Gloriana's Torch

by Patricia Finney

  Mijnheer van den Berg sucked on his long-stemmed pipe and narrowed his eyes. They had been eating a roasted chicken with some of the odd roots that had come from the New World, candied in syrup. Very strange tasting, almost dough-like, and quite hard to swallow. Pasquale noted that Van den Berg had eaten very little. His wife spoke to him unbidden, in a low urgent voice and he smiled at her. Then he spoke to her and when she turned to Pasquale at last, he was sweating with jealousy that the Dutchman should have the privilege of speaking at all to such a beautiful, delicate little person.

  ‘Señor, my husband says that both ideas are good, but that of course, theft is easier and record-keeping much harder if the powder and shot is distributed amongst all the ships. He would recommend designating one or two large well-found ships as magazines and loading the powder and shot aboard them. As you will be keeping such a close formation, it will be easy for captains to send for more if they are so extravagant of their supplies as to need it. And in any case, surely you must be very careful to preserve plenty of powder and shot to use when the troops are ashore in England?’

  Pasquale nodded at this good sense. He put the point to de Acuna Vela who frowned but agreed, and supplied him with the San Salvador as a transport ship. In the last few days at Corunna, while the Van den Bergs were inspecting the galleases and advising on the safe mounting of the new guns on their decks, barrel after barrel of powder went down into San Salvador’s hold, net after net of shot. This would be for the ordnance used to take English, here were the weapons of war that would do the holy work. Pasquale felt his neck thrill at the thought and at last he ticked off the items on the list with little Mevrouw van den Berg standing beside him. She had put back her heavy veil so she could breathe more freely, as she said. She looked drawn and weary, which was understandable if she had been forced to stand on a galleas oardeck amongst the terrible stink and lechery of the galley-slaves. Pasquale deeply disapproved of her husband for allowing it.

  ‘There is such a lot of powder and shot,’ she breathed to him. ‘How is it possible to need so much?’

  ‘An army eats powder and shot,’ Pasquale told her wisely. ‘And you would be shocked to hear how much an ordinary siege takes. This is gunpowder brought from all over the Holy Empire.’

  She shook her head and then added hesitantly, ‘I am only a woman, sir, perhaps you can tell me. Is the gunpowder valuable?’

  Pasquale nodded.

  ‘What happens if, perhaps, a man is disobedient and a spark makes one of the barrels explode? Will the others be safe or will they explode too?’

  It was impossible not to smile at the earnestness and innocence of her questions, although Pasquale had asked questions that were very similar when he first began the unfamiliar work of clerk at the Ordnance.

  ‘They will explode too from the heat and fire of the first explosion.’

  ‘Oh.’ Her voice was small and thoughtful. ‘Then shouldn’t they be spread about a bit? As I would put apples carefully separated on a shelf, so if one should be bad it wouldn’t touch the others and make them bad too?’

  Pasquale opened his mouth to explain how foolish it was to apply rules intended for apples to barrels of gunpowder, but then he thought for a moment. Of course, it was quite sensible. The barrels should be separated as much as possible. He had to store about ten in the magazine in the stern so that it was available to the gunners, but the rest could indeed be spread around the hold with shot and food to separate it. Delighted at her housewifely thinking, Pasquale caught the little bird-boned hand and bent over it to kiss it.

  ‘Señora, you are a most wise and sagacious woman.’

  She blushed and giggled a little, looking up at him sideways through the fur of her lashes, and then away. Thank God her husband was watching the cranes on the other side of the deck and had not noticed.

  * * *

  They left Corunna on 12 July with a God-given wind, pressing them north and east. The hulks and transports left first because they were the slowest sailors, and last of all was San Martin, towed by four longboats, banners flying, musicians playing on the aft deck. Every ship had been blessed with Holy Water, every man had heard Mass that morning and many had even received Communion because of the solemnity. It was a most glorious sight to see the great galleons with their sails spread, the vast number of ships assembling on the uncertain waves, swelling above each one the sacred red cross of the Crusade. Pasquale wept once more as he stood humbly in De Acuna Vela’s train on the high deck of San Martin, watching the Duke of Medina Sidonia facing out to sea, his round anxious face almost smiling at the blessed sight.

