“These people weren’t killed by men, Harriott. They were killed by monsters, by representatives of the age we find ourselves living in. Our only consolation is God and the grave. We shan’t hunt these killers down.”
In the gloom, Harriott rolls his eyes. He bends down to Marr, and looks calmly at his injuries. He works his way to the back of the shop and finds Mrs. Marr, and then James Gowen, and here he stops, because the flavor of the injuries is such that stopping is the only appropriate thing to do. The boy’s head has been savaged. Harriott looks back at Story before heading downstairs. His hand shakes slightly with the thought of what he will find down there. Story stands at the top of the stairs and continues to hold forth, as if he were preaching from the mainmast of a ship.
“A baby, Harriott. What species of creature murders a baby? And why?”
OCTOBER 1564
Dear Kate
It is near midnight, and outside the window of my little room is Plymouth. A mad, Godless place enclosed by a wall and the sea. Imagine the Stanton St. John alehouse, late on a Saturday night, and then make the alehouse a mile around, and fill it with salty creatures of every stripe, with appetites of every hue, all fixed on spending every coin they have on drink and on women.
Everything is for sale here. Even the women offer themselves for money. I had heard of such things, Kate, but the wonder of it still enthralls me. There is nothing, it seems, that cannot be turned into Money given the necessary circumstances to Trade.
I am hypnotized by the place. There is Opportunity on every single corner, Kate. It would make your head spin. Everywhere you look there is somebody going about the making of a fortune, and still more and more people pour into the place each day, all of them with an eye to Money and Destiny. In this, it is the place I thought it would be. The right place to start an adventure such as the one we have talked so long about.
We have traveled to Oxford together, you and I. We have been intoxicated by it. It made our head spin, the size of it, the clothes on the townspeople, the goods in the market. I remember you laughing and shouting with the extraordinary wonder of it. But Plymouth is something else. A kind of fairyland imagined by a drunken sailor.
The men here are a warning to me. They have no control of themselves. They appear on shore after months and even years at sea, often but not always with money in their pockets. And they seem hell-bent on destroying themselves once they come ashore, or at least on destroying their small piece of fortune. They show no husbandry whatsoever. The Money is there. Then the Money is gone. Why can they not see that the Money is a vessel? That it is the material of Life itself?
I do believe these men want nothing more than to end themselves. Their lives are, to be sure, miserable and careworn. But these miseries seem to me to be self-inflicted, to be nothing more than a lack of imagination and application. I shall not end up like them, Kate. I shall return with Money in my purse, enough money to buy a dozen pigs and to set us up on a small parcel of land of our own, close to your father’s farm but far enough away for us to make our own lives together. I find myself dreaming of Woodperry and Peartree Lane Ground, up on the edge of the wood. We will be happy, and our fortunes will grow. Our children will be born and will add to our estate. And we will live long, happy lives, growing old together in the sure knowledge that we have been good and productive people. And at the end of our lives we shall bequeath an Estate upon our children, and our name shall be made in Perpetuity.
I sail tomorrow, my darling. This will be my last night in England for God knows how long. I will arrange for these letters to find their way to you, and, God willing, I will try and find ways to write to you from wherever God may carry me. I will carry your voice in my heart, your counsel in my head, and your face in all my dreams.
Billy
He had found the ship without any trouble at all, as Hawkyns had predicted, and it was indeed the biggest thing he’d ever seen. Its size dwarfed anything else in the harbor at Plymouth, and its reputation was just as large. Everyone knew, and Hawkyns made no attempt to hide, that the Jesus of Lübeck belonged to the Queen herself. Hawkyns had let it be widely known that he’d come to Plymouth directly, only a day or two before, from a private audience with Elizabeth at Enfield Palace.
