Earthly Joys

Autumn 1627

That very afternoon a messenger came from the fort. Commander Torres was suing for peace, and for terms of surrender. Buckingham did not let the messenger, an officer, see his smile, but took the news as if it were a matter of indifference. “I daresay you are weary,” he said politely, as one gentleman to another. He turned to his servant. “Bring him some wine and bread.”

The man was not just weary but half-starved. He fell on the bread and devoured it in hungry bites. Buckingham watched him. The messenger’s condition told him all he needed to know of the state of the soldiers within the fort.

Buckingham unfolded the letter the man brought and read it again, carefully, sniffing at the silver pomander he wore around his neck.

“Very well,” he said casually.

One of his officers raised his eyebrows. Buckingham smiled. “Commander Torres asks for terms of surrender,” he observed negligently, as if it did not much matter.

Taking his cue, the English officer nodded. “Indeed.”

“I was told to take a reply,” the messenger said. “The fort is yours, my lord.”

Buckingham savored the moment. “I thank you. Merci beaucoup.”

“I’ll call for a clerk,” the English officer said. “I take it that we can dictate the terms?”

The messenger bowed.

Buckingham lifted his hand; the diamond winked. “No hurry,” he said.

“I was told to take a reply,” the messenger said. “The commander proposes the terms in the letter, our full and unconditional surrender. He said I could carry a verbal reply from you – yea or nay – and the business could be finished tonight.”

Buckingham smiled. “I will write to your commander tomorrow, when I have considered what terms are agreeable to me.”

“Can we not agree now, my lord?”

Buckingham shook his head. “I am going to my dinner now,” he said provokingly. “I have a very good cook and he has a new way of doing beef in a thick red gravy. I shall think of you and Commander Torres while I dine, and I shall write tomorrow, after I have broken my fast.”

At the mention of meat the man gulped. “I was ordered to take a reply, sir,” he said miserably.

Buckingham smiled. “Tell Commander Torres I am going to my dinner and that he shall dine with me tomorrow. I will send him an invitation to a grand dinner, along with his terms of surrender.”

The messenger would have argued but the French Protestant officers pushed him gently from the room. They heard his hesitant tread down the gangplank, and then one of the sentries giving him safe conduct back to the besieged fort.

“We’ll let them sweat,” Buckingham said cruelly. “They wanted to keep their weapons and safe conduct back to La Rochelle. They even wanted their cannon out of the fort. It was hardly a surrender at all. I want their weapons and their standards and then they can go. I have to have something to take home with me after all our trouble here. I want their cannon on my ships and their standards to show to the court. I need to lay the standards before the king. We need to have some gaudy props for the last act of this masque.”

At dinner the officers drank deeply. John had a couple of glasses of the Rochelle wine but then he went out on deck. The ship was moving uneasily on its moorings as the wind freshened. The darkening sky was thick with clouds and the horizon where the sun had set was rimmed with a yellow line, like a fungus on a felled tree trunk. John wondered how the rest of the fleet, strung out across the bay, were faring in the wind.

He called to a sailor to bring him a boat.

The man reluctantly brought a little skiff to the foot of the ladder and John went down the side of the Triumph. The waves rose and fell under the keel of the little boat. John could see them, coming across the bay, frighteningly high from his low viewpoint in the water. The great swell of the Atlantic Ocean pushed them onward like an enemy to the little boats holding tightly to each other in a circle around the beleaguered fort.

“Take me round the point,” he said, raising his voice above the wind. “I want to see the barricade.”

The sailor leaned heavily on the oars and the skiff bobbed and fell as the big waves passed underneath. They rounded the point and John saw his barrier.

At first he thought it was holding. Squinting his eyes against the darkness he thought that the ships were still moored, nose to tail, and the unevenness of their rocking was the big waves passing through them, each one lifting and falling at a different moment. Then he saw that one had broken free.

“Damnation!” John yelled. “Get me on a ship! I have to raise the alarm.”

The sailor headed for one of the moored ships and John scrambled up the ladder. His bad knee failed him and he had to grab like a monkey with his arms and haul himself up the side. At the top he turned and shouted down. “Get you back to the Triumph. Tell the admiral that the barrier is breached. Tell him I’m doing what I can.”

The man nodded his agreement and set himself to row back to Buckingham’s ship while John flung himself on the bell and sounded the alarm. The sailors scrambled out of the waist of the ship, clutching their dinner – nothing more than a thin slice of rye bread and a thinner slice of French bacon.

“Get me a light,” John cried. “I need to signal to the ships to take that loose vessel up. The barrier is breached.”

“I thought they had surrendered!” the captain shouted as one of the men ran for a lantern.

“They sent terms,” John said. “His lordship is considering them.”

The captain turned and roared for a light and ordered the gunners to their posts. The signaling officer came running up with flaring torches. “Tell them to take up that ship,” John said.

The man ran forward and started signaling. John, looking past him, suddenly saw a gleam in the dark water, a reflection.

“What’s that?”

“Where?”

“In the water, beside that ship.”

