The Blast That Tears the Skies (2012) Read Online Free Page B

Dowager Countess, had ever been, at best, as close as that of mutually suspicious cats, one old and ferociously territorial, the other young and impertinent. The difference in opinion between ourselves and my mother over the matter of my brother’s marriage to the enigmatic Louise, sometime Lady De Vaux and now Countess of Ravensden, had created a final and apparently irreparable rift. Mother was seemingly convinced that the lady in question would be able to provide an heir to continue our bloodline, a feat that Cornelia and I seemed wholly incapable of achieving; a brutal truth that brought forth many tears at midnight in our bedroom. My wife, in turn, had been convinced that the Lady Louise was the murderer of her first two husbands and had for good measure done away with the daughter she had borne to the first. Thus affairs had stood before we learned that the marriage had been arranged so that the heir to Ravensden could be fathered upon Lady Louise by the King of England himself, thereby repaying some old and unspecified debt to our family. To say that this revelation had not improved Cornelia’s mood is perhaps the grossest understatement I shall record in these journals.
    Fortunately, this rift within the House of Quinton coincided with a marked improvement in my fortunes. Firstly, there was the income I had accrued from six months in command of the frigate Seraph ; secondly, there were the not insubstantial sums of prize money I acquired during that commission and my more recent service in the House of Nassau , which had spent four very lucrative winter months cruising the Channel and intercepting mock-neutral shipping. All of this vied in my mind with the dishonour of having no command at the onset of a great war. After all, if Matthew Quinton had prospered so satisfactorily before that conflict was officially declared, exactly what riches might come his way once we were properly and legally engaged in sweeping Cornelia’s countrymen off the seas? I had in mind the purchase of an estate in Cornwall, where I now had many friends. That, I calculated, was probably about as far away in England as it was possible to get from my mother and sister-in-law.
    In the meantime, however, my improved condition had allowed us to set up home in a respectable and relatively modern four-storied house in Hardiman’s Yard, off Harp Lane, far enough from the Tower to be safe if the ordnance store at the Minories blew to kingdom come and far enough from the river to avoid all but the faintest whiff of its dire odour at low tide. It was noisy (especially so compared to Ravensden , which was as quiet as an ancient grave), but then, where in the City was not? Even on a Sunday, when the endless rumble of cartwheels and the clattering of hoofs diminished a little, we were treated to the full glory of the bells of London’s hundred and more churches, each of which seemed to keep slightly different time to all the others.
    Of course, we were in no position to buy the entire building, nor even to rent it. We had to be content with the three rooms on the second floor, along with a garret room in which we had installed my wife’s servant and my own. Conveniently, these were both named Barcock; the eldest grandchildren of the steward of Ravensden Abbey, whose own prodigious brood was reproducing apace. In practice, this new Quinton property had been rapidly taken under the wing of Phineas Musk, the curious and markedly obstreperous steward of my brother’s London house, who had accompanied me to sea during some of my previous voyages. Musk invariably slept in one of our rooms when he was too drunk even to get back to Ravensden House upon the Strand; this was often.
    I found my wife contemplating the purchase of a tapestry for the wall of our main room.
    ‘Well?’ she demanded as I entered.
    ‘No command,’ I said miserably, for I had decided that directness was the only way to break the news. ‘And no reason for my dismissal from the