Gentleman Captain (14 page)

As the sand ran from the ship's glass towards the moment when the bell would be rung, I thought ever more despairingly of the services that I had attended at our local parish church; I combed them for inspiration in case the task of leading the Jupiters in prayer should devolve upon me, but the Reverend George Jermy was hardly a shining example of Anglican eloquence. Put in as vicar of Ravensden by my grandfather fifty years before, Jermy had, with equal dexterity, survived countless changes in the official religion of the state and warded off the attentions of the grim reaper. Ordained by an ancient bishop who as a young man had been one of the chaplains attendant upon King Henry the Eighth's Archbishop Cranmer–the very man who had created the entire Church of England on which our immortal fates depended–Jermy's Methuselah-like refusal to die did not prevent his falling victim to the meandering habits of old age. As a result, his services were invariably an opportunity for the good folk of Ravensden parish to snatch another hour's sleep of a Sunday morning, the pews rocking slightly as snoring men and women swayed back and forth to the accompaniment of his soothing whispers. Strangely, Sunday was the only day of the week when my passionately Anglophile Cornelia reverted unhesitatingly and very publicly to the dour Calvinism of her youth, giving her the ideal excuse to avoid attendance at church.

I glanced at the clumsy pendant-watch that had been a coming-of-age gift from my uncle. Despite my complete failure to recollect a single sermon of Jermy's where I had stayed awake long enough to note the subject matter, I realized that the moment for action was at hand. We could wait for the sottish Gale no longer. I had a Bible in my cabin, of course, and the good old prayer book from the days of Cranmer and Queen Elizabeth. I would send Musk below to fetch them. Perhaps I could extemporize something on the first verse of Genesis...

A flurry of black and white from the steerage heralded the timely and surprisingly sober arrival of the Reverend Francis Gale. In daylight, Gale was not an unimpressive man: stocky, ruddy, and aged perhaps in his mid-forties, he was clearly no milk-and-water cleric, donnish and lost in his books. Shaven and washed, his wild hair concealed–at least to some extent–beneath a modest wig, and clad in full canonicals, Gale looked the part of a man of God. At the very least, he looked the part far better than his putative substitute, Captain Matthew Quinton. He raised a comparatively steady hand in benediction, and his unlikely congregation shuffled into a variety of prayerful postures. Even our four known papists (including the enigmatic Frenchman Le Blanc), and our one Mahometan, a thin and ingenious Algerine renegade named Ali Reis, closed their eyes and bowed their heads in their position slightly apart from the rest at the starboard rail.

I expected the usual prayers and intercessions from the century-old Prayer Book; but not today. Gale looked around his congregation, then directly at me, and began with the words of Psalm 51: 'I acknowledge my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me.'

I had heard these words, as the prelude to a short sleep, from George Jermy many times before. But from Jermy, who had committed no sin in half a century that anyone knew of, this sentence had always been a mild rebuke to his flock for the manifold inebriation, fornication, and quarrelsomeness in Ravensden village during the course of the previous week. Not so from the lips of Francis Gale. Our chaplain continued with unfamiliar words, read from a very small and very new leather-bound book that he drew out of the sleeve of his cassock.

'O eternal Lord God, who alone spreadest out the heavens, and rulest the raging of the sea; who hast compassed the waters with bounds until day and night come to an end; be pleased to receive into thy Almighty and most gracious protection the persons of us thy servants, and the fleet in which we serve.'

Vyvyan glanced at me, a quizzical frown on his young face. Down in the waist of the ship, Polzeath's features were beatific. Some around him seemed confused, others transfixed. Even our half-deaf surgeon Skeen seemed to listen intently to Gale's strange new prayer, and both Roger Le Blanc and Ali Reis seemed rapt.

'Preserve us from the dangers of the sea,' continued Gale, 'and from the violence of the enemy; that we may be a safeguard unto our most gracious sovereign Lord, King Charles, and his dominions, and a security for such as pass on the seas upon their lawful occasions; that the inhabitants of our Island may in peace and quietness serve thee our God; and that we may return in safety to enjoy the blessings of the land, with the fruits of our labours, and with a thankful remembrance of thy mercies to praise and glorify thy holy Name; through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Amen.'