One of the officers stared where John was pointing. “I can’t see anything,” he said.

“Hold a torch out!” John ordered.

They held a torch low over the water and saw the dark shadow of a French barge, rowed swiftly toward the gap in the barrier.

“To your places!” the captain yelled. John raced to the bell and rang it again. The gun crew opened the hatches and ran back the cannon for priming and loading; the soldiers poured out on deck. Someone lit and threw a flare toward the dark water below and in its briefly tumbling light John saw a string of barges rowing steadily and confidently from the papist camp around La Rochelle toward the fort of St. Martin.

From the other end of the barrier of English ships he heard the bells ringing for action stations. A single cannon started pounding in the darkness and then he felt the timbers under his feet shake at the explosion and recoil of the guns on his own ship. The loose ship which should have been lashed into the barrier was swinging wildly out of control, the crew swarming to get sails up, and to get her under way so that she could rejoin the line. But through the gap she had left the barges were pouring, heading straight for the citadel.

“A fire ship!” John gasped as he saw them launch the blazing raft toward the French barges from the English ships on the other side of the bay. One man stood at the back of the raft, courageously steering it straight toward the supply barges, the wind setting the flames in the bow leaping and crackling, reflected in the water until it looked as if the fires from hell were burning up from under the sea. The sailor stayed at his post until the last moment, until the heat beat him into the water, and the flames licked toward the kegs of powder. He dived off the back of the raft just as the charges on the fire ship exploded like celebration firecrackers. His head went deep under the water and for a moment John thought that the man was lost; then he came up, wet-headed like a seal, and swam to the nearest ship, clung to a rope and was hauled in.

The wind swung around; the unmanned fire ship, yawing wildly, blew before it, drifted away from the French barges and helpfully lit their way across the heaving glassy seas to the shore and the fort.

“Damnation!” Tradescant swore. “It’s going to miss them.”

Perilously the fire ship swung in a current and headed for the English line. The sailors scrambled to the side of the ship with buckets of water to try to douse the flames and poles to fend it off. By its brilliant flaring light the English gunners on the other ships could at last see their targets. The English guns pounded into life and John saw the French barges struck and men thrown into the water.

“Reload!” the gunners’ officer yelled from below. The deck of the ship heaved and thudded under John’s feet as the big guns fired and rolled back. Another direct hit, and another French vessel smashed amidships, men screaming as they were thrown into the rolling dark sea.

Squinting through the smoke, John could see that some of the barges were getting out of range, heading toward the citadel.

“Aim long!” he shouted. “Aim for the furthest barges!”

No one could hear him above the noise. Impotently, John saw the leading French barge run ashore below the castle on the tideline, the citadel’s sally port gates flung open in welcome, and a line of defenders rapidly form to unload the barges and throw sacks of food and supplies of weapons into the fort. John counted perhaps a dozen barges safely unloaded before the light from the fire ship died and the English gunners could no longer see their target, and the battle was lost.

The citadel was reinforced and revictualed and there would be no visit from Commander Torres to dine with the duke and accept his terms of surrender tomorrow.

John did not attend the council of war. He was in disgrace. His barrier had failed and the fort, so near to surrender, was eating better than the besieging English soldiers. While Buckingham took advice from his officers John walked away from the fort, away from the fleet, deep into the island, watching his feet for rare plants, his face knitted up in a scowl. The same pressures would still be working on the duke as before, but the situation was worse than ever. The fort was revictualed, the weather was deteriorating and on one of the ships there were two cases of jail fever. The cold weather would bring sickness and agues, and the men were underfed. They had the choice of sleeping in the open under pitiful shelters of bent twigs and stretched cloth and risking ague and rheums, or inside the ships packed like herrings in a barrel, risking fevers from the close quarters.

John knew that they must withdraw before the winter storms, and feared that they were mad enough to stay. He turned in his walk and went back toward the fort. One of the French sentries on the castle walls saw him and shouted a cheerful yell of abuse. John hesitated; then the message became clear. The sentry hauled up a pike with a huge joint of meat on the tip, to demonstrate their new wealth.

“Voulez-vous, Anglais?” he yelled cheerfully. “Avez vous faim?”

John turned and trudged back to the ill-named Triumph.

Buckingham was certain what they should do. “We must attack,” he said simply.

John gasped in horror and looked around the duke’s cabin. No one else seemed in the least perturbed. They were nodding as if this were the obvious course.

“But my lord…,” John started.

Buckingham looked across at him.

“They are better fed than us, they have almost limitless cannon and powder, they are mending the defenses and we know that the citadel is strong.”

Buckingham no longer laughed at John’s fears. “I know all that,” he said bitterly. “Tell me something that I have not thought of, John, or keep your peace.”

“Have you thought of going home?” John asked.

“Yes,” Buckingham said precisely. “And if I go now, with nothing to show for it, I can’t even be sure that I will have a home to go to.” He glanced around the cabin. “There are men still waiting to impeach me for treason,” he said bluntly. “If I have to die I’d rather do it here leading an attack than on the block outside the Tower.”