  It must be a great burden, even for so important a Duke, the right conduct of Santa Cruz’s vast enterprise against heresy, the waging of a crusade against the evil Witch-Queen of England. While angels might come to fight on their side against the English devils, the responsibility for it was on Medina Sidonia’s narrow shoulders.

  The fleet had assembled and begun the long, slow voyage north with such bright skies and fair winds it was impossible not to realise that Jesus Christ Himself was their captain, the Virgin Mary their patroness.

  * * *

  The voyage north was surprisingly pleasant, with livestock to provide quite decent food in the early days. The Duke generally dined alone, not least because he was badly affected by seasickness. Pasquale found to his dismay that he spent a day and a half in squalid misery again, but he recovered a little more quickly.

  Once he was recovered he went with de Acuna Vela to all the ships, one by one, dining with the gunners. San Salvador, the ordnance store ship, was last and they ate a suckling pig covered in biscuit crumbs somehow roasted in the galley, deep in the bilges. It had a slightly peculiar taste but nothing too bad. The Van den Bergs sat facing each other at the long table, Mevrouw van den Berg pale and slender, breaking up biscuits and nibbling them. She had no stomach for the meat, she explained, because she had been so sick.

  ‘The answer is to well-water your wine,’ Pasquale told her kindly. ‘Here, let me serve you with some.’ He poured water, added wine, and she sipped and drank, watched blankly by her servant, the little dwarf woman. De Acuna Vela grinned at Pasquale as if there was some sinful meaning to his perfectly simple act of courtesy and asked Mijnheer van den Berg, how was it that the English had so many gunners and such good ones?

  Mijnheer van den Berg answered with his usual slow deliberation and the voice of his wife gave the Spanish for his words. ‘The English gunners are well-paid and much respected. Every English pirate that preys on the Indies fleet needs gunners and so there is always plenty of demand for them and the English cast-guns rarely explode and so more of them survive. But I would not overrate them. Your Spanish gunners are full of faith and zeal for the cause.’

  De Acuna Vela agreed that this was a good thing and proposed a school of gunnery where men could study the better laying and aiming of guns. There was something strange about guns: everyone knew that the balls flew in straight lines, and yet when you tried to shoot at something a long way away – a fortess wall, for instance – you often hit below the point you aimed at, as if the ball were like an arrow.

  Mijnheer van den Berg sniffed when the words were relayed back to him. He had always understood that cannon balls flew in straight lines – perhaps the aiming was not quite as accurate as it should be.

  Pasquale listened respectfully to this technical, almost alchemical talk, while Mevrouw van den Berg was the bridge between his master and the Dutch gunner. They seemed to like and respect each other. Pasquale could not quite like Mijnheer van den Berg, who seemed to stare at him coldly and made no attempt to be friendly or indeed to learn any Spanish. But his wife … While she relayed meaning through the changing veil of words she could not help being animated and yet deferential. Her little fingers picked up bread and speared small morsels of pot herbs on her knife and dipped them in olive oil and were busy generally with the work of feeding her, and yet they were delicate, precise, like a bird’s bea
k as it drank at a puddle. Never was she caught in mid-chew when she needed to translate. Never did she make any foolish womanish comment, nor did she seem to mind that the talk between her husband and De Acuna Vela was so military.

  Pasquale gave up any intention of trying to make comments – in any case, he knew very little of the art of gunnery, having come to it so recently. He sat and ate and watched Mevrouw van den Berg at her work and wondered at the delicacy of her cheeks and the heavy fur of lashes on her eyes.

  In the night he dreamed she came to him as a Moorish maiden, as one of the women at the house he visited, veiled across the lower half of her face, and he had struggled to undress her and take her clothes off, which seemed to be stuck to her. Appalled that sin was chasing him even here on the Holy Enterprise, although there had been no actual sinfulness in the dream, he had started up in his cot and prayed against the attentions of succubi.

