The Rage of Fortune

by J. D. Davies

  For my part, it proved just as impossible to anticipate what he would do in fight as it had when he was conspiring against me.

  I tried all I knew. Feints at his left, forcing him to parry – lunges for his heart and his head – counter-attack, always trying to work round to his left – stoccata thrusts at the belly – taking a high guard, using my height, angling down for his head – but he was always ready for me.

  I watched his eyes. I watched his wrist. I watched the blade. I watched how he stood, the angle of his body. But as we fought along the sand of Alnburgh, the waves lapping the shore at our side as steel struck steel over and over again, I found no weakness in my cousin, not even a hint of a mistake.

  I could barely anticipate his moves, but he seemed always to be able to anticipate mine. His blade always seemed to be in the right place, a second before I even thought of placing my own there. He was always on the offensive, always advancing on the right foot, forcing me further and further up the beach. I do not know how long we fought thus, but one thing I knew: I was losing.

  I thrust again for his head, but he brought up his rapier from beneath, at once deflecting my blade, pressing it back toward my body, and threatening my face with his own. We stood there for a moment, face to face, barely inches apart, and I saw the all-consuming hatred in his eyes. Then he suddenly brought up his left foot, thus shifting his entire balance forward, and gripped my sword-hand with his own, trying to prise my fingers away from the quillions.

  Fuck and damnation – no need for him to have a botta segreta, for he’s undone you with a schoolboy trick, Ravensden – disarmed and pierced with your own blade would be a fine way to die.

  I swung at him with my left arm, hoping to use my reach to land a punch. He ducked away from the blow, but in doing so lost balance slightly on the wet sand and let go of my sword arm. But as he parted, he somehow flicked his wrist to manage a little mandritta cut. I felt the point of his rapier slice my cheek, felt the familiar sensation of blood flowing over flesh, and knew he had drawn first blood.

  I half-expected him to charge me instantly, to follow up his advantage by attacking furiously and finally. But instead, he stepped away.

  ‘You have suffered the first blooding,’ he said. ‘By your rules, you may change weapon, if you wish.’

  ‘I never expected you to permit that, if you had the upper hand.’

  ‘Is it not the honourable thing? The thing that an Earl of Ravensden would do?’

  His answer dumbfounded me. After all, then, and in spite of all, some of the honour of the Quintons had found its way into the Hungarian’s blood.

  ‘It is. It is indeed. I am grateful to you, cousin Balthasar.’

  I called for Iles, and he brought me a new weapon. Or rather, an old weapon: a very old weapon, and its attendant. An English sword of the old fashion, with a cross hilt and a shorter, broader blade than the rapier, together with the buckler that nestled on my left forearm. It is difficult to explain the sense of relief and familiarity I felt as I gripped the sword. For this was the weapon I had learned and mastered as a boy, when it was still the universal blade of choice in England, before the damnable rapier, its complicated grips, and all its Italian and Frenchified tricks, became the rage of the hour.

  I nodded to the Hungarian, we took up our guards, and resumed.

  Oh, this was better. No more of the incessant offence, the constant lunging and thrusting. The English sword was made for cutting and defending, complimented by the indispensable buckler. Now I could parry the Hungarian’s thrusts with the latter while cutting with the blade; and, as even the simplest grasp of anatomy reveals, a cut to the head, the shoulders or the body with such a sword is made with far more force than a rapier thrust, where the body is lunging forward unnaturally far.

  It was my turn to attack, and for perhaps a minute, cousin Balthasar seemed confused by this new-old weapon, by the different lines of attack. But then he adjusted, countering my cuts by using the rapier in the same fashion that I was using my sword – eschewing quite so many thrusts as before, relying more on the quarters of his weapon nearest the hilt for blocking my attacks, parrying and cutting double-bladed.

  Now I was on the back foot again, parrying his relentless attacks with my buckler, and the truth came to me. His weapon of choice was a scimitar; another cutting weapon. This method of fighting favoured him just as much as it did me, if not more.

  I was tiring now. For just as each attack with a cutting sword carries more force, so it expends more, too. My left arm, now bearing the brunt of defence as endless cuts rained in upon the buckler, felt like it was carrying a pail of coal. Yet still Balthasar came on, seemingly as fresh as when we began, seemingly inexhaustible.

