The Blast That Tears the Skies (2012) (30 page)

‘Captain Quinton,’ said the Duke of Monmouth. ‘As well that you steered a truer course during the battle.’

‘As you say, Your Grace.’

‘I had been hoping to get the chance for a word with you. All men speak highly of your conduct in the battle, and although I usually avoid the common herd, on this occasion I happily concur with its opinion.’ The Duke smiled pleasantly. He was ever an easy man to like, and was very aware of the fact that he could generate such liking in almost anyone he met; a trait which proved ultimately to be his fatal weakness. ‘I will be going directly to court, and to my father. I will be certain to speak to him on your behalf, Captain Quinton.’

To the best of my knowledge I was still anathema to His Majesty, so the prospect of an intervention on my behalf by Monmouth, the son on whom the king doted, was something to be snatched at with both hands. ‘Your Grace is most kind,’ I said. ‘And if I can ever be of service to your Grace…’

I left the sentence unfinished, for it was intended as no more than a conventional pleasantry, but Monmouth seized upon it. ‘Yes, perhaps so. One day, perhaps you may indeed be of service to me, Matthew.’

It is said that words return to haunt us, and I have learned the truth of that saying many times. But never was it more apposite in my life than in the case of that exchange between James, Duke of Monmouth, and myself, on a street in Greenwich in the summer of 1665.

* * *

‘Cornelia!’

I called out for the twentieth time, but still there was no answer. Our rooms in Hardiman’s Yard were deserted. The conviction that she must have gone to Ravensden Abbey to escape the plague grew upon me; and yet she had left no word, which surely she would have done. Despite the risk, I opened a window to let some air into our stiflingly hot and musty home. Outside, the streets were all but deserted; it seemed that the door of every other house was marked with a red cross. The smell of death, the same as that present in Sir John Lawson’s chamber, was upon the air, and with it a faint whiff of the lime-pits that had been dug in Aldgate and elsewhere to consume the ever-multiplying legion of plague corpses. I had to get out of London before I was infected. I had run enough of a risk by riding brazenly through the streets from London Bridge; isolated aboard the fleet, I had not realised how terrible the contagion had become. Few men were abroad, and those who did risk the streets were muffled against the poisonous air around them. Behind countless doors, I could hear muffled sobs and screams. It was a veritable city of death.

The court had decamped long ago to the palace of Hampton Court, but finding that to be still too close to the tentacles of plague, it was now removing itself all the way to Salisbury. The navy would be safe as long as it kept at sea, but with the
Merhonour
too shattered to go anywhere but the dry dock at Chatham and Captain Quinton on leave pending a new command … well, then, to the abbey it would be. Musk had to be there, too: he was certainly not at Ravensden House, which bore suspiciously little sign of recent building work – and if Tris was back at Oxford, as he surely was by now, it would be an easy matter to override my mother’s objections and bring him to the Abbey. There, surely, all matters could finally be resolved.

I was almost out of the door when I spied the letter, resting on the top of a small chest. It was addressed to me, but was not in any hand I recognised.

I was astonished. For my mother to have travelled so far was inconceivable; for Cornelia to have done so without sending me word was, if anything still more fantastical. Something about the whole business, about this very letter, was not right.

I was on the road to the south-west within an hour, my head filled with terrors and anxieties. Thus, at last, the man who might already be Earl of Ravensden set out to confront his destiny.

 

 

 

It was already the middle of the afternoon when I galloped out of London upon a good steed from my brother’s stable. My road took me past the incomplete shell of Clarendon House, and I reflected briefly upon all that had passed since I was summoned within its walls. At first I was determined to ride through the night, but I knew within an hour that to attempt it would be folly; my foot, which I had foolishly believed to be largely healed, was in agony as every equine movement pushed it hard against the stirrup, and to attempt to change horses at two or three in the morning would have risked bringing upon my head the righteous wrath of some disgruntled ostler, torn unwillingly from his bed. Moreover, Charles might already be dead; if he still lived, he would either survive until after my arrival or not. (The fatalism of my wife’s Calvinist faith was somewhat infectious, and perhaps it had been reinforced by my recent experience of the senseless, random nature of human dying.) Above all, I suspected that I would need all my faculties about me on the following day. Thus as dusk fell, I halted at a mean inn in the shadow of the ruins of Basing House, the mighty palace blasted to pieces by the rebels during the late wars, and there snatched a few troubled hours of sleep.

I pressed on at dawn upon a new steed hired from the inn’s stable, and reached Lyndbury late in the afternoon. The countess’s deceased second husband, Major-General Gulliver, had evidently been something of a favourite of the Lord Protector, for he had been granted a truly lavish property. The seat for four hundred years of a once-mighty dynasty that had been impoverished and then extinguished by the civil wars, Lyndbury was a lofty castle after the Gothic manner, partly rebuilt with larger windows and more capacious rooms in Queen Elizabeth’s day, but dreadfully shattered when Gulliver’s own men had besieged it. Most of the north side lay in ruins, as was evident to me even as I approached from the east.

