The Rage of Fortune

by J. D. Davies

  The Dowager Countess:

  He did indeed ride with Sir Philip Sidney at Zutphen. What was more, he never tired of telling the story of how he had ridden with Sir Philip Sidney at Zutphen; I probably heard it, oh, four or five hundred times during the course of our life together. He was not at sea in that summer of 1586 because of yet another falling out with Sir Francis Drake, so being of an impatient and warlike nature, he went off to join the army fighting in the Netherlands instead. There, he became fast friends with Sidney, England’s romantic warrior-poet. He was alongside Sidney when Sir Philip was fatally wounded in the thigh, and was at his bedside for much of the month that he lingered, dying slowly of gangrene. The Earl was one of the principal mourners during the great funeral at Saint Paul’s, as yet the only state funeral England has ever bestowed upon a commoner; although I have no doubt that General Cromwell will order one for himself when the time comes for him to make his deserved descent to hell.

  Of course, that was all before my time. But one of the few consolations of having to learn that unspeakable barbarity called the English language is that I have been able to read Sir Philip Sidney’s poetry in the original. Arcadia…Astrophel and Stella…they still bring tears to my eyes. Be a poet, grandson, and make women weep for centuries to come. Better that by far than becoming a warrior like your grandfather, or being a warrior-poet fated to die young in battle, as both Sidney and your own father were.

  The Earl of Ravensden:

  I made my way to the hovel where Nicholas Iles lay – or rather, Captain Musk, whose praises the crew of the Halcyon could not sing loudly enough.

  ‘How does he fare?’ I asked the dolt of an army surgeon attending to him.

  The fellow, a bald, sweating creature, wiped his bloodied hands on his breeches.

  ‘Should be dead, with such a wound. But it’s not infected, My Lord, and that’s the miracle. He must be the only man in the army not infected with something.’

  ‘Then why does he not wake? He’s been dead to the world for two weeks, man.’

  ‘That I can’t say. Struck his head when the shot blew him to the deck, perhaps? That’s what some of his men said.’

  I looked down upon the still face of the young poet, and felt – I do not know, but for one fleeting moment, I wondered if it could be that which fathers are said to feel for their sons. As it was, I knelt down by the side of his pallet and began to recite the forty-first psalm. But as I spoke the words, I vowed to Our Lord that if Nicholas Iles lived, then to repay all his good service to me, I would send him back to Ravensden Abbey to recover his strength.

  The Dowager Countess:

  And that, grandson, was how, one day in January of the year Two, a horse-drawn litter came through the gate passage. I was but recently returned from a visit to the Treshams, not far away in Northamptonshire, who were loyal sons of Holy Church and always seemed able to secure the services of a priest to celebrate Mass and hear confessions. Thus I was in the library of Ravensden Abbey, feeling spiritually uplifted and reading, if I recall correctly, Moderata Fonte’s The Worth of Women: Wherein is Clearly Revealed Their Nobility and Their Superiority to Men, when I heard an altercation involving Old Barcock – no, the Old Barcock that was then, not the one that is now. So I went down, donned boots, trudged through the snow in the courtyard, and found two rough fellows who, nevertheless, knuckled their foreheads at my approach.

  ‘What is the meaning of this?’ I demanded, as imperiously as I imagined a Countess of Ravensden should demand.

  ‘Begging pardon, My Lady,’ said the rightmost fellow, ‘we are Halcyons, here by My Lord’s command—’

  ‘Halcyons?’ I said. ‘What, pray, are Halcyons?’

  ‘I’m afraid, My Lady,’ said a weak but familiar voice from within the litter, ‘that they are part of my crew.’

  Ah, but it is as though I can hear my husband chiding me for interrupting him. Look at him, grandson, there in the Van Dyck. Do you not detect a frown upon that imperious face which was not there a moment ago? Let us return to his journal, then, a few weeks before Nicholas Iles came to Ravensden Abbey; and so to the Battle of Kinsale, where the fate of one of Queen Elizabeth’s kingdoms was decided.

  The Earl of Ravensden:

  Nothing can trump the blood, glory and thrill of a sea fight.

