Gentleman Captain (19 page)

We ended the meal in an ill temper, for Vyvyan was young and convinced of the rightness of his theory. He fell heavily against the bulkhead as he left, and I wondered how he could possibly be fit to stand his watch. For the first time in my life I–still but twenty-two–felt impossibly old and dull, the voice of age and authority calming the hot, irrational passions of youth. Yet for all that, I could not quite forget what he had said of my purser.

After Vyvyan had gone I went up on deck, for I was in need of air and solitude. It was late in the evening, and we were well into St George's Channel, that busy crossroads at the confluence of the Irish Sea and the Bristol Channel. The wind had strengthened and rounded again into a stout westerly gale bearing sharp flurries of rain. For a horrible moment I felt the chill of the
Happy Restoration,
but even I could gauge the forces of different winds against my face and knew at once that this was not cast from the same ship-breaking mould; but it was strong enough, and I had to move from rope to rope, bracing myself and waiting for each roll of the hull. Lanherne, part of the watch on deck, saluted perfunctorily and in apparent unconcern at both the wind and his saturated, amphibian condition as he turned the glass and rang the ship's bell to mark the passage of another half-hour. Our hull and masts creaked in a loud song of protest against the winds and seas that assaulted them. We had but a few men aloft: I thought I glimpsed the unmistakeable form of John Treninnick, far above me on the main yard. In the furrows between the great waves, I could sometimes just make out the
Royal Martyr,
to windward of us and well ahead, sailing steadily northward. Like us, she bore only hitched half-sails at her lower yards: reefed courses, the seamen called them, though God alone knew how I had remembered that piece of information. She bore away from us no more than three points, I reckoned. Away to starboard, I could see the distant masts of some half-dozen large merchant hulls, no doubt coming down from Bristol, probably bound for Africa or the Americas. They would have to tack often, I speculated, for their course would be almost directly into the wind. Far off to larboard, riding on the great waves like ducks upon a weir, lay a smattering of tiny sails, Cornish fishing craft plying their trade on the shoals that must lie in that direction. Brave souls, to be out in such feeble craft in such a mighty sea; no doubt the kin of some in my crew, many of whom had known that life.

I stood on the starboard side of the quarterdeck, gripping a rope–a
shroud,
yes, that was it–and swaying with the ship's motion. Despite the effort and the wet and the noise, I found myself almost ready to laugh out loud–for I had needed no reminders of what to look for, or what to sense. It was as though I was new born, and seeing the world around me for the first time, drinking in its wonders and mysteries with the wind and the salt spray.

It is strange the way such things happen in life. We learn, and the lessons pass over us as the waves over a shore, leaving no mark. But when enough tides have ebbed and flowed, the shore is reshaped, and thus it is with mastering a new skill. There is a moment when the matter is too difficult, and we cannot master it. Then, without warning or seeming reason, there is a moment when we have it. The pedagogues will doubtless call this the moment of understanding, or such like. Whatever it was, I felt it and knew it, that dusk-tide on the quarterdeck of the
Jupiter.
I still feel its thrill in my bones, all these years later; aye, despite all the horrors that it foreshadowed.

I surveyed the scene again with a peculiar sense of contentment: a scene so similar to my nightmare on the
Happy Restoration,
yet so different. I thought of the kind face of my grandfather on its canvas high on the wall of Ravensden Abbey. This had been his domain, the sea. As I felt the wind suddenly gust a little more southerly, and watched the effect it had on our reefed sails, I finally believed I understood what had drawn him to this sphere. For man to move on the sea at all flies in the face of logic. Any voyage on water, even the transit of a punt across a river, is a miracle, the triumph of man's ingenuity over the most alien environ imaginable, and over his own darkest fears. To be a master of this watery realm must have given my grandfather more pride, and more delight, than all his titles, and lands, and the adoration of a queen. Godsgift Judge and good-brother Cornelis, too, though they were both born to the sea, and thus perhaps took it for granted. But we, the two Matthew Quintons, were landsmen, who had come to the sea as ignorant supplicants to a most demanding mistress. I would not speak for Judge, but I was willing to wager that Cornelis had never experienced the satisfaction that I felt then, as I heard our hull creak and felt our rigging strain in response to the strengthening wind, and watched the grey-clouded April dusk darken to the west, over the grave of the
Happy Restoration.

