As I say, we didn’t embark for Flanders until the autumn of 1707 and when we did it was from Harwich. Hope of leaving England without attracting attention was put paid to by the Bratchet. At her first glimpse of the boat’s masts and the grey sea beyond, she began to scream.
I tried reason: ‘It floats. I told you. We sit on it and it carries us over the water.’ I tried threats: ‘Do you want to be left behind to fend for yourself?’ I tried force: ‘Get on that bloody gangplank.’
Struggling, she kicked my bad leg again so that I hopped, holding on to her, while her dog nipped at my good one and passengers leaned over the packet’s side to watch. I might as well have hired a farewell bloody band.
I was loomed over. A voice exclaimed, ‘Laddy. Is it yourself, Master Millet? And Holland bound? Isn’t that the coincidence?’
I was too busy for surprise. ‘Help me get her on the boat, will you?’
‘Does the maid come as well, then?’ This time Livingstone of Kilsyth’s voice held real astonishment.
‘She does.’
‘And the wee dog too?’
‘Just get the slut aboard.’
The Bratchet was picked up and the dog turned its attention to the Scotsman’s heels as he carried her up the gangplank.
Hawsers were slipped, the anchor raised and the packet moved with the tide along the channel that took us under the guns of Harwich’s fort and out into the confluence of the Orwell and Stour.
Passengers were ordered below while the boat made sail to catch the strong easterly blow. I dragged Bratchet to the shelter of the stern to be out of the way; I’d crossed the North Sea below decks before, with most of my company packed into a transport’s innards, and would rather be drenched in sea-spray than vomit.
Harwich packet masters make the crossing so regularly they’ve become surly, with a take-it-or-leave-it attitude that’s losing them some of their trade to the passage-boats going back and forth to the Low Countries from the Thames which, though the voyage is longer, provide more comfort and considerably more courtesy.
But Daniel Defoe, or whoever Daniel was serving, had stipulated Harwich as an embarkation port less likely to be watched than London’s. Since becoming an agent himself, he saw spies everywhere. He’d been afraid that every word we’d exchanged that night in the Beggar Maker’s had been passed on to the Scotsman and it looked as if he was right. Kilsyth had kept watch on me and followed us from London in the hope we’d lead him to Anne Bonny.
He came after us to the stern but lost confidence as the boat hit the swell and meekly went down below with the rest.
The dull brown and green coastline was left behind and the last of Bratchet’s defiance was tossed out of her. She degenerated into a shivering bundle. I clipped the dog’s lead to the back of the belt round her cape to stop her falling overboard, tied her shawl more firmly around her head and extracted the sealed orders that Defoe had sent me. ‘From my employers,’ he’d said. I settled on a coil of rope with my back to the wind to read them. The seal had been slit. Somebody else had read them already.
The orders were bloody impossible, anyway. A general’s orders: I wish it, therefore it will be. The paper was good quality but unembossed and there was no signature. Harley or Chancellor Godolphin, one of the two, I thought; I still wasn’t sure who directed Defoe.
The orders said I must discover the woman calling herself Mary Read, satisfy myself whether the woman was indeed Read or the woman known as Anne Bonny. If Read, extract from her the whereabouts of said Anne Bonny. If Anne Bonny, assure her of Her Majesty’s goodwill and procure her return to England. In need I was to call on Her Majesty’s representative in The Hague.
‘The whilst keeping in ignorance all but him of the true purpose of your journeying, nor permitting anyone access to either the said Mary Read or Anne Bonny. These instructions to be destroyed as soon as they have been mastered.’
I let the paper go to leeward and watched it flutter in the breeze until it flopped on to the waves. What the hell was I doing here? On a pitching bloody tub taking me where I didn’t want to go?
Saving the Bratchet’s life, I supposed. Marking time because my Puritan conscience – the only thing I’d inherited from my father – wouldn’t let me rest at becoming a comparatively rich man on Effie Sly’s money, uneasy at how the old harridan had acquired it. Pursuing a clue to who’d strangled her. That most of all. Nobody was going to be allowed to slaughter an aunt of Martin Millet’s and get away with it. I owed her that much.
Suddenly I became aware of the Bratchet. She was staring at the sea. She wants to go in it. I knew it as surely as if she’d said so. I dragged her round so that she sat between my knees, facing me. ‘When were you on a boat before?’
