The Rage of Fortune Read online

  He does not need to name the escaping goat, as I believe the English saying goes. Who was it who saw the Invisible Armada in its harbour? Who was it who commanded at Calais when the galleys passed through the strait that the English regard as their own private lake? Who, indeed, was drunk in a tavern ashore when the Spanish came into sight?

  He is not drunk, of course. He was not drunk in the tavern. But I know the English well enough now to understand that the truth is of but slight concern to them. If that is the story which is spread – and it needs only one malicious voice to spread it – then it will be believed.

  He knows all of this. He continues to stand there, looking out to sea until the galleys are gone, beyond the horizon. But still he looks, and I realise he is staring at the white cliffs of England’s shore. It is almost as though he can hear the very first whispers upon that distant strand.

  The Dowager Countess:

  Federico Spinola, that was his name, and his galleys’ audacious dash through the Straits brought that name before the world. How brightly his fame shone, like a shooting star in the heavens! But, again like a shooting star, he – But I should not jump ahead of myself, young Matthew, and we should see what my husband says of it in these papers of his. Ah yes, you say you have heard the name of Spinola, but it is Federico’s brother, Ambrosio, that your uncle will have told you about. They were both commanders for Spain, although they were actually Genoese. Ambrosio’s finest hour came when he took Breda in the year Twenty-Five, for no man believed that mightily fortified city could ever fall. A great painting of the surrender was made by Velazquez, with the Governor of Breda bowing as he handed over the keys of the city to Spinola. Your grandfather got hold of an engraving, and chuckled over it for days on end. For you see, grandson, the Dutch Governor who surrendered Breda to the Spanish was none other than Justinus of Nassau, the Bastard Orange.

  But all that was for the future, and at the time, I had other things on my mind. And on my belly, to be precise. I did not know it then, of course, but while the Earl was fretting and raging at Calais as the Spanish galleys sailed imperiously past him, I was in my birthing-bed, enduring a twenty hour labour. I did not know it was possible for a person to bear such pain, but bear it I did, as women have since Eve gave birth to Cain. Still, I consoled myself that it would be worth it, for I was giving birth to the heir to Ravensden, the future Earl.

  But God had decided to mock the House of Quinton that day. It mocked my husband, shaking his fist impotently at the galley fleet in the Channel. And it mocked me, as I held in my sweat-soaked arms a tiny but healthy child who was all too evidently a girl.

  At Easter, I had somehow managed to persuade my husband to discuss this eventuality. He devoted all of half a minute to the unwelcome thought. A girl, he decreed, would be christened Elizabeth. In those times, of course, virtually every first-born girl in England was named Elizabeth, as a way of displaying one’s loyalty to the great Queen. But the Earl had an ulterior motive, as he always did. He reckoned that naming a daughter Elizabeth, and persuading the Queen to act as godmother, might be a way of ingratiating himself back into her good graces.

  Alas for My Lord. The fiasco at Calais meant that he would need someone rather more powerful than our little Beth, or something rather more desperate than the birth of a child, to restore him to favour.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  1600

  The Earl of Ravensden’s Journal

  Let me be very clear about this, so that there is no misunderstanding: I did not set out to provoke a duel with My Lord of Essex.

  Robert Devereux, second Earl of that title, to be precise. The most famous man in all England, the darling of the people, the Queen’s great favourite (albeit disgraced), the greatest warrior in all of Christendom (albeit only in his own dreams), etcetera, etcetera.

  No.

  It was not my fault.

  Truly, it was not.

  I am still not entirely certain how it happened. It is true that I have a certain recollection of hot words passing between us. It is possible that he called me an idle Frog-loving coward and varlet who had invented an entire Armada whilst waving half-a-dozen Spanish galleys through the Channel. It is not entirely beyond the bounds of possibility that I called him a vain milk-livered ratsbane who had been trounced by the bog-crawling peasants of Ireland and justly humiliated by the Queen.

