The Mountain of Gold (6 page)

This pleased me; young Andrewartha had been an officer's servant on the
Jupiter,
and was saved from a court-martial and an almost certain hanging by the generous spirit of Francis Gale. But the mention of my ancestor's marriage brought me back to present concerns, and I said, 'Well, Francis. So what is your opinion of the proposed match between my brother and the Lady De Vaux?'

I had seen Francis Gale in many states. I had seen him drunk. I had seen him angry, I had seen him desperately sad, I had seen him deliriously happy. I had seen him kill men with rabid blood-lust in his eyes. But until that moment, I had never seen him embarrassed. Haltingly, he said, 'She—she is a fine lady, sir. She will be a countess to bring credit to this house—'

The library door was thrown open with such force that it struck hard against the inner wall, shaking loose some plaster from the ceiling. 'Oh,
kloten—bollocks,
Francis!' cried Cornelia, who was finally dressed.

We stood, and my wife made straight for my flagon of ale and drained a long draught. As the world knows, Dutch women come out of the womb crying not for their mother's milk, but for beer.

I said, 'My dear, perhaps Francis has a different opinion of her—'

Gale sat, but rather less comfortably than before. 'Oh, husband,' said Cornelia. 'Think on it! I will say what Francis dares not, but which should be obvious to the man who could be Earl of Ravensden in a heartbeat. For but a few months more, at any rate. In this country, any vicar owes his place to whoever holds the right of presentation to the living. Is this not so? Thus Francis remains our vicar only at the pleasure of the earl, although of course, that pleasure would also be shaped by the two women who bear the title Countess of Ravensden—the earl's mother and his new wife. And should there ever be any debate in the matter, the final judgment would rest with the Supreme Governor of the Church that Francis serves. The earl's friend King Charles, in other words. Now, what do all of those who hold power over poor Francis's position have in common? Ah yes. They all favour the marriage.'

For my part, I was increasingly uneasy that both my wife and uncle had condemned this woman out of hand, without fair trial and without even meeting her. But in one sense she was right. The Vicar of Ravensden's position was particularly delicate, perhaps because—'Oh, Francis,' I said, 'surely you are not to officiate at this ceremony?'

Francis Gale essayed a little smile of relief. 'No, Captain. God places men in situations that are invidious enough, and He has not sought fit to inflict that additional punishment upon me, thanks be to Him. The ceremony will be at Saint Paul's, no less, and in November, so thankfully distant. It's as well, really, for Ravensden Church could never hold the congregation that's expected. What's more, the King himself intends to give away the bride, so I would not wish to be held to account if the roof collapsed in the middle of the service. Some might construe that as high treason.'

Ah, Francis, my old and long-gone friend; would that we all have the gift of second sight. For the roof, tower and bells of Ravensden Church are all still there and sound enough, more than sixty years on. They will probably still be there at Doomsday. Whereas, of course, old Saint Paul's was reduced to cinders but three years later.

Cornelia sniffed. 'Ha, Charles Stuart only chose Saint Paul's because no other church is large enough to accommodate his brood of mistresses and bastards. Then there will be the family and confidantes of our new countess, of course. A veritable multitude they'll be.'

Francis said, 'Not so, Mistress Quinton. It seems she has no immediate family of any sort.'

Cornelia and I leaned forward, almost in unison. This was news indeed. My wife said, 'No family? Who has no family, other than beggars, orphans and the very old? Most of us have too much family.' This was undoubtedly true of her own breed, the van der Eides: her parents, brother, sisters, uncles, aunts and cousins, spread across a large swathe of the Netherlands and Flanders, constituted a vast dynasty of tedium. It was less true of the Quintons, a line that was almost extinct; but even I had a living mother, a brother, a sister and an uncle (as well as innumerable cousins on my mother's and grandmother's sides of the family, including even a few who were both sane and not French).

Francis nodded. 'Quite, Mistress. But the Master has written to tell me that he has been conducting some discreet researches into Lady De Vaux's history. He has no conclusions as yet, but as he writes in a letter I received only today, neither does she. No conclusion to any branch of her family's history, for there seems to be no family.'

