The Blast That Tears the Skies (2012) (32 page)

The barb struck home. In a sense, I felt more pain in that moment than I had when the Dutch musket ball struck my foot; for was not this but the plain truth?

Tristram was unfazed. ‘My Lady, King Louis’ peace has another name to it. That word is slavery. Yes, it suits him at this present moment to have peace between England and the Dutch, but only so that he may eventually achieve his real aim – and that, My Lady, is to rule over us both.’

She stared at him, that same strange expression upon her face. ‘Tristram Quinton, my most inveterate enemy of all. And I know why, Doctor Quinton – I know the role you play.’ She looked around the room, her eyes ablaze. ‘You can accuse me all you like,’ she said bitterly, ‘but I know the truth of you Quintons now – of the secret that you have tried to hide all these years. I will take it with me to France, and denounce you all, and your foul hypocrite of a king, from there!’ She was exultant now. ‘Aye, none of you can touch me! I will walk from here a free woman, for I am under the protection of France!’ she spat. ‘Of France, I say!’

‘No longer, madam.’ This voice was the least expected of all. I turned, startled beyond all measure, to look upon my mother. She was smiling; and in recent times, I had known my mother to smile only when a particularly large dissenter congregation was arrested. But the revelation of her extraordinary past had seemingly liberated the Countess Anne. ‘King Louis was susceptible to your reasoning once, perhaps,’ she said. ‘But now, My Lady, he takes the counsel of others. Recently, he has been particularly receptive to the arguments of his aunt, Queen Henrietta Maria. My dearest friend. Arguments that I provided her with, before she left this shore for the last time.’

The Dowager Countess of Ravensden raised herself from her chair. My brother might have feigned his pain, but my mother clearly did not; yet she intended to bring down this interloper, who had deceived her more thoroughly than any of the rest of us, by confronting her face to face.

The Countess Anne walked slowly, painfully, across the great gallery, and stood at last in front of her daughter-in-law.

‘You may ruin my name,’ said my mother. ‘It is of but little concern to me now. But you will not ruin the sainted reputation of the Queen Mother with malicious accusations about what passed between her and Colin Campbell, and you will not sully the name of the King and Martyr whom I loved.’ The dowager countess was almost spitting her bile at her good-daughter. ‘It would be impossible to proceed against you here, in England. We have such inconveniences as a rule of law, with juries, a need for evidence, and other such troublesome barriers to the execution of justice. But they are not so particular in France, and for all your bluster, you are now an embarrassment to that state and its king, good-daughter. The French have a device called the
lettre de cachet
, which permits indefinite imprisonment under royal warrant and without trial.’ She reached within her sleeve and produced a small, folded piece of parchment, sealed with wax. ‘A letter such as this one.’

‘It need not be so,’ said Charles, ‘depending upon –’

But it was too late. Louise Quinton ran to the wall near where Cornelia and I were, lifted the tapestry over her, and disappeared. Musk tore the tapestry from its hangers, revealing a concealed doorway. Despite the pain from my foot, I was the first to reach the opening and the spiral staircase behind it. Drawing my sword, I took the steps two at a time. I could hear Louise’s steps high above me. Below, Charles, Tris, Musk, Madeleine and Cornelia followed up the stairs in their turns, for this was a particularly narrow spiral which must have survived from the earliest days of the castle.

At last there was some light upon the stair – the roof had to be near –

Out, and onto a broad crenellated platform with fine views of the wooded countryside all around. She stood there, before me, pressed against the battlements.

‘Louise,’ I said, ‘I beg you, there is no need for this – I will mitigate their wrath –’

My brother stepped out onto the roof behind me, followed in short order by the others.

‘Damn you,’ she hissed. ‘Damn you all, you so-mighty Quintons! What did I do?
What did I do
? All I sought was to end a war – is that so very wrong? And Harry Brouncker ensuring sail was shortened, saving thousands more lives – can that be a crime?’ She looked at me imploringly. ‘True, I also wished for the best life I could have – to be a great lady – I saw the coach of the Lady Bankes once, when I was a child in Dorset – aye, a child living with the stigma of having a witch for her mother – the coach came through our village, and I thought,
one day that will be me
– oh yes, but that which in men is called ambition, in women is called whoring and witchcraft. Sweet Mother of God,
is all I have done so very wrong
?’

‘Wrong indeed, if at the expense of the lives of your husbands and your daughter!’ cried Cornelia.

‘And of your king,’ said Tris, coldly.

