He looked up, blue eyes very bright, and a grin spread all across his round, weathered face.
‘My lord Admiral, we dare not wait. I’ll give you my ship, the Thomas, two hundred tons burden, and my Captain John Yonge for to set her afire and sail her at the Spaniards with the tide tonight.’
‘I can give you no compensation for her, Sir Francis,’ said the Admiral gravely.
‘Nor will I ask none. She’s a gift to Her Majesty, only so you singe the Spaniard’s lower beard and his arse with it. Begging your pardon, ma’am.’
There was a rumble of laughter, some clearing of throats. Hawkins was scowling as well, rather put out.
‘I’ll give Her Majesty my ship, the Bark Bond,’ he growled. ‘One hundred and fifty tons burden, and Captain Prouse to be Yonge’s second-in-command.’
The Admiral nodded and looked quizzically at the other captains. Within ten minutes, they had eight large ships and a quantity of tar and gunpowder and paint to make fireships with.
The Admiral smiled at Rebecca, who smiled back for the first time with perfect understanding of what his game had been, curtseyed and left the cabin.
* * *
By evening the eight ships were at the centre of the gathered English fleet with small boats plying furiously back and forth with anything and everything that would burn. There was even a box of fireworks.
As night fell, they worked on by lamplight, the men tarring the rigging and the oldest sails in the fleet being hoisted into place. For all that half the court gallants on the Ark Royal volunteered to sail the fireships, they were mostly crewed with wide-shouldered pigtailed Cornishmen in their fifties, who would have the nerve to get as close to the Spaniards as they could before taking to their boats.
Thomasina and Rebecca stayed at the rail in the warm night, feeling the freshening wind on their faces, as the frantic work continued. At last, just as the ships at anchor began to turn around with the tide, there were shouts and a scurry of boats carrying workers away from the fireships. Men manned the rigging of the ships that had been screening them from the Spaniards and began taking their craft out of their path.
The ships began to sail, silent and black in the blackness, with lanterns hanging from the yards. They could smell smoke but see no flame because the fires had been started below decks.
Slowly at first, then speeding with the wind pressing their sails the eight ships began to flower with flame as they drew near the Spanish fleet, the fire licking up the rigging and crowning the masts. Dark figures still worked them, daring each other to stay aboard longer, working the steerages to aim the beautiful, short-lived vessels of gold and red and orange straight at the Spanish fleet.
There was someone behind them. Thomasina turned to find the long legs of the Lord Admiral standing there, watching as they were.
‘Beautiful,’ she said fiercely. ‘May they kill many Spaniards.’
‘Just so long as they break the formation, Mrs de Paris,’ said the Admiral. ‘Mrs Anriques, I am much indebted to you for speaking to my council to such good effect. If there is any service I may—’
Rebecca turned on him, the side of her face lit by the now distant fireships. ‘Oh yes, my lord Admiral, you may do me a service. If there is any opportunity, any chance no matter how slim, to board and take the galleas San Lorenzo, will you give me your word that you will do it?’
‘I can’t promise that any—’
‘This is the only service that I would ask of you. That you help me save my husband from the galley-bench. Promise me that if you can, you will.’
The Admiral tilted his head. ‘Your husband is a man most fortunate in his wife and her loyalty.’
‘Will you take San Lorenzo?’
‘Yes,’ rumbled the Lord High Admiral, ‘I give you my word. If I can take that galleas, I will.’
Edward Dormer
Flanders, 1588
When he came back from killing the mapmaker, Parma saw him personally, clapped him personally on the back, shook his hand. Edward glowed with the honour, pleased with the purse of gold, but far more delighted with the praise given out, lavishly by Parma’s standards and by his own. In fact nobody had ever praised him so much before, never had he done anything so wholeheartedly approved of. His struggles with the priesthood, his exhausting efforts to subdue his body to the service of God, they all fell into the background because here at last was something he understood and could do.
