The Lion of Midnight, page 3
‘Twenty fathoms and firm ground!’ came the leadsman’s call. Seth Jeary, at my side upon the quarterdeck, nodded in quiet satisfaction; that was the depth assigned to the main channel in our waggoners, so there seemed no danger of the ship being cast upon the exposed rocks that seemed to be encroaching ever nearer on either side. If the current were more leewardly, as it seemed it often was, we could not have got in; but the great seas that had struck us off Norway had abated. Jeary had his course set upon the tower of a distant church which the chart named as Arsdalen. Meanwhile I had my telescope trained upon an island a little way to the south of the church, upon which stood a large and very modern fortress. The batteries of very large cannon were clearly visible upon the ravelins and ramparts; batteries just as clearly manned and ready. From the great square tower in the fort’s midst streamed the swallow-tailed yellow cross upon blue banner of the Three Crowns.
‘The castle of New Elfsborg,’ said Lord Conisbrough, who was also upon deck; still resembling a Viking chieftain in his great wolfskin covering. ‘The principal seaward defence of Gothenburg.’
‘Then we shall have to exchange salutes with it,’ I said. ‘I propose giving them eleven guns. Will they accept and return that, My Lord?’ The matter of proper form in salutes was always of intense concern to a king’s captain; to give more guns in salute than were merited, and to receive too few (or, most heinously, none) in return, would be a grave dishonour to the sovereign and nation that I served. A dishonour that could be answered only with a broadside and, if necessary, a war.
Conisbrough nodded. ‘Eleven will suffice for New Elfsborg, in my experience, and they ought to return you three. That is the protocol I have witnessed before. But it is by no means certain to be observed. Ter Horst is a prickly fellow and no friend to the High Chancellor, so even if he has had orders to receive us properly, there is no guarantee he will do so. Much will depend on whether the captain of the garrison panders to him or fulfils his higher duty. If you so wish, Sir Matthew, I could go across and attempt to adjust matters.’
I pondered the courses available to me. I could send a boat across as Conisbrough suggested and negotiate an agreement over the number of guns to be given and returned; but in the Mediterranean three years before, when commanding the Wessex, I had witnessed just such a situation develop into a three-week stalemate with neither side able to agree, a farce that ended only when I sailed away shamefacedly and without my convoy. Moreover, was it not a diminution of both the person and the honour of his nation honour for a nobleman of England to demean himself and haggle with some low-born Swedish soldier? Better, I decided, to sail boldly toward this castle of New Elfsborg, give the Three Crowns the eleven guns, and place the onus entirely upon the captain of the fort. And if that became the onus for starting a war between England and a fourth great nation, then so be it.
‘I thank you, My Lord,’ I said to Conisbrough, ‘but I think we will adjust matters in naval fashion. Lieutenant Farrell and Mister Blackburn!’ I cried. Kit came up onto the quarterdeck from the ship’s waist, stood before me and saluted. It was still curious to see him as a lieutenant, clad in breastplate, sash and sword, rather than as the bluff young master’s mate I had first encountered four years earlier; but I, who had been entirely responsible for his elevation, was also not a little proud of my creation. Alongside Kit stood the ship’s gunner, a brisk, lively fellow of fifty or so named John Blackburn who had served in the artillery train of the King’s army during the civil war and claimed to have personally fired the shot that breached the walls of Bristol.
‘We have no guarantee of a return of our salute from the Swedish castle, yonder,’ I explained, ‘and equally no guarantee that they will accept our eleven as sufficient. So we would be advised to prepare for any eventuality. Thus we shall clear for action, but as quietly as possible, Mister Farrell. We shall man the larboard guns, Master Gunner, but there must be no unusual bustle upon the upper deck. The Swede must not see that we are prepared to do battle.’
My old friend frowned. ‘Sir Matthew, should we not at least discover whether they are prepared to return our salute?’
I record his words as he spoke them. Nowadays, such questioning of a captain’s direct order publicly, upon his very quarterdeck, would probably place the lieutenant squarely before a court-martial. Then, sixty years ago, there was still a freer intercourse between captains and their officers. The latter were readier and more able to proffer advice, and the former had not yet given themselves the god-like airs and graces that they assume these days. The young Sir Matthew Quinton certainly had not. No; I remember the words so vividly because this was the first time that Christopher Farrell, whose station in life was entirely of my creation, ever sought to contradict me.
