Gentleman Captain (11 page)

I woke late the next morning, not even the noisy swabbing of the decks or the ship's bell tolling for the change of watch stirring me from the insensibility brought on by Judge's liberality with his excellent wine. I reached out sleepily for Cornelia's welcoming flesh, thinking myself back in our comfortable great bed at Ravensden, but when my hand caressed instead rough wooden planks, I sat up with a start. The smell struck me at once, that unmistakeable stench of a ship of war below decks: old wood, new wood where the old could no longer serve, the oakum that stopped water pouring between the wood, the white-stuff that stopped the sea worms getting at the oakum, the gun smoke ingested from many broadsides, tobacco smoke, bilge water in all its infinite variations of stink, and most potent of all, the odour of over one hundred and thirty men, even allowing for all the dire royal injunctions against relieving oneself between the decks. A frigate of the Fifth Rate is no leviathan but a mere eighty feet long and twenty-five broad, and packing so many men within such a little frame means but little privacy or quiet for any, even her captain. I could hear snatches of talk from the decks above and below, and as I lay in the warmth and comfort of my sea-bed, I listened with amusement to the aimless gossip of the men around me.

'And your wife was on her back for old Harker, too, like half the women of Cornwall and Portsmouth town...'

'Why no, that were your sister and your mother, so as I heard...'

Then I caught some whispered words that pierced right through me and made me sweat. 'Aye, the
Happy Restoration.
All hands, so they say. Gentleman captains, boys. Knows nothing of the sea, and proud of it they are, too. God curse them for their arrogance, and they'll whip the skin off your back if you so much as spit—'

'They say he shat himself with fear right there on the
Restorations
deck, aye, right before he gave the order that sent her the wrong way and drove her onto the rocks, just because he didn't know his starboard from his larboard—'

'Harker murdered? Never, I say. The creeping pox, he had–seen that, once, down in Alicante. Big among the Spanish it is, the creeping pox. Some old Portsmouth whore will have given it to him, mark my words–'

'Matthew Quinton, eh? Well, boys, we'll soon see if he's a hundredth part of the men his father and grandfather were—'

I turned over and groaned, then cursed at the thunder of ten regiments of horses inside my skull, regiments provided gratis by Captain Judge's liberality with his wine. As I began to stumble into my clothes, I dimly recalled my return to the
Jupiter,
and Vyvyan's grudging provision of blankets for me to lie in James Harker's surprisingly comfortable sea-bed. Praying to see the face of Phineas Musk was a new and unusual experience, but as I sat in the house of office in the quarter-gallery, the captain's exclusive place of easement, I longed for the old rogue to arrive with my belongings.

I prayed fervently for another arrival, too. For I desired, with all my heart, the presence of Kit Farrell aboard the
Jupiter.
I needed his steady advice. I desperately needed to begin the lessons he had promised me in Kinsale, all those months before. Above all, I needed on this ship one man, just one, that was my own.

For all his youth and strangeness, Vyvyan was an efficient and quietly competent lieutenant, as far as I could then judge such things; for those were the days when all ships, no matter how great, had but one lieutenant, and yet seemed to work as well as they do nowadays, when even the smallest frigates have lieutenants galore crawling out of every inch of the bilges. Nevertheless, I could have done without his bringing the ship's warrant officers to my cabin to be formally introduced to me over a prolonged breakfast of bread, veal, eggs, and small beer. I was not feeling myself, and had wished to avoid my fellow men as long as possible. As it transpired, I need not have been concerned, for rarely in my life have I encountered a more unimpressive group of men (other than when facing a committee of the House of Commons).

Boatswain Ap was the most talkative of them, though this was not much to the good for he was virtually unintelligible. I gathered that he came from some unpronounceable hole north of Cardigan, though he might just as likely have said Cardiff, or Carmarthen, or Caernarvon. It was impossible to be certain from the gabble that came from his mouth, but I quickly learned that an occasional nod and a
just so, Boatswain,
would suffice to keep him happy. Stanton, the gunner, and Penbaron, the carpenter, were devout members of Harker's Cornish coterie, too distraught at the loss of their master (and probably at their employment prospects, also) to manage much in the way of conversation. Although I had enough of a knowledge of guns to be able to find some common ground with the portly, guarded Stanton, there was none at all with the small and wiry Penbaron, for like most captains, I never could properly tell a keelson from a futtock, and to me the wooden world of the carpenter was wholly anathema. He attempted to engage me upon the subject of the mizzenmast, which was apparently held aloft only by the ministrations of the angelic host; but I had no wish to spoil my breakfast so gave him little encouragement.

