Ensign Royal Read online

  Ebb, frigate, blockade: in those days, Charles might as well have been speaking to me the language of the Moon. True, my grandfather had been a legend in the briny environ — one of the heroes who repelled the Invincible Armada, no less — but I simply had no comprehension of what had driven him to it in the first place. My single passage upon the sea up until that time had been three years before, when my mother and I left England for exile, and despite being upon what the mariners dismissively called ‘a gentle swell’, I had spent the entire voyage alternately groaning and spewing.

  My second voyage began in very different fashion, however. After saying farewell to Charles, and pledging that I would safely deliver the precious letter, I boarded the vessel, which flew Zeeland colours and evidently belonged to the fussy Puritanical factor upon the quayside. I acknowledged the rough and almost incomprehensible greeting from the fellow Henfield, a sly, fawning fellow with calloused skin, and went below, where I found my change of clothes: rough seamen’s breeches, a grease-stained shirt and a woollen cap that proved too tight for my head. But the tiny space within the hold that did not contain bales and barrels (few of which, I suspected, would ever trouble the quills of Cromwell’s excise-men) was piled with sacking, and for a man who had not slept the entire night, it had the appearance of a most acceptable bed. I could feel and hear the movement of the boat as it cast off, but the river’s motion was gentle, the lapping of the water upon the hull almost seductive. I settled down upon the sacking, and within moments my dream-self was in the arms of the alluring and strangely unsettling girl upon the quayside.

  * * *

  I was thrown bodily against an unyielding barrel, and woke in confusion. It took me some moments to realise where I was, and why I was there. The hull, so recently such a benign bed, now seemed to me to be a malign and literally unstable enemy, rolling crazily from one side to another. I could feel the stirrings of protest in my stomach, and somehow staggered to the upper deck. I emerged into bright sunlight, entirely ready to disgorge my belly’s contents over the side.

  A burly rogue, dressed very much as I was and manhandling a rope, snapped something at me in what might have been Dutch. I looked about me in confusion. The sails above my head cracked like thunderclaps. The hull suddenly lurched, and I was thrown against the vessel’s side. I clung on for grim life, and looked up. The horizon rose and fell crazily. I could see perhaps a dozen other craft, all seemingly tossed about at will by this vast blue-grey watery mass upon which we rode.This was a very hell, a chaos beyond imagination and certainly far beyond the tolerance of my stomach. Again I felt my gut rise inexorably toward my mouth.

  Then I looked ahead. My breath left me and my senses raced. For there, dead ahead and perhaps two miles beyond the tiny craft in which I now resided, was the most astonishing sight my young eyes had ever beheld.

  Ahead of us, coming on apace toward us, was a great ship. It was far larger than any I had ever seen, although then my experience in such matters was distinctly limited. It seemed to be coming directly for us, rising and falling majestically as the waves broke upon the bow. Two vast black iron anchors sat menacingly upon either side of that same part. Great swathes of canvas hung from its masts, taut in the wind that filled them. From the stern, and from the masthead, streamed the ensign and command flag of the republic. I could hear the creaking of her timbers and the song of the wind in her ropes. I could see men upon her, many upon the upper deck, some upon the thin poles that extended out from the masts, some upon the strange ladders of rope that led upward by the sides of those same masts. But as the vast ship came ever nearer, seeming to fill the sky, none of this was the most remarkable part of her. That was the monstrous sculpture at the most forward part of the ship, a vast array of gilded wood, entirely recognisable even at a distance. The figure rising and falling upon the wave - oh, no man could mistake that. Upon a rampant horse, Oliver Cromwell, to his acolytes the Lord Protector of England, Scotland and Ireland; to his foes, Matthew Quinton among them, a king-killer and usurper who would burn in Hell for his presumption. There he was, his graven image imperious upon this mighty ship. Beneath his feet, six figures. As the distance narrowed further, it even became possible to identify them. There, an Englishman; there, a Scot; there, an Irishman; there, a Frenchman; there, a Dutchman; there, a Spaniard. Six nations, all trampled beneath the feet of the omnipotent Lord Protector.

  I do not know how long I stood upon the deck, enthralled and afeared alike by the oncoming spectacle, beauty and destruction encompassed within one wooden frame. At length, I was aware of the presence of Skipper Henfield beside me.

