The galleon's grave

Chapter 8

October 1587 — May, 1588 Cambridge; London; Lisbon; the Netherlands

It was a tricky job, dragging the cannon out of a ship. Like taking out a tooth. Firstly the barrels had to be taken off the short wooden carriages and properly slung. Each weapon was massively heavy, but unevenly balanced, with more weight at the breech than at the tapered muzzle. The lifting tackle had to be exactly positioned to avoid the gun swaying and splintering the timbers of the vessel. Poorly tied knots, a frayed rope or a pole not seated firmly on the ground and you risked the whole thing crashing down onto the deck. Never mind the people, in one such incident only last year the gun had gone right through the hull and was resting on the sea bed. It was a miracle they had been able to save the ship.

The sailors looked on glumly as the last of the guns were swung overboard, and laid in their padded nest on the vast carts, then to rumble off to be stored in the great armoury at the Tower of London. The disgruntled manner of the seamen was not because they were being laid off with the ships. That had been part of a sailor's lot in the winter for as long as mankind had been daring to set sail. It was fear. A number of the men looked nervously down the reach of the Thames to the sea, as if they half-expected to see a Spanish galleon bearing down on them, its cannon ready to belch destruction into London. Now that the fleet was being stepped down for winter, what was there to stop the Spanish if they chose to come?

Holding one possible answer was Walsingham, sat in front of the remnants of a frugal meal, gazing out over the River Thames. He had taken a tenancy at Barn Elms ten years earlier, falling in love with the combination of its quiet solitude and the easy access to London from the tiny village of Barnes. He had complained fiercely at the decision to step down the fleet, to no avail. Money! Money! How dare they preach saving to him, the man who had spent out his own fortune to keep England's borders its own! Thank God in his wisdom that Santa Cruz was ill again. Had it been otherwise, he knew what he would have done in Santa Cruz's position when he heard, as he would surely hear, that the English fleet had been put to bed for winter. He would have ignored his King, taken a squadron of fifteen ships up the Channel risking wind and weather, sailed them into Plymouth or even up the Thames and landed five thousand troops. Let England stop Parma then with a hornet's sting already working its poison in its belly! Oh what tactics, daring, or fifty of the best ships could dash out from Lisbon, and do to the English fleet exactly what Drake had done to the Spaniards in Cadiz.

It could still happen. King Philip was sending ever more urgent messages to Santa Cruz, demanding that he sail now, even in the depth of winter. The moment the first agent in Lisbon reported back that yards were being stepped, supplies being loaded for just such a venture, then this half-manning nonsense would cease. Walsingham guessed Her Majesty would move with unseemly haste, her dignity in disarray at the prospect of her old knees bending to King Philip of Spain! Then let us see the sycophantic Burghley rush to support the immediate re-manning of the fleet, the noble Lords of Leicester and Essex suddenly feel the foundations of their vast castles tremble beneath their feet!

Yet it was history repeating itself. For most of Elizabeth's reign her soldiers and the idiot nobles sent to lead them had proved a false saviour, just as even a fully-manned English fleet might do now. It had been espionage that had saved England from the Spanish threat so far, and if England was to be saved now it would be by the same measure.

As he rose from his table, the pain stung at his belly. He doubled up, no one there to see his humiliation. You are already dead, his doctor had said. Only a quack will promise you hope. How soon before his actual death was reported as a certainty?

The Fellowship of Granville College were uncertain as to how they should respond to Henry Gresham on his return for the Michaelmas Term 1587. Guilty? He had taken a prolonged absence, and brought back a beautiful Spanish girl who he had met under impossible circumstances and who had to be his mistress, of course. Fellows were not permitted to marry, and were meant to control the sensual excesses of the students rather than set them an example of it. Innocent? He had fought most heroically for his country at Cadiz. It was now an open secret that the money for the extension to the Old Court had come from him, though God knew who had leaked that bit, of information. He had at least had the decency to return for the most important part of the year. The arguments for a positive response seemed, on balance, to outweigh those for a negative response, so acting true to form two thirds of the Fellowship decided to take a wholly negative approach.

'We could all of us,' said Will Smith, who ran a mile if someone mentioned the word sword, never mind threatened to use one against him, 'go gallivanting off to sea if we chose, enjoying ourselves at the expense of our students. If, of course, we needed such spurious glamour to bolster our reputation.' It was generally agreed that it was far braver and heroic to remain at home, manning the domestic fort, so to speak, than to rush off to obscure places like a common soldier or sailor. Fat Tom was having none of this.

'Do tell me, dear boy,' he mouthed excitedly, all of his chins wobbling in unison, 'all about it, preferably in the most gory detail. I imagine these sailors are very rough people indeed, and you must tell me all about them as well. And please, do dwell at unseemly length on the episodes with lashings of blood in them!' The most worrying thing was that he was entirely genuine in his interest, both in the details of the fighting and in the men.

