Philippa Gregory - Earthly Joys

Buckingham’s sharp gaze warned John to be silent; but he doggedly continued.

“I beg your pardon, my lord, but if His Majesty is delayed in sending succor then we will have to withdraw for this year,” he said stoutly.

“You are afraid,” one of the Frenchmen declared. He whispered something behind his hand about gardens and easy lives.

“I know that we are running short of food and munitions,” John said steadily. “And the men are on half-pay. If there was anywhere for them to go they would have deserted already. We cannot make them fight if they are hungry. They cannot shoot their muskets if they have no powder.” He looked at Buckingham, past the gentlemen who were openly laughing at him. “Forgive me, my lord. But I am much with the common soldiers and I know what they are thinking, and I know that they are going hungry.”

Buckingham glanced at his table where a flagon of red wine gleamed beside a plate of biscuits. “Are we short of food?” he asked, surprised.

“We’re not starving; but rations have been cut,” John replied. “The Protestants are sending us all they can from La Rochelle – but it is not justice for us to eat their supplies. We came here to relieve them, not to devour their stores. And they themselves are surrounded by the papist French troops; they cannot go on supplying us forever.”

“I will speak with the French commander,” Buckingham said thoughtfully. “He is a gentleman. Perhaps we can make some sort of terms.”

“We should starve them to death and drive them into the sea,” Soubise said hastily. “We have raised the siege; we should smash them into nothing!”

“Next year,” Tradescant said hastily. “When we come back with another fleet.”

A package of letters for the English troops had gotten safely through. The king had written, Buckingham’s wife Kate had written and his mother, the cunning old countess. None of them had sent money to buy food or pay the troops, and there was no news of the fleet being equipped and setting sail. The duke kept the bad news to himself but no one seeing the way he thrust the letter from the king inside his embroidered waistcoat could doubt that Charles had sent fond words but no news of an English fleet ploughing its way through stormy seas from Portsmouth to relieve his beloved friend.

The letter from the old countess was even more ominous. She urged her son to come home and reclaim his place at court. No man could risk being too far from one of the Stuarts; they had notoriously short memories. Buckingham himself had replaced Rochester, the previous Favorite, in the affections of King James, and now King Charles was coming under the sway of new advisers. William Laud, a new bishop, a common red-faced little man, was advising him at every turn. Buckingham must hurry home before he was forgotten.

Charles wrote to his dearest friend that he had no money but that he was raising funds by every means possible. He wrote that he was thinking of nothing but ways to get money to send a fleet. The old countess wrote to Buckingham in their private code that Charles had just bought the Duke of Mantua’s entire collection of pictures for fifteen thousand pounds – enough to equip and send two fleets. He had been unable to resist them at such a bargain price, and now he was penniless again. The money for the fleet had been squandered twice over – Buckingham need not hope for support.

Buckingham tore up her letter and scattered the tiny pieces over the stern of the Triumph. “Oh, Charles,” he sighed. “How can you love me as you do and yet betray me like this?”

The pieces blew in an eddy of wind, like flecks of snow. Superstitiously, Buckingham looked up at the September sky. There were thick clouds on the horizon; the fair weather was due to break. “He is a sweet man,” he said to himself. “The sweetest man that ever lived, but the most faithless friend and king that could ever be.”

He wrapped his cape around him a little closer. He knew that any time his name was mentioned at court, Charles would think of him with love. He knew that he would return to an openhearted welcome. But he knew also that a collection of pictures like the Duke of Mantua’s would be irresistible to a man who from boyhood had been able to have what he wanted at the instant he had wanted it. Charles would think that Buckingham, that the English fleet, that the full-scale war with France could wait while he amassed yet more money from the hard-pressed taxpayers of England. He would never understand that it was he who had to do without. He had no practice in self-denial. For all his sympathy and charm and sweetness, there was a core of pure selfishness in Charles that nothing could penetrate.

“I will have to win and return home or I will be left here to die,” Buckingham said. The last pieces of his mother’s letter blew, sank into water, and then slipped away. Buckingham watched them go down into the heaving greenness and realized that he was facing his own defeat and death, and that he had never thought before that his life and his charmed career could end in despair.

He looked up at the horizon at the dark layers of cloud. The wind was blowing the rain toward the Triumph and toward the string of English ships moored as a thin barrier between St. Martin and the sea of La Rochelle.

“I will win and return home,” Buckingham vowed. “I was not born and raised so high to die in a cold sea off France. I was born for great things, for greater than this. I will see St. Martin razed to the ground and then I will go home and I shall have that fifteen thousand pounds poured into my hands for my pains; and I will forget I was ever here, in fear and in want.”

He turned back to the waist of the ship and saw John Tradescant, standing a yard away, watching him.

“Confound you, John! You startled me. What the Devil are you doing?”

“Just watching you, my lord.”

Buckingham laughed. “Did you fear an assassin’s knife on my own ship?”

John shook his head. “I feared disappointment and despair,” he said. “And sometimes a companion can guard you against them too.”

Buckingham slid his hand around John’s shoulders and pressed his face against the older man’s thick-muscled neck. John smelled comfortingly of home, of homespun cloth, clean linen and earth. “Yes,” Buckingham said shortly. “Stay by me, John.”

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.