The Triple Goddess (37 page)

This time Ralegh rose, his fists clenched. ‘By my beard! I refuse to be insulted in my residence by a stranger, and a woman at that. God wit, I have suffered enough consecutive lifelong sentences to such treatment from my wife, which is more than any man has ever borne.’

Arbella tossed her head. ‘Stop blustering, sir, and resume your seat. Your hectoring manner grows tiresome.’

Surprised, Ralegh complied with the order and Arbella, who had been struck by a crazy idea—nothing was normal in her life any more—moderated her tone. ‘Sir Walter, I have a proposal to make to you.’

‘Thou darest to…what sort of proposal?’

‘That you and your son should become partners...’

‘Partners?’, said Ralegh and Carew simultaneously.

‘…in a last venture.’

‘Venture?’, echoed the pair.

‘What I have in mind is that Master Carew might agree to assist you, Sir Walter, in arranging a final voyage. This, I understand, remains your great ambition. Each of you would bring your respective expertises to bear in bringing it to fruition.’

The knight looked taken aback. But when he recovered his tongue, his tone was silken. ‘I already have such an undertaking under consideration. I am accustomed to managing my affairs unaided.’

‘Then you are assured of yet another failure. Where are your assets, your financial backing? Everyone knows you are good at blowing smoke, but where is the organizational infrastructure necessary for such a project? With your record and without an iron-clad guarantee of success, who would invest in it?’

Arbella looked quickly at Carew. Although he said nothing, in contrast to his father’s ruddy features, his face was pale and blank. She was concerned that she had overstepped herself with him as well as his father, as well as contributing to the irreconcilability of father and son. Even Wat and Captain Kemys had not been allowed to be more than unquestioning participants in Sir Walter’s campaigns.

‘Malapert wench,’ said Ralegh, absentmindedly and in a tone mild enough to belie the derogation. Then, severely, ‘The fact is, my son knows nothing of the sea.’

Carew rallied. ‘I was a shipowner and sea-merchant before I became an underwriter, as well you know.’

‘Being seated at a desk with an abacus, sirrah,’ bristled Ralegh, ‘surrounded by your fellow cutpurses is not the same as standing on a heaving deck and making life-or-death decisions. He who would be a leader of men must learn by experience.’

‘Leaders are born, not made. “The very bees have their prince, and the deer their leaders...” Your words, sir.’

‘Aye, “...and cranes, by order imposed, watch for their own safety.” Thou art a crane, sir.’

‘Fortune does not always favour the brave,’ Carew observed.

His father countered in a clipped voice, ‘It is not enough to fancy oneself a visionary. Theorems are of no use in fighting currents and high winds, and disease, and the enemy in a strange land.’

‘An intelligent assessment of the odds will always improve a situation. Plunging recklessly into danger may be heroic, but more often than not it leads to death and defeat.’

‘In a jungle full of snakes and savages, there are no guarantees of success.’

‘Before entering that jungle a wise man seeks a path around it.’

‘And if such a path does not exist, doth one return home to roast chestnuts before the fire?’

‘My point is, that to hazard all upon a single throw of the dice is foolhardy.’

‘I am no common gambler, sirrah.’

‘The world is a random place, Father, and we are all risk-takers to greater or lesser extent. The object is to minimize that risk.’

‘I will not be lectured with such arrant nonsense. I repeat, that thou knowst nothing of the sea. Shipboard language is Greek to thee.’

‘You may essay me on it, sir.’

‘Very well, we will start simply. What is a back-rope?’

‘A back-rope is a rope.’

‘Excellent! What else is it?’

‘It is a rope...’

‘Methinks we already established that.’

‘...that fits over the dolphin striker with a cuckold’s neck, and sets up to the bows on each side.’

‘And what is a cuckold’s neck?’

‘A cuckold’s neck, or knot, is a hitch by which a rope is secured to a spar.’

‘What are futtock shrouds?’

‘Futtock shrouds are short shrouds leading from the lower ends of the futtock plates to a…’

‘Studding-sails?’

‘A studding-sail, or stunsail, is a sail set beyond the leeches of any of the principal sails during a fair wind.’