Gresham had sent messengers to the Netherlands, seeking the whereabouts of the untraceable Jacques Henri. So far they had drawn a complete blank. He had at least found a chaperone for Anna. The daughter of his father's housekeeper, a rather stern, puritanical girl with thin lips and a thin face, she had a permanent air of censorious disapproval about her. She held her once-expensive but now rather shabby skirt close about her nervously, as if everyone and everything including the ground upon which she stood might rise up and criticise her at any minute. Or, even worse, try to make love to her. She had presented herself at The House with the story of the death of her employers, and in a stroke of genius the housekeeper, an elderly and flustered woman, had recommended her to Gresham. It was an interesting relationship. The chaperone had no actual authority over her charge, merely the requirement to be there and ensure her virtue was preserved. The authority came from the certainty that the chaperone would try to put off any amorous young man, deny them opportunity and, in the final count, report their misdeeds to her master. 'Bit like when you pour cold water over a dog that's after your favourite bitch?' asked Mannion, who was intrigued by the idea of a chaperone. 'Not… quite,' Gresham had replied, giving up on an explanation.

The wild set in London with whom Gresham tended to mix when he was there, the poets, the musicians and those trying their hands at the new fashion of writing for the Playhouse, had taken Anna to their hearts. With a chaperone in place, Gresham was less concerned about whether they took her to their beds, not his. Why should he care? Yet he had felt obliged to find a better base in Cambridge than his two rooms in Granville College. The Merchant's House lay in Trumpington, just outside Cambridge, and had lain vacant for a year or more, the dust thick over its old floors and walls. It was ancient, built round the medieval core of its Great Hall, probably a nobleman's house before passing to the Merchant who had given it its name. And now Henry Gresham flickered briefly in its history, setting up a base where he could summon his ward once every six weeks, the state of the roads allowing, from the fleshpots of London to savour the rural delights of Cambridge and the questions of her master. Her nominal master, at least.

The bonus for Gresham was Excalibur's Pool. He couldn't help but call it that, for if anywhere in England there was a place where a magic sword might rise up out of the mist, it was in the bend of the river where the water had scooped out a deep, dark pool, somehow separated from the moving water, a place where time and motion stood still. You could look into the translucent depths of Excalibur's Pool and see the history of England. He found himself drawn to it more and more, spending the night in the simply furnished great bedroom so that early in the morning he could walk out over the meadow and plunge into its darkness. Buying The Merchant's House created more trouble in the College, of course. It showed unseemly wealth. Residence in College was mandatory for Fellows, the core of communal living on which the whole concept of the College was based.

He had spent Christmas in London. No young man with blood flowing through him would refuse his monarch's order to celebrate the twelve days of Christmas with the richest and most spoilt of the land. The memories blurred into each other. The swirling, flickering light from thousands of candies, the stately procession of the dance with the vibrant bodies, hungry for each other under the strict discipline of the music. Anna, with fire in her eyes, being swept round and round by a courtier whose tongue was hanging out, and who later offered her his whole inheritance for one night spent with her. She had sent him home to his mother. The dreaded moment when a really drunken Gresham had looked up to see that the dance had placed him yet again opposite Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth. He had never danced as well, nor sobered up more quickly.

The men, the ships, the very countries involved in this great game of life now stood like dominoes stacked in a line, each one carefully placed over years through the scheming ambition of those with a desperate desire to retain power, or those with a desperate desire to grab it. For years those dominoes stood still, silent, and then came the push. It only needs one of those dominoes to topple, and worlds shiver, history is changed.

The first of the great dominoes to topple and knock the next in line, was the death of Don Alvaro de Bazan, Marquis of Santa Cruz, Captain General for the Ocean Seas, hero of Lepanto, victor of Terceira and endless other conflicts and Commander for the Enterprise of England, on February 9th, 1588. He died, the old man, with no tears from his servants for this abundantly cruel man.

Then the worst day in his life came to the Duke of Medina Sidonia. It had started badly. There was rarely peace for any Spanish grandee, living his life from dawn till dusk in the eyes of his people, the few snatched hours of night with his wife the only time he was not on show. It was his duty, he accepted it both as his responsibility and his birthright, but sometimes he ached for isolation. Having returned from Cadiz he had been sitting in judgement on tenants all day, and one particularly unpleasant case where a man had denied God, his duties as a tenant, and his duties as a husband and father had sickened him. So it was that he had a strange feeling that things were not well, coupled with a great restlessness.

