The Mountain of Gold (11 page)

I struggled for words. 'Sir Venner, this cannot be the case—I trust the King—I hold his commission, I serve him in honour and duty—' But even as I spoke those words, I recalled Charles Stuart's own words to me on Newmarket Heath.
To be the richest monarch of all, able to make my country the greatest empire that the world has ever seen, able to do anything that I wished.
And in that moment, I came to a terrible epiphany. I had always revered Charles, the King. But suddenly I understood that it was possible to serve the office of King while mistrusting the man, Charles Stuart; and in that moment I seemed to feel the presence of my father, who had reluctantly fought and died for the previous holder of that same office, a man whom he knew to be arrogant, duplicitous and incompetent.

As if he could read my thoughts, Venner Garvey said gravely, 'Think on the cause that your father believed he was dying for, Matthew, rather than the false one that he truly served. Then ask yourself if you, too, wish to serve the false cause of ending parliaments forever, and bringing down our good old English constitution. Oh, this mountain of gold is probably a chimera, good-brother, merely the wild fantasy of a desperate man. But in the name of Parliament, I tell you this. If such a mountain really exists, then you must not find it.' He leaned toward me, half his face red from the undercroft's firelight, the other half in black shadow. He whispered, 'This mission must not succeed, Matthew. This mission
will not
succeed.'

Six

The snows were gone within a week, leaving behind a sea of mud that choked the roads from Bedfordshire to London, and then from London to Deptford. Musk and I rode out from Ravensden House, my family's crumbling old town house on the Strand, struggled past the herds of cattle and people thronging London Bridge, and rode east, entering open country at the edge of Southwark. The fitting for sea of my new ship was to proceed, and I had decided that it was time for me to inspect her. Venner's dire warning had made me wary of sabotage, and I wished to reassure myself that the security provided for my ship by the officers of Deptford yard was adequate. But leaving London for Deptford, no matter how briefly, also removed me from any prospect of an unwelcome encounter with Colonel Brian Doyle O'Dwyer, who had become something of a celebrity at court thanks to his sharp wit and exotic history, or a reencounter with My Lady Louise, who was also about the palace. Of course, fitting-out was by no means a prelude to the immediate departure of the
Seraph,
although I have met very many who believe that sending a ship-of-war to sea is but a trivial matter. An order is given—let us say, by the King; let us say, during a race meeting at Newmarket—and behold, the very next day His Majesty's ship the
Utopia
is under sail,
en route
for foreign climes and untold glory! Many of those who hold to such opinions are poor innocent souls who cannot be expected to know better: for instance, women and soldiers, and these days that new-fangled beast, His Majesty's Prime Minister.

In truth, preparing a ship for sea, and especially for an expedition to far distant shores, is not a matter of a day's jollity, with cheerful tars singing songs as they hoist sail and put to sea as soon as their captain comes aboard. Would that it were. The ship has to be fitted, and that means endless orders to and from the Navy Board, the master shipwright of the dockyard, the master caulker, the master attendant, the master dogsbody, and so forth, followed by several weeks during which the works are carried out wrongly, and finally made good again. Then the ship has to be armed, which in the case of the
Seraph
meant prising thirty-two good and true pieces of ordnance out of His Majesty's Master of that deadly commodity, ensconced at Tower Hill. The Master of the Ordnance claimed to know nothing of it, protested that he had no demi-culverins in store, and sought sanction to have new ones cast at the furnaces in the Weald of Kent. The ship still has to be victualled, and the victuallers are accustomed only to supply those ships that put to sea in the summer; a sudden and unexpected decision to put out ships in the winter makes the clerks of the victualling office turn white in the face and protest that this is a matter beyond all human comprehension. Then there is the not inconsiderable matter of the other ships meant to sail in company with one's own. In our case this meant the
Jersey,
one of England's finest and strongest fourth-rate frigates, and a hired merchantman carrying a party of sixty soldiers, considered essential for the security of the landward part of our expedition to find the mountain of gold.

