The ship upon which she and her mother were to travel aboard, the great carrack San Felipe, was vast, crammed to the hilt with enough produce of the Indies to make a sizeable dent even in the debts of King Philip. Normally the prospect of such a great voyage, with all its dangers, would have excited her, and her natural high spirits would have lifted at the sight of the wonderful bustle on the dockside. But now she hardly cared, hardly cared even if the vessel sank and took her along with it. Death looked attractive compared to life with an old, fat merchant. Her nurse had described what men did to women, and she had gagged and felt sick, even as a strange part of her had felt excitement. It seemed terrifying to have this done to her even by a young, handsome man. To be… entered in this way, by an old, fat man astride of her… it was filthy.
Anna Maria Lucille Rea de Santando showed none of her feelings. She stood by the quayside waiting to board, impossibly aloof and cool, in control. The tantrums were over now. She had decided. Emotion was weakness, a betrayal of the armour needed to protect one's mind. Let the fat merchant labour over her body. He would find it motionless, as cold as ice. And she would fuel her hatred of her husband with her hatred of Spain, where the real betrayal was. Her family had lived and ruled there for generations, and now it had thrown them out without hesitation, punishing her Spanish father for daring to marry an English woman.
Her mother called to her in a low voice. As they turned to mount the ornate gangplank she stumbled, falling down on Anna's arm so hard that for a moment it was as if both women would topple over. Anna looked at her mother. She had tried so hard to hate her too these past few weeks. Her strong face was starting to line now, Anna noticed, the flesh hanging in wrinkles on her neck, always the give-away of age in a woman. Yet there was also a new pallor on her mother's brow, an unhealthy tinge on her normally strong face.
'Are you alright?' Anna asked, almost unwilling to show concern. 'Can I get you some waters?' Anna's English would occasionally slip in to eccentricity, revealing it as her second language.
Her mother said nothing, just nodding. She had not bothered to correct the use of the plural, was still leaning very heavily on her arm. Anna noticed the pressure increasing as they entered the hull that would be their world for weeks ahead. The gloom closed over them. The smell was overwhelming: wood, tar, cordage, stale sweat, a multi-layered taint of spices acting like a fine sauce laid over rotten meat to hide its stench. The sudden move from the bright sunlight into the darkness seemed to her symbolic of her life, Anna thought. From sunshine to darkness. Would the darkness ever end?
'Are you strong enough to support me?' asked her mother, breathless now. Anna smiled up at the person she loved most in the world.
"Me? Of course!! have millions of energies!'
The mistake brought a smile to the tired face of her mother. Anna flushed. She was not willing to appear weak in front of anyone, even her mother. You will need those energies, my dearest girl, her mother thought. You will need them more than ever. And how I wish you could give some of them to me, to fight a battle I know I am losing.
It was the masts that first struck him. Taller than trees, they festooned the sky, scoring it with the dark lines of their rigging. The waterfront at Plymouth was chaotic, the Elizabeth Bonaventure an asylum gone mad. Hordes of sweating men were heaving barrels of biscuit, beer and gunpowder off the waiting carts in a haphazard manner and bundling them on board the ships drawn up by the quay. Untidy masses of stores were swinging aboard wildly in nets, threatening to smack indiscriminately into masts and men. To wild shouts one such load, the net bulging under the weight of a pallet of cannonballs, swung against rigging and wrapped itself round the arm-thick ropes tensioning the main mast. A succession of boats were scudding across the waves like so many beetles, taking yet more stores to the other great ships anchored out in the sound. Cordage littered the quayside and a spare foresail that had somehow broken free of its binding ropes was flapping forlornly on the cobbles, like a lobster kicking out the last moments of its life on the fish-seller's stall. Like all waterfronts, it stank of the sea, the rotting smell of fish and seaweed, the tang of salt and the earthy, dark smells of rope, tar and canvas.
'Damn them and their cowardice!' ranted Sir Francis Drake, appearing on the side of his flagship with a voice that could cut through a gale rising above even the clamour on the dockside.*Who do these scum think they are, deserting their country and their captain in their hour of need! More lackeys in the pay of Spain!'