The messengers arrived at his home as he did. King Philip never sent one man where ten would do. The letter hit him like a sword through his heart. Santa Cruz was dead. His King required the Duke of Medina Sidonia to become Commander by Sea for the invasion of England. He clutched the parchment in his hand, frozen, the blood draining from his face. For minutes he said and did nothing. Then, with a slow walk, he called for his Secretary. He had no time to think over his response, merely to feel the awful dread pulling at his heart. It was from his heart finally that he wrote to his King.

My health is not equal to that needed for such a voyage. I know this since the few times that I have been at sea I was sea sick and always caught a fever. My family have debts of over nine hundred thousand ducats. I have no money to spend on the enterprise, nothing to spend even for my King. I have no experience of war, nor of the sea. How is it that I can be suited for such a great command I know nothing of what Santa Cruz has been doing. I have no intelligence of England. I fear therefore that I will let myself and you, Your Majesty, down most terribly, acting as a blind commander, relying on the advice of those I do not know, unable to distinguish truth from lies, the good advice from the bad…

As soon as he had sealed it and sent it he regretted the impetuosity with which he had written. Fretfully his mind told him that his response would make him look like a coward. He feared such an accusation against his honour, far more than he feared death itself. Yet equally potent in his growing sense of despair was the realisation that his letter would fail, of course. Like all limited men, Philip was incapable of changing his mind, not seeing that sometimes to do so was wise, but seeing it rather as him being proven wrong. And the King with God's ear could never be wrong.

He knew why he had been appointed. They were proud men, the sea captains of the Spanish Empire, and men uniquely conscious of their rank. Well, Sidonia was superior to any of them in rank and, more importantly, breeding. He had the status to quell the extra proud spirits of the other commanders. Was all lost? These commanders had won and held an Empire. There was huge skill and knowledge in their ranks. They would give him the military advice he would be so desperately in need of. Yet the challenge! Not the challenge of fighting. He was born to that. It was the challenge of marshalling over one hundred ships and ten thousand troops languishing in Lisbon harbour, every month's delay costing seven hundred thousand ducats.

He wrote again, of course, two days later. Useless though he knew it was, he felt he owed it to himself. And to history, if anyone ever bothered to read his laboured offering. He was more reasoned, this time, questioning the whole wisdom of the Enterprise. The sea was a fickle battleground. A storm could destroy the whole endeavour in an hour. As Sidonia understood it, the Duke of Parma was penned in behind shallows patrolled by the infamous Dutch fly-boats, waters no ship the Spanish possessed could travel. It did no good. Don Cristobel de Moura, the most influential of King Philip's secretaries, wrote back immediately.

We did not dare show His Majesty what you have written. God will see that the Armada is victorious.

Well, so he might, the Duke thought as he mounted his horse for the journey to Lisbon. Yet in his experience, God rarely made up for man's inadequacy, and there were very many inadequacies that needed to be dealt with before the Armada could hope to succeed.

On arrival in Lisbon the first thing the Duke of Medina Sidonia saw were great sackloads of paper being carted out of Santa Cruz's administrative headquarters. All the paperwork for the Armada. Invoices, bills of lading, lists of ships, charts, all vital to an invasion. It belonged personally to Santa Cruz, of course. There was no doubt about that. History and tradition dictated it was so. Sidonia called over the most sympathetic and charming of his secretaries, gave him clear instructions. Somehow those papers had to be retained and preserved, at all costs. The Duke was starting to realise that the actual fighting would be the easiest part of this endeavour.

And so the dominoes continued to fall. Cecil called for Gresham. It was their first meeting since the night Gresham had returned from sea.

'The Queen has pushed for negotiations with the Spanish forces in the Netherlands, and the Duke of Parma has agreed,' said Cecil. 'I can tell you now that the death of Santa Cruz has just been reported.'

What a surprise, thought Gresham. Mannion will be gutted.

'The death of Santa Cruz will throw the Spanish into confusion. We leave from Dover, for Ostend, immediately, in the hope that we can profit from that confusion. I have been allowed to join the party as an observer, as you expected.' Cecil's chest seemed to swell, 'In fact I have been asked to use my best endeavours to obtain the maximum amount of information on the military preparedness of the Netherlands.'

Gresham could not repress a smile. 'I'm sure your extensive military experience will be a wonderful asset to you in that task,' he said. 'In fact, you'll be acting as a spy. Welcome to the club.'

'A spy?' Cecil sniffed. 'An ambassador with eyes is how I prefer to think of it. Spies are employees, after all, paid for their work.' Cecil realised his mistake as soon as he had spoken, but it was too late.

'Really?' said Gresham, who had less need of money than anyone. 'Fancy that. If I'd realised that someone was meant to pay me I'd have asked for the money… After all, you can never have too much, can you?' Which might well have been the motto of the Cecil family, come to think of it. Gresham doubted that the magnificent palaces Lord Burghley had built and was building were afforded from whatever allowance the Queen made to him.