  ‘Aye, she’s a dread sight,’ he said. ‘The Naseby, that’s what she is. General Montagu, going to assume command of the Dunkirk blockade.’

  I felt a shock upon hearing the name. More than a shock: a pain seemed to shake my entire body from head to toe. Naseby. The battle in which my father had died. Fallen as a needless sacrifice to the vanity of a prince after barely three months as Earl of Ravensden. And now Cromwell commemorated the place of my father’s martyrdom in the name of this, by far the largest and most dread moving object I had ever seen.

  For one fleeting moment, I sensed that I, too, would be trampled beneath the wooden image of the Lord Protector, and would join my father in perishing upon Naseby. But Henfield barked some orders to the man who held the wooden pole that seemed to be called a ‘helm’, and we veered away. The Naseby swept past us, only yards away, and I heard the talk of the men on her deck, their foul oaths directed at us for having dared to stray into their path.

  Then, in a moment, she was by us, and the sea suddenly churned in turmoil. I managed one glance at the glorious gilding and sunlit windows that adorned what seamen called the stern before the sudden motion of the waters finally did for my stomach. I clung to the side of our craft, stuck my head out over the side, contemplated the grey-white-blue ferment beneath for but a second, then discharged long and hard into the waters.

  As I stood there, miserable and retching, I heard Henfield’s voice. ‘Well, then, Mister Quinton. At least be grateful unto God that you’ll never need to be a seaman.’

  Chapter Four

  The Kentish shore appeared low and menacing, despite the bright evening sun. Henfield kept close inshore along the coast that he named as Sheppey, steering well clear of the two frigates that lay at anchor upon what he termed the Buoy of the Nore. But in truth, there was little danger of us being singled out for attention by the Lord Protector’s navy. The tide was upon the flood, Henfield proclaimed, it was a long and fine June day, so much of the trade of the world seemed intent upon taking such a perfect opportunity to traverse the broad Thames mouth. To me, then still profoundly ignorant of all matters maritime, the scores of hulls within our sight seemed identical — some larger, some smaller, but otherwise a random collection of wood and canvas chess-pieces moving haphazardly upon some watery checker-board. Yet to Henfield, they were evidently as familiar as the flesh upon his hands. He pointed out several high-sided craft, wallowing deeply in the water, and called them flutes, Dutchmen bound upstream to London with French wines, Norwegian timber and God alone knew what else. Yonder, a fleet of herring-buses; there, a ketch; toward Essex, a bevy of Tyne colliers bringing the coals for London’s hearths — a myriad of types of ship, a myriad cargoes. For the first time in my life I marvelled at the complexities of this sea-business, although I could never see myself venturing forth upon this strange, unsettling briny environ. Such things were best left to those born to them, the rude tarpaulins, men like Henfield. The ship master had surely been right: the sea was no place for a gentleman.

  We ran in toward the marshes, to an inlet that Henfield termed a ‘fleet’, and his craft’s row-boat came alongside ready to take me ashore.

  ‘Saint Mary Hoo’s a mile or thereabouts, due south and west. Walk towards the setting sun, Mister Quinton. You’ll find the alehouse you seek by the sign of the crossed keys.’

  ‘The coast is not guarded?’


  He looked at me curiously. ‘Too remote, sir, too remote. With the best of his army over in Flanders, Old Noll has too few men to spread everywhere. Most of his Ironsides in these parts are down guarding the dockyard at Chatham, or else patrolling the London road.’ Henfield smiled. ‘Besides, for godly men the soldiers prove mightily afeared of the legends of the ghosts and goblins that inhabit the marshes. You’ll not see a turtle helmet this side of Strood.’

  I was assuaged by this. ‘And you will be upon this same shore tomorrow evening, to bring me off?’

  ‘The noble earl your brother pays me to that end, does he not? I’ll be here waiting, Mister Quinton, never fear.’

  I was rowed ashore by a surly Dutch brute who possessed not a word of English. I scrambled my way across a mud-bank, the ooze rising over my ankles, finally reaching firmer ground amid an apparently endless reed-bed. There I drew breath, turned to contemplate Henfield’s craft already pulling away from the shore, and realised that for the first time in three years, I stood upon the soil of my native land. And therein lay the paradox. For England was also the enemy, the ground upon which I now stood belonging to a foul usurpation which damned everything that my family and I stood for. The England of the Lord Protector, Oliver Cromwell.

