The Blast That Tears the Skies (2012) (4 page)

They sat in an alehouse upon the Southwark shore. Through the grimy window, Musk could see the myriad masts of the ships in the Pool of London, and behind them, the squat, menacing walls of the Tower.

‘The French and the Dutch?’ scoffed Musk. ‘Calvinist and papist? Republic and monarchy – aye, and the most absolute monarchy of them all, at that? Oh yes, my friends, a recipe for a lasting amity, that!’

The argument progressed by degrees to the stage of red faces and the slamming of tankards upon tables. Musk was on the point of walking away to find a quieter berth when he heard his name being called.

‘Musk! Is a Phineas Musk here?’

It was a boy, one of those knowing lads of twelve or thirteen who would always run an errand for some pennies or a jug of ale. Musk identified himself and the lad handed over a small slip of paper. The wax seal bore no imprint. Musk tore it open and looked upon the message within:
34. 51. 9. 77. P.
’

‘You all right, Phin?’ asked the farrier. ‘Looks like you’ve seen one of your froggy demons.’

‘Need to go,’ mumbled Musk.

‘Pay for yer share of the ale, then, yer skinflint whoreson!’

Agitated beyond reason, Musk hurried away and made along the shore toward Lambeth marsh. By the time he reached his destination, close by the river, darkness was falling.

Musk made his way through the ruinous door of a tall, round building, open within to the sky. Broken and burned wood, the remains of galleries, littered the floor, making his passage difficult. Finally, though, he stood upon the remnants of a stage.

‘My Lord?’ he enquired softly.

At that, a cloaked man emerged from the remains of the rooms behind the stage. His face remained in darkness. In a deep and ambivalent voice he said, ‘Do you know me, Phineas Musk?’

The steward of Ravensden House nodded warily; this was a game he had not played in many years. ‘Yes, My Lord, I know you now.’

‘By what name do you know me?’

‘You are Lord Percival.’

‘And what would I have you do?’

‘You would have me complete the quest, My Lord.’

The man emerged at last from the shadows. ‘Well then, Phineas Musk,’ said that familiar yet almost forgotten voice, ‘we understand each other once more.’

 

 

 

A sudden rumble of thunder shook the windows of Sayes Court at Deptford.

‘Curious,’ said the house’s owner, the thin and aquiline John Evelyn, opening a window and looking up to a cloudless blue sky. ‘Most curious. Upon a day such as this, whither comes the thunder?’

His friend Lord Brouncker looked up from the adjacent table and the plate of sturgeon upon it, already considerably diminished, before his dainty hand descended instead upon a large slice of venison pie. ‘It is a time of signs and wonders in the heavens,’ Brouncker said, ‘beginning with the comet, and as all know, however much we men of science analyse them and predict their paths, the truth remains that comets bring inexplicable events and disasters. Always have. So, coming as it does in the comet’s wake, thunder from nowhere is only to be expected, Mister Evelyn. Although no doubt Captain Quinton’s esteemed uncle would disagree, as he disagrees with so many other conclusions of our learned society. Is that not so, Captain?’

I avoided Brouncker’s penetrating stare and looked out instead over Evelyn’s famous gardens, a veritable English Elysium. ‘My uncle has always ploughed his own furrow, My Lord,’ I said hesitantly, for defending the frequently indefensible Tristram Quinton was hardly my concern.

Brouncker smiled knowingly. He was pre-eminently a mathematician and scientist, President of the recently established Royal Society, which was how he knew my eccentric uncle, a fellow member and the somewhat unlikely Master of Mauleverer College, Oxford. Brouncker was also newly made a member of the Navy Board, perhaps because the king reckoned that a man who could count might be of some use in the navy, an institution not known for employing the most numerate of men and, perhaps because of that, notorious as a bottomless pit which ever consumed most of the public purse.

Evelyn finally turned away from the window, clearly still puzzling over the mysterious thunderclap. ‘Your uncle has not favoured you with his opinion of my book of
Sylva
, perchance?’ he asked. ‘The praise of the eminent Doctor Quinton would be of much worth to me.’

‘Alas no, sir,’ I lied, picking some rabbit and anchovies from their pewter plates, ‘I regret that he has not.’ This, I knew, was not the time or the place for the truth of Tristram’s opinion, which was that Evelyn’s attempt to persuade the English of the merit of planting more trees was as worthwhile as a fart in the grave.

