The Blast That Tears the Skies (2012) (31 page)

Then the second terrible consequence of this revelation struck me. If Charles was not the son of James Quinton, then he could not be the Earl of Ravensden. I was. I had been since the age of five.

There was a strange silence. None moved. My mother still seemed far away, lost in the memories of her dream-time; my brother stared feebly out of the window toward the green acres of Lyndbury. The Countess Louise stood in the centre of the great gallery, seemingly revelling in her triumph. My heart pounded, and my thoughts raced.

Strangely, Cornelia seemed impassive. Indeed, after a few moments she did the strangest thing. She smiled. At first, I thought this must be her reaction to the realisation that she might now be the rightful Countess of Ravensden; in contrast to the ambivalence I had always felt toward the prospect of succession, she positively relished it. Swiftly, though, I realised that her reaction betokened something else. I was tense and perspiring, yet Cornelia seemed strangely relaxed. She no longer seemed to be a prisoner; she had the confident air of a gaoler.

‘Well, husband,’ she said, ‘now you have heard. This Jezebel has condemned herself from her own mouth, and you can testify to it.’

For the first time, the Countess Louise seemed nonplussed. ‘The only testimony given here will be that which I dictate, Cornelia!’

‘Oh, I rather think not,’ said a new but familiar voice. ‘The game has altered, My Lady.’

The door to the gallery opened. Framed within it was the wizened form of my uncle, Doctor Tristram Quinton. He entered the room, thus enabling Phineas Musk to make his own entrance behind him. But Musk was not alone. At his side was a young woman of eighteen or so. Her hair was as raven-black as that of the Countess Louise, but she was perhaps half a foot shorter. Her face was pinched and her complexion pallid; the girl had not lived well, I thought. I did not know then that her face looked remarkably well, considering how recently she had recovered from the plague.

Her eyes fixed upon the countess.

‘Hello, mother,’ said Madeleine Lugg, alias De Vaux.

 

 

 

Lady Louise stared in stupefaction upon her daughter. She did not greet her; she did not embrace her. Instead, she suddenly looked away, toward the door of the antechamber, and screamed, ‘Sleep! Hughton! Baines!’

Tristram shook his head. ‘All below, My Lady, along with all your other men. It is as well that this place was built with most commodious cellars. If you look out of the window, you will see that we have secured it all around with a troop of Wiltshire militia.’

She went to the window, satisfied herself of the truth of Tris’s words, then turned back at last to face us.

‘You have no authority here,’ said the countess, still seemingly serenely confident. ‘You cannot give orders to the militia! You do no man’s bidding but your own, Tristram Quinton!’

‘Not so,’ said Charles mildly. He was still seated in his chair near the window, still the very image of a man at death’s door. ‘All that has been done here, and will be done, is at my bidding.’

She turned on him furiously, but could only stare incredulously at him. ‘
Your
bidding, husband?’ She nearly spat the words at him. ‘Not even your own body obeys your bidding, Charles.’

He smiled; and a smile from Charles Quinton was as rare as snow in summer. ‘My dear Louise,’ he said, ‘you should never have essayed the part of a spy. You are too gullible, for you trust appearances and letters recounting the movements of a sickly husband rather too readily, madam.’

Then Charles did something unexpected. He lifted himself from his chair and drew himself up to his full height, an action that always pained him. He turned to my uncle, and his face was suddenly as hard as gunmetal. When he spoke next, his voice was deeper and stranger; the voice of an actor. Or of a man who had learned the art of actors.

He said, ‘Do you know me, Tristram Quinton?’

My uncle smiled complicitly as he recited the ancient passwords. ‘Yes, My Lord, I know you now.’

‘By what name do you know me?’

‘You are Lord Percival.’

I felt a shock in my heart, and knew at once that it was not the single shock of my brother’s revelation: for I stared at Cornelia, and saw plainly that for her, this was merely prior knowledge.

Lord Percival
. To my surprise, I found myself grinning in belated realisation. For I recalled at once how my brother was always much taken with an old book by Chretien de Troyes, the
Percivale
. The tale of a valiant, pure knight who grew up not knowing that he was the son of a king.

Lady Louise stared open-mouthed at her husband: at Lord Percival. ‘You? But I first heard that name months ago from – from an agent of the Most Christian –’

‘As the man who was intent on bringing you down, and obstructing all the machinations of France in this land. Intent upon exposing you for what you are, Louise. And now you have done so quite thoroughly, by your own admission before us all – a French spy, a traitor who seeks to blackmail the king, and so much more besides. As we shall shortly hear.’

