The Mountain of Gold (16 page)

I glanced up, and saw the flames creeping closer across the deck of
Antelope.
The
Harlingen
was already well ablaze, flames roaring from her deck and the single stump of a jury mast that served most of the ships laid up in ordinary.

We had no time. Two men, alone, would never cut all the cables and free the
Seraph
before the flames reached her. Kit must have had the same thought, for he looked at me and shook his head.

A sudden shout—'
Kernow bys vyken!'
—and I saw the enormous shape of George Polzeath rearing up out of the night onto the larboard wale of the
Seraph.
Behind him came Julian Carvell, brandishing an axe with the relish of a man who was more accustomed to using it as a weapon. Behind him, Ali Reis the Moor and another five of my men.

Polzeath saluted. 'Saw you and Mister Farrell by the light of the flames, Captain. Master Shipwright ordered us not to leave the dousing of the tar-house, but we don't take orders from the likes of him, sir.'

Carvell grinned; his accustomed condition. 'We're the ones who can swim, Captain,' he said in his slow Virginian drawl. 'Not many, but we should be enough.'

At that, we all set to the cables. The larboard side of
Antelope
was well alight now, and
Harlingen
was all but gone, a blackened, blazing hulk. A new danger to us, indeed, for as she burned she began to settle toward the dockyard wall, pulling
Antelope
over toward her. I could already feel the new strain on the cable I was hacking with fury; very soon,
Antelope
would begin to pull us over, into the flames. The row, and the swim, and the cutting, had all produced an exquisite concoction of pain throughout my body, but I drove myself on, chopping at the cable with as much vigour as I could muster. Seeing my weakness, a cheerful youth of Mount's Bay named Penhallow joined me at the cable, hacking at it with all his might.

'Hot work, this, Captain!' he cried.

Indeed, the heat from
Antelope
was reaching us now. Sweat ran down my naked torso, and I could feel my brow begin to burn. For we were now at an angle, and it was growing with every minute—it was harder to keep a footing .

My cable broke, and almost decapitated me as the end sprang back. Penhallow grabbed me and prevented me from falling. Almost at once, Kit and some of the others severed their own cables, and others broke of their own accord. The balance had suddenly switched in our favour, and I was flung bodily onto the deck as
Seraph
righted herself. We were free of the
Antelope.

Free from her, aye; but not apart from her. A wet dock is sealed against the tide, and has no current. Opening the gates would have taken too long, and besides, the tide was flooding. We needed to put distance between ourselves and the
Antelope,
but how?

'Trewartha, Reis, Polzeath—with me!' cried Kit. 'Carvell and the rest of you, unbatten the main hatch!'

At that, Kit and his three men raced below deck, while Carvell and the others hastened to open the large hatch in the middle of the main deck. Within barely a minute or two, a large wooden beam was being thrust out of the hatch to the waiting party on the main deck, Penhallow and I at the fore; a yard, and by the size of it, probably that for the foretopmast. Another followed in short order; a little smaller, so probably for the mizzen. Thank God we already had many of our stores aboard, these yards among them.

Kit and his men came back to the deck, and I saw his purpose. We divided into two parties, each taking one of the yards, and pushed them out over the side, resting them on the larboard rail. I joined the party with the foretopyard; no time to stand on dignity. With our makeshift poles, we shoved ourselves away from the flaming hulk of the
Antelope.
Inch by inch, we began to separate from that hellish conflagration. Our hull and our faces were scorched. But would it be far enough—?

With relief, I saw four boats coming out to us from the head of the dock. Master Attendant Cox was finally coming to our aid. We caught the lines as they were thrown up to us, and the boats took the drifting
Seraph
in tow, bringing us safe over to the east side of the dock and a berth alongside the old
Nonpareil.
Behind us, I could see the Master Shipwright's teams suppressing the last remnants of the fire in the yard itself.
Antelope
was burning hard, her upperworks all but gone, and beyond her, it was just possible to see the blackened bow of
Harlingen,
burned almost to the waterline.

But we had saved the
Seraph.

Only later, as I was clad in dry clothing and took soup and wine in the Master Attendant's house, did I consider exactly what we had saved. My employment and my pay, certainly. A good new king's ship, true. But we had also saved the lunatic quest for the apocryphal mountain of gold, and ensured that the next few months of my life would be spent in the company of the renegade O'Dwyer. That night, and so many times since that night, I have wondered whether I would have done better to have ignored the half-heard cry of 'fire!' from that child in Wapping, and allowed the
Seraph
to be consumed by the flames.

