Gentleman Captain by J. D. Davies Read Free Book Online Page A

great army. This is fit to start a war.'
    'This is fit to
win
a war,' said the king, who ever cut to the heart of a matter more rapidly than his brother. 'There is our problem. Since we disbanded the usurper's New Model Army, we have only a few thousand troops in our service. Most of them need to stay here in London, in case the mob rises against us, as it did against our father. In Scotland, we have only some hundreds of men. An army of Campbells and Covenanters, armed with these weapons from Castel Nuovo's arsenal, could conquer Scotland in a matter of weeks.'
    I said, 'But as Your Majesty said, they would need a leader, and Argyll is dead—'
    'True, Argyll is dead. Our agents in Rotterdam and Bruges could not trace Castel Nuovo's customers back to their source. But we suspect one man above all others. Colin Campbell of Glenrannoch, Argyll's kinsman. He was once a great courtier, I'm told, at the end of my grandfather's reign and the beginning of my father's, before he went abroad. He has great lands, and good husbandry over many years may have given him the funds to afford so many weapons. Even if not, he was once General Campbell in the Dutch army, a great man of his time, so I fancy he'll have quite impeccable credit with money lenders from Antwerp to Konigsberg. Glenrannoch might see this as a chance to take control of Clan Campbell, either on behalf of Argyll's son, or for himself.'
    'If not control of Scotland,' spluttered Rupert. 'Hell's blood, sir, no man buys this many weapons to make himself leader of a mere tribe on the last edge of Europe. Campbell has commanded some of the greatest armies of our time, in battles that make Naseby seem but a skirmish in a cockpit. This man seeks to rule, as I have told you before, sire. He seeks to depose you in Scotland and to set up a Covenanter republic, with himself at its head. We must stop him–cut him off, by Christ.'
    'But if we are not certain it is Glenrannoch—' began my brother.
    'No, Charles,' said the king, 'we are not certain, but we suspect strongly enough. We think there are no others in Scotland with the resources to pay for such an arsenal, and few with the experience to command the army it could equip. He has ample motive to strike now, while our rule is still relatively new and insecure.' The king stood and walked to the window, where he looked out across the Thames to the dark hull of a fishing smack, just visible near the far bank. She would have been out of place there, so far from her rightful home on the Yarmouth banks, were it not for the fact that she was now a royal warship: the
Royal Escape,
the very boat in which the king had escaped to France after Worcester fight, now moored opposite his palace as a constant reminder to Charles the Second of what had been, and what might be again. After some moments, the king turned back to us. 'Fortunately, Castel Nuovo's factors have been slow in gathering the arsenal from their suppliers. He is happy to take the money for the weapons, of course, but he is also willing enough to assist the King of England at the same time.' The king dropped a scrap of meat from the platter at his side. The little dog sprang forward and took it, but unaccountably gave Prince Rupert as wide a berth as possible. Just in that one moment, I recollected the old stories of the prince's diabolical reputation, of the poodle he carried with him into battle (a poodle damned as a Satanic familiar by all on Parliament's side) and wondered whether the phantom of that poodle could be at Rupert's side still, to terrify the king's dog so.
    'Castel Nuovo does not know precisely where the arms will be landed,' the king continued. 'The agents dealing with him have kept their secrets close. We do know that they have employed a
schipper
with experience of the Western Islands. Castel Nuovo has conveniently taken many weeks to load the cargo. This has given us time to order two ships to the west coast of Scotland, there to join a regiment