Battle’s Flood Read online

  ‘Well done, Will,’ Jack Stannard murmured to his old friend. ‘The cat isn’t only among the pigeons; it’s well and truly devoured the lot of them.’

  * * *

  Meg Stannard and Luis de Andrade left Westminster Abbey by the west door, and made their way round to the right, into St Margaret’s churchyard. They had been delayed by the crush to leave the abbey, so the heretic was already at the foot of the pyre. He was a thin man of middle years, his beard long, grey and unkempt. Even from a distance, Meg suspected the presence of a legion of nits.

  ‘Who is he?’ asked Luis, in his good English.

  ‘By name, one William Flower,’ said Meg. ‘Sometime a monk of Ely, they say, but turned heretic, like the foul reprobate Luther. He tried to stab to death the priest here at St Margaret’s as he celebrated Easter Mass.’

  Luis shook his head. ‘Then he amply deserves what is his due.’

  Bonner, the Bishop of London, was present, looking splendid in full canonicals, but this was a secular matter under the old parliamentary statute De heretico comburendo, so it was a magistrate who signalled to the executioner to begin the business. That dreadful fellow took up a small axe, too small for a beheading, but ideal for the first part of the proceedings. William Flower was pushed to his knees by guards, with his right arm then strapped to a bench. The excited noise from the crowd rose to a new pitch, and Meg and Luis did not hear what the executioner said. Luis was also struggling to see through the throng, but with her greater height, Meg had no difficulty in doing so. Thus she saw the axe fall, severing the hand that had wielded the knife against the priest of St Margaret’s. A great gasp went up from the crowd, intermingled with many cheers. To his credit, though, William Flower did not cry out, did not even seem to flinch.

  The stump of the heretic’s arm was bound so he would not deny God and the law by bleeding to death. Then he was pushed up onto the pyre and chained securely to the stake. Bishop Bonner led the congregation in prayers, but again, only those at the front of the great crowd heard anything. That done, the lighted torches were put to the base of the pyre, and there were cheers as the flames caught.

  As smoke billowed about him, and the flames rose towards his feet, Flower seemed to call out at last. Word was passed back from the front of the crowd.

  ‘He be saying, “Oh the son of God, have mercy on me! Oh the son of God, receive my soul!”’

  ‘The insolence of these heretics,’ said Luis firmly. ‘Madre de dios, to imagine that Our Lord would listen to the likes of him!’

  The flames reached higher, and Flower lifted his bloodied stump with his good arm, as though trying to keep it out of the inferno for as long as possible. The flames were consuming his lower body, although he still made no sound. But a discontented murmuring was beginning at the front of the crowd. Luis craned his neck to see what the matter was, then nodded knowingly.

  ‘I saw this happen once at an auto-da-fé in Sevilla,’ he said. ‘The fools have used too little wood. The fire will be insufficient to consume him.’

  So it seemed. Bonner and the magistrate conferred urgently, and gave a signal to the executioner. He, in turn, stepped forward with two of his guards, and using staves and sticks, they attempted to push Flower further down, into the flames.

  ‘The poor man,’ murmured Meg. ‘Whatever his sin, none deserves this.’

  Luis was indifferent. ‘Only the fire will purge him, Margarita,’ he said. ‘Only the fire will cleanse his soul, and give him a chance of standing before the gates of Heaven.’

  ‘Meg,’ she whispered. ‘Call me Meg.’

  As William Flower continued to burn, his charred mouth still opening and closing with words that none could hear, Meg Stannard vowed that she would bed Luis de Andrade that very day.

  One

  Twelve years later

  A thick summer fog cloaked the bay of Aiguillon. The Jennet of Dunwich had slipped into the bay at dawn, and now, as evening set in, she was moored at an all but abandoned wharf in the vicinity of the island village of Charron. A tall young man paced the deck of the ship, turning occasionally to glance at the older man who stood in the stern. Some of the crew of forty sat on cables or barrels, eager to begin the work of unloading and eager to be away from this strange, remote shore.

  ‘Maybe he’s been arrested,’ said the tall man, Tom Stannard, to the older figure behind him. ‘Maybe they’re coming to arrest us, too.’

