Peril on the Sea Page 7

  Sherwin pressed the silver into the farmer’s hand and then he turned to address Katharine.

  “My lady,” he said, “I am sorry you had to see this.”

  Sherwin had known many women before, including an intimate entanglement with Lily Sprocket, the daughter of the owner of the Cock and Miter inn. He had thought himself in love with Lily, and ruefully advised himself to forever keep a closer guard on his affections when Lily took up with an ostler from Epping, found herself pregnant, and married him.

  Sherwin had never met a woman like Katharine Westing. She had a direct, lively gaze and a ready smile. But she also had that indefinable quality so often described as beauty.

  “My dear Sherwin,” said Katharine with a smile, “I have seen many things worse.”

  “My lady,” said Sherwin—feeling his earnest intentions never to love again slipping away—”I regret to hear it.”

  He took the offered gloved hand, the white leather of the glove well cured and not a mean piece of stitchery, either. But for all the expense of the silk lining of her mantle, lavender showing well against the heath-brown of the hood, there was a tear in her sleeve that had been daintily mended, and a fray along the instep of her shoe. She was well appointed, but not as wealthy as she had been in the recent past.

  “I suppose,” she said, “a felon such as yourself fires a pistol before breakfast every day.”

  “My lady,” was all he could think of saying, “if it pleases you.”

  BUT TRYCE did not leave at once.

  “I’ll not retreat to the ship,” he told Sherwin, “without the captain’s pig, as he requested, and payment from your lad for the money he took.” His leg was still bleeding, and no one had given another thought to his medical needs.

  Katharine had gone back toward the great house in the distance, taking her sword-wearing servant with her, and Evenage was trying to lead Tryce away with a soothing Now, now, like a dockside constable calming an angry drunk.

  “Mr. Highbridge,” the sergeant said, “will find a way to pay you back for your trouble.”

  “I want payment now,” said Tryce.

  “As for compensation,” Sherwin could not restrain himself from saying, “you owe us all for saving your life, covering your disgrace, and not delivering you over to those hungry dogs.”

  Tryce gave a shake of his shoulders, and Evenage released him.

  “Do I?” said Tryce, smoothing down his sleeves with a show of dignity. “Shall we simply forget all about this, then?”

  “As you wish,” said Sherwin shortly.

  “Until, as it happens,” added Tryce, “I beat the coin out of your little lifter, when his new master is playing cock pigeon with his white-gloved doxy.”

  A lifter was a street thief, on a level with pickpockets and fruit-stall filchers, and Sherwin took offense at this slur against Bartholomew. As for the insult against his respect for Lady Katharine, and for the lady’s good name, Sherwin had seen gentlemen on Fleet Street draw their blades and use them for less.

  But he made no quick remark, and he kept his sword in its sheath, with an effort of will.

  There would be plenty of opportunity in the future to teach Tryce good manners—perhaps even at the point of a sword.

  V

  BLOOD ON HIS

  DOUBLET

  18

  ALL RIGHT, FATHER, it’s done,” Katharine said. “I did as you requested—I have sent for Captain Fletcher. The seamen will return to visit us at day’s end.”

  Sir Anthony had rolled out one of his rare sea charts, this one printed in Holland, showing the Atlantic with the Azores puckering the sea’s white expanse like wounds that had imperfectly healed.

  “Now, Father,” she said, sitting down before the fire and tugging off her gloves, “tell me what you are planning.”

  She held the empty leather fingers up to her lips. She imagined the touch of Sherwin’s hand, the way his warm grasp would feel unprotected by leather. She had encountered many men in her role as hostess of Fairleigh. They had been shipwrights and navigators, shipping agents and knights. But no one had caught her eye like the young man with sunny brown hair and traces of blood on his doublet.

  She wanted to see him again, and in fact spend more than a small amount of time with him. She wanted this very much, and she was willing to run some risk to bring this opportunity about.

  If only she could think of a way.

  “Planning?” Sir Anthony was asking with a sideways smile. “What possible mischief can I be up to, inviting a notorious sea rake in for some roast capon?”