  Sometimes, when he was not careful, he found himself idly thinking of the rest of her body, wondering how her breasts would be and whether her hips were wide or narrow – impossible to tell when a woman was dressed in a farthingale. Of course he knew what female anatomy looked like from questioning suspected Jewesses, and from the women at that house of the Moorish paradise, but he was shocked at himself for speculating about a respectable married woman, who wore a crucifix and knelt reverently for Mass on the Sunday. Her husband had been taken ill with a stomach flux that day but the priest had visited him to offer the comfort of the Blessed Sacrament and Mijnheer van den Berg had explained through his wife that he was afraid that he would commit the sacrilege of vomiting it up again if he did.

  At the time Pasquale approved the reverence.

  After dinner the Van den Bergs went up to the poop deck, watching the sea slip by, occasionally staring north and east. Almost without intending it, Pasquale went to join them. Mijnheer van den Berg turned away angrily after a while, saying something incomprehensible in Dutch. He went below, muttering as he climbed down the companionway.

  Pasquale found himself moving closer to Mevrouw van den Berg. She seemed not to notice him, blinking into the distance. And then he saw that there were tears hanging on her eyelashes, dropping down her face. She didn’t touch them, didn’t seem to notice them either.

  ‘Mevrouw van den Berg…’ he whispered, hesitantly. ‘May I help you in your distress?’

  She looked at him and smiled a little. ‘No, I think not. This is a trouble I have made for myself.’

  Pasquale bowed. ‘I have no wish to pry—’

  ‘I am afraid, Señor, that’s all. I am afraid because here we are sailing nearer and nearer to England and soon that fierce El Draco will be coming out to fight the King’s Armada and the guns will fire and … and men will be killed … Perhaps my husband, perhaps me. I’m sorry. I know it’s very foolish. But I am afraid, so afraid, all the time.’

  ‘You should never have come,’ said Pasquale, ‘Your husband is no better than a marrano to bring you with him. You should have stayed in a kindly nunnery like my mother until we had taken England and then come to join him.’

  She smiled sadly at him. ‘Alas, Señor, my husband needs me here. How else can Mijnheer van den Berg express himself except through me?’

  ‘He could learn to speak Spanish.’

  ‘Not in the time, Señor and besides, he has tried hard to learn the Spanish and the Italian tongue and never succeeded, he has no gifts that way. Whereas it is well-known that words come naturally to a woman.’ She went to sit down upon a coil of rope and looked up at him, her small, pointed face as woebegone as a child’s. ‘Come, Señor, entertain me and take my mind off my fear. Tell me about yourself.’

  Pasquale stammered and blushed. He was not used to talking to women. There had been a couple of strained and formal interviews with girls his mother thought might do for his wife, but none of the negotiations had succeeded. And of course he had never actually talked to any of the veiled women at the little house.

  He talked about what might be understandable to little Mevrouw van den Berg, about his mother, about the terrible morning when she woke unable to move and he had run through the streets to find a doctor. There were very few doctors in Lisbon, or at least, very few respectable Old Christian doctors. It had taken him a long time. At last the man had come and at the cost of many gold pieces had pronounced that Señora Isabella Lopez Pasquale had been struck by a calenture and might never walk again. And nor had she.

  Mevrouw van den Berg took his hand and clasped it. ‘I am sorry for it. Where is she now?’

  ‘Before we sailed, I took her myself to a beautiful and gentle nunnery where the nuns will care for her as a sister.’

  ‘She must be proud of you.’

  ‘She … I am not so good a son as I should be. She did not like my work at the Holy Office, although she said it was good that I serve the Catholic King. Alas, I have never married, Señora, which would have pleased her so greatly, for I am her only son, and born when she was quite old – in her late thirties, I believe.’

  Mevrouw van den Berg nodded, her eyes wider than ever. ‘The Holy Office,’ she whispered. ‘Is it hard to … to work there?’

  ‘Very hard, Mevrouw van den Berg,’ he told her sadly. ‘It is very hard to question and interrogate sinners to find out their sins and not be marked by it, to hold oneself apart from … from the unpleasantness of it.’

  ‘And who do you question?’ she asked. ‘Traitors?’