  Jack, his father, was still squinting through the dense fog, trying to make out any sign of movement ashore.

  ‘He’ll be here. There’s not a royal officer for miles, other than safe behind the castle walls in Rochelle.’

  Of the two men, Tom Stannard was significantly taller, but he seemed somehow less of a presence. Quiet and serious, with a pointed beard and short, straight hair cut in the old-fashioned way, he appeared older than his years. His father, though, might have a face battered and lined by countless voyages spent on deck, but his hair was as wild as it supposedly had been in his youth, and he remained stubbornly clean-shaven. Those who met the Stannards for the first time often assumed that they were brothers, and indeed, that was what age alone might have made them; in that strange, tense summer of 1567, Tom was not far off his thirtieth year, but his father was still shy of his fiftieth, having married very young. Married for the first time, at any rate.

  There was a noise ashore, a noise distinct from the cries of the marsh birds and the barking of dogs. Jack Stannard’s hand went to his sword hilt, while his son drew a pistol from his belt. The men on the deck stood, and looked nervously at each other.

  Now there were shapes just visible through the fog. Grey, indistinct figures, like wraiths. A score of shapes, perhaps two dozen. They must have made out the equally ghostly shape of the Jennet, for they stopped abruptly and stood stock still.

  The Stannards, father and son, exchanged another glance.

  Friend or foe?

  A lantern flashed three times. Jack Stannard gave a nod, and Hal Ashby, the boatswain and the most experienced and reliable hand on the ship, took up a lantern from the deck. He opened and closed its shutter five times. The lantern ashore flashed twice in reply.

  Friend, then.

  Jack stepped onto the gangplank and went ashore. A familiar figure came forward: a square, balding man of middling height, who sported an outrageously long and full white mustachio.

  ‘Bonjour, Jacques,’ said the familiar Frenchman.

  ‘Bon jewer, Anthony,’ Jack Stannard replied.

  Antoine Mielle grimaced, but took the Englishman’s hand nonetheless, thanking God as he did so that he had learned enough of the man’s ugly offshore tongue during years of trading with Southampton and Exeter.

  He nodded towards the Jennet. ‘A good passage, mon ami?’

  ‘As good as it could be – a fair wind, gentle seas, and no sea-robbers. Would that it were always so.’

  ‘And the cargo is in order?’

  ‘To the letter of the inventory. The secret inventory, at any rate.’

  ‘Bon,’ said Mielle. ‘We’ll begin unloading immediately.’

  If the Jennet had been carrying her usual cargo of Suffolk woollen cloth, there would have been no urgency, and certainly no cause to unload her at such an obscure wharf. If she was carrying cloth, she would have gone straight up to one of the quays of La Rochelle itself, in the old harbour behind the Nicholas Tower. Instead, she lay amid the marshes a few miles to the north of the town, a much better place to unload a cargo that would never appear in any port book.

  Mielle’s men strode purposefully up the gangplank and mingled warily with the crew of the Jennet. Tom Stannard barked orders, and Englishmen and Frenchmen alike went to work.

  ‘So how fares France, my friend?’ asked Jack, as he and Mielle watched the hatches being broken open.

  ‘Ah well, if I was to tell truth, then ripe for another war, I’d say. There have been riots – you know, the usual. This is France, after all. But there’s also talk –
serious talk – that the Queen Mother and Cardinal de Guise have persuaded the young king to join the Holy League. For certain, mon ami, Condé has left the court. He’ll be plotting something, no doubt of it. Likes nothing better than a good plot, does the noble prince. And when whatever it is that he’s plotting happens, the Queen Mother will want revenge, bien sûr – like all Medicis, the very first word she uttered as a babe in arms was vendetta. Or so they say. So sensible men must take precautions, Jacques Stannard.’

  ‘Sensible Huguenot men?’

  ‘All sensible men. What is Catholic or Huguenot when the times are merde? And then there’s Alba’s army, of course.’

