'Are you all right?' he asked the boy, who was wild-eyed with terror, and wetting himself. The boy's eyes connected with his rescuer.
'Fuck off, mister!' he said with a squeak, and repeated it for good measure. 'You fuck off, you!' He picked himself up, and ran off with a shambling gait into the crowd, a master of urban disguise.
Gresham felt a hand grab the back of his sodden doublet and, with surprising strength, haul him out of the water. His own men had formed a protective cordon round him, once they had realised what was happening, but they had obviously let someone through. Was it Mannion? No. It was the Earl of Essex.
A hand plonked something on top of Gresham's head. It was his hat.
'Well, Sir Henry,' said the Earl of Essex, 'at least you're wearing something that's partly dry. I picked up your hat from the water just as you dived in.'
'Thank you, my Lord,' said Gresham, spluttering a little.
However hard one tried, water always seemed to get into the lungs in escapades like this. 'It wouldn't do to be seen hatless in company.'
'Quite,' said the Earl, as if the conversation they were having was the most normal thing on earth. 'Now you must tell me, how did you train those men of yours to be so superb? Outstanding. Quite outstanding. If Philip Sidney had had men like that around him he'd be alive now. You must tell me how you did it.'
As the realisation of the stupidity of it all hit him, Gresham could no longer restrain his laughter. It burst out of him.
And to his surprise, Gresham heard Essex join him in the laughter. After all, life was a farce, wasn't it? A bad joke played on humanity, their punishment for feeling pain? Was Essex the only other man in the world who saw how ludicrous it all was?
Gresham allowed himself to be helped to his feet. The laughter subsiding, he looked at Essex. 'Forgive me, my Lord,' he said, with a formal slight bow. 'You are most gracious, and I am very silly.'
Essex looked at him, something glancing behind his eyes, lighting them up. 'Fuck off, mister,' he said.
And both men collapsed into yet more uncontrollable laughter.
Gresham was leaving visible puddles behind him as he walked with Essex into the courtyard of the Palace. Mannion followed a dutiful few paces behind, clucking like an ancient hen over a lost chick. He made it clear, without saying a word, what he thought about people who dived in to rescue a child no one would miss. From behind came various gurgling and sloshing sounds, and a torrent of swearing. Gresham glanced over his shoulder. An incandescent Gelli Meyrick was being hauled out of the river, his extravagant dress reduced to a sodden sponge, ruined.
'Shouldn't we wait for your… secretary, my Lord?' asked Gresham.
'He will look after himself,' said Essex carelessly. 'Gelli is very good at that. It's actually what he does best. If he needs me for anything, you can be sure he'll ask.'
They walked on in silence for a few moments, past the guards at the water gate, who drew their pikes up to attention in a salute to Essex. He pretended not to notice. Gresham suspected that had they not shown him this sign of respect they would have had the roasting of their lives. That was the trouble with real aristocracy, thought Mannion: treat you like a brother one minute then have you up for being too familiar.
'I've a room here in the Palace, and some old rags,' said Essex airily. 'I'm taller than you, but they'll fit you passably, I imagine, and I'm sure we can rustle up a towel.'
They walked on for a few more yards. Only Gresham would have noticed the slightest of changes in Essex's step.
'An urchin,' said Essex casually. 'A vagabond of no worth, destined to grow up a thief or a villain, or worse. Why did you risk yourself for him?'
Gresham's tone was the only dry thing about him.
'He is of no worth to us. I suspect to himself he is worth quite a lot.'
Very few people other than the Queen's servants kept a room in the Palace, particularly a large, beamed room with a generous fireplace and splendid views out over the river. Even fewer kept a stock of clothing that would have doubled the wardrobe of many a gentleman.
'Just in case, Gresham, just in case,' said Essex, as a servant brought garment after garment out of chests. Another servant laid a fire and lit it. The cold was starting to get to Gresham now, and he was fighting his body's desire to shiver. He found himself welcoming the heat of the fire.
Just in case of what, thought Gresham? In case he found himself with an unexpected overnight stay at the Palace in the old Queen's bed? Essex's arrogance, his assumption of superiority, was supreme, yet at the same time Gresham felt himself strangely unaffected by it. He was… amused, that was it. Amused, rather than offended. Why? Perhaps it was because the arrogance was so much on the surface, so understood by its owner as to make it no threat. With Essex, what you saw was what you got. Except by all accounts what you saw and what you got could change several times in the space of one hour. However, he was all conciliation and concern now, though never mentioning once that the reason for Gresham's sodden state was the arrogance of his boat master in seeking to claim a berth that clearly was not his.
If life as a campaigning soldier had taught Gresham anything it was to disavow his culture's horror of nakedness. He stripped down to his shirt, and then pulled that long, dripping garment over his head, allowing Mannion for once to towel him rather more vigorously than was strictly necessary, still cross at his master for taking what he deemed unnecessary risk. Essex had not quibbled when Mannion had made to enter the room. He glanced at Gresham's naked body, not lasciviously, but rather in the manner of a Welsh farmer looking over a bull he was about to buy. Did he notice the slight discoloration down one side of Gresham's whole body, the slightly paler tinge of the skin where a stupid soldier's carelessness had ignited the powder store? Only Mannion knew why there were so few oil lamps in any room Henry Gresham had power over. Candles were likely to snuff out if they were knocked over; a knocked oil lamp spread its flame. If he did notice, Essex said nothing, and nor did he comment on the various scars that adorned almost every part of Gresham's body. Instead, he looked almost dreamily out over the Thames.