Then there was Skeen, the ship's surgeon. Thin and dirty, he was a profoundly ignorant and insignificant man, a Londoner whose hearing had been shattered by too many Dutch broadsides a decade before. After James Vyvyan, he had been the first man to inspect James Harker's body, but had done no more than eventually and solemnly to pronounce that the captain was indeed dead, a fact that Vyvyan and the whole crew had known well enough twenty minutes earlier. Skeen would have been an obvious suspect for the poisoning of Harker, but it was hard to imagine this repulsive and foul-smelling little creature being competent enough to bring off such a cunning and secretive crime. I prayed privately to Our Lord for good health through our voyage, that I would have no need of Skeen's ministrations.

The lowest of our warrant officers, in rank at least, was one William Janks, a bluff old Norfolk man and the provider of the excellent veal to which I found myself unable to do justice–a sad consequence of Captain Judge's table. Like most of the navy's cooks, he was a maimed sailor, given the post as a means of supporting himself. Janks had no left leg; it had been hacked off during the Hispaniola expedition, to save him from the gangrene. Unlike most of the navy's cooks, though, Janks could actually cook, and so well that Harker had felt no need to employ a second cook for his own table, as was usually the case. Janks was so old that he had actually sailed with my grandfather during the notorious attack on Cadiz in '25. This had been old Earl Matthew's last voyage at sea, and Janks told a good story of my grandfather stamping and raging on his quarterdeck as the invading army returned to his ship, drunk as lords after liberating several warehouses of wine, instead of pressing home their assault on Cadiz. I could imagine my grandfather's wrath at the realization that the unfailing ability of the English to get unspeakably drunk on any foreign shore had cost him a chance of gathering up all the booty of Cadiz town, thus restoring the fortunes of the House of Quinton. As the cook mumbled on toothlessly, I could see that this, my grandfather's greatest disaster, had been the apotheosis of Janks's life. For him, nothing since had matched the sheer excitement of that great adventure when he was young and whole, and nothing ever would. The ship's cook, at least, was an ally, I thought, with a disproportionate amount of pleasure.

There were two exceptions to the regiment of mediocrity that made up the ranks of my warrant officers, and I was soon to wish that they were as insipid as the rest. The first was the ship's master. Malachi Landon was a brooding great ox of a man. His salute was surly, and as he stood in front of me, lofty and arrogant, his whole body screamed its contempt for the ignorant young prig of a captain who stood before him. Even so, Landon–like all the other officers–knew well his dependence on my testimony to his good conduct at the end of our voyage, and his words, spoken in a harsh Kentish burr, were less hostile than his posture. He gave his opinion that we were wasting time, lying at an anchor waiting to sail west when we had such a fine breeze to take us east, and northabout around the top of Scotland; but our orders from the king and Duke of York were to sail west to allow us to send word to Dumbarton, and although I could not share such a confidence with Malachi Landon, I made it clear that we had no discretion in the matter. He then asked if I would be keeping my own journal, or intended to issue the sailing commands, as some of my fellow gentleman captains were already doing. I replied that, for the moment, I had no intention of doing either, and he seemed morosely content at that.

Later, James Vyvyan told me that Malachi Landon had long been master of a large merchantman trading with the Levant and was a Younger Brother of Trinity House, no less, with good connections to both courtiers and Parliament-men. Having avoided taking service under the Commonwealth (whether out of secret affection for the king, as he claimed, or a fondness for the profit to be had from Levant voyages, Vyvyan could not say), Landon now fancied himself ready to captain a king's ship. He was bitterly discontented at having been given instead a master's post on a mere Fifth Rate frigate, rather than one of the ships sent to Lisbon or the Mediterranean on their grand voyages. He and James Harker had quarrelled endlessly, it seemed; for Harker esteemed his own seamanship, and his ability to set a course. No doubt Landon was outraged to have been passed over when the command of the
Jupiter
became vacant; even more, to have been passed over in favour of the likes of Matthew Quinton. As was my new wont, I tried to cast him as a killer, and found it easy. But Malachi Landon would have killed with a blade or his fists, I thought, not with the subtlety that had done for Harker–if indeed there was any truth in my lieutenant's wild suspicions (and in the wilder fancies that roved through the far reaches of my mind).

