Gentleman Captain (25 page)

I dismissed Vyvyan and Stanton, and, in bad temper, sank down upon a chair and held my hands over my face.
Thank God for one small mercy,
I thought.
At least we will not need to fight another ship.

Late in the afternoon, we were off a village that Ruthven named as Crinan. Ahead of us lay Craignish Point and its sea-inlet, a maze of pleasant-looking islets guarded by a small castle. I was stood on the quarterdeck, listening to a passionate lecture from Penbaron on the damage the broadsides had supposedly done to our fragile rudder;
about the only thing we were likely to damage,
I thought, as I set about trying to mollify my ardent interlocutor.

As he talked on, my attention drifted to the
Royal Martyr,
now dead astern. She had steadily made up ground since we first sighted her off the Isle of Gigha. Her new figurehead came on proudly toward us: the Blessed King Charles the First carved from oak, a wreath about his brow and a sword in his hand. For this one ship alone, Vyvyan told me, the king and his brother had made an exception to the rule that figureheads should depict crowned lions, as was the case with ours. I waved to Godsgift Judge, who was attired in a strange confection of furs, a poor imitation of everything I had ever heard of Russian dress and thoroughly inappropriate for the mild spring weather. He raised his voice trumpet and ordered me to sail into Craignish, where we would anchor for the night, and invited me to dine again on
Royal Martyr.

The fare, as ever, was excellent. We dined on a good steak of boar–a delicacy that had been brought out as a gift from the Governor of Dunaverty–along with venison and some excellent puddings. Judge brought out his charts once more, and explained that the loch of Craignish was surrounded on three sides by Campbell land–the small castle guarding the headland was theirs, too–and that we were about as close as it was possible to come to the Campbell seat at Inveraray, where Lord Lorne brooded on his father's destruction. There was, crucially, a narrow strip of land here, said Judge, between the sea and the great stretch of Loch Awe, along which all travellers going north or east must pass; it was certain that by anchoring here, news of our coming would swiftly pass to Inveraray and Glenrannoch, if it had not already done so.

Judge was less effusive than usual and seemed somehow preoccupied, lost at times in his own thoughts. I asked him if anything was amiss, but he waved an elegant hand in denial. His lieutenant was ill, he said, and he was standing extra watches. Such burdens had been nothing when he was my age–at that a glimmer of the old, obsequious Judge–but he was no longer the brash young captain he had been when last in these waters. I had not known Godsgift Judge so contemplative before; all the concern to impress, to solicit the Quinton family's influence for his advancement, had been put to one side. He still dressed and decorated his person as though for a court masque, but it seemed more a shell than the man's true identity. He reminded me, once again, of the king–another who could at will put on garments and expressions to mask his true feelings. I knew several different versions of Charles Stuart, just as I now felt that I knew several different versions of Godsgift Judge. With both men, I began to sense, their true and ruthless selves remained firmly hidden away in some unreachable place.

As I left the ship, I asked Judge to pass on my wishes for a speedy recovery to Nathan Warrender. He looked at me curiously, but promised me that his lieutenant would soon be a man reborn.

The next morning the wind was still light and westerly. We used our boats to warp out to Craignish Point, then tacked for a northbound course. Judge had told me to look to the west, at the channel between the north end of Jura and the small isle of Scarba, for there, he said, lay the whirlpool of Corryvreckan. This was the most remarkable and feared sea-feature of these parts: vicious spirals of water that had done for many an unsuspecting ship. I asked our pilot about it as we sailed swiftly past, and in his unintelligible, mumbled reply sensed a real dread of the strange phenomenon. Musk, unimpressed, suggested that perhaps the Hag of Winter, queen of the witches, was using the whirlpool as her laundry. The eclectic breadth of Musk's knowledge was always as unexpected as its rare manifestations.

We sailed out into the broad Firth of Lorne, with the large and rolling Isle of Mull ahead of us, and turned downwind to show ourselves off Oban–a rude fishing town dominated by the Macdougalls–and nearby Dunstaffnage, where the wind-torn standard of the red lion rampant was a solitary but welcome sign of our king's authority. This, the royal castle of Dunstaffnage, was our one gateway to the world we had left behind: letters to and from the
Jupiter
could pass through the ancient castle gates in the Mail Royal, which maintained teams of riders down the long road to England.

