Traitor's Storm (28 page)

Avis raised a sardonic eyebrow and looked out to sea again. She turned her head frantically left and right. In the moment she had looked away, Georgie’s ship had disappeared behind the trees. But no, there it was, beyond the trees, turning west at the mouth of the river. She leaned on the parapet and peered closer, greedily taking in the last view of the
Commander
before she got too far away for Avis’s short sight. She gave a sob that went right to Bet’s heart.

‘Avis.’ She put a hand on the woman’s arm. ‘I know what we can do. We can go down to the quay and ask the men left there what is going on. Better that than staying here, always wondering. What do you think?’

Avis froze for a moment and then gave herself a shake. She turned away from the distant view and looked at Bet almost as if seeing her for the first time. ‘You’d do that?’ she asked.

‘Of course. I do love your brother, you know, Avis. And you.’ Bet could hardly believe the words coming out of her mouth and yet, amazingly, she knew them to be true.

The big woman stood there irresolute for two more heartbeats, then threw off her blanket and made for the stairs. From the first stopping place, she looked back at the mistress of Carisbrooke and shouted, ‘What are you waiting for, Bet? The tide won’t be right forever, you know!’ And with a whirl of skirts, she was gone.

John Vaughan sat on the bridge of the
Bowe
, a lantern at his elbow. The dawn was rising, but he was totting up rows of figures and he needed the light. Some of his men had been a little mutinous, wanting to go and fight the dons. He had chosen them for their bellicose nature in the first place, he thought to himself, so now he had to ride that particular storm. He also had quite a lot of information on most of them – information that could have them twirling from a rope before they could say knife – so, muttering, they had continued their normal morning tasks on board while he assessed the damage that having the mouth of the river blocked by the
Commander
had done to his business. Finally, he drew two straight lines under the figure he had arrived at and, blowing out the lantern, pushed himself back from the table, a half-smile on his face. He was still all right. He could rebuild Mead Hole in a twinkling and soon be back in business. With the dons or with the governor, it didn’t really matter which.

He hadn’t heard her approach, but suddenly Bet Carey was standing opposite him, a hand on either side of his reckoning table, forearms taut, breasts almost bursting out of her bodice. Her chest was heaving and for a moment he wondered if he was asleep and dreaming. Like most men on the Island who had not actually sampled her charms, he had often spent time there in his sleep. ‘Master Vaughan,’ she snapped. ‘Why is your ship still in harbour?’

He looked up at her and put on his most winning expression, which dripped off his chin when he looked further and saw Avis Carey standing behind her. He knew he was beaten, but tried an excuse nonetheless. ‘I fear the
Bowe
is not seaworthy at the moment, my ladies,’ he said. ‘She has barnacles on her bottom and I would not risk her out to sea.’

A sailor popped his head out of a nearby hatch. ‘No, sir,’ he said, sketching a salute to the women. ‘She just bin scrubbed below for foulin’. We’re fit to set sail any time you like.’

Vaughan turned on him but Avis was quicker.

‘Excellent, my good man,’ she said. ‘Call your crew, Master Vaughan, and have them do whatever is necessary to get this ship out of this river. We must follow the
Commander
. She may need our help.’

The sailor was ready with his opinion again. ‘Beggin’ your pardon, Mistress,’ he said. ‘We can’t overhaul the
Commander
. The
Bowe
, she ain’t built for that kind of running. But we could wait in the Solent, watch for’n, if she should need our help.’

Avis opened her mouth, but this time Vaughan was the quicker. ‘He’s right, Mistress Avis,’ he said. ‘We can heave to, to help your brother’s ship if she comes to harm, but we could never catch her in a month of Sundays.’

Avis was reaching over the table, ready to haul the man to his feet, but Bet, expert at reading men in any weather, knew he was speaking the truth. ‘Let’s settle for that, shall we, Avis?’ she said. Then, turning to Vaughan, ‘Where do we sit? Is there some kind of viewing platform? I doubt I can keep Avis below decks, you know.’

Vaughan looked at her with a worried frown. Lined up on the quay he could see other women there, the wives of his fellow conspirators who, not hours ago, had done their level best to topple George Carey. ‘You can’t come with us, ladies,’ he said. ‘The sailors won’t have women on board ship. It’s bad luck.’