We returned to the table, where Pepys was engaged in a spirited discussion with Lord Brouncker’s brother Harry about the prospects for the impending war against the Dutch. I could tolerate the elder Brouncker, but the younger was quite another matter: an ignorant, flattering courtier of the worst sort, and one of those rabid cavaliers who would gladly have hanged every sometime
Commonwealths-man
. He was holding forth at some length about the innate superiority of our monarchical navy over that of the malignant republican Dutch, if only the king had not seen fit to recall so many time-serving verminous captains who had once taken Cromwell’s commission. Across from them was Cornelia, who had swiftly made a friend of Mrs Pepys, a vivacious Frenchwoman named Elizabeth; this was unsurprising, for both were foreigners in this strange world called England and both had husbands for whom the navy was the be-all and end-all. The two women were whispering conspiratorially and occasionally laughing indiscreetly. Back across the table from them, Mrs Evelyn, the pious and profoundly intellectual consort of our host, toyed with a morsel of carp, attempting desperately to avoid conversation with Lord Brouncker’s exotically dressed companion, a remarkably buxom and ugly actress named Mrs Abigail Williams. It was an eclectic gathering. Having subsequently hosted many such occasions myself, I have learned that one can swiftly sense whether the assemblage of humanity one has brought together is a success; and this was most certainly not such.

A case in point was the conversation upon which the party was engaged an hour or two later whilst launching an assault upon a most splendid dessert table of sugar cakes, plum puddings, jellies and more. Our host’s wine was flowing liberally, although Cornelia was speculating on how recently it might have been within the hold of a Dutch prize-ship. Whatever its provenance, it had flowed far too liberally into the gullet of Harry Brouncker, who was now holding forth upon the roguery of Members of Parliament.

‘Corrupt!’ he blustered. ‘Self-seeking, to a man! No sense of honour! The sorts of skulking poltroons who count their pennies and record their worthless miserable apologies for lives in diaries!’ Methought both Pepys and Evelyn seemed discommoded by that remark, but I might have been mistaken. ‘Men who will not grant the king enough to support his estate,’ raged Brouncker, ‘nor to wage war properly upon that damnable pack of Fleming butterboxes – ah, my apologies, Mistress Quinton…’

‘There is not enough money in the land to fight this war, then, Mister Brouncker?’ asked Elizabeth Pepys in her thick French accent, seeking to deflect the explosion that was threatening to erupt from my dear wife.

Lord Brouncker waved a hand, thereby stifling the response that his inebriated sib had been about to venture. ‘Parliament has voted two-and-a-half millions for it. With respect to my dear brother, such a sum has never been known, my dear lady,’ he said, scowling at his dear brother as he did so. ‘And if as all men expect, men like Captain Quinton here drive the Dutch off the seas before the summer’s end, just as Monck, now His Grace of Albemarle, and the rest of them did in the last war – well then, we will have a peace treaty that brings us all the trade that they currently have, and we will place young Prince William upon their throne to do his uncle’s bidding.’ Brouncker nodded toward Cornelia, who raised her glass to him in return. Cornelia had ever been an Orangist, one of those who resented the coup in Amsterdam that brought to power the republicans under her
bête noire
, Johan De Witt; but these monarchist principles had formed initially to spite her glum republican parents and dour republican twin brother. ‘Think of Britain as a great eagle, my dear, or a vulture, perhaps. Once the war starts, the Dutch will have to keep up their trade with the outside world. Trade is their lifeblood. Without it, they will perish. But there we are, the great British vulture, astride their only sea routes. They try to run their trading ships through the Channel, and we pounce on them. They try to run them around Scotland, and we pounce on them. All their trade, swept up by our brave ships. Riches beyond imagination for old England, and our king a veritable Midas! Halcyon days, my friends!’

Cornelia bridled and, under her breath, she swore in Dutch with a quite exceptional degree of obscenity. After all, she had been brought up in a Dutch seaport by a Dutch merchant whose prosperity depended exclusively upon the wellbeing of Dutch maritime trade. Consequently Cornelia had learned the ebbs and flows of the Dutch shipping industry before she could walk, and needed no lessons in it from My Lord Brouncker.

Mrs Williams suddenly caught my eye. Quite loudly, she cut directly across the company and said, ‘Captain, I have not seen your brother lately. He has ever been a devotee of the playhouses – we miss his patronage.’

‘Indeed, Mistress. Marriage has provided my brother with attractions other than those of the stage, alas.’ I attempted to make the remark sound as light as I could, rather than expressing my true feelings upon the matter of my brother’s condition.

