The Blast That Tears the Skies (2012)

by Davies, J. D

  ‘Pissing below decks, Captain,’ said Pewsey. ‘And smoking his pipe away from the tub. At the same time.’

  Within the hull, smoking was permitted only in the immediate vicinity of a large tub of water, for obvious reasons; and pissing was permitted nowhere below decks, ditto, or so it evidently appeared to all but some of the more backward landsmen and to young Cherry Cheeks.

  I stared at young Russell, who returned me a bleary, uncertain gaze. It was barely the forenoon watch, but it seemed clear he had already been imbibing something rather stronger than the daily issue of small beer.

  ‘Great God, boy,’ I said, ‘you are a disgrace to the House of Russell. A hopeless sot and addicted to your pipe before your fourteenth birthday. For the reputation of our English nobility, let us be thankful that a dozen lives or so stand between you and an earldom…’ Young Castle and Scobey, standing in attendance behind me, sniggered; they were much the same age as Russell and evidently detested this wayward sprig of a chivalric house. ‘Tell me, then, Cherry Cheeks – exactly why is it, do you think, that His Royal Highness’s instructions to his captains enjoin them to prevent pissing and defecation below deck?’

  ‘Smells,’ said Russell, hesitantly. ‘And I didn’t def – def – shit. Not this time, anyway.’

  ‘Worse than smells, Mister Russell. Disease. Foul miasmas, bringing on all manner of sicknesses. Smallpox, for one. Even the plague that already stalks the streets of London. Why do we have pissdales on deck, Mister Russell? And why do you think God gave ships heads?’

  The boy said nothing, and stared down sullenly toward his feet.

  ‘Your orders, Captain?’ Pewsey asked.

  ‘Well, then. The law of the sea is entirely clear in such a case, I think. For drunkenness, the loss of a day’s pay. For smoking away from the tub, punishment at the captain’s discretion. For pissing beneath decks, up to twelve lashes. What do you have to say for yourself in mitigation, Cherry Cheeks?’

  The lad shuffled. ‘Sorry, sir. Won’t happen again, sir.’

  ‘No, Mister Russell, it will not. But it seems to me that your youth stands in your favour and inclines me against the lash.’ Cherry Cheeks looked up with relief. ‘Nevertheless, punishment there must be, otherwise every man on the ship will do what he pleases.’ I seemed to consider the matter. ‘Tell me, Boatswain – when you asked Russell if he had done the things of which he stands accused, how did he answer you?’

  Pewsey seemed nonplussed. ‘Why, he denied it, sir! Despite the word of three witnesses.’

  ‘Ah. Then that denial would have been a lie, would it not, Boatswain?’

  ‘Aye, sir. That it would.’ Pewsey caught my gist, and smiled.

  ‘And the navy has an ancient punishment reserved for liars, does it not, Boatswain?’

  ‘Aye, sir. That it does.’

  Russell’s short-lived relief had turned once again to lip-nibbling anxiety. ‘Very well,’ I said, putting on what I trusted was my gravest expression and tone. ‘Mister Russell, you will be hoisted from the main stay for half an hour with a broom and shovel tied to your back and the entire crew shouting “A liar! A liar!” You will then will spend a week cleaning the ship’s hull, directly beneath the heads.’ Castle laughed out loud, and I scowled at him. ‘I pray that the experience will teach you the importance of cleanliness aboard a man of war, and that your high birth will not protect you against the custom of the sea –’

  I had no opportunity to finish my peroration, for a knock brought Ali Reis into the cabin. The Moorish renegade, whose command of languages was truly extraordinary, had set himself to learn Welsh, that he might join Treninnick as an interpreter to that rude race. As yet he had found precious few teachers, and the new drafts, knowing him to be one of the captain’s men, generally kept silent in his presence.

  ‘Begging pardon, Captain,’ said the Moor, ‘Royal Charles has hoisted the Union at the mizzen peak. The signal for the fleet to form line of battle, sir.’

  * * *

  I ascended to the deck by the tortoise-stair, the curious old-fashioned private spiral ascent for the captain that only the more ancient ships retained, and saw at once that no battle was imminent. This was to be one of the training manoeuvres that the Duke of York had promised, no doubt to see how long it took the fleet to form into its line.

