Gentleman Captain (18 page)

'Damned madness,' muttered Phineas Musk. 'They'll think you weak. Weak, soft in the head and rich. I'll come to wake you tomorrow and I'll find your throat slit. Then they'll come for me. And my throat'll be slit, then, and there'll be Musk blood all over the floor. Deck, I mean. Musk blood, washing away into the sea. Oh...'

I knew Musk was wrong in every sense, and his bile came more from jealousy that a Quinton coin had not found its way into his own capacious pockets, as they had so many times before. Rather I was pleased with myself, sure that my action had raised me in the crew's estimation. Lordly charity: I had seen my brother distribute such largesse countless times in pauper homes around Ravensden, and knew from experience the goodwill that it generated. And perhaps, if Captain Matthew Quinton could not earn the respect of this crew, then he might buy it.

James Vyvyan came on deck just then. He studied the scene with his contemptuous eye, took in the computations of wind and tide and course with an ease that shamed me, and saluted.

'Well, Captain. The wind's on its way round to head us so our passage will be somewhat harder than before.' And then, unexpectedly, he broke into a smile so good-natured I could not help but return it. 'And word of our coming will be well down the Lostwithiel road by now. All Cornwall will know of it by nightfall. There'll be boats coming out of every harbour between here and the Scillies, which will slow us yet further.'

So it proved. Another six boats came out of Polperro and a dozen from Fowey, where my father had fought in the last great battle that King Charles the Martyr won. That had been a great fight, in the year '44: Parliament's Lord General, the mighty Earl of Essex, was forced to make a hasty escape out of the Fowey River in a pathetic row-boat. All but forgotten now, of course. There were more boats hailing us at Mevagissey, and Gorran, and Veryan, and Gerrans. Vyvyan remained on deck, rolling the names off his tongue as he marked each hamlet and fishing port like a poet reciting a sonnet.

He was a happier man now, so close to his own shore: he was almost like a proud host, showing off his home to a visiting bumpkin. And his shore it most certainly was. We could hear the mourning-bells toll for James Harker in every church along the coast. Once again I felt the most abject of outsiders; an interloper in a ship still commanded by a dead man.

We came at length by Falmouth Bay, saluting the round, brooding castle of Pendennis, confident on its high headland; the last fortress in all of England that had held out for its undoubted king in the late wars. In the roads behind it, we saw four of our East Indiamen at anchor; two great Dutchmen getting under way for the Levant; a fleet of squat, grimy Welsh colliers bringing coals to warm Cornish hearths; and some twenty small craft–all bound for the
Jupiter.
At every port, and at Falmouth above all, there was more news of births, and deaths, and cuckoldry, so that every man on the ship seemed to have word of his family's doings. Even James Vyvyan's brother came out from the Helford River in a small boat of his own, and came aboard us for an hour or so with the news that their sister was to be married to the scrofulous and allegedly impotent heir of an Irish viscount. I saw my lieutenant in a different light, laughing and exuberant in a brother's company.

It was after the elder Vyvyan had disembarked, and our ship was rounding the headland that Kit Farrell named to me as Manacle Point, that Vyvyan came to see me in my cabin. My Frenchman, the mysterious Roger Le Blanc, was there already, come to repair a gash in one of the damask drapes. I had hoped to engage him in a conversation, for I wished to look further into this man whom I thought to be neither tailor nor sailor; but then came a second rap at the door and Vyvyan entered the now crowded little cabin.

'Congratulations, sir,' I said. 'The news of your sister–a notable match, Mister Vyvyan.' But James Vyvyan's thoughts did not seem focused on his brother's tidings. Instead, he turned his countenance to me with a dark and puzzled air. 'Sir, one of the men has had some strange news. It may bear on the murder of my uncle.'

Since we sailed from Spithead, Vyvyan had been silent on the matter of James Harker's death. His own researches at Portsmouth had seemingly undermined his conviction that it was foul murder. Moreover, he had been absorbed in the work of the ship, and in proving to his captain that he was by far the better seaman out of us two.

I said, 'Which of the men?'

