The Mountain of Gold (23 page)

Only then did my inner alarm beacon burst into flame. I tensed. All of us there on the quarterdeck had the fire at Deptford in mind; of course we did. If that had been part of a conspiracy to prevent the sailing of the
Seraph,
then surely the perpetrators would not rest at just that single attempt? But I also had my own private reasons for suspecting the oncoming flyboat. My officers might possess infinitely greater knowledge of the sea, but they did not possess the very particular knowledge—and experience—that belonged to their captain. For my officers had not just fought a brutal sword fight with Habakkuk Leech and his murderous gang. My officers were not the target of the vengeance of a deranged Knight of Malta. My officers had not listened to one of the land's most powerful politicians warn that the mission of the
Seraph
would not be permitted to succeed. The approaching ship seemed to bear the imprimatur of each or all of those dark forces, and the dread grew in me.

As calmly as I could, I said, 'Gentlemen, we will clear for battle, if you please. I would have all necessary hands aloft. My compliments to Mister Negus and Gunner Lindman; I request their immediate presence on the quarterdeck.' Then an afterthought—'Oh, my compliments to Mister Plummer. Please tell him that his services will not be required for some little time, and that for his own safety, I suggest he goes below.'

I expect to go to my grave, and remain there, as the only captain in the history of our illustrious navy who ever ordered the decks cleared for action so far upstream between the shores of Kent and Essex that he was almost twixt Surrey and Middlesex instead. This unique event was witnessed by a huddle of curious tinkers on the footslope of Purfleet, and also evidently caused not a little surprise to the off-duty larboard watch, who emerged complainingly into the bitter cold and a particularly vicious shower of sleet. Still, the entire crew set to with a will. I heard the clatter of the wooden partitions on the main deck being taken down, the dull thuds as the gunports lifted, the grinding of the gun carriages on the decks as our new battery was run out for the first time.
Seraph
was ready for her first battle.

The grim flyboat came on, she on the starboard tack, we on the port. Of course, in the normal order of things she would give way to us, even though we had the wind—naturally, a merchant's hull should always give way to a king's, regardless of their tack or position—and salute us in her passing. But I was now entirely convinced that she had no intention of giving way to us at all. I determined to prove it.

'Gentlemen,' said I to my quarterdeck officers, 'what say you to coming to starboard by three points?'

Negus, who had joined us, was quick to respond to this most unspeakable heresy. 'Alter course at all, sir? An act unworthy of a king's ship? And alter course to
starboard?"

'I think the King and His Royal Highness will forgive me the dishonour of giving way, Mister Negus, if it saves his ship from a head-on collision. And if you were he, what would you least expect
Seraph
to do?'

Negus and the rest saw my point, and I was mightily gratified to receive a smile and a nod from Kit Farrell, for this proposition of mine was truly stretching my infant command of seamanship to its limits. My thinking was thus. If, as I believed, the flyboat had no intention of giving way, but was determined rather upon ramming us, then he was probably gambling that we would do one of two things: either ploughing straight into him thanks to the arrogant pride, or the unvarnished ignorance, to be expected from a mere gentleman captain; or else, if the veteran navigators on the quarterdeck prevailed over their feeble chief, the
Seraph,
still on the port tack, would surely alter course to larboard to avoid collision, thus keeping the weather gauge. I prayed that the skipper of the approaching ship was no chess-playing Machiavel who might anticipate my double bluff.

If she had a skipper at all. For as the flyboat came steadily on, no man could be seen on her deck, or in her yards. She seemed as a ghost ship.

Francis Gale came on deck in that moment, looked at the approaching vessel, and raised an eyebrow.

I said, 'A prayer might be suitable, Chaplain.'

Gale improvised with considerable dexterity, as he always did. 'O Lord of hosts, fight for us, that we may glorify thee. O Lord God, preserve us from those who seek our destruction. O Lord, arise, help us, and deliver us for thy Name's sake. Amen.'

As many as were within earshot repeated the 'Amen', Musk with rare enthusiasm for such an ancient cynic. Gale said, 'Well, indeed. The esteemed Lords of Convocation didn't devise a special prayer for this situation, Captain. Let's hope the Lord is in a tolerant mood today.'

