The Lion of Midnight (23 page)

I went to the nearest gunport, both to breathe fresh air into my lungs and to see the effect of our broadside upon the
Faisant
. And what an effect it was! Confident of an easy victory over a disordered enemy, the Dutch captain had closed to barely two hundred yards. Consequently almost all of our shot had hit home: there were already several holes in the hull, and – thanks be to God, we had holed her just below the waterline, too! Even so, a valiant captain and crew would have shrugged off such wounds and responded in kind at once. But the
Faisant
did not fire. Instead, she began to move away. Men went aloft; the frigate put on more sail. At first I feared she was turning back downwind toward the mast-fleet, perhaps calculating that we were in no condition to sail to the aid of the merchantmen: which would have been true, if the
Dutchman
had but the gumption to attempt it. Instead it swiftly became clear that the
Faisant
was running. One good English broadside, and perhaps the dire warning provided by the sight of the
Oldenborg
in flames, had been enough to put her to flight. She fired a couple of desultory volleys from her stern chasers, but they did us no harm.

Or so I thought, until I returned to the upper deck. John Bale had been laid upon the deck. Most of the right side of his torso was gone. ‘A thousand-to-one chance,’ said MacFerran, who was kneeling beside him. ‘The very last shot the Dutchman fired.’

I kneeled. The regicide looked at me and gripped my hand tightly, imploringly.

‘All I did was for England,’ John Bale said in a strangled, nearly inaudible voice, almost coughing upon each word. ‘For the England I wished to see. But that perfect England was a false hope, Quinton – the falsest of hopes.’ Blood trickled from the corner of his mouth. ‘Better, then, to die for the imperfect sort. Tell my wife. Above all, tell my son. Tell them that John Bale served England, and died for her.’

‘Yes, you have served England,’ I said. ‘Once for ill, now for good.
And you have served Sweden too, I think, in helping to save it from the designs of Lord Montnoir. By freeing me, you opened Count Dohna’s eyes to Montnoir’s true nature. You prevented –’

Bale did not allow me to finish, for his eyes had narrowed at the name I mentioned. ‘Dohna?’ he whispered, struggling for some last
vestiges
of breath. ‘But Dohna is –’ He coughed, and the dark blood oozed upon his lip and chin. ‘Dohna is –’

His eyes stared hard at me, as though they were trying to complete the sentence that his mouth could no longer utter. But the eyelids did not blink, and I knew then that John Bale lived no more.

I bowed my head as I would to my superior in rank. ‘Farewell, My Lord Bale,’ I said.

We effected running repairs off the Swedish isle of Marstrand, in the lee of the gaunt, forbidding fortress that dominated it. Then we committed to the deep the bodies of our departed shipmates, with myself playing the part of chaplain and reciting the prayers for the dead. At length the
Cressy
and her consorts proceeded to sea once more. We made but slow progress past the Skaw of Denmark, out of the Sound and so west, towards the Dogger Bank and England. The wind remained westerly and the mast-ships continued to struggle against it. We sighted many Dutch fishing craft, but were too wounded and too encumbered by the mast fleet to contemplate an attack upon them. Conversely we sighted several Dutch capers upon the horizon, two of which darted in
impudently
to see if one of the mast ships might happen to straggle, but even in her damaged state, the
Cressy
proved too formidable a deterrent to the ambitions of the brave crews from Harlingen, Stavoren and the like.

I made regular visits to the cockpit where Phineas Musk and Kit
Farrell
lay, both still thankfully alive. The former was swiftly out of danger from Lydford North’s stab wound in his side and restored to his
accustomed
self: ‘Not the first scars Musk has borne for you Quintons,’ he growled, ‘and I doubt if they’ll be the last either.’

But Kit remained oblivious to all around him, by turns
unconscious
and delirious, until on the fourth day after the battle the surgeon
reported to me that he was lucid and seeking a word with his captain.

‘Well, Mister Farrell,’ I said, remaining formal while others were in earshot, ‘despite all, it is not yet time for you to depart this world.’

‘God is merciful, Sir Matthew.’

