by J. D. Davies
Although it was winter, our king, Henri Quatre, had decided there would be balls twice or three times a week. They were halcyon days, you see, in those last weeks of the year 1598. We had peace at last – peace within France, for the religious wars that had torn our land apart for thirty years were finally ended, and peace without, for we had made peace with Spain half a year earlier. And then the great King Philip of Spain, the black-garbed spider whom we all feared, had died. Yes, there was a new King Philip, but he was not half the man his father had been, which meant there was no prospect of the war resuming. So France had cause to rejoice, and if Henri Quatre knew anything, my dear grandson, he knew how to throw a party.
It was only my third or fourth ball, although I was already nearly nineteen – shamefully, my father, your great-grandfather, the Vicomte de Beaufay, had kept me shut away on our estate in Touraine until I was long past the age when all of my sisters had married. I still remember the excitement among all of us virgins of the court – what, grandson, you do not know what a virgin is? When you are eleven years old? Ask your uncle Tristram, he is most knowledgeable in such things. What was I saying? Ah yes, the excitement at the news that the famous English pirate, the dread Milord Ravensden, would be present! They said his ship had been forced into Nantes to repair after a great battle with a Spanish galley. Of course, the king invited him to Chambord at once, and from the moment the word got out, we were all agog.
It was my sister who first spotted him through the throng – Anne-Catherine, your great-aunt, the Marquise de Lavelle.
‘Look, sis! There he is!’
Excitedly, we pushed our way through the great crowd of French, Spaniards, English and Scots. Our court in those days was a magnet for the world, all the women in the grandest of gowns, all the men in the most exuberant ruffs. And they were all turning to look upon the new arrival. He stood in the doorway of the great hall, tall and proud, accompanied by only one attendant – the poet-actor, Iles, as I later learned. The major-domo beat his cane of office upon the floor and announced Le comte de Ravensden, amiral de Sa Majesté la reine Elisabeth d’Angleterre. The Earl advanced toward the throne, and passed no more than a few feet in front of us. I took in the leathery face, the greying, roughly-combed hair and beard, the hand upon the sword hilt even in the presence of the King of France, the way in which his costume of fine purple satin and quite modest white ruff seemed to sit awkwardly upon him. This was the sort of man I usually went out of my way to avoid: an ageing warrior, and God alone knew, after so many years of vicious civil and foreign wars, France had more than enough of those.
But there was something else about this man, something that made me feel strange from that very first moment my eyes settled upon him. Yes, there was the thrill of the exotic. After all, he was English, and Englishmen were both distinctly exotic and very much in vogue in those days. Had they not put the invincible Spanish Armada to flight, and sent an army to help our King gain his throne? Moreover, they were ruled by a woman, a thing unheard of in France. All of us young girls of the court were in awe of the legendary Queen Elizabeth, and secretly wished that we were her. And Lord Ravensden would have met her! He would have kissed her hand and talked with her, just as he was about to do with our king! So if I could but talk with him, I could find out what she was like, from one who knew her in person! And then, of course, the Earl was a pirate, and what woman does not dream of being – Ah, but you are too young, grandson, and I digress. But there was something else about him that I could not name. Something that tightened my stomach and unsettled my heart.
He strode across the great hall and bowed before the throne. The king stepped forward and allowed the Englishman to kiss his hand, then talked to him for some minutes. The ordinary hubbub of idle court chatter resumed all around us.
‘He has quite a history,’ said Anne-Catherine. ‘He and the famous Sir François Drake and Sir Valter Raleigh were forever at each other’s throats, it seems, but that is not the half of it, nor the more interesting half. Milady Edmondes, the English ambassador’s wife, says that Milord Ravensden has buried three countesses and all his children with them. She says that his mother is mad, and has been locked away in a tower for years. She says that his grandmother is a hundred years old and cannot die. She says that his uncle was a notorious sorcerer, who placed a curse on his brother’s line and the entire House of Ravensden before making a pact with the Devil and disappearing into thin air. She says that because of all this, no lady of rank in England is willing to accept him in marriage. So his title will die with him.’