The two ships seemed to be approaching each other at an ever-increasing rate, the flyboat relentless in its course. Time for one last gesture—'Mister Lindman!' I cried from the quarterdeck through another flurry of sleet. The gunner, down in the ship's waist, raised his hat in salute. 'A warning shot from the bow chaser if you please!' This, after all, was the nicety that we would go through to enforce the salute to the flag on any other recalcitrant merchantman.

Lindman passed on the order to the crew manning one of the two nine-pound minions, up in the forecastle, and the gun fired. The shot tore a hole in the foresail of the flyboat, but still she came on.

Musk suggested, quite mildly, that this might be a good moment to make our move. Kit shook his head. We held our course. Every man in the rigging, every man on the deck, had their eyes trained only on the flyboat.

Then, as if they were commanded at once by some invisible lever, Kit, Castle and Negus all nodded in unison.

Helm three points to starboard!'
I cried.

Now we would see if the King of England's confidence in the sailing qualities of the
Seraph
was well placed...

By God, so it was! With the whipstaff brought over, our bow swung to starboard almost at once—the
Happy Restoration, Jupiter
and
Wessex
had been veritable carthorses in comparison .

And in the same moment, the judgment of Captain Matthew Quinton, too, was redeemed. For the flyboat had made her move—made it, indeed, before I gave the order to my own helm. With a slower, broader ship and a more sluggish rudder, her invisible captain could only give his own order, anticipating the manoeuvre he felt we must make, a little while before I issued mine. Thus the flyboat, too, moved to starboard; but instead of ramming into us and causing untold damage, she passed harmlessly to larboard, barely a few feet away from our own larboard side.

'I will magnify thee, O God, my King,' murmured Francis Gale, 'and I will praise thy Name for ever and ever.' He smiled at me. 'Methinks the rest of the Hundred and Forty-Fifth psalm will be most appropriate for the next ship's prayers, Captain.'

Now, all was changed. For we were a ship of war, with fourteen primed and deadly pieces of ordnance on our larboard side. And the other was but a flyboat.

'Gunners!' I cried. 'Prepare to give fire!' Wait until the relative movement of the two hulls meant that all our broadside was able to bear—wait—
'Give fire!'

Ours was still a raw and untrained crew, and our fire was hardly in unison. We were so close to the other that we could hear the balls striking the hull like hailstones upon a window. Many must have gone straight through, for a flyboat's scantlings are so much lighter than those of a man-of-war, but it was impossible to see until our own gunsmoke cleared—and with the wind from the north, that smoke carried back over our own deck, blinding and choking us. When at last it cleared, and we had coughed the acrid fumes from our throats, we observed that the flyboat, badly damaged and listing to larboard, was continuing her own turn to starboard, coming ever closer to the wind and to the Essex shore as she did so.

Castle saluted formally. 'Captain,' he said. 'Shall we come round, sir, take that cursed craft and arrest her murderous crew?'

Of course, that was the natural course of action for us to take; but even with as nimble a ship as
Seraph,
bringing her about, then beating back against wind and tide, would take no little time, especially in such raw conditions. We would then hardly get round into the Hope on that favourable ebb. And besides .

'She's going to run herself aground,' said Kit Farrell. 'We'd never get up to her in time.'

We held our course. We officers went to the stern rail of the poop as one man, and watched as the flyboat ran herself onto the mud of the Essex shore. The small boat that she towed behind her was hauled in, and six men climbed down into it. Six men; the skeleton crew that had sought to wreak untold damage on the
Seraph.

But on whose behalf? My mind conjured up those same faces. Leech, Garvey, Montnoir. Whoever it was must have been mightily determined to prevent our sailing, and able to command a fair purse—for it would have cost no pittance in gold to obtain a flyboat for such a mission, and to pay a crew a sufficient wage for them to risk their lives or liberty in such a way. Discovering the answer would needs wait, for
Seraph
was sailing on majestically, downstream on the ebb, approaching the turn in the river at Greenhithe. Beyond that, it would be the Hope, the salute to Gravesend and Tilbury, the Nore, and finally the open sea at last.