As it was, my answer was equable. ‘We dare not risk what the French call an impasse, Mister Farrell. We could lie here for a fortnight, sending our boat back and fore, and at the end of that time, still have the same outcome as if we sail past their guns upon this tide. And the delay might have cost us the moment to bring out the mast ships. From now on, every week – every day – will see more and more Dutchmen and Danes upon the sea. Our necessity and our honour alike impel me to resolve this question of the salute at once.’
Kit still seemed unconvinced, but he was too good an officer and too firm a friend to argue the matter. He went below, and almost at once I heard the Cressys clearing the decks as silently as they could manage. Even the Cornish managed to restrain themselves from singing as loudly as was their wont, contenting themselves instead with quietly humming some strange tune of their land.
‘Mister Farrell and I share an opinion of the honour of the salute,’ said Musk in his customarily gruff manner. This was what passed for discretion from Phineas Musk: his way of informing me in public that I was being an obstinate stickler for a principle that in private he would proclaim to be unworthy of using to clean his breech.
I tried to tell myself that neither Musk, a low-born rogue, nor Kit Farrell, a plain tarpaulin, understood that for the heir to Ravensden, honour was tangible: so real, so potent, that it seemed almost alive. But I saw something in the eyes of Lord Conisbrough, who was of a lineage at least the equal of my own, and it did not suggest that he agreed with my notion of honour.
The Cressy had taken in most of her sails. We moved through the waters at barely walking pace. Those waters now carried rafts of ice down from the Gothenburg river; rafts that bumped into the hull of the Cressy like visitors knocking loudly upon a door. The larboard battery of eight-pounders upon the upper deck was manned by the gun crews who would fire the blank rounds in salute to New Elfsborg, which drew ever nearer. What the men on the castle walls could not see was the scene below, on the covered main deck, where my men crouched over the demi-cannon and culverins of the larboard battery.
Closer, then closer still. The eyes of the men on the upper deck turned nervously in my direction. Conisbrough and Musk at my side, both inscrutable. Kit Farrell in the waist, doing his duty but clearly thinking that a Captain Farrell would be handling the matter differently. A nod to Gunner Blackburn, and the foremost eight-pounder fires and recoils, the smoke hanging over the deck in the light airs. Then the next gun gives fire. Then the next, and so along the battery and back to the forward gun until we have fired eleven times.
A stillness in the air. From the ramparts of New Elfsborg, not a movement; no gun fired either in salute or in anger. The captain is calling my bluff. Very soon, I will have to decide whether to accept an insult to the king’s flag or to fire in earnest, with God knows what consequences. Conisbrough says nothing, but his whole body indicts me, insisting that I should have followed his advice and permitted him to go over to the castle and negotiate an agreement.
Apart from the shrill call of the sea-birds and the wind in our remaining sails, there is silence; and that silence seems to last for ever. We come level with the castle island. Through my telescope I see the man who must be the commander of the garrison, armoured and cloaked, his eyepiece trained just as intently upon me. The guns upon the frost-encrusted ramparts remain silent. We are almost past the island. I wish my friend Francis Gale, vicar of Ravensden, is with me upon this voyage, for his prayers had proved mightily efficacious in the past –
A puff of smoke upon the lower rampart, followed by the sound of the blast. That moment of uncertainty when one waited to see if a ball would throw up a water spout in the sea, or tear through a sail, or through a man –
No ball struck us. A second gun fired, and a third. No more. The castle of New Elfsborg has returned the Cressy’s salute. Honour has been satisfied. Captain Sir Matthew Quinton walks to the quarterdeck rail and orders Lieutenant Christopher Farrell to stand the men down. Two young men look upon each other afresh, and critically.