'In any event,' said Cecil, moving rapidly on, 'you have the excuse of seeking your… ward's fiancй, I gave you my word that I would facilitate your access to Lisbon and to the Netherlands. You may join my party. You will be listed as an adviser, a status little above a servant. But alone. The woman cannot come with you.'

'I wouldn't wish her to do so,' said Gresham. 'The Netherlands is a war zone. There's no certainty of finding her fiancй perhaps not even a reasonable chance. What I need to do there doesn't involve her. It does, however, need your expedition, as my cover.'

Cecil's lips turned up in distaste at the word "cover". 'It has cost me in credibility to include you in our party,' said Cecil. Already it was "his" party, though as the mere son of a nobleman he was the least important member of it. 'So perhaps you may feel able to tell me, following our "agreement", what you achieved — if anything — in Lisbon.'

'Something. Perhaps nothing. Not enough. As I said previously, it's better you do not know. Particularly as we're heading into a country ravaged by war where even the best-escorted parties can't be guaranteed safety from brigands.'

Cecil blanched slightly. 'I am sure it will not come to that.'

He returned to The House and Anna. She had had a wonderful time over the twelve days of Christmas, though she would never admit it to Gresham, and was glowing as a result. The glow turned to frost when she saw him. The chaperone looked more miserable by the minute.

Cecil was not his only reason for being in London. Gresham very much wished to attend a party hosted by Edmund Spenser, who seemed about to give birth to his own baby, a lengthy poem called 'The Faerie Queene'. It was the least glamorous of the events Anna and Gresham had been invited to, but Spenser was a true friend, and a true poet, so the event was worth dragging him away from Cambridge. Anna refused to talk to Gresham, but had softened towards George and talked to him with some animation, seemingly with complete trust. At an earlier soirйe the Earl of Essex had made a pass at her.

'It was appalling!' she said, clearly not at all appalled. 'He is such a handsome man, a favourite of the Queen and they tell me he is a bolted Earl. Yet he dresses so carelessly!'

'It's belted Earl actually,' said Gresham later, as they walked the Long Gallery of The House, 'and yes, he's deemed to be the most handsome of the lot.' George had left to go home, his face long. His elderly parents were about to arrive in London on one of their increasingly rare visits, and spoil his bachelor life.

Anna looked at him. 'I do not listen in to your conversations. I fail to see why you should listen to mine. It is probably unsafe for me to even be near you. The girls at Court, they say you are dangerous.'

Well, dangerous to one or two of their husbands, perhaps. What was a young man to do if a girl flung herself at you? It would be impolite to refuse. 'Not as dangerous as the Queen will be to you, if she thinks you're stealing the attentions of her latest young man. So what happened?' His curiosity overrode his distaste for this foreign creature.

'The Earl — Robert Devereux is he not? — danced with me for the first time, and then took the second dance and even the third. I know he had ladies for the second and third dances waiting for him. I saw, because they were most upset.' There was no sign that Anna had been upset on their behalf. 'And then, in the third dance, he whispered in my ear!'

Gresham paused, and looked at the girl. Why had she not flung herself at him? There was more control to her than he had given her credit for, Gresham realised. The pan might be boiling, as Mannion had insisted to his laughter, but the owner was managing to keep the lid on tight. Now he thought about it, this must be the first really beautiful girl who had not flung herself at him. Did he mind? Of course not. 'And what did he whisper?'

'What men always whisper,' Anna said simply. 'To go to bed with him.'

'So what did you do?' asked Gresham, despite himself.

'I told him that I was a virgin,' she answered simply. 'And more than that, I was a Catholic virgin. So that I could only go to bed with a man who would guarantee me an Immaculate Conception.'

Despite himself, Gresham burst out laughing. 'And his response?' he found himself asking.

'He burst out laughing, like you. Men are all the same. He said that great though he undoubtedly was he was not yet ready to be the father of Jesus.'

Good on him, thought Gresham, his respect for the Earl of Essex reluctantly increasing. Then the bleakness of his situation forced itself into his mind. Once, as a child, he had seen a flock of pigeons scatter up from the roof of The House, winging up towards the clouds. Then, suddenly, one of the pigeons had crumpled in the air, as if shot. Yet there was no man with a gun nearby, no archer trying the impossible task of killing a bird on the wing. The dead bird, transformed in an instant from a thing of beauty to something inert and lifeless, had plunged like lead to earth, landing with a soggy thump on the roof, dislodging two of the tiles by its impact. The still-warm flesh lay motionless, the tiles skittering down the length of the roof to tumble and smash into pieces on the hard ground below. So it was with Gresham's mood at present, as he remembered the bleak reality of his future, the gaiety of the moment crumpling like a dead bird. ‘I must leave,' said Gresham. 'I have to go to Flanders.'

