Battle’s Flood Read online

  There were cries of consternation on the French boat. Jack saw one man clasp his chest and fall dead over the side, and another corpse being pushed over the wale into the water. A third Frenchman was howling piteously from what had to be a severe wound. The men in the bows were still priming the swivel gun, but the men on the oars and the tiller were already bringing the boat round, retreating in the face of the unexpectedly stiff resistance from the English ship.

  The swivel gun fired one last, defiant round. Jack was aware of timbers shattering to his right, and behind him, the impact forcing him off balance. He heard a loud gasp, then the strangled word ‘Jesu!’ and feared for one terrible moment that Tom had been hit. But as he steadied himself and turned, he saw that it was John Holbrook, his right arm, shoulder, and part of his chest gone. No man moved to assist him, the dreadful sight seeming to anchor them to the deck. But it made no odds, for Holbrook was past any assistance. His shattered body fell to the deck, and Jack Stannard thought of the four young children and his ever-cheerful wife in the little house under the lee of Hen Hill.

  His widow, rather, and it would be Jack’s task to tell her that she had moved from one state to the other. He already knew that he would not, could not, tell her the truth. He would tell a tale of John Holbrook dying in one of the countless accidents that occurred aboard ships; better for her, and her children, not to know that he had died in a pointless fight against men with whom England was not at war. The Stannard ledgers would show only that a voyage trading in woollen cloth to Rochelle had turned a handsome profit.

  As his crewmates reverently carried the remains of John Holbrook below decks, Jack went to stand beside his son. They said not a word to each other. Instead, both concentrated on the waters ahead, and on the fog, which was slowly lifting. There was even a hint of a breeze. Soon, God willing, they would be able to set sail, and lay their course for England.

  Two

  The storm struck the Jennet five or six leagues south-west of Ushant. At first, it was no more than a slightly darker sky and a somewhat stronger breeze. Within two turns of the glass, though, it was in full spate. The sea swelled up into a great, grey mountain range of water, the white crests crashing in on each other in a furious ferment. It was impossible to see the horizon. Huge waves smashed against the larboard beam, making the ship roll violently. As it did so, it also rose and fell between the great ridges of water. Even Jack, who had grown accustomed to such conditions over many years, felt his stomach heave as he stood upon the after deck, watching for hazards, assessing the state of the minimal sail still aloft, and listening to the ominous creaks and moans from the masts and hull.

  Under his breath, he prayed in Latin to Maria stella maris, then to an entire litany of saints for their intercession, then to the Virgin once again. They were the prayers he had offered up in storms upon the sea every time since his first, on an Iceland voyage in the year when the queen was born. But that same queen now decreed that prayers should be said in English, and that the Virgin and the saints did not intercede between man and God, so should not be prayed to. Mindful of this, Jack began to utter the Lord’s Prayer in English, over and over again. ‘Our Father, which art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name…’

  All the while, the ship rolled and pitched, its timbers screaming, as the shores of Ushant, and beyond it, the murderous cliffs of Brittany, came ever closer. Jack swayed with the movement of the ship and redoubled his prayers.

  Tom came up on deck, grabbed hold of the lifeline, and hauled himself over to where his father stood. ‘I’ll relieve you,’ he shouted into the teeth of the gale.

  ‘No, Tom,’ bellowed Jack. ‘I can stand another hour – two, mayhap.’

  ‘You’ll do better with some sleep!’

  ‘And what chance sleep in this, eh? No, lad, I’ll—’

  A great crack cut off whatever Jack Stannard was about to say. The mainmast seemed to shudder, then to move bodily, but somehow held firm.

  ‘Jesu,’ said Tom.

  ‘You have your wish, son,’ said Jack. ‘You have the ship.’

  With that, the elder Stannard began to make his way forward, holding on for dear life to the rope as the sea’s motion threw him every way at once, and the treacherous torrent sweeping over the deck threatened his footing with every step he took.

