Destiny's Tide Read online

  Deflected them for the brief interlude until there was no longer any need to do so.

  That day, upon the deck of the Matthew off Dunwich shore, was evidently not to be one of Peter Stannard’s more tolerable interludes.

  ‘Nolloth, have you turned Bedlam-man, to allow this? Can ye not see Kingsholme, yonder? We need to be more northerly by a good point! Get off your arse and take the helm, you lubbering slug!’

  The crewmen forward of their position glanced knowingly at each other, then turned once again to stare apprehensively at the fast approaching shingle bank.

  ‘No, Father,’ said Jack, summoning all the courage within his young frame and shouting to be heard above the wind. ‘Jed is spent, and you’re not well. I can do this. I will do this.’

  Jack did not know where the word came from. Three times before, to the best of his memory, he had mouthed a ‘no’ to his father. Twice, when he was a boy, he had been leathered until his arse was raw. The third time, barely eight months before, Peter Stannard had pummelled his son so fiercely that he cracked ribs and nearly took out his right eye. But his father could no longer use his hands so readily. Even so, Peter took an angry step toward his son, his bloated and strangely scarred face contorting with fury. But, contrary to Jack’s expectation, his father did not reach out to try and take hold of the whipstaff himself, nor to strike him. Nor did he bark another order at the slumped, spent figure of Jed Nolloth. Instead, he stood stock still, staring at the makeshift, bloodied bandages on his hands, then out toward Dunwich shore. A minute, perhaps two, passed with Peter Stannard looking from one man to the other, then at the shore again, as all the while the Kingsholme drew ever nearer. Jack kept his hands on the whipstaff and his eyes on the seamark, finally visible again behind the wreck, only glancing briefly at his father out of the corner of his eye. Then, at last, Peter Stannard did something that Jack had never witnessed before, not even at his mother’s funeral.

  He wept.

  At first, Jack was aware only of a dampness on his father’s cheeks, easily attributed to the salt spray. Then the old man shuddered, his head and shoulders fell forward, and he sobbed loudly and piteously. Jed Nolloth looked up in astonishment, and exchanged a lengthy stare with Jack.

  Peter Stannard collected himself, turned as if to go below again, but then turned back to his son.

  ‘All right then, boy,’ he said, his voice at once drunken and strangely hesitant, ‘sing us home, if you think you can. Sing us into Dunwich haven, or kill us all on her cliff or Kingsholme, for I no longer care. Kill me above all, for all the saints in heaven know I deserve it. Seventh son of a seventh son, thus blessed, but look upon me now. Look upon my fortune. Look upon my sins.’ He looked at the bloody cankers on his hands. ‘The Devil of the Doom is coming for me. I see it in my dreams, boy, I hear its wings beating. May your mother forgive me, God bless her sainted soul and speed her from Purgatory. Ave Maria, gratia plena…’

  With that, Peter Stannard went below, still muttering the Hail Mary. Jack and Nolloth said not a word to each other, for both had heard the litany often enough. Seventh son of a seventh son, and thus feared by many in case he possessed the supernatural powers often associated with such a condition. Two of his brothers dead of plague, one washed overboard off Iceland, one killed in a fight in Southwold, one fallen at Flodden Field, and the last, so both whispered rumour in Dunwich’s alehouses and the opinion of Jack’s sister Agatha had it, an other-worldly simpleton murdered by his youngest brother so that Peter could inherit unchallenged.

  Jack and Nolloth concentrated once again on the spectacle before them. Driven by wind and tide, the Matthew was approaching the narrow mouth of estuary at what seemed an impossible speed. Jack could feel the strength of the sea working upon the whipstaff, trying to force him from his chosen course. A fraction to the south would cast them upon the Kingsholme to share the fate of the wrecked Nicholas, while a fraction to the north would run them aground upon Southwold’s shore, a fate akin to being wrecked on the wrong side of the River Styx. The Kingsholme was coming up ever more swiftly, the spray from the waves crashing upon it all too visible from the Matthew. Jed Nolloth fingered his paternoster, repeating the Ave Maria to himself, but Jack dared not take even a finger from the whipstaff. He had no feeling in his hands, and the pain in his arms and shoulders was worse than any he had ever known, but still he did not alter his grip. Any prayers from him would be superfluous, he believed; but there was one thing that Jack Stannard could do to bring divine assistance to the voyage of the Matthew. One thing that nobody else on the ship could do.