He escorted ten barges down a canal and drove off some raggedarsed beggars who tried to take them back. He took a couple of small forts and rounded up several herds of Butter-eaters’ cows to supply the troops. He spent much of his time patrolling up and down the length of the new canal that Parma had built to bring his army to the North Sea when the Armada was in the Channel.
He had a wonderful time. Piers Lammett came to join him, as leathery and enigmatic as before and they went drinking together in dark little alehouses that supplied wonderful dark sticky beer made from cherries.
‘Did you ever find out why His Grace wanted Van Groenig killed?’ asked Lammett, as the potboy opened another barrel of cherry-ale.
Edward scowled with the effort of memory, not helped by several quarts of beer. ‘Who?’
‘The man you were sent to kill in England. God, I pitied you then, Ned, I thought you were certain sure to be arrested and Walsingham would have you dangling from a pillar being flogged to improve your memory.’
‘When I went to England, I didn’t know anything at all about Parma or the Holy Enterprise,’ said Edward, substantially slowed by the beer.
‘Exactly. Nobody expected to see you again. When you bounced back on the Fortune, we thought for a bit that perhaps you’d been turned, but obviously you hadn’t. Very impressed, His Grace was, and I told him that you were clearly naturally talented.’
Edward accepted the praise as his due. He looked back on the raw untested boy he had been six months before and felt a kindly patronage for him. ‘Did you know I killed Becket?’
‘Did you now?’ Lammett smiled and lifted his tankard. ‘How?’
‘Same way you taught me, come up behind him, grab his hair and stab him in the eye. Worked a treat on both of them.’
‘Oh, yes. And he gave you no trouble?’
‘Not much. He tried to fight but couldn’t draw his sword in time—’
Lammett’s eyebrows went up. ‘I’m surprised he’d bother. He’d know a sword’s no good for close work.’
It came to Edward that Lammett was quietly doubting that he had in fact killed Becket at all – not exactly saying it, just not looking entirely convinced. Edward grunted, lifted his feet off the table, and scrabbled out the canvas wallet he kept in his pouch, which one of his men had made for him to keep the trophies of the men he had personally killed. He felt it was good for his soul to keep track of it, how many he had actually sent to Hell in God’s service. There was something important about the numbers, not that he was childish enough to think he would get another room to his mansion in Heaven for each heretic he had destroyed, but still … You had to stop them blurring into each other, for each was in fact a man, had been a child full of hope, had been corrupted and led astray by the evils of heresy and had ended choking out his life on Edward’s blade. God’s justice was a terrible thing.
Lammett watched with grave interest as he opened up the little wallet and pointed to the second lock of hair, the wiry sandy one, not very long.
‘There. That’s Becket’s hair.’
‘Ah,’ said Lammett, taking another pull of his beer. ‘And there was I thinking he was dark-haired.’
‘No, for he introduced himself as Mr Becket when he asked the sailors about me,’ said Edward, his jaw sticking out a little at this continued doubt.
‘Well, then,’ said Lammett, lifting his tankard to Edward. ‘No doubt about it. Many congratulations, sir, I cannot think of a greater blow struck for His Majesty’s Holy Enterprise than the killing of David Becket.’
Ed
ward tilted his head in courtesy, wondering why he was being so touchy at the moment. It seemed an awfully slow business, waiting for the great Armada to be in the Channel so they could begin to board the barges and take ship across the sea. Everything he was doing was working to that end, but it all seemed piddling and unreal in comparison to his longing to go home, to retake England for the True Faith.
‘As for Van Groenig…’ Edward felt a little stirring of guilt there, foolishly because after all the man had been about to betray Parma for money. ‘Van Groenig was no trouble either,’ he said smiling, and drank more cherry beer.
* * *
As it happened, the next time he saw Lammett, they were both in Parma’s antechamber, waiting for an interview with him. The attendant showed them both in and as they knelt beside each other, Parma waved his hand for them to rise, called for wine.
‘I have a special mission for both of you,’ he said, ‘in which you shall be partners, and which shall be for the God-favoured liberation of England from the toils of heresy.’