She didn’t answer. With the money I’d given her, Mrs Defoe had dressed the girl in garments that answered their purpose but little else, a thick grey woollen travelling cloak under which was a thick grey dress and thick grey boots. Her eyes stared straight ahead, though not at me, while her hands gripped the dog shivering in her lap.
I’d once asked my Chelsea widow how old she thought the girl was. ‘Thirteen? Fourteen? She doesn’t seem to know.’
‘Oh, Martin,’ she’d said, ‘how unobservant you are. She’s a grown woman. Seventeen at least.’
She looked a child to me, especially at that moment. ‘Bratchet.’ I had to pitch my voice against the wind so that it became a shout. ‘Were you on a boat before this?’
She nodded.
‘When?’
She shook her head; she couldn’t remember when.
‘What happened?’ It was unsettling to see the small face convulse. I didn’t think she was going to speak but a whisper of despair came out of her mouth.
‘Tipped over.’
‘You were tipped over? The boat tipped over?’
She nodded again. This time her lips compressed together twice. ‘Mm, mm.’ Tears were shooting out of her eyes. Agitated, the dog licked her face.
‘Mama? Your mother?’ It was like a guessing game, taking leads from her intensifications of pain.
‘Maman,’ she said, rocking back and forward, ‘Martian, Maman. Va l’aider.’
French. I knew that much. The widow was right. ‘Did she drown, Bratchet?’ The rocking became faster, so did the weeping.
The Huguenots had come fleeing to England in such desperation they hadn’t bothered with how seaworthy the ships were that they came in. Some of them had sunk without trace, one or two within sight of Dover. The Bratchet would have had to have been very young, perhaps a sole survivor, not to have found her way to the many Huguenot communities that existed in London instead of being placed in the poorhouse in which Aunt Effie found her.
Poor little sod. ‘Mine too, Bratchet,’ I said, ‘If it helps, I lost mine too.’ I didn’t think she heard me.
By evening the wind eased. The decking and rigging drummed with bare feet while reefs were let out and then quietened so that we could hear the creak of the wheel as the steersman kept his new course, watched by the master.
From a topsail arm a voice called out, ‘Vessel on the starboard beam.’ Everybody on deck looked into the dull sunset that put a watery yellow on to the tops of the waves. There was a shape on the horizon.
‘Three-master. Raked. Flying no pennant.’
A few feet away from us, the master’s voice called, ‘What’s she a-doing of then?’
‘Keeping our course.’
‘Armed?’
‘Ten gun ports.’
‘Keep them bloody eyes skinned up there, bor.’
‘Aye, aye, Cap’n.’
The master called for his bosun and told him to order hot food for the crew; men were fed before an expected action in case there was no time later. A boat without identification was ipso facto a threat; the master was taking it seriously.
‘Issue weapons. Gun crews to stand by.’
‘Aye, aye, Cap’n.’
‘An’ quietly now, bor. No need to alarm they bloody passengers.’
A Sea Beggar? But those Dutch privateers had mostly disappeared when the Spanish were expelled from Holland, leaving only a few who’d degenerated into plain piracy. A Frenchman? Possibly, though Marlborough was driving the French out of their ports along the Flemish coast.
The steersman’s and master’s conversation was covering the same ground as me, and with no better result. ‘And where’s that bloody navy when a man needs ’em?’ The master paced up and down, thinking, and his boot scuffed against the tarpaulin that covered the sleeping Bratchet, bringing a snarl from Turnspit. He stopped. ‘You pay passage for that bloody dog, bor?’
‘No,’ I told him, ‘And I’m not going to.’
The master nodded without rancour. He’d growled because he was worried.
‘Could be a press boat,’ I said.
There was a clatter from the hold as someone dropped a musket and the master swore. ‘They’re welcome to this bloody lot.’ He scuffed the canvas again. ‘Bloody dogs, bloody women. Never allowed on ship in the good old days. Bad bloody luck-bringers. Bloody priests next.’ He returned to the wheel.
It can’t be her. It was beyond belief that the ship out there was going to attack the packet because it had the Bratchet aboard. It can’t be her. But if the Brotherhood had her marked, it could be. Damn you, Bratchet, I thought, what is it you know?