  Whatever the actual words, they were the cause of us circling each other with rapiers drawn, upon the frosty grass of Hampstead Heath during a freezing dawn in February: Matthew Quinton and Robin Devereux, two Earls of England and two of her most famous warriors, each intent on spilling the other’s blood.

  The Dowager Countess:

  Men.

  That is what I said at the time, and that is what I say now, grandson.

  Oh, my husband was evasive about the entire affair from the very beginning. I asked him why he wished to visit Essex, a man he heartily disliked and who was in even greater disgrace than he was. At least your grandfather was not under virtual house arrest, although he was denied the court and had no immediate prospect of a fresh command at sea. Even so, we lived comfortably enough with our little daughter in Ravensden House; well, as comfortably as it was possible to live in that crumbling, ugly, timber-framed edifice upon the Strand, surrounded on all sides by the noise and stench of London. It was not yet suitable, he said, for us to go to his principal seat, Ravensden Abbey in Bedfordshire, because it was important for him to stay close to the court and solicit the favour of the great men of the kingdom. I believed him, up to a point. For even though my English was still negligible, I knew the meaning of the word ‘repairs’, and heard it uttered worryingly often in my husband’s discussions with the Abbey’s steward, a certain Barcoq, whenever the latter came to town.

  Although your grandfather cursed and complained about the injustice of his fate, then, he was not in the same dire state as Milord Essex. The noble Earl had not only failed to defeat the Irish rebels, he had actually agreed a shameful truce with the Earl of Tyrone, their leader. Then, against the Queen’s express orders, he returned to England and made all haste to the court to explain himself and try to win her over. What happened next was the talk of London for months on end – indeed, the talk of England, if not the whole world. Muddied, booted and spurred, Essex burst into the Queen’s bedchamber as she was being dressed. I have it on the authority of two of her ladies in waiting, who were there and with whom I later became close friends, that she was in her nightgown, and that her aged face had not yet been miraculously rendered thirty years younger by the white makeup she always displayed in public. But that was not the worst of it. Why, it seems her hair had not been combed, and was in disarray! Truly, Milord Essex had committed one of the greatest sins imaginable against womankind, let alone against a Queen, by bursting in on her with her hair in such a state. If it had been me, grandson, I would have had him executed upon the spot. As it was, Elizabeth dismissed him from her presence, and he was placed under arrest – although it proved a very loose form of detention, as his rendezvous with your grandfather proved.

  So, yes, I asked my husband why in God’s name he wished to visit the Earl of Essex, whose disgrace seemed to be as complete as a man’s could be. He refused to answer me directly, but gave me that look I had seen upon his face only two or three times before. That look of a small boy caught stealing apples from an orchard. And then I knew at once. Essex and Ravensden, two mighty warriors in disgrace, were going to discuss making common cause. And in those times, even a Frenchwoman new to England and largely ignorant of its ways could divine readily enough what that common cause might be, for it was the only matter that could possibly bring together such inveterate enemies. They were going to plot how to bring down their joint enemy, Robert Cecil, and agree upon their choice of the Queen’s successor.

  Perhaps they would have done, too, had they not decided first to insult each other beyond endurance.

  Men.

  Nicholas Iles:

>   I was My Lord’s second, but even so, I could barely believe the sight I was witnessing. Ravensden and Essex in single combat! Truly, here was an epic combat to outdo those of Achilles and Hector, or Guy of Warwick and Colbrand the giant Viking! And yet, as the two noble earls parried and thrust, trading stoccatas and imbroccatas, I found it more and more difficult to concentrate on the poetry of the occasion, upon the nobility of the battle before me. At best, the encounter was most certainly illegal, and could lead to all of those present – myself included – being thrown into a dungeon and forgotten. At worst, one of them would kill the other, in which case it would certainly be the scaffold for the seconds of victor and vanquished alike. If Essex killed My Lord, then where would I be? Bereft of purpose, bereft of the limited protection from arrest that My Lord’s patronage provided, and, more pertinently, bereft of money, even the pitiful allowance, far in arrears, that My Lord deigned to pay me. But if My Lord killed the great Earl of Essex, then might not our case be even more desperate? Killing the darling of the people and the love of the Queen – dear father in heaven, the mob might tear us apart, ripping our limbs from our sockets and feeding them to the dogs of Leadenhall! And so for the first time, I prayed for Horvath, the Hungarian. I prayed that despite my suspicions of him, the many practice fights he had fought with My Lord would bear fruit: that the moves and attacks, learned during the wars in the east, that he had been teaching to Matthew of Ravensden, would both preserve My Lord’s life and bring him the victory. But not a victory that entailed the killing of the Earl of Essex. A slash on the arm would be enough. Or maybe a gash in the side. A gash not quite deep enough to kill, but to satisfy honour and to keep My Lord happy. That would be ideal.