* * *
We bore up into a large bay of brade water behind the castle island, where our charts showed ten fathoms and a good roadstead, and there dropped anchor. This was some way short of the town of Gothenburg itself, which lay upstream, but the young officer on the boat that came out to us from New Elfsborg informed us that the river was frozen over a little way west of the town; besides, I wished to remain in an anchorage that gave me sea-room in the event of unforeseen circumstances. This caused no little grumbling among my crew, who knew that the further out from the city we moored, the less likely their prospects of leave. But in the light of Lord Conisbrough’s account, I was of the opinion that adding a large cohort of Cornishmen – ferociously loyal to me after several voyages together, but still the most violent and volatile souls upon God’s earth – to the potent brew of troubles already extant in Gothenburg would be akin to tossing a lighted candle into our powder room.
The next morning, the Cressy’s longboat took Conisbrough and I ashore, making landfall on the south side of the estuary beneath the ruins of the Old Elfsborg castle. This shore was one of the principal anchorages of the port, and was thronged with moored shipping: Lubeckers, Hamburgers, some Scotsmen, but above all the ubiquitous Dutch in their flyboats, some already deeply laden and awaiting a fair wind for Holland, most high in the water and presumably hoping for a thaw that would allow them to go up to Gothenburg to load.
Phineas Musk, restored to his customary condition after the travails of the voyage, eyed the serried ranks of our enemy with calculation. ‘They’d make a pretty bonfire,’ he said at length, his words forming a little cloud in the chill air.
‘Perhaps we’ll catch a few of them at sea on the return voyage,’ said Kit, at his side upon the wale in front of my privileged position at the stern of the longboat.
‘Easier to put a torch to the lot of ’em here,’ said Musk.
I smiled. ‘You have a pretty disregard for the laws of war, Musk. Neutral waters, remember.’
‘War is war,’ Musk replied, ‘and show me the man who invented the notion of “neutral”. Was there “neutral” in the war between the Philistines and the chosen people? I think not.’
There was a laugh from Peregrine, Lord Conisbrough, seated beside me; his attendant, the nervous, silent youth North, was further forward, toward the bow of the boat. ‘Pray God the king never sees fit to make you an ambassador, Mister Musk,’ said Conisbrough merrily.
Ours was a short voyage, but a bitter one; we could get no nearer to the town by virtue of the frozen channel upstream of the castle, and the presence in the water of great lumps of ice made the oarsmen’s task onerous. I had never seen the likes of John Treninnick and George Polzeath, stout Cornishmen both, gasp for breath, but that was their condition long before we reached the shore. I prayed that none of them suffered frostbite, for although all wore self-knitted woollen mittens with which to grip the oars, I doubted that garments appropriate to wet Cornish winters would suffice in this harsher northern land.
Several horsemen awaited us at the jetty. One, a stocky and cheerful young major of the governor’s retinue, bowed with an exaggerated flourish and made an extravagant apology in flawless French on behalf of the most noble Landtshere, Baron Ter Horst, who regretted that urgent business precluded his greeting us in person. Nevertheless, he looked forward to entertaining us shortly in his city of Gothenburg, where he would pay proper respect to the esteemed representatives of His Britannic Majesty.
As we mounted, Conisbrough murmured, ‘I expected Ter Horst to keep us waiting for days.’
‘Surely he is merely doing what any loyal viceroy of the Swedish King ought to do, My Lord?’
‘And that is the troubling aspect, Sir Matthew. The Landtshere’s sole loyalty is to his own aggrandisement; for him to behave as a loyal viceroy ought to do is out of character He hates the English, yet he is making every effort to show us honour. We should be upon our guard, I think.’
We set off for Gothenburg. This was almost as treacherous a voyage as the Cressy’s through the archipelago; the land was covered in snow, the grey clouds threatened more, and the road was little more than a ribbon of ice stretching across a treacherous, undulating landscape. Yet my horse took it in his stride, as though he and I were upon a gentle summer’s stroll through the meadows of Ravensden. Conisbrough rode a little way ahead of me, conversing animatedly in Swedish with the young major, while Musk and Kit were a little behind, discussing how old England was brought low by the seemingly universal presence of corrupt time-servers in all parts of our public affairs.