A clamour of shouted instructions punctuated the afternoon as we tacked to and fro in a westerly direction. We passed the Isle of Lismore. The Jupiters scuttled aloft and down again, rushing hither and thither with a noticeable new enthusiasm–perhaps trying to redeem themselves after the gunnery drill. We showed ourselves next in the Sound of Mull, where gaunt, grey-green hills stretched away on either side of the sea-channel. Duart Castle, at its entrance, stood proud upon a great rock and was the seat of the Macleans, who had been loyal to the king in the late wars. The castle saluted us by dipping her flag. I have no doubt that Maclean had cannon from the wars hidden unlawfully in his cellars, as did all the chiefs of those parts. Of course he did not reveal his hand to the king's ships by firing in salute.

So we came to Tobermory, a small fishing village at the end of the island of Mull. A great galleon of the Spanish Armada had come to grief here, in Queen Bess's day, as she struggled past this dreadful coast in the forlorn hope of returning to old Galicia. Uncle Tristram insisted that she was one of the very ships my grandfather had attacked back in July 1588. As we passed, so I nodded a salute to the old warrior and those of his honourable enemies who had died in this sea.

Beyond Tobermory, the wind fell right away again. Within the hour a dense fog had come down, shrouding us so deeply that we could not see
Royal Martyr
a few chains ahead of us. Only her bell and trumpets told us where she was. Judge shouted that we should warp towards where he believed a safe anchorage to be. Boatswain Ap dropped our boats, and Lanherne's craft took position at the head of the tow. After every few yards the sounding-lead was slung over the side, and shortly afterwards came a shout telling us of the depth of water beneath our keel. 'Four fathoms!' carried eerily through the dank greyness as I huddled in my coat upon the quarterdeck. We spent perhaps an hour in this fashion, inching to safety, as I hoped, and not to oblivion on an unseen shore. Then I heard a sound like the wailing of a hundred dead men.

'
Royal Martyrs
,' said Kit Farrell, appearing out of the gloom. 'She's dropping anchor.'

Martin Lanherne's shout followed almost immediately. 'Ho, the
Jupiter!
Captain Judge's order! Drop anchor!'

This time, Landon looked at me before he gave the order. I nodded. The cable was released and our bower anchor slipped into the dark waters. His work done, Landon went below, leaving me to contemplate the strange scene. It was early in the evening, but it may as well have been the depths of night, for there was no sight of anything, beyond the three dim glimpses of light that were
Royal Martyrs
stern lanterns. There was no sound, once our ship was secure and the men had stood down. No sound at all.

James Vyvyan heard it first. He was younger than any of us, true, though not by many years; but Vyvyan had never fought in a battle and had his hearing assaulted by the blast of gunfire.

'Sir,' he said, in the hushed tone that mankind reserves for being in churches or thick fogs, 'I swear I can hear a drum...'

Then I heard it too. A single drum, beating time, drawing closer.

My grandfather, who had been there when they slipped Drake's lead coffin into the waters of Nombre de Dios bay, claimed to have created the legend of Drake's Drum: the phantom beat that would rouse the old pirate's ghost from its infernal slumber. For a moment, just one fleeting moment, I thought that here in these waters, where the Armada they fought had come to grief, Drake and the last Matthew Quinton had returned to resume their battle against the great popish crusade.

The drum grew louder, but now there were two other sounds that accompanied it: water parting rhythmically, and the unmistakeable creak of wood on wood. It was a sound I knew well, from the barges that plied the Ouse and the Ivel as they meandered across Bedfordshire.

'Oars,' I said.

The fog lifted for just a moment and I saw them. First three, then six, then ten: long, low craft, built high at bow and stern, with a single mast and yard, bearing no sail. Instead, they were driven forward by rowers, sweeping their oars in time with the drum on the lead vessel.