  Kit Farrell had the watch upon the quarterdeck and saluted with a bow of his hat, a gesture (and, indeed, an item of clothing) that was evidently still perfectly alien to him. Alongside him was Yardley, the master, who acknowledged my presence perfunctorily. Along with a small bevy of midshipmen and masters’ mates, Francis Gale and Roger D’Andelys completed the complement upon the quarterdeck.

  ‘Well then, gentlemen,’ I said, ‘His Royal Highness seems to have chosen propitious weather for it.’

  We had a warm but somewhat variable breeze from the south west; that, after all, was why we were out of sight of the Dutch shore, lest we were blown onto the butterboxes’ treacherous sandbanks. Consequently the fleet was moving slowly west upon the Dogger Bank, roughly between the fifty-third and fifty-fourth degrees of latitude, awaiting a change of wind that would permit us to resume our close blockade of the Texel sea-gate.

  I surveyed the scene. The ships of Prince Rupert’s White squadron, to the south, were already putting on sail to fall into their positions in the van. Conversely, Lord Sandwich’s Blue squadron, to the north, was shortening its sails in order to fall in to the rear of the fleet. Both had to manoeuvre in relation to the Red and the Duke’s command flag; thus for the ships in the Red itself, there was comparatively little work to do to take up station. I knew from my many readings of the Duke’s fighting instructions (or rather, Penn’s, for we all knew the true authorship) that our appointed place was directly astern of Lawson’s Royal Oak, half a cable’s distance from her, with the Guinea in the place behind us. An easy task, I thought. We would simply shorten sail briefly to allow the Oak to move ahead, then we would come up quite close into the wind to take position astern of her. I said as much to Kit.

  ‘Aye, Captain,’ he said. ‘That should be the manner of it, indeed. But we will have to be brisk about it, sir. It will bring us dangerously close to the wind, and being as cumbersome as we are, we cannot risk coming closer than eight points to it. The Oak is a far better sailer than we are, and the Guinea is but a small Fourth, nimble enough to turn upon a farthing.’

  Yardley nodded. ‘Not certain of this wind, either, Captain,’ he said. ‘Strange weather altogether, since the comet.’

  I ignored the master’s pessimism. ‘Very well, gentlemen,’ I cried, ‘let us be brisk indeed!’

  Men scuttled aloft. We would shorten our courses and depend upon our topsails alone; with Royal Oak resplendent under full sail, that should be sufficient to bring us astern of her. But almost from the first moment, it was evident that our manoeuvre was going badly awry. The main course began to rise toward the yard, but unequally; the men heaving upon the clewlines and buntlines to larboard were evidently far more competent than those to starboard. All were notionally Able Seamen, fit for the yards and tops, but some were clearly more able than others.

  ‘Ah, now this is familiar,’ said Roger. ‘This is how French ships sail. My officers were quite animated by such things when we first put to sea, and flogged relentlessly until Le Téméraire could put out and take in sail more smartly than a slovenly washerwoman hanging her laundry.’

  There is nothing more galling to an Englishman than to have his conduct compared unfavourably to the French, and I would have upbraided Roger if our situation had not been so precarious.

  The great main course was fast resembling a triangle, rather higher on one side than the other. Entirely ignoring his duties and station as a quartermaster’s mate, Treninnick sped back and forth across the yard, trying desperately to make men learn what they must do. If I had ten Treninnicks, I thought, we might still be saved, but not even he could remedy it now. On the fore, indeed, matters were even worse; t
he course was barely shortening at all. And the Merhonour’s rudder, ever stubborn, was coming round at its wonted snail’s pace – perhaps I should have ordered more men to assist the helmsman in hauling the whipstaff over –

  If we did not turn and slow, and that soon, we might run into the starboard quarter of the Oak. Worse, the Guinea, a sleek little hull manned by a crack crew of Humbermen, had shifted her sails neatly, come up far closer to the wind than the lumbering Merhonour could ever manage, and was already nearly in position, thus rapidly reducing the sea-room available to us.

  All that was needed now for an entire disaster was –

  ‘Wind’s gusting round, west by south!’ cried Kit.

  Even if we managed to shorten the courses and hurriedly backed the remaining sails, we would surely collide with the Oak, or the Guinea, or even both. Yet if we turned away, with the wind as it now was –

  ‘Starboard the helm!’ I commanded.

  ‘But Captain –’ protested Yardley.