To find Jacques Henri?' asked Anna.

'That's part of my excuse. If this damned man of yours exists, which I'm beginning to increasingly doubt. But it's not my real reason. And I can't take you with me. It's a war zone there, out of control. It's going to be difficult enough keeping Cecil out of trouble and myself free to do what I need. And you would be at real, serious risk.'

She chanced a very rare smile, to herself more than to him. 'More risk than being stranded at sea on a sinking ship with fifteen pirates?'

Sometimes the best way to deal with a woman was to remain silent.

'You are happy for me to remain here?' she asked. 'Living as I do?' She was asking if he consented to her continuing to spend his money.

'Of course. You're my ward, aren't you?' Gresham liked saying that. It gave him a feeling of power. 'Yet for a short time, in a month or two, I may ask you to stay in a new place. Not for long, I hope.'

A puzzled expression crossed her face. It was time. He had no option. He had to tell this girl his real business. The truth. The truth that only Mannion had known hitherto. The truth that would most likely lead to Henry Gresham being killed in disgrace. As she was a Spaniard, perhaps he should have told her much earlier. Who knows? Secrecy becomes like a second skin, and humans are not like snakes who slough off their skin effortlessly. 'Let me explain,' he said. And then he told her the truth that had been haunting him for so long. The truth that he knew would decide his fate, his life. As he did so, he realised how stupid it must sound to an outsider.

When he had finished, he looked at her face. She was white, aghast. There were tears starting in her wide eyes — of shock? Of horror? Suddenly, surprisingly, he realised what a terrible moment this was. For the first time since he had known her she looked into his eyes, and broke down, the emotion shaking her whole body.

'I'm sure you'll be safer where I'm asking you to go than in the Netherlands,' he added lamely, at a loss as to what he could do. He was to remember his words later on.

All Mannion said when he heard of the conversation was, 'You don't make life easy for them as follow you, do you?'

Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth's Embassy to the Netherlands was one of the most bizarre, mad and, in some strange way, ridiculous events of Gresham's life. Perhaps all diplomacy was this ridiculous. If so, it was a wonder that the world was not permanently at war. Then again, perhaps it was.

Why should the Duke of Parma want peace, wondered Gresham, when he had every chance now of winning a war that had cost him and Spain so dearly? All the cards were in Parma's hands. He had the best army in the world at his disposal. He was winning the war to keep the Netherlands in Spanish hands. He had the biggest fleet in history coming to help him get that army over to England, and he must know how little there was to oppose him if he landed. So England was sending a peace delegation. And was this the team to conclude a peace? Henry Stanley, Earl of Derby, was urbane, intelligent and widely-travelled. But the other two nobles, Cobham and Sir James Croft, were bewildered, the two civil lawyers accompanying them pedantic, and Cecil and Tom Spencer, a relative of Derby's, intelligent enough but wholly inexperienced. This was what England was sending, to oppose an army.

Dover in late February was death by ice. The winter weather was appalling, ships huddling in the harbour as if in fear. For days the wind howled, blowing so hard down the chimney of the inn reluctantly occupied by the peace party that it drove smoke and cinders into the main room, setting furniture ablaze. It was just before the end of the month that they managed passage to Ostend. Gresham thought he was accustomed to rough seas, counted himself a seaman now, but this bucking, crazed animal beneath his feet surprised and frightened him. The bitter cold cut like a blade, flecking their beards with sharp particles of ice just minutes after being on deck. God knows how the sailor's fingers kept enough feeling to work the sails for more than seconds.

Ostend was a city surrounded by war, in a country taken over by war in the way that plague takes over a human body. A whole family lay dead a quarter of a mile outside the walls. The father was on the ground, in a shirt, arm outstretched. It had been gnawed to the bone above the hand, which showed white against the brown mud, half his head eaten away, and great chunks of flesh taken out of his body. His wife and children were similarly mangled, holes where their eyes had once been. 'Wolves,' said their guide, 'and birds, of course. The wolves come right up to the city walls at night now. You'll hear them, well enough.'

Ostend was a town where people walked hunched, where even the deputation from England with all its gold found that there was no food in the hostel. Cecil rose to his feet, issued peremptory orders to his servants. Ludicrously, he returned two hours later with two mangy hunting dogs and two thin fishing nets. 'If there is no food, then we shall find it!' he pronounced proudly. The dogs ran off when the servants took them out, the fishing nets proved to have two vast holes in them, and something in the manner of the servants persuaded Cecil not to ask them to set out on the choppy sea in the small boat that was all they could hire. It was Mannion who went out and returned with three eggs, half a cheese and some mouldy ham. They ate it like village children at a feast.

