The Voyage of the Destiny

by Robert Nye

  The bricklayer, realising that he was being scolded, I think, while perhaps not understanding how or why, covered his confusion by stooping to pick up his box again.

  At the same time, Stukeley doused his torch by thrusting it into a puddle on the road. There was light enough now to be safe without it.

  ‘Know the last time I saw you, Sir Walter?’ the bricklayer said. ‘It was when you marched through Westminster right alongside her coffin. The Queen’s. Captain of the Guard you were then. Black plume on your helmet, black band on your arm. I remember the drums—’

  I remembered them too. I did not want to indulge their memory further in a public street with a total stranger, however civil that stranger seemed. I coughed, therefore, and interrupted him.

  ‘What’s in your box, Mr Adams?’ I asked, tapping at it lightly with the point of my cane.

  The bricklayer stepped back as if wounded.

  ‘My child, sir,’ he said.

  I stared at him.

  ‘Your child?’

  The man bit his lip. When he went on he sounded almost apologetic. ‘My little son, sir,’ he said. ‘Dead of the fever. He was just the three weeks old, sir.’

  I said: ‘And you are carrying his body down the Minories in a box? I fail to understand ‘

  ‘Well, you see, sir, it’s the parish dues,’ the bricklayer said. ‘It’s the parish dues charged. I can’t afford them. For a proper church burial and all.’

  ‘So what do you intend to do?’ I asked.

  ‘What everyone does, sir,’ he said. ‘I mean - what everyone does who is poor. Take the morsel over London Bridge and dig a hole and bury him secret like, in St George’s Fields or some other field south of Southwark.’

  I shook my head. ‘You say you are a bricklayer. What do you earn?’

  ‘Varies, sir,’ the man replied. ‘Can be a shilling a day. That’s six shilling a week and good enough when there’s work to be had. But there’s no work now.’

  ‘How much are these parish dues for a burial?’ I asked him.

  ‘Nineteen and six, sir.’

  I reached for my purse. Then I realised that I hadn’t a purse. Sir William Wade, Lieutenant Governor of the Tower, had not supposed that his prisoner would need a few shillings. Not during a short coach ride from Tower Hill to his wife’s house in Broad Street.

  ‘Cousin Lewis—?’ I said.

  ‘Yes, yes, of course,’ Stukeley said. He took coins from his purse and pressed them into the bricklayer’s hand.

  I had turned aside, my body racked by a bout of coughing. Stukeley came and put his arm around my shoulders. I was shivering, I know, and my teeth were chattering. I must have made a rather alarming spectacle.

  ‘I am not ague-proof,’ I muttered. ‘Don’t be alarmed. It will pass.’

  When it had, I drew myself up and nodded to the bricklayer.

  ‘Good day, Mr Adams.’

  I moved off to avoid the shower of blessings which the fellow started to invoke upon my head. I daresay I was limping badly by the time we passed through Bishopsgate and turned into Broad Street.

  ‘That was horrible,’ I said. ‘Most horrible and pitiable.’

  Stukeley said nothing. His face was angry and embarrassed. I asked him why. Then he pointed out to me that the bricklayer, after taking leave of us, had continued on his way towards Southwark and the open fields beyond it. I hadn’t looked back, I hadn’t noticed this as my cousin did. Nor was I in a position to know what Stukeley told me next. Namely, that there was currently a boom in the bricklaying trade, with houses going up everywhere in the open country north of the Strand, in Long Acre, all around St James’s Park, in Tothill Fields, and even out as far as Islington.

  ‘So we were cheated?’ I said.

  I suspect as much,’ said Stukeley.

  I shrugged. It was no great matter. But I could see that my cousin pitied me for being taken in. We came to the house on Broad Street. Bess was waiting.