‘She’ll not come at us in the dark,’ the master said, and I hoped the man was right.
A moon rose and bobbed above ragged clouds which every so often blotted out all view so that when they’d passed it was difficult to refocus on the dark patch that broke the darker line of sea. But it was always there. The packet changed course; the mystery ship changed course. The packet zig-zagged, the mystery ship zig-zagged. As if the packet’s shadow had transferred itself to a point a mile away.
Dawn dragged up enough light to show two parallel ships on an otherwise empty sea. The master swore. It was unusual to be alone on this route; as a rule there would have been friendly craft in the offing; transports carrying soldiers to the front, a fishing fleet, naval patrols. Today, of all days, the sea was as bald as an egg.
A few passengers emerged from the hold, among them Livingstone of Kilsyth, who staggered over. He was pale. ‘I’ve not the liking for sea trips,’ he said.
‘So why are you making this one?’
He made no bones about it. ‘It is a quest on behalf of my chief. He wishes me to find his kinswoman, Mistress Bonny, that I was asking for when we met. There is a likelihood that her friend, Mary Read, is in the Low Countries and can inform me of her whereabouts.’
‘Coincidence you chose to cross on the same boat as me, then?’
‘What else?’ He actually winked. ‘And yourself, Master Millet? For what have you ventured on the watery main?’
I kept up the game. ‘Thought I’d try and rejoin my regiment.’
‘Laudable. Most laudable.’ He looked around and became aware of the crew’s tension. ‘What’s afoot?’
There was a halloo from the crow’s nest. ‘She’s changing course. She’s making for us.’
The wind had altered a degree or two to the north in the unmarked ship’s favour. The packet master shouted orders to cram on more sail and changed his own course, but the enemy clearly was faster and would overhaul us in an hour. All the passengers were on deck now, alerted by the kerfuffle, watching the angled brown sails of the pursuer grow bigger and more defined, a running wolf of a ship.
Whatever she was, I absolved the Scotsman in having a part in her purpose. The man’s knuckles gripping the rail were as white as mine. His voice, however, was calm. ‘Will she be a pressman? I have no liking to be pressed nor pirated.’
‘Amen to that.’ The damned Bratchet was sleeping peacefully.
‘Sail on the port bow.’ The call came from the lookout. ‘It’s the Suffolk. Out of Ipswich. The navy’s here, lads.’
The packet ran up flags requesting assistance and a cheer went with them. The brown sails behind us were altering. ‘She’s going on another board,’ sang the lookout. ‘She don’t like the cut of the fiver.’ The pirate/pressman was making a run for it, not wanting to take on a five-masted warship.
‘Fiddler’s Green, lads,’ shouted the master, joyfully. ‘Stand down.’
The next evening, we sailed into the packet station while behind us, rocking on the big breakers that distinguish the rough waters outside from the rolling brown stream of the River Maas, HMS Suffolk stood off from The Hook of Holland, watching over us as we went in.
The last time I’d been to The Hague was with my regiment, when the city had been too crowded with other forces funnelling through its gateway into Europe to see it properly. Then we’d been fighting under William of Orange to rid Holland of the French.
It was still too crowded to see it properly – this time with allied forces under the Duke of Marlborough on their way to rid Flanders of the French. Now they’d been joined by diplomats and entrepreneurs seeking newly opened markets.
As before, the solemn streets were a vast, horizontal Tower of Babel, a grandfather of a city pestered by manic, vividly dressed children. The only thing the allied regiments have in common, apart from a determination to deny control of the continent to Louis XIV, is a desire to knock the eye out of every other allied regiment. Coloured uniform provides recognition on the battlefield but it’s also to spread the fame of the regimental commander whose responsibility it is to buy it. I’ve seen deserters flogged, cut up, hanged – frequently in that order – not just for deserting but because they’d made off in clothes costing their colonel-in-chief money. Here they all were: Prussian blue, Venetian purple, English red, Dutch orange, Swedish yellow, gold-epauletted, velvet-frogged, gabon-flashed, calf-belted, feather-hatted.
Colonels wanting to discuss strategy with generals, majors trying to be noticed, captains trying to discuss tactics with majors, quartermasters trying to arrange winter camps, sutlers trying to order fodder for men and horses, and sergeants trying to find out what the hell everybody else was doing.