John fell silent. It was a measure of the duke’s desperation that he spoke so frankly before them all.

“And if I return home in disgrace and am executed then the prospects for all of you are not golden,” Buckingham pointed out. “I would not be in your shoes when you are asked what service you gave the king on the Ile de Rhé. I shall be dead, of course, so it will not trouble me. But you will all be hopelessly compromised.”

There was a little uncomfortable movement among the men in the cabin.

“So are we all decided?” Buckingham asked with a wolfish grin. “Is it to be an attack?”

“Torres cannot stand against us!” Soubise exclaimed. “He was ready to surrender once; we know the measure of the man now. He’s a coward. He won’t fight to the last; if we frighten him enough he will surrender again.”

Buckingham nodded to John as if there were no one else to convince. “That’s true enough,” he said. “We do know that he will surrender if he thinks a battle is lost. All we have to do is to convince him that the battle is lost.”

He leaned forward and spread out some papers on the table. John saw that they were his sketch plans, drawn when they were new to the island and his new gillyflower was heeled into his little nursery bed. Now it was rooted and putting out new shoots, and the sketches were dirty in the margin from much use.

“We bring the ships as close as we can and pound the fort from the sea, then fall back,” Buckingham said. “First one side then another, so as soon as they get our range we drop back. Then on the landward side of the fort we launch an attack. Scaling ladders to get the men to the tops of the walls. They must carry and throw down ropes. As the ships fall back from their attack they land the sailors and they support the soldiers in the attack on the walls. As soon as the soldiers are inside they open the sally ports and the rest of the sailors come off the ships and into the gate.”

“Perfect!” Soubise exclaimed.

John was looking critically at the map. “How will the ships come forward and fall back?” he demanded. “What if the wind is in the wrong quarter?”

Buckingham thought for a moment. “Can we use the landing craft as barges?” he asked. “Take the ships in tow to help them around?”

A gentleman nodded. “The wind is bound to be right for either coming in or going out.”

Buckingham looked to John. “What d’you think, Tradescant?”

“It might work,” John said cautiously. “But we could only tow one or two ships in and out at a time. We couldn’t do the big attack you described.”

“One or two would do it,” Buckingham said. “It’s to keep their attention to the seaward side while we attack on land.”

“We should do it on the turn of the tide,” John proposed. “So the tide pulls the ships out of range, helps the barges to do their work.”

Buckingham nodded. “Give the orders, John. You will know how it should be done.”

“I shall make them practice first.”

“Very well. But do it out of sight of the fort, and have them ready for dawn tomorrow, as near to dawn as the tides permit.”

John bowed and went to leave the cabin. He hesitated at the door. “And the attack on the castle?” he asked.

“A textbook attack!” one of the officers enthused. “While they are looking out to sea we attack on land. Speed, stealth. May I have the command, sir?”

Buckingham smiled at his enthusiasm. “You may.”

“What about the ladders?” John asked. “And the ropes?”

The officer turned on him impatiently. “You may leave all that to me!”

“I beg your pardon,” John said politely. “But that’s only a rough sketch I did. Someone needs to check the angle of the walls, any overhangs, the best places for the ladders. The ground beneath the walls.”

The officer laughed. “I had no idea you were a soldier of experience, Mr. Tradescant!” He emphasized the “Mr.” to remind John that he was among gentlemen on sufferance, he had no right to the title. Buckingham, leaning back in his chair, sniffed his pomander and watched John control his temper.

“I am a gardener, and a collector of my lord duke’s rarities,” John said tightly. “I’ve never pretended to be anything else. But I have seen action.”

“Once,” someone said softly at the back. “And hardly glorious.”

John did not look around. “It is in my line of work to look at the little things, to see that they are not forgotten. All I am saying is that the height and the dimensions of the walls have to be known exactly.”

“Thank you,” the officer said with icy courtesy. “I am grateful for your advice.”

John glanced at his duke. Buckingham gave a small jerk of his head to the door and John bowed and withdrew.

It was a small slight after three months of slights but it was the one conversation that John was to hear in his head, in his dreams, over and over again.

They could not make the attack when the duke wished; the tides were wrong and the moon was too bright. But two days after his final orders they launched the attack on the castle. John was on shore, watching the ships maneuver before the fort as he had planned they should. The scheme worked well. The French defenders took time to get their aim on each attacking ship, and as they got it in range, the ships dropped sail and the rowing barges and the ebbing tide pulled her out of range again. John watched for only a few minutes, to see that the ships were safe, and then turned to run to the landward side of the fort where the army was going in to attack.

The citadel was not taken unawares. They were fully armed and ready on the landward side, and they poured musket fire down the high walls onto the attacking English army. John pushed his way through the crowds of soldiers, sometimes surging forward, and then hanging back, until he was near his duke. Buckingham was at the very center of the line, dragging the men forward with him toward the musket fire.

Before him were the soldiers running with the scaling ladders. Buckingham was pushing them on, toward the deadly fire, toward the walls of the castle.

