The Players by Margaret Sweatman

Author:Margaret Sweatman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC019000, FIC014000
Publisher: Goose Lane Editions
Published: 2010-11-08T00:00:00+00:00

“She is a swan, Your Majesty,” cried James Hale. “An utter swan!” Hale strutted up the dock to greet the King. He pointed at a three-masted ketch. The Wivenhoe.

Charles hesitated. She is small. Not old but, judging by the mass of hemp stuffed in her planks, not sound. “Then our trade goods must go in the other swan,” he said.

“Quite! A jest!” Hale waved toward the farther dock, where there was moored a small frigate, the Prince Rupert. Hale had acquired a pipe. Onlookers would be impressed with his nautical expertise; that sailor over there likely mistakes him for a pilot.

Charles felt melancholy, he felt remorse, so unfamiliar to him that he couldn’t name it. Some private portion of himself had been brought to light, and he felt debilitated, shy to greet the day. His tenderness toward Lilly seemed distastefully avuncular, a burden on her, something boggy and shapeless and lacking in dividend.

The Prince Rupert’s deck extended not more than seventy feet. He turned to review the Wivenhoe. A deep-waisted boat, she’ll founder in the first storm. Both ships were as small as, no, surely they were smaller than Captain James’s Henrietta Maria. And Captain James had called that a small ship.

Charles became aware of Rupert beside him, wearing grape velvet stitched in gold thread and a fresh bandage beneath his wig. Rupert hummed something Italian. At least Rupert could appreciate the deadly ratio between the Voyage and the cockleshells provided for it. He was examining the Wivenhoe, her staves and ironwork and rigging.

“Small,” said Charles.

“Hmm? Yes, she is rather,” Rupert agreed, as if surprised by his cousin’s acuity.

“Small and weathered.”

“Hmm?”

“She reminds me of Mother.”

“I was thinking of your mother when I awoke this morning.” “I think of Mother whenever I am worried.”

“Your mother was a wonderful woman. You know, Charles, I owe all of England to your little mother.”

Charles sighed. Rupert was often at his most elevated when he was in pain.

On shore, a rooster crowed. It was what a navigator would call “a change day,” the day of the new moon. Auspicious, in an obvious sort of way that would please the pamphleteers. A beak poked up through the Wivenhoe’s hatch, Radisson’s long nose.

“Monsieur Radisson!” Prince Rupert called out. “What do you think of our ship?”

From the tilt of the snout, Rupert and Charles assumed he’d shrugged. They heard sibilance. “S’b’n, p’rs’qu’c’p’tite.”

Rupert turned to Charles. “He said that he likes the ship because she is small.” Rupert put his hand to his mouth and bellowed, “And why do you prefer that she be small?”

Radisson took a step up. “She can be made to, like so, esquiver la glace.”

“To dodge the ice.”

“Oui. You cannot force a big ship through big ice.”

“Quite.” Rupert confided to Charles, “There will be a great deal of ice. That is what Captain James saw in ’32.”

Charles said quietly, “James also said that there is no possibility of there being a passage south of sixty-six degrees.”

“Yes. I know.”

“Why are we pretending?”

“A habit of mind?” suggested Rupert.

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