All of it in an effort to defeat France, and all of it in the tongues of fifty-odd nations from the Hebrides to the Danube which had no common denominator other than, ironically, French.
The Bratchet hung on to the back of my belt with one hand and the lead of the dog with the other as we buffeted our way through pandemonium and the Gevangenpoort archway, making for a door in the Binnenhof. The autumn tints of trees lining the square stood out against a clear, washed-out evening sky.
Attachés to Her Majesty’s diplomatic service are badly paid and those serving at The Hague since the beginning of the War of the Spanish Succession were overworked. Master John Laws, who received us, was both. A tall, thin young man, long on indiscretion and short on diplomacy.
‘My dear,’ he said, wagging a finger, ‘if you’re wanting a bed for the night you can bugger off. Just bugger off. I’ve got half the nobility of England camping out in my spare room already.’ He looked at me more closely and fluttered his eyelashes. ‘Unless you want to share mine.’
‘Letters of introduction,’ I said, handing them over. ‘And a dispatch. Secret.’
Master Laws looked wearily at the seals. ‘About as secret as my arse which, my dear… oh, love me, another bloody flying cypher. It’s too bad. What’s the point, what’s the bloody point I ask you, in sending it on to all our embassies when they’ll undoubtedly have forgotten which cypher we’re using this week and will enquire back in last week’s and when dear Louis knows all our secrets long before we do. And all of them blaming me, the puddings.’
He turned to me. ‘Puddings, my dear, accusing me. Just because they can barely grunt in English and my French is perfect they assume I’m not a patriot. I tell you, if it weren’t that the dear duke needs me I’d go back to tutoring. I would.’
‘We all have our problems,’ I said. ‘Mine’s to find us somewhere for the night.’ Tramping a city in which every inn had been commandeered by one army or another hadn’t done my leg any good.
John Laws looked at the Bratchet. ‘Chacun à son goût, dear. Well, I suppose I can squeeze one more in, if you’ll pardon the expression. But young Morgan le Fay here will have to bed down with the staff. That…’ he pointed at Turnspit, ‘goes in the cellar.’
‘Do you know where the First Dragoons are camped?’
‘Dear one, I can’t tell you where anybody’s camped. The duke’s in Flanders accepting surrenders and the rest of us are too busy persuading our glorious allies to keep on the offensive to know what the army’s doing.’
Situation normal then. We were given supper, the Bratchet was sent upstairs to the servants’ attic, and the rest of the reluctant attaché’s guests came back for a nightcap, several nightcaps, before retiring to shared mattresses on his floor.
Four of them were younger sons of nobility acting as personal secretaries to envoys on government business. Two were merchants, one in wool, the other in wine, hoping to reestablish trade now the French were being forced back. There was a close-eyed gentleman of undetermined background who John Laws, raising his eyes, introduced as ‘Mr Smith’ and who I therefore assumed was on a government assignment as confidential as mine.
And there was Livingstone of Kilsyth.
‘Extraordinary thing,’ said the Hon. Andrew Partington ushering him in, ‘Met this mighty Scotchman by the Mauritshuis and fell into conversation. Turns out he’s related to m’aunt on m’mother’s side. Nowhere to sleep, poor fellow, so brought him here. Knew you wouldn’t mind, Laws. But what a coincidence, ain’t it?’
Ain’t it though. Coincidence seemed to be Kilsyth’s middle name. And the bugger still pretended it was, uttering Scottish noises of surprise as he and I exchanged bows.
Laws did himself well, and us. He gave us tankards of what he called Cool Nantz – brandy with lemon, sugar, nutmeg and wine – to wash down a collation of cheeses, tongue, nuts and apples. The board held linen napkins and crystal fingerbowls. ‘Dutch creditors crowd the wings, dears,’ he said, ‘just waiting to spring should Her Majesty withdraw my diplomatic immunity, so until then let us enjoy le métier d’un ministre aux cours étrangères.’ He smiled lovingly at the incomprehension on our faces.
Jackets and tongues were unloosed, wigs discarded. The allies, it appeared, were as much trouble as the French, more.
‘’S always the damned same,’ expostulated young Lord Carthew, ‘It’s “Please, good duke, be our saviour,” when they’ve got Louis up their arses. But the moment the duke’s kicked him out for ’em, the States General and the Margraves and the Electors and the Savoyards and all the bloody rest start arguing.’
