Gentleman Captain (21 page)

I turned to him, and said as gently as I could manage, 'What have you to say for yourself, lad?'

Andrewartha was shivering. How many times in his short life had he stood in line with his fellows to hear the Articles of War read aloud by their captain? He would have thought on the thirty-second, perhaps; but he was certainly now thinking on the twenty-first, which specified that assaulting a superior officer, like so many other crimes, was punishable by death.

'G-got to his cabin, sir,' he stammered. 'He ... he thought I'd come for the same reason as before. Came at me, he did.'

Peverell began to protest but I silenced him with a look. As captain of a king's ship, duly commissioned by the Lord High Admiral, I was judge and jury in one at that moment.

'Are there any witnesses to this?' I asked the company, in a low voice. 'Did anyone see an assault by the purser upon the boy, at any time?'

The silence that followed my words was interrupted only by Peverell, protesting his innocence in a low, vicious voice. He warned that even the imputation of this was an almighty slur on his reputation, and on the honour and good name of the Peverells, and that his unnamed mighty friends would make us all regret this indignity. The boy should pay the highest price for his insolence and abominable falsehoods. So he continued as the ship rolled and pitched and the steerage lanterns swung manically upon their hooks. And as Peverell spat and hissed his venom, the rest of us in that crowded space looked at one another. None spoke; none had witnessed an assault by the purser on the boy, even though none doubted the man's cruelty. It was Andrewartha's word against Peverell's. The purser would survive, and by the full force of the state, the lad would be put to an agonizing death.

'Perhaps someone did,' said a new voice. The Reverend Francis Gale had emerged from his cabin. The chaplain was barefoot, and wore only a stained shirt and breeches. Even from a distance of some yards, I could smell the stench of drink on his breath and in his sweat. Yet his speech was sober enough, and his cold eyes were clear.

Peverell snorted. He, too, had recognized the strength of his position and had regained his customary arrogance. 'You, Gale? Belike you were insensible, as always.' He turned his malevolent gaze to me. 'Captain, I was merely attempting to instruct the lad in the ancient truths of the Roman Church. He's an inquisitive boy, quick to learn. Almost as quick as he is to show violence to an officer.'

Andrewartha shook his head miserably, but in such a way that I suspected there was some half-truth to the purser's story. Gale, though, simply stared at Peverell with unconcealed contempt.

'Who knows what I've seen when the rest of you have been looking the other way?' he said, in a steady, terrible voice. 'That's the thing with my discourses with my friends, the bottles. I can be asleep all through a storm, yet awake and roam the decks when all the rest of you are asleep.' He took a step closer. 'Who knows how many times I may have witnessed you buggering that boy, Peverell, when you assumed I was far gone in drink?'

I glanced at the faces of Phineas Musk and James Vyvyan, both ghostly in the dancing lantern-light. All the men in that circle of misery and accusation looked grim; all of them feared the public exposure of this most awful and intimate of acts. Peverell's face was a mask of horror. 'You
lie—
'

'Ah, Purser, Purser...' said Gale, moving closer still. 'Would any court in the land take your word over mine? Now who would dare think that a man of God would lie on oath, and testify that he had witnessed things he had never truly seen? And me the firmest friend of the king's own chaplain, too. Any judge, or jury, or court-martial that you know of, Purser?'

'Let me see if I have the right of what you say, Reverend Gale,' I interrupted. I understood my chaplain's intent, discomforting though it was. 'You claim to have witnessed the purser, Mr Peverell, and the boy, Andrewartha, perform acts in direct contravention of the thirty-second Article of War? Which article prescribes death as the automatic punishment for such a heinous sin? And you are sure of what you've seen, Reverend, and would testify to it?'

Gale shrugged. 'Who's to say what I've seen and haven't seen, Captain? My recollections come and go, these days.' His face hardened as he turned back to Peverell. 'But be assured of one thing. If this worm presses any charge against the boy'–he stared intently at the cringing man–'then the recollections I put before a court martial will be as clear as day.'