Alexander Farnese, Duke of Parma rarely spoke in such a flowery manner and Edward blinked at him in puzzlement. Lammett caught his eye and looked deliberately at one of the tapestries where there was a slight bulge.
Parma smiled faintly. ‘This mission, as ordered by His Most Catholic Majesty King Philip of Spain and the Low Countries, is contained in these sealed orders. You shall together recruit a troop of about four hundred men, all experienced soldiers, with the proviso that none shall be Frenchmen or Spaniards, and then you shall attend upon the peace commissioners at Dunkirk. At the moment when the King’s invincible Armada is sighted in the channel you shall open the orders and follow them to the letter.’
Raw excitement made Edward’s ears hammer.
‘As a precaution against accidents, the orders are in two halves and each of you holds one half, written in code, for which each of you holds half of the key. Thus, if one of you should unfortunately fall prey to one of Sir Francis Walsingham’s men, at least the secret shall still be safe.’
‘What do we do if that happens?’
‘When the Armada arrives, you must row out to them and explain your problem to the Duke of Medina Sidonia, who will also have opened his sealed orders. He will tell you what you must do and with God’s grace you shall do it and achieve the miracle by which the Armada shall be able to hold the narrow seas against the English until I and my troops can board our barges and sail across. Otherwise the thing is impossible, as I am sure you realise.’
Lammett’s head had come snapping up as Parma spoke. His eyes seemed to be burning holes in his head to Edward, so fierce was his intent to serve the cause of right.
‘Does it all depend upon us, Your Grace?’
‘Not entirely. But you have a most important part to play and so it is imperative that you hold yourselves ready in Dunkirk. You will be attached to my commissioners as guardians, but I expect your troop to be ready for action the minute the Holy Cross is seen in the channel. Do you understand?’
‘Yes, Your Grace,’ said Lammett. ‘Thank you.’
‘Any questions, Mr Dormer?’
‘Do we have money and weapons for the troops or must we find them ourselves?’
Parma smiled kindly at Edward. ‘Of course they will be provided. The last thing I want is any independent campaign to gain funds or munitions. In matters of policy, Mr Dormer shall lead. In matters of war, Mr Lammett shall advise. And you will be given everything you need.’
And they were. They were also given Imperial warrants and twenty men to guard the two wagons full of bullion and guns. They headed south at once in the hopes of finding soldiers in the campaign bedevilled borderland between Flanders and France.
* * *
Two weeks later, having recruited a bare three hundred in the teeth of the furious opposition of the various Captains in the area, most of whom had contracts to supply Parma with troops for the invasion of England, and having immediately lost a third of them to desertion, Dormer and Lammett came to Dunkirk. It was a muddy, miserable little fishing village blinking out onto the English Channel, and they found it overpressed with people, since Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth’s peace commissioners were in lodgings there and so were His Majesty King Philip’s peace commissioners, their respective trains of servants and their guards. There was no space to be had anywhere, not even in the stables of the meanest inn, and so, much against their will and all best practice, they sprinkled their troops in billets around the surrounding muddy farming hamlets. Most of the farmers protesting at the evil intrusion were well-used to having soldiers billeted on them and eyed up Dormer’s ugly-looking Germans and Italians and renegade Englishmen very much as they might have assessed pigs they were buying at market. Their daughters did much the same. As for the price of food …
‘A barrel of salt fish for a gold piece?’ Dormer groaned. ‘They catch them out there, they salt them here, how can they possibly be—’
‘Where else will we go?’ pointed out Lammett philosophically. ‘The country’s eaten bare and the peace commissioners offer top prices.’
‘Bastards,’ snorted Dormer. ‘What do we want peace for?’
Lammett laughed. ‘Mostly it’s in the nature of seeing who blinks first.’
They settled down like everyone else, arguing over prices, trying to buy beer on credit from alewives who always bit coins first, waiting like everyone else with bated breath for the ships to appear in the channel.