‘’S a watchamaflip,’ nodded the Hon. Partington, sagely. ‘Happens every two years.’
When the situation was dangerous the allies gave Marlborough all the authority he needed, but after a victory they became over-confident and quarrelsome. Each battle won was followed by months wasted in argument and stagnation that prevented a quick end to the war.
‘Couldn’t exploit Blenheim,’ complained on Lord Carthew, ‘Can’t exploit Ramillies. Louis’ll merely withdraw, retrench and it’ll be another two years before we’re allowed to defeat the bastard again.’
The merchants, being Tories, disapproved of the war’s continuing. ‘What I say is this,’ said the one in wine, ‘We’ve as good as won. Why did we go to war? To stop Louis putting his grandson on the throne of Spain, that’s why. Couldn’t allow him to rule Spain as well as France. Well, Blenheim and Ramillies showed him we’re not going to let him do it. So why not treat with him, eh? Stop all this prancing about in Europe that’s ruining trade.’ He wagged a thick finger, ‘He’s no fool, Louis; it’s French trade as well as English, remember. He’ll be glad to come to terms. And if he don’t, well, we’ve kicked him out the Low Countries, so we just press on with war at sea. That’s what I say.’
The young nobility, being Whigs, were appalled. For them it was a military solution or nothing. ‘Treat with Louis? Treat with that Papist monster?’ Cool Nantz was making Lord Carthew hot. ‘Sir, any man who thinks there’s any losution, solution, to this war than wiping Louis off, off, face of earth’s no friend of mine.’
‘Fight to last man,’ agreed the Hon. Partington.
‘Poor last man,’ drawled John Laws, ‘Think of all the impregnating he’d have to do after to keep the race going.’ Which deflected the conversation off dangerous ground and on to women.
I was starting to like John Laws.
‘Talking of women,’ said the man called Smith, after we’d been doing it for some time, ‘got any for us tonight, have you? I’ve been on the road so long my prick’s beginning to itch.’
‘I’m afraid you’ll just have to scratch it, dear,’ said John Laws lightly, ‘And talking of women, we haven’t yet toasted our gracious Queen. Gentlemen, charge your tankards.’
The company rose obediently. ‘Health to Her Majesty, Queen Anne, God bless her.’
But this time Laws’s diversion didn’t work.
Into the pause that succeeded the toast, Lord Carthew whispered incredulously, ‘He passed his tankard over the fingerbowl.’ Then louder, ‘He passed his tankard over the bloody fingerbowl.’ He was staring at Livingstone of Kilsyth. He shouted, ‘This Scotch bastard’s a Jacobite!’
‘Can’t be,’ protested the Hon. Partington, ‘He’s related to m’aunt. Not a Jack, are you, Kilsyth?’
‘Ask him,’ shrieked Carthew, ‘ask the swine which queen he was toasting, Anne or that bitch over the water, Mary of Modena.’
The Highlander had to lean down to put his face close to his lordship’s. They were both red and breathing hard. ‘I’ll thank ye to keep a civil tongue behind your teeth.’
‘Which?’ demanded Lord Carthew, dancing like a terrier, ‘Say it. Go on. Which queen?’
‘The rightful queen,’ roared Kilsyth, ‘ye impident callant.’
‘That’s no answer.’ His Lordship turned around and around demanding support from the company. ‘Make him say which queen.’
I wondered why I was going to do what I was going to do. I suppose because I was sick of aristocratic young bastards like this one who were prepared to let other men fight to the last. Because, if I didn’t, there’d be blood; hands were already hovering on sword hilts. I pushed myself between the two men. ‘Leave it. He’s with me.’
‘He’s with you?’ Carthew had ignored me all night, I wasn’t the right class. ‘And who are you?’
I said: ‘I’ve delivered dispatches to Mr Laws in which Master Kilsyth here is mentioned as being concerned with my mission on the queen’s behalf.’ Quite likely it was the truth. The letter from Defoe’s principal would have warned the attaché of the Scotsman’s doubtful connections. ‘Isn’t that correct, Mr Laws?’
Laws looked at me carefully and then made up his mind. He didn’t want blood on his carpet. ‘Perfectly correct. Mr Kilsyth is most deeply involved.’
