The galleon's grave
( Henry Gresham - 3 )
Martin Stephen
Martin Stephen
The galleon's grave
Prologue
March 24th, 1587
Death comes from such random throws of the dice. Thin streaks of grey light signalled dawn bleached across the black, flat Cambridge landscape. The horses sensed their owner's fear, were restive in the yard, hoofs clattering the cobbles, snorting so that the mist of their breath in the cold air joined with that of the panting men charged with their care. The lanterns swung wildly, the gloom still deep enough for them to cast flickering shadows on the walls, highlighting in passing the sheen of sweat on the faces and arms of the ostlers. You could smell the sweat, the strangely warm tang of horseflesh on the cold morning air, and the stink of the dung the Spaniard's horse had dropped.
If the Spaniard had chosen to leave Cambridge as night fell, when he first heard his news, he might have lived. As it was, he gambled that he had time enough, time for a decent supper, time for a few hours' sleep in a clean bed. He made the sensible decision, and it killed him, used up the time he had on earth. After all, few men rode out at dark. The finest horse can see no better at night than a man, and the appalling mud tracks that passed for English roads were quite capable of drowning a man and his horse in the potholes that seemed to penetrate the centre of the earth. Better to make the break at dawn, and hope for clear skies in this interminably damp country. A man determined to find his destiny did not skulk out like a traitor emerging from a dungeon, eyes closed shut from the danger of light A man — and a Spanish man above all — rode out with his eyes all-seeing. In command. In charge.
The two Spanish servants he had brought with him on his mission to England had succumbed to one of the fevers this Fen-blasted town of Cambridge seemed to breed like a peasant woman in Seville bred children. Their English replacements were shifty, reluctant in their duties. What Englishman could blame them when Spain seemed set on destroying England? In fact, only one of the Spaniard's English recruits was with him that morning, a burly man past middle-age but with a quiet authority that made him the only one capable of calming the baggage horses. What was his name? The Spaniard found it difficult to remember the names of those of common birth, and was increasingly irritated by the English habit of treating servants as if they were real people. It was as if they were ashamed of rank. Nevertheless, the Spaniard smiled patronisingly at the man, thanked him for his calm in loading and quieting the horses (when in Rome; or Cambridge…), and dug his spurs unnecessarily into the side of his own fine mount. He had given gold to the inn, more than enough to settle his debts. Pray to God he might never see this miasmic hole Cambridge again. He was away at last. Away to Spain. Away to tell his masters the truth of the fools they had been made to become.
The Spaniard's spirits rose as he felt the thrumming of the horses' hoofs beneath him. Even this early the smoke from the morning fires lay heavy on the ground, stinging the nostrils. His horse flung up mud from the unpaved streets, as if anxious to clear the stench of the town too. Soon they were clear of the poor houses and the stone and brick arrogance of the Colleges. He had chosen to escape through Grantchester meadows. Even he had felt his heart touched here, where the lush grass backed on to the wide, flat river, an image of pastoral bliss. And if one let one's eyes rise, there was the soaring vision of King's College Chapel.
It was the lack of noise that caused him to slow down. Suddenly the Spaniard realised his servant was no longer with him. The man, and the baggage horses he controlled, had veered off for some reason. He was on his own, pounding through the meadows. Then he heard other hoofs, a single horse racing towards him. He turned, lashing his horse with his whip, and the fiery pain of pure fear shot across his chest as he saw who it was pursuing him. The servant had reined in the baggage horses and was waiting quietly by a little copse of trees. From out of those trees two men had erupted, one a burly man on a squat but powerful horse, the other a slighter figure, superbly mounted on a grey. The grey was leaping ahead. The Spaniard knew who its rider was, guessed in an instant and far too late that the English servant had been in the pay of this young man all along, had warned his master of the Spaniard's departure.
Real fear then clawed at the Spaniard's belly, yet he was no coward. He yanked his horse round by brute force, drew the sword at his side and ran at the young man on the grey, sword extended like a lance. If he had hoped to surprise his adversary, he miscalculated. In a second his opponent had extended his sword, and the two men rode at each like medieval knights at the joust. The Spaniard fixed his eyes on the Englishman's heart, determined to plunge his sword into it. Seconds before they met, he made the mistake of looking up into the young man's eyes. They were cold, hard, and his sword seemed to be pointing directly between the Spaniard's eyes.