Elizabeth’s father Henry had bought the giant vessel off the Hanseatic League more than twenty years before, all 700 tons of her, and she was now an old, creaking Leviathan of a thing, patched up and repainted magnificently and ready to go on whatever mission Hawkyns had in mind. Her age, her almost comical size, her history, all seemed to contribute to the courtly message the young Queen was sending about this voyage. Go with God’s grace and my blessing, it said. But I’m taking a chance on you, Mr. Hawkyns, and this ship’s all you’re getting, however ridiculous and ancient she seems to be.
She’d been converted from a trading vessel to a fighting ship by the old king, and was formidable, with 26 guns and 4 masts. She was fat and squat, as fat and squat as old Bloody Mary, only two and a half times long as she was wide. At either end of the ship towered wooden castles, slapped onto the old merchant vessel to make the Jesus a more threatening fighting prospect. Even to Billy’s uneducated eyes, the Jesus looked like a marine chimera: a stubby thing which also contrived to appear uncomfortably tall, as if she might fall over in a strong wind or if she turned too sharply.
The Jesus sat out there in the Pool with the three other ships in the Hawkyns fleet: the Solomon, a reasonable-sized 120-ton merchant ship, and two smaller vessels, the Tiger and the Swallow. Billy watched the ships for a while. To his untrained eyes they were a chaos of wood and rope and cloth, brightly colored and somehow impossible. He tried to get a plan of the Jesus into his head, he tried to imagine what its cargo might be, and he tried to work out how he was supposed to get on board. Boats were making their way out to the fleet, and he saw a group of well-dressed gentlemen clambering up onto the Jesus from a pinnace, perhaps twenty of them.
He waited for the boat to empty and then make its way back to the quayside, where there were several small groups of rough-looking men standing around. With a final glance at the huge shape of the Jesus, Billy made his way over to one of these groups, toward which the pinnace from the Jesus was now returning. He did so with little enthusiasm. They looked as vicious a bunch of miscreants as it would be possible to imagine.
The men were gathered around a familiar-looking figure: Tregarthen, the glittering, venomous gentleman he’d encountered in the Mitre. He was yelling at the shabby men as they climbed down into the now returned pinnace. A great many more of them were being squeezed in than the previous cargo of well-dressed gentlemen. Billy joined the huddle and soon discovered that this was no orderly queue. He was shoved aside half a dozen times before he realized that there was a hint of desperation about these men, an urgency to get onto the ship that pushed them on even as the memory of last night’s liquor thumped in their skulls.
It’s every man for himself, he thought. None of these men are guaranteed a berth on this ship.
Some of the men gazed hungrily out at the fleet and not one of them looked back toward the land. There were no loved ones there to wave them off. They could not wait to get off the land, and virtually leaped down into the pinnace as if the ground beneath their feet was red-hot.
With that thought, Billy screwed up his courage and began to barge and jostle with the rest of them. His desperation to get on board the great ship had its own incentives, and with the image of Kate clear in his mind, not to mention the thought of pig farms and Peartree Lane Ground, he shoved his way to the front in relatively short order, and suddenly he was face-to-face once more with Tregarthen.
Tregarthen chose to ignore Billy at first, making him wait while he barked at the men around Billy and, in some cases, behind him. Billy waited. He felt relaxed and, if possible under the weight of terror which had come over him when he first saw those gigantic wooden impossibilities sitting on the water, amused. His destiny was aboard the Jesus, it had alre
ady occurred to him. It seemed a nonsense even to consider that he might be placed on one of the other three ships. Nothing Tregarthen could do would change that.
Eventually, Tregarthen’s eyes moved to his. They glittered with malignant mischief.
“Ah, our young friend from the Mitre,” he said, smiling that lupine smile. “You found us then.”
“Yes, sir. I wish to present myself to the admiral John Hawkyns, sir.” Words he’d been given by his father-in-law, but pompous, pious words which sparked hilarity among the men around him. A couple of them shoved him in the back, while he caught a whispered pretty words, pretty boy from his left. Tregarthen’s grin grew wider.
“I’m sure Admiral John Hawkyns is excited by the prospect, young sir. But he is rather busy to be receiving guests, be they ever so grand. Step down into the boat, and I’ll make it certain that you’re taken care of.”