  Nothing was to be gained by such reflections. Decisively I turned my back upon the sea and strode out toward the sinking sun. Gradually the salt marsh gave way to more permanent ground upon which a few stray horses grazed, then at length to fields, albeit apparently untilled ones. There was not a soul in sight; it was as though I had entered a ghost world, its people swept away by some dire, invisible pestilence. Finally I came upon a lane, hemmed in ditches and thick hedges on either side, that meandered away in the direction that I needed to travel. I had only gone a little way when I saw two or three wispy spirals of smoke in the evening sky, above the hedge: surely a clear sign that I was almost within sight of Saint Mary Hoo.

  It was fortunate that the sight of the smoke quickened my thoughts, for almost in the same moment, I heard the unmistakeable sound of cantering horses behind me, further back on the lane. Perhaps a dozen of them, and not riderless. For the sound of their hooves was accompanied by the clank of sword-hilts upon armour, a sound familiar enough to me from the comings and goings of cavalry pickets in the camp at Ypres.

  I ran to my left and leapt into the ditch, concealing myself beneath the branches that straggled from the hedge. I was barely in time. The sound of the hooves upon firm ground rose to a crescendo, and I felt the vibration as they came level with me. I saw the knee-length stirruped boots of dragoons, their scabbards dangling at their sides, muskets slung across their backs. I glanced upward, and saw the evening sun glinting upon breastplates and upon the unmistakeable helmets of the New Model Army. There they rode, barely inches from me, the arrogant, righteous legion that had slaughtered my father and beheaded my king.

  I recalled Henfield’s words: You’ll not see a turtle helmet this side of Strood. If my skipper had been wrong in that, what else about my present mission might prove to be unfounded?

  Finally the last of them was past me. I breathed long and hard in relief —

  Breath that was crushed out of me as a stout left arm pinioned me from behind, while the right held cold metal against my bare neck.

  ‘Now, friend,’ said my captor, his voice a low north country man’s rasp, ‘I wonder who can he be who hides himself from a lawful patrol of godly soldiery?’

  I struggled, but the man’s grip was tight, and I knew that the blade upon my flesh had but little distance to go to carve a bright red smile across my throat. My heart pounded within my chest.

  ‘I — I am but a common mariner —’

  ‘Common mariner.’ The man laughed, his mouth so close to my ear that his mockery seemed almost to bore directly into my mind. ‘If you’re a common mariner, my friend, then I am the Grand Turk. Your hands betray you, for they’ve never pulled on a rope in all their days. And a sailor walking away from the sea, with drying mud coming up to his knees? A sailor who leaps into a ditch at the approach of the Ironsides, when there’s no hot press for the navy this summer? I think not, my friend. So now tell me who you really are, or I’ll have this ditch running red in a trice.’

  The flat of the blade pressed against my neck. I felt the nick of the edge, and a small trickle of blood running down my skin.

  Shame and humiliation coursed through me. I had failed — failed my brother, failed the king, failed the glorious name of Quinton. My short, worthless life would end here and now, butchered like a suckling pig in a Kentish ditch. If it was to be so, I vowed at least that I would die under my own name, not under some dishonourable alias.

  ‘Then know that you kill Matthew Quinton, brother to the noble Earl of Ravensden and a proud servant of this realm’s rightful sovereign, King Charles the Second!’

  Foolishly believing that the name of Quinton would be enough to awe any man, I struggled against his hold. My assailant whistled, but his grip on me remained firm. ‘Quinton? Quinton of Ravensden? So, what, grandson to the Ravensden that fought the Armada? He who sailed with Drake?’ I gave a slight nod. ‘Quinton of Ravensden, then, and thus by your own admission a traitor to the Commonwealth and a sworn enemy of His Highness the Lord Protector?’

  ‘An enemy to the usurper and tyrant Cromwell — yes, thanks be unto God! Now finish me, man.’ I felt tired, and old before my time. Strangely I was not afraid of death in that moment, the first of the hundred upon hundred times when it has seemed about to visit me.

  The blade left my throat, the grip slackened, and I was free to turn. I saw before me a stocky, meanly-dressed fellow, perhaps ten years older than myself, with a keen, smiling face.

