'Choose one,' said Gresham, on impulse.
'May I see some of them walk out, please?' she asked. Of course she could. Particularly as it was the first time he had ever heard her use the word 'please'. The ostlers were bored, their master hardly ever there, and were pleased to have something to do. The lady was good to look at, and it would be another story for the servants' hall. As for the horses, it would do them no harm to do a little gentle parading. Would she go simply for looks? Or choose the most placid?
First of all she walked the length of the stalls. She waited by each boarded door for the inquisitive head to pop out and examine this new human. She did not flinch when the massive heads bucked and shook from side to side, nor when one animal let out a whinny of protest at some perceived insult. Firmly, and with no hesitation, she put out a delicate hand to stroke several of the heads, muttering words inaudible to Gresham and Mannion. Then she stepped back.
'Can I truly choose any horse?' she asked.
'Yes,' said Gresham.
'Then may I see the big dappled grey walk out, please?'
Gresham and Mannion looked at each other, and grinned. ‘Now that,' said Gresham, 'is a real pick.' The grey was not an obvious choice for a woman, a high seat and a big animal, and it had seemed restless as she approached. Yet it was a glorious creature, a thing of pure beauty, and with a wild look in its rolling eyes. Something unpredictable, a character and a spirit yet an intelligence too.
'Be warned,' said Gresham, who knew every horse in his stable better than he knew himself. 'She can be stubborn, and demands that you talk to her, and while she will let any man or woman sit on her back she will only show her true spirit to the person who masters her. Yet when she is ridden properly, she rides like the wind.'
Walking placidly round the yard, it suddenly stopped, dragged its halter and started to paw the ground.
'Whoa, whoa!' said Gresham gently, walking over and taking the horse from the boy at her head. He dropped the halter to the ground. 'Stand back,' he said quietly.
The grey looked at him for a moment, bobbed her proud head, and then with only the faintest clip-clop of her hoofs turned and walked, with a gentleness at total odds with her bulk, up to Anna. The horse stood by the girl for a few seconds, as if not interested, and then unexpectedly turned its head and nudged her gently under the chin. She turned, at ease, and the horse dropped its great head, nuzzling her again. She stroked it, her own form tiny by comparison. *Well,' said Mannion, 'that's something as I ain't seen before.' 'Would you like to ride out? There's still light, and time,' asked Gresham.
'What, now!' said the girl, and there was an excitement there, a passion. 'What is the horse called?'
'You may rename her,' said Gresham,*but I called her Triumph, because 1 could imagine her hauling a Roman Emperor's chariot as he entered Rome in triumph too;'
The girl looked at the horse, and smiled. Her face changed when she smiled. Another first. 'It is a good name. I will call her Triumph.'
They had found an old riding dress, the maid told him, when they had gone through The House for its female wardrobe, and had just then finished some minor restitching and repair. It was an old dress, they said, but expensive and well preserved. Anna dashed back in to be changed, and in a length of time that made Gresham swear he would never complain again about how long it took a woman to dress, was back in the yard, the cheap, battered sidesaddle she had acquired since arriving in England transferred to the new horse. Gresham stood looking at his ward, clothed in the old dress. The colour had drained from his face.
'I am so pleased we could find a riding dress,' said the elderly maid to Gresham with pride. 'I think it belonged to the Lady Mary, when your late father was her guardian.'
Gresham felt a spasm cut through his body. How annoying. He thought he had cut any link of emotion with his mother. Was this how she had looked as she prepared to ride from The House? An elfin-like shape standing proudly by the bulk of a dappled grey, two things of great beauty united?
Gresham was not fearful for his life, at least not for the present, but it would be inconceivable for form's sake that he and Anna should ride out unescorted. Four men dressed in the dark blue and silver livery of The House accompanied them, one to ride ahead and clear the street, the other three as escort. And Mannion, of course, scorning to wear livery, dressed in a tunic and trousers that made him look either a very well-paid member of the working class or a very badly off member of the middle classes. That was the way he liked it.
