The Blast That Tears the Skies (2012)

by Davies, J. D

  My boat came alongside, and I boarded my command. The boatswain, an aged and ineffectual Essex man named Pewsey, piped me aboard, and I was reassured to see that the makeshift side party contained several of my personal following, including Macferran, Treninnick, Carvell and the renegade Moor Ali Reis. Beau Harris had been good to his word and released them once his own complement was made up. The House of Nassau was already with the fleet and dashing about the sea on scouting duties, a fact that made me not a little jealous: ordered to sea almost as an afterthought, the Merhonour was still very far from being in a fit condition to sail. At least the reassuring presence of my own following made up to a certain degree for the evident inadequacies of the ship’s warrant officers. The Merhonour had not left her mooring in twelve years, and as her shipkeepers, the standing officers had all too evidently seen their places as sinecures. Pewsey, the boatswain, was decayed and ineffectual; I wished I could lay him aside to put in Kit Farrell or Lanherne, but feared that would not be allowed. Thurston, the carpenter, was seventy-three; Faraday, the purser, was nearly blind; Webb, the gunner, was nearly deaf from too many broadsides, and prayed loudly to Saint Barbara, the old patron of his kind. Great God, we even had a supply of bows and arrows in the armourer’s stores that must have been left aboard since my grandfather’s day. Old men, an old ship and old weapons: perhaps that was the curse of the Merhonour.

  As I stepped onto the upper deck and raised my hat to salute the ship, Lieutenant Gideon Giffard saluted me stiffly in return. ‘Captain Quinton. Welcome back aboard, sir.’

  I returned the courtesy. ‘Mister Giffard. Still no sign of our men, I take it?’

  ‘No, sir.’ I was still having difficulty with his Jersey accent, which sounded like a strange hybrid of French and Dorsetshire. ‘There’s talk of a hoy coming up the river, though, so perhaps they will be aboard that.’ We were over a hundred men short of our complement; without them, the Merhonour could never leave its mooring, let alone join the fleet. ‘But the new chaplain has come aboard, Captain.’

  I went below, steeling myself for an awkward meeting. The fleet was now so large, and both the number and quality of those who wished to minister to its spiritual wellbeing was so low, that naval chaplaincy was a byword for the dregs of the Church of England, and I wondered what sort of mediocrity, dissenter or sodomite might have been visited upon me. The chaplain’s cabin lay on the lowest gundeck, almost at the very stern of the ship. Like all the officers’ cabins, it was a precarious timber and canvas affair with no natural light, no more than six feet by five, which would clearly be a constraint upon the stocky man who now turned to greet me –

  ‘Francis!’ I cried in surprise.

  ‘Captain Quinton,’ said the Reverend Francis Gale.

  ‘Great God, man, you should have written – I had no idea you were even thinking of serving at sea this summer.’

  Francis, a man of God who was as dexterous with the cutlass as the catechism, had first served with me aboard the Jupiter three years before, and after we had exorcised the very personal demons that afflicted him, he had become a close friend. He was made rector of our local church upon my recommendation, but had taken leave to serve with me aboard the Seraph during its voyage to Africa. That, he had assured me, was to be the end of his seafaring.

  ‘I have reflected much upon the will of God,’ he said. ‘I asked him whether I served Him best by tending to the farmers and peasants of Ravensden, or by watching over His servant Matthew Quinton in the dreadful fights to come. And the Lord spake unto me, and he sayeth, “Get thee to sea, Francis Gale, and kill as many avaricious cheese-stinking Dutchmen as come within reach of thy sword.” Or words to that effect. Thanks be to God, for his wonders are manifold.’

  ‘But my mother and my brother – surely they cannot be content that you have forsaken your parish duties?’ I said. ‘Yet again.’