Billy made to step past him, but pulled up short at the feel of something hard and sharp in his side. He looked down to see Tregarthen’s stiletto pressed to the side of his father’s old Polish greatcoat. Tregarthen leaned in to whisper in his ear.
“’Tis a shame I’m not to be traveling with you, boy.” His breath was warm and carried a disgusting whiff of ale and garlic. “Me and my friend here, we’d have enjoyed your company.”
The sense of pressure in his side disappeared, the stiletto likewise, and then Billy half-clambered, half-tumbled down into the pinnace, which, despite its size and the number of heavy men within it, yawned impossibly when Billy put a foot in, and he was convinced that he and all the other new sailors would be tipped into the Pool, and he remembered that he had never even considered the fact that he could not swim.
My first time on the water.
He tried to find a point of balance, his stomach flipping and his heart pounding. He sat down eventually, drawing scowls and muttering from the experienced sailors in the boat, and waited for the last few men to make their way down. Then they began to make their way out to the fleet.
The Jesus only grew bigger, and yet bigger, as they approached. If she had seemed massive from the shore, from the water she took on the appearance of a maritime cathedral. With every tug on the oars, the sides of the ship grew taller, and then they were touching the hull of the gigantic vessel, with rope ladders hanging down to meet them and carry them up a steep wall of wood and nails, against which Billy’s feet slipped and scrabbled, the ladder swinging wildly as he made his way upward, his tall frame swinging from side to side, laughter from the boat below and laughter from above. And then he was on the deck, and everywhere was a mess of movement and activity, the men from the shore seemingly springing into life the minute they stepped on deck and transforming themselves into disciplined seamen. He was grabbed by the collar, shoved toward some incomprehensible activity, and Billy became a sailor.
After several hours the Jesus and the other ships began to creep out of the harbor. Billy was bounced around from job to job, fetching, carrying, sweeping, stowing, the language of the ship already beginning to reverberate around his overflowing head—Hawkyns standing in full finery on the quarterdeck, in front of the rearmost sterncastle, while one of the men gathered before him (the first mate) called for the foresail to be cut. The wind caught the sail and one of the ropes (which were mystifyingly called sheets) whipped a pulley round, directly into the face of a young deckhand. The man’s head was smashed to pieces instantly, and Billy and another deckhand were commanded to clear the blood and the brains off the deck and the rails.
At the end of that first day of wonders, which passed in a blur of alien-sounding words, slaps to the back of the head, and occasional grudging acceptance of satisfaction, Billy was shown where to take some sleep. Most of the men slept on the floor, lying in apparent disarray on one of the two decks within the ship. Billy learned immediately that this seemingly random display of bodies was an illusion: every man had his spot, and even when sleeping he had a job allocated to him. Billy was shown a spot on the upper of the two decks, where he was introduced for the first time to his very own Bloody Mary, a falcon cannon which he was to sleep next to for the duration of the voyage, his head tapping against the cannon’s wheel while he slept, the smell of the old Hanseatic wood full in his head. He was shown how to maintain the cannon, and dark imprecations were muttered at him about the consequences of the weapon malfunctioning if it were needed.
In the first hours and days of the voyage, rumors swirled around the ship as to their destination. The officers (a class of men who looked much the same as all the other men, Billy thought, the grandly dressed Hawkyns apart) kept their counsel, but down in the bowels of the ship, where a few hammocks swung in the corners and you could occasionally hear the quiet whimpering of terrified young boys on their first voyage, Billy listened in silently as the experienced sailors discussed the trip.
“It’s New Spain,” said John Gilbert, a one-eyed seaman from Gloucester who had sailed across the Atlantic half a dozen times, and who had recently escaped from a French prison. “Old ’Awkyns is off to singe some Spanish beards, and to grab some treasure.”
