Gentleman Captain Read online

  Cornelis nodded gravely, but said nothing. The first of the great wars between the Dutch and the English had begun ten years before, born of the perverse refusal of the Dutch to agree that English goods (plentiful) should be carried in English ships (few and expensive) rather than in Dutch hulls (many, and quite preposterously cheap). This war proved to be a very Armageddon on the North Sea, and after a few early Dutch successes, the Commonwealth's navy smashed their vaunted fleet almost into oblivion. Cornelis van der Eide had then been lieutenant on a forty-gun Zeeland ship, but in the middle of the ferocious Battle of the Gabbard Shoal, a cannon ball took off his captain's head and gave him instant and unexpected promotion. Although Cornelis had fought his ship out of danger with skill and courage, fifty of his men had died at the hands of a fleet under the same General Monck who now strutted the corridors of Whitehall as Duke of Albemarle: the man to whom the king owed his throne and who proclaimed loudly that he desired nothing more than a new war against the Dutch, thus finishing the job he had begun.

  My good-brother and I were silent for a minute or more, perhaps both thinking of the men we had commanded who were now only memories, even for the fish who had consumed them. Then my mother turned back to us from a discussion with Barcock, coughed and clapped. 'Now, Cornelis,' she said, 'what were you saying about your father becoming burgomaster?'

  We were eating suspiciously green cheese, and Cornelis was once more regaling us with the town politics of Veere, when Barcock's daughter slipped into the hall and whispered something to her father. She was the youngest of the fourteen Barcock children, and with foreknowledge of her nature, her parents might have thought twice before naming her Chastity. She was about my age, and had been in love with me since we were infants. As she turned to leave she caught my eye, winked, and smiled wantonly. Her father, happily unaware of her ill-concealed lust, and of the fact that she was known to amuse herself with a steadily rising number of swarthy lads from the valley villages, patted her fondly on the head. Then he turned and began staggering slowly over to the table.

  Reaching my mother's side, Barcock coughed loudly. 'The man Phineas Musk is here, my lady. He has a message from the earl for Captain Quinton. I commanded him to remain in the antechamber, but he has made his way to the library.' He gave another dry cough and muttered under his breath, 'I anticipate there will be several books fewer after he leaves.'

  Barcock detested Musk, the steward of my brother's town house in London. Where Barcock was every inch the dour old Puritan, Musk was a crafty, carousing rogue with a suspiciously vague past. Cornelia was convinced he had once been a highwayman on the Canterbury road, albeit on no good evidence.

  I made over-hasty apologies to my wife, my mother, and, with blessed relief, my brother-in-law, and almost sprang from my chair, such was my joy at this unexpected liberation. The library of Ravensden Abbey was a short walk away, down the corridor that had once been the east side of the cloister. The library itself had been the chapter house, just as the hall in which we dined was once the nave of the gloomy old abbey church, in which for centuries monks had prayed for the release of souls from a purgatory I imagined as only marginally less painful than a dinner with Captain Cornelis van der Eide and the Countess of Ravensden. My ancestor Harry Quinton, the fourth earl, had been granted the abbey lands and buildings by King Henry VIII when that sovereign brought down the monasteries, and how glad he had been to decamp here from the family's ruinous old castle across the valley. But we Quintons were multiply unfortunate with money, and never quite had the funds to replace the abbey with a great house after the latest fashion, or so the story ran. So the old church and its monastic offshoots survived, converted piecemeal over the years into a strange, rambling jumble of unsuitable rooms and corridors that ended inexplicably at poorly built brick walls. My mother, though, had a different theory to explain the oddity in which we lived. The Quintons had ample money, she said, before my grandfather lost it all. According to her, the house had stayed recognizably an abbey through the formidable will of Katherine, wife to the fourth earl and mother to the next three, who lived to be nearly ninety. She had been a nun early in life, and guilt at abandoning her vows for the bed of Harry Quinton made her determined to die in her very own, vast, private convent. Or so my mother said.