The echoing '
Amen!
' from the crew was thunderous, and carried across the water to the
Royal Martyr,
some three hundred yards away. Judge, who had no chaplain and who had thus conducted his own service punctually and concisely, was looking across at us from his quarterdeck, no doubt wondering what strange wave of evangelical zeal had swept over the
Jupiter
's company.

Gale took the rest of the service forward in an equally brisk and impressive manner, leading a surprisingly responsive crew in three lusty hymns, dispensing the bread and wine at Holy Communion with exemplary efficiency, praying for our new Portuguese queen and casting a brief but incisive sermon upon Psalm 107, ever a favourite in the wooden world: 'They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters; these see the works of the Lord, and his wonders in the deep.' This he turned into a paean to the memory of James Harker, passing over the dark rumours of murder that consumed both Vyvyan and the entire lower deck, where suspicion had taken as firm a hold as bindweed.

Following Gale's final benediction and the dismissal of his congregation, James Vyvyan murmured to me with a new and almost conspiratorial fellowship. 'My God, sir, if he could speak like that every Sunday, he'd be a bishop.'

This sudden confidence from my lieutenant delighted me. For a moment, I was torn between engaging Vyvyan in further discourse and seeking out the Reverend Gale. But I knew which of them would prove more elusive in the future. I went across to my chaplain to introduce myself formally.

Gale was deep in conversation with the Frenchman, Le Blanc. I caught just a snatch of his words–'...terrible, indeed. But rumour is truly the devil's seedbed, monsieur...'–as I approached. Gale halted and turned his only faintly bleary eyes upon me with a discomforting stare that both weighed and measured.

'Captain Quinton,' he said at length. 'Lord Ravensden's brother, then. You're very young to be taking Harker's place.'

Inwardly, I raged at the impudence of the man. But the eyes and ears of the crew were all around, he was a man of God in full canonicals, and it was a Sunday. Thus, with difficulty, I confined myself to sarcasm, that last resort of a defeated protagonist.

'A pleasure to make your acquaintance, Reverend. For the
second
time, in case you have forgot the first.' He glared at that and I felt a small satisfaction. 'A most interesting service, if I may say so. A particularly unusual prayer at the beginning.'

Gale sniffed and looked steadily at me with the wan, distant expression that I would come to know so well. 'You won't find it unusual for long, Captain. It's to be said daily, on every one of His Majesty's ships, from Easter Sunday until the day of judgement. We'll be heartily sick of it within a month.'

Ah. So your prayer book—'

He nodded lightly. 'The new book of Common Prayer, now being despatched to all the parishes in the land by direct command of King, Parliament, and Convocation, to be adopted in place of the old one from this Easter. The weekend after next, in other words. A sure path to salvation for a nation that lost its way, Captain Quinton.'

I could not tell whether Gale's remark was spiritual or sarcastic, although I suspected the latter. 'I'd heard there's to be a new book, of course–my brother attended the debates in the House of Lords. But I was not aware that the copies had already been sent out.'

The chaplain smiled. 'As Christians, Captain Quinton, we believe that when the last trump sounds, we shall all stand naked and equal before the judgement seat. Until that dread day, however, we all live most unequally.' He turned with a gesture, and we strolled towards the poop. 'You, sir, are the brother of an earl, which gives you the command of a king's man-of-war at a most tender age.' I felt my face grow hot with the seeming impertinence of his observation, but he continued as if unaware. 'Whereas I ... well, Captain, for all my manifest faults and sins, nobody can take away the fact that Billy Sancroft and I are the oldest and best of friends from our Cambridge days. When we were newly matriculated at Emmanuel, we wagered that by our sixtieth birthdays he would be Archbishop of Canterbury, and I, of York. Now, with thirteen years to go, he is the personal chaplain to King Charles, and I am the chaplain of the
Jupiter...
' He waved vaguely towards the deck abaft the mainmast, where a clutch of men stood patiently waiting to speak to him. 'We may conclude with some certainty that he will win his part of the wager, and I shall lose mine.'

Gale was silent for a moment, looking intently out towards the Isle of Wight. Then he shrugged, as though he had reconciled himself to his unequal fate. 'But Billy still throws his old friend some scraps, like my position on this ship and an early copy of the new prayer book. In truth, it surprises me that he doesn't think I'll sell it off to a crooked printer and make cheap copies to undercut the royal printers' monopoly. Come to that, I'm not entirely certain why I haven't.'