‘Show us the letter, then,’ said Carthew, but it was bluster.
‘Oh, I think Her Majesty wishes her personal concerns to remain personal,’ said Laws, lightly, and began bustling. ‘A last nightcap, gentlemen, and then to bed. In view of your unexpected arrival, dear Mr Kilsyth, perhaps you won’t object to sharing mine.’
Serves you right, I thought, seeing the Scotsman’s alarm, you stupid great plaid.
In the night I was woken up by the Bratchet screaming. I could hear her from two floors down, even with the Hon. Partington’s foot in my ear.
As I took up a guttering candle I counted my sleeping companions on the mattresses. Four, five, six. There should have been seven. The itching Mr Smith was missing.
By the time I’d hobbled up the stairs, the noise of screams had been replaced by another, a scuffling thump mixed with hissing, coming from an upper landing. I could see two figures, one of them very small, whipping around and around. Actually, it was one monstrous, untidy figure, because the smaller person’s head was attached to the bigger one just below waist-level and the bigger one was trying to dislodge it by revolving even as he hammered at it.
I once saw a performance by two street acrobats in which the girl held by her teeth on to a long strap round the man’s neck and was whirled bodily outwards as he rotated. It was like that.
‘Get the bitch off me. For God’s sake get the bitch off.’ Smith’s shriek was a falsetto.
As I went towards him, a large shape pushed past me, took Smith by the neck and hurled him to the floor. Livingstone of Kilsyth had come to the Bratchet’s rescue. Even then we had trouble prising her teeth from the part of Smith’s anatomy he had been trying to force into her mouth. We pulled. He shrieked. Eventually, with Kilsyth pinning Smith’s arms and legs down, I got the Bratchet’s jaws open. She was spitting and hissing. We had to hold her back from clawing at Smith’s eyes.
‘Do I sense something of a contretemps?’ John Laws, in a fetching nightshirt, candle upraised, had come up. He ignored the shouted explanations – and the louder shouts by Smith that the slut had jumped out and attacked him while he was innocently trying to find his way to the privy – and escorted the still-snarling Bratchet back to the servants’ quarters. Going with them, I glimpsed a shelved room with Dutch bodies stolidly asleep on the tiers.
The palliasse Bratchet had occupied had been dragged to the door. John Laws pushed her on to it. ‘I want no more trouble from you tonight, my girl,’ he said, and shut the door.
‘She didn’t ask the bastard to assault her,’ I said.
‘Of course she did, dear,’ said Laws, patiently, ‘She’s a female.’ He stalked back to where Smith stood, groaning, his hands clutched tenderly round the front of his breeches. For good measure, I knocked the man down. Bratchet was my responsibility, after all. Kilsyth, amused, patted me on the back.
John Laws shook his head. He looked weary with the ways of heterosexual men: ‘I told him to scratch it,’ he said.
The next morning, the Bratchet and I were hurried away before the other guests were up, with Livingstone of Kilsyth. John Laws had scribbled a letter of accreditation for me to ‘whomsoever it may concern’, but wouldn’t give us breakfast.
‘I don’t wish to be inhospitable, dear,’ he said privately to me, ‘but bugger off and take your Jacobite with you. You may know what you’re doing with our tartaned friend, but I’ve got one war on my hands already and I don’t need you three starting another.’ He stood at the door, waving, as we set out across the Binnenhof. ‘Do hesitate to call again.’
You three. Somehow the night had grouped us together; at least, it seemed to have bonded Kilsyth to me, and the Bratchet to Kilsyth; she kept directing mooning glances at him, like a rescued princess at the rescuing prince. Kilsyth, who was hungry, glanced resentfully over his shoulder at the still-waving John Laws. ‘He could have provided some cheer for our bellies.’ Sotto voce, he added, ‘D’ye ken yon laddie wears pairfume?’
‘He saved your bacon, anyway,’ I told him.
‘Mebbe.’ He didn’t rise to the bait. He clapped his arm round my shoulders. ‘And where are we away?’
If you can’t beat ’em, let ’em join. The bugger had the nose of a tracking dog. Wherever we went, he turned up sooner or later. If the Bratchet was going to go on attracting trouble, I decided we might as well use his company. The time to give him the slip would be when, and if, we closed in on Mary Read or Anne Bonny. Until then the best way to keep my eye on him was having him under it.