Drake was a short man, barrel-chested and round-faced, brown bearded, with ruddy cheeks like the babies Devon farmers' wives brought with them to market. He was extraordinarily expensively dressed, the ruff as proud as a peacock's tail, his doublet all of slashed silk in a deep, dark green and ostentatious gold buckles on his fine leather shoes. In total contrast, Drake's Secretary was a thin, lugubrious figure with a balding pate, white face and an expression of very long suffering. His clothing looked as if someone had taken a used sail, dyed it black and turned it into an ill-fitting cloak for human nakedness. His scarecrow figure held a strange dignity. He had a slate in his hand, with a piece of chalk, like a rather tired schoolmaster.
'The sailors have run off,' the Secretary intoned in a voice one might otherwise have expected to find coming from the pulpit at evensong in a tiny, freezing village church, 'because they thought they were going off to rob Spanish treasure ships. Now they hear they're going off to attack the Spaniards in their home ports. This is much more dangerous and far less remunerative. It is-'
'Fuck what it is!' roared Drake, his colour now the highest red and his face looking set to explode. 'Fuck what they are! Fuck what you are! Fuck all cowards and traitors!'
The Secretary showed no sign of wishing to fuck anyone as he stood by his master's side impassively. His eyes were perhaps looking rather more towards Heaven than might be deemed customary, but whatever he was saying was being kept private between him and his God.
It had not been a good day for Henry Gresham. Nor a good week. The doubts about this mission had grown and buzzed in his head like flies. Why should he risk his life to tell Walsingham how many barrel staves were being landed in Cadiz? The weather had been foul when they set out from London, and now he was soaked to the skin. His great riding cloak was wet, weighing five times its normal weight, and had the dank stink of damp wool. Uncontrollable shivers passed through him without warning. Yet it was more than his shivering cold that bothered him. A deep dread had settled over Gresham at the prospect of taking to sea. Seafaring was something about which he knew nothing. He hated being an innocent abroad, hated his own ignorance, sensed that his carefully cultivated front of superiority and control would be smashed. He had been made to look the fool often enough as a child. An aching heart and a nagging headache told him that he was on course for neither Lisbon nor Cadiz, but rather on course for humiliation. Or a lonely, wet death beneath the greasy rolling waves of the Atlantic.
Gresham also hated the filth of seafaring. He was obsessive about cleanliness, and his usual daily routine was to stand in the iron bath, scrubbing his skin with the cold water as if it would cleanse him of all sin as well as of dirt. At sea, the fine velvet and silk-covered bodies stank more with each day that passed. No soap would work up a lather in sea water, which left salt stains on any flesh and cloth it touched, as well as something of the stink of the sea. That strange odour, of sharp salt water tainted by an unidentifiable corruption just beneath the surface.
Therank smell and clutter of the quayside did nothing to reassure him. Even Mannion's usual banter had deserted him and he had descended into an unprecedented black mood of his own from the moment they left London. For years Gresham had often prayed for Mannion to shut up. Now he found himself praying that he would speak. And to cap it all, if this ranting maniac before him was indeed Sir Francis Drake, it would not be a good time for Henry Gresham to introduce himself. Drake saved him the bother. Drake caught sight of the young man and his servant on the quayside.
'You need not mention your miserable name. I know it,' said Drake with extreme rudeness. Gresham's hand itched to clutch his sword. 'It was a condition of the voyage that I take you on board. It is not a condition that I otherwise acknowledge your existence.'
Gresham bowed his head respectfully. It seemed the only thing to do. Clearly Drake did not like spies.
‘Are we loaded? Are we prepared for our voyage? Is there any meaning in this chaos?' Drake was roaring again.
'If you keep distracting me every other minute with requests for information that I cannot supply, my admittedly feeble attempts to keep track of what is being loaded aboard the Elizabeth Bonaventure will die in tatters.' The Secretary placed his slate on a nearby barrel. Clearly, he alone on the waterfront had no fear of Drake. The barrel was almost immediately grabbed by two burly seamen, and the Secretary grabbed his slate back just in time. 'To be frank, Sir Francis,' said the Secretary, ‘I do not know if twenty tons of gunpowder has just been taken ort board, or twenty tons of dried peas.'