‘Oh, Tristram Quinton,’ she said mockingly. ‘See yourself now, sir, as I see you. A fine, rational man of science. Master of an Oxford college, member of the Royal Society. But what has it been, your pursuit of me, if not that of a witchfinder hunting his witch?’

I had never seen my uncle flummoxed and wholly at a loss for words: never until then.

‘It is over, madam,’ said Charles firmly. Then his voice changed; no longer was he Lord Percival. ‘Come, Louise. We need not employ King Louis’ letter – quiet exile will not be so bad, if you will but agree to it –’

Louise was flushed and increasingly hysterical. ‘You think I believe that, Charles? That you and your harridan of a mother will trust me to keep the secrets I now know? And even if I trusted the House of Quinton, do you really think I trust Charles Stuart? Do any of you?’

‘I give you my word,’ said Charles Quinton. ‘The word of the Earl of Ravensden.’

‘And is that really a word you can give, husband? You, who might be a king’s bastard instead? And in any case, would it truly be your word, or that of Lord Percival? For I would not trust him in a century of Sundays.’ She laughed bitterly. ‘Ah, perhaps I might trust the word of an Earl of Ravensden, after all. But only of one.’

At that, she stared directly upon me. As she did so, she moved along the wall until she was framed directly in the embrasure, her back to the open air.

I stepped forward. ‘Louise,’ I said, ‘you have my word – in the name of God, come away –’

‘Too late, Matthew. Too late for all, now. You will not parade me to public scorn, as you did my mother. You will not burn me as you burned my mother!’

With that, she turned, gripped the battlements, stepped up and flung herself into space.

I was the first to reach the wall, and was thus the only one to see the mortal form of Louise, Countess of Ravensden, strike and break upon the ground far below. To this day, I can recall the expression on her face in that last moment before her head snapped forward on impact with the earth. I will go to my grave convinced that she was smiling.

Tris gently moved me to one side and looked down upon the grim sight. ‘A singular woman,’ he said. ‘Singular and unsettling. Her entire life was a lie, and yet at the end it brought her to a clear vision of the truth. Disturbingly clear.’

My brother looked down upon the remains of his wife, watching as Madeleine came out from the castle, knelt down by her mother’s body, and began to weep. Charles was silent for some moments, but when he spoke again, it was with the voice of Lord Percival. ‘Musk, attend to the body. She will be buried with all the honours and respect that befit a Countess of Ravensden.’

‘As you say, My Lord.’

As Musk retired, I went to Cornelia and took my shaking wife into my arms. ‘You called her Louise,’ she said, half quizzically and half accusingly.

I looked out, far beyond the walls of Lyndbury Castle. A small black cloud upon the horizon seemed to presage a distant storm.

 

 

 

The court and government of Charles the Second had descended upon Salisbury like a plague of locusts. The population almost doubled overnight; the cesspits and the old-fashioned water channels that flowed in the midst of every street could not cope. The rooms of the antique low-roofed inns of the town were suddenly crowded out. It was said that at the Haunch of Venison, two baronets and a viscount shared one garret, while the King’s Arms was so full of young ladies of dubious reputation that it was newly by-named Signor Dildo’s Convent. The butchers, bakers and brewers were confronted by at once the greatest opportunity and the greatest nightmare of their lives, for the insatiable needs of the royal purveyors and the countless lackeys placed intolerable demands upon their supplies. Within days, courtiers and men of Sarum alike were grumbling at this singular choice of a royal refuge. What was wrong with Oxford, the old cavaliers complained, which was good enough for this king’s parents, the royal court and the entire royalist army in the civil war? Plenty of rooms in the Oxford colleges, they said, and spacious quadrangles for perambulation. Ah, said the more knowing, but Oxford is not My Lord of Clarendon’s city. Hereabouts are the village where the Chancellor was born and the ruined palace from which he takes his title. The graves of Salisbury are full of dead Hydes. Most of the butchers, farriers and vintners are kin to the Hydes. Such economy of effort on the part of the Chancellor, who could thus attend to his estates, the enrichment of his friends and neighbours, and the governance of England without needing to move an inch! And so the capital of England had decamped to this peculiar little provincial town, beneath the shadow of the cathedral’s lofty spire, simply because it was convenient for His Eminence, England’s secular Richelieu.

The king had installed himself in a fine new house close to the cathedral, a square, grey-stone pile with a multiplicity of south-facing windows. It was there that my brother and I found him, looking for all the world like a lofty attendant to the far grander personage in his company, the Earl of Clarendon himself.

