stood out from the others, and now it approached us: a yawl flying an ensign far too large for it, a great red ensign which denoted the command flag of an admiral.

  The yawl secured alongside, and a sturdy, long-chinned, pockmarked old man of fifty or so hauled himself up onto the deck of the yacht. One of the seamen of the yawl at once pulled down the ensign, sprang onto our deck and hoisted it anew to our masthead. That act immediately deprived me of this command so briefly held, but in the presence of the legend who stood before me, I could hardly demur.

  I drew my sword and brought it up before me in salute. ‘Sir John,’ I said, ‘thank God you are spared.’

  ‘Aye, thank ye, Quinton,’ the newcomer said. ‘We can only reflect upon the seventy-seventh psalm, verses eighteen and nineteen. But one seeks the will of the Lord in vain in such instances, I fear.’

  Sir John Lawson, Vice-Admiral of the Red Squadron and captain of the London (for in those times, we made do without flag captains and other such extravagances) was a dour man, but I could see the unspeakable shock and grief that lay beneath his mask of godly fatalism. A Yorkshireman who was skipper of nothing more than a Tyne collier barely twenty years before, Lawson had been a great fanatic in religion until (it was said) a timely and quite prodigious bribe bought his allegiance to the crown. It was Lawson who brought the fleet under his command into the Thames in the bitter winter of fifty-nine, thereby bringing down the detested rule of the army and setting in motion the chain of events that led to the Restoration. Thus he was a colossus of the times, and even those who now damned him as an apostate and turncoat did not doubt that John Lawson was, in truth, one of England’s very greatest seamen.

  ‘I give you joy of your preservation, Sir John,’ said Pepys. ‘Pray, sir, do you know what happened to cause such a disaster?’

  ‘I know for I witnessed it, Mister Pepys,’ said Lawson grimly. ‘We were nearing the ship, and she was firing off the salutes due to my flag, when a great blast burst through the forecastle and part of the waist. Most of
the force must have gone downward, though. Reckon her bottom blew out, hence how she’s settled as she has. But why it happened, only the Father of Heaven can say, as the one hundred and thirty-ninth psalm tells us.’

  Pepys and I exchanged glances. In a ship firing its broadsides in salute, there are countless ways in which a spark can ignite in the wrong place; in any ship, there are a host of other accidents that can bring about its immediate, awful destruction. But Pepys and I were realists enough to see that in the fevered circumstances of the time, with men going in fear of the comet presaging the end of days and the country rife with talk of sedition and war, it would surely only be hours before very different explanations were rife in the taverns and coffeehouses of London. The London had been blown up by the Dutch, some would say. No, others would cry, surely by the French, the eternal scapegoat of the English! Yet others would inevitably incriminate the fanatics, that faceless horde of dissenters, republicans and the like who many of my cavalier brethren saw lurking in the shadows, waiting their moment to rise up and cut all our throats. And all of that was before one reached the outlying realms of conspiracy and sanity alike, where lurked those who would blame the loss of London upon the Jews, the Pope, or Satan, or if they were being especially inventive, all three of those, conjoined in unholy cabal.

  Dispirited, I looked out across the scene. The light was dying now, but on the boats slowly circling the wreck of the London, men were firing torches to continue their search into the night. A search for –

  ‘Sir John,’ I asked, as gently as I could, ‘do you yet know how many perished?’

  His ugly face was impassive. ‘Some dozens were upon deck or in the roundhouse and were untouched,’ he said. ‘They simply walked off the ship when the boats reached them, for mysterious are the ways of the Lord. But three hundred and more are gone. Aye, gone.’ He looked down into the hull of the yawl, still tethered against our side. Laid out upon the thwart was a tarpaulin; only now did I see the hideously burned, shoeless remnants of a man’s feet that protruded from it. ‘My sister’s son John,’ said Lawson quietly. ‘A promising youth of twenty. He was so keen to serve, to fight the Dutch alongside his uncle. So were they all. A good crew, Quinton, most of them my own Yorkshiremen, but many Scots also. Veteran seamen, for the most part.’ He looked back at me, and I thought I saw the shadow of a tear in the admiral’s eye. ‘A score or more of my own kin have perished here, Quinton.’ He was hoarse, almost inaudible. ‘Much of my family, wiped out in the blinking of an eye. “For all flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of grass. The grass withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away.” Thus it is told.’