‘I’m looking for my old regiment,’ I told him. In fact, it was the regiment to which the woman known as Mary Read had belonged, but I wasn’t going to hand over that information on a plate.
He gave my shoulder a squeeze. ‘And I’m with you, laddie. I’ll pursue my own enquiries as we gang.’
We breakfasted at a communal table outside an inn by the side of the Vyver, watching the passing barges. Kilsyth ordered generous amounts of ale, cold beef and hot beans and was equally generous in throwing scraps to Turnspit at his feet, producing more grateful glances from the Bratchet. When it came to pay, though, he fumbled lengthily in his sporran and produced monies exactly accounting for a third, despite the fact that the Bratchet had eaten less than a quarter.
This time I let him get away with it, but afterwards I saw to it we messed separately. Her Majesty’s government wasn’t paying me enough to treat a man who was its enemy. It hadn’t paid me at all, come to that. What I’d received so far was some cash for expenses and a promise of the hundred pounds on my return.
The barges were disembarking some fifty English infantrymen of the Third Foot, the Buffs, on to the quayside where they were being met by a drill sergeant. They were new recruits, poor bastards. You could see the chafes on their neck from the stiff linen of their stocks. Their mitres sat shakily on their heads and their muskets sloped to all points of the compass. Pressed, duped or sentenced into joining the army, they’d have been shipped over the North Sea immediately, before the seas closed for the winter and they had time to desert. Here and there was one who looked around him with interest. The others hung their heads, like bullocks waiting their turn in the abattoir. Most were hungover, having drunk too well of the recruiting officer’s liquor, and hoping against hope their enlistment under its influence was a nightmare they’d soon wake up from.
Muttering to his corporal and fife-player the where-do-they-find-’em complaint of drill sergeants everywhere, the sergeant watched them shamble into lines. He stepped forward, his voice slicing through the chill Dutch breeze like cheesewire.
‘Welcome to the army, lads. Glad to be here, eh?’ Encouraged by the flat of the corporal’s bayonet, there was ragged agreement that they were glad to be there.
‘Lucky lads, you are. The queen’s shilling and eightpence a day. Now, ain’t you fortunate soldiers?’
More whacks and yes they were fortunate, Sergeant.
Eightpence a damned day, James. The rate hasn’t changed since the reign of Elizabeth Tudor, when the penny was worth something. And six of those eight pennies would be deducted for their keep. Jesus, the archers at Crécy were paid sixpence a day.
As a Dragoon, I’d been allowed a thrilling extra ninepence a day for the maintenance of my horse, horses being both more expensive and more valuable than men.
‘And how fortunate we ain’t got to the end of,’ the drill sergeant was saying. ‘You’re goin’ to fight under the finest general since Julius Caesar, you are. You got the Duke of Marlborough.’ He smiled. His recruits rocked in recoil. ‘And you got me. Thinks a lot of me, does the duke. And you’re going to think a lot of me, too. Ain’t they, Corporal? Going to think a lot of me?’
The corporal said that indeed they were.
The drill sergeant’s voice sharpened: ‘For I’m going to take you bed-pissing, mustard-grinding buttercups to your nice, warm winter quarters and I’m going to make soldiers out of you. Gawd ’elp me, by the time I’m finished, you’ll be more frightened o’ me than the Crapos. Right, Corporal, march ‘em out.’
While the recruits were formed up, I called the drill sergeant over and handed him a full blackjack. He drank it. ‘Good health, sir.’
‘Good health, Sergeant.’
The drill sergeant raised his eyebrows. ‘Light bob?’
I shook my head. ‘Dragoons.’
‘Oh, the Filly-Fuckers,’ said the sergeant. ‘Still, good health.’
‘Do you know where the First Dragoons are?’
The drill sergeant lifted his bonnet and wig to wipe his bald head on his sleeve. ‘Winter quarters over Ghent way, I heard.’ He replaced his bonnet, saluted and called out, ‘Lip us a chant, fifeman.’
The Dutch at the inn’s table cheered as their English allies ambled off to the tinny notes of the fife and the corporal’s curses. Kilsyth shook his head in pity. ‘I’m spiering how many of yon puir raws will desert before the year.’