“Go on! Go on!” he was shouting. “For England! For God! For me!”

The men had suffered after three months on the island. Buckingham could not make them laugh anymore. They hesitated and went reluctantly forward. At every point in the line the officers were shouting and demanding that they advance. Only the musket fire – as dangerous for those who hung back as for those who ran forward – kept them moving.

“For the love of God get those ladders up!” Buckingham shouted. All down the line of the castle wall there were soldiers setting the feet of the scaling ladders into the rocks at the foot of the wall.

“Up! Up!” shouted Buckingham “Now! And get those damned gates open!”

Tradescant was flung back by a man falling against him as he took a musket ball. He turned to hold him; but at once a man on the other side went down too.

“Help me!” the man called.

“I’ll come back!” John promised. “I have to…”

He broke off, abandoning both men, and plunged forward, trying to keep close to the duke. Buckingham was at the foot of a scaling ladder, urging men up it. For one dreadful moment Tradescant thought that his lord was going to climb the ladder himself.

“Villiers!” he shouted above the screams and the firing, and saw Buckingham turn his bare head to look for him.

John pushed his way through the crowd at the foot of the scaling ladder to get to his master’s side and cling with all his weight on to his arm to prevent him going upward. Only then did he realize that something was wrong. Tradescant and Buckingham looked upward together. The men were climbing the ladder, head to heels all the way up, the new soldiers at the foot of the ladder pushing up and forcing the ones at the top onward and upward. But then they seemed to stick. No one was moving; the attack had paused. John stepped back a pace and looked up. The scaling ladders were too short. The men could not reach the top of the walls.

The picture of the ladders, crowded by men with nowhere to go, and their faces turned upward to where the musket balls were raining down on them, burned into Tradescant’s vision.

“Retreat!” he yelled. “My lord! The day is lost! The ladders are too short. We have to go back!”

In the noise and the panic Buckingham did not hear him, did not understand him.

“We’re lost!” Tradescant repeated. He fought his way back to Buckingham’s side. “Look up!” he shouted. “Look up!”

Buckingham stepped out from the foot of the ladder and craned his neck to look upward. His face, bright with excitement and courage, suddenly drained of blood and lightness. John thought that his master aged ten years in that one upward glance.

“Retreat,” he said shortly. He turned to his standard bearer. “Sound the retreat,” he ordered. “Sound it loud,” and he turned on his heel.

John ploughed back, still flinching from the musket fire rattling from the citadel walls, to where the man had fallen. He was dead; there was nothing John could do for him except say a swift prayer as he ran, stumbling, like a coward, out of the range of the musket fire, and away from St. Martin’s citadel – the fort where the walls were never measured and the scaling ladders were too short.

“I will fight him myself,” Buckingham said at the council of war the next day. “I shall send a challenge.”

John, weary and bruised, leaned against the doorway of the cabin and saw that his master was in despair, and making the grand gestures of a man in despair.

“He must accept!” Soubise exclaimed. “No gentleman could refuse.”

Buckingham glanced across at John and saw the weary pity in his servant’s face.

“Do you think he will accept, John?” he asked.

“Why should he?”

“Because he is a gentleman! A French gentleman!” Soubise exclaimed. “It is a matter of honor!”

John’s shoulders slumped; he moved to take the weight off his aching knee. “Whatever you say,” he said. “It can’t do any harm. You would beat him with a sword, would you not, my lord?”

Buckingham nodded. “Oh, yes.”

John shrugged.

“The scaling ladders were absurdly short,” the officer burst out. “The wrong size had been loaded. They should have been checked as they were loaded. It was madness to think that they would be any use. You could not reach a thatched cottage roof with ladders that short. You would pick apples with ladders that short!”

There was an awkward silence.

“Send a challenge,” Buckingham said to one of the officers. “He might be fool enough to take it.”

As John had predicted, Commander Torres did not take up the challenge, but the following week the French tried to break out of their siege and capture the English camp. The alarm sounded in the night and the men stood to and fought like savages, pushing the French forces back to the citadel again. It was, in theory, a victory for the English besieging army, but there was little joy at dawn when they did a roll call for the wounded and dead and found that they had fought a long hard battle and were still no further forward.

The siege had held; but the cold weather was coming and it would be a better winter for those inside the fort with food, fuel and shelter than for those camping on marshy ground outside the walls. The duke had been promised that the reinforcing fleet was waiting in Portsmouth harbor under the command of the Earl of Holland, ready to sail any day. But there it stayed, and none of King Charles’s protestations of love and constancy could relieve the English army on the island. The bad weather that kept the earl in harbor also made it impossible to sustain the siege in France. In October, another flotilla of French barges broke the English barricade and fresh French troops were successfully landed inside the fort. Buckingham decided to withdraw.

They had hoped that they might steal away at dawn, and that the citadel might not realize they were gone until it was too late. Following that plan, they did not disembark where they had arrived, on the beaches and dunes on the east of the island, but sent the ships northward to wait off the marshy waters around the Ile de Loix. The Ile de Loix was connected to the island by a tiny causeway, covered at high tide. Buckingham’s plan was that the English army should slip across the causeway as the waters were rising and any French pursuit would be kept back by the swirling currents. Then the English could board the ships in good order and sail away.