She looked desperately around the room, as frantic as a cornered animal. At last her eyes settled upon Phineas Musk. ‘You lied to me, Musk!’ she cried. ‘You told me that Percival was an alias of Mordaunt’s! You
showed
me Mordaunt, garbed as Percival, at the conventicle in Barking! You swore upon oath that Earl Matthew told you he knew his grandson was spurious! And you swore never to betray me to one named Quinton –’

‘Many better people than you have come to grief by actually believing what Phin Musk told them, My Lady,’ he growled. ‘If the late earl knew anything of My Lord’s paternity, he certainly never revealed it to me – truth to tell, our discourse rarely extended beyond “Musk, you poxed fustilarian, where the hell are my boots?” But otherwise I kept my word, in a sense, and never betrayed you to one named Quinton. By your own logic, My Lord’s real name is Stuart, is it not?’

Louise stared at him open-mouthed; that a mere servant might have been better versed than she in the principles of Machiavelli seemed genuinely shocking to her.

‘And as for My Lord Mordaunt,’ said Charles, ‘let us say that he was perfectly happy to play the part I assigned to him, as he did so often in the past. He relished the opportunity to play the man of action again, rather than the role which he usually plays in public these days – the disillusioned and idle bore. Yes, a good man, Johnny Mordaunt. My man.’ Charles was relentless now, moving toward his wife and circling her without the trace of a limp. ‘It took many months to assemble the evidence against you, Louise. Almost as many months as it took Matthew, Cornelia and Tris to convince my mother and I that you were indeed the harpy that they took you to be from the first. You covered your tracks well, but not well enough.’ He nodded toward the impassive figure of Madeleine De Vaux, who had not taken her eyes off her mother. ‘As in the case of your daughter, here. Sent to a convent in France, I believe you said? I think not.’

‘Convent, My Lord? Aye, some convent,’ said Madeleine. Her voice was harsh, a cynical, world-weary London accent. ‘A whorehouse, more like, when I was but six. At least the old bitch Anderson had the grace not to put me with the customers for a few years afterwards. Not that it would have mattered to you whether she did or not, would it, mother? But I remembered you, the proud Lady De Vaux. And I remembered what you screamed at me, that day you left me behind.’ The girl’s eyes welled with tears. ‘That my being born had done for your womb – that you could never bear children again, and it was my fault…’

Lady Louise moved toward her, hand raised, but Charles reached out and grasped her wrist. ‘You have committed enough violence, madam,’ he said.

‘These are
lies
!’ screamed the Countess of Ravensden. She released herself from Charles and backed toward the window. ‘You have bought this girl’s testimony – I have never seen her before –’

‘We have evidence,’ said Cornelia. ‘The ledger of Goodwife Anderson, for instance. Which names you, My Lady, as the – the depositor, let us say, of this child with her.’

‘Of course,’ said Charles, ‘it would have been mightily inconvenient for you to admit to the king or I that you could not bear children – not when your first scheme depended on you being able to convince both he and I that you could provide an heir to the earldom. His Majesty does not take kindly to being lied to, madam.’

Aye, I thought, a strange paradox, that: for Charles Stuart had no compunction in lying to men’s faces if so doing ensured his survival upon the throne.

‘Nor does this family take kindly to your lies,’ said Tris. ‘Your assumed interest in the earlier generations of Quinton history – that was but a ploy to conceal your real target, the evidence of Her Dowager Ladyship’s liaison with the late king, was it not?’ Louise stared at him, her eyes a curious meld of fury and fear. There was something about Tristram’s words, something about Tristram himself, that unsettled her more than the condemnation of her own husband. ‘And then there is the question of your origins. Oh, you must have thought that tearing from the parish register the page recording the entry of your marriage to Sir Bernard de Vaux – an entry giving your place of birth – would keep that information safe from all mankind. It took some considerable time to locate the Reverend Tobias Moon, the man who conducted your marriage. He had been deprived of his parish at the Restoration and forced to seek a living in the New World, chiefly because of your evident and relentless persecution of him – is that not so?’ She made no reply. ‘But finally we located him, in some foul and distant fastness within the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, as that remote place terms itself, and he sent us the piece of information that you had sought to conceal. Tell me, My Lady,’ said Tristram, ‘what do you know of a place called Chaldon Worgret, in the county of Dorset?’