  That said, I had nearly forgotten the very particular feelings of exhilaration that a warrior only experiences in a cavalry battle. True, there is the thrill of the charge, but one can feel something akin to that any day of the year, when in chase of some decayed stag or scabby fox across one’s own fields. But there is something about being upon a fine steed, riding straight at an enemy. Man and horse become one, a kind of martial centaur, and all other senses are blotted out. It is as though the horse’s blood runs through you and yours through the horse. Mountjoy had given me Menelaus, a fine black steed from his own stables, and I sensed at once that this horse and I would greatly enjoy killing Irishmen and Spaniards together. I wished I had my best full armour, rather than merely the battered breastplate which I wore about ship; but then, blue-and-gold Milanese armour was likely to be wasted on the bog-Irish, and would probably rust in their endless, infernal rain.

  The Irish armies lay before us now, advancing across the ridge to the south of the forest, north west of Kinsale itself, aiming to fight their way through us to their Spanish allies in the town.

  ‘Six, maybe seven thousand men,’ said Dick Wingfield on my left, surveying the host before us. ‘Your countrymen have turned out in force, My Lord Clanricarde.’

  ‘The Irish will never fail to rush headlong to their deaths in a hopeless cause,’ said the young Burke, Earl of Clanricarde, who in his manners and speech was as English as Wingfield or I. ‘That is Ireland’s tragedy, time upon time.’

  We three sat upon our mounts at the front of the royal army’s cavalry, studying the advancing lines. Harp standards, the red hand of Ulster and the personal banners of the treacherous earls of Tyrone and Tyrconnel flew before them. Pipers and drummers sounded their defiance. I turned to look at our own men, a motley collection of English and loyal Irish, fighting under the flags of Saint George and the golden crowns of Munster – the province ever firmest in its allegiance to the English crown, unlike the notorious traitors of Ulster.

  ‘Mountjoy’s taking time with his orders,’ said Wingfield. ‘And that’s an almighty risk. If the Spanish come out of Kinsale town before we’ve dealt with the rebels over there—’

  I had fought with Dick Wingfield before, in Holland, Portugal and Brittany. Now Marshal of the loyal Irish army, he was an old soldier who did not suffer fools gladly; a man after my own heart.

  ‘I think your wish is granted, Dick,’ I said, pointing to an impossibly young despatch rider galloping directly for us, Mountjoy’s standard in his hand.

  ‘My Lords! Marshal Wingfield!’ Clanricarde and I exchanged a glance: the lad was so young, his voice was only just breaking. ‘The Lord Deputy’s orders! Your cavalry to advance across yonder stream and charge the enemy forthwith!’

  ‘Surely the enemy will expect that?’ said Clanricarde.

  ‘I think not,’ I said. ‘They’re northerners, My Lord. They don’t know the land, so they certainly don’t know the depth of that stream.’

  ‘From the way they’re forming up,’ said Wingfield, ‘they’re going to try to mire us in the bogs. And their columns are too far apart – a five year old child could set out a toy army in a better disposition than that. The Lord Deputy has the right of it, I reckon.’

  Wingfield raised his hand, and our trumpets sounded. The royal cavalry advanced, at first at a walking gait, then a trot, then a canter as we approached the stream. The Irish were frantically redeploying their own cavalry to meet the threat, but as we reached the water’s edge, Wingfield gave the signal to our trumpeters, and we broke into a gallop, the demi-lances lowering their points and directing them toward the enemy. Menelaus seemed to revel in the shallow water splashing up over his
haunches. For my part, I drew my sword – a good old plain English sword, not a fancified rapier – extended my arm, and prayed that my blade would shortly bury itself in the heart or brain of a traitor.

  A moment later, the killing business began.