The delays felt endless, the frustration almost like a physical force pressing down on them. They were in Ostend, but Parma was reportedly in Bruges. Messengers were sent between the two camps, frequently crossing to arrange a meeting. Parma was no longer in Bruges. Where was he? No one knows. 'Inspecting his troops.' How much inspection can an army stand? There was no entertainment in Ostend, not even coal. Her Majesty's Ambassadors sat huddled round a smoking peat fire, praying for real warmth. Cecil's education was expanded even more. The smoke from a peat fire does not sting the eyes. Any more than it warms the body.

Dale, Cecil and Gresham rode to Ghent in the second week of March, their only food an orange apiece. There were brigands riding, lurking in what was left of the woodlands on either side of the road, just out of musket range, lean men on horses, watching, gauging the strength and the commitment of their escort. The eggs they got when they arrived were like a King's feast. They did not compensate for the fact that Parma's emissary had gone, with no one seeming to know where. Finally the ambassadors met with Gamier, Parma's secretary, a small man in his mid-thirties, wearing a heavily furred cloak down to his knees, wearing what could only be called a cassock of blue velvet with gold buttons and a gold chain around his neck. There was more talk, more delay. Then, at long last, they agreed for proper negotiations to start at Bourbourg, near Dunkirk.

'I fear this delay is intentional, that we are simply being stalled while Spain prepares her Armada,' said the Earl of Derby to Gresham. He had fallen into the habit of exchanging words with the young man, to Cecil's evident discomfort.

'It's possible, of course, my Lord,' said Gresham, toying with a rock-hard crust of bread that even his starving stomach was unwilling to take. 'Yet it's one of the Duke of Parma's techniques as a leader to be everywhere and yet nowhere, to move around his command to no obvious plan.'

'What advantage is there in it?' asked Derby, intrigued. He was an intelligent man with a quick brain, and a major supporter of the players.

'They say it's one reason why there's been no assassination attempt against him. That and the loyalty of his troops,' answered Gresham. 'Yet it also means that no commander can be secure against a sudden, ruthless inspection. The first thing he demands is a parade of the men, with the muster roll.' The plague of all European armies were the officers who took money for recruits who had either died, or never existed at all except as a fictional entry on just such a muster roll. It was a foolish officer who played this trick in Parma's army, and one who finished his career at the end of a rope. 'And, my Lord,' said Gresham, 'have we considered if this is the Duke's way of testing our sincerity, our strength of purpose?' *Well, it may be so,' said Derby, 'but I will tell you now that he has tested this man's strength of purpose near to breaking point!' He stood up, ordering one of the very few remaining bottles of wine he had brought with him from England to be opened. A whole dozen bottles had been smashed to pieces in their passage over the Channel.

There had always been an old head on Henry Gresham's young soldier's body, but that night the youthful blood must have been running even more strongly than usual in his veins. Despairing of the conversation in the crude inn where they were staying, with the wind shrieking through the ill-mended windows and rattling the doors, he flung a cloak over his shoulders, threw open the door and took himself off through the night air. The houses were close, crowded in on each other, not dissimilar to London except with no roar of traffic and the ceaseless yelling of trades-people. Mannion tucked in behind his master, silent. They walked briskly for quarter of an hour, reaching the outskirts of the town. The rain was holding off, though the air was thick with wet and cold, and there was a pleasant tingling in Gresham's body after the exercise. The moon emerged briefly from behind the scudding clouds, revealing the dark shape of the town wall before them. It was as if they had the whole town to themselves, apart from a lame, skulking dog that had shadowed them all the way from the inn.

They were halfway back when the attack came. The men must have been waiting down a tiny, stinking jennel that led off the main route. It was the mud that saved Gresham, that and the fact that for a few seconds the wind had ceased its howling. There was a slight squelch as the lead attacker drew his foot from out of the slime that coated the streets. It was a tiny noise, but it was enough for Gresham and Mannion to swing round and face the men. The jennel was so narrow that only one man could leap out from it at a time. It was the one weakness in the attackers' plan. Without the sudden drop in the wind's noise the dagger would have been plunged into Gresham's back, the first he knew of it the sharp, sudden agony and the drawing down of the blinds in his eyes. As it was he turned to see his enemy, the hand, with the dagger in it held high, was already descending. The man with a ragged beard and pock-marked face, teeth drawn back in a grin of concentration, a strangely incongruous pink tongue poking out between the misshapen teeth. A second figure was close behind, already starting to swing a huge cudgel at Mannion's head.