Despite their safety behind the thick walls, the French sentries on duty were alert. As the little makeshift English tents were struck and the soldiers quietly formed into ranks, the French sentries watched and raised the alarm. As the ragged English army lined up in companies the gates of St. Martin opened and the French, well-fed, well-clothed, well-commanded, marched out. Buckingham’s troops, nearly seven thousand of them, fell slowly back before the French force. They went in a textbook retreat, staying outside musket range, refusing to engage with the sporadic fire that the French troops offered.

“How does the tide?” Buckingham asked John quickly as he tried to keep the men maintaining a steady pace toward the causeway. The ground underfoot was marshy and wet and the men could not keep to a quick march. They floundered about and had to be ordered into single file on the narrow path. The sniping from the rear increased as the French soldiers gained on them.

“The tide’s turning,” John warned. “Let them run to the ships, my lord, or we’ll not get them off the island before the tide rises.”

“Run!” Buckingham shouted. “As fast as you can!” He sent his standard bearer ahead to show the men the way. One man stepped carelessly off the causeway and immediately sank to his waist in thick mud. He shouted to his friends for help and they, glancing anxiously toward the rear of the army where the French were coming closer, laid their pikes on the ground toward him and pulled him out.

“Go on! Go on!” John urged them. “Hurry!”

It was a race against three forces. One, the English, breaking ranks and running for their ships; two, the French coming behind them, as confident as poachers in a field of rabbits, pausing to fire and reload and then marching briskly on; three, the tide swirling in either side of the island, threatening to cut the narrow causeway in two, pushed on by the rising winds.

The men who had been ordered to lay timbers down over the mud flats to make a causeway to the ships had made the road too narrow, and there were no handholds. As the men pushed and shoved their way along the track, those at the very edge fell off and struggled in the marshy water, which grew deeper with every pulse of the tide. John stopped to haul a man back on the causeway. The man struggled, gripping tight to John’s reaching hands until John felt his own feet slipping under him.

“Swim with your legs!” John shouted.

“Pull me!” the man begged.

A higher wave lifted him up and John landed him like a writhing frightened fish on the causeway. But the wave which had brought the lieutenant on shore was washing over the causeway, making the timbers slippery and wet. Men were stumbling and plunging off on either side, and the men at the rear, fleeing from the French, were tumbling over their comrades and falling over the edge.

John glanced back. The French were closer; the front ranks had cast aside their muskets and were stabbing out with their pikes. The only way the English army could be saved would be to turn and fight; but half of them had lost their weapons in the run through the marshes, and there were dozens swimming in the water and struggling in the mud. The currents swirling treacherously around were sucking them down, and they were screaming for help and then choking on the slurry of the marsh.

He looked around for the duke. He at least was safe on board, leaning out from the side of the Triumph, urging men on to the landing craft and up the nets to the ship.

“God bless you.” The half-drowned man staggered to his feet and gripped Tradescant’s arm, and then turned to see why Tradescant was staring in horror. The French were coming on, sure-footed and closer than ever, stabbing and pushing men from the causeway into the marshes and the seas. The waves were coming in faster than a galloping horse across the flat sandbanks, rushing in and washing the exhausted English army off their narrow causeway, into the brackish stinking water, and under the sharp downward stabbing French pikes. The French were standing on the causeway and stabbing their long pikes into the waters, picking off the English soldiers like a boy needling fish in a barrel.

The lieutenant shook Tradescant by the arm. “Get to the ship!” he shouted above the noise of the water and the screams of the men. “They’re closer and closer! And we’ll be cut off!”

John looked forward. It was true. The causeway was half underwater; he would be lucky, with his weak knee, to get to the other side. The lieutenant grabbed his arm. “Come on!”

The two men, clinging to each other for balance, pushed their way through the water to the other side, their feet unsteady on the wet wooden track. Every now and then a deeper wave threatened to wash them into the sea altogether. Once John lost his footing and only the other man’s grip saved him. They tumbled together onto the marshy wetland on the other side and ran toward where the Triumph’s landing craft were plying from the boggy shore to the ship.

John flung himself on board one of the craft and looked back as the boat took him from shore. It was impossible to tell friend from enemy; they were alike mud-smeared, knee-deep in water, stabbing and clawing for their own safety as the high dirty waves rolled in. The landing craft crashed abruptly against the side of the Triumph and John reached up to grip the nets hung over the side of the ship. The pressure of the men behind him pushed him up, his weaker leg scrabbling for a foothold but his arms heaving him upward. He fell over the ship’s side and lay on the deck, panting and sobbing, acutely aware of the blissful hardness of the holystoned wood of the deck under his cheek.

After a moment he pulled himself to his feet and went to where his lord was looking out to the island.

