Gentleman Captain Read online

  'Time enough for such business when we're properly at sea, Captain. Tonight is for good conversation and society, and that alone!'

  He refilled my silver goblet. Apart from this willingness to press upon me more and yet more refreshment, though, Judge's idea of 'good conversation and society' proved very different to mine. He tried so hard to be the perfect courtier, witty and urbane, that he succeeded only in being the perfect sycophant. He proclaimed the names of all the great people that he knew, one every few minutes, as though he were announcing the guests at a grand ball. Had I so wished, I could have countered his list with my own, ten times as long and composed of people twenty times as great, but that was not the Quinton way. As it was, Judge revealed himself to be too deeply interested in my family and its ways. It soon became apparent, above all, that he was especially interested in what my family could do for him.

  'I have a fighting record as good as any, Matthew–if I may?–but these days, that counts for nothing. There are men at court who scorn the likes of me, and all my kind–men who were once feared on every ocean from Jamaica to Batavia. You served a usurper, they say. We served our country, say we. Take this very ship, Matthew. She's the Royal Martyr now, but two years ago, she was called the Republic. I commanded this ship in the Dutch war, and pray to God that if we ever have another, I'll command her again. Does it matter what she's called? She's just as able to fight for old England, whatever name she bears, and the same's true of the likes of me. But no. These days, it's all to do with who you know–who you know about the king, that is. Now, your brother, for instance. My lord of Ravensden is reputed to be one of the king's oldest and closest friends, I understand.'

  'My brother has had the honour of serving His Majesty these fifteen years or more,' I said, 'since they first were in exile together.'

  'Quite so, my dear Matthew. And no doubt your noble brother would have considerable interest with His Majesty, shall we say, when it comes to the weight of his recommendations?'

  And so it went on, Judge trying with little subtlety to recruit the beneficence of the House of Quinton for the advancement of his career. He was interested in my brother-in-law Venner Garvey's connections with some of the great Parliament-men. He was fascinated by my anecdotes of the king (he roared at the story of the shitting dog) and the Duke of York. An hour or more passed in this way, as I tried to fend off Judge without insulting his sumptuous hospitality.

  All this time, Nathan Warrender sat a little way apart, looking glum. During a momentary pause in Judge's endless stream of obsequiousness, I seized the chance to draw his lieutenant into the conversation. 'You were captain of a ship before this, Mister Warrender?'

  I knew that the reduction in the fleet following our peace with the Dutch and Spanish had driven many good captains to take employment in lesser ranks. Some of my fellow Cavaliers, young men like me, found themselves in command of lieutenants, masters, and boatswains twice their age; bluff old Republic-men who had captained great ships in the Dutch war. One of the stories that did the rounds of the London coffee houses held it as gospel truth that the captain who had killed the mighty Admiral Van Tromp was now the cook of a Fourth Rate, and turned out the worst beef stew in the navy.

  Warrender seemed uncomfortable. 'No, sir. I was a captain in the army. The New Model Army.'

  Judge said, 'Warrender, here, was one of the army men brought into the navy by Generals Blake and Deane, to teach us sailors how to fire our guns straight. And to bring us good, tough army discipline, of course.'

  That would explain Warrender's attendants, I thought: former troopers, probably, taken to sea as his servants by their old officer, to give them some employment and keep them out of the gutters, where so many of them had ended up.

  'So you were an artillery captain, Mister Warrender?' I asked.

  'No, sir, not at first. In the early days, I commanded in the cavalry.'

  A chill on my neck, an instinct, call it what you will, impelled me to ask, 'Were you at Naseby field, Captain Warrender?'

  For the first time, Nathan Warrender looked me in the eye. 'Aye, I was, Captain Quinton.' He paused, seemingly wondering whether to say more. Finally, he made his decision, and went on. 'I was on our left flank–on the Parliament army's left flank, that is, under General Ireton. I faced Prince Rupert's charge, sir. The finest sight I ever saw. Irresistible, they were, with great feathers in their hats all blown by the breeze. Down past Okey's dragoons they rode, ignoring the fire from that flank. When they hit us, it was like being struck by a galloping wall. We stood no chance, none at all.'