  He hummed a note, then, loudly and confidently, began to sing the tenor line of Non nobis, the great hymn of humility and thanksgiving, in the setting by the Frenchman, Mouton, which he had learned at school.

  ‘Non nobis domine, non nobis, sed nomini tuo da gloriam…’

  Not unto us, oh Lord, not unto us, but unto your name be the glory.

  A quarter mile, no more.

  A furlong.

  Eight chains.

  Six.

  Four.

  He could see the seabirds, perched upon the jagged ribs of the Nicholas of Walberswick, and sang louder still.

  Three chains.

  Two, if that – no more than forty feet…

  During his third rendition of Non nobis, the Matthew just cleared the seamark at the northern point of the Kingsholme, the post only a few feet, a chain or less, from her larboard beam. Without waiting for a command from Jed Nolloth, Jack put the whipstaff hard over, bringing the ship’s head around into the mouth of Dunwich river.

  ‘Well done, lad,’ said Nolloth, taking the whipstaff.

  Jack released his grip, staggered backward, and fell to his knees upon the deck.

  They were home.

  * * *

  The Matthew finally came alongside the Dain Quay of Dunwich haven, the cables making her fast. Jack Stannard could see his Alice, standing upon the quayside and smiling, little Meg alongside her, waving happily and jumping up and down. Alice’s belly was even larger than when it was when the Matthew had sailed for Emden, so the new child was evidently prospering. Jack longed for nothing more than to take her in his arms, but there was business of securing the ship to attend to first. There was no sign of his father, who was still below decks, no doubt drinking yet more to alleviate his terrible pain. Jack knew his father was terrified by the prospect of what his illness might be; of course, he would never admit that before his son, but Jack had heard some of the prayers he muttered under his breath, and knew, for Dunwich had no secrets, that he had consulted infirmarians at the Blackfriars and Maison Dieu more than once. Jed Nolloth, who had voyaged more than once to the coast of Castile, believed he had an inkling of what Peter Stannard’s condition might be, and had spoken to Jack in hushed tones one night, as they drank together in a quiet corner of the Pelican in its Piety. Jack would speak to Alice of it that night, after Meg had been put to bed.

  Just then, the bells of Dunwich began to ring, followed almost at once by those of Walberswick and Southwold, her neighbours to the north and perpetual foes. Saint Peter’s rang out, and All Saints high upon the cliff, and Saint John’s upon the market square, the greatest of the three remaining churches of the town, its peal seemingly louder than the other two combined.

  ‘Alice!’ cried Jack. ‘Why the bells?’

  She laughed.

  ‘What, be Jack Stannard the last man in England to know?’ she shouted back. ‘A prince! Queen Jane be safely delivered of a son! God be praised, Jack, the king has an heir at last!’

  Jack Stannard smiled and clapped. A son, the prize the king had sought so desperately all the years of Jack’s life – aye, and long before he was born, too. Perhaps now all the changes would cease, the killings too, and the Pope and the monasteries would be restored. Perhaps, Jack thought, Englishmen would now be united at long last, and the land would have contentment again.

  But it was not to be.

  PART ONE

/>   ROUGH WOOING

  APRIL TO MAY 1544

  The principal cause of sending the army into Scotland is to devastate the country… burn Edinburgh town, and so deface it as to leave a memory for ever of the vengeance of God upon their falsehood and disloyalty. Sack Holyrood House, and sack, burn and subvert Leith and all the towns and villages round, putting man, woman and child to fire and sword where resistance is made…

  Henry the Eighth, King of England; orders to his erstwhile brother-in-law, Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford, for the invasion of Scotland, 10 April 1544

  ONE

  The war fleet lay in the Horse Reach, a south-westerly breeze set fair for it to move out into the Blyth haven and then the open sea beyond, the flood tide nearly spent.