  ‘Your brother has been absent from Ravensden for many weeks. Some say he is at his Northumberland estate, others at the countess’s estate in Wiltshire, yet others taking the waters at Bath. He is a sick man, I fear – sick in body and sick in heart, for he now sees the folly of his unnatural marriage.’ I shuddered, as I often did when the truth of my situation came to me: that I was but one feeble heartbeat away from the earldom of Ravensden and all the dread responsibilities that came with it.

  Francis sensed my concern and raised a hand in sympathetic benediction. He had been an opponent of my brother’s marriage, and endeavoured to discover something of the mysterious past of my sister-in-law, the Lady Louise. To no avail, alas; all of the enquiries that he and my uncle Tris had conducted seemed to have ended at brick walls. ‘As for your mother, she was sympathetic to the argument that you should have a friend at your back. Besides,’ said Gale, ‘I think I am growing old, Matthew, and it will be good to fight another battle or two before I allow senility to overtake me.’

  I was mightily glad to have Francis alongside me, for I knew from experience how useful he was in a fight. I took him around the ship, along each of her three broad gun-decks, and everywhere we went, the lads who had sailed with us before smiled and nodded greetings, for they had shared much with the Reverend Gale and respected the man profoundly. My own following, those who would volunteer to serve under me in preference to any other captain, now numbered nearly a hundred, and included Bristol and London men from my commission in the Seraph as well as my Cornish coterie from the days in the Jupiter. But the rest of the crew included a fair number of pressed men, chiefly scrapings from the Thames and inward-bound merchantmen, resentful at being kept from their families and their pay. I saw a few scowls as we passed, and heard the growling speech of a malcontent, hastily concluded when the speaker became aware of our approach.

  ‘…that you’ve never heard of the curse on this benighted ship? They say every living soul aboard her perished of the plague in the year twenty-five – every living thing save the ship’s cat – and they say the ghost of the captain’s grandfather prowls the decks, and he’d made a pact with the devil, that he had, just like the captain’s uncle –’

  Francis frowned and glanced questioningly toward me. I merely shrugged, for there was no privacy upon the decks. So we went up to my cabin, a lavish space that was larger than the main room I shared with Cornelia at Hardiman’s Yard: the Merhonour had been built as a flagship, and thus had two great cabins, one at the stern of the upper gundeck and one upon the middle, an unusual luxury in a ship of that vintage. For the time being I had the run of both, although the enthusiasm of every idle courtier and nobleman to get to sea and impress the ladies was so great that I was certain I would soon have some pompous nonentity inflicted upon me.

  We settled ourselves upon fine oak chairs which had once adorned the long gallery at Ravensden Abbey. My little retinue of Barcock, Castle and Scobey, delighted and amazed to be in service aboard so great a ship, scurried to provide us with tankards of good London ale. Then we two men looked out at the spectacle beyond the stern windows: the storehouses, slipways, cranes and ropewalk of Chatham yard, the distant mass of ruinous Rochester Castle next to the spire of the cathedral. I longed to confess to Francis my other overarching concern, the secret orders given me by Clarendon and Arlington, but my honour prevented it; besides, we had another pressing matter to discuss.

  ‘A curse, Matthew?’ my old friend asked, quizzically.

  ‘The tattle of the lower deck, Francis. But they are well informed of my history, even if they have conflated the sixth earl with the eighth.’ Henry, sixth Earl of Ravensden, was said to have been a necromancer who had sold his soul to the devil, a story reinforced by the failure to discover a body after his alleged death in a tavern brawl; his satanic visage and unconventional interests had been inherited by my uncle. ‘Tristram would never be able to sell his soul to the devil, for Old Nick would rightly suspect he was being swindled. And if my grandfather’s shade truly haunts the ship, it has not troubled me with a visitation.’

  ‘But you and I are rati
onal men, Matt. Alas, though, the seaman is not. Indeed, he is the most superstitious creature upon the earth, ever prone to believe in witches, ghosts and the like. If this of a curse is allowed to take hold, and if they identify you and your family with it, who knows what harm it could do when finally we go into battle?’