  I found Phineas Musk in the library, studying my father's first folio of Shakespeare. He was a small, round man with a bald head, and a timeless, watchful face that might have borne any age between forty and sixty. As usual with Musk, there was no deference, only an uneasy sense that he was resuming a private conversation with himself. 'Don't see the point in Shakespeare, myself. Went to see his Hurricanoe at the Cockpit just last week, attending on your brother. No, not Hurricanoe–some great wind or other. And that was all it was. Great wind. Couldn't follow it. Fell asleep. Give me John Fletcher any day. Plenty of bodies, plenty of blood. Now that's what I call theatre.'

  From the window, I could see the ruined choir of the old abbey church, where the grey stone table-tombs of the Quinton earls stood exposed to the weather. My grandfather was there, the old pirate, and I wondered yet again why his last act in life had been to hire this ignorant villain as the new steward for the London house. I said, 'You've a message for me, from the earl, Musk?'

  'Wants you to come to London.'

  'He could have written. Why send you?'

  'Wants you to come to London straight away.'

  'Today? But it'll be night when we get there, man. We'll set off in the morning, early...'

  Musk frowned. 'I'd be for the morning, that I would. Ridden so hard to get here, I think my arse has turned to leather. But the earl wants me to turn right around and ride all the way back again, bringing you with me. Today, Captain Quinton.'

  'Why the hurry, man?' Even as I said the words, that oldest and darkest of thoughts came to me, striking like a shard of ice into my heart. 'My brother–is he ill?'

  Charles Quinton was not one to issue peremptory commands without need. My elder brother was a man who measured his words and his actions. He was, however, a man who for ten years had never been wholly well. Charles ill could so easily become Charles dying. And Charles dead would bring to me the nightmare of nightmares. I still remembered Uncle Tristram's words to me, a child of five, after we buried my father in the ruined choir of the abbey church. 'Your brother Charles is the earl now, Mattie. The tenth Earl of Ravensden. You owe him all obedience and deference, under the king and God. But if, like your father, Charles falls in glory in this wicked war, then you will be earl. You are the heir to Ravensden now.'

  And the heir to Ravensden I remained. Heir to its debts, and its crumbling walls, and its querulous dowager. Heir to responsibilities that I never, ever wished to face.

  Musk knew our family well–far too well–and read my face. 'Your brother's well enough, Captain Quinton. As well as he ever is. You'll not be earl yet, not this little while.'

  My relief must have been transparent, but it was tinged with impatience. 'Then what's so pressing that we have to leave for London now, man?'

  Musk relished his moment. 'The earl told me to tell you, sir. It is the king's especial and urgent command. You are to attend on His Majesty, in person, at the palace of Whitehall. Tonight, Captain Quinton.'

  Chapter Three

  The apologies to my family were perfunctory, and the farewells took little longer. Cornelis shook my hand gruffly and bowed his head in the German fashion. My mother was inscrutable and sanguine, as always; she was well used to her menfolk riding off to their fates at a king's command, and she gave me but the merest peck of a kiss. Cornelia's tearful farewell embraced a mixture of pride in my summons from the king himself, and abundant apprehension at what that might portend. Dear, dear Cornelia, who in most things could ever mirror my own feelings exactly. An immediate summons from the king? Not even the attainment of my life's dream, a commission in the Guards, could warrant such urgency, I reflected, as I rode out through the gate of the stable yard and beyond the sight
of those who worried for me.

  Yet the paths of the Quintons and the Stuarts had often crossed, in ways that were by no means always clear to me, and it was hardly unusual for the one to call on the good offices of the other. My brother and the present king were the closest of friends, and Charles had often undertaken the most secret of tasks for his royal namesake, or so my mother claimed. My grandfather had been one of those most instrumental in bringing the king's grandfather, James of Scotland, to the English throne, or so my uncle Tristram proclaimed; and Tristram's own connections with the court ran deep, though somewhat opaque. Finally, of course, my father had made the ultimate blood sacrifice for the first King Charles, despite his original reluctance to fight for that or any other cause. After the unfortunate monarch himself, Earl James was the Royalist martyr par excellence, or so said Cavalier opinion throughout the land. All this made an urgent royal summons to one of his sons less unlikely than it might have been for many another young man of breeding.