  As though in a waking dream, I said, 'My father died in that charge, Captain Warrender.'

  'I know he did, sir. I saw him die.'

  There was a profound and awful silence. I saw Judge's face, and it was unreadable.

  'He died well, your father,' said Warrender, at length. 'One of the bravest things I ever saw in my life. If the rest of Rupert's men had followed him, not their wastrel prince, your side would have won the war that day, Captain.'

  It was no longer considered seemly in polite circles to mention the war, or to talk of 'your side' or 'our side'–at least, not in polite circles containing a mixture of one side and the other. It was one of many topics of conversation that was now greeted at London dinner tables with the disgust once accorded to someone who had broken wind. But Nathan Warrender was plainly a man who cared not one jot for such niceties. Years later, I read that Noll Cromwell once claimed his ideal officer was 'a plain, russet-coated captain, that knows what he fights for, and loves what he knows'. Nathan Warrender was the model of that plain man, and he spoke with plain honesty. Of course, Judge was horrified in case his lieutenant's criticism of Prince Rupert made its way back to Whitehall through me. Little did he comprehend that I was the last man living who would betray any man to that duplicitous prince–even had Warrender not paid my father one of the noblest compliments I ever heard.

  Much later, as I leaned on the ship's rail to stop myself falling into Royal Martyrs boat, Judge said softly in my ear, 'Good night, then, my dear Captain Quinton. God speed back to your Jupiter.' Then, even more quietly, for Warrender was on the quarterdeck, 'I do hope my lieutenant's, ah, indiscretion did not spoil the evening for you?'

  I replied as soberly as I could. 'Very far from it, Captain Judge. In fact, I valued Captain Warrender's honesty, and the honour that he paid to my father's memory. I would not wish to hear that he suffered for it in any way.'

  Godsgift Judge looked at me curiously, as though some mental struggle was taking place behind the ghastly white face-paint. Finally, he bowed. 'You have my word on it, sir. As one king's captain to another.'

  Chapter Six

  I woke late the next morning, not even the noisy swabbing of the decks or the ship's bell tolling for the change of watch stirring me from the insensibility brought on by Judge's liberality with his excellent wine. I reached out sleepily for Cornelia's welcoming flesh, thinking myself back in our comfortable great bed at Ravensden, but when my hand caressed instead rough wooden planks, I sat up with a start. The smell struck me at once, that unmistakeable stench of a ship of war below decks: old wood, new wood where the old could no longer serve, the oakum that stopped water pouring between the wood, the white-stuff that stopped the sea worms getting at the oakum, the gun smoke ingested from many broadsides, tobacco smoke, bilge water in all its infinite variations of stink, and most potent of all, the odour of over one hundred and thirty men, even allowing for all the dire royal injunctions against relieving oneself between the decks. A frigate of the Fifth Rate is no leviathan but a mere eighty feet long and twenty-five broad, and packing so many men within such a little frame means but little privacy or quiet for any, even her captain. I could hear snatches of talk from the decks above and below, and as I lay in the warmth and comfort of my sea-bed, I listened with amusement to the aimless gossip of the men around me.

  'And your wife was on her back for old Harker, too, like half the women of Cornwall a
nd Portsmouth town...'

  'Why no, that were your sister and your mother, so as I heard...'

  Then I caught some whispered words that pierced right through me and made me sweat. 'Aye, the Happy Restoration. All hands, so they say. Gentleman captains, boys. Knows nothing of the sea, and proud of it they are, too. God curse them for their arrogance, and they'll whip the skin off your back if you so much as spit—'

  'They say he shat himself with fear right there on the Restorations deck, aye, right before he gave the order that sent her the wrong way and drove her onto the rocks, just because he didn't know his starboard from his larboard—'

  'Harker murdered? Never, I say. The creeping pox, he had–seen that, once, down in Alicante. Big among the Spanish it is, the creeping pox. Some old Portsmouth whore will have given it to him, mark my words–'

  'Matthew Quinton, eh? Well, boys, we'll soon see if he's a hundredth part of the men his father and grandfather were—'

  I turned over and groaned, then cursed at the thunder of ten regiments of horses inside my skull, regiments provided gratis by Captain Judge's liberality with his wine. As I began to stumble into my clothes, I dimly recalled my return to the Jupiter, and Vyvyan's grudging provision of blankets for me to lie in James Harker's surprisingly comfortable sea-bed. Praying to see the face of Phineas Musk was a new and unusual experience, but as I sat in the house of office in the quarter-gallery, the captain's exclusive place of easement, I longed for the old rogue to arrive with my belongings.