  The Irish, as was their wont, were on much smaller steeds, their hobbies: nimble in their wild bogs and mountain passes, but no match for proper war-horses on open ground. No matter how brave the soldier, or skilled the horseman, a fighter is at an almighty disadvantage if his opponent towers over him. Menelaus was like a great beast in the ancient tales, rampaging through ordinary mortals as though they were chaff. He seemed positively to revel in the soft, marshy ground that the Irish clearly hoped would prove our undoing. And as for his rider –

  I hacked and stabbed with abandon, always with the advantage of height, slashing downward into skulls and shoulders. The Irish, for their part, persisted with their age-old tactic of throwing their spears, a fatal strategy against armoured men on proper war horses – men armed with lances and swords, or else the muskets and pistols of our shot-on-horseback. One fellow, more valiant than the rest, tried to keep me at a distance and to work around Menelaus’ flanks to my blind side. He was a remarkably able rider, but then, the Irish had to be: their horses were too small for war saddles, and they rode without stirrups, ideal for skirmishing and ambushes, but a fatal combination in combat such as this. My adversary was also a capable swordsman, parrying and weaving dexterously to avoid my thrusts and cuts, trying to make me lose my advantage by over-extending. Curling red hair and a thin beard that curled outward at its end: a face I shall never forget. Finally he stabbed at Menelaus, no doubt hoping to unhorse me, but the fine beast only neighed furiously, not rearing up out of control. Reining in with my left hand and shifting my balance, I swung round and slashed hard, severing Thin-Beard’s head clean from the neck. The great gush of blood drenched both Menelaus and me –

  ‘My Lord!’ cried Wingfield. ‘You’re not hurt?’

  ‘A fine bath on a bracing day, Marshal! What could be better?’

  But as I answered Wingfield, I looked behind him. Although we were slaughtering Irishmen by the dozen, our advantage in size would swiftly be offset by the sheer numbers the enemy were bringing against us –

  ‘Great God, Dick, look at Clanricarde! Did you ever see the like?’

  For the moment, the Irish were ignoring us and concentrating all their attention on the young Earl. But Clanricarde seemed to have a veritable legion of invisible guardian angels around him. Every one of his thrusts struck home. Every one of his parries deflected oncoming steel. Every pistol aimed in his direction missed. It was very nearly a sight to make a man turn Papist: for Richard Burke, Earl of Clanricarde, was as loyal to the Church of Rome as the traitors Tyrone and Tyrconnel, but he saw as clearly as they did not that Ireland could only prosper under English peace and law, with the incomprehensible superstitions of the Gaels banished to the outer darkness.

  Inspired by Clanricarde’s astonishing example, our cavalrymen rallied and began to press the rebel Irish once again. The matter might have been very different if del Aguila had brought his veteran troops out of Kinsale town; but apart from a token force, far off on the other side of the engagement, the Dons did not stir.

  ‘Time to second the noble Earl, Marshal!’ I cried.

  ‘Aye! And look there, My Lord! Tyrone won’t have expected that, by Christ!’

  A little way downstream, the main body of Mountjoy’s cavalry was advancing across a ford which the rebel army simply could not have known about, else they would surely have guarded it. It was the last I saw of this part of the battle: a moment later, Wingfield and I charged back into the melee, and once again my entire world consisted only of Menelaus beneath me and the man I was about to kill in front of me. But from the accounts of others, notably that of Charles Mountjoy himself, I know that the charge of the Lord Deputy’s cavalry proved the last straw for the mounted Irish. The rebel cavalry broke, and even I, my eyes and mind clouded by the red mist of battle, became aware that fewer and fewer opponents were before me.

  Then there was Mountjoy’s young officer again, galloping over the prone bodies of dead and dying Irishmen.

  ‘My Lords and Marshal! Lord Deputy’s orders! Regroup, and fall upon the enemy infantry—’

  He was barely ten feet from me when one of the wounded traitors raised himself upon one arm and fired a pistol with the other. It was as though the lad’s chest exploded, the blood and bone and organs spattering his shocked young face.

  I rode over to the killer, made Menelaus rear, and brought the great horse’s forelimbs down upon him. I repeated the move again. And again.

  The Dowager Countess:

  Cornet John Taylor. That was his name, it seems. The solitary Englishman of birth to die in the entire Battle of Kinsale, such was the scale of the victory.

