are! I am a Brother of Trinity House, Mister Farrell, and I tell you –’
Hardy was never able to speak the rest of the sentence. The
Sceptre
stopped abruptly. The great hull shook. The timbers screamed in protest . We were thrown from our feet. My left shoulder slammed against a great timber knee, causing such pain that I could only assume I had broken it. I got up. Kit was on the other side of the steerage and seemed unharmed, merely winded. The helmsman, Teague, was picking himself up. But Philemon Hardy lay still on the floor, a dark pool seeping from the ugly gash in his head.
‘His head went straight against the end of the whipstaff, Sir Matthew ,’ said Teague. ‘Smashed his brain open.’
Perhaps it was for the good. Hardy had been a proud man, and he would have found it difficult to bear the humiliation of being so catastrophically wrong. I gave orders for Urquhart, the boatswain and an experienced ship-handler, to succeed immediately as acting master, and for a party to attend to the corpse. The remains of Philemon Hardy would be sewn into a hammock and stored in the hold, in the hope that we might get an opportunity to give him a more dignified farewell than that accorded to so many of the fleet’s casualties, who had simply been slung unceremoniously over the side.
Clutching my shoulder and wincing at the pain, I made my way back up to the quarterdeck, followed closely by Kit. I looked quickly to starboard and larboard. The ships most nearly level with us, the
Dunkirk
of the Red Squadron and the ancient
Saint George
of the Blue, were similarly aground, as was the flagship, the
Royal Charles
, a little further off to the north-west. Our hull seemed to be at once swaying unnaturally and growling like some vast, indignant beast. And there were the Dutch, closing rapidly. They built their men-of-war smaller than ours, with shallow draughts to enable them to traverse the shoals in their own waters. If we could not get off the sand, they would batter our stranded ships into matchwood.
‘The smaller ships ahead of us would have gone over it without even knowing it was there,’ said Kit. ‘They are not to blame for not warning us.’
‘Disaster upon disaster,’ I said, pacing my quarterdeck furiously. ‘The fleet divided. Rupert sent west. Now this. Well, Francis –’ I turned to the
Sceptre
’s chaplain – ‘do you have a prayer to get a fleet off a sandbank?’
‘The Church always has a prayer, Sir Matthew. A prayer for any and every occasion. I was but now contemplating Acts, Chapter Twenty-Seven , where the Angel of the Lord assured Saint Paul that all those on his ship would be saved –’
‘Aye, Reverend,’ said the Earl of Rochester, ‘but was not Paul’s ship wrecked anyway?’
‘I had not taken you for a theologian, My Lord,’ said Francis.
‘One needs to know the Commandments before one can break them, Reverend.’
Francis smiled; he was enough of a realist to know when he had encountered a lost cause, and the Earl of Rochester was most certainly lost to any semblance of the Christian faith. Instead, Francis brought his hands together in supplication, raised his eyes to the heavens, and recited the words of the Book of Common Prayer.
‘O most glorious and gracious Lord God, who dwellest in heaven, but beholdest all things below; look down, we beseech thee, and hear us, calling out of the depth of misery, and out of the jaws ofthis death, which is ready now to swallow us up: save, Lord, or else we perish –’
The sails strained. The ship’s timbers groaned. Men looked anxiously over the ship’s rail, down towards the waters yellowed by the sand being churned up by our keel. There was one great, final shudder and then the ship surged forward once more. We were free of the Galloper .
Francis turned to Rochester. ‘Such, My Lord, is the power of God Almighty.’
‘No, Reverend, in all truth. Such is the power of the rising of the tide.’
I took up my telescope and
Hardy was never able to speak the rest of the sentence. The
Sceptre
stopped abruptly. The great hull shook. The timbers screamed in protest . We were thrown from our feet. My left shoulder slammed against a great timber knee, causing such pain that I could only assume I had broken it. I got up. Kit was on the other side of the steerage and seemed unharmed, merely winded. The helmsman, Teague, was picking himself up. But Philemon Hardy lay still on the floor, a dark pool seeping from the ugly gash in his head.
‘His head went straight against the end of the whipstaff, Sir Matthew ,’ said Teague. ‘Smashed his brain open.’
Perhaps it was for the good. Hardy had been a proud man, and he would have found it difficult to bear the humiliation of being so catastrophically wrong. I gave orders for Urquhart, the boatswain and an experienced ship-handler, to succeed immediately as acting master, and for a party to attend to the corpse. The remains of Philemon Hardy would be sewn into a hammock and stored in the hold, in the hope that we might get an opportunity to give him a more dignified farewell than that accorded to so many of the fleet’s casualties, who had simply been slung unceremoniously over the side.
Clutching my shoulder and wincing at the pain, I made my way back up to the quarterdeck, followed closely by Kit. I looked quickly to starboard and larboard. The ships most nearly level with us, the
Dunkirk
of the Red Squadron and the ancient
Saint George
of the Blue, were similarly aground, as was the flagship, the
Royal Charles
, a little further off to the north-west. Our hull seemed to be at once swaying unnaturally and growling like some vast, indignant beast. And there were the Dutch, closing rapidly. They built their men-of-war smaller than ours, with shallow draughts to enable them to traverse the shoals in their own waters. If we could not get off the sand, they would batter our stranded ships into matchwood.
‘The smaller ships ahead of us would have gone over it without even knowing it was there,’ said Kit. ‘They are not to blame for not warning us.’
‘Disaster upon disaster,’ I said, pacing my quarterdeck furiously. ‘The fleet divided. Rupert sent west. Now this. Well, Francis –’ I turned to the
Sceptre
’s chaplain – ‘do you have a prayer to get a fleet off a sandbank?’
‘The Church always has a prayer, Sir Matthew. A prayer for any and every occasion. I was but now contemplating Acts, Chapter Twenty-Seven , where the Angel of the Lord assured Saint Paul that all those on his ship would be saved –’
‘Aye, Reverend,’ said the Earl of Rochester, ‘but was not Paul’s ship wrecked anyway?’
‘I had not taken you for a theologian, My Lord,’ said Francis.
‘One needs to know the Commandments before one can break them, Reverend.’
Francis smiled; he was enough of a realist to know when he had encountered a lost cause, and the Earl of Rochester was most certainly lost to any semblance of the Christian faith. Instead, Francis brought his hands together in supplication, raised his eyes to the heavens, and recited the words of the Book of Common Prayer.
‘O most glorious and gracious Lord God, who dwellest in heaven, but beholdest all things below; look down, we beseech thee, and hear us, calling out of the depth of misery, and out of the jaws ofthis death, which is ready now to swallow us up: save, Lord, or else we perish –’
The sails strained. The ship’s timbers groaned. Men looked anxiously over the ship’s rail, down towards the waters yellowed by the sand being churned up by our keel. There was one great, final shudder and then the ship surged forward once more. We were free of the Galloper .
Francis turned to Rochester. ‘Such, My Lord, is the power of God Almighty.’
‘No, Reverend, in all truth. Such is the power of the rising of the tide.’
I took up my telescope and
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