Avis and Bet folded their arms in unison. They planted their feet on the deck and looked at Vaughan under their brows. It was clear he would have more luck moving Carisbrooke Castle than these two.

‘But, on the other hand,’ he said, standing up and gesturing for his crew to start hauling the ship into sailing rig, ‘luck is just a state of mind. Lean on the rails, ladies, for the best view. Master Page!’

The captain sprang to attention on the lower deck.

‘Haul sail and make for Mead Hole.’

‘That’s bad luck, you know,’ Tom Sledd said as he caught sight of Benjamin, still in his farthingale. ‘A woman on board ship.’

‘Stow you!’ the lad snarled at him and pulled off his wig, kicking himself free of the skirt. Judging by the wolf-whistles that followed, he began to wish he had kept it on.

It had been still dark as the
Commander
slid past Richard Turney’s fort at Cowes and the little garrison there saluted as the stern lanterns flickered past them and swept on into the open sea. There was that bloody wind again, Tom Sledd moaned to himself as they butted free of the river. Why was the damn thing always blowing in his face, whichever way he stood and whatever direction he was coming from? The little ship churned and rolled as the cables creaked and groaned. The low headland of the island was dark to their larboard, the curve of Gurnard Bay and Thorness. Soon they were slicing the sea beyond Newtown and running with the tide along Hamstead Ledge. The dawn was lighting the sky behind them as the ship buffeted below Edmund Burley’s guns at Yarmouth. No firing yet. The dons had not got this far east and that was a good sign. Kit Marlowe stepped down from the quarterdeck where all the officers and gentlemen had gathered. The main deck was solid with militiamen, leaning on their pikes and watching as Colwell Bay snaked to larboard.

‘That’s Hurst Castle,’ Marlowe heard Sergeant Wilson say. ‘Narrowest point to the mainland, that is. Reckon we could hold the Armada here all by ourselves!’

There was a ripple of laughter. Marlowe wondered if it was like this on board the Spanish ships, anxious men making small talk, cracking feeble jokes, moaning about the weather. Or were they all kneeling in fervent prayer, kissing their rosaries while their black-robed priests sang
Te Deum, pro nobis
?

‘Shit!’ the helmsman at George Carey’s elbow hissed. Carey had seen it too, the sea mist like a wall that so often cloaked the Island and made it invisible. It was seeping into their nostrils already, smelling of salt, but it hadn’t quite reached them yet. Totland should be to larboard and the coloured cliffs of Alum beyond that. But there was nothing, just grey above the rolling sea, whispering and restless. The fog moved stealthily towards them, like an animal stalking its prey, glowing with a fantastic magick that could be hiding anything in its coils. There was a stir from the men on deck and everyone gritted their teeth, ready for whatever may come.

‘Steady, rudder,’ Carey murmured. The last thing they needed was the weather to be against them when they could almost hear the roar of Medina Sidonia’s guns. The wind had dropped and the sails were not so full now, but the momentum of the sea kept them surging forward, into the unknown.

‘Dear God, no!’ No one knew who said it, who saw it first. The single voice came, not from the crow’s nest where the sailor there was drenched in mist and shivering with cold. It came from the main deck, from a foot soldier who had never been this far out to sea in his life, a lad from Essex, from dry land.

For a long electric moment, there was silence on board the
Commander
. The mist was clearing as though a man was drinking smoke and blowing the rings away. And beyond the mist came the Armada, a vast crescent of timber, canvas and iron, more ships than any man on the
Commander
had ever seen in his life before. As sea mists will, the one that had shrouded the ship moments before had gone now and the sun shone bright on the sails and brass and gold of the Spanish galleons. The sky behind them was as black as pitch, rolling clouds coming in from the west, thunderhead anvils building and collapsing, then building again, each time bigger and blacker than before. In the depths of the cloud, beyond the ships, lightning flickered but there was no thunder that the men on the
Commander
could hear. Their ears were filled with the snapping of the canvas as the wind got up again and the roar of their own blood.

George Carey let his eye roam over the wall of ships that filled his horizon. He knew their banners; so did Nicholas Faunt and Kit Marlowe. The blood-red bars of Aragon, the rampant lions of Castile, the chains of Andalusia: all the panoply of the greatest power in the world was bearing down on the Wight, churning forward like an unstoppable juggernaut for the narrows. And in his heart of hearts, George Carey knew that he had nothing in the Wight to stop that. They would bat aside Burley’s cannon at Yarmouth, blow Turney and Norris off their perches at the Medina estuary. Nothing could stop them. Nothing.