He had him! The Spaniard exulted, feeling his blade heading inexorably towards his enemy's heart. Yet at the very last possible second, the young man swayed his body aside with an impossible athleticism and sank his own sword into the Spaniard's neck.
The shock of contact should have ripped the sword out of the Englishman's hand, yet somehow he held on to it. His sword cut through the sinew and muscle of the Spaniard's neck until it met cold air, half decapitating the foreigner whose eyes opened wide in surprise. He toppled forward slowly on the still-galloping horse, ludicrously, comically, arm still outstretched holding his sword.
Then, as if time had been slowed down, the sword dropped from the nerveless hand, and the Spaniard slumped over the side of the horse, foot caught in the stirrup. His body and half-severed head bounced on the hard earth until his horse felt the drag on its side and reluctantly came to a halt.
It was pleasantly cool in the meadows of Grantchester, the sky a hard blue. The spring breeze fluttered over the grass, the smell overpowering as the sun gently warmed the earth with the early morning heat. The river burbled cheerfully nearby, neither the angry flood torrent of winter nor the sludgy, torrid stream of high summer. The birds were singing their hearts out at having survived the winter, the beauty of the sound hiding the reality that their song was a savage defence of their territory. It was Henry Gresham's birthday, and-he, the rider of the grey, had just killed a man.
The body lay in the grass, distorted in death, mouth agape in a silent scream. The man's complexion was swarthy, and from behind the torn doublet a set of hidden rosary beads could be seen. He was only a Spanish spy, of course. Was that meant to make it better? Gresham was handsome and something in his stance said that he knew it. He was tall, thin-hipped and broad shouldered, a shock of black hair over a striking and chiselled face, sweat-stained. And now he was a murderer, standing over his victim like a statue carved out of marble.
Mannion, an oak-tree of a man, perhaps five years older, stood silently by Gresham's side as his young master threw up a poisonous yellow bile, obscenely splashing the rich green grass. Mannion waited patiently. Finally, when there was nothing left in the stomach, he spoke. 'Stones, and some rope.' — Gresham looked up.
'You can't take the body home,' Mannion said flatly, 'and you can't leave him here. There's stones on the bank. There's rope in my saddlebag.'
Gresham stared blankly at his servant. It was always like this, Mannion knew, for the first four or five men you killed. The excitement that drove away all conscience and feeling, the blood* lust of combat all gave way to sickness, and the numb nausea.
'We need to sink him,' said Mannion patiently. 'In the river. It's deep here. You get the stones. I'll get the rope.'
Gresham was numbed, unusually obedient. Only half seeing, he moved to the bank to collect stones.
There should be tears, thought Mann
ion. It was a terrible thing to take a life. It would be better if his master cried. Yet crying was the one thing Henry Gresham never did.
Chapter 1
March, 1587 The Queen's Court, London
They had ridden the first part of the journey as if the Devil was on their tail, for no other reason than Gresham's love of speed and danger. He had fresh horses waiting every twenty miles, at the various staging posts between Cambridge and London.
'It was easier in the meadows’ Gresham had muttered when the messenger delivered the summons to attend the Queen's Court. It was a week since he had killed his man. 'At least there I knew who the enemy was.'
The hard riding had driven some of the devils out of Gresham, yet he was still looking glum as he and Mannion rode companionably side by side, some four or five miles before London.
'There's thousands who'd die for a summons from the Queen to attend her at Court,' said Mannion, who hated Cambridge. There's no pleasing some people.'
'There's more men who've died through obeying the summons,' said Gresham glumly. 'I go to Court, amid all the fawning and the sycophancy, and it's like I'm walking through a forest I don't know, at night, and maybe there's an enemy behind every tree. Yet I don't know and I can't see, and the first I'll know is when a knife or an arrow lands in my back.'
'Bit like Cambridge, then,' said Mannion.
