The Blast That Tears the Skies (2012)

by Davies, J. D

  ‘Should make the Gunfleet by dusk, sir,’ reported Yardley, the master; a thin, grey Kentish man who had served as a midshipman on this very ship in the year twenty-eight.

  ‘Very well, Mister Yardley,’ I said, a little testily. I was looking about me, and was aware that all was not as it should be. The sails were a little too loose, especially on the fore. There were too many slack braces and halyards, too many slovenly tackles and garnets, too many cables heaped untidily upon the deck. Too many men were standing around, staring aimlessly at their officers and at each other. There were scowls aplenty, and arms folded defiantly. I saw the bearded Welshman, whom I had noted upon the quayside at Chatham. He was staring at me. If I had been a man of superstitious bent, there aboard a ship allegedly cursed, I might have sworn that he was giving me the evil eye. I returned his stare with what I took to be my finest expression of aloof condescension. These are the 1660s, I thought to myself; such idle fancies have no sway in our times. But I felt a sudden chill, even though it was unseasonably humid.

  Treninnick ran hither and thither, jabbering in Cornish, pointing at this capstan or that halyard, and occasionally shoved a man or two in the direction he had indicated. I could see Lanherne, far ahead on the forecastle, cudgelling a stout, hairy brute to make his point. Fatally, though, Pewsey – the officer who should have been dictating the discipline of the ship – stood amidships, occasionally gesticulating ineffectually but otherwise merely shaking his head impotently.

  I had served long enough as a captain of king’s ships, and had thus learned enough of the sea, to be somewhat alike a new pedagogue, suddenly deposited in front of a schoolroom of obstreperous boys. The pedagogue knows the theory of his subject well enough, and has sufficient awareness of his surroundings to realise that his words are having no effect and that he has no control of the class; but he does not yet have the faintest idea of how to regain that control.

  With Giffard strutting upon the waist, bellowing orders ineffectually, and Yardley focused solely on the navigation of the ship, I summoned Lieutenant Christopher Farrell to the quarterdeck.

  ‘Damnation, Kit,’ I grumbled, ‘it’s like a rabble at a may fair! What is the matter with this crew?’

  Kit was ever philosophical in the face of adversity. ‘Any crew of a great ship takes time to come together, sir, and we’ve had far too little time to mould this one. We have a good, sturdy core of men in the Cornish and some of the drafts out of the river, it’s true, but they’re only a fraction of our complement.’ He shook his head. ‘Alas, Captain, we also have a share of landsmen who have no notion of what to do, and another share of pressed rogues who might have the notion but have no intention of doing it. Some of the Welsh, especially, though whether out of spite, fear of the curse or plain ignorance isn’t easy to tell.’ Kit grimaced; he was a man who liked being about solutions, not recounting problems. ‘Despite all Treninnick’s good work, he cannot be everywhere at once, so you have Welshmen all over the ship who can’t understand a word of the commands they’re given. Or claim they can’t, at any rate.’

  ‘Like the Bretons,’ said Roger. ‘Good seamen, but the very devil to command. If God had meant the Welsh and the Bretons to keep their incomprehensible tongues, mes amis, do you really think he would have allowed them to be conquered by the English and the French? I think not. It is unnatural. On Le Téméraire, I had them whipped if they spoke Breton. “French is the language of the angels, you miserable bastards,” I told them, “so in the name of le bon dieu, Saint Denis et la France, you will damn well speak it if you want to keep the skin on your worthless stinking Breton backs.” Amazing how quickly men can learn a new tongue when they have such an incentive before them.’

  ‘Just so, My Lord,’ said Kit, who was adjusting with some difficulty to granting due deference to this man who had once been a mere sailmaker’s mate, and thus by many degrees his subordinate, during our previous voyage in the Jupiter. ‘But even when Treninnick explains matters to them, our battle is not yet done. It seems the men of north Wales detest the men of south Wales and will not work with them, just as the men of Cumberland will not work with what they call a pack of addled Westmorland rogues. Then some of the Welsh will not work with men from the next valley or the next village, and some of the Cumbrians with the men from the next dale.’

