The galleon's grave hg-3

by Martin Stephen

  Drake was clearly out of his depth. Gresham's decision to move forward took less than a second. He knew how to handle beautiful women. 'Your ladyship,' Gresham said, bowing deeply to her, 'there cannot be a man in this English fleet of heroes who would not see the conquering of you as worth more than the conquering of any Spanish fleet that had ever set sail!'

  The Englishmen cheered. It broke the ice, the ludicrous overstatement of the courtier here on this crowded, stinking deck. The girl stiffened at this new threat, held her chin even higher. It made her look even more beautiful.

  'Yet we English are gentlemen, gentlemen above all.' Gresham turned to the sailors from the Elizabeth Bonaventure who had clambered aboard with him. They roared in his support. They liked him, didn't they? The toff who'd beaten off the galley? The one who didn't mind taking a rope with them? And anyway, this was turning out to be far more fun than usual. He'd have that Spanish bitch, they knew. Good luck to 'im! They cheered again.

  'My commander is the legendary Sir Francis Drake, scourge of the seas!' Had he overdone that bit, thought Gresham? The roar from the sailors encouraged him. 'You have nothing to fear from him, nor from his men.' Another roar from those same men, every single one of them with a voracious lust for this girl. She had had everything to fear from these men. You took whatever was on board a captured ship, didn't you? 'I merely implore you to treat Sir Francis with the same respect with which he will undoubtedly treat you.' Gresham retired, still bowing, behind the figure of Drake.

  Drake turned to him, scowling. He spoke in a low tone, vicious, hissing. 'If I can manage fucking Cadiz harbour I can manage a fucking Spanish whore without your help!' he said caustically, though he could not hide a slight sense of relief. And, evidently, the girl was no whore, but rather a gentlewoman.

  The girl stood her ground. After all, she had nowhere else to go. Gresham would not expect Drake to realise that he had saved his day. Beautiful girls were a threat. They forced a man to love them for more than their bodies and the blessed relief of sex. They gave physical supremacy to the man, and in exchange demanded mental slavery.

  'Madam,' Drake said solemnly, bowing as low to Anna as Gresham had done, and perhaps even a patch lower. He learned very quickly, this pirate. Or perhaps he had known it all along and just not bothered to use it. 'You are now on board an English ship.'

  More cheers from the crew. They were already working out how much the San Felipe would be worth. Over a hundred thousand pounds, surely?

  'We English respect our women,' Drake continued grandly. 'We are not savages, to violate them in conquest.'

  Oh no? thought Gresham thinking back to what he had heard of some of Drake's earlier voyages. Ah, well, it sounds good, he thought. *You are free to retire to your cabin while I discuss details of surrender with your captain here. As for your safety, I give you my word. There will be an armed guard at your door.' It was a grand gesture, and grandly Drake offered her his ringed hand to kiss.

  What followed was so different, so startling that Gresham never forgot it. The girl was defenceless, captured goods, yet she had stood up to the man most feared on the oceans of the world and secured her virginity, if indeed it had not already been claimed by some lucky man on a clandestine meeting. Now all she needed to do was to retire gracefully. Instead she drew herself to her full height. Five foot eight? Five foot nine? It wasn't really a great height at all. No taller than Sir Francis Drake himself. For a brief moment on the deck of the Son Felipe it could have been seven foot.

  'I do not kiss the hand of my conqueror!' she said. There was a hiss of indrawn breath from the English boarders, and from the Spanish crew. 'I offer the obedience to no man.' It was said simply, in her faltering English, yet with great authority. 'I accept your promise of safe conduct,' she announced, 'for myself and for all the other innocent womens on board this vessel.' The Spanish crew grinned. There were a surprising number of 'womens' aboard the San Felipe. Very few of them could accurately be described as innocent. 'You have care of all the poor souls on board the San Felipe, women, girls, crew. And officers.' She directed a withering gaze towards the Captain of the ship.

  If she'd been in charge, thought Gresham, they'd have sunk before they dared surrender. What was it with beautiful women, he wondered? Why did they think they owned the world?