  Francis’s words troubled me; I had been inclined to dismiss the legend of the curse, convincing myself that perhaps my crew would never come to hear of it, or else that as creatures of a modern, rational age, they would not be as fearful a breed as their forefathers. I had also never even considered the notion that I might be seen as a living manifestation of the curse. Foolish boy, a visitation seemed to whisper.

  ‘Then what can be done, Francis?’

  ‘Naturally I can sermonise upon the ridiculousness of such superstitions – the third letter of Paul to the Romans, verses the thirteenth to eighteenth, will serve the purpose.’ He was contemplative. ‘But if such fails, I suppose there is one other course left to us.’

  ‘That being?’

  Francis smiled and took a long draught of ale. ‘For that, Matthew, I need to write a letter. A very long letter. To the Lord Archbishop of Canterbury.’

  * * *

  ‘Can’t sail with you this time, Captain. Not yet, at any rate.’

  Phineas Musk stood a few feet from me in the cramped, oak-panelled hallway of Ravensden House, but he might as well have been a world away. This was the last news I had expected: since my second commission, Musk had been as inevitable a part of my services at sea as wind and tide.

  ‘Great God in Heaven, Musk,’ I said, ‘think of the pay that a captain’s clerk of a Second Rate receives! Think of the prize money that will accrue to all of us in this war, even in a great tub like the Merhonour! And all of that additional to what my brother pays you as his steward here.’

  For almost no perceptible work, I might have added; even less, now that Earl Charles had largely abandoned our decrepit town house upon the Strand in favour of other abodes.

  ‘Builders,’ said Musk uncomfortably. ‘Can’t trust builders. Your brother wants them in to shore up this place and make good the back wall. Needs me to oversee them. They won’t fleece me, trying to pass off any old wattle-and-daub as an honest stone wall.’

  ‘And this must be done now? When the house is barely used?’

  ‘Best time,’ grunted Musk. ‘Nobody here to disturb, other than me. If it’s not done soon, the whole thing will collapse. Although now I think upon it, I suppose your grandfather did say much the same thing to me back in the year forty-four.’

  If I was being even-handed, I had to admit that the case for such remedial work was unanswerable. Above where we stood, the sagging ceiling contained two ominously large cracks; the smell of damp and long-forgotten cesspits pervaded the entire crumbling building. Even so, I could still barely digest the news. Musk had become something of a talisman upon my voyages; an obstreperous talisman, admittedly, but I was about to sail into my first fleet battle, and it would be strange not to have his oddly reassuring presence at my side. But there was another and even more troubling strangeness to the whole business. Musk was many things, and not all of them were entirely reputable. One thing he was not, though, was a liar; at least, not to those named Quinton. Yet I had an unnerving feeling that he was lying to me now.

  Concealing my darker thoughts, I clutched at a straw. ‘You said “not yet”, Musk. Then there is hope that you might join the ship later?’

  The old rogue shrugged. ‘Can never tell how long builders will take. Law unto themselves, builders are.’ Specially at the moment, with all these great new mansions going up in Westminster and the likes of Lord Clarendon paying over the odds. Not to mention,’ he said, brightening, ‘not knowing how long this war could take. You might have beaten the Dutch and come back wreathed in laurel before the idle buggers even get as far as the plastering.’

  I sighed, for there was evidently no remedying the situation; and if Musk truly was lying, then the lie was as elaborately constructed as Clarendon House itself. ‘Well then, Musk, I shall take my leave and ride on to the abbey to say farewell to my mother. I pray that your duties here will permit you to join me in due course, for I sense that a Dutch war will not be complete without Phineas Musk.’

  A lying Musk, a cursed ship and the possibility of vile conspiracy in the fleet, cocooned within that evil web named ‘politics’: as I rode for Bedfordshire, I had to content myself with the thought that surely nothing else could worsen the condition of Matthew Quinton.