'Alan Tregerthen, sir. He's of St Just in Roseland. As was Pengelley, one of my uncle's servants, who acted as his clerk.'

'And?'

'Tregerthen's wife sent word to him, sir. Seems that a justice of the county came down to see Pengelley's wife. The justice told her that Pengelley's corpse was found at the side of the road from Portsmouth to Southampton, near to old Titchfield Abbey. Stabbed to death, sir. But the Hampshire justices think he'd been bound and tortured first.'

We rounded the Lizard slowly and with difficulty, beating a jagged path into the wind, then turned up to sail directly for the Land's End–much to the disappointment of the men from Penzance, Porthleven and the other places on Mount's Bay, for we were too far off for their families and friends to come out to them. Kit Farrell had me taking bearings on distant church towers and recording the results dutifully in my journal, which was beginning to fill out with more and longer entries. Malachi Landon looked on all this with contempt, but he was too much a navy man, and far too much of a hypocrite, to say anything to his captain's face.

Phineas Musk had no such constraints. He prowled around the quarterdeck, complaining audibly that this was no work for the heir to Ravensden, and that he knew full well that the good wife of the heir to Ravensden would second him emphatically were she present. At least these grumbles provided a welcome interruption of his ongoing tirade against what he supposed to be the slowness of travel by sea, with its inexplicable reliance on such trivial concerns as tides and winds, and his consequent astonishment that we were still nowhere near a landfall in Scotland.

Nominally, James Vyvyan had the watch, but he kept apart, morose and uninterested in the ship's progress, muttering occasional vague words of command. Since his revelation of this second death–the cruel torture and murder of the man Pengelley–my lieutenant had become obsessed once more with the notion that his uncle had been murdered; and if truth be told, this new killing had given me pause. I kept a primed pistol at my belt. Vyvyan had gone below at once and questioned all those on board who had known the dead man, but as was so often the way, it seemed that the captain's servants mingled but little with the rest of the crew. Pengelley may as well have been a phantom, or a fiction.

As we cleared the Land's End, the wind blew ever more strongly from the south-west, forcing us further and further out to avoid the deadly cliffs on the lee shore of Cornwall. As the first star glimmered out, I thought I saw the low, dark land of the Scillies, far off to larboard. At length, I retired to my cabin and invited Vyvyan to sup with me.

In part, this was because my ambition to dine with the Reverend Francis Gale was relentlessly thwarted by substantial quantities of port wine, which may have been responsible for the frequent screaming nightmares that Musk reported to me. I had thought of physically entering the man's cabin and ordering him to leave it, but God alone knew what a strong man like Francis Gale–a veteran of the civil wars–would do, even to his captain, if in drink or otherwise deranged. In part, too, the invitation was an attempt to mollify Vyvyan. I thought my favour to Kit Farrell, though necessary, must be hard for a lieutenant, almost my equal in honour and rank, to take; I should be confiding in him by rights, and not in a supernumerary master's mate. Finally, I meant to offer Vyvyan the chance to disburden himself of his thoughts relating to Pengelley's murder. He was becoming too quiet and distracted. The men had noticed, and it would do the feeling aboard the ship no good. I had done my own thinking upon the matter, and hoped that I could talk young Vyvyan out of his state of deep and uneasy suspicion.

So it was that we came together to eat and discuss the question of Pengelley. I filled his cup and bade him drink, thinking to win some confidence and restore his composure. There were footpads enough on any major road in the kingdom, said I; bold highwaymen, too, and roving gangs of rough, masterless men, discharged from the old Republic's army, and who belonged to no parish. Any or all of them would have been attracted to a road out of Portsmouth and the prospect of waylaying mariners newly paid off from the sea, with ample coin in their pockets or saddlebags. The likes of Pengelley could easily have fallen prey to one of their kind. As we chewed on Janks's offering of chicken, I suggested all of this to James Vyvyan, but he was beyond such reasoning. He spoke with blind passion, his eyes wide with excitement and vengeful fury. Pengelley must have been killed, he said, because he knew the truth of his uncle's murder. Pengelley must have been the man who brought the mysterious note, with its precognition of death, into James Harker's cabin. I admitted this could be true; but why, I asked, would a faithful body servant have written a note in the first place–and an anonymous one at that? Why couch his suspicions in such ambiguous terms? And how could he have learned of a plot, if such there was? And why not speak up after his master's death? No, I said firmly. It was queer indeed, but to make any more out of the coincidence was fanciful.