Nine

One of the abiding consequences of Doctor Tristram Quinton's unexpected and (from my mother's perspective) entirely unwelcome appearance at the introductory reception for the soon-to-be-Countess Louise had been a reluctant edict from the Earl prohibiting the Master from visiting his family home, Ravensden Abbey. This was certainly not of Charles' conception; in executing it, he was merely the mouthpiece for his mother and his bride-to-be. My dear brother was perhaps the bravest man I ever knew, but alas, his bravery extended only as far as the male sex. When it came to women, he ever surrendered with greater haste than old de la Palice when faced with Henry the Eighth's array of knights at Guinegate. I found the whole business shaming, for what authority did my mother and brother possess to deny my uncle the right to visit the graves of his own father and brother? In truth, I need not have concerned myself: Tristram being Tristram, the edict was a dead letter from the beginning. A sudden increase in nocturnal sightings of the spectral sixth Earl of Ravensden suggested the means by which my uncle paid his respects to the eighth and ninth of that ilk. By day, the Master of Mauleverer College took great delight in turning up at the kitchen door, disguised as a beggar, to be taken in by a happily colluding Goodwife Barcock. However, the edict created certain difficulties for those of us who were uneasy about our prospective Countess Louise. We could not meet in person at the abbey, and Francis Gale's vicarage was rather too close to Ravensden and thus to the prying eyes of my mother. Mauleverer, over which Tristram Quinton ruled almost as a feudal monarch, was too distant for frequent visits; and with the fitting out of the miraculously preserved
Seraph
now in its final stages, I was taking enough of a liberty by being away from the ship at all. Thus it was that on a bitter day at the very beginning of December, Cornelia, Francis Gale and I found ourselves on a punt, being steered by a reluctant Phineas Musk through the thin ice that encrusted one of England's last undrained fens.

After a quarter-hour or so, our destination appeared gloomily through the freezing fog that enshrouded the hoar-crusted reeds on all sides of our craft. A small, ancient building with ruined arches and columns abutting it, the farmhouse of Skelthorn had once been a Dominican friary, and was virtually unaltered from its monastic function as the institution's refectory. At the Dissolution, the decayed friary fell into the hands of Earl Harry, my ancestor; and his grandson, Earl Matthew, in turn had made it his chief bequest to his younger son. Tris obtained a small but useful income from the estate, but more importantly, it provided him with a refuge far from both my mother and the disapproving glares of the Fellows of Mauleverer; perhaps by way of compensation for their unfashionable and uncomfortably popish prohibition on marriage, the college statutes permitted the Master a quite remarkable degree of latitude in the residence requirements. Consequently, here at Skelthorn my uncle could indulge his passions to the full; both his passion for women (or at least, for such women as could be tempted to such a remote place by such a strange man) and for what he termed the exploration of all human knowledge, physical and metaphysical, but which was described by most contemporaries rather more crudely as mere alchemy.

As the punt approached, we could see the dim light of candles through the thick glass windows and a thin pall of smoke struggling to free itself from the chimney and fight its way through the low, chill fog. Tris's steward, a silent, bent old man named Drewett, came down to the water's edge to greet us in his unsmiling way. He led us into the main room of Skelthorn, the vaulted former refectory. We were all used to the sight, of course, but I still wondered how strangers would react upon seeing it for the first time. It was not so much the chaos of books and jars strewn on every available surface, nor the unmistakeable odour of sulphur, which seemed to be the essential ingredient of most of my uncle's experiments. Rather, it was the fact that the whole of the far wall was taken up by skulls. Shelf after shelf of skulls. During the chaos of the civil wars, Tris had apparently 'liberated' an entire medieval ossuary from a church somewhere in the wilds of Derbyshire. Quite what earthly, or indeed unearthly, purpose they could serve on this remote isle in the Fens, only Our Lord and Doctor Tristram Quinton knew.

The Master of Mauleverer greeted us with his customary cheeriness and somewhat chaotic domestic arrangements; Drewett produced jugs of good Malaga sack, claret and ale, hard cakes of indeterminate age, and some plates of coffee, though quite how (and why) this newest and most fashionable of London commodities had made its way to the remote fastness of Skelthorn was a sublime mystery.