I rode into the cobbled courtyard and dismounted. There were no servants anywhere in sight, but I had the unsettling feeling that several pairs of eyes were fixed upon me. I made my way to the obvious entry into the main building, a grand arched doorway at the top of a sweeping flight of stairs, pushed the door, and found myself at the bottom of a dimly lit stairwell. I ascended. The room on the first floor must have been the great hall of the original castle; it was a cavernous, vaulted chamber, but it was completely empty. Upward, then. Through the half-open door onto the next floor, I glimpsed lush tapestries and the movement of a woman’s skirts. I pushed open the door and entered.

The tableau before me was astonishing. Cornelia sat opposite the doorway, and although she raised her eyes at sight of me, she did not spring up and embrace me passionately, as was her wont. Instead she appeared dejected, and did not even manage a smile. Off to the right, near the fireplace, sat my mother, who gave the merest nod to acknowledge me. Further right again, beneath a fine Tudor window that looked out over the parkland beyond, sat my brother, Charles, Earl of Ravensden, his head resting upon his hand, looking deathly pale. And beside him, proud and exultant, clad in an extravagant scarlet gown, stood the Countess Louise.

‘Matthew!’ she cried. ‘You have made excellent time. Splendid. Now, at last, we can all conclude our business here.’

‘Business, My Lady? What business is this?’

‘We are prisoners,’ said Cornelia bitterly.

‘Oh, guests, Cornelia, not prisoners!’ said the countess, airily. ‘A pleasant family gathering, is it not? Nought but a summer sojourn away from the plague-ridden city. What a thoughtful hostess, to offer such hospitality!’

Cornelia scowled. ‘The woman is insane, husband –’

‘Insane, Cornelia?’ snarled Lady Louise. ‘Ah well, there we shall have to agree to differ. For is it insane to bring out the truth? That is what I am about, you see. The truth that your family has hidden for nearly forty years.’ She moved across the gallery toward me. I rested a hand on the hilt of my sword. ‘Your weapon can stay sheathed, Matthew. The castle is filled with my men. Several are just beyond that door, in the antechamber. And I have no doubt that you are curious. It would be such a shame to strike me down before you learn what your mother and brother have concealed from you throughout your life, would it not?’ Her tone was almost playful, taunting me; for she knew that her words struck home. I looked at Charles and at my mother in turn. The earl’s eyes were blank; my mother’s were tearful, and tears from the Dowager Countess were nearly unknown. ‘And with you and your dear Cornelia to witness the depositions that they will shortly sign, all will be legal and indisputable, you see? Proof that will stand in any court of law, and proof that demands to be trumpeted to the world. Proof positive of the great lie that the House of Quinton has inflicted upon England.’

She was close to me now: I could easily have drawn my sword and struck her down. But I did not doubt the truth of her words about the men in the antechamber, and could not bring down their inevitable vengeance upon my family.

‘What are you about, madam? What is it that you
want
?’ I demanded angrily.

The countess stared at me quizzically, and for just one fleeting moment, I thought I saw an unspoken answer in her eyes: that what she wanted was the man standing before her. As it was, her answer was provided by my wife.

‘Power, husband,’ said Cornelia, ‘power and money. All that has ever mattered to this murderous whore. She hoped that allowing the king to father an heir to Ravensden upon her would elevate her into His Majesty’s principal mistress, ousting Lady Castlemaine.’

‘But even His Majesty proved more discriminating,’ said my mother, harshly. Tears and criticism of the Lord’s anointed: this was indeed a day of unexpected glimpses of a very different Anne Quinton to the one I had known all my life.

‘And as our king’s fleeting interest in her vanished, so her use to the French king diminished in turn, and with it the pension that allows her to maintain all of this,’ said Cornelia. ‘So she had to find a new way to make herself indispensible to King Louis.’

‘Crudely put, Cornelia,’ said the Countess Louise, ‘but not entirely wide of the mark.’ Her eyes were very strange now: ablaze with emotions that might have been exultation, or scorn, or fear, or a little of all of them. ‘What could be more valuable to France than proof of a dark secret of state, of knowledge that can be used against Charles Stuart if he strays from policies favoured by King Louis? Can be used, indeed, to force him to abandon his present policy that so offends the Most Christian? Do you not think that the agent who uncovered such knowledge would have proved herself worthy of France’s continuing gratitude and beneficence?’

I went to Cornelia and stood alongside her chair. She placed her hand in mine and gripped it tightly.

‘You speak in riddles, madam,’ I said. ‘What policy? What secret? Be direct, in God’s name.’

‘The policy you know, Matthew. You were at the reception of the ambassadors. I seek merely to further their purpose, although by rather different means.’