Vyvyan made no answer to any of this. Instead he turned his venom quite unexpectedly upon Stafford Peverell, the purser. It seemed Pengelley served informally as captain's clerk, and in that office he would have been well placed to discover corruption by the purser. Harker and Peverell had often quarrelled fiercely, he said. Peverell was the only officer who was also ashore on the day that Harker died. Peverell was a haughty and insolent man, but he was worse, far worse ... James Vyvyan trailed off, looking meaningfully into his goblet. This was all supposition, I said. Men had been hanged at Tyburn on less evidence than such suppositions, Vyvyan countered, for that was the way of English law.

'Lieutenant, that men argue does not mean that they murder. Besides, Peverell was aboard this ship, at sea, when Pengelley was killed.' Although privately I thought my purser a foul specimen of humankind, I could not countenance such an accusation against one of my officers.

Vyvyan glared at me. 'True,' he said angrily, 'but like the devil, he may have agents elsewhere.'

Against such casuistry there could be no reasoning, and as Vyvyan helped himself to more wine I changed tack and asked him why it was he disliked Peverell so.

'Ha...' he said, and sat swaying on his chair, leering at me.

The wind was strengthening; we already had to brace ourselves at times as my cabin rocked with the motion of the sea. I was uncomfortably aware that Vyvyan had taken more wine than I realized–perhaps he had been drunk when he came to supper–and that he was due to stand a watch not many hours hence.

When speech came, it was sudden and unexpected. 'Sodomite,' he hissed.

This was a weighty charge indeed, for the thirty-second naval Article of War, enacted by Parliament but the previous year, specified that 'the unnatural and detestable sin of buggery or sodomy with man or beast' was to be punished by death. Such rigour applied ashore would have decimated the ranks of the clergy and the court, if not the navy too; and I was not a little mindful of my own brother's inclinations in such matters. But as it related to my immediate question, all of that was academic. A vague suspicion of sodomy was hardly something that would make tough men like Vyvyan, Stanton and Landon fearful of a vain, puffed-up landsman like Stafford Peverell.

'Lieutenant,' I said sternly. 'You forget yourself, I think.'

'Papist,' he slurred, 'and alchemist. A warlock. He has a crucifix and a rosary in his cabin. Andrewartha has seen them. And potions. He knows more of potions than Skeen.'

That an educated man like Stafford Peverell should know more than our profoundly ignorant surgeon was hardly the basis of a charge, I thought. I briefly wondered how young Andrewartha, Vyvyan's servant, knew so much about the purser's cabin, but then realized that this was probably also how his master knew of Peverell's other proclivities. We continued our meal in an uncomfortable silence, with Vyvyan glaring drunkenly into his goblet, or at me. The lanterns swung from the beams to which they were fastened, casting fantastical shadows upon Harker's eccentric panelling. I wondered briefly whether, after all, there might be something in Vyvyan's drunken ramblings. If James Harker really had been poisoned, and Peverell knew how to blend alchemical potions—

I chided myself for falling prey so easily to the predilection of seamen to believe superstitions, and of all humanity to believe the darkest of conspiracies. I thought of Uncle Tristram, contentedly mixing elements in his shambolic Oxford lodgings or at Ravensden, forever hoping to find the philosopher's stone. A different age, and men like James Vyvyan would have had him burned as a warlock. Even my mother had once been denounced as a witch in the market square of Bedford, albeit by a lunatic who thought he was John the Baptist, and on no better ground than her liking for cats. Scratch the surface of men of reason like James Vyvyan (or, God knows, perhaps Matthew Quinton too), and a suspicious bigot often lurks just beneath.