  ‘An enemy to Cromwell is a friend to Tom Clarabut, especially if he’s the grandson of the famous Lord Ravensden himself. A true English hero if ever there was one. But God help King Charles if he’s sending boys as raw as you to do his business, Matthew Quinton. I followed you half a mile along that lane and you never saw me. You’re not even a passable spy, my friend.’

  I bridled at that, but allowed it to pass; after all, this Clarabut still had a long knife in his hand, and I could feel the blood on my neck.

  ‘You are for the king also?’ I asked. What else, at bottom, would have made the man hide himself from the dragoons?

  Clarabut laughed. ‘I’m for your king in that he’s not the hypocrite Cromwell. And they say Charles Stuart is a man who knows his way between a woman’s thighs — between many women’s thighs. That’s sufficient to earn him Tom Clarabut’s respect.’

  ‘Damn you,’ I cried, forgetting the knife, ‘you dare slander the Lord’s Anointed so?’

  I stepped toward him, but the blade came up before my face. ‘You’re strangely determined to persuade me to kill you, Matthew Quinton. And if you’re going to die for the Lord’s Anointed, you’d better have him crowned at Westminster, for only then does divine grace bestow itself upon him. Is that not what you Cavaliers believe?’

  This was a brazen rogue indeed, but also a strangely knowledgeable one. A rude northern churl with a fine grasp of the symbolism of the coronation ceremony, waving a blade in front of my eyes in a ditch in Kent; I have had few stranger encounters.

  ‘Now, my friend,’ said Clarabut, ‘we can stay in this ditch, and you can take umbrage at every word I utter, and in the end I’ll be forced to despatch you to your maker. Or we can proceed like decent fellows, get out of the ditch and take the lane to the village yonder.’

  ‘Why should I go along with you, when you threaten my life with every other breath?’ I demanded impatiently.

  Clarabut shook his head. ‘Well, I see it thus, Matthew Quinton. One markedly tall young man alone near the coast, pretending to be a seaman but talking like a lawyer and with hands like a maiden - now that screams “spy”, and will most surely bring that troop of dragoons upon you in the blinking of an eye. Especially as that troop of dragoons is under orders to apprehend ju
st one man, travelling alone.’

  ‘You?’ I said.

  ‘Me, Tom Clarabut. But two men together upon the road, and at table — who will quarrel with that? A master and his apprentice, or two brothers, or whatever tale we choose to concoct; the world accepts such things, but looks with suspicion upon a man alone. If we go together, Matthew Quinton, we double our innocence and our security alike.’

  He stepped out of the ditch, put his knife into his belt and offered me his hand to haul me out.

  ‘And how,’ I demanded, ‘is my security improved if I go with the very man whom the dragoons are pursuing?’

  He smiled. ‘Because, Cavalier, I think what you need most at this moment is a man who knows how to fight and who knows how Noll Cromwell’s Ironsides think. Two qualities in which you are sadly lacking.’

  I looked at him intently. There was something in his bearing, and in the way he had handled his blade, that reminded me of Villasanchez and others I had encountered in the army — ‘You are a soldier,’ I said. ‘But your own kind pursue you. Which must mean, Tom Clarabut, that you are a deserter.’

  He shrugged. ‘So the muster-master would say. So the Lord Protector would say.’

  ‘And you say?’

  Tom Clarabut smiled: a gentle, rueful smile. ‘Ah, Matthew Quinton. What I say is that’s a tale best left for the road, and for a tankard at an alehouse.’

  * * *

  When Tom Clarabut spoke the word ‘tankard’, he evidently had in mind the word ‘kilderkin’. I do not know how convinced the landlord of the mean, low-roofed alehouse of Saint Mary Hoo was by our claim to be a master cobbler (Tom) and his unlikely apprentice (me), seeking employ at nearby Cliffe, but my new friend carried it off with such bravado and filled the tapster’s pocket with so much coin that any doubts the man might have had were swiftly assuaged. Tom chose a table at the opposite end of the room to the main door, close to the tapster’s hatch. The alehouse was nearly empty, apart from a drunken old blind cripple; the sullen tapster remarked that the local lads were still out in the fields on this long June evening, and with the tide now upon the ebb the fishermen of those parts were making ready to sail. Thus Tom Clarabut and I were left to an increasingly bibulous discourse, although I remained acutely aware that I needed to remain alert for that one word which would complete my mission: deliverance.