The Battle of All the Ages by J. D. Davies

Author:J. D. Davies [Davies, J. D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literature & Fiction, Genre Fiction, Action & Adventure, Historical, Historical Fiction
ISBN: 9781908699701
Amazon: B00K9W407I
Publisher: Old Street Publishing
Published: 2014-06-16T04:00:00+00:00

Charles and I watched the King and Chiffinch depart. A distant door closed. Nothing stirred in the great church. In the dim candlelight, surrounded by all the royal tombs, there was an eerie sense of the entire weight of English history pressing down upon we two, the Quinton brothers.

‘Yes,’ said the Earl of Ravensden at last, ‘His Majesty wants someone who England can blame – someone, anyone, other than himself. After all, it is not meet for governors to appear fallible in the eyes of the governed. Especially not as fallible as this, in such a time as this.’

‘But what if there proves to be no guilty man? No traitor for the king to scapegoat?’

‘Oh, the world is full of traitors and guilty men, Matt. The law is simply the means by which crimes are fastened upon them, like the planks of your ship to its ribs. The King commands us to find such men, and in my experience they are two a penny – the ones who are neither innocent enough nor clever enough to avoid the hangman’s rope.’

With that, Charles went over to the nearby tomb of Mary, Queen of Scots, and placed the papers that Chiffinch had handed him on top of the monarch’s effigy, so much simpler than that of the cousin who had ordered her execution. My brother opened the first of them, leaned against the tomb, and began to read. I was shocked by my brother’s apparent disrespect toward the remains of a divinely ordained monarch, even one as foolish, headless and Scottish as Mary Stuart; but then I realised to my astonishment that if the dark legend of his royal paternity was true, my brother was merely resting upon the grave of his own great-grandmother, whose ghost would probably indulge one of her own flesh and blood.

I moved into the light of a small group of votive candles, and opened the papers addressed to me.

My heart grew heavier, almost at the sight of each new word. I was to be transformed into a creature I despised: a soldier. I was to venture into perhaps the only part of the known world where my good standing in Cornwall would be positively dangerous to me: that is to say, Devon. Worst of all, one of those who I was to interrogate happened to be a good friend. If the evidence against him proved sufficiently damning, I was to be the instrument of his destruction. If I made him a scapegoat for the division of the fleet, which was clearly what the king wished, then I would be condemning him to a traitor’s fate. In darker moments, I still blamed myself for the death of Will Berkeley. Was I now to be the instrument of another friend’s death? If so, then it seemed there was a high price to pay for friendship with Matt Quinton.

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