‘Bumpkins.’

‘...are pieces of timber projecting from the vessel to which the fore tack may be boarded, and the main brace-blocks.’

‘Dog’s ear.’

‘A small bight made in the leech-rope of a sail, in reefing and making up.’

‘Quaker guns.’

Arbella interjected, ‘Oh, I know that one. Quaker guns are false or wooden guns.’

Both men turned to look sightlessly in her direction, and Ralegh continued. ‘Tom Cox’s traverse.’

‘Tom Cox’s traverse,’ said Carew, ‘is what a skulker does to avoid work. He might go up one hatchway and down another, or take three turns around the long-boat, with a pause to take a pull at the scuttle.’

‘Horse latitudes.’

Carew’s eyebrows shot up. ‘The area of seas bordering those favoured by the northern edge of the north-east trade-winds, notorious for its tedious calms and light airs. You grow desperate, sir, to introduce such an obvious anachronism.’

Ralegh’s jaw clamped shut; though whether he was searching for a more difficult question, or had given up trying to fault his son on shipboard terminology, Arbella could not tell.

‘If you two men,’ she said, ‘intend to continue in this childish vein and move on to maritime law, please tell me now because I won’t be able to take it. As I said, I have work to do.’

‘I’m sorry, Arbella,’ said Carew. ‘Look here, Father, about Arbella’s idea of a last voyage. Why don’t you give it some thought? Should you decide that you’d like to go ahead, Arbella and I will do what we can to raise the necessary funds, by arranging a special policy at Lloyd’s. I would undertake not to interfere with the details of the expedition itself.’

As hard as he tried to keep them down, Sir Walter’s eyebrows rose higher than a mainmast pennant.

His son added, ‘There would be conditions, however.’

‘He talks to me of conditions,’ Ralegh muttered. But despite his offended tone, it was obvious that he was paying close attention.

‘Underwriters would pay a lump sum at inception—I have in mind the amount of one million pounds—with the contractual proviso that…’

Arbella was stunned. ‘Excuse me, Mr Carew, but even allowing for the undoubted fascination you exert upon the market, I could never place such a contract. Lloyd’s isn’t a charitable institution, as underwriters are constantly reminding me.’

‘No, but they cannot resist a challenge, and publicity, and there would be a warranty of no dividend payable to Sir Walter Ralegh. The funds raised would be spent on equipment and outfitting costs, and any net profit from the enterprise would be distributed amongst the subscribing market. My father wouldn’t receive a penny.’

‘What!’

‘What what, Father?’

The great man subsided. ‘Nothing.’

‘The enticement to underwriters will be the prospect of receiving one hundred per cent of the booty, if there is any. Except we’ll call it profit commission.’

Arbella was puzzled. ‘But there would have to be a premium, surely, in return for advancing the funds, and against the possibility, or rather probability, that they would receive nothing in return.’ She looked at Sir Walter, who, with the vision of a million pounds dancing in his head, was struggling to curb his annoyance that anyone might consider a profitable outcome to be less than assured.

‘Indeed there would: the entire wealth of Sir Walter Ralegh. As an earnest of good faith, my father must agree to divest himself of all his worldly goods.’

Ralegh’s neck stiffened as if it had absorbed the starch from his ruff. ‘Pray, what sort of bargain is that?’

‘It isn’t meant to be a bargain, Papa, it is the only way to get you what you want. The purpose of the voyage is not to enrich yourself. I have no idea what your assets are, and their value, but it is of no consequence. The important thing is that you surrender everything as a show of good faith. Gold and silver, moneys, precious stones, books, paintings, the tapestries on the walls...’

‘Never!’

‘I haven’t finished. Furniture, ornaments, and the clothes in your wardrobe, including the famous puddle-soaked cloak stepped on by Queen Elizabeth, and never dry-cleaned, which we will auction off. All Ralegh memorabilia, including the gifts and collectables from your travels that decorate this apartment and are stored in the box room off the dressing-room upstairs.