'You'll join me at the play? Sit with me? It's the least I can do
… particularly if you tell me how you trained those men of yours. Superb! Quite superb! Put my lot totally in the shade.'
Something in Essex's voice told Gresham that the men on the Essex barge would be made to pay for what had happened out there on the river.
Gresham was dried off now, attending to the intricacies of unfamiliar buttons and fastenings. The doublet he had chosen was one of the most reserved in the Earl's spare wardrobe, but still had double-slashed sleeves and an immensely ornate neckline. The Earl wore his doublets cut high, probably to amplify the cut of his legs, and while Gresham thought it made Essex look faintly ridiculous, like a stork, it suited Gresham remarkably well. On the Earl there was the merest hint that the upper thighs were perhaps just a little too… fat? Perhaps he should ask Essex if he could keep the outfit…
I’d take them out on the river and tell them that we would stay there until they got whatever manoeuvre it was we were practising right. We went out at high tide to some mud flats. If they kept on getting it wrong, we'd get stranded on the mud flats as the tide went out, and they'd have to wait till the next high tide to get home.'
'And did you ever have to wait?'
'Oh, yes. Twice, as it happened. The first time they didn't believe me. The second time they were so desperate to get it right they were all fingers and thumbs. Not a bad training for a real fight.'
Gresham had seen outwardly well trained men panic under the pressure of battle, and load two powder charges into a musket, or ram two balls down the barrel. The effect in each case was lethal, the barrel peeling back and the marksmen blinded by splinters and burning powder. Once he had seen a man fire his musket with the ramrod still in the barrel. For some reason the gun had held firm, and in crazy slow motion the wooden pole described a lazy arc through the air and caught an
enemy horseman a smashing blow neatly on the chin, where it peeked out from under his helmet, and threw him to the ground. It was a shot the man could never have made if he had planned it. It had turned the skirmish their way, as it happened. They had been outnumbered and losing their will to fight, and the ludicrous sight of the flying ramrod had persuaded them that someone up there must be on their side.
'Did you arrange for yourself to be picked up? Surely you didn't stay marooned?' asked Essex, leaning forward now, his interest really engaged.
'I couldn't leave, even if I'd wanted to. There was no way off those mud flats — you'd sink seven, eight feet if you tried to step on them. No one could leave the boat, and no one could join it. Tides take a long time to turn, I can tell you.'
'Food and water?' *No. None was allowed.' *Not even for you? The commander?'
'Especially not for me. I was making a simple point. If a vessel gets boarded on the river, it's not because those boarding it want to say hello. They're not going to leave any witnesses alive, particularly the commander. If the men fail, the captain dies as well. It's a simple lesson.'
'Didn't discipline suffer? You can have no secrets crammed onto a small boat with eight men.'
'Sometimes four, sometimes eight, sometimes sixteen,' said Gresham. 'Did it suffer? I don't know. I certainly wasn't going to shout at them for seven or eight hours. The punishment was having to be stuck there. So I played dice half the time, and then kept sane writing sonnets for the rest of it. Bloody difficult, sonnets.'
Mannion, who had been helping him in silence, stepped back, and nodded approvingly. Mannion had little pride in his own appearance, but great pride in Gresham's. Gresham winked at him and gave a slight sideways nod. It was time for Mannion to leave, or rather for him to wait outside the door. Essex would talk more freely if the two men were alone. He was clearly in it up to his neck with James of Scotland, and God knew who else. For once it might be in Gresham's interests to sound out Essex's political thoughts.
Essex hardly seemed to notice Mannion's departure. As he often did, he spoke, but in the manner of someone talking to himself.
'You played dice with them…' Essex mused, his brow furrowed in thought for a moment. His eyes swung back to Gresham, a signal perhaps that his mind had returned to here and now. 'Didn't they lose respect for you?'
'They lost money,' said Gresham, with a grin. 'I learnt to play dice with Drake, and on the Spanish Armada. In fact one of those men on the boat this afternoon, Dick, he owes me five hundred crowns still. I keep reminding him, but I don't think I'll get my money.'
This new vision of a relationship between commander and men was worrying Essex. He kept coming back to it, like a terrier after a rabbit that he was not convinced was quite dead.
'I couldn't do that,' he said with disarming honesty. 'I don't understand common men, not in the way I suspect you do. I've seen commanders in the field like you — on the very rare times I've been allowed to be a real solder!'
It was no secret that the Queen kept Essex on a leash, and that he wanted military glory more than anything else. The fury he descended into when the Queen refused him permission to go on one jaunt or another was legendary.
'Commanders like me? I'm hardly a great commander,' said Gresham. *No?' said Essex. 'I can see the way your men look at you, the way they trust you, the ease of the relationship they have with you. I can lead such men, I think, but I can never feel part of them.'