‘Hard a starboard!’ Carey was suddenly galvanized into action. ‘Bring her round, Master helmsman.’ The man wrenched the wheel, hauling the ship round, and the
Commander
swayed and swung, militiamen slipping and colliding with each other against the deck rail.

‘Are we in range, Master gunner?’ he called down to his artilleryman.

The man looked at him as if he was mad. At best he could bring ten guns to bear against that great and terrible fleet. Ninety pounds of iron smashing into any one of those galleons would hardly leave a scratch.

‘Barely, sir,’ the man shouted. There was a vicious wind rising from the north-west and it brought a sudden squall of rain. It stung the faces of the men clinging to the
Commander
’s rail and lashed the billowing sails. The Armada was changing course, whether to combat the wind or by design was impossible to tell. The leading ships were dipping to starboard, veering south, away from the Solent and the wind was behind them.

‘Fire!’ Carey commanded. He could see the whole Armada slipping away from him if he did not hurry and although the pinnace could easily outdistance the big galleons, he had no wish to sail in too close. The militiamen scattered as the guns along the
Commander
’s hull roared and bucked, their carriages sliding back. Below decks, the gunners toiled and sweated, stripped to the waist for action, hauling on ropes to check the recoil.

Carey scanned the sea, heaving in the squall as it was. Explosions of water burst ahead of the crescent’s left horn, but the shots had fallen short. ‘Reload!’ he bellowed and the Master gunner on the middeck yelled the same to his lads under the timbers. It was then that Tom Sledd saw his life pass before him again. There was a muffled roar and a burst of flame and smoke from the nearest Spanish man-of-war as she fired a broadside at the
Commander
. Her guns were bigger, her aim was better, who knew the reason? Not Tom Sledd, stage manager of the Rose, certainly. He saw the deck rail disappear in a shower of splinters and the roar and crash as the foc’sle disappeared and holes gaped in the canvas over his head. Men standing alongside him a moment ago were no longer there. Others were lying on the shattered deck, slick with blood. They were moaning and crying. War had come to the Wight.

‘Hard a starboard!’ Carey shouted, helping his helmsman to control the wheel. There was no time to reload and fire again because the wind was roaring through the shredded canvas now, threatening to tear the sails down. The only chance was to reach the shelter of the Solent and even then they would not be out of danger. Carey clung to the stern rail as the
Commander
veered and swung. Marlowe was on one side of him, Faunt the other. Henry Meux was shaking his fist uselessly as the Armada was blown south. Robert Dillington was white and rigid, frozen to his spot on the deck.

Nicholas Faunt made his way across the heeling wheel deck and hung on to a rail. ‘As a landlubber, Sir George,’ he said, sounding for all the world as though he were making small talk at a party, ‘I have to ask what we do now.’

The Captain of the Wight looked at him. ‘We pray, sir,’ he said, as his banner was ripped from its housing by a sudden, sharp gust, ‘and we do it hard.’

The thunder, which had just been a rumour so far, opened its throat and roared defiance at all of the ships ploughing through the increasingly angry sea. Christopher Marlowe had never considered himself a particularly good man; on the contrary, he had done many things he sincerely regretted. And yet, search his soul though he might, he could think of nothing that would make him deserving of the dismal, choking death by water that he seemed to be in danger of experiencing within the next few minutes. A better sailor than Tom Sledd, he nevertheless was not happy when he had to look up at a breaking wave from his place hanging on to a hatch cover for grim death. The sea should be below a man on a deck. It was the world turned upside down.

All around him, men were crying, to their God and for their mothers. Marlowe shook his wet hair from his eyes and saw Tom Sledd, just an arm’s length from him, hanging on by one pale hand to a piece of spar which had broken loose in the rigging and which had become jammed across the deck. His eyes were closed and it was only his fist clenched on a staple hammered into the wood that told Marlowe he was still alive. The poet called the boy’s name and his eyes fluttered open. With the next heel of the deck, as the ship climbed the sheer face of a wave and hung, teetering on the crest as it seemed to decide whether to flop back and turn turtle or race down the other side to plunge with its own momentum to the bottom of the sea, Sledd let go of the spar and slid into Marlowe’s side, where he clung, with his head buried, as he prayed for it all to be over.