‘Aye,’ slurred a leering Harry Brouncker, ‘but his wife has found attractions other than those of the marriage, too!’ His arrogant
self-regard
and broad smile left little doubt that these ‘attractions’ were, in fact, his own.

Both of the Evelyns were scandalised, although Abigail Williams grinned bawdily. I frowned at the rogue and began to rise from my stool, despite Cornelia’s restraining hand upon my arm and her urgent whisper of ‘
Nee, betalen geen acht
!’ (‘No, pay no heed!’). I pushed her hand away. For here was a matter to pursue, by God: I had no love for my good-sister Louise, but for good or ill she was Countess of Ravensden. The honour of my ancient house demanded a defence, or else the exposure of any dishonour that she might bring to it. But Lord Brouncker had gripped his brother’s shoulder and was whispering angrily into his ear while raising a hand to me to stay my advance. In that moment, too, a young man whom I recognised as one of the clerks of Deptford yard was admitted to the room by Evelyn’s maid, thus distracting the party. The clerk walked up to Pepys and whispered hurriedly to him. Pepys’s mouth suddenly gaped, and he swayed. He asked another question of the clerk, who nodded vigorously.

Finally, Pepys turned to the rest of us. Some instinct had made us all fall silent at once. For some reason, in that moment I thought upon the comet.

‘It – it was not thunder that we heard,’ said Pepys, an unsteady note in his voice. ‘The king’s great ship
London
, coming from Chatham into the Hope – Sir John Lawson’s flagship – oh dear God…’

Elizabeth Pepys ran to her husband’s side and gripped his arm tenderly. ‘Courage, husband!’ she cried.

Samuel Pepys looked at us with tears in his eyes. ‘The
London
is no more,’ he said. ‘She has been blown apart by a great explosion.’

* * *

Barely two hours later Pepys and I were bound downstream with full sail set. We had ridden post-haste from Sayes Court across the fringe of Greenwich marsh to the royal dockyard at Woolwich, where all was frantic activity. Every skiff and wherry the yard could muster was being manned for the long haul down to the outer reach of the Hope, where the stricken
London
was said to lie. But the arrival of one of the Principal Officers of the Navy was as the parting of the Red Sea, every man of that cramped little dockyard falling over himself to impress the mighty potentate that they perceived in Samuel Pepys, who was evidently more than a little pleased to be so received.

Urgently, I looked about the yard. Any of the oared craft would take an eternity to reach the wreck, even with the tide now on the ebb –

But there was one vessel that would suit, moored just a few yards off the wharf: a trim little hull, elaborately gilded, with dainty raised cabins astern and amidships as well as lee-boards after the Dutch fashion. Aboard her, men were making hurried preparations for sailing.

‘Ahoy, the yacht!’ I cried.

‘Who seeks her?’ bawled a stout creature upon the forecastle.

‘Captain Matthew Quinton and Mister Pepys, the Clerk of the Acts!’ I could have sworn the man made to genuflect, but then thought better of it. ‘Where’s the captain?’

‘G – gone up to the Navy Office, my lords!’ stammered the man, presumably the senior mate.

‘You sail without authority or a captain?’ Pepys demanded.

The man was abashed. ‘Aye, sirs – to save poor souls on the
London
, if we can!’

Pepys and I exchanged a glance. ‘Well then,’ cried the Clerk of the Acts, ‘you have all the authority you need, my friend – aye, and a captain, to boot!’

A skiff took us out to the vessel, which proved to be the
Mary Yacht
. Thus for the first and only time in my life I found myself in command of what was then still seen as a new and un-English innovation, a royal yacht. Our sovereign lord had fallen greatly in love with sailing during his exile, and at his Restoration the Dutch gave him a gift of the
Mary
, the first of many such craft that would soon adorn the royal inventory. Older seamen scoffed (privately, of course) at the notion of any man in his right mind
desiring to sail for pleasure
, of all the lunatic notions. But as the
Mary
went onto a close-hauled beam reach in Long Reach and I took her tiller from the helmsman while the yacht’s practised crew took pride in showing off the skill and speed with which they could adjust the set of her sails, I felt the thrill that appealed so much to Charles Stuart.

Pepys was evidently less of an enthusiast. He clung grimly to the larboard rail, especially when our yacht heeled hard over in the breeze, and proceeded to utter not a word during our voyage, as though opening his mouth to the slightest degree would disgorge the entire contents of his body. I was relieved at this, for Pepys could be something of a pontificator; but his silence allowed free rein to my own thoughts, and they focused above all on two things: what we would find ahead of us, and the meaning of Harry Brouncker’s unguarded remark about the Countess Louise.