  Jack Stannard could see the topmasts of the four ships, all at single anchor in the nor’easterly lee of Hen Hill, the Kingsholme beyond, the distant church towers of Walberswick and Southwold beyond that. Men were busy in the shrouds and on the yards. His men, aboard what were now his ships, about to sail for King Harry’s war against Scotland. A rough wooing, some called it, to force the treacherous Scots to marry their infant queen Mary to the king’s son, Edward, Prince of Wales, as they had promised to do, only to later renege on their word and promise her hand instead to the heir of France.

  The waves of the last of the incoming tide were breaking on the beach and the Kingsholme, singing the eternal song of the relentless sea, and Jack should be setting sail upon the ebb. But he would bury Alice first, laying his lost wife to rest in the soil of All Saints’ churchyard, high on Dunwich cliff, on the April day that would have been her twenty-seventh birthday.

  ‘Et ne nos inducas in tentationem…’

  Old Overfield, the priest of All Saints, sprinkled Holy Water over the corpse as he sang the plainchant litany for the commitment of the body. His acolytes swung their censers vigorously, wafting a great cloud of incense over the large congregation at the graveside: a cloud so dense that it briefly suppressed Dunwich’s perennial stink of fish. Several of those nearest the censers coughed violently, even as they uttered the familiar, ancient response.

  ‘Sed libera nos a malo.’

  Jack had filled out in the course of the previous six years. Now he was sturdy, but in no way inclined to fat. To his still untameable hair, he had added a short beard, which made his face seem even more angular than it already was. Six more years of voyaging had further weathered a visage that only his late wife had considered handsome. Two years younger than Alice, most people who met the couple together considered the husband to be by far the older of the two. Others considered Jack’s appearance striking, or even unsettling. This was on account of the marked resemblance to his father Peter, who had unsettled many folk in his day, his son among them, and still did, albeit for very different reasons. Otherwise, though, the younger Stannard seemed a picture of mournful respectability, clad in his guildsman’s black mourning gown, with the hood drawn up over his head.

  Jack knew his thoughts should have been full only of prayers for Alice, whose body, wrapped merely in a winding-sheet, lay on the ground before him, or else for his two motherless children.

  But they were not. In part, this was because he knew such thoughts as those would have overwhelmed him, and had him sinking to his knees in dire misery. Had he grieved as good Christians were told to grieve, and as the pain in his heart ached so very much to do, he feared he might hurl himself into the ground alongside his lost love, and cry out for the gravediggers to shovel the sods onto his living body.

  ‘A porta inferi,’ said Overfield, somewhere seemingly far away.

  Nor was Jack more than dimly aware of the crowd around the grave, the throng of family, friends, fellow members of Saint Catherine’s Guild, more humble mourners, and even old foes like Mark Cuddon and his brothers, many of them also clad in hooded black gowns. A dozen perfectly still figures, also gowned and hooded, paid for from the Stannard monies, stood on either side of the grave, bearing lighted torches.

  Instead, Jack Stannard thought the thoughts that drove out those of feelings, and grief beyond all measure, and of a heart that seemed to be weighted down by a great anchor. Instead, he concentrated on other thoughts, the ones that distracted him from the void caused by the absence of a living, vibrant, laughing Alice. The Alice he longed for and always would, not that stiff, shrouded shape, the merest husk of his wife, lying at the graveside to await its committal. What he would give to see her smile one more time, to hear her laugh one more time.

  If Overfield did not make haste, Jack mused, the fleet might miss the tide, and the opportunity to wage war against Scotland. A war that might bring blessings untold to Jack Stannard, and to Dunwich. Blessings that might provide a certain future for Tom and Meg, and pay for countless masses for Alice’s soul.

  True, Nolloth and Eagle would have the two Dunwich ships, the ships owned by the Stannards, in good order, but he could not be so sure of Maddox from Walberswick, and as for Raker of Southwold—

  ‘Requiem aeternam dona ei, Domine.’