'The injustice...' Peverell could hardly speak. 'You're a creature of the devil, not of God. I have friends and I will have vengeance on you, you drunken pisspot.'

'You'll not be avenged on anyone or anything, Stafford Peverell,' said Gale savagely. 'In the old times, the Church gave sanctuary to those who sought it, with God's holy wrath as their defence against pursuit by their enemies. Well, so do I. If Lieutenant Vyvyan concurs, I'll take the lad for my own servant.' Vyvyan nodded. 'In all official senses he now serves me, and thus the Lord Archbishop, and thus God Almighty. So mark this, Peverell. My sword hasn't tasted blood these twelve years, but if you stray anywhere near that lad now he's under my protection, whether it's to convert him to Rome or to do whatever else you might have in mind, then I'll stick you on the end of it like the overripe pig you are.'

The purser's face was twisted, and I could see veins pulsing on his neck and forehead. For a moment he stood torn between his fear and his anger. Then he turned furiously on his heel and retired to his cabin. Andrewartha looked confusedly between James Vyvyan and the Reverend Gale. The chaplain inclined his head toward the lieutenant, and the boy went to his accustomed master, who saluted me before returning to his place of duty on the quarterdeck. Boatswain Ap, satisfied that murder and equally gross disorder had been prevented on his ship, saluted in his turn, and left the steerage.

I began to say something in thanks to Francis Gale, but he raised a hand. 'Forgive me, Captain. I have a conversation to resume, and this bottle is proving particularly loquacious.'

As he turned toward his cabin, I called after him. 'We
will
talk, Chaplain. You'll not avoid me this entire voyage!'

'Ah, my dear captain,' he said, 'you'd be surprised how long my avoidances can last.'

Kit Farrell scraped the quill across the paper, spilling ink to left and right. Slowly, he completed his unsteady downstroke and turned the pen to the left, drawing something like a hook, as he had been told. He lifted the pen and moved it a little way to the right, where he scratched a shape that vaguely resembled a horseshoe. Further to the right again, he essayed a small circle with a downstroke coming from its left, then a bold single stroke, then a Christian cross. He stopped, looked at the paper, and frowned. With his face a mask of concentration, he drew a horseshoe on its side, and closed it off at the top. Finally he scratched another hook, the mirror image of his first, upright and pointing off to the right of the paper.

He looked at the finished effort, and said with a little pride, 'Jupiter.'

Jupiter
indeed,' I said. 'You can write your ship's name, Kit Farrell. Be thankful you're not serving on the
Constant Reformation.'

We were a day beyond the confrontation with Stafford Peverell. The
Jupiter
was sailing northward through the Irish Sea in fine and clear weather. The mood on board had improved with the weather, and there was no further word of Malachi Landon's grim prognostications of doom.

That morning, I had sat in my cabin with my grandfather's compendium dial in my hand, and looked upon the inscription on the outer face:
MQBC 1585.
Matthew Quinton, Baron Caldecote. My grandfather. The year before he inherited the earldom. I opened up the device and looked upon its many pages. When I played with it as a child, these were all meaningless to me, and so I thought it would be now, for I had not opened the device properly in ten years. But strange to say, the pages now made a certain sense. That one was evidently a calendar, and that–why, a miniature sundial, surely. One was plainly a compass for taking bearings; Landon and Kit Farrell had larger versions of the same instrument, and called it a circumferentor. I went to the stern window, lined up the device on a distant Irish horse-boat and took a bearing. Another dial resembled the compass, but was scaled in the named months, and twelfths, and thirtieths. A nocturnal, then–the instrument used by the master and his mates to take bearings on the Great Bear! Then there was a table by which a man could tell the time of the tide anywhere on earth. No, not such a mystery, after all! My grandfather had mastered this device, and so would I: MQ 1662.

The bell had rung then for the change of watch, Kit Farrell came below, and in the blinking of an eye, I turned from student to teacher.

I had begun instructing Kit in the lexical mysteries by giving him an alphabet on a copy-tablet, and suggesting he recite the sounds of the letters over to himself. Then I had shown him the method of holding a pen properly, and taught him to sign his name–or at least, to write the word
Kit,
as to a man of no learning, both
Christopher
and
Farrell
would be as daunting as a poem by Milton. His second word was
ship,
though the's and the
p
took a while to march across the paper in the right direction.
Jupiter
was his third word. Phineas Musk, who had always been suspiciously literate for a rogue of such dubious birth, had watched my teaching with amusement until he became bored; whereupon he went up on deck to shout insults at the distant coast of Wales. I trusted that the target of his bile would not be mistaken aboard the
Royal Martyr,
which was sailing parallel to us a few hundred yards to starboard.

'Well, Captain,' Kit Farrell said, shaking me out of my reverie, 'if seamanship is as hard for you as this of writing is for me, then I think we should...' He stopped, gazing over my shoulder out of my quarter-gallery window.

'Mister Farrell?'

'
Royal Martyr
...' he said, and said no more, for suddenly there was a flash and in the same instant a mighty thunder deafened us both. I turned, and saw the side of Judge's ship engulfed in smoke. She had fired her full broadside. She had fired it at us.

Men scattered from our path as we ran to the quarterdeck. They seemed startled, but none displayed the panic I would have expected under fire.
Why had Vyvyan not ordered our decks cleared? And why had Judge fired at us?

A second broadside roared out from
Royal Martyrs
larboard battery. We reached the quarterdeck to find James Vyvyan, hands braced on the rail, looking over to Judge's ship with his face set. Musk had backed against the larboard rail, his face as white as a shroud and his breeches suspiciously damp. It was only in that moment that I realized we had not been hit. Our rigging still stood, our sails were intact, our hull unscathed.

Royal Martyr
's guns were not shotted.

'Lieutenant Vyvyan,' I said, joining him at the rail. 'What in Christ's name—'

The foremost gun of
Royal Martyrs
larboard battery finished my sentence for me. Even it had not, the task would have been accomplished by the next gun behind her, which fired barely moments afterward. Then her next, and the next, and the next after that. And then I knew.

'She's firing a salute,' said Kit Farrell at that instant. 'She's even hoisting all her ensigns and bunting. A royal salute, Captain.'

'There's no anniversary today–no cause at all for this,' said Vyvyan.

'Unless the cause is to impress us with her broadsides, sir,' suggested Kit. 'I make that two full broadsides in less than a fifth of a glass, and this rolling fire not long after. There won't be many ships in our navy that can match such a rate of fire. Not many ships in
any
navy, come to that.'

I promised myself that I would order a drill of the great guns as soon as it was fitting–which would be a time when the
Royal Martyr
was out of sight and therefore unable to gloat over our inadequacies–for if Judge's intention was to impress, he had succeeded all too amply. He had told me that almost all his men were veterans who had sailed with him before, learning their trade in the great war with the Dutch. Their excellence explained in no little measure why not even the great butterbox sailors, my own good-brother amongst them, could stand against these ironsides afloat.

'
Martyrs
hoisting the signal for captains in company to repair aboard, sir,' said Kit.

I nodded. 'Well, then. Perhaps Captain Judge will be kind enough to explain exactly why he chooses to waste so much of the king's powder.'

Boatswain Ap and his crew hauled in our longboat–in these light seas we had been towing it in our wake–and Martin Lanherne assembled his oarsmen. They rowed me over to
Royal Martyr,
where I was greeted by a full side party, her boatswain's pipe, and the sullen Lieutenant Warrender. Lanherne, Le Blanc and Polzeath stood at my back, dressed as smartly as Le Blanc's hasty efforts would permit; a not unsuitable escort for the heir to Ravensden. I raised my hat to the stern and the royal ensign streaming out in the breeze. As I did so, I noticed with a shock a man that I had not seen since my first night at Portsmouth. My brutal old crop-headed adversary Linus Brent looked me up and down, then turned his back on me and stooped to attend a sailor who lay unconscious upon the deck in a pool of his own blood.