  'Yet you do not own us!' she announced finally, gathering up her long skirts and heading for her cabin. She actually headed for the wrong door, and had she gone through it would have fallen to the bottom of the hold. It was an English seaman who, rather apologetically, directed her to the right one.

  Drake's excitement at his booty was far more potent than any concerns over a damned woman. He demanded a tour of the vessel. Before leaving with the Captain and four armed sailors, he turned to the other men on the deck.

  'There's money here to buy you any woman in Devon!'

  Sir Francis Walsingham gagged as the pain hit him, the stones in his kidney cutting into his flesh at its most basic level, making him cry out and clutch the table edge. He knew what the pain was, knew where it would end. The Spanish, his spies told him, now put it about that he was suffering from a 'terrible corruption of the testicles'. Well, there had been pain and trouble enough for the products of his loins, but nothing like this from his testicles.

  It passed, as all pain passed, as life itself passed, and Walsingham settled back into the hard wood of his chair. He looked again at the stained sheet of paper in his hand. His agent had rammed it into the hand of one of the sick sailors Drake had sent home, though the only sickness this particular man had was the illness of wanting to take Walsingham's money. The report made interesting reading. So Drake had done damage in Cadiz and hit the coastal shipping. So much the better! Yet he had steadfastly refused to land young

  Gresham. Why disobey such a request? Walsingham was still powerful, and for Drake to refuse to send Gresham ashore meant that the order to keep him on board, if indeed it had ever been issued and was not simply some madness of Drake's, had to come from someone with higher authority. Who was higher than Walsingham? Who was important enough to risk offending Walsingham? The Queen, of course. Perhaps Leicester, or even Essex. Burghley, certainly. And if Burghley, then his son Robert Cecil.

  Just as worrying as not knowing who the order came from, he did not know why. Knowledge to Walsingham was as blood to other men, the stuff of life. Someone was thwarting his orders to one of his agents. As of now, finding out who it was and why they were doing it was his top priority.

  Chapter 5

  June, 1587 Flanders; the Azores; the Escorial

  They were hardened soldiers, the usual mixture of nationalities, the usual blaspheming, hard-drinking whoring sons of the Devil. Yet they fought like the Devil too, as they had proved in campaign after campaign. They hardly paid attention to the man in their midst, caked with mud, swearing too as he stumbled waist-high through the water. All were holding their firearms high above their heads, though in the pouring rain God knew what was happening to the powder. Then the man's foot sank into even deeper, invisible mud, and he seemed set to fall forward.

  'Careful, my Lord.' A soldier leaped forward and caught the man's arm, halting his fall.

  'Thank you,' said the Duke of Parma. 'Whose bloody idea was this?'

  A ripple of laughter went round the soaked and exhausted men.

  'I think you'll find it was yours, my Lord,' the soldier grinned.

  They struggled up out of the channel, a boiling inferno of water at high tide, only just fordable at low tide. Cadzand. What a Godforsaken spit of land. Sand with not a building nor even a tree in sight, yet crucial for guarding the channel that gave access to Sluys, crucial for capturing the port of Sluys itself.

  He had rather it had been Ostend, Parma thought, if he was to find a deep-water port for the fleet his King was insisting on sending. But Ostend was too well defended, the English troops he had brushed against the best he or his men had ever fought. Good! If they were in Ostend they could no
t fight him in England, where he knew there were no soldiers of any standing. Sluys it had to be. No deep-water port, for sure, but at the heart of the system of canals and waterways that would allow him the only battle plan that he believed might work.

  He had the army here in Flanders, a mere forty miles off" the English coast. Once in England his men would cut through the English like a hot knife through butter. Yokels, militia armed with pitchforks were all the English could muster against him. Spain could and would send the ships, now that her conquest of Portugal had given her a proper, ocean-going Navy. But what about the damned Dutch fleet under the thrice cursed Justin of Nassau? It was that fleet that haunted the dreams of the Duke of Parma. Using their shallow-bottomed yet heavily armed fly-boats, they could bottle up his men, pounding them in their fragile barges as they came out from the canals and before they reached the open sea. The great Armada of his master's dreams could only wait off shore in deep water, and witness the tragedy, unable to sail into the shoals where the Dutch had mastery. If only he could capture a deep-water port. Allow Philip's Armada to sail in, embark his troops and blast the English navy out of their way in the Channel. Yet he had no time!