  From the moment the royal summons was received, and it was decreed that young Stannard of Dunwich should command the contingent, Raker had been—

  He recalled the words Alice had used. That Raker, he be a blowbroth jakey, right enough. A meddling toad. Alice always had the knack of saying the right thing.

  ‘Et lux perpetua luceat ei.’

  Jack heard himself murmur the response, and crossed himself, but to his eternal shame, he was thinking of Martin Raker of Southwold, and of the smell of candle-tallow within the greatest castle in the whole of Suffolk. Yet even within that thought, he held an image of Alice, as if she were a shadow there, in the corner of the ancient baronial hall, those very few weeks past. She was smiling, as she always was when she chided him in jest.

  ‘Ever thinking of your ships and your cargoes, Jack Stannard, not of your wife and children. Thank God you have me for a wife, for no other woman in Suffolk would put up with you. No other woman in England, come to that.’

  ‘Grant her eternal rest, Lord. Let light perpetual shine upon her.’

  * * *

  ‘Honoured sirs, I have nought but the greatest respect for the family of Stannard and the town of Dunwich,’ Martin Raker had lied on that cold evening early in March, in the cavernous, tapestry-lined, candle-lit great hall of Framlingham Castle. He was a small man with an unruly grey beard, and hands that seemed to be in perpetual motion. ‘But it would be remiss of me – nay, good sirs, failing in my loyal duty to the king – not to say that Master John Stannard, there, is too young to command over us. He has been on many voyages, as he says, but almost none have been outside the German Ocean. Whereas I, sirs, have sailed to Bordeaux many a time. Aye, and to Danzig, Lisbon, even Madeira. I have fought the sea-robbers of Scotland, Galicia and Morocco. I have seen the sea serpent. All this and much more, as sworn to in my deposition. So, sirs, I implore you – set aside ancient precedence in this case, and appoint an admiral fit for the mission.’

  Jack shifted uncomfortably on his feet, and pulled his best gown a little more tightly around him. For all his belief in his own cause, he knew that what Martin Raker said was only the truth. Of course, there was more to Raker’s objection than that, and every man in the room knew it. But it was clever of the Southwold man not to found his argument upon his town’s ancient quarrel with Dunwich, nor his own bitter history with Jack’s father, a history that, in Jack’s estimation, had never been fully explained to him. Instead, Raker emphasised the youth of his rival, the one charge that Jack Stannard simply could not deny.

  The two judges in the case, seated upon stools upon the dais, were impassive. One, Sir William Drury, sheriff of Norfolk and Suffolk, was clearly neutral, as his few cursory interventions to that point had indicated. He was a Norfolk man, and a landsman, and gave off the air of someone who wanted the whole trivial business over and done with, so he could get on with more pleasurable pursuits. Thus Drury was evidently content t
o let the decision rest with his companion, an old, white-bearded man who seemed nearly asleep for half the time, and utterly distracted for the other half, his eyes roving wildly around the hall. William Gonson was the vice-admiral of Norfolk and Suffolk: in truth, largely an honorific title, but it gave him a certain jurisdiction over the men and ships being sent to the war by the two counties. That alone would have given Gonson the authority to judge in the case between Raker of Southwold and Stannard of Dunwich. But the two rivals knew well enough that Gonson’s decision would be given even greater weight by the fact that he was also the treasurer and storekeeper of the king’s Navy Royal. Many men, including the very tall, very young man at Gonson’s shoulder, said that even with due respect to the new and unusually active Lord High Admiral, this old man effectively was the king’s Navy Royal.

  Gonson mumbled something, and the young man stooped down to whisper in his ear.

  Gonson nodded, raised his head, and looked directly at John Stannard.

  ‘Stannard of Dunwich,’ he said, very slowly, as though turning over each word to see if something lay beneath. ‘There was a Stannard of Dunwich with the fleet when we sailed against the French in the year thirteen. An old one-armed man.’