The juxtaposition of Master and Mistress confused me momentarily. Then I realised that 'the Master' could only be my uncle Tristram, the Master of Mauleverer. So Tris was looking into our new countess's past.

I looked at my wife, and at my friend Francis Gale, and knew in that moment that I was looking upon the beginnings of a conspiracy. My heart cried out to me to join it, there and then, but my head urged different counsels.
You have not spoken with your brother,
said my head,
and after all, it is his marriage.
My heart protested that it might indeed be his marriage, but that it was my inheritance, for good or ill, sought or unsought; my duty to the past and future of the House of Quinton. Besides, my brother was far away, inspecting the bleak and barely economical estate in Northumberland that a complex marriage-settlement had brought to our family a century or so before.
That may be,
said my head,
but neither have you spoken with the two who urge this marriage more than any others.
This was so, but I could hardly seek an audience of Our Sovereign Lord the King to demand to know why he wished my brother to marry a suspected murderous whore. But as for the other...

As if summoned by angels or demons, the state coach of the Earls of Ravensden thundered into the stable yard beyond the library window, an unjustifiably extravagant team of six horses pulling it home. Two young Barcocks rushed forward to the door that bore our ancient blazon of arms, opened it, and helped a tall but stooped old woman to descend. Still clad in mourning black, some eighteen years after her husband's death, the Lady Anne, Dowager Countess of Ravensden, looked about her with a satisfied air and made her way slowly towards our old house, bent almost double, her two sticks striking the cobbles and giving her the unsettling sight and sound of a vast and ancient spider, moving relentlessly towards its next fly.

My mother had returned.

The crooked hand extended toward me, and I leaned forward to kiss it. Mother was seated in her room in the former monks' infirmary, a little way down the corridor from the one which Cornelia and I shared. Thus she, too, had a view over to the ruins of the abbey quire, but the demolition of part of the wall by Henry VIII's agents when the monastery was dissolved meant that she had an uninterrupted view down to the grave of her husband. James Quinton, Earl of Ravensden for less than half a year, lay there, forever in her view: poet, warrior, fallen legend of the Cavalier cause, and the father who had died when I was only five. My mother's chair was carefully positioned so that she did not have to look down upon the adjacent grave of my grandfather Matthew, the previous earl, whom she had hated with a passion equal to that with which she had loved his son. Or as I thought she had loved him until I had heard the enigmatic words of a dying man, in Scotland the year before.

'Matthew,' she said. 'You should have sent Musk or another ahead of you, to inform us of your coming.'

'There was much to do, mother. There always is when a ship pays off.' This was invention, for the end of the
Wessex's
cruise was the first time I had paid off a ship in the normal way. My first command had been wrecked on the coast of Kinsale, my second almost blown apart in the Scottish isles. But there was also a truth in it, for the bombardment of paperwork which accompanied our return to Chatham had been almost as terrible as a broadside, and certainly more time-consuming. I had meant to write ahead and inform my family at Ravensden of my return, but by the end of each day I had written so many formal letters, read through so many muster books, pay books and manifests, dealt with so many officious time-servers from the dockyard and the Ordnance—after all of that, I could barely keep my eyes open for a jar of wine at the King's Head in Rochester before falling unconscious into my bed.

The Dowager Countess frowned. 'As you say, Matthew. The ways of the navy are a mystery to me.' (This was a blessing; her hatred of her father-in-law had grown into a profound lack of interest in the service that he had graced and to which I now belonged.) 'But you are so
brown
! Why, they will mistake you for a Moor when next you ride into Bedford—the people there will never have seen so dark a face—'

My mother was not adept at ordinary conversation. This was one of the chief reasons why relations were sometimes strained between her and Cornelia, who could extract a conversation out of a rock. So I came straight to the matter, and said, 'Mother, we must speak of this proposed marriage. Between Charles and the Lady De Vaux.'

The eyes narrowed. To be fair, my mother had learned suspicion at the court of King Charles the First, amid all the fevered rumours and hysteria that had culminated in civil war; like many men and women of her age, she carried suspicion on her shoulder like a vast but invisible bird of prey. 'What of the marriage?'