Some instinct made Gresham lunge forward, not pull back as most men would have done, and tuck his head down. He collided with the man, his head burying itself in the stinking woollen tunic. He was under the blow now, and the man tried to pull his arm back, redirect the dagger into Gresham's heart. With one hand Gresham grabbed the man's arm, while bringing his head up with a savage jerk under the man's chin. Gresham's hat was in the mud now, so bone met bone. The man's jaw snapped shut. There was a gurgling scream, and the arm Gresham was grasping suddenly flopped. His attacker had bitten off his tongue. Gresham flung the man away from him, directly in the path of the third man to emerge from the jennel. They were brave, or starving and made desperate by their hunger. There was another gurgling scream, and the first attacker slumped to the ground. From his stomach the tip of a blade poked through. The third attacker must have held his sword out before him, and Gresham had inadvertently thrown the first man back on to its point, impaling him on his friend. This attacker was a slight figure, dressed in a billowing cloak, close-shaven and with a wide, dark hat that hid his face. He placed a foot on the now dead body of his accomplice, sought to drag his sword out of the body. Then his hat went flying, and a startled expression lit his face, before he toppled forward, hand still clutching the embedded sword. Mannion had killed the second man, taken his vast cudgel and swung it into the back of his head with massive force, crushing bone and brain in an explosion of blood. The two Englishmen stood, panting slightly. Gresham had not even taken his sword out of its scabbard.

'Thieves?' he gasped to Mannion.

Mannion put his foot out, rolled over the body of the third attacker. It was clear he was of a different class, his clothing breathing wealth, his complexion clear. And there was his sword, of course. Mannion bent down, withdrew it from the body with a sickening sucking sound. It was immaculate except where it was now stained with blood, the hilt finely decorated.

'Spanish,' said Mannion, taking in both the sword and the dead man. He used the tip of the sword to part the man's doublet. There was a gleam of gold. With the delicacy of a surgeon, Mannion let the sword blade pull on the precious chain, revealing the top of a crucifix. 'Not thieves,' said Mannion. 'Hungry, desperate local men — look how thin they both are — probably hired by this one here, who chooses to lead from behind, with his sword out and ready in case anything went wrong.'

'Damn!' said Gresham.

'Damn right,' said Mannion. 'This wasn't Walsingham, or Cecil. Or the Queen. You've got up everyone's nose, haven't you? It was Spain as wanted you dead tonight.'

The street was empty, the fight almost silent, apart from two gurgling, blood-stopped screams, the greatest noise the weight of their own breathing. They" hauled the three bodies roughly back into the jennel. Gresham tried not to think about the starving dog and what it would do to the bodies.

The others had gone to bed when they returned to the inn, with the exception of Cecil. A cloak clutched round him, he was huddled in front of what little was left of the fire. He glanced suspiciously at Gresham.

'Taking the air?' he asked, the irony thick in his voice. 'You might as well yell a challenge out for someone to kill you, to walk these streets at night! Or did you have someone you needed to see?'

Sometimes the truth was the best weapon. 'Someone did try to kill us, as it happened. Three of them. And one of them a Spaniard, a gentleman by the look of him.'

Cecil blanched, his thin hands giving an involuntary tug at the thick cloak. 'A Spaniard, you say? Are you sure?'

The surprise in Cecil's voice was unmistakable. Gresham doubted even he could counterfeit it.

Mannion was wearing something that looked more like a tarpaulin than a cloak. He drew it aside, and tossed the dead Spaniard's sword onto the rough trestle table that was set back from the fire. Spanish steel was renowned throughout Europe, their swords the best. The intricate working of the hilt was unmistakable. A man's sword was as accurate a guide to his breeding as his clothing, and told the viewer as much about him.

'It's not just his weapon,' said Gresham, flinging off his own cloak and settling by the fire, reaching out his hands to its thin warmth. 'Clothes, appearance. And this.' He tossed a purse onto the table. Cecil looked at it, reached for it, fingered the coins inside. 'Spanish money,' said Gresham.

'But this is in breach of our immunity. No one, no one attacks a member of a diplomatic mission!' Cecil breathed. 'In political terms it is the equivalent of blasphemy.'

'Then we have some unbelievers in our proximity,' said Gresham. He noted Cecil's care for his and Mannion's safety. Or, rather, the complete absence of any such care.

'Do you have an explanation for this attempt?'

No, thought Gresham, I do not. Or at least, not yet. Nor will I find one until you cease your prattling and I am allowed to think. 'Welcome to Walsingham's world,' he said to Cecil. 'There's no diplomatic immunity in our world. The enemy don't wear a certain uniform to tell you they are your enemy. The knife can come as easily from the back as from the front.'

Cecil still seemed deeply offended at the perceived insult to English diplomacy. If Cecil ever came to real power, he would deal with ambassadors and not spies, thought Gresham.