That left Stafford Peverell, the purser. He was a perspiring man of perhaps forty years, of middling height but running now to fat. His face was florid beneath his lavish yellow wig. His breath reminded me of the stench of a decomposing dog. He glanced around my cabin with distaste, then looked me up and down in the same way.

'Peverell, sir. Stafford Peverell. Of the Peverells of Rydal. In the county of Cumberland.' He paused, as though expecting to me to say that of course I had heard of his illustrious lineage. 'I am glad to welcome you, Captain. I am sure that having a Quinton at our head will prove a great advantage to this vessel,' and he gave a leering smile that exposed his rotten teeth. 'We have been rudely governed aboard this ship, Captain. The more genteel of us have found life ... onerous.'

Vyvyan gave this slug-like creature a look of fury beyond his years. Peverell ignored him, and leant in close to me to talk malodorously of the demands of his position, for no office on the ship was as burdensome as that of purser. I must have evinced some visible sign of disbelief, for Peverell, seeing that I needed convincing, held forth at length on the manifold corruptions of the Victualling Office at Tower Hill, the endless pains necessary to keep the ship's books in good order, the importance of keeping an eye open for evil-doing and dishonour among a crew of worthless Cornishmen. A necessary sacrifice, he said, to achieve his ultimate and entirely deserved goals of a clerkship to the Exchequer or the Privy Council, followed by the secretaryship to one of the great men of the realm. Only the impoverishment of his family in the civil wars, he explained, along with Whitehall's unaccountable neglect of his obvious merits, forced him to hold such a mean position as purser on an insignificant man-of-war. And all the time he spoke, I had in mind the Duke of York's incisive assessment of him:
Purser, Stafford Peverell. Haughty and ambitious. A close, cunning fellow.

It was evident from their faces that the other officers disliked Stafford Peverell, but there was something more in their eyes, too. Was it fear? Could this unpleasant, arrogant, toadying individual pose a threat to anyone? I thought not, although there truly was something about him that sent a chill down my spine.

Later, I asked James Vyvyan if Peverell's contempt for his uncle had been reciprocated. Vyvyan's reply was slow and careful, the response of a man who does not wish to take his enemy into his confidence, but does so despite himself. It had been reciprocated, he said, and tenfold at that. Their contempt for each other was so powerful that Vyvyan had even hysterically accused the purser of being James Harker's murderer. But when the first torrent of grief abated, Vyvyan considered the matter again, and concluded that it would have been far more likely for Harker to have killed the arrogant, overbearing Peverell, than the reverse. But my lieutenant's eyes told a different story, and I knew that one day, I would have to find the bottom of this estrangement between my purser and the rest of my officers.

One warrant officer was missing from the assembly, and at the end of breakfast, as the others trooped out to their duties, I asked Vyvyan, 'So where was the chaplain, Lieutenant? The Reverend Gale, isn't it?'

Vyvyan shrugged. 'Ashore, no doubt. He'll be back for the Sunday service, sir–or at least, he usually is. Much good that a service from Francis Gale will do for our immortal souls.'

Ashore,
I thought,
without his captain's permission?
'And what does Reverend Gale do ashore?'

'Captain Harker gave him the permission, sir. He thought it best to have him on the ship as little as possible.' Then, for the first time in our acquaintance, James Vyvyan smiled a little. 'As for what he's doing ashore, Captain, well, he does the rounds of the places of worship. Most mornings he's worshipping at the Red Lion. Afternoons, at the Greyhound. In the evenings, if he's still sensible by then, his devotions take him to the Dolphin.'

A sot, at sea for money,
the Duke of York had written.