My moment of satisfaction, such as it was, proved short-lived.

***

Malachi Landon had the watch. I had been dimly aware of his presence on the other side of the quarterdeck. Now I noticed that he seemed agitated. He paced the deck, looked across at me, then at the heavens, then at me again, and so he continued for almost a turn of the glass. Finally, he approached me, doffing his plain woollen cap in salute.

'Captain, this voyage,' he said, far more deferential than was his wont, 'it's gone well, thus far. We've had God's grace with the winds. Even this gale–abeam, almost from the quarter, the ideal wind to speed us to Scotland.' I acknowledged it, but Landon seemed morose. 'Sir, I've been casting our charts. They're ominous, some of the worst I've known.'

'What charts, Master?'

The only charts I had seen bore lines that took us west from Portsmouth, around Cornwall, then due north through the Irish Sea to the west coast of Scotland, according to the sailing orders given me by the Lord High Admiral. This, I suddenly recalled, was the 'dead reckoning' that had perplexed me but so short a time before.

'Why, our heavenly charts, sir. The auguries for this voyage, based on the alignment of the heavens at the moment of our sailing from Portsmouth.' Any confidence in my supposed new-found mastery of the sailor's arts evaporated, and witty Poseidon saw fit to increase my discomfort by sending a great wave to soak me with a measure of Atlantic water. Shaking himself and shouting above the gale, Landon continued. 'It's Mars, sir. Mars, the lord of the ninth house. He's retrograde on the cusp of the eighth, sir, thence casting a malicious quadrate to the Lord of the Ascendant. Worse, the lady of the eighth, the
domus mortis,
is on the very degree ascending!'

I listened to the words much as I would to a speech babbled in Hebrew. 'And this all means, Mister Landon?'

'Why, this all foreshadows great difficulty, Captain. Obstructions and danger lie in our way, sir.' He was wringing water from his cap and looking earnestly at me. 'Death itself, in truth.'

I was shaken by his words; not many can hear a presentiment of death without reacting so. But I took hold of myself and said with some impatience, 'Then what would you have me do, Master? You know our orders. You know that I can answer only to the king and the Lord Admiral. Can I turn this ship round, or put us into port, on a suspicion you may have formed from star-gazing?'

Landon's expression twisted as if with pain but his voice was angry. 'Never seen charts this bad. No captain who knows the sea would ignore an omen this clear...' He must have sensed he had strayed too far, for he became quieter, almost imploring. 'Sir, there are countless ways to delay or prevent a voyage–a leak could be discovered–Penbaron's precious rudder cannot hold forever...'

He stopped quite suddenly, looked at me as though anew, and shook his head. He must have known that, ignoramus though I be, I could not in all honour sanction such a gross deceit on our king. Then he scowled, saluted loosely, and returned in bad grace to the other side of the quarterdeck, bracing himself against a cannon as another wave broke over our side. As I mused on the strange scene, I realized that for Malachi Landon to have approached me in this manner, to have confided in me thus, and to have even dared suggest the desperate stratagem of ignoring the king's express order, was proof of the dark, Hades-like depths of his concern. These charts of his had alarmed him beyond measure; so powerfully, indeed, that his fear of them had even briefly displaced his hatred of me, and his duty to the king. Landon and Harker argued often, Vyvyan had told me, and now that I had seen the quality of Landon's rage, and his servitude to this mysterious knowledge of the old necromancers, I found I could cast him quite easily in the part of Harker's murderer. Or, indeed, of my own—

There was a sudden noise, like the felling of a great tree. I heard Lanherne's desperate shout–'Mizzen's sprung!'–and looked across to see a great crack near the base of the mast.

That slightest of movements saved me. I saw the block from the corner of the eye, felt it graze my hair as it passed my temple at skull-breaking speed. I looked up, and saw ropes strain and break as the mizzenmast trembled in the gale. More blocks flew off crazily into the air. Lanherne screamed orders to Treninnick and his companions on the main yard, while the men on deck laboured to secure the great rope called the mizzen-stay. Then I looked across the quarterdeck and saw Malachi Landon's face; it was twisted in what might have been a smile.