I had called up the wrong ghosts: I had been dreaming that my grandfather and his old friend had come again. These ghosts were just as familiar, though, and should have been more expected in these waters. I had seen them in drawings in some of Uncle Tristram's books, and I knew them for what they were.

They were the longships of the Vikings, returned from Hell to drag down the souls of us poor mariners of the
Jupiter.

I have lived long enough now to know that there are no ghosts, other than the phantoms of our own pasts. There are no ghost fleets, either, and the shades of the Norsemen had not come again in their longships to drag the
Jupiter
down to fiery oblivion. But I was a young man then, my head still full of the legends from history that Uncle Tristram had drummed into me as a child: of the fury of the Vikings, terrifying all the lands of antiquity from Greenland to Byzantium; of abbeys ablaze, from Lindisfarne round to St David's; of women ravished and men slaughtered. So I stood like a statue, watching the long, low shapes come towards us out of the fog, oars keeping time with the single drum that beat from the leading craft. A giant stood in the bow of the first boat, a bearded giant wrapped in black furs, and I thought of Odin and Thor, of Skjold and Sweyn Forkbeard. My head swam across centuries, and time as I knew it faded away into the fog.

Then Ruthven the pilot came up on deck, an older man and a Scot. He laughed heartily at the sight of the Jupiters, their captain included, rooted to the deck, staring at a spectacle that had struck terror into our ancestors a millennium ago. These craft, he said, were merely
birlinns,
the ancient war galleys of Clan Campbell. Frightening they may have been in a fog, but one blast of even our feeble broadside would have smashed them all to driftwood. They were the last relics of a past long dead.

The first boat came alongside, and the fur-clad giant climbed aboard. Close to, it was plain to see that he was a very modern kind of warrior. Two pistols protruded from his belt, and they seemed to be flintlocks, perhaps even French ones–the best. The giant's left hand was mangled and lacked the middle two fingers. He was Zoltan Simic, he said, attendant upon his excellency General Campbell, who invited us to call upon him at his Tower of Rannoch. Simic's English was immaculate, but tinged with unexpected Gaelic inflections that betrayed a man who had spent years fighting alongside Scots and Irish soldiers of fortune. I pointed out that he was in error in boarding my ship first; he should have paid his respects to Captain Judge, the senior officer, who was bellowing at me across the water in the hope of learning what transpired. But Simic just shrugged, and I had to send Lanherne over to the
Royal Martyr
to convey the invitation.

Within an hour, Simic, a soberly dressed Judge, and I were ashore and mounted on the squat, long-haired horses of those parts called garrons. Perhaps thirty Highlanders ran alongside us, bare-legged and clad in swathes of rough cloth; they seemed capable of keeping up with us indefinitely. The fog disappeared as we moved further inland, revealing a dull, cold sky. There were no roads, only harsh, treeless hills and bare moor. The soil seemed to spring beneath our horses' hooves. Every few miles, we saw the smoke or smelled the fragrance of peat fires from cottages that appeared almost to grow out of the land, but no man or woman came out to view us. The light began to fade sooner than it did at Ravensden or Portsmouth, and there was no sign of our reaching our destination. I asked Simic, who had been silent throughout our journey, how much further it would be, for I did not relish the thought of returning this way in the depths of the night.

'Beyond the ridge ahead,' he said. 'There lies the Tower of Rannoch.'

Moments later we breasted the ridge and looked down into the broad valley beyond. I expected to see a gaunt tower-house, very much still the fashion in Scotland in those times, like those that stood sentinel along the shores we had passed. But the Tower of Rannoch confounded me utterly. At the head of a long lake–or loch as the Scots call them–a formal garden had been laid out that would not have disgraced the valley of the Loire. Hedges and bushes that had been set in neat geometric patterns surrounded a low white palace, exactly modelled upon the French style. Torches lined the immaculate avenues, their flames fanned by a breeze that–I noticed just then–was becoming steadily stronger. I could have been looking down on a miniature Chenonceaux, transplanted by some alchemical trick from its warm habitat to this strange, blasted land at the edge of the world.