Gresham had taken them left out of The House, up along the river to Whitehall rather than into the City. Partly it was through his nervousness at the girl riding an unknown horse through the frenzy and noise of London, partly because the Strand was one of the few paved roads in the city. He need not have bothered. Her seat was superb, and she and Triumph looked to be united in their fluid, easy movement. The horse could be restive, Gresham knew, and, if you could ever ascribe human emotions to animals, seemed to get bored at times. There was no sign of it now. Triumph was concentrating on carrying her new mistress as if she were the only person who mattered in the world. Every person in the prosperous street leading to Westminster and the country's seat of power turned to look at the extraordinary pair, the handsome young man on his superb black mount, the glorious girl controlling effortlessly the great dappled grey. One passer-by started to cheer, as they had on his salt-stained journey earlier, thinking that so dashing a young man must be the Earl of Essex. Then his friend put him right, and he started to cheer anyway. The effect was rather spoilt by. Mannion, riding a nag that looked as if it would die of shame before entering Gresham's stables. Yet Mannion knew that it had the heart of a lion, could gallop all day and would not shift aside if a barrel of gunpowder was blown up before it. Mannion liked appearances to be deceptive. But there was nothing they could do to deceive the next person whose attention they attracted. They were about to turn back when there was the rumbling, trundling roar of a great, heavily escorted carriage from behind them.
The Queen was quite capable of gracing a horse, though usually travelled by water in London on one of the great state barges. Today, however, she had chosen the vast, lumbering carriage that must have been a nightmare for the coachman to control in the narrow streets of the capital. They pulled the horses up and drew them to the side, Anna having the sense to realise that someone great was passing by, even if she did not realise that it was the greatest person in the land. Instead of speeding by, spattering them with mud and dust, the coach slowed and then stopped some yards ahead of them. Its escort, in the Tudor colours of green and white, drew up, their horses snorting. They waited, uncertain, and men leaped down from the roof of the carriage. The door was opened, a carpet laid on the road. Queen Elizabeth stepped out on to the street.
Oh no, thought Gresham. Not the Great Bitch Incarnate! His murderess? Please, dear God, preserve me from this!
A ragged cheer went up from the bystanders who had stopped to gawp. Gresham and Anna froze on their horses, then made deep obeisance from the waist, before leaping off their mounts — Gresham bowed low, very low indeed. Anna bowed her head and bobbed down, holding the curtsey at its lowest level. Thank God someone had brought her up to know what to do, thought Gresham.
'Here!' The voice was imperious. When the daughter of Henry VIII wanted something, no one was left in any doubt. 'Cease your bowing and scraping! Come here. And bring those horses with you.'
Gresham had been about to hand the reins to one of his men, but moved forward now, to the edge of the carpet the Queen's men had laid to preserve the hem of her dress. And what a dress. Deep, deep red, bejewelled as if to rival the night sky, and slashed, the ruff extravagant, the sleeves so puffed as to have life of their own. The Queen eyed Henry Gresham up and down appreciatively.
'Young Henry Gresham, unless I am very much mistaken!' she exclaimed.
'Your Majesty,' said Gresham bowing deep again, hat in hand. Alive, he thought. Just in case you wondered, or had want
ed me dead.
'Young Henry Gresham who absents himself from my Court, I see,' said the Queen, dangerously. Correction; every word she spoke was potential danger, thought Gresham, including these.
'Your Majesty, I have until yesterday been at sea for several months, with the forces of Sir Francis Drake. Nothing except the urgency of serving Your Majesty overseas would otherwise take from me the pleasure of attending Your Majesty's court.'
'Hmph!' said the Queen, in a most unladylike grunt, 'so I hear that you picked up a prize of your own on your recent sea voyage. Show yourself, girl. Come forward now!' She motioned to two men to take Gresham's and Anna's horses. Eyes lowered, Anna advanced, curtseyed again.
Oh help, thought Gresham, had she been listening? Does this silly girl know who this is? Does she think it's some dowager aunt of mine who's accosted me in the street?
'Well,' said the Queen, 'I could see they would fight over you. Is it true, girl, that your mother died on board ship? That she cast you on the mercies of this young wolf here?'
'Your Majesty,' said Anna, eyes still decorously lowered, 'it is true that my dear mother departed this life at sea. As your all-knowing Majesty will know, I was placed in the guardianship of your subject here.'
