The galleon's grave hg-3 Read online

  Pinpricks, Walsingham thought as he gazed unseeing through the mullioned window, the servant clearing the remnants of his solitary meal at noon. That was all that he had managed so far, pinpricks, important, but in the final count little more than that. He would have to strike harder and deeper, not just at the Armada, but at the whole concept of the Enterprise of England, as his spies told him it had now been christened. But how to do it?

  Then there was that damn fool Burghley, as if he did not have enough to worry about. The Queen's long-term ally was increasingly deaf, suffering from gout and losing his edge. What had Burghley said when they had met the Queen? That her vessels should, must be cut down as soon as possible, skeleton crews only, to save money. 'Two thousand, four hundred and thirty-three pounds, eighteen shillings and fourpence!' the old fool had intoned, as if it were "some magic catechism instead of the sum the Queen would save by reducing the Navy to half-manning over the winter. 'Two thousand, four hundred and thirty-three pounds, eighteen shillings andfourpence’ he had repeated, saying the figure with all the pride of a midwife holding up the first-born male child. The King of Spain could launch his ships at any time, was fanatic enough to take even the mad risk of sailing in winter. And if he did? If his vessels got through? With even five thousand soldiers he could hold a decent town, even somewhere such as the Isle of Wight, and either advance from there in the Spring or hold it until Parma's troops could be ferried over. There was nothing to stop them, except those ships. If Burghley had his way, would it be the first time that, a country had been sold for two thousand four hundred and thirty-three pounds, eighteen shillings and fourpence?

  I will die with my mind as sharp as the pains that afflict me, vowed Walsingham. The irony of the situation hit him then, perhaps for the first time. We are all of us ill and dying, he thought, the men playing this great game for the survival of a country, what the religion and the philosophy of the world will be for the next hundred, two hundred or even five hundred years. King Philip of Spain is sixty-six years old, his circulation failing, Walsingham thought, an age which would make him a mythical, almost God-like figure in any English village. The Marquis of Santa Cruz, commander of the fleet, was spitting blood if Walsingham's informants were to be relied upon, though not fast enough. Recalde of Spain was sixty-two, the same age as Santa Cruz. Burghley was a failing sixty-seven, Elizabeth herself fifty-four. Parma, he thought. The Duke of Parma. The youngest of all the players, on the Spanish or the English side. Was it his youth that made Parma the greatest threat to England?

  In the final count, it might all depend on his throw of the dice with Parma. Walsingham was well aware that the prize was not just the sovereignty of England, not just his own life, which would soon be forfeit anyway, but his honour, perhaps even his place in history.

  Chapter 7

  September, 1587 London; Lisbon

  Has it crossed your mind how dangerous this jaunt you're planning to Lisbon is?' asked George. 'And just how many games do you think you can play at the same time? Agent, double agent, dammit, even triple agent? At times even I don't know what side you're on!'

  Gresham chose to respond only to the first part of the question. 'I'm on my own side. And is it more dangerous than being in a rowing boat fired at by cannon from a Spanish galley?'

  'About the same, I reckon,' said George. 'In fact, I'm starting to think I'd rather be back on the boat. At least there we knew who the enemy was.'

  'There's an invasion coming,' said Gresham almost dreamily. 'I can feel it in my bones. And that invasion, once it touches these shores, could act like a fuse and trigger every sect, every family and every person who's ever lusted after power… and all we have between us and chaos are a few ships who've never worked as a fleet… wouldn't the real danger be to do nothing?'

  They were walking in the Long Gallery of The House, an expanse of polished panelling hung with the very best of Sir Thomas Gresham's paintings and tapestries. It was cool there, despite the long line of windows and the slanting, late-summer sunlight streaming through, creating alternate pools of light and dark along its length. The Queen had demanded a price for licensing Henry Gresham to travel to Lisbon: that he formally present Anna to her at Court. It was unusual for the Queen to be in London in the summer. She preferred to go on progress then, bankrupting her nobles and saving herself a small fortune in the upkeep of the Court. It was the continuing uncertainty surrounding the Armada, which some said was ready to sail despite the damage of Cadiz, that kept the Queen in London. Old fox that she was, she knew perfectly well that if Philip came knocking on her door London was the place for her to be, not out in the sticks being fawned on by an ageing Lord presenting her with endless poems written by someone else praising her eternal beauty.

  'I don't know what it is with you,' said George. 'You just can't keep it simple, can you? What do you do with a young man who gets caught up in all this spying business! This double and treble agent stuff! When you should have been doing normal things like chasing girls and drinking yourself stupid!' He paused for a moment. 'Mind, to be fair, you have done those as well. Anyway, my guess is you'll get a knife in your gut the minute we land in Lisbon. From one side or the other.'

  There was a crash from a room nearby, a wail and a torrent of rapid English. Gresham flinched, confused. Anna was telling her maid to hurry up, and doing so by hurling a rather fine ceramic pot of pins at the nearest wall. Pots cost money. So did maids, for that matter. He hoped it was only the pot that was broken. In front of him, apart from her obvious excitement in the stables, he had never seen anything except cool control. Had he missed something? Whatever was going on next door was from a very different person to the one he thought he knew.