  I failed to bring up the buckler in time – his blade sliced across my left shoulder, and as I brought up my own sword to clash with his, I tripped over a hummock of sea-grass, falling heavily onto the wounded shoulder.

  I saw the shadow of cousin Balthasar upon the sand, his rapier raised and levelled in a high guard, poised to thrust for the kill.

  I heard Iles’ cry – ‘My Lord! Remember Tamburlaine at Chester!’

  I saw Horvath’s right foot step forward toward me, then come forward again as he steadied himself for the final, fatal lunge –

  I swung my sword low and hard, barely three inches above the sand. I felt the impact of steel through flesh and bone. I saw the blood spurt as the leg came very nearly entirely away from the foot. Fatally off balance, Balthasar Quinton, or Laszlo Horvath, fell forward.

  I brought my sword up, hard and fast, directly between his legs.

  He fell beside me, his face no more than inches from mine, his eyes staring at me. I lifted myself on my right elbow, and saw the terrible flow of blood spilling onto the sand. I was aware of Iles running toward me.

  The Hungarian’s lips moved, and he formed a word. His name.

  ‘Balthasar,’ he said. ‘Balthasar, Earl of Ravensden.’

  Then the eyes ceased to blink.

  The Dowager Countess:

  I ran faster than I had ever run, even when I was a girl chasing her brother in the groves around our chateau. Down the spiral stairs, through the courtyard, out of the postern, down to the beach. I stumbled more than once – skirts are not well suited to running on sand – and felt a pain in my arm which I immediately dismissed, only to learn a little later that it was a broken wrist.

  By the time I reached him, the Dutch surgeon was already stitching the fierce wound in his shoulder, and Iles was pouring a flask of some fiery liquid down his throat in between his roars of pain. I flung myself to his good side, and wept copiously.

  He kissed me on the top of the head.

  ‘It is done,’ he said. ‘God’s righteous judgement has prevailed. And tonight, my countess, we can return to the business of begetting a son who will be the undoubted, unchallenged Earl of Ravensden.’

  ‘And you will go no more to the wars,’ I said, ‘and put your life in peril as you have here, today?’

  ‘As to the latter, my love, I certainly intend to fight no more duels. It is a young man’s game, and I do not think at my age that I can learn to love the rapier. Besides, who is there left for me to fight? But as for the former… Soon there will be a new age in England. A new King. And whether he maintains the great war with Spain or not, he will still have enemies at sea, and he will still need an admiral.’

  I sobbed, but he held me tightly, and it all seemed better.

  Nicholas Iles:

  Once again we three were in the principal room of Alnburgh Castle, where the man once named Laszlo Horvath had sought to do hurt to my countess. The Earl, his shoulder heavily bandaged, was eating a leg of mutton and swilling a tankard of ale. The countess fussed over him protectively, telling him to be careful not to jar the wound. He humoured her, although I knew what he was thinking: which was, that a man who has been wounded a score of times really has no need of such advice.

  We were attending to the cons
equences of the death of Balthasar Quinton. A chest which must have been his, abandoned when he fled the castle those months before, had been brought up, and I was endeavouring to break the lock. Meanwhile, the Earl was dictating orders to the lad Ielden.

  ‘The body will be buried at Ravensden Abbey,’ he said, ‘in an unmarked plot.’ The Countess made to protest, but My Lord raised a hand. ‘It is what I want. I, the Earl of Ravensden. And it is what my grandmother wants. Whatever else he was, Balthasar Quinton was the son of Henry, sixth Earl, my uncle and her son. He is entitled to that mark of respect.’

  Finally, the point of my knife prised open the lock, and I lifted the lid of the Hungarian’s private chest. I drew out a dagger: a long, fearsome blade, still with dark stains of blood upon it. There were clothes, and two pistols, and –

  ‘Look here, My Lord,’ I said. ‘Papers. Notes in his hand. He kept a record.’

  Matthew, Earl of Ravensden, picked up a few of the sheets, surveyed their contents, crumpled them, and threw them to the ground.