'I am sorry for your mother, and for you in your loss,' said the Queen, not unkindly. Anne Boleyn, her mother, had been executed for adultery before she knew her, thought Gresham, and called a whore ever since. It must give her a limited line in sympathy for dead mothers. Of all people on earth she had been dealt a Devil's pack by her breeding. Yet she had survived. Against all the odds. The Queen looked at the beautiful girl and her horse, the striking young man standing beside her. They were an embodiment of good breeding, for all that Gresham was born on the wrong side of the bed. Like their respective horses, they were the summit of their species. The Queen stared at the young bastard in all his glory, and the young girl, the splendour of her beauty shining out despite the riding habit twenty years out of fashion.
'It will end in tears,' she said, but with the slightest of smiles playing on her make-up smeared face, her eyes dancing with fierce intelligence. She looked directly at Anna. 'I of all people know how hard it is to be a woman in a man's world. They would rather own us than obey us, these men. So you, young lady, can I come to your rescue?' Suddenly Gloriana appeared rather tired, and above all old. 'Is this young man terrorising you? Is he haunting you? Would you wish that I make you a ward of Court — though, God knows, I have enough expenses to my charge already!'
Had the Queen looked at Gresham as she spoke?
Anna risked her own tiny smile. 'No, Your Majesty, not terrorising me. He is trying to be very distant,' and here she chanced the smallest of looks up at the Queen and into her eyes, 'as he tries to be very distant from everyone. But he is perfectly proper.'
The Queen laughed out loud, an unashamed belly laugh that would have done a fifteen stone man in a tavern proud. 'Well,' she roared, 'if you keep them distant you've won your safety! Well, my offer stands.' She was clearly becoming bored, and the wind was starting to blow up the street, the crowds increasing by the minute. 'If you wish me to take you in, find you a good English husband even, you may contact me. And as for you, Henry Gresham…' She turned to him. 'Come and see me in my Court! There are enough who would die for such an invitation. Do not be so arrogant as to refuse one from your Queen that others would give their lives for. And one other thing. Lay a finger on that girl and it won't only be your head stuck on a pike on London Bridge!'
And with another roaring laugh, she ascended into her coach. Gresham's shoulders were beginning to sink back in relief as he let out his breath. Then, as she was almost in through its vast door, she turned and motioned to Gresham to come close. His shoulders pulled upwards again. Her teeth were black and Gresham was surprised her breath could not be seen like a putrid brown stain on the air. She leaned close to him.
'Tell me,' said the Queen, 'is it true that Drake said he intended to swinge the King of Spain's beard, and then changed it when that damn fool Secretary of his put him right?'
You never knew with royalty, that was the problem. They could be your best friend one minute, and then have you up for treason for telling a bad joke or being over familiar. And this one could be chatting away knowing full well she had just ordered him killed. Gresham gambled. He leaned forward even closer to Elizabeth, wondering if at that proximity his trimmed beard would catch fire at her breath.
'As a mere subordinate, Majesty,' he said, 'and someone who Sir Francis saw fit to take a shot at…' she would have heard that story for certain, 'you would expect me to be the soul of discretion. Yet I can confirm that a certain rather unconventional assault on the King's beard was proposed, somewhat sotto voce, before a correction was issued and a rather different threat was made fortissimo.' He leaned in even further, almost touching her face. Had he got the mix of deference and the conspiratorial right? 'However, Your Majesty, what is not widely known is that when the first threat was made I was the only person looking away to Cadiz harbour. I swear two additional Spanish vessels sank the minute our commander uttered his unique threat to the King of Spain.'
He had got it right, thank God. An appreciative snort of laughter emerged from the unnaturally red royal lips, wrapped now in a grin of positively malicious enjoyment. Then her face darkened. Gresham's heart sank with it.
'And what does the young man who I hear such things of…' Such things, Gresham's mind raced. Talk of good things, or bad things? 'What does he think about the prospect of Sir Francis Drake commanding the only wooden walls that stand between my kingdom and Spain?'
This could not be happening, not in a street with nearly a hundred people watching, pushed out of earshot by the mounted guard. Not happening to a man barely out of nappies, given from nowhere the chance to influence events that he had thought only Cecil would be able to take advantage of. Perhaps he should go to Court more often. At least it would be more comfortable.
'Your Majesty,' he said, his thoughts a bare second ahead of his words. 'I have no concept of defending a kingdom such as Your Majesty must have. In all honesty, most of my life has been concerned with defending myself. Yet your wooden walls are not one line of masonry, but ten, twenty or thirty separate walls, each capable of going its own way.'