Their problem was that they seemed to be dealing with no one. Finally, when they were reduced to despair, they were allowed their first meeting with Parma himself. Cecil was scornful in his despatch to his father, and the rather more formal one to the Queen; The room was full of poor, battered furniture, hardly better heated than their foul lodging, too small for the assembly gathered there. Gresham thought differently. This was a soldier's meeting. Parma would hardly notice the decorations or the fittings of where he met, he who had destroyed so many towns and cities. Meetings for Parma, Gresham thought, were not about gilded chairs, or precedence. They were business. Or was he clever enough to realise that by holding his meeting in such a poor room he disarmed the diplomats he met, put them off balance?

The ambassadors droned their formalities and Parma's intelligent eyes flicked between them as if measuring their worth. The chair he sat in was ornately carved, but across the back, on the left hand side, there was a blackened, circular indent six inches or more long, as if someone had lain a red-hot poker there and let it eat into the wood.

Within minutes Parma had chosen Derby as the real leader of the party, as well as its designated leader, taking him by the arm, pouring his wine himself. And he paid attention to Cecil as well, the man there simply because of his father's name. But the man tasked by the Queen, as Gresham had found out, to write to her daily on the progress of the negotiations.

Gresham received the merest of passing nods, despite a warm introduction from Derby. An hour? Two hours? They had waited so long for this meeting) yet such conversation as there was seemed trivial, meaningless. Gresham lost track of the time. Finally, the delegation bowed out, their eyes stinging. No peat. On this fire, but damp wood, so that their clothes would smell for months of the slightly rancid stink of smoke from wet timber. The tap on the shoulder came as the others were ushered to separate rooms to wash before the dinner Parma had organised.

‘You have a labour of love to conclude, I believe?' It was Count d'Aremberg, one of Parma's closest advisers. He was smiling. How typical of his master, the smile said, to consider the hunt for a missing fiancй in the midst of considering the fate of nations. 'The Duke can spare you a few minutes, before the formalities, to discuss your search, and report on your initial findings.'

Gresham was ushered back into the conference room, through an arras and into a small back room with furniture no better than in the main hall. The Duke of Parma, General in Chief of His Most Catholic Majesty's Army in the Netherlands, looked calmly at Henry Gresham. They were alone.

'Are they genuine?' he asked, with no preamble, 'these two wise men and these five or six fools they have sent to negotiate with me?'

'They're genuine, my Lord,' said Gresham, 'in that they truly wish for peace. England is by far the weaker combatant. And they'll remain so while they think there's still hope, though in their hearts they don't believe you'll make peace or even that you have the power to do so.'

'So,' mused Parma, after a moment's thought, 'at last, here is Henry Gresham. The young bastard who dances with the Queen of England, the man who is one of Walsingham's trusted recruits, the brave adventurer who makes his name fighting for England at Cadiz, the controversial academic, the man of fabulous wealth who survives an attempt by Drake to kill him.' He paused. 'And the man who all this while has been spying for Spain.' He paused again. There was a slight smile on Gresham's face. 'The man who attends Mass once a week, at huge personal risk, not just now, but for years,' Parma went on, 'and whose allegiance to his faith overwhelms his allegiance to what he sees as a corrupt state. The man whose reports are deemed among the most important and secret to reach the Escorial Palace, and some of very few sent in their entirety on to me. The man who admits he has been forced to do things to damage the Spanish cause, such as corrupting the chief armourer in Lisbon, so as to retain his credibility with his English masters and to prove himself to the heretic Walsingham. Spain's great secret. The man — the very young man — they talk of in whispers as Spain's secret weapon. The man whose real name is known only to the King, to a single one of his private Secretaries and, recently, to me.'

Henry Gresham bowed his head in acknowledgement. The sense of relief was almost palpable, the sense of no longer having to deceive. 'And the man who would like passage to Spain,' Gresham stated. To end deception, and to join the Armada. I have vital knowledge of Drake, of the English fleet. I must be there to advise the Duke!' He was pleading now. The thought of having come so far and not be there at the climax was unthinkable, obscene.

There was a glint in Parma's eyes. 'You have heard the news that your Walsingham is dead?'

Gresham's expression did not change. 'I had not heard, my Lord,' he replied. 'But it was expected.'

The Duke of Parma looked deep into Gresham's eyes. 'We will talk,' he said. 'And you will tell me everything.'

'I have much to tell you, my Lord,' said Gresham.

Neither men noticed that there was a small gap in the planks beneath their feet, a gap not covered by carpet or a thick layer of rushes. Nor did they notice the briefest flicker, as if someone had been crouched beneath the floor listening, and had moved to their exit.