King and Chancellor began by congratulating me on my efforts in the
Merhonour
– heroics, Clarendon said – during the late battle. The king demanded a detailed account of the action, clapping his hands with glee at the account of the
Eendracht
’s destruction. Only that morning, he had learned that Obdam’s family had invoiced the States-General for all the silver cutlery, extravagant tablecloths and other personal effects lost when the ship blew up.

‘And that, of course,’ said King Charles, ‘is why the Dutch are destined to lose this war. Mean, avaricious penny-pinchers, all of them, who can think only of their balance sheets! Whereas our true and honest Englishmen serve for honour, not for base coin.’

Which is as well, I thought, given how tardy this king’s treasury proves in actually paying any of the moneys now long overdue to the same true and honest Englishmen, the captain of the
Merhonour
among them.

Clarendon was clearly bored during my discourse of the battle; his entire lack of interest in naval affairs could not be shaken even by the tale of England’s greatest victory by sea. As soon as he decently could, he changed the topic of conversation to his perennial and most pressing concern, the security of the crown – that delicate euphemism for the continuation in power of the Earl of Clarendon.

‘As you know, sirs, the business of the twenty captains was seemingly a canard, a mere fiction,’ said the Chancellor. My brother and I glanced at each other complicitly. The great Clarendon was clearly not as all-knowing as he assumed, for in this matter he had been well and truly gulled. ‘The invention of a disgruntled Middlesex magistrate and some of his circle of fanatics and malcontents, who turned the ordinary murder of a poor wretch into the basis of a great conspiracy. They sought to spread dissension and uncertainty within our fleet, hoping thereby to bring about a Dutch victory –’

‘Which would encourage all the sectaries to rise up and send me packing,’ said the king, with equal complicity. ‘To think there are those within my realms who would revel in an English defeat.’

‘A plot defeated chiefly by the guile of that dark and mysterious creature, the Lord Percival,’ said Clarendon, smiling and nodding toward my brother, who reciprocated. ‘Let us be thankful for his unexpected and timely reappearance.’

The Earl of Ravensden smiled and bowed. It was still strange to see him as he really was, this feared and indomitable bulwark of the realm.

On our journey to Salisbury, Charles had told me something of his alternative identity. He first adopted it in Cromwell’s time, initially as a way of protecting his family and estates from the wrath of the Protector.

‘Gradually, I came to realise that the disguise was far more potent than plain Charles Quinton,’ he said, taking me fully into his confidence for the first time in our lives. ‘A man whose face is concealed and whose true identity is unknown strikes fear into the hearts of the credulous, who see in him all their nightmares of wraiths and phantoms and the like. With the playhouses closed, my theatrical friends had ample time on their hands to train me in acting a part and convincing an audience. Soon, Lord Percival had a small army of agents at his disposal, with Phineas Musk at their head.’

The idea of Musk alongside my brother at the heart of royalist intrigues – aye, as a cavalier hero, no less – was more than a little disconcerting. ‘Then why did you not recruit me, Charles, or at least confide in me?’ I demanded.

‘Come, Matt, you remember how dangerous the times were. One of us could play the spy, but for the good of the house of Quinton – and our mother’s peace of mind – it was better that the two of us did not lay our heads upon the same block. And if you were ever arrested by the Puritans and their lackeys, you could legitimately deny all knowledge of this Lord Percival.’

As we rode on, Charles explained that he believed the Restoration would be the end of his days as an intelligencer: there would a new era of peace and contentment under our rightful sovereign, and the Earl of Ravensden could devote all his efforts to the recovery of his ancestral estates. ‘But by last autumn, it was apparent that plots against the king were multiplying faster than rabbits in a warren. And if truth be told, Matt, I was most dreadfully bored by the endless ledgers, the disputes over rentals, the discussions upon wheat… Christ God, spare me from wheat… It needed only a catalyst to revive the dark spectre of Lord Percival. A catalyst that you provided.’

‘That
I
provided, brother?’