I recalled the night of the great state reception in the Banqueting House of Whitehall: of the grand entry of the Duc de Verneuil, and of my sight of the Countess Louise’s agitated conversation with Monsieur Courtin.

‘France wishes England to withdraw from this war with the Dutch,’ I said slowly, piecing together the implications in my head. ‘If we do not, King Louis’ treaty obligations to them will force him to enter the war on their side. And that does not suit the purpose of the Most Christian, who wishes England and Holland neutered so he can pursue his ambition to conquer Flanders.’ I looked at her and nodded with what might even have been a hint of respect. ‘The embassy failed to achieve its end, but perhaps you yet may, Madam, if whatever secret knowledge you think you hold against the king is so truly heinous that it compels him to change his policy and end the war.’

‘Bravo, Matthew!’ cried Louise admiringly. ‘You should become a statesman, methinks. And the knowledge is heinous indeed – a secret able to halt a war or topple a king. Very well, then.’ She turned and faced my mother directly. ‘Time to tell your son the truth that you have hidden from him and the world, My Lady.’

My mother seemed incapable of speech. Her eyes were focused on the unlit fireplace, not blinking, seemingly lost in a far distant place and time. Charles shifted uncomfortably in his chair and said, ‘I will say it, to spare our mother.’ His voice was thin and broken, bearing the weight of illness and of the ages. ‘It is – it is possible that my father was not James Quinton, Earl of Ravensden.’

Not James Quinton. Not our father –
my
father.

As I struggled to take in the enormity of the impossible words that Charles had uttered, I thought back to the conversation I once had upon a Scottish moor with a great general, a man with barely days to live, and to my subsequent interview with his lover Henrietta Maria, Queen Mother of England. Now, at last, the pieces all fell into place.

‘It was the king,’ I said, staring at my mother. ‘You were King Charles’ lover.’

Charles Stuart, the First of that name. A man revered as a saint and martyr, a man whose spotless private life was held up as an example and indictment to his son. My mother’s guilty eyes spoke the truth of the assertion. I recalled all the candles she lit every thirtieth day of every January, the anniversary of the king’s execution. I remembered the fanatically devoted way in which she venerated the dead king’s memory. At last, it was all clear to me: the Dowager Countess was mourning her lost lover.

In that same moment, I realised one of the two chief consequences of this terrible new truth. Proof that the royal martyr had betrayed his queen and fathered a bastard would be utterly devastating for the cavaliers, who had built an entire religion upon his memory and a potent romantic myth around the loving, doomed marriage of a king and a queen. It would be a mighty weapon in the hands of the malcontents who sought once more to bring down the entire edifice of monarchy, restored so very recently and still so fragile; as, indeed, the whole business over the twenty captains had so recently proved to me. England was a powder keg, and it would take only one small spark to blow it all to kingdom come. Moreover, possession of the House of Quinton’s fateful knowledge – categorical, legally proven knowledge, not the ordinary tittle-tattle of rumour and slander that ever swirled about the court and the streets of London – and the threat of trumpeting it to the world, would have given King Louis an almost irresistibly powerful hold upon his English cousin. Perhaps even a hold powerful enough to compel Charles Stuart to withdraw from the war and to be in thrall to King Louis ever after; such had to be the calculation made by Courtin and executed on his behalf by the Countess Louise with this desperate throw of the dice, detaining us all in this grim ruin until she achieved her purpose. It would matter not a jot that the depositions she wished my mother and brother to sign were made under duress, for upon such evidence ever rests a large part of English law.

In any case, how could my brother and mother deny testimony that was essentially true?

With the words spoken, a great weight seemed to lift from the dowager countess. She looked at me directly, and said, ‘I loved him, and I loved your father. Equally, for those few heady months in the year twenty-seven, when the world was new and all seemed possible. Buckingham loved the Queen of France, Campbell of Glenrannoch loved the Queen of England, so why could I not love a king?’ For the briefest of moments I caught a glimpse of the bold, lively young woman that my mother must once have been. ‘Your father came back from campaign, and he was different. Changed. Distant. I loved him still, and we lived conjugally, as man and wife ought – but the king was kind, attentive and understanding. He craved a woman’s company, a woman who could show him the way to make his wife love him.’ Her eyes seemed lost in that long-dead past, at once desperately happy and yet so utterly painful to recall. ‘So I cannot be certain, Matthew. I cannot say who fathered your brother.’

‘Perhaps that is so, madam,’ said the Countess Louise. ‘I sympathise, as one’s king’s whore to another.’ I bridled at that and even reached for my sword, but Cornelia restrained me. Strangely, though, the remark seemed not to offend my mother in the least. ‘But that is not what you will depone before the lawyer waiting in the antechamber,’ the countess continued. ‘You will testify that you were the mistress of the first King Charles, and that the man who calls himself Charles, Earl of Ravensden, is in truth the bastard son of that king.’