At the best of times the Court of Queen Elizabeth was a vicious, competitive and back-biting arena. It was increasingly decadent, a shifting maelstrom of new broken loyalties and bitter feuding laid on top of the long-standing clashes. The loyalty was lessening and the hatred increasing by the second as the news of a possible Spanish invasion became more and more threatening. It was clear that the Queen was past child-bearing age, even had she begun to find a husband she could tolerate. Who would be the next King of England? Or even, God help the country, its next Queen? The old order was soon to die. There were factions fighting for power within the Court, factions outside of it. To talk of who would succeed the Queen was to risk an ear lopped off or worse, yet those who formed the Court talked of little else. And recently there had been something else. Something personal against Gresham, an animosity, people turning away as he walked near. Or was it just an overactive imagination?
'That's part of why you go,' said Mannion. ‘You like the smell of danger. And you like the sense of power. And the girls,' he added finally.
'I could do without the attention of the oldest girl of the lot’ said Gresham. As the Queen visibly aged her desire to surround herself with well-formed young men increased. To his great alarm, Gresham had found himself one of her new menagerie.
They smelled and saw London long before they entered it. The sea coal that Londoners were addicted to had a deeper, heavier smell than the woodsmoke of Cambridge and seemed to leave an oily, cloying after-taste. Then there was the rotting stench of waste from hundreds of thousands of living creatures, man and beast, their only common denominator ownership of bowels and a bladder dominated by the need to empty themselves. The great city was built on filth, not just the manure of its living creatures but the mangled bones of beef and fish and chicken, the filthy water from washing and cooking. The river took as much as it could, of course, and it had its own smell: dank, rotten yet strangely sweet. And for all of that, in the middle of London, a sudden change of wind could replace the stench of massed humanity with the clear and sweet breath of countryside from the fields of Highbury and Islington, from where the milk was brought in every morning. At night the blazing lights of torches, of lanterns and of candles challenged the darkness with a frail gesture of protest from humanity. In daylight, it was the pall of smoke hanging over the city that first drew attention, with the silver ribbon of the Thames seeming to stand out in stark clarity, however obscured the sky. And then the noise, the deafening, crucifying noise! All the world had something to sell in London and was bellowing the news to anyone who cared to listen and to all those who did not. The traffic in the streets was like a river in torrent suddenly forced into a narrow gorge, men, women, boys, oxen, sheep, horses, clumsy farm carts and lumbering carriages moving, fighting, squabbling, all at full volume.
Coming from Cambridge, Gresham and Mannion had to enter by Eastgate and cross all of London to reach The House, the palatial and neglected mansion on the Strand that Gresham had inherited from his father. It would have been easier to leave the horses by the Tower, and get one of The House's boats to row them upstream. Yet Gresham felt the need to let London and its madness soak back into his spirit, remind him of the days when, as a child, he was penniless and free to wander these wild, narrow streets as he wished, remind him of the days when friendless and alone he had learned to rate survival as the only virtue, and learned how to survive.
He waited now in the Library, his favourite room in The House, dressed in all his finery for Court. Mannion sat with him. The high, mullioned windows looked out directly on the Thames, seemingly more crowded every visit he made. Would Spanish sails fill the view next time he came to London, thought Gresham, their cannons smashing to splinters the ludicrously expensive glass in the windows of his library? There was no hint of impending destruction in the soft, dark glow of the lovingly polished panelling, the even sorter gleam of the leather bindings on the books. Suddenly a commotion in the yard broke the peace, the clattering of hoofs, the sound of a loud, jovial man's voice. The Honourable George Willoughby, soon to become Lord Willoughby when his increasingly aged father died, was incapable of going anywhere incognito.
George Willoughby was the ugliest man on earth. A face that looked as if it had been slammed into a stone wall at a formative time in babyhood was further pock-marked by the deep, dark craters of smallpox. A mistake by the midwife had given George a slant to his face, the left side of his mouth pulled down in a permanent grimace, the lid on his left eye — a dark, muddy-brown eye — forever doomed to droop half-closed. He was also a big, burly man prone to knock over anything in his path.
'You're such an ugly bastard!' said Gresham, smiling affectionately at the only friend other than Mannion he had on earth.