‘How sad,’ I said, gazing with renewed interest at the distant form of the English Milord. ‘A tragic romance, worthy of a poet.’
‘You are too sentimental, Louise-Marie, dearest. You always were. And you read far too many romances by bad poets.’
‘That is not true,’ I hissed, although, of course, it was. ‘Come, sister. I want to meet this Englishman, curse or no curse.’
‘Don’t be foolish, Louise-Marie! There is no-one to present us! Our brothers are nowhere to be seen – I expect they are in the kitchens, accosting serving wenches again – and my husband would not forgive us for interrupting his discourse with the Duc de Montmorency.’
‘Then we shall just have to present ourselves, shall we not?’
‘Present ourselves? Who has ever heard of such a thing? And in the king’s presence, too? Truly, sister, you must have taken leave of your senses!’
‘Very well, then, I shall present myself. Do not look at me like that, Milady la Marquise. I am sure an English Milord will permit it – after all, is he not accustomed to being given orders by a woman?’
The Earl of Ravensden:
She was a damned forward little strumpet, even for the French. But then, she was also a fetching little piece. I saw her approaching, great brown eyes staring up at me. I saw the presentable little bosom heaving away like a bellows, and I thought, ‘Half your age, Ravensden. Papist and French, to boot. Quarantined cargo, my lad—’
The Countess of Ravensden:
Quarantined cargo? A damned forward little strumpet? Presentable little –
No, grandson, you should not be writing this down.
Why, that strutting old braggart, that arrogant –
Ah.
Matthew, you had better summon Barcock to wipe the wine off the Van Dyck. I did not imagine that at my age, I could aim so well, nor throw so far.
Nicholas Iles:
Was there ever such a beginning to a great love? Anthony and Cleopatra, boast your Nile-blessed romance no more! Tristan and Isolde, look to your laurels. Lancelot and Guinevere, depart the scene, for the glory of your passion is but a flower, crumbling to dust after its season is done. The two of whom Shakespeare wrote, whose names I now forget –
She presented herself before My Lord and the King of France, curtsied, and said, as boldly as a herald proclaiming a war, ‘Your Majesty, My Lord, if you will forgive me – I am Louise-Marie de Monconseil-Bragelonne, fourth daughter of the Vicomte de Beaufay. I present myself, great sirs, on behalf of the virgin womanhood of France, to convey to Milord Ravensden our felicitations upon your glorious victories, and to ask you to pass on our respects to your sovereign lady, Queen Elizabeth, the epitome of our kind!’
You will say I am a poet, and that I exaggerate My Lady’s words. But I do not. Indeed, even as this mere child-woman spoke and I studied her for the very first time, I cursed her for plucking words out of the air that it would have taken me a week to conjure onto a page.
My Lord looked at the King of France. The King looked at him. Then they both laughed.
‘Well, My Lady,’ said King Henry, his great grey eyebrows arching merrily, ‘I see that a new age is truly come to France, and that it is not merely a figment of the highly paid imaginations of those I employ to write my eulogies. Milord Ravensden, I leave this impetuous harbinger of the future to you. But I advise you to be very careful with her!’
The King moved away, still ch
uckling. I stood where I was, for it was clearly my duty to record every word of the exchange between My Lord and this remarkable young woman. But I was aware that My Lord was giving me a strange look: indeed, he appeared suddenly to have acquired a tic that made his head jerk violently in the direction of the distant doorway. I prayed that this was not the consequence of some past wound –
He stepped toward me, and whispered, ‘For God’s sake, Iles, can’t you take a hint? Just fuck off, there’s a good fellow!’
