Gloriana's Torch

by Patricia Finney

  ‘Ours,’ insisted the Frenchman, stood up in his boat and fired a caliver straight up in the air, which nearly knocked him over, causing more jeering and hilarity among the English.

  The next moment the great guns in the Calais Citadel began to speak, enormous shot, crashing into the water and drenching everyone, first one side of the sandbank, then the other, and at last the shot began hitting the galleas, while the shot that missed nearly swamped the longboats still gathered round.

  There was a stampede. All the English swarmed off the galleas and into their boats. Simon stood, hesitated. What about Snake’s body? But then sense prevailed and he simply went with the throng as they scrambled for any boat and rowed as fast as they could away from the cannon in the fortress, waving muskets and swords at the Frenchmen and shouting elaborate obscenities about the French and their sexual diseases.

  Simon found himself thinking that it was quite funny, but the capacity to laugh seemed as frozen in him as his tears. Nor did he care about the guns of the ferocious sea battle going on out in the Channel rumbling like thunder.

  Somebody elbowed him in the ribs. ‘Who’re you?’

  ‘I’m English, I was a galley-slave—’

  ‘Well if you know how to row, why ain’t you rowing?’ The sailor had a wounded hand, roughly wrapped with a bit of torn sheet.

  Simon blinked, took the toothpick of an oar that the sailor gave him, dropped it in the rollock and bent with the stroke. So strange, it was so small, he was facing the wrong way. In his mind Simon heard Snake singing, an eerie ferocious song, and found himself humming along with it. Then he shook his head to clear it. Snake was dead, gone to Sheol, he couldn’t sing any more.

  Simon blinked over his shoulder at the gaily painted blur of wooden hull and flying sails they were approaching, his spectacles gone in the fight with Padron.

  ‘Which ship are we going to?’

  ‘Ark Royal. Look what I got.’

  It was the reliquary box, the holy relic of San Lorenzo on which Simon had sworn. The sailor shook it in his ear, opened it with his teeth. ‘Urgh, what’s that?’

  Simon stared owlishly at the carbonised bone. ‘I believe the Spaniards say it’s a toe of St Lawrence.’ It was many months since he had spoken English, it came quite slowly and strangely to his tongue.

  ‘Ugh. Stinks.’ The sailor tipped the toe of St Lawrence in the sea, shook out the box, then examined it again. ‘This is good though, look, pearls. And rubies. Did you get anything, mate, any gold pieces or jewelled crosses?’

  ‘No, but my friend killed the Padron and I … shot the Spanish captain, Don Hugo de Moncada.’

  It was obvious the sailor didn’t believe him, only nodded noncommittally. Rowing such a tiny ship, such small oars … It should be funny, really it should. When they came up alongside the Ark Royal, the sailor next to Simon caught his hand as he drew in the oar, looked at the palm.

  ‘Well, you ain’t lying at least.’

  ‘Now take me to my lord the Admiral, I must see him at once.’

  The sailor shook his head. ‘Not yet, mate, if you take my advice. His lordship’s very upset, he didn’t want to come in after just one galleas, it was the madwoman made him do it … Hoy, you can’t go up there!’

  In the waist of the Ark Royal, Simon looked about, saw sailors, soldiers, cannon, gunners … Crowds of people, all busy. He made his way to the stern, to the poopdeck where the Admiral would be, saying only to all the crowds of blurred people who tried to stop him that he must speak with the Admiral. The ship was trimming her sails, turned away from the lee shore and tacking towards the peppering of ships out to sea, all of them clotted into furiously fighting groups. More cannon bellowed, the clouds of smoke drifting like bog-cotton over the waves.

  Somebody stopped him again as he climbed up to the quarterdeck, just as he came to the top of the stepladder. He could hear a person speaking higher than a man, not a boy’s voice either, he squinted, looked again. The hairs on neck and arms prickled.

  A small woman was standing facing the Admiral, her fists on her hips, defiance in every inch of her. Lord Howard of Effingham was leaning over her, roaring; she was arguing with him fiercely.