  One of my previous commands, and one of my previous crews, might have brought it off. The good old Jupiter, or the nimble Seraph – how I wished I was on one of their quarterdecks, and not that of this ancient, leaking sea-cow.

  The great ship lost headway. With her sails in confusion and her helm as unresponsive as ever, there was but one conclusion. We fell away from the Oak; aye, and from the Guinea too, and then from the rest of the fleet in their wakes. The Merhonour was in irons, wallowing impotently to leeward of the navy royal.

  It was a calamity. It was utter, gut-gnawing humiliation. I could sense the eyes of the entire fleet, watching the hapless Merhonour in the slough, blinking away tears of mirth and nodding knowingly to each other about the curse on the old ship. Lawson’s all-too-apparent wrath, and the scorn of his kinsman Abelson, were but the most adjacent manifestations of our shame. I knew that aboard the Royal Charles, the telescope of the Duke of York himself would be trained upon us.

  Well, Matthew Quinton, I thought to myself, you are well and truly blasted now. The king thinks you an arrogant fool, and the heir thinks you an incompetent one.

  Expect who can the Dutch fleet should come out

  Whilst Opdam lies at anchor of the gout?

  Perhaps they have no wind and so keep in:

  What? Out of breath before they do begin?

  ~ John Bradshaw, rector of Cublington, Buckinghamshire, Some Thoughts upon the Dutch Navies Demurr and upon the First Squadron of the Kings Royall Navy (1665)

  ‘Sic semper tyrannis, crieth the righteous man! For doth not the Prophet Isaiah tell us, “I will punish the world for their evil, and the wicked for their iniquity; and I will cause the arrogancy of the proud to cease, and will lay low the haughtiness of the terrible”? My dear brethren, thus shall it be with the tyrant Charles Stuart! Even now, the instrument of our salvation comes to us from the east! The wind fills the sails of the godly Dutch who will deliver us from this unholy Pharaoh – a tyrant who must go the way of his father! Aye, we shall all be as the sixth angel foretold in Revelation, preparing the way for the army from the east that will cleanse the land of fornicating princes and the plague their sins have hatched! Recall the sixteenth verse of the sixteenth chapter, brothers and sisters – “And they gathered them together at the place called in Hebrew, Armageddon”! Aye, dear brethren, Armageddon, the battle to come upon the sea, where the godly will prevail! Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia!’

  All around Phineas Musk and Lazarus Sutcliffe, the Reverend Jeroboam Harvey’s congregation raised their hands to their heaven, crying loud and repeated ‘amens’. Almost all the women, and not a few men, were weeping copiously. The eyes of a thin girl close to Musk were glazed over; in trance-like ecstasy, she began to dance. A man at the front, almost at the base of Harvey’s makeshift pulpit of kilderkins, suddenly began rolling on the floor of the great barn that housed the conventicle and started speaking in tongues, to applause from those around him. Musk caught the eye of a comely matron attired in a simple Puritanical garb of black broadcloth, white linen collar and hood; she was waving her arms in the air and seemed to be mouthing the words of a psalm. Musk was impressed. Far from being transparent and entirely out of place, as he had expected, the Countess Louise seemed born to the role.

  Musk himself cried out, ‘Oh, Alleluia! Alleluia, amen!’ before whispering to Sutcliffe, ‘Sweet Jesu, why can he not have the common decency to speak treason five minutes into his sermon rather than after two interminable hours?’

  The crippled veteran murmured, ‘Once heard Hugh Peters, that was Noll Cromwell’s chaplain, berate us for four hours. And we didn’t even fight that day.’

  Musk grimaced. ‘Ah, Peters … his head is still stuck on a pole at the end of London Bridge, is it not? Proof that justice catches up with malcontents and bores alike. Enough, though. Time to introduce our Israelites to the notion of the Babylonish Captivity, methinks.’

  Musk pushed his way through the congregation and reached the very front, directly before the sweating black-clad form of Jeroboam Harvey. The dissenter was still ecstatic from his peroration, his arms outstretched toward his adoring acolytes. It took him a few moments to register Musk’s presence. Then he smiled benignly.

  ‘My brother,’ he said, ‘what is it that you seek?’

  ‘What do I seek? Well, that’s a question. To tell truth, Reverend, what I seek is your miserable rebellious arse locked up in the Tower for a few score years.’ Musk turned to face the congregation and shouted at the top of his voice, ‘God save the King!’