  ‘Will not work with!’ I exclaimed. ‘I am not concerned with their petty jealousies, Lieutenant! Damnation, this is a royal ship! Men work with men at their officers’ command, or else it is mutiny!’

  ‘Aye, sir. But surely it can only be mutiny if the men understand the commands in the first place, and in our case, we also have the problem that discipline among the men is – well, is entrusted to – begging your pardon, Captain…’

  ‘Quite, Lieutenant. I take your point.’ Kit was learning the discretion of the quarterdeck, namely that one did not denounce a fellow officer in public. He did not need to, of course: it was obvious to all that Boatswain Pewsey was about as effectual as wet gunpowder.

  Kit returned to his station in the forecastle, and I went up onto the old-fashioned high poop deck at the very stern of the Merhonour, there to be alone with my thoughts. Of course, our problems were chiefly a consequence of our late setting out; most of the other great ships had been at sea for a month or more, and many of them had crews composed chiefly of volunteers from the maritime counties. Most also carried large drafts of soldiers, including some from the new-fangled Marine Regiment raised by the Lord Admiral. I had come to regret my prejudice against completing my crew with soldiers. A troop or two aboard the Merhonour would have been doubly useful: for one thing they could easily have cowed the recalcitrants, and for another, one of the first things I had learned in my naval service was that nothing unites mutually suspicious seamen better than the presence of the hated redcoats. Moreover, most of my fellow captains would also have had ample time to exchange any inept warrant officers for better ones; but that option was hardly available to me, for there were virtually no ships left in harbour with which to exchange an incompetent boatswain or an antediluvian carpenter. A raw and fractious crew, then, yet within weeks – perhaps even days – we would be in battle with the Dutch, and perhaps with some of our own countrymen, too. I looked out across the mud-brown waters of the Nore anchorage toward the distant, flat shore of Essex, and offered up a silent prayer for the Merhonour and her captain.

  * * *

  In ante discessum…

  As I contemplate the peculiar paper in my hand, I consider once again the sheer perversity of my uncle Tristram. Dear Lord, even all those long decades ago, in the year of grace 1665, Englishmen did not make their depositions in Latin. Well, none but one, at any rate. The same one who would leave it all to his nephew to translate. My pencil annotations are almost illegible now, except in the (many) places where my younger self struggled for the right word, or the right tense, and scored through abortive efforts with steadily mounting degrees of frustration. But I can reconstruct enough of it to establish the sense, albeit by indulging myself a little in the art of Defoe, so inexplicably popular in this fanciful new century. So, then:

  The Tudor quadrangle of Gresham’s college on Bishopsgate was an appropriately august home for the new Royal Society, and it was here, as the Merhonour made her painfully slow way to the fleet, that Doctor Tristram Quinton concluded his demonstration of the Florentine poison.

  ‘Thus let us observe the effects upon the creatures employed in our experiment,’ said Tristram in his fluent Latin. ‘I would suggest that the hen gives every appearance of being drunk.’ The august Fellows contemplated the bird staggering around the stage and nodded sagely to each other. ‘The dog has vomited, but seems otherwise unaffected.’ A miserable-looking cur glanced up at Quinton and retched another gut-full of black bile onto the flagstones. ‘Whereas the cat is evidently dead.’ Lord Brouncker, chairing the meeting as the society’s president, prodded the erstwhile creature with his foot and bowed his head in concurrence. ‘Thus, honoure
d Fellows, I believe I have demonstrated conclusively that the Florentine poison, named after the mysterious substance recently presented to His Majesty by the Grand Duke Cosimo, is misnamed. Not unnaturally, and given the reputation of that illustrious city as a den of poisoners, I think we all expected this to be the most lethal substance ever known to man. However, I believe I have demonstrated beyond all doubt that this Florentine poison is nothing more than a distilled oil of tobacco, and as my experiments today have shown, it is therefore unlikely to kill anything larger than a cat.’