  No. It was cunning that would bring him victory, the same cunning that had won him all his victories, made men talk about the Duke of Parma's army in the same breath as the all-conquering Roman legions. If he held Sluys, he held power over a spider's web of canals and waterways. It was clear in his mind. He would send out barges to the north, allow them to be seen, draw the damned Dutch off. Then he would flood the southern canals at night with his men, when the darkness would confuse the Dutch sailors, if they were there and if they were mad enough to sail at night. Shielded lanterns would guide his invasion barges, invisible from the seaward side, and guide them out and over the shoals before the Dutch would see or know what was happening. If the Dutch followed the barges out to sea the guns of the huge galleons would blast them to pieces before they could blink. And if enough ships were sent by Spain, then they could stand as an impenetrable barrier between the frail barges and the English fleet. But first he had to capture Sluys.

  He climbed over the sand to what amounted to Cadzand's highest point. Where were the barges bringing his supplies and the heavy guns he needed to set up over the channel? The Duke of Parma sighed. War was never certain. They had known the barges could be, were likely to be, delayed by enemy interference. They faced a cold few hours while they waited, praying their enemy would not mount an assault from the seaward side, knowing if they did with wet powder and priming all they had to resist with was cold steel, praying the barges would get through. Meanwhile, trenches had to be dug, the emplacements formed for the big guns.

  The soldier proffered something to his commander. It was a lump of biscuit, soaked through and with the pattern of the man's fingers embedded in its surface where he had clutched the sodden mass. Damn! Why did he always forget to order his servants to pack food when he went out to battle? You would think they'd have learned by now. Yet he was hungry, surprisingly hungry. He looked up at the man, nodded, and grasped the biscuit, cramming it into his mouth. It tasted good.

  True to his word, Drake mounted an armed guard outside the door to Anna's cabin. 'Is it to keep us out? Or to keep 'er in?' joked the sailor to his mates as he took up position.

  George had been sent off to reconnoitre the cabins at the stern. Since no one had told Gresham not to join him he followed. Their instructions were clear, given to them by Captain Fenner while Drake entertained the captain of the San Felipe in what had once been the man's own cabin.

  'Anything of value in those cabins, I want it detailed, written down here, immediately.' He tossed a scrap of paper to Gresham, turned to give him the pen and ink, looked at him and thought better of it. He handed them instead to George. 'I don't want things going walking the minute the prize crew get on board, you understand. And I don't want anything walking in either of your pockets, either!'

  They had opened the door to find the woman in bed, and drawn back instinctively, embarrassed. So much for conquering heroes, thought Gresham, ruefully. In the heat of battle, the red-blood excitement, such a woman might have been raped or simply had her skull smashed in. Now it was all over, decorum had returned, and manners too.

  'Come in! Please come in!' The voice was faint, but the accent perfectly English. Exchanging a glance, Gresham and then Mannion pushed through the cabin door.

  They knew she was the girl's mother immediately. The lustrous fair hair, now rather lank and thin in the older woman but clearly once a matter of great glory; the high cheekbones, the full lips, the beautiful blue of the eyes. God had starved the rest of the world when he handed out the good looks — to this pair. Yet the older woman was clearly ill. The face was pale beyond the demands of beauty, drawn and with fine lines of pain etched on to it. The voice was faint, the spirit of the woman obviously ebbing and flowing as alternate tides of weakness and of pain flushed through her body.

  'Tell me… tell me what has happened, please. My servant ran away when the first gun was fired…' The woman was too weak to raise her head from the pillow. She was bathed in sweat now, not the healthy glistening that covered a man's brow in hot weather or after intense work, but rather something that seemed to have boiled up within her and tainted the surface of her smooth, beautiful skin.

  'The ship has been captured, madam,' said Gresham, with a low bow. He felt confused. He had always been as uncertain with mature women as he was certain with the younger oneself he had known a mother it might have been different 'By Sir Francis Drake and a squadron of his ships. The battle, such as it was, is over.'