  Upon the signal, the doors of the barn were flung open from outside. Heads turned in alarm. Somewhere in the middle of the congregation, a woman screamed. Regardless, two files of red-uniformed militiamen of the London Trained Bands strode into position along the walls of the building, matchlock muskets primed.

  Many of the dissenters, and Harvey himself, fell into fervent prayer. Thus at first not all beheld the strange apparition that now strode into the heart of the barn, an unfashionably long cloak flowing out behind him. The man was booted and spurred, but strangest of all, his face was masked by a kerchief.

  He walked to the front of the barn, stood alongside Phineas Musk, looked out over the congregation and then spoke in a loud, deep tone. ‘By Act of Parliament in the sixteenth reign of his most blessed and sacred Majesty Charles the Second, by the Grace of God King of England, Scotland, Ireland and France, chapter the fourth, it was made the law of this realm that religious assemblies of more than five persons outwith the Holy Church of England be henceforth declared illegal!’ The masked figure paused and looked about him, over the terrified faces of the two hundred or so souls in the barn. ‘And I see somewhat more than five persons in attendance within this undoubtedly illegal conventicle,’ he said sharply. ‘However, His Majesty is a most lenient and benign sovereign, and thus has no wish to incarcerate innocent subjects who have merely been led astray by a false and foresworn traitor!’ The masked man turned, and pointed theatrically at the trembling minister upon the firkins. ‘Jeroboam Harvey, self-styled minister of the Word, by the authority vested in me I arrest you for high treason against His Majesty’s most sacred person! We have the requisite two witnesses’ – Musk smiled, but Sutcliffe endeavoured to remain anonymous – ‘and as an example to these good but deluded people, you will most assuredly hang! Sergeant, take this man!’

  As the wailing from the congregation reached a crescendo, Harvey was escorted away, singing the one hundred and twenty-ninth psalm in a broken, nervous falsetto: ‘Many a time have they afflicted me from my youth: yet they have not prevailed against me…The Lord is righteous: he hath cut asunder the cords of the wicked. Let them all be confounded and turned back that hate Zion!’

  The soldiers began to usher the members of the congregation out of the building. As they did so, the cloaked man pulled down his mask and said, ‘Well done, Musk. A most satisfactory day’s work, I feel.’

  ‘As you say, My Lord.’

  Musk looked away, and
again caught the eye of the so-comely broadcloth-clad Puritan matron, one of the last conventiclers left in the building. Musk nodded almost imperceptibly. In return Louise, Countess of Ravensden, smiled slightly and stole one more glance at the unmistakeable face of John, Viscount Mordaunt of Avalon.

  * * *

  I dreamed of the Countess Louise. She was bound to a stake atop a blazing pyre, and I could even seem to smell the smoke in my nostrils. My grandfather was her executioner, stoking the flames around her. Then she stepped out of the blaze, stepped toward me, bearing balls of fire in her hands – aye, fire –

  ‘Fire!’ Dimly, dream gave way to reality, only they were nearly the same. I heard the cries beyond my bulkhead, just before young Castle burst in upon me with the news that there was fire beneath, on the middle deck. Hence the smoke in my nostrils; it was creeping up between the planks beneath me.

  Fire: no four letters are capable of creating such terror aboard a man-of-war. For what is a man-of-war but a vast tinderbox of wood, filled to the brim with substances that burn and explode?

  I sprang from my sea-bed and ran down the spiral stair from the steerage to the middle gun deck. At the foot of it, I looked astern and saw flames consuming the starboard officers’ cabins. The heat struck me as a great wave. For a moment I feared for Roger d’Andelys, who had taken the lower great cabin on this deck, directly beneath mine; but then I recalled that he was still aboard the Prince Royal, having been entertained rather too amply by My Lord Sandwich and His Grace of Buckingham, who after his rebuff at the council of war was serving as a volunteer aboard that ship.

  Dense smoke made it difficult to make out individuals, but I could hear Lieutenants Giffard and Farrell, who were already barking orders. Some men were sent to draw up pails of water from the pump-wells, others to break open water-casks in the hold and establish a bucket-chain from there to the blazing cabins. At last, Welsh, Cornish and English alike were joined as one: there is nothing quite as effective at bringing men together as the prospect of imminent immolation.