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

difficulty whatsoever in obtaining a command: indeed, he had been given his choice of several ships, each larger and better than the last.
    ‘I rather doubt that a great star shot across the heavens to foretell the fates of Matt Quinton and Cornelis van der Eide,’ I said, smiling to reassure her. ‘And besides, for there to be any chance of us meeting each other, I would need a ship, and we now know that the chances of that are slim. Even if I were to get one, these will be truly vast fleets, my love – a hundred ships and more on each side. The chances of Cornelis and I facing each other directly are minute, thanks be to God.’
    She looked at me tearfully, then smiled a little. She reached up and kissed me on the lips. Then, slowly and softly, she nuzzled my neck.
    ‘I think,’ I said breathlessly, ‘that we had better send the Barcocks out for provisions.’
    An hour or so later, as we lay naked upon our bedraggled bed, she lifted her head from my chest and prodded me from my exhausted reverie. ‘Perhaps this time … I feel it within,’ she said softly.
    I sighed. Cornelia still prayed that each and every lovemaking bout would make her pregnant, despite the contrary evidence of seven years of childless marriage. I stroked her head. ‘Ah,’ I said, ‘perhaps that was what the comet portended.’
    She looked at me seriously, then saw my smile and pushed me away. ‘I will never stop hoping and praying, husband,’ she said.
    ‘Nor I, love, but mayhap one day we will have to reconcile ourselves to the will of God –’
    She stared hard into my eyes, and for a moment I thought she was going to burst into tears or launch into another diatribe upon the unfairness of our childlessness or the iniquities of the Countess Louise. But at bottom, and despite her occasional moods and flights of fancy, Cornelia was a deeply rational woman. ‘The condition of Matthew Quinton must be truly bleak if he, of all men, is conjuring up the will of God as an excuse for his woes,’ she said reprovingly. ‘And when all is said and done, who is the predestinarian here, husband?’ She clambered out of bed, naked as Eve, and reached for her shift. ‘But I almost forgot,’ she said, matter-of-fact once again, ‘we have an invitation to dinner, three days hence, albeit in Deptford, of all the foul holes this land has to offer.’
    ‘Indeed? Who has invited us?’ This was unexpected; most of my friends were at sea, and most of Cornelia’s were in the land with which we were now at war.
    ‘A man with one of your unpronounceable English names – Ye Vlin, or something of the sort. A friend of that proud little man who orders you about. The one at the Navy Board. The one with that other silly name. Pips? Peppis?’
    ‘Pepys,’ I said. ‘Mister Samuel Pepys. The Clerk of the Acts.’
    Even more unexpected. Mister John Evelyn, one of the great polymaths of our age, I knew not at all, although he was well known to my uncle Tristram. Moreover, almost all of my meetings with Evelyn’s friend Mister Pepys had been in connection with the business of my ships, although I had encountered him at the theatre or occasionally in a tavern. I hardly counted him as a friend; but, I reflected, Pepys was probably the sort of man who would brag mightily if he could attract an earl’s heir to a dinner company. And with no commission in prospect, and thus no pay, a free dinner was not to be refused.
    * * *
     
    A man may be in only one place. This is one of the immutable truths of the human condition, but it was a damnable inconvenience to me in that year of 1665, when I often found myself needing to be in two – or three or more – places at once. Being unable to divide myself or to take on divine form and thus be omnipresent, I witnessed with my own eyes and ears only a part of the unfolding of the strange events that transpired in that spring and summer. But young as I was, I already realised that those events demanded to be written down;