Drake looked at his Secretary, with that same speculative glance. Then he rounded, without warning, on the sailors and workmen filling the slippery quayside. 'To Spain! To death and to glory!'
The men on the waterfront heard his words, stopped their work and started to cheer. The sailors caught the mood. Suddenly the whole quay was a feast of cheering. Drake opened his arms, welcoming the cheers. He turned and set off through yelling crowds, mounting the gangplank. Once aboard the Bonaventure he vanished below decks.
‘Now that one,' said Mannion glumly, following Drake up the gangplank, 'he's a real bastard.'
There was a clatter of hoofs behind them, yells and curses and the noise of a pile of barrels being knocked over. Several sailors and half the women waiting to say farewell to their menfolk had run for their lives as the heavy barrels rolled down the quayside.
'Sorry! Sorry!' a booming voice called out. 'Any damage paid for, of course. Truly sorry!' George Willoughby had arrived, plastered with the rain and looking like a drenched mammoth.
'What in God's name are you doing here?' asked an astounded Gresham, his heart lifting already.
'My father's got contacts with Drake. Helped fund one of his voyages five years ago. I asked him to call in some favours. Plus, no doubt the old man'll have landed the bill for half of Drake's powder! Who cares? It's only money, and it worked.'
'But why?' asked Gresham, grinning at his friend. 'Why choose to come?'
'Too much theoretical politics, dear boy!' boomed George. 'The fate of the nation's being decided here.' There was a sense of excitement in his voice, a burning in his eyes. 'Do I want to be one of those who comments on what's happened? Or do I want to be the one who tells the girls of my first-hand acts of derring-do against a horde of Spaniards?'
He had a point, Gresham thought. Every young man with fire in his belly had sought to sail with Drake, the eternal rite of passage where men have to prove their courage. And George Willoughby was no coward.
'Will you shout as loudly at them as you're shouting at me?' asked Gresham, noticing an increasing number of the rabble gathering round for this free show.
'Sorry!' George clamped a hand theatrically over his mouth. Well, thought Gresham, the Elizabeth Bonaventure was going to seem a lot smaller with this man's bulk on it, but somehow he sensed the horizons would seem a lot wider.
The twenty English vessels were strung out over a vast expanse of ocean so blue that its glittering surface bit into the eyes, white sails looking like dainty seagulls dipping in and out of the waves. So peaceful, so calm in the mild wind driving them to Cadiz. So deceptive. Each patch of white on the blue of the sea was a heaving, straining, iron-fastened box of wood entombing the men who crawled like so many maggots on their deck and up their masts. Fragile things, for all the serenity they showed from afar, built from tension. The tension of straight wood forced to curve and hug a hull. The tension of the huge pressure of sail pitted against a thin wooden mast and the taut pull of infinitely complex rigging, checking and balancing all to keep that sail full of the ferocious and fickle power of the wind. And those tensions broke easily. The savage, ripping, tearing noise of a sail suddenly shredding itself as a tiny weakness opened up into shreds. The crack as a rope snapped, whipping viciously across the deck and then through the body of any man unlucky enough to stand in its way. The seam between planking forced open as the ship plunged and drove time and time again into a heavy sea, the caulking being driven out in what the sailors called a boat spewing its oakum, burying its prow in the» water and only after what seemed like minutes rising up and shaking the water from its bow. Those picturesque dots on the ocean were a fragile challenge to the power of the elements.
Gresham and Mannion were munching their midday meal companionably in the waist of the ship, George alongside. All three were now used to the easy rise and fall of the deck. Gresham was surprised at how he felt. Three or four days of dreadful sickness and intense misery had passed, to be replaced by a life confined, simplified. There was hardly room to move on board the Elizabeth Bonaventure, crammed to the hilt as it was with 'gentlemen adventurers' such as George, and the extra crew needed to replace those lost by sickness and combat. Luxury was to find room to stretch out to the full on the deck at night, huddled under one's cloak, the rough timbers cutting in to each toss and turn of the body. Even the longing for his bath in the morning was a dull ache rather than an active stab of pain. He had become accustomed to his own rancid smell and that of those alongside him. Seafaring, he was finding, was largely about fighting the elements. It left him with far less time to fight himself.