Time for diplomacy, for the King and the Lord Admiral his brother wanted their captains to be good diplomats. 'Well, it affects me, as the heir. Mother, all I seek is some explanation that will settle my mind in this matter.'

She looked on me with sadness and—and with something else, something that I could not quite identify. 'Yes, you are the heir, Matthew. And after you? Who is the heir then? When you married Cornelia, Charles and I saw it as the salvation of the bloodline. But five years on, you have no children. The line must continue. This family must continue.'

'But to put Charles through this—Charles of all men—and with this woman of all women—'

'Charles is—sanguine, shall we say. You can speak to him yourself, when he returns from Alnburgh. And the King's enthusiasm for the match weighs heavily with him. As for the Lady De Vaux, it's true that she has a certain reputation. But I have lived a long time, Matthew, and I have found that reputations are often unjustified. Particularly if, as I suspect, that reputation is founded upon jealousy of the thirty thousand that she possesses.'

'
Thirty thousand?
That much?'

'Some widows are fortunate in their inheritances, Matthew, while some are not,' she said, looking out to the grave in the ruins. 'I need not tell you what thirty thousand will mean to this house. And remember, I have met the lady several times, which you and Cornelia have not. I believe I can judge a character, and I judge hers to be—suitable.'

'But there are so many questions about her past—she has no family-'

The bird of prey preened itself, and pounced. 'And how do you know that? Oh, don't bother lying. Tristram, of course.' She was angry now, and my mother's anger was always cold and controlled, unlike the armwaving tempers of Cornelia. 'Tristram will never reconcile himself to this, just as he never reconciled himself to me, nor to his king in his time of need, come to that. I could have proposed the marriage of Charles to the most saintly virgin in England, if any such can be found, and still my good-brother would have opposed it—for it would not have been of his conceiving, and that irks him more than anything. But then, if he had any true sense of family duty he would abandon his miserable little college, his wine and his mistresses, get a wife, and father the future heir to Ravensden himself.' She was furious now, and my mother furious was a sight to behold. 'But Tristram will always indulge himself first, then play his little games. So like his father, in all things. Thank God that he was the younger son, and thank God that is the way of it in the next generation, too. All the responsibility and sense of duty with the elder—'

'
Enough, mother!
Enough of diplomacy, too; time for the broadside. 'Responsibility? Duty? You dare talk of those things, when you tell Cornelia to enter a convent? Oh, you'll gladly set aside my responsibility and duty to my wife to suit your own purposes. You chide my uncle for playing games, when you play them with the lives of everyone in this family?'

'You will not speak to me in this way. I have told you before,
you will not
—'

I was angry now, the rage blazing inside me like a burning magazine. 'Oh yes, mother. You have told me before. You told me when I questioned you about the early days of the late king's reign, in Lord Buckingham's time, when my father was away at the French wars—' elusive hints of secrets buried deeply over thirty years before were an unexpected legacy of my voyage aboard the
Jupiter—
'What else passed in those times, mother?
What else?

I saw something in her eyes...

It was gone in an instant, and the narrow, suspicious slits returned. 'Get out,' she hissed. 'Get back to your barren wife.'

'Better a barren wife than a whore for a countess,' I snapped as I turned away from her and strode from the room.

It was only when I stood outside, in the dark, damp corridor, that I realised two things. First, she had insulted Cornelia, but she had done no more than speak the truth; whereas I had made the fatal mistake of not distinguishing between the once and future Countesses of Ravensden. As I heard my mother's sobbing begin, I also knew what I had seen in her eyes when I demanded the truth of all that she had known and done at the court of the first King Charles.

It was fear.

***

I sat in a small private room of the old George Inn, just up from the river bridge in Bedford. It stank. As in all towns, the common sewer flowed down the High Street just outside, but in Bedford, it met the river's own distinctive stench right outside the entrance to the George. Moreover, the stables at the back were particularly close to the main body of the inn, and the innkeeper apologised for the presence of a noxious herd of unruly Irish horses with violent diarrhoea, en route for the royal races at Newmarket. Yet by the end of a second jug of good Bordeaux, the George seemed like a very paradise on earth, especially as it did not contain either my mother (still distraught) or my wife (attempting vainly to calm my mother).