“In a ship the size of a bloody island?” scoffed Morgan Tillert, a Welshman with gambling debts who cheerfully admitted to being on the voyage only as long as was needed to earn enough to get free and clear so he could start gambling again, and who planned to jump ship as soon as he could afford to. “Why does he need this monster to carry gold? And it’ll be as much use as a fart in a hurricane if we get caught in a fight with Spaniards.”
“Hides,” said William Cornelius, who had spent the last eight years sailing sardine ships to and from Portugal. “I hear hides can be bought on Hispaniola for pennies. He’s going to get hides.”
“And pay for them with what?” asked Gilbert. “He might be bringing something back to England, right enough, he might be. But he’ll need to pay for it with something. Aztec gold, mates, Aztec gold. We’re off to take some off those Spanish whoremongers, and steal the treasure from the mouth of the Roman Satan himself.”
Billy heard someone chuckling nearby. They were knowing and rather sophisticated chuckles, and they came from a young man of Billy’s age, who followed the chuckles by whispering something under his breath. Billy caught the words “African treasure” before the young man realized he was being watched and looked sharply at him. The man’s eyes inspected him for a few seconds, and then the face softened and he smirked at Billy, nodding toward the older men in the shared contempt of the young for the old.
He wore a young man’s wispy red beard, but it was well tended. He was dressed plainly but something about the smoothness of his skin and the whiteness of his teeth gave the impression that he was perhaps used to rather more opulent surroundings. William Cornelius noticed the smirk and was about to say something, before another man gave him a warning slap on the shoulder. The young man saw this and smiled insolently. He seemed impervious to the fear that Billy still felt—the fear of these strange, salty men talking a strange, salty language of rigs and yards and sheets which meant nothing to him at all.
Two days out from Plymouth, Billy and the insolent young man were told to take an inventory of the supplies down in the hold. Billy found this a surprising task for two such young crewmen. Surely it was vital that the information was correct and perhaps even confidential? He pointed this out to his new acquaintance, who smirked that smirk again. “We can both read and we can both write,” he said (Billy had been spotted writing a letter to his Kate the night before, and word had got around already that there was another scholar belowdecks). “Qualities much needed in those taking inventories. Besides, Hawkyns doesn’t want old hands ferreting about in here.”
The man’s easy air and familiar way with the admiral’s name struck Billy. All the crew were rude about the captain and his officers in their belowdecks mutterings, but even they invested the word “Hawkyns” with some kind of weight, as if speaking it in the wrong way might jinx their fortune. This young man had no such anxiet
y.
“He wants to keep things tight and keep things mysterious. Those fools up on deck have barely been down here. And look! Enough food to feed an army. Too much food for us. Why all the food?” And he tapped his nose, and then offered a hand. “Francis Drake,” he said. “Cousin of the commander, Mr. Hawkyns.” And seeing the look in Billy’s eyes, he nods: “And thusly impervious to injury from those muttering idiots.”
Billy introduced himself. And made the immediate decision to stay within Drake’s orbit. It seemed a safe place to be.
They got started with accounting the items down in the hold. There seemed to be three main groups of cargo. In one were the victuals for the crew: biscuits, dried beef and bacon, beer, peas, cider (no fruit, noticed Billy, whose diet in Stanton St. John had been full of the stuff). Then were great piles of random but seemingly valuable materials: cloth, iron, wood, and jewelry. This was obviously intended to be traded.
And then, a third category of cargo. Piles of dried beans and peas, set apart from the victuals for the crew. Neat bundles of plain, austere clothing—cotton shirts and simple shoes of varying sizes. An odd collection of wood of various lengths and thicknesses and thick, sailcloth-like material in bright colors which Billy could see no use for at all. All this was part hidden behind a set of bulwarks in the hold of the Jesus. Drake watched Billy assessing the nature of the cargo, and once again that knowing smirk appeared.
“Finding the cargo a bit unusual, are you?” he asked Billy.
Billy considered the question. He looked around. There was something odd, now he had come to look closely. He considered things further. Drake was asking the question with a certain air of bonhomie. Billy wondered if he was being tested.
The English Monster Page 6