Kit was not usually so devout; he claimed to have had his fill of the canting Puritanism that stifled his neighbourhood of Wapping when he was a child. But the prospect of death makes all men devout, as I knew from my own experience.

I sat by him. He was pale and thin – or at least, thinner, for Kit was a sturdy fellow-but he was strong, and seemed set fair to live.

‘I rejoice in your recovery, Kit,’ I said, and prayed I was not premature: he was still weak, and infection might yet fit him for the grave-shroud.

‘And I give you joy of your victory, Sir Matthew, although you
purchased
it at a heavy price.’

‘True, my friend. Many good men perished, yet seemingly for nought. A ketch out of Leith tells me this morning that we still have no formal war with the Danes. If this is the kind of battle we fight when we are notionally at peace, then God spare us all the sort we will have to fight when war does begin.’

In fact, there would be no war with the Danes for some months more. I later discovered from my brother that both the Danish King and my own were content to accept the explanation that Captain Rohde had attacked the mast fleet on his own initiative, hoping thereby to avenge our alleged perfidy at Bergen, and that valiant officer’s death in the
battle
ensured that he could not testify to the contrary. (As lies went, it was of a piece with that which I perpetrated in my letter to Lord Arlington, informing him with profound sadness that Lydford North had fallen heroically in battle against England’s enemies.) Moreover, King Frederik hardly wished it trumpeted that he had been browbeaten by the Seigneur de Montnoir into lending him one of Denmark’s greatest men of war merely so that the Knight of Malta could pursue a personal vendetta; and of course it suited my King to delay a war against a third powerful
enemy for as long as possible, certainly until after a summer’s campaign which, we all prayed, would bring us the decisive victory that we had so nearly achieved in the previous year. If, that is, we could triumph over the Dutch fleet and its brilliant new commander, Michiel De Ruyter, before the French and the Danes could bring their full forces against us: in that event, the failure of my embassy to Sweden would hardly matter.

‘Sir Matthew,’ said Kit, ‘I fear I have not behaved well toward you on this voyage, and I was intemperate upon the matter of the
gentleman
and the tarpaulins. My judgement was clouded by the Maiden Ter Horst; I must needs apologise to you.’

‘In great heaven’s name, Kit,
you
apologise to
me
? It is I who should apologise to you! You defended me admirably when we were ambushed in Gothenburg, and brought the
Cressy
down to ensure my release from Montnoir’s prison, yet all that concerned me was the punctilio of the Lord High Admiral’s instructions! I have been a very monster of
ingratitude
, Kit.’

He looked upon me curiously, and I thought for a moment there were tears in his eyes. ‘And I was but a lovelorn young fool. At our last meeting, after we were released by the new Landtshere, Magdalena turned only angrily and told me the truth, in the few words of
seafarers
’ argot that we shared. Her father had sent her to spy upon us, Sir Matthew – to spy on the doings of Lord Conisbrough and the
Cressy
, through me. She was to have attempted the same upon you, but it seems that word of your fidelity to your wife has reached even Gothenberg. That was why she appeared to take to me so quickly. I was nothing more than her dupe.’

‘I am truly sorry, Kit.’

‘A lesson learned, I think, Sir Matthew. And not the only one either. It was presumptuous beyond measure for me to believe myself ready for command. You have had to be an ambassador, to deal with the likes of the High Chancellor and the Landtshere, and you can take such
dealings
in your stride because you are born to consort with such men.
Whereas who am I? Plain Kit Farrell of Wapping, who was merely a Master’s mate only four years past.’

‘You do yourself an injustice, Kit. You will make a fine captain one day, and that very soon. Wars create vacancies, my friend, and are ever a happy season for young men in search of promotion. Think upon it – if a shot had carried me away in the late fight, you would have been the captain of the
Cressy
, and I do not doubt that you would have pursued the battle with the
Oldenborg
to the same conclusion. The King and the Duke of York always promote in such cases, Kit.’

He smiled. ‘Then I have to wait for you to be killed in battle, Sir Matthew?’

‘I trust not, Kit. When we return to England I will see to it that your name is entered in the Lord High Admiral’s book of candidates for command. Who knows, perhaps before this war is done I will be able to toast Captain Farrell, and give him joy of his first command!’