The Earl of Ravensden:
A forward strumpet she may have been, but she was also a witty and disarmingly intelligent one. This was a change from the majority of the women I had ever known, who were mostly dead, mad, or whores. Perhaps that thought was in my mind when I was part way through a prolonged explanation of how I, an Englishman, actually owned an estate much further up the Loire, beyond Nevers in Burgundy, despite such a thing supposedly being prohibited by the laws of France. This, I explained, was by means of a convoluted Scottish inheritance that had passed down through my mother, a Stewart connected by blood to the Aubigny line of that house, who were considered Frenchmen and thus able to own land in –
I must have been boring even myself, for I suddenly blurted out, ‘I have buried three wives, a son and three daughters, My Lady. Almost all of my friends have been slaughtered in battle. I have locked up my mother. And my grandmother, if truth be told. So I am done with losing those I love.’
Why did I say that, in the name of Heaven? She was a slip of a girl, I had met her but a few minutes before, yet here I was making her privy to secrets I barely dared admit even to myself. I had already decided to bed her, of course, but as for anything more than that –
The Countess of Ravensden:
Thank you, Matthew, I think there is no need for you to copy any more of this particular piece.
In truth, though, I was as taken aback by this shared confidence as he was. I was aware, too, that many eyes were upon us, and few of them were approving. For a maiden to talk with an unmarried man for so long, unescorted – and he an Englishman, in the name of all the saints in Heaven, and so capable of God alone knew what kinds of behaviour – well, that was then still a matter of scandal, even at a court as informal as that of Henri le Bon.
‘My Lord,’ I said, ‘I trust that I shall be a friend whom you do not lose.’
His face, so resolutely cheerful until a few moments earlier, was now unspeakably sad.
‘Well, then, Milady de Monconseil-Bragelonne, that is a promise to which I shall hold you.’
But alas, I was not the only person in that vast hall who was of interest to Milord Ravensden. I could see his eyes straying from mine, and even from my bosom, and followed his gaze. He was staring at a slight youth in a distant corner: a lad little older than myself, dressed in the sort of plain, Calvinistic garb that was out of fashion in even the most fervent Huguenot congregation. A youth who was standing quietly, and seemingly quite out of place, amidst the loudest and most boisterously drunken group in the entire room: that is to say, the Scots.
‘You know that young Scotsman, Milord Ravensden?’
‘Know him, My Lady? We’re distant cousins, of a sort – as I told you, my mother is a Stewart, and so is his, which makes us even more distantly related to the Scottish King. I haven’t seen the boy these two years, since our time as students at Padua.’
‘You were a student, Milord Ravensden? And so very recently?’
‘Went abroad for my health, to recover from the wounds I took at the Cadiz fight. But I was a scholar before I ever became a warrior. Before you stands a graduate in Mathematics from the College of Saint John the Evangelist in the University of Cambridge, My Lady.’
‘You are a man of surprises, My Lord.’
‘To myself, most of all. But if you will excuse me for a bare half-hour, My Lady – and I assure you, I will then return to your side, and will tell you what Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth is like. Upon that, you have the word of Matthew Quinton, the eighth Earl of Ravensden.’
He stooped, lifted my hand, and kissed it delicately. In that moment, I knew I would marry this man, if he would have me – and I intended to make very certain that he would. He was twenty years older than me, and English, and Protestant. Father would object, and the Abbé Mousnier would object, and my brothers and sisters would object. But the Earl of Ravensden had one thing that would overcome all their objections. The one thing that nearly everyone in France lacked, after thirty years of endless war.
Gold.
Well, he was a pirate, and all pirates have gold, do they not?
So reasoned my young and foolish self. But even if he had not a sou to his name, young Matthew, I would probably have set my heart on marrying him anyway. For as his lips touched the flesh of my hand, sending a shiver through my entire frame, he looked up at me. I melted into those eyes, so much younger than the face around them, and my heart was lost. I never found it again.
Then Milord Ravensden stood, turned, and went off to speak with the young Scotsman across the room. That is to say, with John Ruthven, the fateful Earl of Gowrie.
CHAPTER THREE
1599
The neatly tied piles of yellowing, mouldy papers are exactly as I arranged them, all those years before.