It was a massacre. Almost all the English soldiers behind John had been caught between the sea and the French. They had plunged off the causeway, or tried to escape by running through the treacherous marsh. The cries of the drowning men were like seagulls on a nesting site – loud, demanding, inhuman. Those bobbing in the water or trying to crawl back on to the causeway died quickly, under the French pikes. The French army, who were left dryshod on land before the causeway, had the leisure to reload and to fire easily and accurately into the marshes and the sea, where a few men were striking out for the ship. The front ranks, who had done deadly work off the submerged causeway, were falling back before the sea and stabbing at the bodies of Englishmen who were rolling and tumbling in the incoming waves.

The captain of the Triumph came to Buckingham as he stared, blank with horror, at his army drowning in blood and brine. “Shall we set sail?”

Buckingham did not hear him.

The captain turned to John. “Do we sail?”

John glanced around. He felt as if everything were underwater, as if he were underwater with the other Englishmen. He could hardly hear the captain speak, the man seemed to swim toward him and recede. He tightened his grip on the balustrade.

“Is another ship behind us to take off survivors?” he asked. His lips were numb and his voice was very faint.

“What survivors?” the captain demanded.

John looked again. His had been the last landing craft; the men left behind were rolling in the waves, drowned, or shot, or stabbed.

“Set sail,” John said. “And get my lord away from here.”

Not until the whole fleet was released from the grip of the treacherous mud and waves and was at sea did they count their losses and realize what the battle had cost them. Forty-nine English standards were missing, and four thousand English men and boys, unwillingly conscripted, were dead.

Buckingham kept to his cabin on the voyage home. It was said that he was sick, as so many of the men were sick. The whole of the Triumph was stinking with the smell of suppurating wounds, and loud with the groans of injured men. Buckingham’s personal servant took jail fever and weakened and died, and then the Lord High Admiral was left completely alone.

John Tradescant went down to the galley, where one cook was stirring a saucepan of stock over the fire. “Where is everyone?”

“You should know,” the man said sourly. “You were there as well as I. Drowned in the marshes, or skewered on a French pike.”

“I meant, where are the other cooks, and the servers?”

“Sick,” the man answered shortly.

“Put me up a tray for the Lord High Admiral,” John said.

“Where’s his cupbearer?”

“Dead.”

“And his server?”

“Jail fever.”

The cook nodded and laid a tray with a bowl of the stock, some stale bread and a small glass of wine.

“Is that all?” John asked.

The man met his eyes. “If he wants more he had better revictual the ship. It’s more than the rest of us will get. And most of his army is face down in the marshes eating mud and drinking brine.”

John flinched from the bitterness in the man’s face. “It wasn’t all his fault,” he said.

“Whose then?”

“He should have been reinforced; we should have sailed with better supplies.”

“We had a six-horse carriage and a harp,” the cook said spitefully. “What more did we need?”

John spoke gently. “Beware, my friend,” he said. “You are very near to treason.”

The man laughed mirthlessly. “If the Lord High Admiral has me executed before the mast there will be no dinner for those that can eat,” he said. “And I would thank him for the release. I lost my brother in Isle of Rue, I am sailing home to tell his wife that she has no husband, and to tell my mother that she has only one son. The Lord High Admiral can spare me that and I would thank him.”

“What did you call it?” John asked suddenly.

“What?”

“The island.”

The cook shrugged. “It’s what they all call it now. Not the Isle of Rhé; the Isle of Rue, because we rue the day we ever sailed with him, and he should rue the day he commanded us. And like the herb rue his service has a poisonous and bitter taste that you don’t forget.”

John took up the tray and went to Buckingham’s cabin without another word.

He was lying on his bunk on his back, one arm across his eyes, his pomander swinging from his fingers. He did not turn his head when Tradescant came in.

“I told you I want nothing,” he said.

“Matthew is sick,” John said steadily. “And I have brought you some broth.”

Buckingham did not even turn his head to look at him. “John, I want nothing, I said.”

John came a little closer and set the tray on a table by the bed. “You must eat something,” he urged, as gentle as a nurse with a child. “See? I have brought you a little wine.”

“If I drank a barrel I would not be drunk enough to forget.”

“I know,” John said steadily.

“Where are my officers?”

“Resting,” John said. He did not say the truth, that more than half of them were dead and the rest sick.

“And how are my men?”

“Low-spirited.”

“Do they blame me?”

“Of course not!” John lied. “It is the fortune of war, my lord. Everyone knows a battle can go either way. If we had been reinforced…”

Buckingham raised himself on an elbow. “Yes,” he said with sudden vivacity. “I keep doing that too. I keep saying: if we had been reinforced, or if the wind had not gotten up that night in September, or if I had accepted Torres’s terms of surrender the night that I had them, or if the Rochellois had fought for us… if the ladders had been longer or the causeway wider… I go back and back and back to the summer, trying to see where it went wrong. Where I went wrong.”

“You didn’t go wrong,” John said gently. He sat, unbidden, on the edge of Buckingham’s bed and passed him the glass of wine. “You did the best you could, every day you did your best. Remember that first landing when you were rowed up and down through the landing craft and the French turned and fled?”