  I am a Quinton, I thought. My king has summoned me, and that should be sufficient. But loyalty cannot displace raw human curiosity, and I had an ample measure of that.

  We were soon on the road for London, with myself mounted on Zephyr, a good black stallion who had been a favourite since my youth. We avoided the so-called Great North Road, for that would surely be clogged with all manner of traffic: slow carts, the Edinburgh coaches and mean northerners bound for London to try their fortunes. Instead we weaved our way along the lanes of that dark and mysterious land to the south, of which our less erudite Bedfordshire tenants spoke in hushed tones; a land of midnight hags and hobgoblins; or in a word, Hertfordshire. All the way, I turned over in my head increasingly fanciful reasons for the summons to Whitehall, creating elaborate secret missions to fantastical foreign courts, or to wild, rude lands such as I had heard of in the Americas. As we rode through Hampstead, a poor village with geese cackling on its street, we heard the deep-toned, distant bells of old St Paul's chime ten, and as we breasted the heath, we reined in for a moment. I had seen London by night from this spot many, many times, but some sights always have the power to stop a man in his tracks. There it lay, England's leviathan-city, lit by a cold April moon and the orange lights from a myriad fires and lanterns. We could make out the cathedral, its tall spire pointing to the moon–to think how little time it had left before the flames consumed it. Behind it, the Thames, a slim silver thread often lost to sight behind the buildings. Away to the left, the Tower, its chimneys smoky from the fires that warmed England's prisoners of state. Away to the right, Whitehall, a sea of lights revealing a royal court that never slept. Beyond, the dark bulks of the Parliament-House and the abbey church at Westminster. And up from it all, sweeping like a wave on the wind, the pungent stink of three hundred thousand souls and their communal close-stool, the River Thames.

  We rode down and finally came into the sprawl of new houses encroaching ever further into the country beyond Clerkenwell. The streets were dark, with only a few lanterns showing. Laughter spilled out of the taverns, shouting and the shrieks of women and infants from many a house. Smoke from house-coal fires shrouded the narrow streets like a pall. Drunks and dogs vied with each other to get out of our way, for we were still riding hard, with no margin for delay. Despite the hour, a few beggars who had managed to evade the constables bleated their pathetic requests from the gutter: 'Bless you, sirs, mercy on an old soldier for the king!' 'Blinded at Cheriton fight, my lords, spare a penny, of your mercy!' 'Three starving children to support, my lord, God have mercy on us!' We rode past them in silence.

  At last, weary and saddle sore, we passed through the crumbling city walls and reached our journey's end. Ravensden House, my family's town residence, stood just behind the Strand. It was modest in comparison with some of its neighbours, especially the sumptuous palace that Somerset House had become. It was a prim, fading Tudor merchant's house, of a kind that had probably gone out of fashion long before my grandfather bought it; a mean dwelling far beneath the level of splendour expected from a noble family. Strange to say, for its pervasive odour of damp must have been there even in his day, it was one of the very few family possessions that the eighth Earl of Ravensden–my grandfather–had not sold off to pay for his madcap voyaging and extravagances. It was there that he had died, a long-forgotten hero of England's legend-time, surrounded by a city at war with its king and attended only by his new servant, the man now riding at my side into its stable yard, Phineas Musk.

  My brother was in his study, a small, bare room with one candle, one chair, one desk and one book, the Percivale of Chrétien de Troyes. As I looked at him, the mystery of that most unlikely friendship between our gregarious, trivial king and my reserved, serious brother struck me anew. Charles Quinton, tenth Earl of Ravensden, sat looking out over the moonlit Thames, the candlelight playing tricks on his thin pale face and thin pale hair. He resembled neither my father nor my grandfather, or so the portraits on the walls of Ravensden Abbey proclaimed. He was dressed simply in a plain shirt and a long gown to keep him warm against the night. There was a fire in the room, but it was unlit; Charles ever eschewed what he regarded as inessential personal luxuries.