  Jack Stannard remembered the room in Westminster, all those years before, and the penetrating eyes of the mighty Duke of Alba. What an eternity it seemed since that time when everyone believed, wrongly as it transpired, that the queen was about to give child, when the old faith had flickered briefly again in England before being extinguished once more, and when Philip of Spain was King of England. Now the same Philip’s vast army, paid for by the endless flow of bullion from the Indies and commanded by the same Duke of Alba whose gaze had once met Jack’s, was advancing slowly along the great military road that stretched from Milan, through the Alpine passes, then along the Rhine to the North Sea, its final destination unknown.

  ‘You have news of it? When we sailed from Plymouth, the word was that it was through the Mount Cenis pass.’

  Mielle spat into the water. ‘For certain, mon ami. But where will it go next, eh? Some say the Palatinate, some say against the Dutch. Here, we fear an order to wheel left. If Alba brings his mighty army to join with the Queen Mother, then every Huguenot man in France could feel the flames licking his balls before the winter comes.’

  ‘In England, most men say he’s marching to Brussels, to put down the riots and come to a reckoning with the Protestant lords.’

  ‘Which he might well do, Jacques. But as I say, a sensible man takes precautions.’

  With that, the first of the precautions emerged from the hold. Although they were carefully wrapped in sackcloth, there was no mistaking the shapes of the handles and long barrels of arquebuses. Dozens of heavy snaphance arquebuses, then scores of them. Mielle’s men carried the bundles down the gangplank before loading them onto carts that had been driven up the causeway snaking through the marsh. Mielle himself went off to supervise the unloading, leaving Jack to oversee the work on the ship. In truth, though, Tom was more than capable of handling that, so Jack stood instead in the bows, and thought upon the irony of his situation.

  Like Mielle, he, too, was a sensible man. So he went to his parish church of St Peter every Sunday he was in Dunwich, said his prayers in English, listened to the sermon in English, and took the sacrament, which looked remarkably like the sacrament that everyone had taken in the days of the old Church, but which, the Reverend James declaimed from his pulpit, most certainly did not literally become the body and blood of Christ, even if it tasted exactly the same as it had always done. Thus Jack Stannard did outwardly what the queen and her ministers wished him to do and avoided having to pay recusancy fines, but inwardly he still recited the Ave Maria, privately crossed himself and fingered his paternoster, and still prayed for the release of his beloved Alice’s soul from Purgatory, no matter how often or how loudly Archbishop Parker and all his bishops proclaimed that there was no such place. So, yes, in his heart, Jack Stannard should have been on the side of the Duke of Alba and the Queen Mother of France, seeking to eradicate what they termed the Protestant heresy throughout Europe. Yet here he was, shipping guns to the Huguenots, the French Protestants, so that if and when the time came, they could better slaughter their Catholic neighbours.

  He glanced across to Tom, who needed to perform no such mental somersaults. He had grown up chiefly in the reign of the boy king Edward the Sixth, when the Protestants had held sway, and had come to prefer the austere services, the whitewashed churches and the absence of ceremony. Tom was content to comply with whatever Queen Elizabeth, her parliament and her bishops ordered. His older sister, on the other hand—

  ‘Jacques!’ cried Antoine Mielle from the foot of the gangplank. ‘We need to—’

  In the same moment that he heard the nearby arquebus’s report, Jack saw the Frenchman’s chest seem to burst outward towards him and spout a fountain of blood. Mielle staggered forward, his face a picture of astonishment, realisation and horror. Then he fell face first into the water that lapped the hull of the Jennet.

  ‘Loose the cables!’ Jack commanded. ‘Tom! Take the helm!’

  There were sounds of battle ashore as Mielle’s men fought for their lives against their invisible assailants. That was not Jack’s concern, except in the sense that perhaps, just perhaps, the Huguenots might buy him enough time.

  Two men joined him to free the cable securing the Jennet to the wharf. Slowly, so very slowly, the bow began to swing out into the stream. Deo gratias, a strong ebb was running, and the fog would swiftly conceal them from the attackers. Ashore, shots were being fired, and there were the unmistakable sounds of blades striking blades. There were screams as well – two, three, then more.

  Jack ran to the stern, where his son held grimly to the whipstaff.

  ‘Topsails, Father?’

  ‘No, Tom. Sweeps, lad, the sweeps!’