  “And baked goose, too,” said Katharine.

  “Heaven has sent us a goose?” asked Anthony.

  A visiting goose sometimes descended from the sky, or wandered in from some far-off place, like an itinerant scold. For all their bad temper, geese were social animals and drawn to flocks of other geese, ducks, chickens; and one goose to Katharine’s certain knowledge had taken up protective residence with a brood of rabbits.

  “Maggie,” she said, “fell into the hands of a particularly unpleasant sailor.”

  She briefly recounted the cruel incident that had befallen the goose well known enough to have earned an affectionate nickname.

  “Poor Maggie,” said Anthony wistfully. “The Spaniards for all their steel would not have had a chance with her to protect us.”

  Katharine wished her friends could meet Sherwin and his seagoing companions. She had paid a visit to her old friend Eleanor that morning, to see how her windmill survived the blustery night. Eleanor and her husband were happy. Their joy was easy to perceive, as easy as watching the sunlight fall from the sky. Clement Wood-field, Eleanor’s husband, had a rugged, horselike quality, and a horse’s contentment in work. Whenever Katharine saw him, he was lifting a sack of grain, or plying a rake, or using an awl to mend a harness. His family had thrived as potters, joiners, and millers as long as anyone could recall.

  Clement had a survivor’s instinct for avoiding trouble, and he had heard that a great Spanish fleet was expected to raid the south of England and leave not a moorhen alive. He had been sharpening his wood ax into a weapon, and grinding a billhook into a battle-pike. He was considering sending Eleanor to Winchester, to get her away from the coast.

  “You can guess,” Anthony was saying, “what my strategy is, can’t you?”

  He was not well today—his ulcerated leg was hurting. But on days when he was most beset by pain, his spirits were the keenest. He stirred the fire now, and then limped around the hall, thrusting the fire iron into shadows like a rapier.

  She said, “Please tell me.”

  “Guess.”

  “I will not make a sport of this, Father.”

  He smiled, and stabbed the iron into the fire, ringing it against the firedogs supporting the blazing log. “Katharine, we will steal our own vessel.”

  She had suspected this, without allowing herself to seriously entertain the prospect. She felt both excitement at the plausibility of the scheme, and dismay at the risk.

  “I don’t think that I am equal to actually sailing the high seas myself,” he continued, “and so we’ll pay Fletcher to do it for us. And he will, I have no doubt.”

  The idea thrilled her. The proposal had the merits of surprise as well as adventure, and it was a ruse that grasping Pevensey, for all his brisk and tireless avarice, would not have anticipated.

  “Where will you put our stolen Rosebriar,” she asked, “so Pevensey and his agents will not find her?”

  “Near Saint Mawes, on an inlet along the Cornish coast,” he said, indicating another map rolled up on the side table. “We’ll hide her from Pevensey, and after a few weeks I’ll ease the ship up to Bristol, sit down with my negotiators there, and make inquiries as to selling a few tons of fine cinnamon.”

  “It might succeed,” she conceded. She was beginning to entertain the bare beginning of another possibility.

  “My scheme is sure to work,” argued Anthony. “I can
see no defect in the proposal at all.”

  “Unless Pevensey hears of it,” she said, “or discovers the truth afterward.”

  “By then it won’t matter,” said Anthony. “We’ll have our money.”

  She did not speak again for a long moment, lost in thought. “I am hopeful,” she said at length, “but I am also uneasy.”

  “About Fletcher? At heart, I warrant that he’s a man much like me.”

  “No,” she said. “I’m not worried about the famous captain. I am concerned about the men with him.”

  “What sort of sailors are they?” he asked.

  She could not respond for the moment. Her father was a clever man, and practical. He was a dreamer who nonetheless knew how to act in the world of real folk and rugged events. But he was not experienced with every breed of human nature.

  There were individuals worse even than Pevensey and his hirelings, and some of them might sail on the Vixen. The character of such rough folk did much to make her question the wisdom of her own embryonic plan.

  “Father, what do you know of Captain Fletcher?”