No-one had opened them, no-one had read them, since my grandmother and I spent the autumn of 1651 studying their contents. Outside the walls of Ravensden Abbey, our cavalier world was crumbling to heavily sequestrated dust, the one consolation being the slow recovery from his near-mortal wounds of my brother, the tenth Earl of Ravensden. And now the same papers lie before me, in the England of King George the Second and Sir Robert Walpole, as I mend slowly from my fever. They bring back both my own memories of that strange, desperately fraught time when I was eleven years old, and the recollections of those who lived half a century before that. Recollections from the deck of the mighty and ancient warship Merhonour, which – rebuilt many, many times – I later commanded in my turn, during the great Battle of Lowestoft in 1665. The recollections, too, contained within the strange, poisonous memoir of the foreigner, Horvath. And the very personal recollections that my dear grandmaman dictated to me, and which lie before me now, my childish hand sprawling across the pages. Curiously, the ancient, crabbed hand in which I write these words seems to have reverted very nearly to the same state it was in three-quarters of a century ago. But then, the only Pope I ever met once told me that as we approach the grave, we become more and more the child we once were.
So to the ancient papers once again. I realise that the story told in them will seem too incredible to those brought up on the mountains of dull, worthy ‘histories’ that have appeared in an endless procession in recent times. Burnet, White Kennett, Echard, Oldmixon…every man sets up as a ‘historian’, it seems, but not one of them with the slightest awareness of the truth of what actually happened in history. Better, then, to present the truth as fiction, just as fiction is now presented as truth, no man, it seems, being able any longer to tell the difference between the two. Besides, this business called ‘the novel’ is not difficult, it seems, but I should have realised that already: the success of that talentless mountebank Defoe proves it beyond question, and he mangles together truth and fiction with breathless impudence.
As for the other sensation of our age, Gulliver’s Travels: read these words, Dean Swift, and weep.
Laszlo Horvath:
‘At least five hundred Janissaries charged our position,’ I say, ‘and there were no more than a hundred of us defending the wall. True, most of them were good fellows – Wallachians, Moldavians, a few Serbs, a few of us Hungarians. But we were too few to hold the position, My Lord. The Janissaries charged, and charged again. We fought them hand-to-hand in the rubble of the breach, falling back toward the church in the centre of the village. I prayed to the Good Lord, for I thought my last hour had come, especially when a Mahometan scimitar slashed across my side.’
I have no need to exaggera
te any of this. I remember it as well as if it were yesterday, a battle in blazing sun and dust in a place whose name none of us knew.
‘Show me,’ he says, leaning forward.
I lift my shirt and point to the scar. It is easy to differentiate from all of the others, being longer and newer. This fight was barely three years before, and my oldest scars date back more than fifteen years before that. He is impressed by the sight of the wound; he has many of his own, so this is no small compliment.
‘We were dead men,’ I say, ‘and if the village fell, the Ottomans would be able to flank our advance on Giurgiu, down the Danube. Further and further back we went, fighting all the way, right up to the doors of the church—’
‘Then how did you survive, man?’
‘Thanks be to God, Prince Mihail knew the importance of our position. Just as my foot reached behind me to find the first of the church steps, I heard the trumpets blowing. There was a roaring of men and a thundering of hooves, and then they galloped into the square. Cossacks, My Lord – one of the regiments of the Host that had allied with we Christians. No finer horsemen grace the Earth. They came on like devils on horseback, shrieking and slashing with their blades. The Janissaries fell back, and we went directly into the church to give thanks for our deliverance.’
He leans back, taking a long draught of his wine.
‘Fuck me, Horvath,’ he says. I now realise, after some weeks of confusion, that ‘Fuck Me’ is not his nickname for me. ‘Fuck me, but you’re a lucky bastard to have survived all those years in a war so vicious.’
‘You call me a bastard? Why do you do that?’
‘Don’t be offended, good fellow. In our tongue, “bastard” is not an insult – well, it can be, of course, but it can also be a term of respect, or affection. Depends how you say it. If I say “You bastard” like this, I am insulting you. But if I say “You bastard” like that, I am calling you my friend.’