  Tristram bowed his head slightly in conclusion, and was rewarded with half-hearted applause from his peers. Mister Pepys, some sort of connection of his nephew in the navy, was enthusiastic in his approbation, but Tristram recalled that Pepys’s knowledge of science was as substantial as his own of the language of Mongolia. Still, at least Pepys had laughed at the drunken chicken. Then Tris overheard Boyle’s soft Irish lilt make an exaggerated stage whisper: ‘Merciful heaven, two hours to kill a cat … but tell me, Wren, how’s that theatre of yours in Oxford coming along?’

  Tristram made to accost Boyle, whom he disliked (both too godly and too chymical for the Master of Mauleverer’s taste). Moreover, he had been made particularly peevish by an unexpected and unwelcome recent visitation to his master’s lodgings in Oxford by his good-niece the Countess Louise, who seemed to have developed a suspiciously detailed knowledge of, and interest in, some of the more arcane and secret recesses of the Quinton family history. Perhaps fortunately, Tristram’s passage toward Boyle was prevented by the timely intervention of Brouncker, who offered his profuse congratulations upon Tristram’s most splendid contribution to the advancement of human knowledge, etcetera, etcetera. By the time he had freed himself from the noble lord, relatively few of the Fellows were left. Fortunately, one of these was his old friend Sir William Petty, sad-eyed and increasingly ruddy in the nose, a man whose range of interests was almost as catholic as Tristram’s own.

  ‘Good evening, Doctor Quinton,’ he said. ‘Interesting lecture, but I’d laid a bet with old Digby that the dog would die. Damnably disappointing.’

  ‘Good evening, Sir William,’ said Tris. ‘Ah well, sir, I condole you upon your loss. But I’d wager my outcome was less disappointing than the fate of your own Experiment!’ The Master of Mauleverer laughed heartily and clapped his friend on the back.

  Petty took that in good spirit, although between anyone other than friends, the jest would have been mortifying. Sir William’s several weeks of seagoing experience as a fourteen-year-old cabin boy had unaccountably convinced him that he was the ideal man to design an entirely new kind of ship, especially at a time when a war was approaching and commissions for any kind of new secret weapon were likely to prove exceptionally lucrative. Regrettably Petty’s double-hulled ship, the Experiment, had capsized in Dublin Bay; but like Tristram Quinton, he was not a man to be abashed by such trivial setbacks.

  The two old friends took to talking, and as is ever the way between men of a certain age and older, they soon fell to discussing the illnesses and deaths of those they knew, and then of those whom they did not.

  ‘The mortality rates are troubling so early in the year, particularly in Saint Giles-in-the-Fields,’ said Petty gloomily.

  ‘Mortality rates!’ Tristram scoffed. ‘Not worth the paper they’re printed on, Will. Meaningless numbers. Every man knows that half or more of plague cases never get recorded as such – who wants their houses shut up for all those weeks? And the constables and the aldermen connive in it, of course, so that their wards and parishes don’t lose trade.’

  ‘Quite, Tristram,’ said Petty. ‘But therefore, and by your own logic, the true incidence of plague must be especially troubling, it being still so early in the season. Yet here we are, the Royal Society, allegedly the finest minds in all of England, and are we putting all our efforts into finding a remedy for the plague? No, we are not! We are –’

  ‘Killing cats and getting hens drunk, Will?’

  ‘Ah … umm … well, perhaps it might have been more revealing if you had tried the Florentine poison upon some poor soul afflicted with the plague.’ Petty shrugged. ‘But I suppose that would have meant bringing him among us, and we could hardly risk infecting this august body with the pestilence…’

  The two friends were passing on to consider the possibility of dining together at a tavern in Wormwood Street when Tristram noticed a rude urchin enter the hall, look around him, settle his gaze upon Doctor Quinton, and evidently decide that the Master of Mauleverer’s unique features matched a description that he had been given. He strode up, essayed a perfunctory nod of the head that might or not have been a gesture of respect and deference, and thrust a small, stained, yellow-brown piece of vellum towards Tris.

  ‘A letter for you, Doctor Quinton,’ said the boy. ‘Directed here from Oxford, according to your instructions.’