  ‘It’s a dead business, now,’ he said. ‘These writings of his won’t interest anyone, and will only remind us of the hurts of this whole affair. Burn them, Iles. Destroy them. Laszlo Horvath is dead. Balthasar Quinton is dead. That’s all that matters now.’

  With that, he returned to his mutton and his ale.

  I looked at the papers again. I was a writer, so the destruction of words on a page was anathema to me. No, I would disobey My Lord in this. I would keep the papers of Balthasar Quinton, the man who might have been Earl of Ravensden.

  Perhaps in some future time, others not yet born might find some interest in his story.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Coronations have been two a farthing in my life.

  I have attended no fewer than six, beginning with the joyous reverie that was the crowning of King Charles the Second, miraculously restored to his throne after long years of exile and penury. I was drunk for a week.

  From then on, they deteriorated. The crowning of James the Second was a tedious affair, notable only for the ominous spectacle of the Supreme Governor of the Church of England refusing to participate in its Holy Communion because he was a Roman Catholic. That of the joint sovereigns, William and Mary, was awkward: what else could it be, when they were only being crowned because they had just deposed her father? Then came Queen Anne (so dull I have forgotten it), George the First (too German), and, very recently, his present Majesty King George the Second (too much Handel).

  But during all of these spectacular enthronements, I have had the same thought, always at the moment when the crown of state is placed upon the royal head, and the royal hands grip the sceptre and orb.

  None of you have a blood-right to sit there, adorned with those baubles.

  Hence my cynicism towards the great matter of the last forty years, the rival claims of the Jacobites and the Hanoverians: I suppose I am probably the only man in the British Isles who thinks it does not matter a jot which descendant of Davey Rizzio sits upon the throne. But one lesson the last forty years has taught me is that cynicism can easily be misconstrued as disaffection, or even treason, so I have learned to toast King George with appropriate enthusiasm. Just as I would toast King James if he ever managed to organise a decent invasion, which seems unlikely in the light of the alehouse comedies he has commanded to ignominious failure thus far.

  Yes, I am probably the only man still living who knows the truth, thanks to the oath grandmaman made me swear on her Vulgate Bible on a cold night at Ravensden Abbey, as autumn gave way to winter in that year of 1651. I swore that I would tell no-one else of our secret, and I kept that promise. At first, it was a sort of game between us: what eleven year old does not love a secret that has been shared only with him? But as I grew older, and especially after grandmaman died, it became an entirely different business. I realised at once that I could not share the truth with my uncle Tristram, whom I loved and trusted in most other things; but in the 1650s, his loyalties were uncertain, and he was rather too close to the Lord Protector and his spymaster John Thurloe for the comfort of the other members of the House of Quinton. His momentary curiosity about the secret knowledge his mother claimed to possess about the succession to Queen Elizabeth, that day we were all together at Ravensden Abbey, was soon forgotten as more urgent concerns pressed in on him, and in later years, he always seemed to have too much to do, and never pressed me upon the subject.

  So no, I could not tell my uncle. I could not tell my brother Charles, the Earl, either, for his loyalty to his King was unquestionable (for very secret reasons that I did not yet understand ), so what right did I have to shake it? I certainly could not tell my mother, whose devotion to the memory of the King and Martyr Charles the First was so all-consuming that I dreaded to think what might become of her if she learned the truth. I thought of sharing the burden with my sister Elizabeth, but she was soon married to Venner Garvey, a prominent member of Cromwell’s government, while my other sister, my twin Herry, was dead just two years after I learned these truths, before I was grown-up enough to even think of confiding in such a foolish creature as a girl. As I grew older, all of my friends were staunch cavaliers, so if I told any of them, they were bound to condemn me out of hand as a madman or worse. And when I finally took a Dutch wife, I could not even confide in her, for Cornelia was an Orangist, and would not have taken kindly to learning that the Prince William she venerated, later England’s King William the Third, was descended from a popish Italian lutenist.

  So there was nothing for it. Countless times I drew my sword, and risked my life, for the Stuarts, despite the knowledge I possessed. As far as I was concerned, though, the restoration of the monarchy had settled the matter: an event so miraculous, so utterly unlikely until just weeks before it happened, was surely conclusive proof that God wanted Charles Stuart to be King of England, regardless of whose blood flowed in his veins. And when I saw him crowned in Westminster Abbey, and remembering the words my grandfather had written about what the coronation ceremony meant, I knew I would fight and, if necessary, die, for this man.