  Carew, you will know that your mother was born Bess Throgmorton, daughter of Sir Nicholas Throgmorton, friend and familiar of the boy-King Edward the 6th, and that she is some twelve years younger than me. You should know also, truth to tell, that your mother was never a great beauty, but that her face was always fair to me, and well-beloved, as I am sure it is in proper part to you, for those qualities of sensitiveness, intelligence, and humour which make it as rich and resourceful as her heart. She has a peculiarity, my dear Bess, less rare than it is believed. One of her eyes is blue and the other is black. I remind you of this, Carew, in order to draw out a moral lesson from the physical fact. Your mother’s eycb were made for love and hate, for happiness and misery, for the mixing of joy and sorrow in equal measure. My dearest Bess has known all these things in the 26 years of our marriage - a marriage which cost her five months in the Tower at the outset, and thereafter banishment for life from Elizabeth’s Court. For Bess Throgmorton was one of the Queen’s Maids of Honour when I first loved her, and Elizabeth’s sexual jealousy could be pitiless.

  She was waiting for me there, as I said, at her house on Broad Street. We embraced and kissed without words. I stroked her grey hair, remembering its gold.

  She said: ‘You’re shaking, husband. Here, drink this hot peppermint cordial I’ve kept ready for you.’

  I took the cup and drained it. She said: ‘You walked?’ Of course,’I said.

  ‘Idiot!’ she said. ‘Dear idiot. Mad March hare on a cold March morning. Will you never learn sense?’

  ‘I doubt it,’ I told her. ‘Too old for that now, Bess. But this ague is nothing. Nothing your kitchen comforts can’t put right.’

  I kissed her again as she helped me off with my gown. ‘Where are our boys?’ I asked.

  Bess folded the gown and stood holding it clasped in her arms. ‘Poor little Carew’s fallen asleep,’ she told me. ‘Can you credit it? He was up most of the night, running upstairs and down, opening doors and pretending you were standing there, rehearsing all sorts of pretty speeches he would make to welcome you, then slamming the doors and worrying you’d never come. There was no way I could make him go to his bed. In the end he got so worn out with excitement that he fell asleep on the windowseat in the library. I tiptoed in and found him, and put a rug around him.’

  God bless you, my son!

  ‘And young Wat?’ I said.

  Bess shot a swift glance at Stukeley, then whispered three words softly in my ear. You know already what those three words were. ‘Sowing wild oats.’

  I must have frowned, and drawn down the ends of my mouth, for Bess said, ‘Now don’t be angry, husband,’ and touched my lips with her fingers, as if to make me smile.

  ‘He’s your spit and image, our wild wag,’ she went on. ‘You’d have been much the same at his age, and you can’t deny it.’

  I did not deny or affirm anything. But I think my eyes must have been cloudy and troubled as I watched Bess move matter-of-factly to put my gown away in a wardrobe.

  ‘Come,’ she said, turning. ‘You go and wake Carew. Then we shall all have some breakfast. Cousin Lewis too.’

  Every inch Lady Ralegh now, she held out her right hand to Stukeley, who bowed and kissed it.

  ‘I apologise for being here,’ he murmured.

  ‘You are welcome,’ Bess said. ‘Someone had to do the job. It was kind of you to volunteer.’

  ‘Thank you, cousin,’ Stukeley said.

  Bess turned back again to me. ‘Breakfast,’ she repeated. ‘Oysters and anchovies, with warm white wheaten rolls. And afterwards you will smoke a pipe of tobacco. I’ve missed that more than anything in this house. The smell of your old Indian tobacco!’

  ‘More than anything?’ I quizzed her, shaking off my gloom.

  We shared what should have been a private smile.

  Sir Lewis Stukeley went awkwardly to the window. He told me later that he had intended only to turn his back on us out of politeness, but as he gazed down into Broad Street he saw two men slip out of an alleyway and
take up positions opposite the house. They were not wearing long black cloaks, but then they didn’t need to. Their trade was obvious.

  *

  That’s how it began. This latest and last grand adventure. This damned pilgrimage. This quest for mere gold which has cost me the life of my son.

  From the Tower I came forth, after 13 years in the darkness. From London I sailed, one year later, full of hope, puffed with pride, at the head of a fleet of new ships.

  Now it’s over. All over. Now I go home to die.

  ‘Guattaral,’ the Indian says.

  The Indian is right.

  It is not Sir Walter Ralegh who writes this. It is a broken man, a wasted mind, a ghost, the senseless echo of a dying name.

  Guattaral sails for Newfoundland, and then home.

  15

  25 March

  We sailed out from St Kitts at six o’clock in the morning, with white birds all around us like a plume, having fair skies and seas sweet as new-mown hay and the wind in the south-east blowing strong yet not too strong. From six until ten at night we ran 100 miles north by north-west. Since ten o’clock we have had hardly a whisper of wind, and journeyed not much more than five miles due north. It is now approaching midnight, with a good round moon and a black sky packed with stars but no sign of the wind coming back to us.

  All the same, a satisfactory first day.

  *

  I have given Wat’s old cabin to the Indian. It was standing empty, and since the man refused to inhabit or employ Keymis’s cabin this seemed the only sensible thing to do. He appears content with the honour, at all events, and has retired to rest in his new quarters now. So at least we should be spared the trouble of having him tumble overboard from his makeshift bed on the bowsprit in the middle of the night.

  Why the Indian would never sleep in Keymis’s cabin is not clear. I suspect that it had more than a little to do with the knowledge that Keymis killed himself in there. However, the man has said scarcely a word all day, being withdrawn and preoccupied, sometimes appearing silently on deck to watch us at work sailing the ship, occasionally following the progress of the Encounter in our wake, more often to be observed standing alone in the bows and staring out ahead across the sea.

  What he might expect to meet there is beyond my imagination.

  When I told him that I had decided that he should have my son’s cabin, he bowed his head as though beginning a gesture of gratitude, but then raised it again abruptly and gave a mere nod as if this was no more than what he considered his due.

  *

  Enigmatic tropical night!

  The stars are the only friendly things in all this friendless sea of warmth.

  In such a night as this one should be able to forget and forgive much.

  I can forget nothing.

  And forgiveness was never my style.

  *

  I spent the winter and another year in Ireland. I did nothing much, but in that waste of desolation it was enough. At Christmas, 1581,1 was called home. I stepped at once from a country as wild as the nether limits of Muscovy into the fantastic Yuletide festivities of the Queen’s Court at Westminster.

  I was 27 years old. What had I acHicved? I had held command of one of Elizabeth’s ships, but on a voyage that met with no success. I had been captain of a band of volunteers in Elizabeth’s army, but in a war which was getting nowhere. My coming out of Ireland to the English Court was scarcely to be welcomed by fireworks or announced with a roll of drums. Yet, at a stroke, I established myself in the Queen’s eyes. How? I’ll tell you how. By a piece of poetry.

  This poetry was not written. It had nothing to do with words. To understand it you must rid your mind of the idea that poetry is always and of necessity limited to the world of language. Poetry can be in persons and their actions. A poem can come into being between a man and a woman. This concept of poetry has to do with an idea of absolute rightness. But while such rightness is commonly a matter of the best words in the best order, it can also be a matter of the best acts in the best order. Or, rather, the only acts in the only order. That’s what I mean by absolute rightness, my son. Sometimes there is only one thing to do, the right thing, but you have to be inspired to do it.

  Also you need luck.

  I had luck.

  *

  On the opposite side of the road from the Banqueting Hall in the great honeycomb which was the Queen’s Palace of Westminster there was an arena known as the Tiltyard. That Christmas of ‘81 they had bear-baiting in the Tiltyard, especially for the entertainment of the creature Elizabeth called her Frog Prince. This was the Duke of Anjou, brother of the King of France and heir to his throne, a pock-marked nonsense who for six years had been going through a pantomime of courtship with the Queen. Elizabeth had no intention of marrying the Frog, but it suited her to pretend that she might. It suited her also to make an elaborate but inexpensive fuss of amusing Anjou. Hence the bears brought across the Thames from their regular stadium in the Paris Garden and baited in the Tiltyard.

  Now the Queen watched such shows from the Tiltyard Gallery, which she reached from her Privy Gallery in the Banqueting Hall by walking through the Holbein Gate and across the road. It was a narrow place, ill-paved, and on that Christmas Eve it was all plashy with half-melted ice and snow.

  Bearing a dispatch from my Lord Grey to the Earl of Leicester, I came walking from the Tiltyard across to the Palace at precisely the moment when the Queen came walking in the opposite direction. Suddenly I found myself face-to-face with a proud fastidious woman in confusion, hesitating, seeming to scruple at the prospect of having to step out of the Gallery and into the plashy road. Around her, behind her, others, lords and ladies, also in momentary disarray.