  “I knew the man to exchange greetings with back on Leadenhall Street,” Anthony was saying, “when I built craft for the Admiralty. So when I hear that the captain of the pirates teeming over our land is no nameless killer but England’s remarkable sea dog, I begin to let my mind fly with the swifts.”

  “How does the approach of war,” asked Katharine, “make your plan all the more crucial?”

  “Because we need to get the Rosebriar into a hiding place where the Spaniards can’t sack her.”

  “And me, too,” suggested Katharine.

  “Yes,” her father admitted, “I wish I could think of a safe place to secure you, as well.” It was like him to plunge from sharp enthusiasm to cloudy concern in an instant. She put her hand over his.

  “Fortiter in re,” she said, quoting part of one of her father’s favorite axioms.

  Mighty in deed.

  He gave an appreciative chuckle, but the concern lingered in his eyes.

  KATHARINE WAS SURE of it now—she had a plan of her own.

  19

  BUT HOW WAS IT, Bartholomew,” asked Sherwin, “that you could hide a scorpion under your tongue?”

  The two were hurrying along the road back toward the ship, behind Tryce and the sergeant. Evenage kept one arm around Tryce, but the injured seaman’s head could be seen jerking and swiveling as the man’s ill humor continued undiminished, and he voiced complaints without cease.

  Sherwin thought that it might prove prudent to walk faster and reach the Vixen and the captain well in advance of Tryce. But hurrying ahead seemed inappropriate, and even a little undignified, so Sherwin stayed a short stone’s throw behind the sergeant and the fuming seaman.

  “As to the scorpion,” said Bartholomew, “the little monster’s stinger, sir, was cut off.”

  “But nevertheless, dear Bartholomew—what a disagreeable duty you had to perform.”

  “My shipboard life is easier.” Bartholomew sighed. “But my mountebank master loved to sing, and he was fond of ladies and cats.”

  “Do you miss him?”

  “My master is in prison for failing to cure an illness,” said Bartholomew by way of answer, a little sadly, it seemed to Sherwin.

  “What sort of illness?” Sherwin inquired.

  “A gentleman in Calais, a captain’s clerk, had not voided his bladder, sir, for many days,” said Bartholomew. “He was in pain.”

  “It sorrows me to hear it,” said Sherwin.

  “My master sometimes performed the necessary operation, a quick in-and-out with a long blade or bodkin, and then always slipped from town the same day, sir, because all such operations end the same way.”

  “What way is that?”

  “Sir, the operation relieves the crisis, but then the patient dies.”

  Bartholomew walked in silence for a few strides, and then he said, “My master stayed in Calais because he loved a lady, sir.”

  “Did he?” asked Sherwin, not paying Bartholomew’s account full attention just then.

  He was trying to think of ways to see Lady Katharine again, and he was deeply troubled that, unless the captain sought his companionship this evening, he might never have the opportunity.

  Sherwin and the boy descended the cliff path, and it was clear at once to Sherwin that he should have taken pains to reach the vessel before Tryce.

  The ship’s carpenter was placing his tools into a leather holder and rolling the leather up into a bundle. Men with mauls hammered away at the barnacles that were unseen from Sherwin’s angle as he drew near the vessel. The seamen were folding their clothing, and setting out the most stubbornly moist mantles and cloaks on rocks near the cliff. The ship’s company had the air of a group that had been steadily at work, and whose chores were gradually being completed.

  The captain and Highbridge were consulting on the waterline, and from time to time the men looked up from their conversation to glance at the lookout on the cliff.

  The boatswain Lockwood was listening with an air of reluctant skepticism to Tryce as the man held forth, and even though the sergeant stood nearby and shook his head, negating what was being said, Tryce’s loud complaints were gathering a small congregation.

  “And then the lad Bartholomew took a knife he keeps in secret,” Tryce was saying, “and he slit me in the leg, here.” The blood, which had ceased to flow, was beginning to ooze again, as though to authenticate Tryce’s fictitious report.

  The seamen stirred, murmuring unhappily.

  “And then the little weasel was in my purse,” Tryce went on, “and taking as much silver as his nasty little fist could grab.”