Now, truly, the voyage of the
Seraph
was beginning.

PART THREE

His Majesty's Ship, The
Seraph

At Sea and in the Gambia River
December 1663 to April 1664

Thirteen

The papists have a notion called purgatory. This is neither heaven nor hell, but rather a place between, where souls wait an eternity to be judged. But one does not need to be a papist, nor indeed to die, to experience purgatory: one merely has to be aboard a ship in the Downs. On a cold, foggy December morning, with but little wind—and that contrary—there are few places that more closely resemble a bleak eternal antechamber. Once again I studied the lights and fires of distant Deal, the ghostly shape of the white cliffs to the south and the squat, menacing bulks of old Harry the Eighth's castles that lined the bay, all of them appearing and disappearing intermittently as the fog swirled about us. I looked about from my quarterdeck at the shrouded shapes of perhaps a hundred ships at anchor, the souls aboard awaiting the judgment of fair winds that would bear them toward their destinations. Norwegian timber ships bound for Spain, Frenchmen bound for London with the wines of Gascony, and dozen upon dozen of Dutch flyboats, bound for every harbour on the globe; all of them congregated in that broad anchorage. To seaward of us lay Holmes'
Jersey,
a Fourth Rate as tough and experienced as her adventurous captain, and beyond her the
Mary,
a battle-scarred Third Rate that had been called
Speaker
in Cromwell's day. Waves broke on the Goodwin Sands, the great barrier that kept ships safe between the open sea and the Kentish coast; one day, though, those sheltering sands and the waves breaking upon them would do for the same
Mary,
three other great ships and fifteen hundred blameless seamen of England, all perished in the greatest storm ever known in these isles. Even forty years before that catastrophe, I stood upon my deck and prayed that one ship, just one, would meet such a fate. She was the unkempt merchant ship of middling size that was beating down toward us from the island of Thanet.

Kit Farrell was at my side, and Kit was his accustomed cheery self, reeling off the sailing qualities and likely cargoes of ship after ship with the enthusiasm of a schoolboy. He could not know I was experiencing a kind of double purgatory that was unique to myself; for it was here, in the Downs, that Colonel Brian Doyle O'Dwyer would come aboard the
Seraph.

Kit pointed toward the approaching ship. 'I don't envy the soldiers, cooped up aboard her all the way down to the Guinea shore,' said Kit. 'She's old and narrow. She'll pitch and yaw like a crazed thing in anything worse than a swell. And look there, sir, her owners must have cut her stern down at some point, and reshaped the bow. All to create a little more space to cram in a little more cargo and give them a little more profit. A botched job, that, right enough. Any carpenters' crew of the navy could fashion something better in a matter of a few watches, if not sooner. Aye, an ugly brute indeed is our friend, the
Prospect of Blakeney.

The troop ship manoeuvred clumsily through the waters of Sandwich Bay and came to an anchor between the
Jersey
and ourselves, making the private signal with the former. The longboat that she towed in her wake was pulled in to the side, and after a few minutes, a cloaked shape descended into it. O'Dwyer.

Kit sensed my mood and fell silent before he left me, for he had his part to play in this grim charade.

The boat's crew, so many unwitting Charons, came alongside
Seraph,
and O'Dwyer pulled himself onto our deck, a brown face above the deep red hue of the king's uniform. He drew his sword, saluted the king's ensign, and was in turn saluted by the whistle-note of Boatswain Farrell.

My last gesture of defiance was to remain rooted to my quarterdeck, forcing the renegade to come to me. We doffed in exchange to each other, and he looked about him with an air of a contented man.

'So, Captain,' he said in that strange accent of his, half-Irish and half-Arab, 'this is your command. A fine frigate indeed, this
Seraph.
Named for the fiery angels guarding the throne of God, as I recall. His Majesty is judicious in his choice of names.'

If not in his choice of colonels
—The blackness of my mood coloured my reply. 'Indeed, sir. One day, no doubt, she will prove mightily useful for firing at the corsairs of the Straits.'