Buckingham smiled, as an old man will smile at a childhood memory. “Yes. That was a day!”

“And when we pushed them back and back and back into the citadel?”

“Yes.”

John passed him the bowl of soup and the spoon. Buckingham’s hand trembled so much that he could not lift it to his mouth. John took it and spooned it for him. Buckingham opened his mouth like an obedient child, John was reminded of J as a baby tucked into his arm, seated on his lap, feeding from a bowl of gruel.

“You will be glad to see your wife again,” he said. “At least we have come safe home.”

“Kate would be glad to see me,” Buckingham said. “Even if I had been defeated twenty times over.”

Almost all the soup had gone. John broke up the dried bread into pieces, squashed them into the dregs and then spooned them into his master’s mouth. Some color had come into the duke’s face but his eyes were still dark-ringed and languid.

“I wish we could go on sailing and never get home at all,” he said slowly. “I don’t want to get home.”

John thought of the little fire in the galley and the shortage of food, of the smell of the injured men and the continual splash of bodies over the side in one makeshift funeral after another.

“We will make port in November, and you will be with your children for Christmas.”

Buckingham turned his face to the wall. “There will be many children without fathers this Christmas,” he said. “They will be cursing my name in cold beds up and down the land.”

John put the tray to one side and put his hand on the younger man’s shoulder. “These are the pains of high office,” he said steadily. “And you have enjoyed the pleasures.”

Buckingham hesitated, and then nodded. “Yes, I have. You are right to remind me. I have had great wealth showered on me and mine.”

There was a little silence. “And you?” Buckingham asked. “Will your wife and son welcome you with open arms?”

“She was angry when I left,” John said. “But I will be forgiven. She likes me to be home, working in your garden. She has never liked me traveling.”

“And you have brought a plant back with you?” Buckingham asked sleepily, like a child being entertained at bedtime.

“Two,” John said. “One is a sort of gillyflower and the other a wormwood, I think. And I have the seeds of a very scarlet poppy which may take for me.”

Buckingham nodded. “It’s odd to think of the island without us, just as it was when we arrived,” he said. “D’you remember those great fields of scarlet poppies?”

John closed his eyes briefly, remembering the bobbing heads of papery red flowers which made a haze of scarlet over the land. “Yes. A bright brave flower, like hopeful troops.”

“Don’t go,” Buckingham said. “Stay with me.”

John went to sit in the chair but Buckingham, without looking, put out his hand and pulled John down to the pillow beside him. John lay on his back, put his hands behind his head and watched the gilded ceiling rise and fall as the Triumph made her way through the waves.

“I am cold in my heart,” Buckingham said softly. “Icy. Is my heart broken, d’you think, John?”

Without thinking what he was doing, John reached out and gathered Buckingham so that the dark tumbled head rested on his shoulder. “No,” he said gently. “It will mend.”

Buckingham turned in his embrace and put his arms around him. “Sleep with me tonight,” he said. “I have been as lonely as a king.”

John moved a little closer and Buckingham settled himself for sleep. “I’ll stay,” John said softly. “Whatever you want.”

The horn lantern swung on its hook, throwing gentle shadows across the gilded ceiling as the boat heaved and dropped in gentle waters. There was no sound from the deck above them. The night watch was quiet, in mourning. John had a sudden strange fancy that they had all died on the Isle of Rue and that this was some afterlife, on Charon’s boat, and that he would travel forever, his arms around his master, carried by a dark tide into nothingness.

Sometime after midnight John stirred, thought for a moment he was at home and Elizabeth was in his arms, and then remembered where he was.

Buckingham slowly opened his eyes. “Oh, John,” he sighed. “I did not think I would ever sleep again.”

“Shall I go now?” Tradescant asked.

Buckingham smiled and closed his eyes again. “Stay,” he said. His face, gilded by the lamplight, was almost too beautiful to bear. The clear perfect profile and the sleepy languorous eyes, the warm mouth and the new sorrowful line between the arched brows. John put a hand out and touched it, as if a caress might melt that mark away. Buckingham took the hand and pressed it to his cheek, and then drew John down to the pillows. Gently, Buckingham raised himself up above him and slid warm hands underneath John’s shirt, untied the laces on his breeches. John lay, beyond thought, beyond awareness, unmoving beneath the touch of Buckingham’s hands.

Buckingham stroked him, sensually, smoothly, from throat to waist and then laid his cold, stone-cold face against John’s warm chest. His hand caressed John’s cock, stroked it with smooth confidence. John felt desire, unbidden, unexpected, rise up in him like the misplaced desire of a dream.

The lantern dipped and bobbed and John moved at Buckingham’s bidding, turned as he commanded, lay face down in the bed and parted his legs. The pain when it came to him was sharp like a pain of deep agonizing desire, a pain that he welcomed, that he wanted to wash through him. And then it changed and became a deep pleasure and a terror to him, a feeling of submission and penetration and leaping desire and deep satisfaction. John thought he understood the passionate grief and lust of a woman when she can take a man inside her, and by submitting to him become his mistress. When he groaned it was not only with pain but with a deep inner joy and a sense of resolution that he had never felt before, as if at last, after a lifetime, he understood that love is the death of the self, that his love for Villiers took them both into darkness and mystery, away from self.