  “That’s not as it happened,” the sergeant said. But even as he spoke Sherwin could tell by a few scattered chuckles that, although Tryce was considered to be the source of dramatic retellings, this most recent account was not necessarily considered to be fact. Sherwin surmised also that the sergeant, although respected, was not always believed, either. His protest was met with no great interest.

  The surgeon, however, was not laughing.

  The physician made his way over to where Tryce was standing, ignoring the seaman’s report of a pig the size of a fishing boat. Dr. Reynard knelt, examining the wound on Tryce’s leg with a critical eye, and when the doctor stood he said something quiet into the dour seaman’s ear.

  “You will not ever,” protested the seaman.

  “If that limb stays joined to your body, my man,” said the surgeon, “it will fester.”

  “And so fester yourself,” responded Tryce.

  “If the leg rots,” said the doctor, “so you will, too.”

  “And thus,” said Tryce, raising his voice and indicating Bartholomew with a theatrical gesture, “it is not enough that this lad Bartholomew winkles me out of ducats, but he tries to steal my leg as well.”

  20

  SHERWIN CAUGHT the gleam of spitefulness in Tryce’s eye.

  Tryce had decided that his power to defame and slur a gentleman like Sherwin, who was apparently in favor with Highbridge and the captain, was not very great. But Bartholomew was not so well regarded, and was open to slander.

  Furthermore, attacking Bartholomew was a sly and effective way to harm Sherwin, and Tryce’s manner seemed to indicate that in his present poisonous humor he would lose both legs, both arms, and perhaps even his head, if it would harm the newly arrived gentleman.

  Bartholomew folded his arms.

  “I’ll explain what happened, Bartholomew,” confided Sherwin quietly but, he hoped, reassuringly.

  “Say what you will, sir,” said Bartholomew, “when folk decide against you, your name is worthless.”

  Sherwin stepped to Tryce’s side and put his arm around the seaman, who kept his body at a stubborn position.

  “Tryce was bravely set on finding a grand pig for our table,” said Sherwin, with a heartiness that was nearly entirely assumed. “Just as Captain Fletc
her desired. And he found such a worthy quarry, too. But this beast proved to have the disposition of a fiend—nine devils, filled with fury, each individual sprite in this sow’s soul bent on rending our friend Tryce here open like a fish.”

  Tryce softened his posture and his frame gave a slight shiver at the recollection. He sighed. “She was a huge, vicious pig,” he said, “and I doubt we should let her go unpunished.”

  “For what?” asked Sherwin, giving Tryce a meaningful pat on the back.

  Tryce looked down at the pebble-strewn beach, and Sherwin realized that the seaman, for all his obstinate rancor, was a man facing the consequences of an injury. No thinking man wanted to spend what might prove to be his last few days as a mortal bearing false witness.

  “For the attacking of my leg,” said Tryce.

  The assembled men relaxed into a good-natured throng, expressing regret at Tryce’s injury and adding congratulations to Sherwin.

  At that moment the lookout high on the cliff sang, “Sail-ho!”

  The cry was almost happy, the sentinel’s voice being lit by the thrill of having spied a vessel after a long, uneventful vigil.

  But then the lookout added, “Nine sails—ten—southwest by west,” and his call was unmistakably anxious.

  THE CREW fell silent.

  Sherwin had the sickening, fearful thought that the Spanish fleet had made its appearance.

  A row of sails, a dozen at least, glided along the horizon, heading east toward Southampton and Portsmouth, the great seaports and unprotected farmland of England.

  The sails were full, and the dark shapes of the hulls barely visible. At this great distance, even on the clear afternoon, movement was impossible to discern, only the presence of stubborn apparitions that had not been there a little while ago, and now represented a tidy multitude, intent on the wind.

  Captain Fletcher walked among his men, giving them comfort.

  “It’s only Drake,” he said. “With his scouting fleet, heading back toward Portsmouth. He’s been looking for the Armada off Ushant, beyond the far reaches of Brittany, and by all appearances he hasn’t had any luck.”