  One thing was for certain, though. My Lord was more likely to have learned swordplay that would prove useful to him from the warrior Horvath than he had from the mere poet Nicholas Iles, during our mock-fights in the past. Neither the exaggerated thrusts and parries beloved of actors on the Southwark stages, nor the devious little cuts and slashes we writers employed in tavern fights, were likely to be of service now.

  The Earl of Ravensden:

  Essex’s blade whistled past my ear, barely an inch from slicing away the side of my skull.

  ‘That the best you’ve got, Devereux, you mewling jolthead?’

  I thrust my right foot forward, left foot back, lunged and thrust, aiming for his left eye. Essex parried, sparks glinting on our rapiers as they clashed, and stepped neatly to his left and back. Then he danced a little, for he favoured the Spanish fashion of swordplay, all little hops and flourishes.

  ‘Just getting loose, Ravensden, you poxed codpiece. Shall I start to fight now?’

  We circled each other. Then he came fast with another attack, this time for my left. But it was a feint. Essex waited for me to commit to the parry and then switched his line by thrusting for my heart. I parried, weaved and countered, swinging and cutting mandritti as Horvath and my old fencing-master at Padua had taught, then shifting my weight and pushing forward with a lunge. I hated this new-fangled business of the long-bladed rapier, all lunging, thrusting and offence, so different to the good old English skills I had learned from my cradle. But this was now the fashion, and I prided myself that I was a not inconsiderable master of it. Indeed, this last sudden change of attack of mine surprised Essex, who barely managed to counter it. He took three paces back, caught his breath, and took a fresh guard, the seconda guardia as Camillo Agrippa would have it, his extended sword-arm and blade level with his shoulder.

  I attacked again, feinting for his belly before bringing my rapier up sharply at the last moment. My blade swung for his neck, but his rapier came up in time, barely an inch from the flesh. We both brought up our free hands to push our blades at each other, for all the world as though we were in a wrestling match with bare steel.

  I was so close that I could smell Essex’s breath, could see the sweat soaking his beard.

  He essayed a smile. ‘Jamie Stuart’s the lawful heir by blood, Ravensden,’ he hissed as we pushed our blades against each other, seeking a hair’s breadth of advantage. ‘Declare for him, and I’ll spare your life.’

  ‘Presumptuous, My Lord Essex,’ I said, taking care that my voice did not reach the seconds. ‘Presumptuous in so many different ways.’

  I pushed him away, and as I did so, the tip of my sword scratched his cheek, drawing blood. Essex wiped the wound with the back of his hand, but as he looked incredulously at his own blood, I attacked again, thrusting for his groin.

  ‘That’s for the wounds I took on your behalf at San Fernando, Devereux!’

  Essex brought his rapier up, easily parrying my attack.

  ‘Christ, Quinton, you’re not still bitter about that? It was not my doing, you vain blind-worm – it was your fault, and yours alone! You shouldn’t have been there in the first place—’

  ‘My fault? My fault, Essex, you arrogant streak of piss? I’ll show you what’s my fault—’

  And with that I charged, intent upon the kill, all science and rules of balance forgotten. I was aware that Essex’s second was shouting something, but did not hear it. I feinted high, then thrust low – a hand grabbed hold of my arm –

  ‘Iles! What the fuck are you doing, man—’

  ‘Soldiers, My Lord! Horsemen! Listen!’