  ‘Of course, traitors to their Religion, traitors to the State.’

  ‘Is there no difference?’

  ‘Since the King is the Catholic King, no there is not. Most are New Christians that have backslid, returned to their vomit like dogs and worshipped as Jews or Moors again.’

  ‘Mm. Do you question many Jews?’

  ‘Certainly, of the New Christians. But not long ago I questioned one Jew who boasted of it, who said he had never been christened and already worshipped the true religion. Can you imagine it?’

  Pasquale laughed at the pure shock and horror on her face. After a moment she swallowed and she laughed too.

  ‘A Christ-Killer believing his religion is true! He was born in England where they permit such things, apparently. Nor would he listen to any priests or read any Holy Scripture, only saying that he had read them and was satisfied that his religion was better than ours. He was defiant.’

  ‘It must be a terrible thing to meet such a person.’

  ‘It was. Nor was he burned, unfortunately, despite his evil defiance and persistence in unreason. He was sentenced to the galleys.’

  ‘So light a sentence?’

  ‘Just what I said myself to the judge, Mevrouw van den Berg, but the judge told me that the burning of one Jew must wait for the success of His Majesty’s Holy Enterprise. That is why I myself am here. Although I serve Don Juan de Acuna Vela in the matter of ordnance, when we have taken London, I will assist in setting up a branch of the Holy Office there, to help the poor lost English souls return to the safety of Mother Church.’

  She smiled up at him, her eyes brilliant and velvet. ‘A most wonderful thing, Señor.’

  She understood him, the true centre of his life, his dedication to the Holy Virgin and the Catholic church. He tried to explain to her, how could he explain it? How the Mass filled his heart with light and happiness, how it gave him strength to do all the unpleasant sordid things he must do to wring confessions from obdurate sinners. How much he pitied the English that they were deprived of the Mass by their evil Queen.

  And she listened to him, those marvellous eyes fixed on his face. When he took her hand in his urgency to explain, she let him do it, and squeezed back.

  He told her his plans for the Holy Office in London, for refounding monasteries and nunneries to provide places for the poor English who could not follow their vocations, for reforming schools so they could learn their Faith once more, for carefully extirpating heresy and all who would not gladly return to their true Mother Church.

/>   ‘It will be a miracle,’ said Mevrouw van den Berg, very fervent. ‘A miracle of beauty.’

  An odd phrase, very appropriate of course, but somehow sounding off key. If she had been a suspected heretic, he would have pounced on the words. But no doubt Mevrouw van den Berg was simply carried away by enthusiasm, and, of course, it summed up their Crusade most poetically. ‘Of course,’ he said, delighted, ‘A miracle to return a whole nation back to the beautiful worship of God. Truly, a miracle of beauty.’

  She smiled and kissed his cheek. ‘You are so enthusiastic for the cause, so holy,’ she said. ‘I’m surprised your mother does not like it.’

  ‘She wishes I had not taken minor orders for she fears I might go further to become a priest.’

  ‘Surely she should be glad.’

  ‘So I told her,’ said Pasquale, not quite truthfully, because he had never dared to defy his mother in his life. ‘But she begged me to wait until she had died and gone to Heaven and I swore to her I would.’

  That wasn’t quite true either, it was what he had quietly decided because he could not face her wrath.

  The horizon faded into the dusk as they sat and talked. Mainly it was Pasquale who talked and Mevrouw van den Berg who listened gravely. Words bubbled out of him, into her graciously tilted ears. He was a little surprised at himself, talking so easily to a woman, when it had been so long … Not since he talked to the beautiful young cousin who became a nun because her father had no dowry for her, so many years ago, had he felt so relaxed and easy next to a woman … Even at the little house of women, he was never relaxed or comfortable: to begin with he was full of explosive tension and haste and afterwards he was as fluid in his bones as an alleycat. They were women for burying yourself in, for containing the explosion of your sin. Here was a woman who …

  His mind balked at that train of thought. He talked about how happy he was to be away from the Holy Office for a little, facing action as a true man should. He talked some more about his mother in his youth, how proud she was and her devotion to the Blessed Virgin.