  I prayed fervently for another arrival, too. For I desired, with all my heart, the presence of Kit Farrell aboard the Jupiter. I needed his steady advice. I desperately needed to begin the lessons he had promised me in Kinsale, all those months before. Above all, I needed on this ship one man, just one, that was my own.

  For all his youth and strangeness, Vyvyan was an efficient and quietly competent lieutenant, as far as I could then judge such things; for those were the days when all ships, no matter how great, had but one lieutenant, and yet seemed to work as well as they do nowadays, when even the smallest frigates have lieutenants galore crawling out of every inch of the bilges. Nevertheless, I could have done without his bringing the ship's warrant officers to my cabin to be formally introduced to me over a prolonged breakfast of bread, veal, eggs, and small beer. I was not feeling myself, and had wished to avoid my fellow men as long as possible. As it transpired, I need not have been concerned, for rarely in my life have I encountered a more unimpressive group of men (other than when facing a committee of the House of Commons).

  Boatswain Ap was the most talkative of them, though this was not much to the good for he was virtually unintelligible. I gathered that he came from some unpronounceable hole north of Cardigan, though he might just as likely have said Cardiff, or Carmarthen, or Caernarvon. It was impossible to be certain from the gabble that came from his mouth, but I quickly learned that an occasional nod and a just so, Boatswain, would suffice to keep him happy. Stanton, the gunner, and Penbaron, the carpenter, were devout members of Harker's Cornish coterie, too distraught at the loss of their master (and probably at their employment prospects, also) to manage much in the way of conversation. Although I had enough of a knowledge of guns to be able to find some common ground with the portly, guarded Stanton, there was none at all with the small and wiry Penbaron, for like most captains, I never could properly tell a keelson from a futtock, and to me the wooden world of the carpenter was wholly anathema. He attempted to engage me upon the subject of the mizzenmast, which was apparently held aloft only by the ministrations of the angelic host; but I had no wish to spoil my breakfast so gave him little encouragement.

  Then there was Skeen, the ship's surgeon. Thin and dirty, he was a profoundly ignorant and insignificant man, a Londoner whose hearing had been shattered by too many Dutch broadsides a decade before. After James Vyvyan, he had been the first man to inspect James Harker's body, but had done no more than eventually and solemnly to pronounce that the captain was indeed dead, a fact that Vyvyan and the whole crew had known well enough twenty minutes earlier. Skeen would have been an obvious suspect for the poisoning of Harker, but it was hard to imagine this repulsive and foul-smelling little creature being competent enough to bring off such a cunning and secretive crime. I prayed privately to Our Lord for good health through our voyage, that I would have no need of Skeen's ministrations.

  The lowest of our warrant officers, in rank at least, was one William Janks, a bluff old Norfolk man and the provider of the excellent veal to which I found myself unable to do justice–a sad consequence of Captain Judge's table. Like most of the navy's cooks, he was a maimed sailor, given the post as a means of supporting himself. Janks had no left leg; it had been hacked off during the Hispaniola expedition, to save him from the gangrene. Unlike most of the navy's cooks, though, Janks could actually cook, and so well that Harker had felt no need to employ a second cook for his own table, as was usually the case. Janks was so old that he had actually sailed with my grandfather during the notorious attack on Cadiz in '25. This had been old Earl Matthew's last voyage at sea, and Janks told a good story of my grandfather stamping and raging on his quarterdeck as the invading army returned to his ship, drunk as lords after liberating several warehouses of wine, instead of pressing home their assault on Cadiz. I could imagine my grandfather's wrath at the realization that the unfailing ability of the English to get unspeakably drunk on any foreign shore had cost him a chance of gathering up all the booty of Cadiz town, thus restoring the fortunes of the House of Quinton. As the cook mumbled on toothlessly, I could see that this, my grandfather's greatest disaster, had been the apotheosis of Janks's life. For him, nothing since had matched the sheer excitement of that great adventure when he was young and whole, and nothing ever would. The ship's cook, at least, was an ally, I thought, with a disproportionate amount of pleasure.