  We embraced as warmly as brothers twelve years apart in age are wont to do. Charles looked me up and down as though seeing me for the first time in years, though it was but a few weeks since our last meeting. In his usual way, dragging up every word as though it were a burden, the Earl of Ravensden said, 'You made good time, Matt. You did not object, then, to being taken from the exquisite company of your good-brother?'

  Despite myself I laughed. 'Cornelis was–just Cornelis, I suppose.'

  'Ah. And that, as we know, is enough for any man.' Charles smiled as broadly as he ever did, which was but a slight upturning of his lip. 'Cornelia and our mother are well?'

  'They would both be well enough if they were not closeted so much in each other's company.'

  Charles nodded. He knew that I had not enough money even to rent some lowly rooms in a less fashionable part of London for Cornelia and myself; and while the earl favoured his solitude so keenly, no invitation would be forthcoming to join him at Ravensden House–even if all but a few sparse rooms were not boarded up and infested with rats. So we stayed cooped up at the abbey, and although Cornelia and my mother could get on well enough when the mood took them, they were at once too alike and too different to make matters entirely comfortable. Certainly not comfortable enough for the husband and son who sought to keep the peace between them.

  Charles turned to Phineas Musk. 'Summon a boat to the stairs, Musk. We'll not take the road at this time of night, there are roaring boys and apprentices with too much ale in their bellies facing down the constables at the Charing Cross.'

  Musk set off, and I helped my brother with his wig, jacket, sword belt and cloak. Charles had always seemed slight and unwell, even in my few and distant recollections of him before he left for the wars. The three Roundhead musket balls that had lodged in his thin frame at Worcester fight in '51 had compounded the damage. The earl moved with difficulty, his left arm next to useless. He stood and walked as little as possible, and was out of breath within minutes. But it was just a little way to the river, and there were always watermen anxious for the honour of rowing great lords to the privy stairs of Whitehall Palace. Ours was a rude mechanic from the Hackney Marsh who wished to engage us in discourse about the iniquities of the new fashion for coffee, being convinced it was the end of beer and thus of old England; but we ignored his ranting, and eventually he fell silent. As we pulled away from the wharf, I could see light pouring from the windows of the shops and houses crowding along the length of London Bridge, just downstream. A herd of cattle was being forced, protesting, over the bridge to the south bank, bound for the slaughterhouses of Southwark, and their terrified lowing almost drowned out the laughter and screams of the people milling across the bridge.

  We sat side by side in the stern of the boat, and Charles talked of family, and
the state of our houses, and the tenants whose rent was in arrears. As ever, he said nothing of himself. We were those twelve years apart in age, so a certain distance between us was inevitable. But when I was only five, just before our father's death, Charles had gone off to Oxford, intending both to study and to attend the royal court, which was then encamped in the city. Within weeks, though, he was the tenth Earl of Ravensden, a man with terrible new responsibilities and a new programme for his life. Charles had joined the old king's army then, and was in time to ride out proudly at the head of his company in the Battle of Stow, in March of the year '46. It was the last battle that army ever fought: its pathetic surrender, followed shortly by that of Oxford itself, marked the inglorious end of the king's cause. At my mother's urging, Charles, then seventeen, joined the young Prince of Wales in Jersey. From there, he was to follow him on all his adventures, culminating in the desperate wounds he sustained at Worcester.

  In all that time, as I grew through boyhood, I never saw my brother. We met again only in '56, ten years later, when my mother finally obtained leave from the Protector for us to go abroad. We Quintons met in a room in Bruges, among a crowd of people gathered about that lofty, impoverished, and exiled young man whom we all believed had become the rightful King of England through the fall of a headsman's axe on a bitter January day in 1649. It took me many minutes to recognize my brother. His wounds, and his travels, and much else, had made him a man old before his time. How I had longed for that moment; for Charles, in my child's mind, had become a mythic hero standing alongside our father and grandfather. He soon made it clear, however, that he had scant time for his brash young brother. We saw little of each other, and he would vanish from Flanders for weeks on end, on various unspecified journeys on behalf of his king.