As I stood, paralysed by horror, one of the mates ran forward across the main deck to the belfry on the forecastle and began to ring the ship's bell with a vigour that could have summoned the dead at doomsday. Kit Farrell and Musk were on the quarterdeck within moments, but of my lieutenant there was no sign: presumably the drink had consigned him to oblivion along with my chaplain. As each man emerged from below, summoned by the bell and the quartermasters' desperate cries of 'All hands!', he made for the shrouds or his work station. Even a land-captain could see that all now hinged on keeping the mainmast safe, for if that sprang as well, pulled out of alignment by the rope–or rather,
stay
–that secured it to the mizzen, the wind would push us up the Bristol Channel and onto the lee shore. I had no desire to relive the wreck of the
Happy Restoration
on some cliff of Gower or Lundy Isle, so I urged them aloft with the sort of bellowed imprecations that I felt my grandfather might have used–'God speed, my brave lads! Climb as though the devil's on your tail!' Musk gave me the look he normally reserved for madmen, beggars and Members of Parliament. As it was, my encouragement was superfluous, for each man went aloft faster than a squirrel escaping a fox. They knew all too well what they had to do, and were about their business with no need of urging.

Of no man was that more true than John Treninnick. Quite suddenly, with the ship rolling and pitching, with the gale screaming through our rigging, Treninnick took hold of the mizzen stay and stepped out into space. Lanherne had told me of this skill of his at our first meeting, but Lord, what a sight it was! Arm over arm, he hauled himself at speed from main to mizzen, his short legs kicking wildly in the air.

'Thank the great God that you have him, sir,' said Kit Farrell by my side, as Treninnick reached the mizzen and began to attend feverishly to the binding of ropes at the topmast head. 'He'll make sure the backstays hold, now. The mizzen should be secure, and the main with it.'

Penbaron, the carpenter, appeared before me and saluted gravely. 'Permission to fish, Captain?' he said.

At first, I thought I had misheard; next, I thought that the block had actually struck me, and that I was senseless, dreaming all that had passed since it struck. Here we were in a gale, with the mizzen useless, and the officer responsible for its repair was seeking my permission to cast lines for herring. 'What in Jesu's name—' I began.

Kit Farrell stepped closer to my side and whispered, 'Fishing, Captain. It's the method of repairing a sprung mast.'

Ah. Of course.' I nodded with as much gravity as I could muster, feeling Cornish eyes upon me. 'Permission granted, Mister Penbaron. Go to it at once, for God's sake, man.'

And go to it Penbaron did. He may have been a prince among dullards, but he knew his job. Barely a minute had passed before his crew brought up from below two long pieces of wood, somewhat akin to river punts with their ends cut away. They lifted one into place at the front of the mast, over the great crack, and matched it with the other at the back. The cooper brought up spare hoops, and within but a few minutes more Penbaron's men were bolting the hoops onto both the wooden supports and the mast itself. There was a cry for woolding, and great coils of rope were wound around the mast, pulled taut by a crew of some of the strongest men on the ship–among them, strangely, the minute father of twins, John Tremar. The whole matter took less time than the turn of a glass.

'Great difficulties, Captain,' said a voice by my ear. It was Landon. His voice was quiet but his look contained more than a challenge. 'Obstructions and danger. The charts never speak falsely.'

There was that twisted grimace again. A smile–just as he had smiled moments after the swinging block very nearly killed me. Pleasure born of satisfaction when one is proved right. No doubt my death would have been an even more conclusive proof of the perils of Mars' malicious quadrate, and a satisfactory conclusion to the business.

'Hardly great difficulties, surely, Mister Landon?' I said, as lightly as I could. 'Penbaron and his crew seem to have fished the mizzen quite easily.'

'
Fished the mizzen
–
O Grandfather, sailing the eternal ocean above (or, more likely, below), art thou not proud?

Landon's look was wild and cruel. 'Aye, the mizzen is well fished indeed, Captain. But it's the whipstaff, sir. It's jammed. See how our head turns eastward? Polzeath's the strongest helmsman on the ship, but not even he could keep hold of it when the mizzen sprang, and now it's jammed. If it can't be freed, we'll drive up the Channel on the gale, sir.' His eyes bulged as he turned from me. 'Doom, as the charts foretold. The
domus mortis
itself, that's where we are!'