  But even on that glorious day, as we all shouted ‘God save the King! May the King live forever!’, one thought held sway in my mind.

  My father, too, never knew of the secret knowledge that his parents possessed, or so grandmaman claimed. James Quinton, ninth Earl of Ravensden for the grand total of one hundred and eighteen days, was a poet-warrior, a dreamer who believed that he was cast in the mould of one of King Arthur’s knights, riding out to rid the world of the evil represented by Parliament’s great rebellion. Would he really have ridden to his death on Naseby field if he knew that he did so for the grandson of David Rizzio?

  That thought is in my mind now, as I set down the last of the ancient papers upon my desk by the window. No, I shall leave this sordid and unseemly writing of ‘novels’ to the likes of Defoe and Swift, whose gutter-like minds are better suited to it. I am very tired, and in any case, I have no doubt that they would be able to think of a suitable ending to this tale, which I cannot –

  The light coming through my window is a peculiar one, creeping through the dark rain clouds that are massing in the west, focusing a narrow shaft of sunlight onto the glass. It illuminates one of my grandfather’s papers, which happens to be on top of one of the several piles into which I have sorted them: the paper recounting his meeting with King James, in the wilderness on the border between England and Scotland.

  ‘And at that moment, I will have your unswerving loyalty, My Lord Ravensden? Even though you know what this letter says?’

  ‘You will be my lawful, anointed King, and I will fight for you with every breath left in my body, Your Grace. Even though I know what that letter says. Especially because I know what that letter says.’

  I notice something that I missed at first reading, by candlelight on a gloomy autumn day in the muniment room at Ravensden Abbey, when I was eleven years old. There is a slight impression in the margin: some faded wr
iting, so lightly inscribed upon the paper that it must have nearly vanished within a matter of months, let alone years, in marked contrast to the bold, forceful strokes of my grandfather’s hand alongside it. An inscription so faint that I must have overlooked it entirely, all those years ago.

  I recognise a date: The fifth day of November, 1628. Gunpowder treason day: the day on which my brother was born.

  I recognise my father’s initials: JQ.

  I recognise the motto of the Quinton family, written in my father’s hand: nihil est quod videtur.

  ‘Nothing is what it seems.’

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  HISTORICAL NOTE

  Matthew Quinton, eighth Earl of Ravensden, is a fictional character, but both his career and personality are based loosely on a number of the ‘sea dogs’ of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, notably George Clifford, Earl of Cumberland, who set out a number of privateering voyages and commanded warships during several naval expeditions. His career is well described in Richard Spence’s book, The Privateering Earl. The principal events of this book – the affairs of the ‘Invisible Armada’ and the Spinola galleys, the killings at Gowrie House, the conspiracy of the Earl of Essex and the Battles of Castlehaven, Kinsale and Sesimbra Bay – and a number of lesser ones (for instance, the treason and execution of Edward Squire, the Spanish galleon at Sligo, and the encounter with the Spanish plate fleet) all took place at the times, and in the ways, that I have described. Inevitably, though, I have injected some elements of poetic licence into each in order to give Earl Matthew and the other principal characters central parts in them. Thus Sir Richard Leveson led the attack on both Castlenipark Fort and the Spanish fleet at Castlehaven, leaving his vice-admiral lying off Kinsale, rather than the other way round; Sir William Monson was Leveson’s second-in-command at the Battle of Sesimbra Bay, and carried out the astonishing sortie into the bay in his flagship, the Garland; while the admiral who actually commanded at the defeat of the Spinola galleys was Sir Robert Mansel. Similarly, I have taken some minor liberties with the precise timings of some of the events during the Irish campaign of 1601-2. Above all, I am deeply conscious of the fact that I have played fast and loose with the personality and reputation of Sir Richard Leveson, whose boldness and gallantry at the Battle of Castlehaven has been measured, not unreasonably, against the most exacting question of all in naval history, namely, ‘What might Nelson have done?’. By way of apology to his descendants, and to the fine city of Wolverhampton, I here reproduce the words upon his splendid memorial in Saint Peter’s Church in that city: