The Mountain of Gold Read online

  We rode by the side of the dockyard wall up to the gate, where the porter informed us that the master shipwright was already aboard the Seraph, moored in the wet dock. This was to the left as we entered the yard. A great storehouse directly ahead of us dominated the entire site and towered above the dry dock to our right, sealed by wooden gates from the high tide on the hull-crowded grey waters of the Thames. Dockyards produced arguably the most prodigious stinks in England, for no other site of comparable size encompassed the smoke from coal furnaces and forges, the smells of wet and dry wood, boundless quantities of tar and rope, and that final indispensable ingredient, the stench of several hundred men. Around us, all was bustle: or at least, what passed for bustle in a royal dockyard, those very Edens of sloth. Shipwrights were at work on an old Third Rate at the head of the double dry dock, some taking down decayed timbers, others hammering new ones into place at an approximate rate of one treenail every fifth minute or so. A few caulkers and labourers stood at the head of the dock, listening to a harangue against their gross idleness from their foremen. Two men painted a boat, lingering over each brush stroke as if they were Titians capturing a Madonna. The sound of sawing rose from the various saw-pits scattered around the yard. Great piles of wood were stacked in every available space: huge trees stripped of their branches, that would soon make masts; strange curved pieces that would make futtocks, the bends in a ship's hull; and planks galore, ready to enclose a ship's side. A few men were sawing away at some of these piles, cutting them expertly into pieces almost exactly three feet long.

  'Chips,' I said to Musk. 'Pepys once told me that by tradition, men can carry out of the yard left-over pieces of wood up to three feet long. They can sell them, or use them in their own homes, or whatever they will.'

  Musk frowned. 'Three feet's a damned big chip, I'd say. And those don't look like left-over pieces. If I didn't know better, I'd say they were cutting them deliberately to that length.' A man walked past us, weighed down by the great piece of oak that he carried. Musk snorted. 'Chips so large, they have to carry them on their shoulders!'

  I laughed. 'Don't impugn the good name of the Deptford shipwrights in their hearing, Musk. We want to get out of here alive, remember.'

  The Seraph was berthed as the outermost of three ships tied to the east wharf of the wet dock, so we had to cross the decks of a Fourth Rate and a Fifth to get to her. The King was quite right about my new command. I was starting to know enough of ships to recognise those that looked the part and those that lumbered sluggishly around the oceans. The Seraph was trim, riding high in the water because the guns were yet to be put in her. She had finer lines than my old Jupiter, which had been about the same size; her masts were stepped a little further back and had more of a rake. Old Shish, the master shipwright of Deptford, was on the quarterdeck, seeing to a problem with the starboard rail. He and I were acquainted vaguely of old, for my first command, the doomed Happy Restoration, had been fitted out in this same yard. He bowed as I approached, but I had forgotten that it was always a mistake to approach Jonas Shish from leeward, for he reeked prodigiously. I introduced him to Musk, the ship's steward-to-be, and they nodded curt acknowledgment to each other.

  'Well, Captain Quinton,' Shish said. 'Glad they've given her to you, sir. She's a good ship. Almost as good as any I could build myself, indeed. Now, you'll wish to see your cabin?'

  'In due course, Master Shish. I'd be grateful for an introduction to the ship's standing officers first.'

  The bluff and pungent Shish seemed nonplussed. 'You've not heard of the funeral then, sir?'

  'A funeral?'

  'Indeed, Captain. Old Graves, the boatswain. Appropriate name, that. Appropriate when you're dead, that is. Laying Graves in the grave, as it were. Anyway, they're burying him over at Erith today, and all the rest of them have gone over there. That's Lindman the gunner, Harrington the purser, Bradbury the cook and Shish the carpenter.'

  'Shish? A relative of yours, Master Shipwright?'

  "Sakes no, sir. Well, probably at some distance, but there's enough of us in these parts, you see. Every second man from here down to the Nore is a Shish or a Pett.' As Shish began to show Musk and myself around the upper deck, I began to think on this matter of the boatswain's death. A previous voyage had begun with the unexplained death of a ship's officer—her captain, in that case—and that parallel, alongside the recent experience with the scarred man, had perhaps made me unduly suspicious. With as much insouciance as I could manage, I asked Shish how the man had died. 'Oh, Graves had the pox, sir. And griping of the guts. And you should have heard the man's chest. But that's not what did for him in the end. Got into a brawl with some Hamburgers in an alehouse down at Gravesend—over some lewd serving wench, they say. He did for two of them before the third put a knife in his ribs. Even then he lingered five days.' Shish sighed. An example to us all, really, considering he was seventy-eight.'