  'Well,' said Gresham, wrenching his mind back to his conversation with George, 'You know the argument. You disguise yourself one of two ways — you hide what you are, or you tell everyone what you are. The girl's fiancй is based in Lisbon. I'm her guardian. It's perfectly reasonable for me to want to fulfil my word to her dying mother. And by getting permission from the Governor General and the Queen to make the visit, by doing it in the highest possible profile, they'll think only a madman would make such a noise about a visit when he's actually come to spy.'

  'I agree with the madman bit,' said Mannion.

  'And I'm coming with you,' said George..

  'You!' said Gresham. 'You can't…'

  'Shut up,' said George. 'Firstly, you can't stop me. I've got my licence from the Queen — and a pretty sum" father had to pay for it — and secondly, I'm superb cover for you, second only to the girl. People think I'm just a big buffoon, and they'd think Walsingham had lost his roof timbers and his slates if he was using me as a spy.'

  He had a point, Gresham conceded reluctantly, though he was not prepared to concede just yet. He knew his real objection; he was fearful that George would come to harm. Why was it so much easier to contemplate risk for oneself than contemplate it for those one loved? It was another reason for loving no one. They waited for Anna to appear.

  Gresham was dressed in a deep, lustrous black doublet, slashed through to reveal the silver silk lining, the black finely embroidered in raised stitching. Some people wore a ruff as if it were a simple irritant; Gresham wore his as if it were simply an extension of his beard. The doublet seemed to emphasise the broad shoulders, the narrow hips, while any young male courtier would have died for the line of his leg and calf in the superb silken hose. Many of the other young men there would have extravagant, high hats, in the full flush of fashion. Gresham's was flatter than the fashion, a thin brim and small top no higher than his head cut from the same material as his doublet. He wore little jewellery; the single diamond on his ring finger, set in a simple setting, alone was worth all the gold and jewels worn by three or four of the wealthiest courtiers. It had been one of the few luxuries his father had allowed himself, and had never left his hand. It reassured the bankers and money lenders with whom he negotiated, he had used to say, to know that he had collate
ral at his finger tips.

  There was another rattle of English from deep within, another crash.

  'Should I go and sort it out?' asked Gresham.

  'No,' said George, 'leave 'em to fight it out. Women have their own ways of doing these things. You wait. She and that maid'll come out in a minute or two as if they were best friends.'

  Minutes later the maid flung a door open as if the Queen had come to The House. In some respects she had. The vision that was Anna stepped forth, and even Mannion wondered where his breath had gone for a fleeting moment. The deep blue of her eyes seemed to be echoed in the equally deep, vivid royal blue of her dress, picked out with so many pearls that at least one ocean must have felt denuded. Her hair had clearly been done by some goddess temporarily on loan from Olympus, the cap not containing but rather complementing it. Her perfect figure was somehow emphasised by the huge sweep of the dress out from her hips, the glorious billows of the sleeves done in some lighter, dancing material that still man-aged to match the colouring of the whole. God knows how they had got the dress ready in time. It could take a year for a good dressmaker to produce such a work of art, and the cost of a Court dress was staggering. But money talked, a fact Gresham recognised as much as sometimes he felt revolted by it, he who had carefully been deprived of money at a crucial time in his youth, left to fend without it and so learn its value.

  'I think your goods have packaged well, is it not so?' asked Anna, making a polite curtsey to Gresham. It was the same cool, infuriating creature, but there was an excitement to her that even her self-control could not hide.

  'Did you break all of Mary's limbs, or just selected ones?' asked Gresham cuttingly. She bridled, stifling the movement halfway through and instead drawing herself up to her full height.

  'Sometimes you are a stupid man, and this is a surprise for someone who is so rich. Mary is a very good maid and we are friends of best,' replied Anna primly. 'Girls do not talk to each other in the same way as silly men.'

  The tone was that of a monarch reprimanding the lowliest of servants. Gresham suddenly realised he was being dismissed as a person of no importance. He found it strangely annoying. It was alright on a deck or where men were in control. Here it was different.

  She was passionate, the girl was, Mannion reckoned. It had taken him some while to sense it. Sometimes beautiful women were like alabaster pots, marble, made of a material that somehow you could never warm up. But this one, though it was a real good coating of alabaster, there was fire in her belly alright, though she hid it. She was young enough even not to recognise it for what it was. Virgin? He reckoned so. You could tell. But it was only a matter of time.

  They were arguing now, again.

  'It's "best of friends",'said Gresham.

  'Exactly. That is what I said.'

  'No, you said "friends of best".'

  'I did not!'

  'Why do you always deny things that are the truth?'

  'I do not always deny things that are the truth.' Anna paused for thought. George's jaw had still not returned from the floor where it had dropped on first sight of her, and the obviously nonplussed man had tickled her vanity. 'I sometimes do this, but only when it is necessary. And with you it is often necessary, because you are often very pompous and talk to me like an old man, when in fact you are still a boy and hardly older than me.'