Even when all of these obstacles have been overcome, the ship has to be manned. The year sixty-three was a year of dead peace, so there was no possibility of press warrants being authorised—the King, then in the early days of his rule, still courted popularity, and pressing in peacetime would have sparked riots in every port in England. Thus I would have to depend on volunteers, and who but madmen would volunteer for a voyage to Guinea, a coast notorious for fatal sickness? It seemed almost unnecessary for my good-brother to put any more obstacles in the way of the voyage of the
Seraph,
but I knew him too well to believe that he would not do so somehow and at some time.

Thus I rode for Deptford in a state of cloying unease. Musk did not share my sentiment; indeed, by his own standards he was unsettlingly brisk. Presumably he wished to inspect our ship to establish exactly where large quantities of illicit imports from West Africa could be stowed without attracting the attention of the customs officers. However, the encounter with my scarred would-be assassin on the road from Newmarket meant that at Cornelia's behest, Phineas Musk was now also my personal guard, his commitment to the task cemented by a purse of twenty guineas. Being Musk, he complained bitterly about the responsibility and yet carried out his duties with an almost fanatical enthusiasm. Thus he horsewhipped a clergyman who rode a little too close to me in Horsleydown ('thought I saw a scar,' Musk explained), and it was only with considerable difficulty that I dissuaded him from shooting dead a suspicious-looking beggar. All in all, it was an uncomfortable journey, made doubly so by the bitterly cold east wind and the roads that resembled quagmires; we must have passed a dozen carts or coaches stuck in the morass, and resisted all the cries of their crews to come and help them, for pity's sake. All told, I was doubly relieved when we finally came within sight of Deptford yard, beyond which stood the ruinous old palace of Greenwich where Harry the Eighth had been born, all those long years before. The crumbling buildings were nestled between the bare hill of the Black Heath and the river, on which ships, barges and boats of countless sorts jostled each other for passage to or from the port of London.

We rode by the side of the dockyard wall up to the gate, where the porter informed us that the master shipwright was already aboard the
Seraph,
moored in the wet dock. This was to the left as we entered the yard. A great storehouse directly ahead of us dominated the entire site and towered above the dry dock to our right, sealed by wooden gates from the high tide on the hull-crowded grey waters of the Thames. Dockyards produced arguably the most prodigious stinks in England, for no other site of comparable size encompassed the smoke from coal furnaces and forges, the smells of wet and dry wood, boundless quantities of tar and rope, and that final indispensable ingredient, the stench of several hundred men. Around us, all was bustle: or at least, what passed for bustle in a royal dockyard, those very Edens of sloth. Shipwrights were at work on an old Third Rate at the head of the double dry dock, some taking down decayed timbers, others hammering new ones into place at an approximate rate of one treenail every fifth minute or so. A few caulkers and labourers stood at the head of the dock, listening to a harangue against their gross idleness from their foremen. Two men painted a boat, lingering over each brush stroke as if they were Titians capturing a Madonna. The sound of sawing rose from the various saw-pits scattered around the yard. Great piles of wood were stacked in every available space: huge trees stripped of their branches, that would soon make masts; strange curved pieces that would make futtocks, the bends in a ship's hull; and planks galore, ready to enclose a ship's side. A few men were sawing away at some of these piles, cutting them expertly into pieces almost exactly three feet long.

'Chips,' I said to Musk. 'Pepys once told me that by tradition, men can carry out of the yard left-over pieces of wood up to three feet long. They can sell them, or use them in their own homes, or whatever they will.'

Musk frowned. 'Three feet's a damned big chip, I'd say. And those don't look like left-over pieces. If I didn't know better, I'd say they were cutting them deliberately to that length.' A man walked past us, weighed down by the great piece of oak that he carried. Musk snorted. 'Chips so large, they have to carry them on their shoulders!'

I laughed. 'Don't impugn the good name of the Deptford shipwrights in their hearing, Musk. We want to get out of here alive, remember.'