‘I – I have not heard such a name –’

‘Really, My Lady? How strange. For that is where you were born and christened as Louise Lugg, was it not? A remote place, cradled within the broad downs where Dorset comes down to the sea. The sea whither your Spanish father came, and whence he swiftly returned, or so the goodly folk of the place tell me. For I have been there, you see. I have even fought something of a battle there. And although you claim to have forgotten it, there are many still alive in that place who recall your birth, and your childhood. Aye, and many who remember who and what your mother was.’ Tristram smiled. ‘It must have been somewhat uncomfortable, growing up in the knowledge that your mother had given birth to you and was then immediately burned as a witch.’

Then, and only then, did Louise, Countess of Ravensden, break down. Her entire frame shook, and she sobbed pathetically. When she looked up, it was toward me: her one remaining hope of a sympathetic hearing in that place. But I could not meet her eyes, and looked away.

‘No child should suffer for the sins of its parents,’ said Charles, looking significantly toward our mother, ‘but equally, no king is likely to want to take as his mistress – or a royal duchess to take as her boon companion – the offspring of a condemned witch, and a mother who pimps her own daughter. Nor a murderess, in truth.’

‘I did not kill my husbands –’

‘Frankly, madam, it does not really matter whether you did or not.’ This was a Charles Quinton that I had never seen before: a decisive, even brutal, man of action. But then, I reflected, this was not really my brother at all. This was Lord Percival, and he was clearly a very different creature to the cultured, ascetic, sickly tenth Earl of Ravensden. ‘Enough of the world believes that you did – and if it does not now, then it certainly will after Lord Percival disseminates the rumour. A pamphlet, I think, from one of those infernally persistent printing presses in London that our ministers and intelligencers singularly fail to shut down. One of the better writers, perhaps Dryden or Marvell. The child of a witch and a papist enemy of England, her own child condemned to a brothel, the murderer of two husbands, an agent of the hated French, who tried to ensnare an earl, a duchess and a king with her wiles… We will rewrite history, of course, to ensure that the king and I appear as all-seeing and all-knowing, humouring your schemes until the moment came to strike you down. That is the good thing about history, I find – it is so easy to alter it entirely with a stroke of a pen, particularly in these days when mankind as a whole is so remarkably gullible.’

‘And with your own daughter swearing to the truth of this account, what will be left for you, mother?’ said Madeleine bitterly. The Countess Louise gave her a look that seemed to encompass the rage and hurt of a mother spurned, but perhaps something else, too: a pride that her child had inherited her steel.

‘There is one thing more,’ I said. ‘Something that your chosen writer will find irresistible, brother. Paint her as the dark power that prevented her country’s navy winning this war.’

Despite reeling from the onslaught against her, the Lady Louise still managed an incredulous laugh. ‘Dear God, you as well, Matthew? I thought you had better sense than all these who seek my ruin. Well, then, what did I do to prevent your precious fleet’s victory? Hold back your ships through witchcraft inherited from my mother, perhaps?’

‘I fought a duel with Harry Brouncker, lady. Brouncker ordered our fleet to shorten sail in the night after the battle. Now where do you suppose he got that idea, My Lady? From Clarendon and the Duchess of York, desperate to preserve the life of the Duke? That is the tale currently favoured in the fleet and the city. But Brouncker was your lover – your puppet. When you came down to the fleet at Harwich, was it not to perfect the scheme that you had hatched with Monsieur Courtin? Brouncker to do all he could aboard the flagship to prevent the fleet gaining too crushing a victory, for an English navy unchallenged at sea would be utterly contrary to King Louis’ interests?’

‘With the poor duped Duchess as your scapegoat should the scheme misfire,’ Charles added.

‘Aye,’ said I, ‘for how many hundreds would have seen her with you and Brouncker at the reception for the ambassadors? A wife’s natural concern for the life of her husband, translated into an order to Brouncker to keep him safe at all costs – both of them little realising that they were truly serving the cause of King Louis.’

Framed against the window, the Lady Louise finally recovered some of her fight. ‘Damn you all to Hell! You talk of the judgement of history upon me? Well, then, let history judge this, Matthew Quinton – which of us strove to stop a war and preserve the lives of thousands, you or I?’