We rode around the side of a great hill crowned by a stout castle, and there before us lay Gothenburg. It resembled many a town or small city of the Netherlands; unsurprising, as it had been planned and built by Dutchmen. It was a new foundation, the major explained, of no significance at all but a half-century before, when King Gustavus Adolphus decided to build it up as Sweden’s gateway to the west. Surrounded on three sides by moats, ravelins and bastions, and on the fourth by the great river, the town consisted principally of grid-patterned streets of two-storeyed buildings, some of brick but more of timber, the whole bisected by canals. Three edifices stood out: two churches, one squat and English-looking, the other with a fine thin spire in the German style; and a large, long, red-brick structure that the young major called the Crown House, a kind of arsenal. It was within that building, he said, that the young child Karl had been proclaimed King following the sudden death of his warrior father. The slight breeze brought to us a powerful smell of wood-smoke and tar.
‘Look there, Sir Matthew,’ said Kit, riding up to my side, ‘the mast ships.’
He pointed out into the great river that ran to the north and west of Gothenburg. Many ships lay within it, but one group was unmistakeable: eight vessels moored together, two by two, deeply laden and with their upper decks piled with large wooden beams that would one day form yardarms. Below decks would be even greater lengths of timber: the future masts that would propel the Cressy and her like to victory over England’s foes. That is, once the mast-fleet was released from the vast sheet of ice that encased it and all the other ships in the Road of Gothenburg.
‘We shall summon the ships’ masters after we are done with the governor, Lieutenant Farrell,’ I said. ‘Although God knows what we shall discuss, for our sailing is evidently entirely in His hands.’
My heart sank. My intention had been to sail within days, to be back in England well before the start of the new campaign against the Dutch. This plan now seemed to lie in tatters, confounded by the unremittingly vicious snow-bearing north wind that assailed my face. Kit Farrell knew me well enough to divine my thoughts.
‘Thaws can come on fast in these waters, Sir Matthew. Faster here than on the Thames above London Bridge, for certain. We could still be away within the month – if the masters are ready, that is.’
I was not reassured. ‘Kit, you know as well as I the depths of prevarication and incompetence that our merchant skippers can plumb. It will be a miracle if we sail this side of doomsday.’
‘Come, Sir Matthew, these men have been trapped here for months, through the whole of the winter, for want of a convoy. Surely they will be ready to sail upon the thaw?’
Kit was by far a more experienced seaman than I, despite being of the same age, so I deferred to his opinion. But privately, I held to my doubts.
We rode through the outer lines of fortifications and came to the south gate of the city, a fine structure bearing a statue of the late King Gustavus Adolphus within a niche in the wall. Brass cannon poked out of the embrasures atop the ramparts. Guards came to attention as we passed through the gate unchallenged, much to the disgust of the long queue of ordinary citizens seeking admittance. Within the ramparts, Gothenburg was a very Amsterdam in miniature, narrow houses rising from narrow streets on either side of a frozen canal. The narrowness of our way forced us into single file, and the young major shouted back to me that we were fortunate: if the canal had been clear and the stevedores able to work upon the stranded barges, it would have taken us hours to get through the throng. As it was, the conditions had driven all but a few hardy and well-wrapped souls from the street. Yet other eyes were upon us, glimpsed occasionally looking out of windows or from shadowy doorways. In those eyes I saw a gamut of human emotions: utter unconcern, curiosity, suspicion. And rather too often for my comfort: hatred.
At the head of the canal, and at right angles to it, was an even broader waterway, lined by warehouses and grander houses. We rode across a wooden bridge that could be opened to allow the passage of shipping – not that any of the craft frozen within the ice had any prospect of moving until a thaw came. Some of these were quite large, and one flew an ensign that I recognised at once: a red field with a blue canton bearing the cross of Saint Andrew. A Scotsman, then, and a privateer by the look of her, mounting some twelve guns. Her shrouds were crusted in ice, like those of every other vessel stranded in that great canal, but unlike the others, she was not entirely deserted: a stout man with no left leg stood upon the deck, gripping his crutch tightly, seemingly impervious to the cold and staring brazenly at us as we passed. On the far side of the waterway was the large German church that I had spied from outside the city. We rode beneath its walls into the broad public square that lay beyond it, dismounting before a large building that resembled many of the town halls I had seen in the Low Countries. The stairs leading up to the door were guarded by an impressive body of pikemen.