  Grim King of the Ghosts make haste

  And bring hither all your train,

  See how the pale moon does waste,

  And just now is the wain.

  Come you Night-Hags with all your charms,

  And revelling witches away,

  And hug me close in your arms,

  To you my respects I’ll pay.

  ~ Anon., The Lunatick Lover

  (popular ballad of the Restoration period)

  There was no landscape more familiar to me. The stream where I had played as a boy. The mill and the home farm. The kiln and the blacksmith’s forge. The woodland beyond. The gentle slopes on which the Cistercians had planted a vineyard in the days when England’s weather was more akin to that of Iberia than Iceland. The abbey itself, the ruins of the church projecting beyond the jumble of buildings in the domestic range. The wisps of smoke rising from the chimneys into the spring air. Apart from the last few months in Hardiman’s Yard, my sea-voyages and five years in penniless exile upon the continent, I had lived here all my life.

  Ravensden Abbey.

  This was home.

  I did not allow myself more than a fleeting acknowledgement of the thought that this might be the last time I ever saw it. Although I had fought in a battle on land and in an action between single ships, I had never yet experienced a fleet engagement. But I knew enough men who had; never expect you will survive it, they said, it’s easier that way. The humblest powder-boy and the greatest admiral are as one when the cannon begin to roar. Witness the fate of Richard Deane, one of the Commonwealth’s mighty generals-at-sea. Greater than Monck, many said. Could have been greater than Cromwell, some said. It mattered not a jot when a cannonball literally cut him in two at the Gabbard fight.

  I rode into the stable yard, dismounted and handed my steed to my namesake, Matthew Barcock. ‘Her ladyship’s in the Long Gallery,’ he said; he was undoubtedly the least communicative of our steward’s inexhaustible brood.

  I decided to grasp the nettle at once. Allowing no more than an hour for my dutiful farewell to my mother, I should be able to make Barnet, or somewhere nearby, before nightfall. The sixteen pounds and sixteen shillings a month that would eventually accrue to the captain of the Merhonour, and against which I had already borrowed quite substantially, meant that I could afford a decent room in a respectable inn, not the lousy mattress in a shared garret that had long been the lot of Matthew Quinton. An early start would enable me to return to Cornelia before the morning was out, giving the best part of one last day with her before rejoining the Merhonour on the following day. Through the inner gate into the pleasant garden that had once been the monastic cloister, up the stairs to what had once been the monks’ refectory, remodelled by Earl Edward into a fashionable Tudor long gallery, at the end of which sat my –

  Sister-in-law.

  The Countess Louise looked up from the small writing desk that had been positioned to catch the best of the spring sun. ‘Matthew!’ she cried. ‘What a truly delightful surprise!’

  It was not a delight that I reciprocated. I cursed myself for not having asked Matt Barcock which ‘ladyship’ was in residence; but then, the existence of this new countess was still so new, and so unsettling, that the possibility of him referring to anyone other than my mother simply never occurred to me.

  ‘My Lady,’ I said, hastily recovering myself, ‘my apologies for intruding upon you. I had sought an interview with my mother, to say far
ewell before my ship joins the fleet.’

  She was half way down the gallery, between the serried ranks of portraits of dead Quintons, advancing elegantly towards me. She seemed to make almost no footfall upon the ancient floor. Whatever else the Countess Louise might have been, she could certainly act the part of a great and stately lady.

  ‘Oh, poor Matthew,’ she said, ‘you will be so disappointed. And your loving mother will be too, of course.’ Either she did not know how things stood between my mother and I, or else she did and was a consummate dissembler. ‘The Dowager Countess departed but this morning. She must have taken a different road to Whitehall, else you would have passed her on the way. She has gone to court, you see.’

  This news was almost as troublesome as the presence of this cuckoo in the nest of my ancestors. My mother had not been at court in a quarter-century. My mother despised the court, and all to do with it. My mother being at court was as likely as King Charles taking a vow of chastity.