  'My daughter! Have you seen my daughter? Is she safe?' A frantic energy crept into the woman's voice, and she struggled to raise herself.

  'Calm yourself, Madam, please,' said Gresham, feeling out of his depth. 'If your daughter is that extraordinary… young girl, who stood up in front of our Captain, then yes, she is more than safe.' Why are men so weak in the face of women, he thought? 'In fact she's done more to defeat the English navy than anyone else today,' George added, clearly concerned by the woman's state and wanting to reassure her.

  'That will be my daughter,' she said, catching the irony, hearing the good humour in the powerful voice and choosing to ignore the youthful irony. There had been no screams, no wild shrieks, no yells of men. She knew what happened after battle. All women did, and prepared themselves each in their own way. But it appeared that at least some semblance of humanity was present in this capture. Surprised, she felt a coolness at her brow. The other man, the brute of a servant, had looked around the cabin, seen the flannel and bucket of water on the deck, dipped it and with extraordinary gentleness had lain it across her brow, stepping back to make it clear that he intended no offence. The tears came then, flowing rivulets down her cheeks. The act of simple kindness had broken through her defences as no act of violence would ever have done.

  The tears embarrassed the younger man, she could see. He could not decide whether to stay and comfort her, or respect her grief and leave. She decided to save him his pains. A gentleman, clearly, she noted, from his appearance. Even the seagoing clothes he wore were clearly of the highest quality. She felt herself yearning for the son she had never had. Would he have been like this young man, perfectly formed, the glint of intelligence in his eyes? And something else. A darkness. A sense of something hidden, something… She decided to sit up, preparing herself for the ripping, tearing pain that she knew would cut across her stomach as she did so. It took her a few moments to compose herself, hold up her hand as both the servant and the gentleman moved towards her, seeing her pain.

  'Thank you, thank you,' she said breathlessly, but with pride. One always had pride, she thought. Sometimes it was all one had. 'To save your questions, I am English. A daughter of the Rea family.'

  Recognition dawned in Gresham's eyes. The Rea's were an ancient lineage, original supporters of King Henry VII, and richly rewarded for that support. Then
the bad seed had struck, and much of their land was lost in Mary's reign. They were, it was said, the only Catholic family to have failed to make good under Queen Mary. Then they had tried to strike riches in Ireland, but lost most of what little they had left. The male heirs were elderly now, the occasional one hanging round the fringe of Court in threadbare clothes that had been fashionable fifteen years earlier.

  'When our fortunes turned, I married a Spaniard. A noble Spaniard.'

  A handsome and kind man, for all his lack of even basic financial skills, his family were nearly as impoverished as the Rea's, and they had married against all advice. Now he was dead, dead of a fever in Goa, a sad end for a man destined for far greater things.

  Her strength was failing again, she could feel it. 'Please… please find my servant and send her back here. But more important…' How could she take such a risk with this young Englishman, who for all she knew could be the son of a pirate and a philanderer himself? She looked into his strong eyes, and made up her mind. 'I am dying.' It was said flatly, with no melodrama.

  There are all sorts of courage, thought Gresham. This woman, whoever she claims to be, has strong store of at least one of them. He began to; understand where the daughter came from, imagining a headstrong, proud Spaniard joining his blood with the lady dying in front of him.

  'My daughter has no one. It is essential that she reach Europe to marry her fiance. Here… here….' she fumbled in a small case lined with pearls that lay on the bed. Opening it, she produced a small piece of paper, a name and address written on it. 'This is his name. Please keep it,' she said to Gresham. 'I may fall asleep, into a coma, at any time. It would be folly on my part to think I could guard this against a thief.' I must meet this Drake. I must talk to him! I must persuade him to protect and deliver my Anna, she thought in her desperation.

  The effort had exhausted her. With a last despairing look she sank back on the stained pillows. Her eyes closed. Her lips could be seen moving, silently framing the word 'Anna'. Gresham sent Mannion to ferret out the servant she had spoken of, standing guard until the mulatto girl, frightened out of her wits, was ushered in by Mannion for all the world like a vast cow-herd driving a frightened heifer back into the field.