When we were still some thirty miles east of Yarmouth’s shore by my reckoning, we encountered the sixth rate
Laurel
, under orders to take the mast-fleet up to Sir William Warren’s timber yard at Deptford while we proceeded to Chatham for repairs. Thus relieved of its burden, the
Cressy
made a safe landfall, the reassuring bulk of Covehithe church’s lofty tower plainly visible upon the Suffolk shore. We anchored,
ostensibly
to take on water, but in truth to accomplish a more secret purpose: under cover of nightfall we landed the coffin containing the body of John, Lord Bale, along with a small party of loyal men who had orders to convey it to Derbyshire, to his widow and their son. I know the
mission
was completed, both because the men reported back to me while the ship lay at Chatham, waiting to be paid off, and because by chance I found myself in those parts years later, when travelling to Manchester to investigate the possibility of investing in some mines about that
god-forsaken
place. There, in the corner of a windswept village churchyard
overlooked by a great stark ridge of limestone, lay an overgrown grave with a marker that was already fading fast, so often was it lashed by the prodigious rains and frozen by the terrible winters common to those parts. It bore no name, only the initials JBB, which no passing
wayfarer
would comprehend but which I knew to stand for John, Baron of Baslow. Beneath the initials, this legend had been inscribed:

The servant attending upon me that day, who had no Latin, was curious as to the meaning of this singular epitaph. Thus as a drizzle came in over the hills to the west, I translated the lines for his benefit:

Back aboard the
Cressy
, the morning after Bale’s body was put ashore, I steeled myself to compose the letters duty bound me to write to my Lord High Admiral, recounting our fight with Montnoir and the gallant
Oldenborg
, as well as the deaths of so many valiant men of the
Cressy
; and, more painful still, the letters that compassion bound me to write to the mothers and widows of Jeary, Blackburn, Eade and the rest. The writing paper in my cabin had been a casualty of Dutch gunfire, but I knew I had a small stock at the bottom of my sea chest, which had survived unscathed. As I took out a parcel of linen shirts, something fell onto the deck. I stooped and recognised the small volume that Count Dohna had given me at our parting: the
Commentarii de Bello Gallico
of Caesar, tome the seventh. I was about to replace it in the chest when some instinct made me study the book more closely. Perhaps I sought a diversion from the grim task ahead of me; perhaps I wished to
summon
up recollection of a more carefree time, when the young Matthew
Quinton had studied the
de Bello
upon the knee of his uncle Tristram. In any event, I properly contemplated the crest upon the binding, as I do again now, tracing its outline in the leather with my ancient finger. The armorial achievements, which I had taken at a glance to be those of the Count Dohna, were plainly something quite other: the
unmistakeable
crossed keys and triple tiara of the Bishop of Rome, as we good Protestants were supposed to call him. The successor of Peter, Supreme Pontiff and Pope, as he called himself. The spine bore the legend
Bibliotheca
Apostolica Vaticana
. Somehow, the count had appropriated this copy of
de Bello
from the papal library itself.

My puzzlement drew me to open the cover. Dohna had written upon the flyleaf. The message was in Latin, and as I read the faded words once again, all these years later, I feel again something of the shock and thrill which coursed through me that March day in the year of grace, 1666. For some reason, too, I suddenly called to mind what I had taken to be an empty boast of that singular little man, Lieutenant-General Erik Glete:
I obey none but High Admirals of Sweden, anointed sovereigns of The Three Crowns, and God Almighty
. Well, then. It was suddenly apparent to me that Glete had been privy to a great secret, and he had kept it with considerable aplomb.

Strange. Now I even seem to hear the echo of my own laughter, too: the unstoppable laughter that began there in the great cabin of the
Cressy
off the coast of Suffolk, when my astonishment turned finally to realisation.

At last, I knew why Count Dohna’s hands were always gloved.

The inscription upon the yellowing page before me, written in precisely the same hand that wrote the inventory which I had read so recently, of weapons to be supplied to we Royalists in 1649, reads thus, duly rendered into my own tongue: