Philippa Gregory - Earthly Joys

Then a thick fog came rolling over the sea, and the daylight counted for nothing. The sun disappeared behind it and there was neither night nor day but a perpetual pale grayness. Sir Dudley took to his chamber again and summoned one man after another to play at dice with him. John found himself curiously lost in the half-light. He could sleep or wake as he wished, but he never knew when he woke whether it was day or night.

Despite Tradescant’s watching, it was a sailor who first called “land ahoy!,” spotting through the rolling fog the dark outline of the coast of the North Cape of Lapland.

Sir Dudley came up on deck, huddled in his thick cape. “What can you see, John?”

John pointed to the dark mass of land which was growing whiter as they grew closer. “More like a snowdrift than land,” he said. “Bitterly cold.”

The two Englishmen stood side by side as their ship drew closer to the strange land. A man-of-war detached itself from the shadow of some cliffs and sailed toward them.

“Trouble?” Sir Dudley asked quietly.

“I’ll ask the captain,” John said. “You go below, my lord. I’ll bring you news the moment I have it. Get your pistols primed, just in case.”

Sir Dudley nodded and went back to his cabin as John made his way the few steps to the captain’s cabin and knocked on the door.

“What is it?”

“A man-of-war, coming this way, flying the Denmark flag.”

The captain nodded, pulled on his cape, and came out of his tiny cabin. “They’ll only want passes,” he said. “Sir Dudley’s name is permission enough for them.”

He went briskly to the side of the boat, cupped his hands around his mouth and bellowed. “Ahoy there! This is Captain Gilbert, an English sea captain on a voyage of embassy, carrying Sir Dudley Digges and the Russian ambassador. What do you want with us?”

There was a silence. “Perhaps they don’t speak English?” John suggested.

“Then they damned well should do so,” Gilbert snapped. “Before trying to delay honest Englishmen going about their business.”

“Ahoy, Captain Gilbert,” the reply came slowly, muffled by the fog. “We require your passes and permits for sailing in our waters.”

“Ahoy,” Gilbert shouted irritably. “Our passes and permits are packed away for the voyage and besides, we need none. On board is Sir Dudley Digges and traveling with him is the Russian ambassador, homeward bound. You won’t want to trouble the noblemen, I suppose?”

There was a longer silence as the Danish captain decided whether or not the troubling of the gentlemen was worth the possible embarrassment, and then decided it was not.

“You can pass freely,” he bellowed back.

“Thank you for nothing,” Gilbert muttered. “I thank you,” he shouted. “Do you have any provision we can buy?”

“I’ll send a boat over,” came the reply, half-muffled by the fog.

Tradescant stepped swiftly down the companionway and tapped on the door to Sir Dudley’s cabin.

“It’s me, all’s well,” he said quickly.

“Shall I come out?”

“If you wish,” John said and went back to the rail and watched with Captain Gilbert as a rowing boat, like a Dutch scuts, came out of the mist.

“Anything worth having?” Sir Dudley asked, from behind Tradescant.

The men waited. The little boat came alongside and threw up a rope. “What’ve you got?” Captain Gilbert shouted.

The two men on board simply shook their heads. They understood no English but they held up a basket of salted salmon. Sir Dudley groaned, “Not salmon again!,” but he held up two silver shillings for them to see.

They shook their heads and held up a spread hand.

“They mean five,” Tradescant remarked.

“They can add then, even if they can’t speak a civilized language,” the captain noted.

Sir Dudley reached into his purse and held out four silver shillings.

The men spoke briefly one to another and then nodded. Sir Dudley tossed the coins down into the boat and Tradescant caught the rope the sailors threw to him. He hauled in the basket of salmon and presented it to Sir Dudley.

“Oh, wonderful,” Sir Dudley said ungratefully. “I know, let’s have it with dry biscuit for a change.”

Tradescant grinned.

The rest of the voyage they hugged the coastline and watched the landscape change from the steady unyielding white of snow to a russet dry brown, and then slowly to a green.

“Almost like England in a hard winter,” Tradescant remarked to Captain Gilbert.

“Nothing like,” Gilbert said crossly. “Because half the year it’s under snow and half the year it’s under fog.”

Tradescant nodded and retreated to his vantage point at the bowsprit. Now there was more and more for him to see as the coastline unrolled before the rocking prow. On land John could see the people of the country, who startled him at first with their appearance of having no necks, but heads which grew directly from their shoulders.

“It can’t be,” he said stoutly to himself, and shaded his eyes from the sun to see better. As the people ran down to the beach, shouting and waving to the passing ship, and the ship drew a little closer to shore to avoid a midriver sandbank, John could see that they were wearing thick cloaks of skins over their heads and shoulders, giving them the illusion of a hooded misshapen head.

“God be praised,” John said devoutly. “For a moment I thought we were among strange countries indeed, and that all the travelers’ tales I had heard were coming true.”

The people on the shore held up their bows and arrows and spread a deerskin for John to see. John waved back; the ship was too far out to make any bargaining a possibility, though he would dearly have loved to examine the bows and arrows.

The ship anchored at sunset, Captain Gilbert declaring that he was more afraid of sandbars in an unknown river than all the sailing he ever did across the North Sea.

“Can I have the boat take me on shore?” Tradescant asked.

The captain scowled. “Mr. Tradescant, surely you can see all you need from here?”

John smiled engagingly at him. “I need to gather plants and rarities for my Lord Wootton,” he said. “I’ll be back before dusk.”

“Don’t come to me with an arrow up your arse,” the captain said coarsely.

John bowed and slipped away before he could change his mind.

A young sailor rowed him to the shore. “Can I wait by the boat?” he asked, his eyes round in his pale face. “They say there are terrible people on this shore. They call them the Sammoyets.”

“Don’t go without me,” John said. “The captain is far more of a terror than the Sammoyets, I promise you. And he will kill you for sure if you maroon me here.”

The lad managed a weak smile. “I’ll wait,” he promised. “Don’t be too long.”

John slung a satchel over his shoulder and took a little trowel. In the pockets of his breeches he carried a sharp knife for taking cuttings. He had decided against carrying a musket. He did not want the trouble of keeping the fuse alight, and he thought he was as likely to shoot his own foot off in a moment of abstraction as confront an enemy.

“You won’t be too long, will you?” the lad asked again.

John patted his shoulder. “As soon as I have found something worth bringing home I will come straight back,” he promised. “Ten minutes at the most.”

He walked up from the shelving beach and at once plunged into the deep forest. Huge trees, a new fir tree that he had never seen before, interlaced their boughs above his head and made a twilight world which was shadowy green and sharply cold. Underfoot there were thick cushions, as big as bolsters, of fresh damp moss. John knelt before them, like a knight before the Holy Grail, and patted them with loving hands before he could bring himself to dig in his trowel and take a clump to stuff in his satchel.