  The blood-tide ebbed from my eyes. The sound of hooves was unmistakeable, as was the clanking of weapons on saddles and armour. Essex and I looked at each other.

  ‘Another time, Robin,’ I said.

  ‘A pleasure as always, Matt,’ he said, smiling.

  We made our respective exits, well before the Queen’s soldiers could arrive. No man would know that Essex and Ravensden had broken Her Majesty’s strictest injunctions. So I believed, at any rate.

  Laszlo Horvath:

  My friend Mister Trevor is showing me the royal dockyard at Deptford, to the east of London. I think he does so to demonstrate his importance, for all the workmen and officers of the yard bow their heads or doff their caps to the Surveyor of the Navy. This puffs him up, and he smiles inordinately often. Perhaps he thinks I will be impressed, but I do not understand why he would need to do this. Since our first meeting at Tyburn, I have serviced him in all the ways he has required, upon many occasions. It has been distasteful, but as the English say, the end justifies the means.

  We are standing on the precarious remnants of the deck of an old ship. It lies at the head of a long dock, overshadowed by a large storehouse made of red brick. Only the stump of one mast still stands, and there are great holes in the hull.

  ‘Sad, is it not?’ says John Trevor. ‘She was supposed to be preserved here for ever, as a tribute to her great commander and his famous voyage, but people will keep chipping away for keepsakes. I cannot understand it. If I have a piece of wood in my house, who can truly tell whether it is a piece of this Golden Hind, or a splinter that I have cut from a tree in my garden? It is like the old Papist days, friend Horvath, when relics of the saints were everywhere and there were enough pieces of the True Cross to build a fleet of galleons.’

  I look around. The yard is busy, full of the stench of tar, pitch and timber. It is almost impossible to hear John Trevor speak, although he is standing next to me, for the constant noise of sawing and hammering. Flames belch from forges. Out in the river, English warships lie at anchor, taking on stores and great bronze guns. Barges and merchant ships constantly traffic up and down stream. And somewhere far to the north, My Lord of Ravensden will be fighting his duel with My Lord of Essex. I wonder whether he will employ the moves I have taught him. Perhaps he will, if he has the time.

  Next to the dock housing the Golden Hind, men are at work on the frames of a ship. But even to my ignorant eye, it is clear that this will be longer and narrower than any of the other ships in the dockyard. I ask John Trevor what it is.

  ‘Behold the Superlativa, friend Horvath. The first of England’s new galley fleet that we are building to counter General Spinola
’s squadron across the Channel. But it will be much more than that – oh, so very much more.’

  ‘Superlativa, Master Trevor? Surely that is not an English word?’

  ‘Italian, friend Horvath. Spinola has made all things Italian the height of fashion in naval war. And it is a new century, a new era. Time for new thinking. The ship has had its day, as have all those dull old names that the seamen cry up – Dreadnought, Warspite and the rest. No, we owe a great debt to General Spinola, despite the threat he poses to us. He has demonstrated conclusively that galleys are the future for our Navy Royal, the only sure way we can defend England against an invasion by the barbarous Papists. And a means of killing two birds with one stone, come to that.’

  ‘Birds and stones, Master Trevor? I do not follow.’

  ‘Galleys, friend Horvath. They do not need seamen to man them, you see, and seamen are both fractious and damnably expensive, for they will insist on being paid. Whereas rowers… Why, we can now do to the Spanish what they do to us, and make galley slaves of our prisoners.’

  ‘And if you do not have enough Spanish prisoners?’

  John Trevor smiles once again. ‘Have you not seen the numbers of sturdy beggars, vagrants and vagabonds who plague every inch of this kingdom’s roads? Sending them to the new galleys would at once man a great fleet, and provide vast savings in the poor law rates we now impose on parishes. England must end this crushing dependence on alms, my friend. Work transforms men and nations, and what could transform more than a policy which at once entirely removes the poor from the sight of respectable men, and means that we do not have to pay for them?’