  The news reached Ravensden Abbey in a letter from my husband. It must have been one of those kept in the main part of the library, amid the muniments that the rats ate twenty years ago, and thus is lost to history. But in essence, Kinsale was the great victory in Ireland that had eluded the English for years. The Irish rebels, forced to fight the battle on the kind of open ground they had always avoided, were slaughtered in their hundreds. When the Spanish finally deigned to sally forth from the town, they were easily beaten back. General del Aguila surrendered soon afterwards, and the Dons evacuated Kinsale and all their other garrisons. Admiral Zubiaur’s fleet, refloated in Castlehaven harbour, carried them back to Spain, chastened just as they had been in the Armada year. The rebel Irish Earls fought on for a few more years, but their cause was hopeless. They and their retinues finally left Ireland for perpetual exile in Spain, and an entire world perished. Ulster, the stronghold of the fallen Earl of Tyrone, was settled by good Scots Protestants. How successful that stratagem proved, grandson, you may gauge from the terrible massacres of those same Protestants that took place in the year after you were born, and from the equal horrors that General Cromwell has committed upon the Catholics in Ireland, these last few years.

  As a Countess of England, I have one opinion upon it all. As a true daughter of the Holy Mother Church, though, I have quite another.

  But it is probably best if you do not write that.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Laszlo Horvath:

  Even as I stand alongside the Macrae, looking over the corpses of the men we have slaughtered, I know that he intends to betray me, and I know that I will kill him before the next rising of the sun.

  For now, of course, he smiles, and slaps my back, and calls me his ‘good Horvath’. As indeed I am. It was I who chose the ground, so that the much larger force of Lundins were hemmed in by the great bog where their bodies now lie. It was I who trained the Macraes in musketry, a brutal but effective art barely known by these wild Scots. It was I who led the flanking attack, leading part of the Macrae’s force through the trees on the side of the glen to emerge behind the Lundins and cut off their retreat. It was I who cut down a dozen Lundins with my own sword, they being no match for a man who has fought with Janissaries and still lives.

  But despite all this, the Macrae will betray me. When I mention the gold he owes me, he mumbles something about the Edinburgh banker who holds it. And when I mention the more important matter, his eyes shift from mine.

  ‘So, My Lord?’ I say, though he has no more right to such an honour than – than many another. But the Macrae, as he is termed, is susceptible to flattery, and is considered a great man by the few hundred herdsmen and cutthroats who form his so-called ‘clan’. ‘So, My Lord, will you now secure the audience you promised me? The introduction to the King?’

  ‘Aye, of course, good Horvath. But in good time, eh? It’ll take a wee while for my friends at court to smooth things over with His Grace, for killing so many of the Lundins, there. A great man for peace, His Grace is, or at least that’s what he tells us, his lords and chieftains. But enough gold in the rig
ht purses – gold we’ll now get from Lundin lands, and Lundin ransoms – and Jamie Stuart will look kindly on the Macrae again. And then, my friend, you shall have your audience. But for now, Horvath man, there’s feasting and drinking to be done, and ballads to be sung of the day the Macraes slaughtered the Lundins!’

  It is dawn when he is finally carried to his bed, and I lie beside him, seemingly responsive to his attentions. To the men who have carried him to his chamber at the top of this remote tower-house, I will seem as drunk as he is. But the ability to hold drink is given to every Hungarian as a birthright, and not even a Scot can better one of us. So as the Macrae passes out in the midst of his fumbling, I remain very much awake. I look down upon his nakedness, running now to fat, and wonder how I ever allowed myself to believe that this empty, boastful brute could ever help me to my goal. But he wanted a man to train an army – or the tiny, pathetic apology for an army that I later discovered it to be – and was prepared not to ask too many questions about why I left England.

  I curse myself for my folly. There is now nearly no time to remedy it: the reports from London say that Elizabeth is weakening. I have one course open to me, the course I now see I should have embarked upon in the very beginning. The direct course. The course of revenge. But before I can embark upon that course, I have to deal with the inconveniences that are the Macrae and the men he will have assigned to kill me.

  I cross the floor to the small chest that contains the things precious to me, take out my finest rondel dagger, and draw the point slowly across the Macrae’s throat, giving him a new, scarlet, smile, watching the tide of blood darken the furs upon his bed.

  And then I wait. An hour or so, I reckon: having seen me fight at the head of them, Macrae’s men will want to leave me long enough to be entirely certain I am fast asleep.

  At last, I hear steps upon the spiral staircase. Three men, making the unmistakeable cacophony of drunkards trying to be very, very quiet.