  ‘Aye, aye, Father!’

  Hands ran to the hold, and within a minute or so, eight long oars were being pushed outward through small ports cut into the Jennet’s hull.

  ‘On two!’ cried Jack, once he knew the men were in position and ready. ‘One! Two!’

  On the command, the men below swung their blades forward, a little above the water.

  ‘On two again! One! Two!’

  On this next command, the men on the sweeps pushed them down into the water and then pulled back.

  The exercise always amused Jack Stannard, even now, when screams and killing were still clearly audible ashore, close behind them, and their unseen, unknown enemies were still perilously close. To all intents and purposes, the Jennet had become an improvised galley.

  The method had been born an entire sea away, out of dire necessity. Dunwich had once possessed one of the best harbours in England, but that had been all but blocked from the sea by huge storms several centuries before, which had also swept away vast swathes of the prosperous port. Over the years – even within Jack’s own memory – the estuary leading to the town’s quays had become ever more silted, so that it was no longer possible to bring ships up to them under sail alone. The men of Dunwich had erected warping posts so that ships’ crews could haul them into harbour, but as soon as they went up, they were cut down again by the men of Walberswick and Southwold, Dunwich’s immediate neighbours and inveterate enemies. The port might have closed for ever, and the ancient borough been forced to admit defeat, had not Jack Stannard remembered the galleys he had seen, including one he had once fought against, during King Harry’s last war.

  Southwold and Walberswick no longer cut down the warping posts, but the mariners of Dunwich kept their sweeps, and kept up their practice with them. After all, as Jack’s daughter Meg said, working the oars gave the Stannard crews more muscles and better bodies than their rivals, a fact that did not go unnoticed among the maidens of the Suffolk Sandlings.

  ‘One! Two!’

  It was desperately hard work. True, the Jennet was considerably lighter than she had been several hours earlier, with most of her deadly cargo having been unloaded, but that also made her higher out of the water, so it was harder to keep consistent traction on the sweeps. But slowly, surely, and aided by the ebb, the Jennet inched forward, further and further into the comforting shroud of the fog, further away from the sounds of battle and death behind them.

  Jack knew from earlier visits to the bay that no causeways extended further out than the one to their wharf. If they could get far enough away before the attackers could turn their full attention to the English ship, they should be safe,
with nothing between them and the open sea.

  That, though, assumed that the attackers did not have boats.

  A shape, dark, menacing and approaching rapidly from beam-on to starboard, showed that they did. Jack saw the swivel gun mounted in its bow a moment before the weapon fired, the flash of fuse on powder providing the only point of light in the fog. The blast from the gun shattered the calm. Countless terrified seabirds took flight, filling the fog-bound bay with a cacophony of sound.

  The shot smashed into the side of the Jennet a little forward of Jack’s position, causing the entire hull to shudder. A loud cheer went up from the attacking boat. Jack reckoned he could make out well over a dozen men in it, perhaps half of them manning the oars. Were there any other boats behind, though? None had yet emerged from the fog. Hope for the best, then.

  He turned to give the necessary orders, but found that his son had anticipated him. Five men, led by the burly figure of their kinsman John Holbrook, came up from the hold, each carrying a cloth-bound bundle. Swiftly, they laid them on the deck and opened them, taking out an arquebus each, part of the cargo that had still not been unloaded when Antoine Mielle fell. The two ship’s boys, Hal Ashby’s son Ned and an eager lad from Minsmere named Paul Battlebridge, went to work on the spare weapons, loading and priming them. Ned threw an arquebus to Jack, who nodded in thanks. Then he turned back to the rail.

  The Frenchmen were reloading their swivel gun, no doubt assuming that the English ship before them was defenceless and would swiftly surrender after another shot or two. But to be sure of a hit in the fog, the attackers had to be closer than they would have needed to be in clear weather: close enough to be within arquebus range, in fact.

  ‘God, Dunwich and the queen!’ cried Jack, levelling his arquebus at the boat.

  Tom, Holbrook and the others fired off their own weapons, immediately discarding them to the deck. Ned Ashby and young Battlebridge urgently handed them fresh firearms, and another salvo roared out from the Jennet.