  Once again something lifted him. He sidestepped and shoved his shoulder into the man trying to stop him, passed between another two soldiers who tried to lay hands on him as if they weren’t there, climbed another ladder, and got to the small woman, reached her, stopped, suddenly terrified it might not be her.

  ‘Rebecca?’ he said and she spun to face him.

  It was ridiculous but now he was suddenly, breath-stoppingly afraid she might not know him. She stared, her mouth opened as if to scream, and then she ran to him.

  She did. She knew him. Bony, stubble-headed, filthy with blood and smoke, stinking, in rags, eyes squinting without spectacles, she knew him. She knew him.

  Lord Howard was shouting something at him now, but he really couldn’t be bothered to understand it. What did it matter what anyone said or did now he had found Rebecca again? He was making strange noises, seesaw noises, there was water flooding his face.

  His arms were wrapped so tight around her he was lifting her off the deck, her arms went round him, she gripped so he could not breathe and all his heart was a fireship floating out of night, into dawn and exploding with happiness.

  The Last of Gloriana

  For the first and only time, the Queen of England gives a private and most secret audience to an African princess, who stands before her in her ill-fitting men’s clothes, her belly swelling more than could be explained by beer.

  ‘What can I give you, Merula, to thank you for your service to me?’ says the Queen carefully.

  Merula smiles at her, something about her face wild and not quite human, or so the Queen thinks who has never really looked at a black woman before.

  ‘Give me a ship, O Queen of England, a ship with guns and powder and shot, and I shall take my son’s ashes home. There I shall raise an army of men and gods and spirits, and bring to battle and kill the man who sold him.’

  She says it without much emphasis, but the Queen feels that all this might well come to pass. She would never admit it but is not at all happy to have such a creature in her realm as could call any kind of angel. It is bad enough that Dr Dee traffics with them, although he is in Bohemia. And so the Queen takes paper and herself drafts an order that names the black woman a princess of Africa and gives her a small ship and men to sail it and money to pay them. Perhaps they will pounce on the woman while she sleeps and make a slave of her or perhaps they will bear her to the Slave Coast and let her go. But at least she will not be in England.

  The black witch takes the paper and salaams the Queen before being conducted from her Presence.

  Thomasina herself had come back to London, but not yet to court. She was resting at the house of Dr Nunez, since Simon came down with a jail fever after his exertions and those who had been near him were waiting to see if they had taken the infection before coming near the Queen herself. But Thomasina had dictated a most complete report, which made the Queen laugh till she cried at its tactless descriptions of half-witted court gallants and withering contempt for useless men that thought themselves too clever for the Spaniards to detect.

  … It remains only for me to confirm what Mrs Anriques has said, that she it was persuaded my lord Admiral Howard of Effingham to spend three hours to take the galleas San Lorenzo while it lay beached since she knew her husband was upon it, and that by so doing his lordship prevented any other attempt at the harbour until it was too late. Many have spoken ill of him in this matter, saying he is as bad as Sir Francis Drake in his greed for a prize, and other worse things, but he knew he could not come off with the galleas for a prize once the French had the Calais Citadel under their control again and so indeed, he did not. But Mr Anriques escaped and he brought him home, which will be a great benefit to Your Majesty.

  We have performed your mission, Your Majesty. We have used a sprat t
o catch a mackerel, or a little ship to catch a great fleet. There may be other Armadas, but never one so dangerous, I hope.

  The Queen lifted her head to stare into space, imagining she saw the storm angel that Merula claimed to have called as he hunted the ships of Spain northwards. It had been close to a disaster, near enough, without what was written in the report from her muliercula.

  She already knew how she would commemorate the great victory. It would give the credit to the storms of God, visible and invisible, that had blown both men and ships into their best places for the defeat of Spain.

  It could very easily have been utterly otherwise, and the fingers of the dreams that had plagued her all summer, wherein she was a black-browed, broad-beamed general by the name of David Becket, trailed their last icy nails down her back as she thought of her last dream of him, riding across the sky with the Wild Hunt.