‘Last but not least, the inventory must also include the cache of valuables behind the loose stone under that tapestry,’—Carew pointed to the spot on the arras—‘which you think I do not know about. The items hidden there my mother gave you when you were on better terms. When she asked for them back, you asserted that they had been sold to meet certain unavoidable expenses.’

Although Ralegh feigned ignorance, his eyes flickered to the place. ‘I have no idea what thou art talking about,’ he said sullenly.

‘If you hold back so much as a brass farthing, the contract will be rendered null and void. There will be an audit.’

Ralegh’s knuckles, Arbella noticed, were as pale as ivory on the red velour arms of the couch. ‘You insult me, sir. If ever I wanted to make such a journey, I had only to apply to my good friend the Earl of Northumberland for funding.’

‘The Wiz, Papa, is a spendthrift with very expensive tastes, none of which run to enabling what he considers to be your dreamboat fantasies. Anyway, centuries of living the way he has have eroded even his fortune. Perhaps you have not kept track of how much you have won off him over the years at bone-ace, one-and-thirty, maw, treitrippe, passage, hazard, and mumchance. You may not have noticed how your famous potatoes—actually the Spanish knew about them before you did—have made a return to his dining table in place of meat:
Solanum tuberosum
boiled, fried, baked, and mashed.’

Ralegh picked up his pipe, which had gone out, and stared at the ashes in the bowl as if he had fallen into a trance.

After a moment Carew got up, nodded to Grammaticus, and indicated to Arbella that she should follow him.

They did not say goodbye to Sir Walter, and walked back to Lloyd’s without a word passing between them. Arbella was sure that Ralegh’s loss of attention, either real or feigned as a means of bring an interview to an end, was a frequent occurrence.

Just as they were about to enter the building, Arbella said, ‘Oh, I meant to ask...how is it that you know so many nautical terms?’

Carew smiled. ‘My father forgets that he taught us all that stuff as children—it was the one subject he didn’t leave to our tutors—and made us repeat it like catechism at breakfast whenever he was home. It’s like the French grammar or musical theory that is dinned into the modern child: one may not need or have cause to practise it in life, but it is never forgotten. If you want to know more, it’s all in a nineteenth century book called
Two Years Before the Mast
, by Richard Henry Dana, Junior. Swing by the box, you have to pick up your slip-case anyway, and I’ll give you my copy.’

Chapter Twenty-Six

What time she had left that afternoon, Arbella spent running around the market picking up the lines on her risk. She told everyone who tried to stop her and ask about her experience that she did not have time to talk about it.

So curt was she and dismissive of them, and so business-like with the gladsome underwriters in determining their shares, and so intolerant of their self-congratulatory airs, that by four-thirty, when the smoke of hundreds of cigarettes went up, she was done.

It was only on the tube home that night to Sloane Square that Arbella began to think about what had happened earlier at the Tower. After a tiffin of scrambled eggs with smoked salmon, she went into the library and immersed herself in Carew’s copy of Richard Henry Dana. And then, being by now gripped by the maritime theme, she sped through two Joseph Conrad stories.

She was dipping into
Moby-Dick
when her father came in at midnight; and since she still felt wide awake and he was in the mood for a nightcap of organic kiwi fruit juice, she went to the kitchen and made grog for herself—dark rum and hot water, with a slice of lemon. Father and daughter toasted each other, and it was after one o’clock when she turned the light out in her room.

She had a dream, in which she was a junior officer aboard a thirty-eight gun frigate running before a small fleet of pirate ships. The corsair vessels comprised a mixture of eight-gun brigantines, Bermuda cutters with two jibs and abaft-rigged sails, and three-masted luggers with triangular sails. The luggers drew little water and were rigged for fast close-hauled sailing.

Despite the
low superstructure, high length:breadth ratio,
lightness and speed of the ship that Arbella was on, it was gradually outmanoeuvred by those in pursuit. As the wind died down the frigate was surrounded and, unable to bring its guns to bear on the aggressors, forced to heave to. The pirates flung grappling irons over its side and boarded, and although the frigate’s crew fought bravely, the scuppers were soon running with blood and it was forced to surrendered.