The Great Siege

9

In Bristol the boys lay overnight in the door of a warehouse, sleeping fitfully as sailors bawled drunkenly and sometimes tried to nudge them awake, thinking they were waterside whores, or catamite boys. Stanley and Smith said they had business in the town. Business best conducted by dark.

At dawn they were kicked awake again.

‘On your feet!’

The two knights were now laden with bundles and bags over both shoulders.

‘We sail in an hour,’ said Smith, hulking dark against the red sunrise. ‘Into many a springtime storm.’

The boat was called the Swanof Avon. It smelt bad.

It was something of a cross between a cog and carvel, having a triangular lateen sail on its mainmast and a full square-rigger on its foremast. A small, scruffy vessel, no more than a hundred tons and badly in need of a paint. Certainly it carried no gilding. Nicholas only hoped it was better maintained below the waterline, where it mattered. A crude swan had been painted on the flat face of the stern, looking more like an Aylesbury duck, and then a crucifix surrounded by flames, added for good measure as an afterthought. It bore no flag.

The master was a tall, lean, pockmarked fellow with a wandering gaze and two daggers in his belt. He was taking English broadcloth to Spain, and bringing back oranges and Canary wine. As for an island called Malta, he knew nothing of it.

He eyed Nicholas and Hodge, still in their thin disguise. ‘Your daughters, you say?’

Stanley nodded. ‘Nancy and Matilda.’

The captain sneered. ‘What you runnin’ from?’

‘None of your business.’

He grunted, and told them they’d have to bring their own food and drink, and keep out of his mariners’ way. Other than that, they’d not be molested.

‘And remember to spew at the stern,’ he added.

Nicholas and Hodge spewed all the way to the Scillies and beyond. But as they came in sight of France — Brittany, Stanley said — the sea began to calm, though the west wind was still biting cold. At least they were allowed to jettison their maids’ clothes and return to their own.

Exhausted and thinner than ever, they lay against a coil of tarred rope in the weak sun, wrapped in blankets. Smith came and dumped a bundle on the deck nearby. He took a leather flask from his bag and handed it to them.

‘A swig each,’ he said.

Nicholas unstoppered the cork. It smelt of rotting seaweed.

‘Scurvy grass soaked in ale,’ said Smith. ‘Drink it. It’ll stop you getting the Dutch Disease. Your gums rotting and your teeth falling out.’

Stanley came by whistling.

‘Ah,’ he said. ‘A draught of Dr Smith’s sovereign anti-scorbutical infusion. The foulest concoction yet brewed this side of hell. So how are our young crusaders?’

Nicholas swallowed the liquid morosely. ‘Not dead yet.’

‘Well said, well said.’ Stanley grinned broadly, his ruddy cheeks becoming ruddier daily in the sun and wind, his thick fair hair blown back from his fine broad brow, his whole appearance so powerful and leonine.

‘Strange to remember you’re a monk,’ Nicholas blurted out.

Stanley gazed out to sea.

‘When we were born, this ruffian here and I-’ he indicated Smith, who ignored him — ‘England was a Catholic country still, under Henry. Many younger sons of my family have served the Knights for generations. It is the highest honour.’

‘But — you can never marry.’

Smith grunted. ‘There’s another blessing.’

‘Taking that oath, and swearing fealty unto death, lifts all trouble from the mind. It makes life simple. Such a Brotherhood,’ said Stanley softly. ‘Such a band of brothers.’

Feeling a little more alive, Hodge and Nicholas explored the ship, as far as they were allowed.

It was a thing of wonder, despite the frequent sighting of rats and the smell.

‘You think that smells rosy,’ said one old mariner, ‘try opening the hatches of the bilges. ’Twill knock you senseless into next week.’

He was called Legge, and had but one. There were other mariners like Craven and Bloodisack, who barely spoke to them but to snarl. There were landsmen, apprentice mariners, and lowest of the low, pages: boys of no more than twelve or so, who emptied out the slop buckets, killed the rats, scrubbed the decks, and worked the bilge pump banded to the mainmast, hour by exhausting hour. They hardly dared speak, but looked at Nicholas and Hodge with fraternal pity.

There was Vizard, the blasphemous bosun, who sang obscene songs when not shouting, and Pidhook the helmsman, who treated them with a pinch less contempt than the others. He showed them where he stood on the upper deck called the bridge and swung the whipstaff left and right, turning the great rudder hanging from the sternpost likewise. He showed them his half-hour sandglass, which told the time and reckoned the watches in and out, and his dry compass mounted in a gimbel, a cunning device which kept the compass needle flat to the horizon, no matter which way the ship tilted.

Old crock though she was, the mariners seemed to have a sturdy confidence in the Swan of Avon.

At the end of the first eight-hour watch around dawn, the mariners took their breakfast. One tossed a slab of hardtack to the boys. ‘Here. Test your pearly teeth on that, young sprat.’

Nicholas couldn’t even break into it. They laughed. ‘Ye’ll have to soak it a while yet.’

To their surprise, the master came forward and said a Paternoster and an Ave Maria before his men were allowed to eat.

‘Is this not a Protestant ship?’ said Stanley evenly.

The master said in his gravel voice, and with a distant stare out to sea, ‘For the Bishop of Rome and the Church of Italy I care not. And this newfangled Church of England makes my head ache, since I don’t see how Christ could have founded such a church when he never came ashore on English soil.’

‘Ah,’ said Stanley, ‘the pragmatical English mind.’

‘And he lived and preached before England was even a kingdom, I heard tell, so how can he have appointed the Queen’s forefathers as head of such a church?’

‘A theologian ship’s master,’ said Stanley delightedly. ‘And preaching what sounds like Popery!’

‘Popes and Protestants,’ said the master in a flat, bored tone and a wave of his hand. ‘Such tangled arguments belong on land. We’re not on land, we’re at sea, and the law is different here. I decorate my ship and make my prayers as I see fit, and I will pray to God and his Holy Mother under any name I know, if he’ll send us clear weather and plain sailing. When a man’s fifty miles out in the Bay of Biscay, that’s his usual religion.’