  She would see to it that Becket’s family and Fant’s family also were looked after by honest gentlemen that would not try to make their fortunes from their lands.

  She put Thomasina’s report in her chased silver cabinet and went, after suitable ceremony by her women, ignored in her abstraction, to her samite-curtained bed, sleeping alone in the warmth of summer. As she slept she found herself dreaming for the last time of what might have been, of her new husband Ralegh, Earl of Sherborne, Duke of Cornwall, now recovered of his amputated leg, bringing her most gently to a belated nuptial bed in the best chamber of Merton college. And there, in her dream, he taught her that not all men were rough bears with musk-scented boots and that pleasure as well as pain could come from the dry empty place between her legs. She woke in the grey of morning with tears on her face.

  And we gods shall leave her to her mortal dreaming, pulling back from her bedchamber and through the window over the Privy Garden, flying low with one of the carrion kites over Westminster and London, to Paul’s churchyard. It lies in the shadow of the great Gothic cathedral with its twenty-year-old temporary roof: the old spire was struck with lightning at the beginning of the Queen’s reign, and all men shook their heads at the ill luck of a mere woman being supreme Governor of the Church of England. They have forgotten it now, forgotten that St Paul’s even had a spire.

  There in the courtyard are the stalls of the stationers, the booksellers, each with his sign by his stall, as of a fountain, a black swan, a Greek temple, a little lapdog, the starry huntsman. Some print and sell small pamphlets about the terrible levels of street crime in London, others the latest phantastical romances of knights and swords and damsels in distress and ferocious giants. One, with the Archbishop’s permission, has a most lucrative trade and sells a fine range of Bibles, in Tyndale’s version.

  A balding young man that came up from the country with the muster of pikemen from Stratford-upon-Avon is wandering like a child in a king’s pastry kitchen, fingering all the books: here poetry, Englished from Greek; there plays, the very latest of all disgraceful entertainments, inveighed against by preachers and legislated against by councils. He has already gone to see one performance, at the Bel Sauvage Inn, Ludgate. He was left open-mouthed and staggered by it, as entranced and bedazzled as he was as a boy by the entertainments for Her Majesty at Kenilworth. The poetry and magic is still whirling around his head even now, making him feverish and vague. Nor will they ever leave him in peace.

  He picks up in his hands one of the Bibles, weighs it, considers buying it, puts it down again, incidentally leaving a dirty thumbprint on its facing page. Eventually he is seduced by a new edition of English histories.

  Had the Spanish landed he would have died in a muddy field, his head blown off by a musket ball and no one would have heard of him nor said that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.

  And so, it’s time to go. You need not stare at the stars, which are hidden by sunlight in any case, only take that holy book rejected by Shakespeare. Its leather cover is beautifully tooled in gold, its pages crackle creamy white as we turn them with a breath; we read the verse in Isaiah wherein God says, most clearly, that His ways are not our ways, His thoughts not our thoughts.

  The pages brown at the edges, subtly burned by sunlight and air and the passing of time. And now the sound of cars and the chirrup of telephones tell us we are home.

  Historical Note

  Anyone who is anxious to make sense of Merula’s section of the book should read Surfing Through Hyperspace by Clifford A. Pickover, but it would probably be better if you just went along for the ride. I tried to base her on what research I could manage into the area at the time, but I decided to use invention rather than fact, because it seemed to me that a lifetime would be too short to study the great empires and peoples of 16th century Western Africa and I would have to learn Arabic to do it properly.