Francis, Cornelia and I settled onto ancient and precarious stools, while Tris sank into his vast carved and cushioned chair, somewhat resembling the throne of an oriental potentate; no doubt another appropriation during England's age of blood. Drewett disappeared, while Musk took up a watchful position as far from the unsettling wall of skulls as he could possibly be.

So we began. I was made to repeat the story of the Deptford fire, although Cornelia, Musk and Francis were well enough versed in it. But Tris was never a good listener, and fidgeted throughout. Besides, we were all there to discuss rather different fare; a subject that my uncle began to address in an unexpectedly oblique way.

'The mastership of an Oxford college,' said Tris expansively, 'gives a man many advantages. Status and prestige, naturally. A fine wine cellar, of course.' He took a sip of his claret. 'But perhaps the greatest advantage of all is that he has an ever-growing corpus of present and former students, drawn from all parts of the land and from most ranks and conditions. Now, if a college master is minded to use it in such a way, my friends, then he has at his disposal a web of agents as all-pervasive as old Thurloe's.' And Tris would have known that better than anyone, I thought; there were persistent, though always unconfirmed, rumours that he had served John Thurloe, Cromwell's spymaster-general, in certain important but never entirely specific ways. These rumours provided an intriguing counterpoint to the undoubted fact that Thurloe's remarkably efficient organisation had never quite succeeded in capturing one of the most sought-after royalist agents of the day, namely Tristram's nephew, my brother, Charles Quinton, the tenth Earl of Ravensden. 'Thus it is in the present case,' Tris continued. 'Our Lady De Vaux has been markedly adroit in covering her tracks, but not quite adroit enough, perhaps. Although we are clearly still some way short of possessing sufficient evidence to convince even the most venal of magistrates.'

'English law,' said Cornelia dismissively. 'I will never understand it. The plainly guilty go free and become rich while the plainly innocent are hanged.'

'That is why it is called common law, my dear,' I jested, 'for it is applied only to the common people.'

My wife was evidently in no mood for such humour, and cast me the blackest of looks.

'Let us consider what we now know about the lady,' Tris said. '
Imprimis,
the matter of her first marriage to Sir Bernard De Vaux, in the year forty-five. Now, this Sir Bernard was a staunch cavalier, whose seat lay at Billringham in the county of Lincoln. A remote and blasted place, I'm told by the young exhibitioner of Bourne who has made enquiries for me in those parts. Forty-five was the bloody climax of our civil wars, of course—the year that claimed my dear brother, the late earl.' My father, in other words, fallen in glory upon Naseby field. And yet in the midst of all that slaughter, Sir Bernard De Vaux, a lifelong bachelor aged fifty-nine, discovers for himself a new bride, and a bride of no more than sixteen or seventeen summers at that. De Vaux had been a notable commander for the King in the south, where he harried Dorset quite mercilessly, and had returned to Billringham to recover from wounds. He brought the girl with him—several thereabouts can recall the day—and they were wed within a week.' Tris paused and took an exceptionally long draught of wine, even by his catholic standards. 'A strange thing, then, that no record of the marriage exists. No entry at all in the parish register, for the page for that year has been torn out. A pity, for the then vicar of Billringham was most assiduous in providing details of a bride's parentage, and of her native parish if not an inhabitant of his own.'

'What was she hiding?' cried Cornelia. Answer me that!'

'It need not be suspicious, and it need not be her doing' said Francis reasonably. 'It was the height of the war, and many such records were mutilated or lost when the fanatic brethren turned their wrath upon the churches.' That had certainly been true at Ravensden, where some rude Puritans of Bedford had smashed the ancient stained glass and shot at the wooden angels on the roof. 'But the matter can be addressed easily enough. A transcript of the register should have been sent to the bishop at the end of each year, and even during the war, the record-keeping of this diocese was exemplary. I shall visit the archive at Buckden before I come down to join the ship—it will be easy enough for me to find a pretence to pay a respectful farewell to the Bishop.' Like every incumbent of Ravensden since the Conquest, Francis Gale was a clergyman of the vast Lincoln diocese: a territory so extensive that its palace had to be at Buckden, not far from us, as the Lord Bishop had cause to regret whenever my mother's coach passed through his gate.