Dormer flogged the first three deserters he caught and hanged the fourth and fifth. After that, their rate of attrition slowed a little. The peace commissioners were making good progress on the question of the size and shape of the table where they would discuss peace and also on the issue of who would sit where. The hunchbacked son of Elizabeth’s Lord Treasurer, Robert Cecil could be seen sometimes, taking the air along the little fishing quay, attended by large surly Englishmen. Everyone was miserable.
Dormer himself was needing more aqua vitae every night to get to sleep. The sealed waxed package that held his orders was never out of his doublet-front, and seemed to burn him when it crackled. Sometimes, when he was drunk, he would take it out and look at it, but he knew that it had been kept so dark a secret for a good reason and tried his best to trust in the lords and King who knew what they were doing. He repelled the many whores who tried to tempt him to mortal sin, but found himself also suffering from nightly attacks by succubi, which made him conclude that Dunkirk must be full of witches. He went to confession regularly to rid himself of the venial sins of looking at the whores with lust or thinking of them with lust, but the only alternatives were sturdy fishwives and their daughters, who were only marginally less sturdy and stank of fish. It occurred to him to wonder, heretically, just how badly St Peter and the other apostles who were fishermen had stunk. He confessed that fault as well, to the downtrodden curate of the Dunkirk church, and was told to say yet another rosary.
* * *
They lost a few more men to raging fluxes and wearily set themselves to recruit more. Around that time Lammett turned up with the sorriest pair of probable deserters that Dormer had ever seen.
One was a wide, black-haired, black-bearded, scowling bully with a face that seemed teasingly familiar. The other, at first sight, was his slave boy, but then when she stood up, it became clear she was his slave woman.
Dormer gulped in shock at the sight of a woman dressed as a man, when she was so very obviously a woman and forgot to wonder where he had seen her master before.
‘New recruits,’ said Lammett triumphantly.
‘Them?’
They were ragged and looked hungry. Both had short swords but no other armament and no armour or horses. They exchanged glances when he spoke and the woman grinned.
‘I’ll take the man, the woman can go and … do laundry, I suppose.’
The man looked highly amused at this and the woman scowled. ‘I’ll fight,’ she said. ‘I’ll fight you to prove I can.’
/> In the end she crossed swords perfectly effectively with Lammett and showed she knew the use of a caliver as well. Lammett shrugged and said that what they needed were warm bodies who could fight, never mind what they were, and against his better judgement Dormer gave way.
The man claimed to be called Smith and said he had so much experience it would be foolish to go into it all, but that he had been at the siege of Haarlem and also the battle of Zutphen where the English commander Sir Philip Sidney took his death-wound, which he claimed to have given him. He was clumsy with a sword owing to an old injury to his shoulder and wrists, but he would undertake to turn any troop of deserters and cripples into soldiers.
Lammett seemed to like him and so they were signed on, one as David Smith and the other, making only her mark, as Merula.
* * *
The waiting went on, enlivened by the occasional rain storm and slate-skied days. It was a bad summer and, as Lammett said grimly when they tripped over a sickening corpse in the town ditch once, you knew the people were expecting famine when the women started killing their new babies.
Then the wind changed and blew from the south-west, the sun came out, most of the rain departed and the muddy streets of Dunkirk began converting to dust. At last the peace commissioners established the shape of the table as round, to their mutual satisfaction, and settled down to deciding where everyone should sit and in what order they should enter the chamber.
It was on a day with a few bright showers that Dormer went into a small dank inn that charged marginally less for its aqua vitae on account of watering it drastically. He asked the potman if he knew where David Smith was and the man shrugged, drew breath to speak.
‘He will be here in an hour,’ said an indeterminate voice, deep, soft, clear, hard to tell whether it was male or female. Dormer blinked into the shadows at the back of the common room and after he squinted hard, he made out the figure of David Smith’s slave woman, Merula, her cloak lapped around her despite sitting next to the fire, staring gloomily at a leather jack of truly abysmal mild ale. Dormer had learned better than to order mild ale at that establishment.
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