  There were two exceptions to the regiment of mediocrity that made up the ranks of my warrant officers, and I was soon to wish that they were as insipid as the rest. The first was the ship's master. Malachi Landon was a brooding great ox of a man. His salute was surly, and as he stood in front of me, lofty and arrogant, his whole body screamed its contempt for the ignorant young prig of a captain who stood before him. Even so, Landon–like all the other officers–knew well his dependence on my testimony to his good conduct at the end of our voyage, and his words, spoken in a harsh Kentish burr, were less hostile than his posture. He gave his opinion that we were wasting time, lying at an anchor waiting to sail west when we had such a fine breeze to take us east, and northabout around the top of Scotland; but our orders from the king and Duke of York were to sail west to allow us to send word to Dumbarton, and although I could not share such a confidence with Malachi Landon, I made it clear that we had no discretion in the matter. He then asked if I would be keeping my own journal, or intended to issue the sailing commands, as some of my fellow gentleman captains were already doing. I replied that, for the moment, I had no intention of doing either, and he seemed morosely content at that.

  Later, James Vyvyan told me that Malachi Landon had long been master of a large merchantman trading with the Levant and was a Younger Brother of Trinity House, no less, with good connections to both courtiers and Parliament-men. Having avoided taking service under the Commonwealth (whether out of secret affection for the king, as he claimed, or a fondness for the profit to be had from Levant voyages, Vyvyan could not say), Landon now fancied himself ready to captain a king's ship. He was bitterly discontented at having been given instead a master's post on a mere Fifth Rate frigate, rather than one of the ships sent to Lisbon or the Mediterranean on their grand voyages. He and James Harker had quarrelled endlessly, it seemed; for Harker esteemed his own seamanship, and his ability to set a course. No doubt Landon was outraged to have been passed over when the command of the Jupiter became vacant; even more, to have been passed over in favour of the likes of Matthew Quinton. As was my new wont, I tried to cast him as a killer, and found
it easy. But Malachi Landon would have killed with a blade or his fists, I thought, not with the subtlety that had done for Harker–if indeed there was any truth in my lieutenant's wild suspicions (and in the wilder fancies that roved through the far reaches of my mind).

  That left Stafford Peverell, the purser. He was a perspiring man of perhaps forty years, of middling height but running now to fat. His face was florid beneath his lavish yellow wig. His breath reminded me of the stench of a decomposing dog. He glanced around my cabin with distaste, then looked me up and down in the same way.

  'Peverell, sir. Stafford Peverell. Of the Peverells of Rydal. In the county of Cumberland.' He paused, as though expecting to me to say that of course I had heard of his illustrious lineage. 'I am glad to welcome you, Captain. I am sure that having a Quinton at our head will prove a great advantage to this vessel,' and he gave a leering smile that exposed his rotten teeth. 'We have been rudely governed aboard this ship, Captain. The more genteel of us have found life ... onerous.'

  Vyvyan gave this slug-like creature a look of fury beyond his years. Peverell ignored him, and leant in close to me to talk malodorously of the demands of his position, for no office on the ship was as burdensome as that of purser. I must have evinced some visible sign of disbelief, for Peverell, seeing that I needed convincing, held forth at length on the manifold corruptions of the Victualling Office at Tower Hill, the endless pains necessary to keep the ship's books in good order, the importance of keeping an eye open for evil-doing and dishonour among a crew of worthless Cornishmen. A necessary sacrifice, he said, to achieve his ultimate and entirely deserved goals of a clerkship to the Exchequer or the Privy Council, followed by the secretaryship to one of the great men of the realm. Only the impoverishment of his family in the civil wars, he explained, along with Whitehall's unaccountable neglect of his obvious merits, forced him to hold such a mean position as purser on an insignificant man-of-war. And all the time he spoke, I had in mind the Duke of York's incisive assessment of him: Purser, Stafford Peverell. Haughty and ambitious. A close, cunning fellow.