  With my suspicions assuaged, a calculating proposition took shape in my head. The office of boatswain was vacant. No doubt a crowd of solicit-ants for the place were already thronging the Palace of Whitehall, hoping to lay their merits before the Lord High Admiral, the Duke of York. But the captain of the Seraph had a worthy candidate in mind, and all matters relating to this voyage were the prerogative of the King, whose ear the said captain had in ample measure. Ergo, just as in card games kings trump all lesser cards, so in life kings trump all lesser mortals.

  With these thoughts spinning in my mind, jostling for attention against recollections of Sir Venner Garvey's warning and uncalled-for remembrance of the Lady Louise's look and smell, I began my inspection of my new command. The shipwright might have been a moonstruck lunatic, but his creation was anything but insane. Like all Fifth Rates, she had but the one fully covered gundeck, with eleven ports cut into each side. There were another three on each side abaft, beneath the quarterdeck and the small poop at the stern, and another two on either side of the forecastle. The latter was somewhat more truncated than it had been on the Fifth I had commanded most recently, the Jupiter, but the quarterdeck was a little longer, which promised more space for the captain's perambulations. The only sign of the shipwright's peculiarities came on the main gundeck, where a bizarre gallery of animals and astrological symbols had been carved into each beam; at the centre of each was the familiar face of a man with foliage sprouting from his mouth, so alike their fellow Green Man that adorned the porch of Ravensden Church.

  At last we came to the great cabin—my cabin. But even three months ashore had been sufficient to make me forget one of the essentials for the comfort of Matthew Quinton's life in the navy, especially when so many other thoughts served to distract him. I stepped through the door, straightened up, and immediately struck...

  'Beam,' said Musk, helpfully but belatedly.

  Shish said, 'Ah. I think we may need to raise the deck a little, Captain. Six inches should suffice, I think? I'll order Bagwell and a party of men off the Nonpareil to attend to it. But you're not due to sail until, what, the end of the year? Ample time.' I felt the beginnings of that throbbing in the forehead which is familiar to all tall men who have to inhabit low structures. Shish continued, 'So, Captain Quinton. What would you fancy for decoration, sir?'

  I had no opportunity to reply, for at that moment there was a commotion on the deck. The yard porter, whom I had encountered earlier—a low, squinting creature of no breeding—admitted himself, bowed perfunctorily to me and spoke to Shish in a hushed whisper. The Master Shipwright seemed immediately discomposed by his tidings. 'Sir, it seems we have an invasion.'

  An invasion? Great God, had King Louis or the Dutch chosen this moment to exploit England's craven weakness? I felt for the hilt of my sword—'A host of ungodly foreigners is warring in the town, says the porter, here,' said Shish. 'Warring with my shipwrights, Captain Quinton! The women say they are Turks, or some other breed of uncivilised heathen—Russians, perhaps, or worse. They have attempted to seduce honest goodwives, and my shipwrights
won't have it! No, they won't have it! But there is a strange thing, sir. A very strange thing, indeed. They seem to be calling your name, Captain Quinton.'

  A cold chill gripped my heart like a vice. Quite equably, Musk said, 'Well, Mister Shish, you're right in one thing, at any rate. Much worse than Turks or Russians.'

  We ran out of the dockyard and up the High Street of Deptford. Ahead of us, only a few hundred yards from the dockyard gate, lay the venerable Gun Tavern, where my grandfather had got horribly drunk with old Howard of Effingham, the Lord High Admiral of England, before they both ventured out against the Spanish Armada. Now it was the scene of another great battle. A bloodied shipwright lay in the door, moaning; another came through a window as we approached. I halted and sighed. With as much authority as I could muster, I shouted, 'Cornishmen! In the names of your King and of Captain Matthew Quinton, I order you to desist! Lanherne, where the hell are you, man?'

  The sometime coxswain of the King's ships Jupiter and Wessex appeared in the doorway, holding a shipwright in a tight arm lock. Reluctantly he released the man and saluted. 'Cap'n.'

  John Tremar, a behemoth of strength and unutterable violence crammed into a miniscule frame, came up beside him and smiled contentedly. 'Cap'n,' he echoed.

  'What is the meaning of this riot, Mister Lanherne, in the name of all that's holy?'

  Lanherne, who had served notably as a soldier in the land's dreadful civil wars, looked sheepish and said, 'They were rude, sir. We merely asked them to toast with us.'

  'Quite exceeding rude,' said Tremar. A piercing scream came from within the Gun Tavern: it was accompanied by a plea for mercy, cried in a pitiful Kentish voice. There were unmistakeable sounds of large men falling against tables or walls.

  And what toast did you ask them to drink?'

  Lanherne brightened. 'Why, sir, this place, Deptford—well, it's sacred to all Cornishmen, you see. It's where our forefathers fought and died, in the year ninety-seven.'

  Now, I knew my history of Queen Elizabeth's reign; naturally, for my grandfather had done so much to shape that history. But—'I don't recall any Cornish action here in 1597, Lanherne. And with respect, we are quite some way from Cornwall.' With that, another of my old coterie, the man-ape John Treninnick, fell through the door, rubbed away a punch to his chin, saluted, screamed with rage and threw himself back into the fray.

  Lanherne ignored the intervention entirely. 'Oh, not Fifteen Ninety-Seven, sir. Fourteen Ninety-Seven. When our proud Cornish boys led by An Gof the blacksmith and Flamank the lawyer marched all the way across England, to London itself. Twenty thousand of them, sir. Got all the way to Deptford Bridge, then took on the king's army. A close run thing, Captain, but the Tudor's men fought an unfair battle—well, at any rate, they had cannon and cavalry, and our great-grandsires had only pitchforks or their bare hands.'

  I sensed the impatience of Shish, at my side, for we should have been about our task of quelling this riot, but this was a history unknown to me, and curiosity won out. 'So this was some great cause the Cornishmen were about? To overthrow Harry the Seventh and restore the line of York, perchance?'

  Lanherne and Tremar looked at each other. Aye, sir, the greatest cause of all,' said Tremar, gravely. 'They didn't fancy paying their taxes that year.'

  'So we asked the shipwrights to toast their memory with us, sir, all politely, of course. To toast An Gof in his own words, a name perpetual and a fame permanent and immortal. Uttered just before they hanged, drew and quartered him. A request modest enough, Captain.'

  'But they were quite exceeding rude.'

  It was Musk who asked the obvious question: the one that I should have asked at the very beginning, but to which I already knew the answer. 'And what, exactly, is your business in Deptford, Mister Lanherne?'

  The coxswain looked nonplussed. 'Why, Mister Musk, word got down to Cornwall that the captain had a new ship. We beat drums from Penrhyn up to Bude, and there's sixty or more of us here, good and true, ready to list with Captain Quinton once again.'

  Another of my old Jupiters, a dark lusty fellow called Summercourt, came through the door at that moment, falling into the gutter in what appeared to be a wrestling match to the death with a hirsute shipwright. I nodded to Shish and drew my sword, for it was time to restore the king's peace to the good people of Deptford. But at least I had the answer to the question that had vexed me during my journey to the yard.

  Who but madmen would volunteer for a voyage to Guinea?

  Of course.

  Cornishmen.

  Seven

  I still had several weeks of grace before the Seraph finally got under way in its pursuit of the mountain of gold. Weeks during which I could attempt to avoid meeting my dreaded passenger-to-be, a feat that I had managed with success thus far. Weeks during which I certainly could not avoid attending the apotheosis of the Lady De Vaux: her marriage to my brother in St Paul's Cathedral. Weeks in which I could reflect fully upon the warning given by my good-brother Sir Venner, and think upon those others who might seek to prevent the voyage of the Seraph—or at least, to prevent the continued living of her captain. The scarred man, for one, though there had been no further sightings of him, and increasingly I questioned what I might or might not have heard on the road from Newmarket. The other I had almost forgotten, until a letter came to me one day at the beginning of November. The winds were howling around the ancient abbey—indeed, such was the nature of our home that many of them were howling straight through it—and I was in the library, writing what I calculated to be my fifteenth letter of the day to some functionary or other who had a part to play in getting my Seraph ready for sea.

