The Death Ship of Dartmouth: (Knights Templar 21) (50 page)

‘Me?’ Rob squeaked, staring up at the flag fluttering from the top.

‘Go on!’

‘I can’t climb that, it’s too high!’

‘Come back again when you can,’ the man said, and returned to his friends, laughing.

Rob looked up at the flag again. ‘No one can do that!’

The oldest, greyest man strolled over and stood beside Rob. He looked down at the lad with a sorrowful expression. Then he sprang up lightly, gripped the wooden pole with his hands, crossed his shins about the wood, and quickly slithered his way up it to the very top. Once there, he kept on rising until he was sitting on the topmost button.

Rob didn’t wait to see him return to the ground. He walked homewards, disconsolate. At Simon’s house, he
looked about him in the small parlour and began to re-lay the fire, throwing a faggot on top and wondering whether he’d ever be able to go to sea.

As luck would have it, that afternoon and evening there was a foul thunderstorm. Rob remained in the house while it raged, and Bailiff Puttock spoke of another storm he had known. He had been off the Islands south and west, when the storm struck, and the ship had almost foundered on rocks. He had been miraculously lucky to survive.

In his mind’s eye, Rob had a vivid picture: a ship with shredded sails, rolling and slipping towards rocks. The waves crested over the green/black shapes, exploding upwards as the ship moved towards them. And Rob saw a face at the prow, a face full of terror as he screamed the danger to the crew. It was his own face he saw.

And in that moment Rob decided he would prefer to remain on land.

Of all those who survived the murders of Dartmouth’s terrible September 1324, Peter Strete, disgraced clerk to the powerful John Hawley, was the most fortunate.

His injuries were a long while in the mending. However, when he could move again, and his eyes had healed and reopened, the Bailiff had him taken to the monastery at Buckfast for convalescence. There he gradually healed, under the careful nursing of the Brother Almoner, until at last he could walk unaided.

The Brother Almoner was a quiet, kindly old soul. When Strete gradually came to speak to him, and mentioned his tribulations in the gaming dens of Dartmouth, the old man
cackled himself into a coughing fit.

‘I suppose they preferred games of chance, like those with dice? Hazard or somesuch?’

‘Many dice games, yes,’ Strete admitted. ‘But they are safe, because they depend upon chance. That is as fair as any man could hope for.’

‘Unless the dice were marked, or had a little hole drilled in them so that a bit of quicksilver could be dripped in, and the hole filled. Then you only have to tap the dice once or twice to change the fortune of the thrower. A man can fleece another with ease like that. Dear oh dear. They must have taken all you had!’

Strete pondered that. They had beaten him cruelly for not paying them the debt which they had made him incur because they had used unfair dice. He had never heard of such a thing before. ‘They could have killed me for cheating me!’ he exclaimed. What a fool he had been.

‘Aye. They wouldn’t want someone else in town to hear that they’d let a man off too lightly when he owed them money, Peter. No, I think you’re much better off away from them. Where will you go now?’

Strete felt a great wash of enthusiasm. ‘I shall go to Exeter,’ he declared.

In Exeter, he knew, there were manufacturers of dice. With a little advance on his first winnings, he was sure that a man could be persuaded to make a special set for him.

‘What are we?’

‘No, Al, not again!’

‘Come on! What are we?’

‘I said no, Al. I’m not having it!’

‘What are we?’

‘Shit, Al, since you ask, we’re cold, we’re wet, we’re without a job since Dartmouth took so bleeding long, and we’re footsore and weary and pissed off. All right?’

There was a moment’s silence, and then a new voice: ‘Cor! Did you see
her
? She was looking at me, she was! Do you think if I was to go and—’

‘Shut up, Law!’

‘Once you’ve got a beard, boy, you can think about girls like that.’

‘Just because you couldn’t get a girl like that, Bill.’

‘What did you say, you young tyke?’

‘I said, old man, that you couldn’t hope to attract a girl like her. She wants young and fit like me!’

‘I think she’d prefer a man with brains, lad. Someone like me.’

‘So, come on, boys! We don’t mind a little rain, do we? No, because we’re bleeding paviours, that’s why!’

In unison the other two voices rose:

‘Al, will you shut
up
!’

And Alred smiled to himself under his cowl because when the two were bickering like this, all was right in his world. It was only when they sulked quietly that he worried.

For now he had not a worry in the world.

This novel is partly based around the terrible Affair of the Silken Purses, in which the Queen of England, Isabella, saw gifts which she had embroidered herself and given to her sisters-in-law, being flaunted on the belts of three knights. In an age of Courtly Love, giving little tokens to a knight was hardly unknown, but to the Queen it must have seemed inappropriate, to say the least, for her brothers’ wives to give away her gifts.

Such treatment must have rankled. And so she went to her father, the King of France, and told him. I wonder whether she realised how catastrophic the results of this act would be? It led to the death of one sister-in-law, life-imprisonment for another, and it almost certainly caused the early death of her beloved father.