  I did not hesitate.

  I performed the poetry.

  I plucked my cloak from my shoulders and bowed and spread it out across the mire for the Queen to walk on.

  Elizabeth clapped her hands together and laughed. Then she stepped on the cloak. Then she stopped and turned and asked me to tell her my name.

  *

  Understand, Carew, my clothes were then a considerable part of my estate. It was a new plush cloak, red as flame, which I had purchased just the day before, especially for my appearance at Court. The rest of my captain’s wages had gone on other items of apparel. I was spreading out all that I had for the Queen to walk on. I was offering everything that I possessed in order to save her a moment’s embarrassment. I was throwing my life and fortune at her feet. There lies the poem.

  For her part, Elizabeth trod gently on my cloak. And when she had crossed over she bade me take it up again. She understood my action perfectly. The ladies and gentlemen who were following her had to make the best way they could through the mud.

  *

  That was all, then. I delivered my dispatch to the Earl of Leicester, who was delighted to have the opportunity to remark that I looked for all the world as though I had just hopped straight out of an Irish bog. I didn’t mind. I wore the mud on my cloak with as much pride as if it was blood won in a war.

  The Queen, no doubt, had gone on to enjoy the bear-baiting. But she had not forgotten me. I had caught her eye and held it. Not just by my good looks or my youth or my wit either. By being in the right place at the right time and doing the right and only thing. Not easy, Carew. Not to be despised.

  All the same, I must not make too much of this. Elizabeth made enough of it for two.

  The next day, being Christmas, I was summoned to appear before her Majesty and give an account of my experiences in the wars in Ireland. Truth to tell, I got no further with this than the mere announcement of my name. She had smiled when I told it to her by the Holbein Gate, A quick, inward-turning, private smile which I had not understood. Now she threw back her head and laughed out loud and I was made to understand.

  ‘Water?’ she said. ‘Water Rawly?’

  My Devon drawl served to intrigue and amuse her from the start. She enquired graciously after the cleaning
arrangements for my cloak. After much verbal playing on water and rawness, in which I was encouraged by her to join, and during which her eyes never left my face, I was eventually dismissed with the instruction to present myself again before the Lord Chamberlain, the Earl of Sussex, at nine o’clock that evening.

  When I did I was told that the Queen had been pleased to appoint me an Esquire of her Body. This meant that I joined the small company of young men who took charge of the Presence Chamber each night, and slept there. The Presence Chamber was that part of the Palace of Westminster where the Queen and her Councillors appeared usually in the afternoon, where most of the Court danced attendance, and where ambassadors and other official visitors were granted audience. Beyond the Presence Chamber was the Privy Chamber, where the Queen took her meals with her half-dozen Maids of Honour. Beyond the Privy Chamber were the Privy Lodgings, the Queen’s private apartments, where she slept.

  From being a rough soldier in a wretched war I had been transformed into a member of the Queen’s personal bodyguard. All because of one moment, a single inspired gesture, in which I declared without words my longing to make her my life and my fate. You see, Carew, when I spread my cloak I spread my dreams at her feet, and Elizabeth was woman enough to know it.

  Mr Child’s gown would not have done.

  *

  Two o’clock after midnight, four bells of the middle watch, and the wind has begun to fresh. I shall leave Robert Burwick, a good master, to hold our course north until morning. Sackerson and Harry Hunks.

  Names of bears. Bears in the Tiltyard that Christmas I came first to Elizabeth’s favour.

  I remember Sackerson in particular, standing upright in the centre of the sanded circle, a huge brown bear, one hind leg chained to a stake, being attacked by some half a dozen mastiffs. The dogs snarling, the dogs worrying and snapping at their lumbering opponent, but the bear more than a match for them. One mastiff lying dead in the sand. Flash of the bear’s teeth in the December sun as it bit off the ear of another dog. Sackerson clawing, roaring, tossing, tumbling, dealing such buffets that mastiffs went spinning through the air and out of the circle. The bear dancing then, shaking blood and slaver from its muzzle. Pink eyes, pink paws, and bad breath stinking up from the Tiltyard.