  Cornelia brought the letter to me; she always reached the mail first, for invariably most of it was for her. (Letter-writing seems to be one of the national religions of the Dutch, presumably because in their country there is little else to do, and every post brought endless epistles from her parents and her obscure cousins in Gelderland, Friesland and every other 'land' in that muddy nation.) She was in ill temper. Even by our standards, we had been making particularly vigorous efforts to pre-empt the forthcoming debacle at St Paul's by getting Cornelia pregnant. Regrettably, a position recommended by the wise woman of Baldock Forest succeeded only in spraining her back, and she was bent almost double as she handed me the letter. She was still seething at a comment overheard in Bedford, where she and my equally bent mother had gone to purchase some horses—only for a somewhat short-sighted alderman of the town to enquire whether they were sisters.

  She said, 'It's from Roger, by the looks of it. He's close to King Louis these days, isn't he? Can't he persuade him to invade before the wedding? That would well and truly thwart My Lady De Vaux—a few hundred French guards and a cardinal or two parading up the nave of St Paul's! God in hemel, I'd like to see your mother's face, too, if King Louis' musketeers turn up and cancelled the wedding in favour of a full papist Te Deum!'

  I sighed and took the letter. Cornelia sat down opposite me (very, very slowly) and picked up an old anatomy book by Galen that had belonged to the alchemically-inclined seventh earl.

  I broke open the hugely impressive wax seal of the Comtes d'Andelys, its crest unchanged since the times of Charlemagne, and began to read.

  'Mon cher ami—' To render it in the original French is the height of folly, of course, for in these days when the German tongue pervades our court and country, who but the near-dead like myself could comprehend it? In English, then—'My dearest brother-in-arms! Oh, my esteemed and noble friend, Matthew Quinton! My fellow warrior in the time of greatest adversity—' There was much more in the same vein, for although RogerLouis de Gaillard-Herblay, seventeenth Comte d'Andelys, was a good man and a true friend, he was, at bottom, French, and alas, brevity is not a characteristic of that mighty race. When the endless expressions of undying affection toward my person finally ceased, there was much on his search for a wife (as yet unfruitful, although a prodigiously plump daughter of the prodigiously rich Duc de
Montreuil was said to be a promising candidate), a long discourse on the doings of King Louis and his court (the queen and at least one mistress reportedly pregnant), much on the splendid harvest brought in by cheerful peasants from the fertile soils of his endless fields ... and so on. Finally, though, not even a Frenchman could further postpone the matters of substance.

  'My thoughts turn increasingly toward the sea, Matthew, and to the times we had in the old Jupiter. As you will already know, my King seeks to make France a greater power at sea, and is ordering a new fleet of ships from our own yards and those of Holland. This is no threat to England and your great navy, of course, but it is shaming that a country the size of France should have no more than a few ancient tubs carrying her proud fleur-de-lis ensign to sea. The King is commissioning great nobles to command his new ships—men with far less experience at sea than my own, though I will confess that my experiences were, shall we say, unconventional.' (Escaping the wrath of King Louis' minister Fouquet, whose wife he had seduced, the Comte d'Andelys had enlisted aboard the Jupiter as a sailmaker's mate named Le Blanc, and I inherited him with the ship.) 'Thus I am tempted to solicit a command. Who knows, my dear brother-in-arms, one day we might sail alongside each other, side by side against a common foe!' Ever the optimist, Roger evidently had not contemplated the possibility of us fighting against each other.

  'Now, Matthew, I turn to this matter of the Seigneur de Montnoir. I have never met this man, but some of my friends at court know him. He is a strange and secret creature, it seems—part warrior, past mystic. Some say he is a descendant of the old prophet de Nostredame, but our court is ever home to a feverish terror of the occult, and I would place little weight on such tales. He has great lands in the Auvergne that have allowed him to indulge his passions. These do not seem to include wine and women, as is the way with most of us in the Second Estate. Instead, my friends inform me that Montnoir is a fanatic. He seems to have convinced himself that he committed a mortal sin by fighting against Spain during our late wars with that kingdom, believing that all of Catholic Europe should be united in crusade against the Turks and the Moors, as well as those notorious and unrepentant heretics, the English and the Dutch. As we know, my friend, there is only one thing more dangerous than a fanatic, and that is a wealthy and well-connected fanatic. Thus Montnoir serves the Order of Malta because it gives him a licence to kill heathens indiscriminately, and in the hope that one day he will become Grand Master, a sovereign prince of Europe and keeper of much of the supposed secret knowledge of the ancients. But he also has the ear of King Louis, who detests mystics unless they tell him what he wants to hear—'