A sot, at sea for the money.
Yet there was plainly more than that to Francis Gale, and I wished to cultivate this unexpected, sober side of my chaplain. After all, he, Stafford Peverell, and Vyvyan were the only men aboard whose rank and station remotely approached my own, and I had less love for Peverell even than Vyvyan had for me. Gale was a younger son of Shropshire gentry who had been stout for the king in the civil wars, which had been particularly murderous in that county; or so the incorrigibly inquisitive Musk had established within a day of being aboard. Gale had fought with the royal armies in both England and Ireland, it was said. That alone, regardless of his connection to one of the king's favourite clerics, would have made him a fit guest at my table. And perhaps he, of all the men on board, had enough authority and common sense to lay to rest this blasted talk of murder, as unsettling to the crew as to their captain. I invited him to dine with me that same day. He smiled but momentarily, and shook his head.

'No, Captain Quinton, I think we'll not eat together, this day.'

For a moment, the shock of the offence silenced me. 'Sir,' I said at length, 'refusing your captain's invitation is—'

'Yes, unforgivable, I know, by all the laws of the navy, which have almost the same force as those of God, et cetera, et cetera. But I have a prior invitation from a bottle of crusted port wine, Captain, and by I know not what means, it seems to have brought some of its friends to keep it company. And you, too, have a prior and pressing commitment, of course.' I was flummoxed, but before I could speak, Francis Gale looked skyward, as though casting his eyes to the heaven he served.

'The westerly's dropped away entirely, Captain Quinton,' he said quietly. 'And an old boatswain of my acquaintance who shared a bottle with me at the Red Lion yesterday assures me that by dusk today, we'll have a lively southerly to carry us out of the Solent.
Royal Martyr
is just hoisting the signal to make ready to sail. You'll need to prepare your ship for the sea, Captain. As I don't doubt you already know.'

The next hours resembled one of Signor Dante's circles of hell. I had myself rowed across to
Royal Martyr,
there to receive Judge's brusque command. We would sail with the afternoon's ebb, which would carry us easily out of the Solent's western mouth. Lanherne took a boat back into Portsmouth to round up the ticket-of-leave men who were still ashore. The crew's midday meal was rushed and perfunctory, despite Janks' valiant efforts, but the men still queued in orderly fashion to have small beer ladled into their tankards from an open barrel by the mainmast. Victuallers' boats thronged back and forth. We took on chickens, a dozen sheep, and three goats; only my express command prevented the acquisition of a cow, on the grounds that we were bound for Scotland, not Sumatra, and that we already stank like a farm. Other boats took off the wives and the women who perhaps were not quite wives, accompanied by much sobbing from those departing, and some relief from at least a few of those remaining. Men climbed rigging and fanned out along the footropes to ready the sails, long tied tightly to the yards. Surgeon Skeen dealt with his first casualty of the voyage, a stupid brute of a Cornish boy who dislocated two fingers when he missed his grip on the main yard and was saved from falling to his death only by Treninnick's quick reaction. Ali Reis kept up an endless concert of lively tunes on his fiddle, though I had little time to wonder how a Moor had learned such an instrument or the tune of 'Loath to Depart'. I hastily penned brief letters to my trinity of official correspondents–King Charles, Duke James, and Mister Pepys–and to that other trinity, my mother, brother, and wife. Between them, Musk and Janks the cook conjured for me the sustenance of some fine ham, an unusually edible biscuit, and a fine draught of Hull ale.

On deck again, and as best I could, I took the measure of my officers. Stanton, the gunner, was quietly competent, carefully checking each of the great guns, their carriages and tackle, then going below to attend to the powder room and its manifests. Boatswain Ap paced up and down the deck, issuing instructions that hardly a man could understand and waving his rattan cane vaguely in the air–yet at his approach they all sprang to and ran to attend to three or four separate tasks in quick order, perhaps in the hope that one of them might have been the object of his unintelligible command. The carpenter, Penbaron, was below, attending no doubt to the whipstaff and the rudder, about which he seemed to have an obsession equal only to his fears for the mizzen; he was convinced that when the Deptford yard refitted it a year or so before, they sold off the good new rudder intended for the ship and simply fitted back in place the original, carefully repaired and disguised to conceal the shipwrights' fraud. This was too close for comfort to my own experience of the yard's workmanship, even if it had saved my life, so I left him to his work. I saw no sign of Janks, of course, though smoke wafted continually from the pipe that led from the galley down in the hold.