'What are you telling me?' The tone had no humour in it now. It was flat, merciless, the voice of her father who had ordered the murder of her mother.'
Well, Gresham thought, it had not been an altogether bad life, and, after all, the only certainty about life was that it would end some time or other.
'I wish to continue serving Your Majesty. My loyalty to you goes without question, as it does with every subject.' One had to put these things in with royalty, Gresham remembered. They tended to remember what had been said with appalling selectivity. And accuracy. 'And my loyalty to Your Majesty is even further secured by the fact that your reign has brought peace to this country. Peace, and an end to bonfires.'
Which was true. Queen Bitch was mercurial, infuriating and unpredictable, not knowing at times whether she was King Henry VIII or Anne Boleyn, and at times trying to be both. Yet ploughman Jack and milkmaid Jill cared little for the goings-on in London. Their life was hard enough, a bad winter killing a third of their village, rain at harvest guaranteeing unfilled bellies for their children and themselves, not to mention the relentless, random tide of plague and illness that haunted every man alive in Elizabeth's England. Yet they were human beings, as human as the Earl of Essex and Robert Cecil. As human as Henry Gresham. Did the peasant in the field not feel pain and loss like other men, were the hot tears absent when wife or child died? With what they had to bear already, what need had they of armies tramping over their fields, driving down their crops, taking their women and burning their pathetic, stinking little huts? What need did their men have of being hauled off to war, a weapon thrust into their ill-trained hands, simple cannon-fodder? She had brought peace to England, and stopped for the m
ost part humans being burned alive because their God differed in meaningless respects from that which their monarch claimed to worship. All of this flickered through his brain in an instant.
'Your Majesty, this young, inexperienced and badly born man would be happy to have Sir Francis Drake fighting for him, and believe himself lucky to have such a man on our side. Yet to fight and to lead are not the same thing.'
The Queen looked at him, waiting for him to say more.
'You would have made a good politician, Henry Gresham,' she said. 'Too many say too much, and too many say nothing at all with many words.' She looked at him, waiting for him to speak, to say too much. It was she who broke the silence. 'Lord Howard of Effingham will command my fleet. Drake will be second in command.' Then, in his silence, she nodded, a neutral gesture, climbed into her carriage, gave one cursory wave at the crowd, and drove off amid rolling cheers and roars.
A little girl was squatting by the roadside, rough shift drawn up over her scraggy knees, peeing into the dust with her thumb firmly stuck in her mouth. Her eyes were wide, transfixed by the sight of the two beautiful ladies and the handsome man.
'Have I just met the Queen of England?' asked Anna, who appeared to be standing upright but was actually leaning against the bulk of Triumph, exhausted. It was a dangerous thing to do with a horse, but Triumph seemed resigned to being used as a leaning post.
'It's amazing how quickly it changes from being a matter of excitement to something to be avoided at almost all costs,' said Gresham. He turned to Mannion. 'Did she try to kill me?'
'You wouldn't know if she had,' said Mannion.
They rode back to The House.
The others, the outsiders, thought that the plottings and the machinations of Sir Francis Walsingham were concerned with the overthrow of monarchs, the sowing of discord and the undermining of states. How wrong they were. He had only ever sought to bolster and confirm one state, the England of Queen Elizabeth. He had chosen her from the outset. The Protestant Queen. How could any thinking man make any different choice? He was aware of his innate homosexuality, aware how men of his kind were prone to worship powerful women as icons. Yet it was not his sexual urges, as much under control as the rest of him, that had driven him, but something altogether more logical. He had seen the vanities, the arrogance, the corruption and the decadence that was Rome and its religion. He had fled to Padua when Queen Mary, in a bungled succession, had tried to impose on Englishmen the Catholicism they had learned to do without. He had shuddered as the news of the burnings reached him, known that the true heir of Henry VIII, and the best man in the country, was Elizabeth. He had thrown his weight behind her from the outset, given his fortune to the support of her monarchy, given her information to counter the troops that the wealth of the Spanish and the French enabled them to have. Well, Elizabeth had reigned for twenty-nine years now, and Walsingham thanked his Protestant God that he had been spared this long, to enter into his final battle for the continued reign of Queen Elizabeth.
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