On English ships even a commander such as Drake would lend a hand with a rope when the need arose. So Gresham had offered himself for some of the simpler tasks on board. It was strangely soothing. There was a task before him — a rope to be secured just so. Barrels and stores to be moved from here to there as they were emptied and the balance of the ship needed to be kept. And at the end of the task, there was a simple measure of achievement. The line no longer flapped in the wind, the stores were in the right place. He felt inordinately proud when he tied his first knot and it held, and a seaman clapped him on the back. The challenges of this world were clear, success easily measured. Was he in danger of relaxing too much?
Sir George Willoughby had bought most of Drake's wine as well as most of his powder for the voyage, as the price for the carriage of his son, and as a result George had been invited to Drake's cabin to share some of that wine.
Too many ships in Lisbon,' George had reported back to Gresham excitedly. Too many even for Drake to take on board, and strong harbour defences. So it's off to Cadiz, Bursting with ships apparently, and far more weakly defended. We'll have our battle after all!'
Gresham had asked to see Drake. 'Sir Francis,' he had asked with a deference he did not feel, as Drake pored over a chart of Cadiz harbour and ignored him. 'The rumour is that we're leaving Lisbon, yet I need to be put ashore there. Will you grant me a small boat to take me ashore?'
Drake gave him the merest of glances. 'We're already too far away. I doubt a boat would find its way back to me in time. And it's not in my interests for you to be captured at this time, as might well be the case if I granted your demand.'
It had been a request, thought Gresham, not a demand.
'It's essential for this expedition's success that the Spaniards do not know I'm at sea until I've got them by the throat.'
'Sir,' said Gresham, trying and failing to hide his impatience, 'my only reason for being here is to land where I can report on the Spanish fleet.'
'If I have my way you'll land in Cadiz on this vessel,' said Drake flatly, 'and get a very close view indeed of some Spanish vessels. Or will that view be too close for your comfort? Do you wish to be taken ashore before to avoid the battle that might take place there?'
The accusation of cowardice was clear, the insult sufficient for a gentleman to fight and die for. Yet Gresham sensed he was
almost being tested.
‘I’m not sure, Sir Francis,' said Gresham with a calmness at total odds with his fast-beating heart, 'whether your comment was a challenge to my honour or an insult to my intelligence.' Now came the risk. Yet the blood was hot in Gresham, and would not be resisted. 'As it is,' Gresham continued, 'I propose to reject both propositions, and interpret your words as an insult to your intelligence.'
It was a standard rhetorical procedure as taught in the University, the first two comments comprising the defence and the third the attack. Suddenly Gresham realised how silly the intellectual gymnastics of the University seemed here, at sea, in the face of a man who could order his death in an instant Drake looked at him then, without the angry outburst Gresham had expected and with dark, expressionless eyes.
'I care less than a fart for your interpretation of anything,' Drake said. 'I'll let you ashore in Cadiz, where I have no doubt they will find you and hang you from a tree within hours, if it pleases me to do so. Your masters on shore may control what happens there. At sea, I am in command. Now you may leave.'
Gresham could not think of a riposte. He left. A stink of sewage hit him as he left the great cabin. Strange. He was used to no longer smelling the stench of life at sea. Those who wanted to piss and shit were meant to go to the bow of the ship, where there were crude facilities for them to deposit their waste matter hanging over the side. Many did not bother to make the journey, particularly in rough or cold weather or if they woke in the middle of the night. A bucket, or a barrel cut down to half its height, stood at each end of the deck and in the middle of the main deck, slopping over even in decent sea conditions. In time everything gathered in the bilges of the ship where the stone and gravel ballast was stored, the lowest level of all. Just as the piss descended, so its stench ascended after a long voyage, filling the decks with its sulphurous tang, and the rank smell of solid waste.
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