‘Six. Seven perhaps.’ And more would die from disease than were killed in battle, and more would contract the pox. The rest, if they were very, very lucky, would survive the war to be thrown on the scrapheap to beg their living.
Sometimes I think England hates her standing army as much as she loves her navy. I suppose under Charles I, and again under the Protectorate, the army was used to keep her in subjection. For a while that small collection of cut-throats and plough-boys disappearing into the distance, swindled into enlistment to live and die far from home in billets that were sinks of squalor, would be greeted as the country’s brave defenders until, having won her war, she’d again ignore their existence.
‘The miracle is they don’t all desert,’ I said. But that wasn’t the miracle. The miracle was the drill sergeant – there were sergeants like him at Agincourt. He’d take the scourings he’d just been given and bully, curse, terrify and nurse them into the finest fighting instrument the world had ever seen, under the greatest general. And, most amazing of all, I, Martin Millet, knowing all I knew, still wanted to stand up and cheer the bloody lot of them.
From The Hague we went by boat, using the broad, shallow, bun-shaped barges which are the home and workplace of the Netherlands’ waterborne population. We hopped from one to another, going southwest towards the northern Lines of Brabant which the French army had been forced to withdraw from after Marlborough’s summer campaign, and where the First Dragoons among other regiments had made their winter quarters.
Kilsyth wanted to take coaches. ‘You can,’ I said, ‘but we’re going by canal.’ Canals are surer, if slower. Anyway, Dutch coaches were as expensive as in England and the roads were worse; I never liked the way their posters at coaching stations added a pious ‘Deo Volante’, God willing, to departure and arrival times. With the search for Mary Read likely to last the winter, I’d need to watch the pennies. Kilsyth, of course, decided on canal transport too. He wasn’t going to let me or Bratchet out of his sight.
Sometimes we were charged a few pennies by the bargemaster which entitled us to a bed and a share of the stewpot. Sometimes we paid our way by taking our place in the harness on the towpath – usually the boats are drawn by dogs or the masters’ children – while the master leaned on his tiller, smoking his pipe, and the master’s wife knitted dark, woollen stockings and smiled at Kilsyth’s efforts to make the barge go faster than it ever had before.
I like the Netherlands. Between showers, there’s a clarity to the air which makes the windmills with their rush thatching stand out with a distinctness that’s almost alarming. I remember that journey because it was the last real peace we all shared, a time out of time between dykes which only occasionally gave glimpses of the polders in between, where white cottages stood round churches with bells clustered in their tower like a swarm of bees, chiming out, thin and clear, in a minor key.
It was on those canals that Bratchet began to change. It was like watching a sapper who’d been underground in his mine for too long suddenly emerging into daylight. She started to look about her, warily at first, in case she’d come up in enemy territory. Gradually, she stopped protecting her food bowl with her arms as she always had when we ate, in case somebody kicked it away from her. I saw her stroking the rough wool of her skirt like other women stroke satin.
Aunt Effie had a lot to answer for.
She’d have nothing to do with me. I was trying to take up where the Chelsea widow had left off and teach the girl her letters but she refused to learn, just sat and thinned her mouth as if I were forcing poison down it. I passed the job to Kilsyth, who was always impatient for something to do. If she was going to be besotted with the man, she might at least gain some literacy while she was about it.
She did, though not in English. Sitting with him on the barge’s deck top, she chattered away as she never had to me, and took her reading lessons from a book of fairytales by Perrault that he carried in his pack.
‘The maid has a fine intelligence for a female,’ he told me, accusingly, ‘Her progress with Conies de Ma Mère is a miracle. Did ye not know she has the French?’
‘I gathered.’
‘Why then has she been so sorely treated?’ The French and Scottish aristocracy have always had close association, and the discovery that Bratchet could speak French raised her class in Kilsyth’s eyes.
‘It’s nothing to do with me,’ I told him, ‘I’ve only brought her along in case she got in trouble at home.’
He’d become Bratchet’s champion. ‘And what sort of man addresses a young lassie by the title of a dog? Has she no name?’
I called her over. ‘What’s your damn name, Bratchet?’
If she knew it, she wasn’t going to tell me. I could see her searching for something she considered romantic enough and remembering what John Laws had christened her.
‘Morgan le Fay,’ she said.