  I have often had to guess or make up the physical detail of my heroes’ lives aboard ship. The ships of the 18th century were very different from those of 1588. In fact the pace of technological development in ship-building was so fast during the 16th and 17th centuries that the ships of 1588 were quite different from the famous Mary Rose of 1547 and ships of the mid-17th century almost unrecognisable. Imagine basing your knowledge of a Sopwith Camel of WWI on a modern fighter jet and you will get some idea of the difficulties I have had researching the subject. It has often seemed to me that the historians of the period are as much at sea as I was. It was immensely helpful to be able to pick the brains of the craftsmen and women at Square-Sail Experience, Square-Sail Shipyard in Charlestown, Cornwall who have the experience of actually building and sailing reproduction square-rigged ships for the film industry. It was the sailmaker there, Alfred Readman, who came up with the suggestion that the English yards were not lashed to the mast but suspended, so they could be hauled round further and sail closer to the wind. But with all this, I have still had to make things up or arbitrarily decide whether one or another hotly contested detail was more likely. As a primer, I have relied heavily on the splendid illustrations of Mark Bergin in Richard Humble & Mark Bergin’s A 16th Century Galleon published by Simon & Schuster Young Books [1993] and was inspired by the relevant chapters in The Safeguard of the Sea by N. A. M. Rodger [1997]. I used State Papers Relating to the Defeat of the Spanish Armada ed. John Knox Laughton [Navy Records Society 1987] and The Spanish Armadas by Winston Graham [1987] as my main sources for the movements of the Armada and the English fleet, except where I decided that history had to make way for the sake of a good tale.

  This applies doubly to the galleases and galley-slaves. Again, perhaps I was looking in the wrong places or books or, most likely, in the wrong language but I have found it very difficult to get information about them. Accordingly, I read what I could on Greek triremes, normal Mediterranean galleys and ships, and made the rest up.

  The central theme of this book is inspired by my deep irritation with the various theories I have read about the Armada and what Philip II thought he was doing. I do not think that the Enterprise of England was an outrageously expensive exercise in sabre-rattling. Nor do I think that Philip, Santa Cruz, Medina-Sidonia or Parma were stupid men.

  Accordingly, I asked myself how could the Armada, exactly as it set sail, have been made to work – and developed my novel from the obvious answer to that question. The fact that it didn’t work should not be taken as proof that it could never have worked. Much less likely enterprises have succeeded perfectly well: the seaborne invasion of a powerful, cultured and martial country by an obscure, struggling, bastard Duke of Normandy in 1066 comes to mind, as does the defiance of a few ill-armed, scrawny Colonists against the foremost sea-power of the time in 1776.

  As for the problems over dating caused by the English affection for an obsolete calendar, I have taken the coward’s way out and ignored them completely. All dates are English.

  Lastly, please remember that the religious opinions of my characters are not necessarily my opinions and nor are their various prejudices.

  READING GROUP GUIDE

  1. If you
met him, what would you notice first about Robert Carey, and about courtiers like him?

  2. What were Lord Burghley’s motivations in selling cannons to the enemy? Why was this not necessarily treachery?

  3. Discuss the politics of the Elizabethan court. If the Spanish had been defeated in London, how would Elizabeth’s marriage have changed English history?

  4. Discuss the use of the supernatural in Gloriana’s Torch. Do the various gods express the personalities of their faithful? To what extent do they influence the action?

  5. What were the strategic arguments for concentrating on the “Miracle of Beauty” to the extent of ignoring opportunities to attack the English fleet? Would you have supported the Spanish plan?

  6. Why did Philip of Spain wish to invade England?

  7. Is there a link between religious conviction and virtue in Gloriana’s Torch? Discuss the relationship between the “good” characters and their gods.

  8. Communication over long distances is difficult in Gloriana’s Torch. How well do the various characters overcome this difficulty?

  9. If you were casting the film of Gloriana’s Torch, who would you pick to play the leading characters?

  10. Discuss the respective strengths and weaknesses of Spanish and English leadership in Gloriana’s Torch. Which side was better prepared for the conflict?

  For more reading group suggestions visit

  www.stmartins.com/smp/rgg.html

  St. Martin’s Griffin

  Also by Patricia Finney

  A Shadow of Gulls

  The Crow Goddess

  Firedrake’s Eye

  Unicorn’s Blood

  As P.F. Chisholm

  A Famine of Horses

  A Season of Knives

  A Surfeit of Guns

  A Plague of Angels