When Buckingham rolled off him and lay still, John did not move, transfixed by a profound pleasure that felt almost holy. He felt that he had drawn near to something very like the love of God, which can shake a man to his very core, which comes like a flame in the night and burns a man into something new so that the world is never the same for him again.

Buckingham slept but John lay awake, holding his joy.

In the morning they were easy with each other, as old friends, as brothers-in-arms, as companions. Buckingham had thrown off some of his melancholy; he went to visit his injured officers and checked the stores with the ship’s purveyor, he said his prayers with the priest. In the companionway a weary-looking man asked to speak with him and Buckingham gave him his charming smile.

“My captain was killed before me, drowned off the causeway in the retreat,” the man said.

“I am sorry for it,” Buckingham replied. “We have all lost friends.”

“I am a lieutenant; I was due for promotion. Am I captain now?”

Buckingham’s face lost its color and its smile. He turned away in disgust. “Dead men’s shoes.”

“But am I? I have a wife and a child, and I need the wages and the pension if I fall…”

“Don’t trouble me with this,” Buckingham said with sudden anger. “What am I? Some beggar to be hounded about?”

“You’re the Lord High Admiral,” the man said reasonably. “And I am seeking you to confirm my promotion.”

“Damn you to hell!” Buckingham shouted. “There are four thousand good men dead. Shall you have all their pay too?” He flung himself away.

“That’s not just,” the man persisted doggedly.

John looked at him more carefully. “You are the man who held me on the causeway!” he exclaimed.

“Lieutenant Felton. Should be captain. You pulled me out of the sea. Thank you.”

“I’m John Tradescant.”

The man looked at him more closely. “The duke’s man?”

John felt a swift pulse of pride that he was the duke’s man in every sense. The duke’s man to his very core.

“Tell him I should be a captain. He owes it to me.”

“He’s much troubled now,” John said. “I will tell him later.”

“I have served him faithfully; I have faced shot and illness in his service. Am I not to be rewarded?”

“I’ll put it to him later,” John said. “What’s your name?”

“Lieutenant Felton,” the man repeated. “I am not a greedy man. I just want justice for myself and for us all.”

“I’ll ask him when he’s calm again,” John said.

“I wish that I could refuse to do my duty when my temper is against it,” Felton said, looking after the admiral.

John had set some sailors to spinning for mackerel and that night he was able to serve Buckingham with a plate of fish. When he set the tray down, Buckingham said idly, “Don’t go.”

John waited by the door as Buckingham ate in silence. The ship seemed very quiet. Buckingham finished his dinner and then stood up from his table.

“Fetch me some hot water,” he commanded.

Tradescant took the tray back to the galley and came back with a pitcher of heated seawater. “I am sorry, it’s salt,” he said.

“No matter,” Buckingham replied. He stripped off his linen shirt, and his breeches. Tradescant held a towel for him and watched while Buckingham washed himself, and ran wet fingers through his dark hair. He stood to let John pat a sheet around him and then he lay, still naked, on the rich scarlet counterpane of his bed. John could not look away; the duke was as beautiful as a statue in the gardens at New Hall.

“Do you want to sleep here tonight again?” his lordship asked.

“If you wish, my lord,” John said, keeping the hope from his face.

“I asked what you wished,” Buckingham said.

John hesitated. “You are my master. It must be for you to say.”

“I say that I want to know your thoughts. Do you wish to sleep here with me, as we did last night? Or go back to your own bed? You’re free to do either, John. I don’t coerce you.”

John raised his eyes to the duke’s dark smile. He felt as if his face was burning. “I want you,” he said. “I want to be with you.”

The duke sighed, almost as if he were relieved of a fear. “As my lover?”

John nodded, feeling the depth of sin and desire as if they were one.

“Take the jug and ewer away and come back,” the duke commanded. “I want to feel a man’s love tonight.”

The next morning they sighted Cornwall and then it was just another night before they arrived in Portsmouth. John expected to be dismissed, but when the priest had left after evening prayers Buckingham crooked his finger and John locked the door behind everyone else and spent the night with the duke. They were learning each other’s bodies, apprentices in desire. Buckingham’s skin was smooth and soft but the muscles in his body were hard from his horseriding and his running. John was ashamed of the gray in the hairs of his chest and his callused hands, but the weight of his strong body on Buckingham made the younger man groan with delight. They kissed, lips lingering, pressing, exploring, drinking from each other’s mouths. They struggled against each other like wrestlers fighting, like animals mating, testing the hardness of muscle against muscle in a lovemaking which gave no quarter and showed no sentimentality but which had at its core a wild savage tenderness, until Buckingham said breathlessly, “I can’t wait! I want it too much!” and lunged toward John and they tumbled together into the darker world of pain and desire until pain and desire were one and the darkness was complete.