The
Seraph
was berthed as the outermost of three ships tied to the east wharf of the wet dock, so we had to cross the decks of a Fourth Rate and a Fifth to get to her. The King was quite right about my new command. I was starting to know enough of ships to recognise those that looked the part and those that lumbered sluggishly around the oceans. The
Seraph
was trim, riding high in the water because the guns were yet to be put in her. She had finer lines than my old
Jupiter,
which had been about the same size; her masts were stepped a little further back and had more of a rake. Old Shish, the master shipwright of Deptford, was on the quarterdeck, seeing to a problem with the starboard rail. He and I were acquainted vaguely of old, for my first command, the doomed
Happy Restoration,
had been fitted out in this same yard. He bowed as I approached, but I had forgotten that it was always a mistake to approach Jonas Shish from leeward, for he reeked prodigiously. I introduced him to Musk, the ship's steward-to-be, and they nodded curt acknowledgment to each other.

'Well, Captain Quinton,' Shish said. 'Glad they've given her to you, sir. She's a good ship. Almost as good as any I could build myself, indeed. Now, you'll wish to see your cabin?'

'In due course, Master Shish. I'd be grateful for an introduction to the ship's standing officers first.'

The bluff and pungent Shish seemed nonplussed. 'You've not heard of the funeral then, sir?'

'A funeral?'

'Indeed, Captain. Old Graves, the boatswain. Appropriate name, that. Appropriate when you're dead, that is. Laying Graves in the grave, as it were. Anyway, they're burying him over at Erith today, and all the rest of them have gone over there. That's Lindman the gunner, Harrington the purser, Bradbury the cook and Shish the carpenter.'

'Shish? A relative of yours, Master Shipwright?'

"Sakes no, sir. Well, probably at some distance, but there's enough of us in these parts, you see. Every second man from here down to the Nore is a Shish or a Pett.' As Shish began to show Musk and myself around the upper deck, I began to think on this matter of the boatswain's death. A previous voyage had begun with the unexplained death of a ship's officer—her captain, in that case—and that parallel, alongside the recent experience with the scarred man, had perhaps made me unduly suspicious. With as much insouciance as I could manage, I asked Shish how the man had died. 'Oh, Graves had the pox, sir. And griping of the guts. And you should have heard the man's chest. But that's not what did for him in the end. Got into a brawl with some Hamburgers in an alehouse down at Gravesend—over some lewd serving wench, they say. He did for two of them before the third put a knife in his ribs. Even then he lingered five days.' Shish sighed. An example to us all, really, considering he was seventy-eight.'

With my suspicions assuaged, a calculating proposition took shape in my head. The office of boatswain was vacant. No doubt a crowd of solicit-ants for the place were already thronging the Palace of Whitehall, hoping to lay their merits before the Lord High Admiral, the Duke of York. But the captain of the
Seraph
had a worthy candidate in mind, and all matters relating to this voyage were the prerogative of the King, whose ear the said captain had in ample measure.
Ergo,
just as in card games kings trump all lesser cards, so in life kings trump all lesser mortals.

With these thoughts spinning in my mind, jostling for attention against recollections of Sir Venner Garvey's warning and uncalled-for remembrance of the Lady Louise's look and smell, I began my inspection of my new command. The shipwright might have been a moonstruck lunatic, but his creation was anything but insane. Like all Fifth Rates, she had but the one fully covered gundeck, with eleven ports cut into each side. There were another three on each side abaft, beneath the quarterdeck and the small poop at the stern, and another two on either side of the forecastle. The latter was somewhat more truncated than it had been on the Fifth I had commanded most recently, the
Jupiter,
but the quarterdeck was a little longer, which promised more space for the captain's perambulations. The only sign of the shipwright's peculiarities came on the main gundeck, where a bizarre gallery of animals and astrological symbols had been carved into each beam; at the centre of each was the familiar face of a man with foliage sprouting from his mouth, so alike their fellow Green Man that adorned the porch of Ravensden Church.

At last we came to the great cabin—
my
cabin. But even three months ashore had been sufficient to make me forget one of the essentials for the comfort of Matthew Quinton's life in the navy, especially when so many other thoughts served to distract him. I stepped through the door, straightened up, and immediately struck...

'Beam,' said Musk, helpfully but belatedly.