  He reached the mainmast, and saw at once that it was cracked so badly some four feet above the deck that it had very nearly snapped clear. Jack cursed himself. The ship had been new-built, but the mast must have been in the yard at Dunwich for many years, certainly since the time of the traitor Jed Nolloth. He recalled that he had considered waiting to bring a new mast round from London or Yarmouth, but was keen to get Jennet to sea as swiftly as possible for a lucrative voyage into the Baltic. A false economy, it now appeared. Still, by some providence the mast was holding, and if he called up the carpenter and his crew from below, they would be able to—

  A violent gust of wind and a colossal wave struck the Jennet in the same moment, as though trying to tear the ship in two. Jack heard a fearsome crack, saw the foot of the mainmast break apart, saw the rotten wood at its heart, looked up to see the entire timber begin to fall to starboard, stepped back instinctively, lost his grip on the lifeline, then lost his footing as another sheet of water swept across the deck. The last thing he heard before he felt his head strike something solid – before the terrible, unbearable pain overwhelmed him, and oblivion came – was Tom’s scream of ‘Father!’

  * * *

  Peter Stannard, Jack’s father, was there in front of him, sitting before the fire in the lazar hospital of St James at Dunwich. But he was much younger, very nearly as Jack remembered him from his childhood, with none of the disfiguring marks of leprosy.

  ‘You’ll never be your brother, boy,’ said the shade.

  The old litany.

  Jack made to protest, as he had done so often when the old man was alive. But it was not his father any more, and it was not St James. Instead, there in the precinct of the Dunwich Greyfriars stood Thomas Ryman, Jack’s old friend and teacher, who had gone down with the Mary Rose in the last of Great Harry’s wars.

  Ryman smiled. ‘Not your time, lad,’ he said.

  Before Jack could respond, Ryman somehow became Alice, standing before the fire in the principal room of their house, as young and beautiful as she had been in life, her body seemingly uncorrupted by so many years of death. She looked at him, cocked her head quizzically to one side as she used to do so often, then smiled.

  ‘Not your time, Jack Stannard. No, certainly not your time.’

  Not your time, not your time.

  ‘… not your time, Father.’

  Jack opened his eyes, and saw Tom bending down over him, adjusting what felt like a cloth pressed against the impossibly tight band of iron that seemed to have been forced around his skull.

  Tom smiled. ‘You see? I told you it was not your time.’

  Slowly, Jack became aware of his surroundings. He was in the stern cabin of Jennet, lying upon his sea-bed. There was no band of iron crushing his head, but a piercing, fiery pain that felt very much like it. There was no storm either. The movement of the ship was gentle, the pitch of the hull easy as it rode the low waves. The scuttles were open, and Jack could see the sun’s rays falling on his chart table. It was a warm day.

  He tried to raise a hand, then tried to speak, but found he could do neither.

  ‘Don’t strain yourself, Father,’ said Tom. ‘And keep still, so that you don’t loosen your bandages.’ He grinned. ‘You see? I did take in a little of what Aunt Agatha used to teach us, even if Meg took in so much more.’

  Once again, Jack tried to speak, but failed.

  ‘You were fortunate,’ said Tom. ‘You might have been crushed by the mast, or swept over the side, or struck down dead by a flying block, as your brother was. But no, Father, it was definitely not your time. You hit your head on a loose saker, even though it had been double-lashed. Then you became tangled up in a sh
roud that had just been torn loose by the mast, so we didn’t lose you to the sea. As for the ship, thank God the timber of the mast was so rotten. It snapped free entirely, so it was easier for us to hack down the standing rigging and get the whole over the side. I thought that was the end of our good fortune. I knew we were nearing the shore, and there was nothing I could do to bring us closer to the wind. At the end, I could see the cliffs, and could hear the waves breaking on them. We must have been no more than half a league from our deaths. But, thanks be to God, that was when the storm abated. I got us into a cove on the Breton coast, we erected jury rig, and here we are, under sail and set fair for Plymouth. Then I set about tending to your stubborn old head, John Stannard of Dunwich, praying all the while that you would wake up again.’

  Tom smiled, and took hold of his father’s hand. Jack could still say nothing, but strangely, he could remember the words his own father had once spoken to him in the St James hospital: There comes a day in every man’s life when the roles of father and son are reversed.

  Jack Stannard realised he had tears in his eyes.

  * * *

  A watery dawn was breaking as the Jennet, still under jury rig, rounded Rame Head and made her way into Plymouth Sound. Jack Stannard, still wearing a bandage around his head, but now mobile and standing on deck, offered up silent prayers of thanks, first in Latin and then in English. He had no way of knowing whether all their lives had been saved by the old faith or the new, but at least their survival demonstrated that God had not punished him for appealing to both. And whichever dispensation had come to their aid, it had especially strengthened the hand of the true architect of their survival, his son Tom.

  The vast bay stretching out before Jack had become very familiar to both of the Stannards in recent years. To the west, Cornwall’s shore stretched away to the estuary of the River Hamoaze, a broad, navigable stream, albeit with treacherous rocks and shoals at its mouth. The grand new manor house of Mount Edgcumbe overlooked this channel, and was by far the most prominent building visible upon that shore. To the east, beyond the Cobbler Channel, lay the mouth of the River Plym, forming the anchorage of Cattewater, behind which lay the harbour of Sutton Pool. Between the two streams was a broad promontory, on the eastern side of which, partly hidden by the cliff, or hoe, before it, lay the town of Plymouth. Its location was marked plainly enough by the smoke issuing from its chimneys, even on what promised to be a warm summer’s day.

  Plymouth’s castle, an old, decrepit affair, towered above the Cattewater. To the west of the castle, and only a few hundred yards offshore, lay an island, with the ruins of a chapel dedicated to St Nicholas. The flag of St George flew from this, for there was a small gun battery on the island, which was the outermost of the defences that protected the anchorage. Several vessels were in sight: some coasting traders in Cawsand Bay, to larboard; a skiff making its way across to the Cornish village of Cremyll at the mouth of the Hamoaze; and a heavily laden Portuguese caravel edging into the large harbour that lay at the eastern end of the promontory, adjoining the town. Jack could see the tops of many other masts within the harbour of Sutton Pool, and he imagined that this was what Dunwich had once been like.

  The Jennet limped into Cattewater and anchored, attracting many curious glances from those on shore and aboard other ships.

  ‘We are a spectacle, it seems,’ said Tom, standing alongside his father.

  ‘No matter. At least we’re alive, which will most please your Catherine and the boys.’

  Tom smiled. ‘I think I see them yonder, upon Lambhay.’

  There was, indeed, a young woman upon one of the paths by the many warehouses on the Lambhay hill, with two young boys alongside her. One was standing stock still, while the other, smaller lad jumped excitedly and waved.

  ‘Then go, Tom. Go to your family.’

  They hailed a small boat from the shore, and were rowed to the quayside. Like all its kind, Plymouth’s port was a hive of activity: gangs of men shouting and singing as they loaded and unloaded ships, merchants huddled in corners arranging deals, and the all-pervasive smells of timber, tar and fish. Jack remained on the quay, watching as Tom ran to his wife and their sons, sweeping them into his arms. He smiled. It had worked well, this unlooked-for match, even if it threatened to keep Tom far from Dunwich. It was a marriage made in London, where the then-Catherine Trelawny, a laughing, buxom girl, had come with a large troop of her relations to attend the christening of the firstborn son of a cousin of hers—

  A cousin who now emerged from a chandler’s across the way, saw Jack, registered surprise, then raised a hand in greeting.

  ‘Well met, John Stannard, if that is truly you beneath the bandage!’

  ‘Well met, John Hawkins.’