A small table with a pewter mug on it went flying as George entered the Library.
'Oh, damn! So sorry!' said George. A lifetime of knocking things over had neither accustomed him to it, nor diminished the pain his clumsiness caused him Only two things were certain about George. He would barge into everything, and be torn apart by remorse when he did so. Then a smile lit the crags and valleys of his face. 'Wrong again, Mr Fellow of Granville College.' His gaze, impossibly frank and honest, met Gresham's. 'At least on one count. I'm ugly. You're the bastard!'
They advanced and hugged each other, Gresham's eyes dancing with fire and life. There were only two men alive who could call Gresham a bastard. And only one other who could call George Willoughby ugly.
'Ignore the servant,' said Gresham. 'He's getting ideas above his station again.'
George released Gresham, rather like a vast bear releasing its mate, and turned to Mannion. 'Been telling his Lordship the truth again, have you? Warned you about that,' said George, wagging a finger at Mannion. With both men in the room it seemed somehow shrunk, dominated by their bulk. 'I've known him even longer than you. I've told you often enough. Flatter him! Men with great fortunes can't take the truth. Particularly young men who think with their hips!'
George stuck out a vast paw, and Mannion grasped it in return. He looked approvingly at George. A person's appearance had never bothered Mannion. He judged a man by his heart. And George Willoughby's heart was as big as they came.
'There'll be flattery enough this evening,' said Gresham, as the three of them settled down to a bottle of rather fine Spanish wine brought cobwebbed from the cellars of The House. If there was anything odd about two gentlemen and a servant sharing a bottle, none of the three seemed to notice it.
'But of course!' said George. 'The Queen will be told she dances divinely and that she's the only paragon of human beauty, and several so
nnets in her favour will be written on the spot. Despite the fact that she's self-evidently an old cow with a complexion like a distempered wall.'
'You'll be telling Her Majesty that tonight, will you?' said Gresham in a tone of innocence. 'Just imagine how you'd feel if she served up your head on a pewter salver and not a gold one…'
'My head's safer on my shoulders than yours is, Henry,' said George. There was a sudden sharpness in his tone that made Gresham look up. 'I tell you, you're playing with fire. There'll be no flattery of you tonight Only jealousy. Hatred, even. Are you wise to stay as one of Walsingham's men? These are dangerous times.'
Walsingham was Elizabeth's spy master. By now elderly and riven by serious illness, Walsingham had funded from his own income the greatest and the most malevolent network of informers in Europe. He had recruited Gresham as a spy in his first year at Cambridge, when Gresham was still an impoverished student. When Gresham's wholly unexpected inheritance turned his life from penury to fabulous wealth, he had stayed with Walsingham. Danger and risk were a drug to which young Henry Gresham had become addicted.
'Life's dangerous,' commented Gresham idly.
For all his foolish exterior, George Willoughby had a sharp brain. It was also one strangely acclimatised to the world of the Court Just as Gresham only really felt at home in Cambridge and its tiny battles, who was in favour and who was out of favour, who was a rising star and whose star had fallen were meat and drink to George. It was odd that a man so simple could take so much pleasure in charting the shifting sands of the Court.
'But rarely as dangerous as this. And doubly so since we decided to execute Mary Queen of Scots.'
Gresham said nothing.
Mary Queen of Scots. A Queen in her own right twice over — of France and of Scotland. With sufficient English royal blood in her veins to make her not only the obvious successor to Queen Elizabeth, but her present rival for the throne. She had fled to England when Scotland had rebelled against her, and found herself imprisoned for her pains by her cousin Elizabeth, yet remained the centre of continual plotting. And now she was dead, at last. Executed farcically at Fotheringay Castle in February. One Queen murdered on the order of another. A Catholic Queen murdered on the order of the bastard Protestant Elizabeth. The executioner had botched his job. Only at the third attempt had he severed the woman's head from her body. Mary had worn a wig to her execution. When the executioner bent down to grab hold of her mangled head to show it to the audience he had been left with the false hair in his hand, while the obscene, bald coconut of the Queen's head bounced and rolled off the staging. And Henry Gresham would regret to the end of his days the part he had played in that death.
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