  With Petty and the boy watching him curiously, Tristram Quinton snatched the letter. It had been so long, and he had lost almost all hope of ever receiving a reply. And with the war, there was every chance that such a reply might have been intercepted by one of the Dutch capers, the small private men-of-war that were already infesting the mouth of the Channel.

  Yet here it was; crumpled yet apparently unopened, it was in his hand, safe after its journey from the wilds of Hampshire County in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, wherever or whatever that might be. The reply to a letter sent many months before in the slim hope that it would find its way to a man who did not wish to be found: one of those many men of God who, deprived of their parishes at the Restoration, had turned their backs on an England they believed to be irredeemably degenerate, instead seeking out distant wildernesses in which to plant the true word.

  Tristram broke the seal and studied the words of the Reverend Tobias Moon, sometime vicar of Billringham in the county of Lincoln, who at the height of the civil war had married the local lord of the manor to a younger wife. A very much younger wife. A marriage which seemed to have been literally excised from the parish records.

  Tristram read the missive twice over, and frowned.

  ‘Bad news, Tris?’ Petty enquired.

  ‘Good or bad, I cannot yet say. But I think you may yet help me discover which, Will.’

  ‘I? How so?’

  ‘You are of Romsey in the county of Southampton, are you not?’ Petty nodded. ‘And Romsey is no great distance from Dorset, if I recall correctly from Blaeu’s maps?’ Another nod. ‘Then tell me, Will, how I might learn more of the birth of a child in that county. The birth of a female child, in the year twenty-eight or twenty-nine.’

  * * *

  The afternoon grew murky as the Merhonour ploughed inelegantly through the seas, making her uncertain way east from the Buoy of the Nore, then north-east into the Swin. My officers grumbled that we were too leewardly, that if the wind strengthened we were in danger of being pushed onto the West Barrow or one of the other vast and perilous sandbanks that obstructed the broad mouth of the Thames. We were a great slug upon the oceans, complained Giffard; too old, too heavily gunned, too crank, too clumsily girdled, with masts that were too weak and ballast that was inadequately trenched. All that before one considered the not insignificant matter of our diverse crew. I nodded gravely, for even I was aware that we could hardly be described as a greyhound of the seas. My first command, the ill-fated Happy Restoration, had been an ill-sailing brute, but I was then too ignorant of the sea to be very aware of her failings. My subsequent commands had been quite new Fourth- and Fifth-Rate frigates, relatively nimble and speedy. Standing upon the deck of the poor Merhonour was akin to being accustomed to riding Arabian stallions and suddenly being asked to mount a carthorse.

  As we moved slowly up the Swin, we spied a vast collier fleet coming down the Middle Ground, the widest of all the passages into the Thames. Two or three hundred broad-hulled, deeply-laden craft, bearing the coals from Tyne, Tees and Wear that would keep London warm; perhaps more impo
rtantly with spring finally at hand, they would keep the capital’s brewhouses at work, too. Escorting them was just one tiny ketch, all that the navy of England could spare for convoy. She saluted us, and her commander reported that the east coast was infested with enemy capers. They had been attacked off Flamborough, losing a half-dozen colliers, and again off the Spurn, losing four more. God be with you, Merhonour, he cried as he sailed on. And God be with you, too, I thought: God and the king, who has issued a blanket protection to the crews of the colliers, thereby preventing me doing what I very much desired, namely pressing there and then a cohort of veteran seamen to replace the rabble that presently comprised my crew. The vast fleet passed to starboard of us on the opposite tack, the collier-men’s grins being reciprocated by scowls from the Merhonours at our starboard rail. They knew, just as the men on the colliers knew, that the latter would be earning at least twice as much as the king paid, for the manning of the navy meant that the colliers were desperate for men. Conversely, of course, the men of the navy were desperate to get out of it in order to join the colliers, and were deserting in their droves. Supply and demand, I believe it is called.

  Once the last of the colliers had cleared us, I raised my telescope and swept it from east to west. We were well into the King’s Channel now, with Maldon’s river and the Essex shore to larboard. The low cloud and murk had parted a little, and at last I saw the sight I longed to see.