  'I think I'll take Edmund Spenser's parakeet to Lisbon instead of you. The one he got from the Indies? It's more beautiful than you, and when you want to shut it up you just put a blanket over its cage,' said Gresham. Gresham and Spenser the poet had long been friends.

  'Oh yes! So now you want me to climb under your blanket, is that it?'

  'I never said…'

  So they had moved from a rather strange formality in their dealings into bickering like an old married couple. Mannion decided to block it out, but was vaguely aware that the pair of them kept it up all the way to the Palace. God help them if this went on all the way Lisbon.

  He knew that he had to go and see Walsingham. He both dreaded it and, if he was being honest with himself, felt real fear.

  'I hear your… ward's admission to the Court went very well,' said Walsingham, no hint of tension in his voice.

  'If by that, sir, you mean that she was made several offers of marriage that night, and rather more offers for shorter-lived relationships, then the evening was certainly a success,' said Gresham, who had found himself ignored more and more as Anna had taken the floor and the hearts of several young men and not a few old enough to know better.

  'My Lord,' said Gresham, who presently felt unable to engage in idle chit-chat, 'I need to know if you ordered my death at sea.' Well, Gresham had never asked a question quite so directly before. The only sign of surprise was a slightly raised eyebrow. Yet even that from Walsingham was the equivalent of a heart attack from another man.

  'And why would you think I had done so?'

  He had not denied it! Something came near to cracking in Gresham's heart. He could handle any man, even the Queen. Yet of all men, Walsingham was the one who he felt least able to defend himself against. Briefly Gresham explained what had happened, the lethally incriminating evidence planted on him.

  Walsingham gazed in silence out of the window for several minutes after Gresham had finished. From far away came shouts of children playing in the Thames, risking their death of cold. It had been a tiresome ride out to Hammersmith and then on to Barnes. Finally he turned to Gresham.

  'Welcome to your rite of passage. You are familiar with the phrase? It is when a young man is set a task, or faces one, that defines his move from child to adult.'

  'I don't understand,' said Gresham, floundering.

  'As a child, you could ask a question such as you have asked of me and expect an answer that would either put your fears to rest or give them cause. I suggest that if you analyse your own feelings, you will be responding now as a man. As a man, you will know that were I to deny having issued your death warrant it could just as easily be a lie as the truth. The answer, therefore, serves no meaningful purpose. A few simple words of denial do not mean you can afford to ignore the possibility that I might be seeking your death. You will have to guard against that as a possibility whatever, from now on, if you wish to survive — and you, Henry Gresham, have a finely developed instinct for survival. It is the realisation that there are no easy answers that distinguish a child from a man.'

  Gresham knew the truth of what was being said even as Walsingham spoke, knew that he could never again have total trust in this man just as he fought against that realisation.

  'As it happens,' said Walsingham, 'I did not arrange for that commission from Spain to be forged or found. It irritates me that someone sought to kill one of my agents. Yet you will be ill-advised to take comfort from my words.'

  'Why so, My Lord?' asked Gresham sensing the answer before it came.

  'Because I could be lying. Because it would have been simpler for you to identify clearly your enemy, and because you must know that even if this time I did not seek your death I would do so, ruthless, remorselessly and without a pang, of conscience if I thought that by your death I would serve the better interests of the Protestant religion, of England and of the Queen. There you have it. I claim not to have sought to kill you. Yet I will do so if sufficient need arises.'

  'I thank you for your candour,' said Gresham. Such a ludicrous situation! Could this really be happening? Did people have such conversations? Or had he in fact not woken up that morning? 'And of course, My Lord, I would ruthlessly, remorselessly and without a pang of conscience seek your death were I to truly believe that you sought mine.' Except you're probably rather better at it than I am, thought Gresham.

  'If that is indeed so,' said Walsingham, 'then you have truly become a man.' Something like a thin smile creased one of Walsingham's lips.

  " 'I doubt that I've made the whole of that journey,' said Gresham. 'Yet the journey I wish to make now is to Lisbon. You may remember,' sa
id Gresham, 'certain points you made about Lisbon.' Walsingham remembered everything. 'You believed that there were central weaknesses there for Spain, in the event of a decision to invade England.'

  'I still believe so. Though it cannot and never will be the whole answer.'

  'And you believed the Duke of Parma and his army in the Netherlands to be the crucial factor.' 'An opinion I have not changed.'

  'I had planned to address both issues,' said Gresham simply. 'In my own way.'

  'I have been made aware of that,' said Walsingham, 'as I understand you have already discussed a visit to Lisbon and a visit to the Netherlands with Master Robert Cecil.'

  Gresham's heart froze. Walsingham and Cecil were in regular conversation! Were both allied against him?

  'You will remain aware that you are still working for me,' said Walsingham, ice in his voice. 'We discussed the usefulness of your visiting Lisbon and the Duke of Parma. The situation has not changed. You will indeed make both trips, God willing. But be clear that you will do so on my orders, and under my orders. Is that clear?'