‘Of course – your exposure of my wife as a French agent, Matt. Oh, I was already convinced of her duplicity, and regretted my weakness in allowing myself to be persuaded to the marriage by our mother and the king. But I had thought of the marriage as a penance for my many sins – as a cross I would have to bear for as long as I lived. Your intelligence of her true nature made me realise that I had an alternative. Thanks to my unnatural marriage, I had been presented with incomparable access to one of King Louis’ most important agents in England – an opportunity that I simply could not pass over, brother.’ Almost as one, our steeds jumped a shallow gully. ‘I approached the king, Clarendon and Arlington. With the fanatics restless and a war imminent, they were more than enthusiastic to recall the most successful royalist agent of the late troubles, if I may so immodestly term myself. Thus was Lord Percival reborn.’ Charles smiled. ‘The preachers say that rebirth in Christ makes a man new again. I won’t gainsay that, but the rebirth of Lord Percival certainly remade Charles Quinton. I had been sick, weary of my old wounds, weighed down by the doubts over my marriage. I would probably have been a dead man within months.’ We rode through a stream, scattering some ponies that were drinking a little way downstream. ‘But the moment I resumed the identity of Lord Percival, I felt as though a surge of new blood had been pumped into me. I felt a thrill that I had not known since the Protector’s dragoons were in pursuit of me across the fields of Northamptonshire. This was what I was born to do, Matt.’

This, and not the part of the Earl of Ravensden? It was a question that I could not ask; nor did I feel inclined to raise the allegations of the late countess. But Charles himself must have sensed my predicament. We reined in amidst the ruins of Old Sarum, on the bleak hill above Salisbury, looking down to the lofty spire of the cathedral in the broad vale beneath.

‘It tormented father, you know,’ he said, suddenly and evidently regretfully. ‘
Your
father. He told me of it, the day he rode out before Naseby. I think he had a sense that he would not return – indeed, I have often wondered whether he did not truly care if he lived or died in the battle, whether his charge into the midst of Parliament’s army was the fulfilment of a death wish. Mother has blamed Rupert all these years, but I think that has been only a way of assuaging her own guilt.’ He looked into the distance and shook his head sadly. ‘I had to succeed to the title. You realise that? To proclaim myself both illegitimate and the king’s son would have bestowed the entire Quinton inheritance upon a five-year-old in the midst of civil war, when it urgently needed a steady hand to hold it together – and God, what would Cromwell and the Parliament-men have done with intelligence that the king had a bastard?’

‘When did the king know?’ I asked. ‘The present king.’

‘His father told him when they, too, parted for the last time. I think it had caused less anguish between the king and queen than it did between your father and our mother. After all, Matt, it is expected of men, and perhaps of kings especially – but as my late wife rightly said, in women it is called
whoring
.’

‘And are these, then, the deep secrets of the House of Quinton, that you once swore upon our sister’s grave to reveal to me one day?’

My brother – maybe my half-brother, for all we and our mother knew – looked at me, looked away over the ruins of Sarum and to the cathedral spire beyond, then smiled and turned back to me.

‘One of them, Matt. But only one, and perhaps not the greatest. That day of revelation is still to come.’

So we rode down into Salisbury, and despite Charles Quinton’s enigmatic prevarication, at last I knew the truth of his unlikely friendship with Charles Stuart.

Genesis Four, verse Nine.

They were each their brother’s keeper.

* * *

‘I wouldn’t have forgiven you if you’d killed Harry Brouncker,’ said King Charles the Second, a little later. ‘Damn difficult these days to find good opponents at chess. But then, if I’d suspected him of giving the order to shorten sail I’d probably have run him through myself. Wouldn’t you say so, My Lord Clarendon?’

The Chancellor, who was suspected by many (Matthew Quinton at their head) of having played a part in that perfidious order, seemed momentarily discomfited, but quickly recovered his customary arrogance. ‘As well, then, Your Majesty, that the incident seems to have been but a misunderstanding between tired men, all numbed by the shock of battle.’

So this was to be the new truth; and Clarendon’s daughter, gulled by the Lady Louise, was hardly likely to dispute it.

The king sent for wine, and we drank cheerily. Strangely to my mind, there was no mention at all of the late Countess of Ravensden. But then, Charles Stuart presumably did not wish to be reminded of the fact that he, too, had been gulled by that lady, and wished even less to be reminded of the fact that he, the king, had been wrong about her, and that I, plain Matt Quinton, had been right. In my experience, those with divine right have some difficulty admitting to their earthly wrongs.

At length Clarendon withdrew, pleading some urgent business of state; we were, after all, at war, although it was easy enough to forget that amid the cloistered serenity of Salisbury. With him gone, the three men left behind could turn at last to the matters known to them alone.

‘I still feel like a naughty child when I dissemble before My Lord of Clarendon,’ said the king. ‘But it is better that he believes your story of Bagshawe’s guilt, Charles, rather than the truth – especially as Bagshawe lies in a damned convenient plague-pit and cannot disabuse him.’