  Hawkins had aged poorly since their first, fleeting encounter at the strange meeting in Westminster all those years before. Although he was only a little older than Tom, there was already a substantial amount of grey in his beard, and his expression always seemed mournful, as though one he loved had just died. The only aspect of him that suggested his true age was his costume, a rich and highly fashionable black doublet with an abundance of silk trimmings; the sort of thing that ambitious young men wore in London. Hawkins was still a Plymouth man through and through, but like so many mariners, he had been sucked into the irresistible orbit of London and now lived there for much of the time. He was an ambitious and well-connected man who had recently been granted the reversion of the office of Clerk of the Ships of the queen’s Navy Royal. With Jack, too, spending much time in London, they were bound to encounter each other, and had come to move in the same circles. Above all, Hawkins had married the daughter of Benjamin Gonson, treasurer and surveyor of the navy, Will Halliday’s master and friend, and a man also well known to Jack. So when a marriage was proposed between young Thomas Stannard and a maternal relative of Hawkins, it seemed an obvious and felicitous alliance, of mutual advantage to all concerned. The fact that the two young people were clearly smitten with each other was an unlooked-for additional benefit.

  Jack had not expected to see Hawkins in Plymouth. When the Jennet had sailed five weeks earlier, the Devonian was gone to London, supposedly to fit out some ships that he was being loaned by the queen for some mysterious, unspecified voyage. Clearly, Hawkins had not expected to see either of the Stannards, and had certainly not expected to see the Jennet in its present shattered condition. As he scanned the Cattewater from the quayside of Lambhay, he also had a keen enough eye to recognise that not all of the Dunwich ship’s damage had been caused by the weather.

  ‘You had trouble?’ he demanded, nodding toward the anchored Jennet.

  Jack nodded. ‘The worst kind of trouble that Ushant can offer,’ he said, ‘as the size of the scar under this bandage testifies. More than that, too. Mielle’s dead. One of my men, also.’

  Hawkins’ mournful expression became even more anguished.

  ‘Treachery, you think?’

  ‘Someone betrayed us, for certain. I prefer to think it was one of Mielle’s men.’

  Hawkins scratched his beard. ‘Our friends in London will be displeased.’

  ‘I said to you before, friend Hawkins, that dealing with any of the French, even the Huguenots, is a dangerous course to steer, no matter what profit might lie in arquebuses. I said the same to Barne, too, and your good-father Gonson.’

  ‘It’s a time for dangerous courses, my friend, with Alba on the march.’

  ‘There’s news of him?’

  ‘In Lorraine now, or so they say. Bound for Flanders, I say.’

  ‘Mielle thought he’d turn in to France.’

  Hawkins shook his head emphatically. ‘King Philip will want order in his own lands before he concerns himself with anywhere else, mark my words. The danger for us, of course, is that he might think England should still be one of his lands, and that once Alba has dealt with the Dutch, Philip will put the chance to come here before any thought of trying to meddle in France. The militias of Eng
land are good men and true, Jack Stannard, but against Alba’s tercios, they’ll just be so much carrion.’

  ‘Surely, though, the queen has done nothing to offend King Philip?’

  ‘The queen is a Protestant, and a woman, and has turned down his hand in marriage. Those three things alone are ample offence in Philip’s eyes.’

  Jack cast his eyes to the ground. It was a dire assessment, but he had no reason to doubt it; Hawkins moved in circles about the court and knew many more great men than Jack did. Indeed, he had once known King Philip, in that strange time when the Spaniard reigned in England too.

  ‘And you, friend Hawkins?’ Jack asked, raising his eyes. ‘How goes it with your expedition?’

  ‘Well. Aye, well indeed, God willing.’

  Hawkins volunteered no information on the purpose of the expedition, and Jack did not press him. But he knew that Hawkins had already made two voyages to Guinea and then over to the Americas, breaking the monopolies that the Portuguese and Spanish respectively claimed over each of those shores, and it did not require necromancy to deduce that this new voyage was likely to follow a similar course. If the queen was lending him ships, then the expedition had to be a potentially lucrative one, and one that had at least the tacit approval of the highest in the land. But the Spanish in particular had paid eyes and ears everywhere, and it would hardly have behoved John Hawkins to reveal his purpose too openly, even to a man who was very nearly kin. So Jack Stannard paid his respects, and went off to join his family. Neither he nor Hawkins gave any attention to the cripple sitting upon a barrel outside the adjacent inn, so neither noticed that the fellow had been following their conversation intently.

  Three

  Meg poured the hot water over the thyme and ivy in the bowl, stirred, and smiled at her patient.