Many times I have been asked whether I use the internet much for research. This book is a prime example of why the internet is of no use whatsoever to a serious researcher, other than as a guide as to where to look for further information.

When looking into the matter of the silk purses, I first consulted my own collection of books, then went to the web to see what I could glean from there. It was wonderful. I
found lots of reports of the ‘Case of the Tour de Nesle’ as the matter became known. However, no one account was the same. I do not propose to go into the variations available on the web, but suffice it to say that I have so far come up with
five
different estimates of Isabella’s birthday. The problem with the web is, you can never tell whether the research is genuine or whether it was compiled during an hour’s tedium by an acne-ridden youth from Idaho.

The great advantage of a book written by one such as Doherty, Weir or Mortimer (see my list at the end of this
Author’s Note
) is that the publisher will have checked the credentials of the writer; the latter will have gone to great lengths to validate any conclusions he or she has reached; the editors will have gone through their material in detail, and copy editors and others will have added their own five penn’orth. This is why I have more faith in words written on paper than material on computer.

What I also rely on, to a greater or lesser degree, is my own gut-feel based on two decades of research. Usually I can make a good estimate of what might have happened in the past, and on the occasions when I’ve not been able to confirm facts, it has astonished me how regularly I have been proved right subsequently.

Of course, the problem for an historian is that many of the original histories were themselves written decades or even centuries after the events; we are relying on the words of chroniclers like Froissart and hoping he had good sources. Froissart was probably born about 1337, and didn’t get to England until about 1361, so he certainly did not write about Isabella from the perspective of a first-hand witness.

This book is set almost entirely in the beautiful Devon port of Dartmouth. At the time of this story, Dartmouth consisted of three different areas: Tunstal up on the hill; Hardness down at the river’s edge but north of the mill pool; Clifton, south of the mill pool. The southernmost part of Dartmouth, which is still known as Southtown (a name first recorded in 1328), was a separate administrative district in 1324, a part of the neighbouring manor of Stoke Fleming, and was only brought into Dartmouth’s borough officially in 1463. I’m afraid I’ve let Baldwin and Simon play fast and loose with the borough boundaries in this book, because the alternative would have been to have a novel that was even longer than this one turned out to be!

Dartmouth has always been a very important part of Britain’s history. It had a marvellous deep-water harbour that was used for the Second Crusade in 1147 and the Third Crusade in 1190. There was space for hundreds of ships, and it became a popular naval port because it was relatively easily defended as well as being superbly well sheltered.

As the years passed, Dartmouth grew in importance. It depended originally on cloth exports from Totnes, but with the acquisition of large parts of south-western France by Henry II’s marriage to Eleanor of Aquitaine, the city expanded with the wine trade.

One of Dartmouth’s most famous sons is John Hawley. However, the keen-eyed reader will wonder how it was that he could have so stimulated Chaucer during a meeting in (probably) 1373 or so that Chaucer wrote about The Shipman in his
Canterbury Tales
, based on a man who was
already a reasonable age in 1324. Well, the John Hawley of Chaucer’s time was the son of
another
John Hawley. It seems clear to me that the Hawleys were simply following that good old tradition of re-using a perfectly adequate Christian name. ‘If “John” worked for father and grandfather, it’ll do for the lad’ seems to have been the attitude. I have no idea whether the John Hawley who so impressed Chaucer had a grandfather also called John, but it is not an unreasonable assumption.

The two books I would recommend for anyone seeking a little more information about Dartmouth, if you can find them, are W.G. Hoskyns’s mammoth tome
Devon
, published by Devon Books in 1954 and updated regularly since. The other book is
Dartmouth
by Percy Russell, published by BT Batsford Ltd in 1950.

In the course of my search for accurate information about Isabella, her husband Edward II, and the appalling Despensers, I have acquired a goodly library. To any reader, I can heartily recommend the following titles, in no particular order. Alison Weir’s marvellous
Isabella – She-Wolf of France, Queen of England
(Jonathan Cape, 2005); Charles Hopkinson and Martin Speight’s
The Mortimers – Lords of the March
(Logaston Press, 2002);
Edward II
by Mary Saaler (Rubicon Press, 1997); the excellent
The Greatest Traitor, The Life of Sir Roger Mortimer, 1st Earl of March, Ruler of England 1327–1330
by Ian Mortimer (Jonathan Cape, 2003); Harold F. Hutchinson’s
Edward II – The Pliant King
(Eyre & Spottiswode, 1971); Paul Doherty’s
Isabella and the Strange Death of Edward II
(Constable, 2003); not forgetting Michael Prestwich’s
The
Three Edwards – War and State in England, 1272–1377
(Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1980) and R. Perry’s
Edward the Second – Suddenly, at Berkeley
(Ivy House, 1988) – and last but certainly not least, Georges Duby’s
France in the Middle Ages 987–1460
(Blackwell, 1991).

A final thought: as always, any errors or omissions are my own responsibility …

… or the fault of the teenager from Idaho. May his acne never fade if he has led me astray!

Michael Jecks

North Dartmoor

October 2005