'Perhaps, my Lord,' said Gresham, suddenly bored with the conversation. You did not talk about leadership or how to work a body of men. You just did it. Theorising killed the whole thing dead. It was all common sense, after all. 'But I've an advantage over you.'
'An advantage?' said Essex, sensing an insult but not sure what it was. 'What do you mean by that?'
'You were born a nobleman, born to lead, born to see yourself as a cut above other men. Brought up in the household of the most powerful man in England.'
Where apparently you learnt black magic and sodomy, thought Gresham, though this is probably not the best time to mention it. Except there was no sense of any great evil emanating from this man, unlike Cecil. Essex was surprisingly likeable. Spoilt, selfish and certainly arrogant, but no one brought up as the heir to an earl-dom could ever totally avoid that. He was a philanderer and probably a depressive, and his mood swings were renowned. Yet underneath was a genuine power, allied to that strange vulnerability.
'I was born a bastard,' Gresham continued, 'to a merchant who happened to make the greatest fortune in England but who had no birth and no breeding. If I seem at ease with my men, and they with me, it's because we both recognise how similar we are. We're no different, really. I've just had more luck.'
Without realising he had done it, or why, Gresham's last words pushed Essex instantly into a different persona. Gresham saw at first hand one of those famous, meteoric mood changes in Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex.
'And if you can do what you have done without the power that breeding brings, how much should I do, who have had all that advantage, had the ear of the Queen… I, who love the Queen more than any other of her subjects!'
Dark, black melancholia, a bottomless pit of sadness and hopelessness into which one could only dive, helpless. It was a mood Gresham recognised from himself.
The ear of the Queen? It was probably one of her more attractive bits, thought Gresham, but you're welcome to it and the rest of her body. Love the Queen? It was entirely possible that Essex did. Royalty had that effect on some people, robbed them of their senses, made proud men obsequious, filled them with a slavish devotion. Perhaps Jesus had had the same effect on his disciples.
Essex's mood had swung totally in the space of a second. He was angry now, hauled up out of the black dog pit, on his feet, his face reddening, almost shouting at Gresham. Did the man have a dose of the clap, as many said? The disease was endemic in Court, and Essex a known philanderer. These sudden mood changes, often followed by plunges into mad depression were a feature of syphilis. Yet Essex showed none of the outward physical symptoms.
'I was born to power!' he was shouting now, like a lunatic. 'God gave me the breeding, the body and the brain!'
But not, thought Gresham, the modesty to go with it. Nor, as it happened, the money.
'And what have I done with it? Done with my precious ration of time? The gift we are given only once?'
Was this an act? No. There was real insanity lurking behind the Earl's frothings. Yet at the same time there was something else, the strangest sense of a different, almost an alternative intelligence at work, observing and assessing while all the time the outer person gave a very convincing performance as someone who had lost not just the marbles but any sense of the rules of the game.
'You've become Earl Marshal of England,' said Gresham, deciding not to pander to the rage or the self-pity. The appointment had been announced in December of the previous year. This was new in their relationship. They had never talked like this before. 'You've certainly had your ups and downs in Court politics, but as things stand you're the favourite of the Court. You're also, gratifyingly but dangerously, the man the people cheer as he rides through the street. Oh, and you're Master of the Queen's Horse, and holder of her monopoly of sweet wines. Not bad, even for an Earl.'
'Pah!' The scorn in Essex's voice was tangible, a tearing, terrible thing. 'I am mocked for my failure in the Azores, my Lord of Effingham made Earl of Nottingham and so to walk ahead of me at the opening of Parliament!'. Essex was conveniently forgetting that his appointment as Earl Marshal had restored his precedence over Effingham. 'To be sponsored by me for any post at Court is to have the kiss of death on one's prospects! The Queen ignores my nominations. Laughs at me, even.''
The expedition to the Azores in 1597 had been a disaster, the feud between Essex and Sir Walter Raleigh shaking and eventually breaking the whole mad-cap adventure.
'If naval engagements were subject to common sense and logic, or influenced by the effectiveness
of their commanders, Spain would be King of England now and the leader of the Armada, Duke Medina de Sidonia, probably Earl of Essex, for all I know.'
It did not make sense under normal circumstances to remind a reigning monarch how many such had lost their thrones or their lives, nor to remind a proud Earl that his power was to all intents and purposes in the gift of the reigning King or Queen. Yet it seemed to have worked. Essex's head snapped round, his headlong descent into self-pity not stopped, but certainly slowed down. *You were there, not just with the Armada, but on it? You've never talked of it It was one of the great scandals of the time. They said you were a spy for Spain. They still do say so, some of them.'
‘I was there,' said Gresham simply, this time looking into his own soul, rather than trying to fathom that of Essex. 'On board the flagship of the Armada, by the side of its commander. I was a young man then, and already a spy, that most despised of all things. On a fleet led by the person who I still think of as the greatest commander of all. By the side of that man a petty tyrant deliberately stranding his men on mud flats to teach them a lesson is nothing. Nothing at all.'
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