'Bloody stupid officers!' grunted Mannion. 'Makin' heroic gestures and risking good men's lives.'
'What's he doing?' asked Gresham, incredulously. A group of seven or so English ships had approached one wing of the Armada. The Spanish had immediately tried to lay alongside the English ships and grapple, the English intent on ducking and weaving, firing ragged cannonades all the while. A faint popping noise came to them over the waves, the wind whipping the smoke away. It was a skirmish, like wrestlers dancing round each other, trying to get the measure of their opponent before going in for the throw. Yet whoever was in command seemed to have taken his ship directly into the English fleet, allowed himself to become surrounded, cut off, only one other vessel in support.
'I reckon he's doing it on purpose,' said Mannion, sucking at a hollow tooth. 'If the English think they've got 'im, they'll come in close and maybe he can board one. If that happens, the other ships'll have no choice but to try and board him, and he'll get a melee — just what the Spanish want!'
The incessant cannonade the Spanish ship was receiving seemed to be doing remarkably little damage. Once, twice Gresham gasped as it seemed as if she might get close enough to an English ship for its grappling irons to bite, but each time the vessel ducked away. Finally Sidonia took his own great flagship heeling out of line to join the embattled galleon, drawing it back into the main body of the fleet as the English retreated. By late afternoon it was over.
'So who won that one?' asked Gresham, confused. Mannion shrugged.
'It's a draw. The Spanish can't get at the English, but the English can't get near most of the Spanish.' The bulk of the Armada was sailing with no more than fifty metres between each ship. Any English vessel getting in between them would face overwhelming fire and the certainty of being boarded. 'Bit like a hedgehog,' said Mannion. 'Clever way to fight, you've got to grant them. Though you can flip a hedgehog over and I can't see 'ow you'd flip this bloody fleet over.'
They both turned at the sound of the bell calling the crew to prayer. Both men saw the Dutchman grapple with the powder barrel, heaving it down from the stern where it was parked with three others, a gunner going about his job, ignored by the others. They witnessed the quick look round, the slow match smoking gently stuck to the side of the barrel, watched the man duck over the rail and into the water. An officer caught the motion, turned round with his mouth open to yell… what? A query? An order? No one would ever know, because in that precise moment Hell came to the after-deck of the Spanish galleon San Salvador. There were three separate flashes, half a second between. The first, fiery-orange explosion of the single powder barrel, followed in the flicker of an eyelid by the deep red and yellow of the three other barrels parked on the stern castle and then the brilliant, eyeball-piercing explosion of the powder stored in the deck below. Gresham was looking back, he and Mannion right at the ship's forecastle. The split second warning the sight of the Dutchman had given them forced them instinctively to hurl themselves over the side. As if in slow motion Gresham felt the sinking in the pit of his stomach as they started their plunge into the sea, caught a vast flash of red and yellow even through his tightly-closed lids and then, extraordinarily, felt as if a giant had shoved hugely at his feet and legs, spinning him over and over and over before they hit the sea. His eyes forced open in shock, Gresham felt a savage pain in his eardrums as they were pushed in to implosion, and saw tiny little fountains of white water spring up out of the sea as fragments of debris and men were flung out by the power of the explosion.
For too long the green water passed upwards in front of his eyes. Kicking out and up, he finally surfaced, spluttering. Momentary panic. He could hear nothing. He placed a thumb and forefinger over his nose, swallowed sharply, and with a click he knew he could hear again. Knew because the sound of screaming men was cutting through to his brain. A man was bobbing on the water, one arm clutching ferociously at a baulk of timber, his eyes wide with terror. His other arm had gone at the elbow, and when the water bobbed him up and down only one leg appeared on the surface. Both limbs had been cauterised by the blast, and then sterilised in the salt water. He might even live, thought Gresham. If a man wanted to live with one arm and one leg. Then the stink hit him. Burning wood, of course. But above all a singed smell, like overdone pork on a fire. The smell of burning human flesh.
'There!' said Gresham. That boat! The one from the San Martin’ The vast Spanish fleet had hove to, boats scuttling over the water in a hurried rescue operation. The San Salvador lay dead in the water, her stern shot away, sails mere hanging tatters, smoke rising from her deck and an awful, low keening noise of deeply injured men. Weighed down by their clothes, Gresham and Mannion struggled to one of the boats sent from the flagship. As they struggled closer, a man in the water, burned black by some strange decay, was being pulled on board. The sailor hauling his body was suddenly, violently sick as the burned remnant of the man's arm came away in his hand, the rest of the body flopping back into the water.
'There must be easier ways to get on board the bloody flagship!' said Mannion, spitting sea water out of his mouth as he scorned help and hauled himself over the side of the rescue boat.
When they finally arrived, wet, cold and buffeted, aboard the Duke of Medina Sidonia's flagship, they had nothing except the clothes on their backs arid the handful of gold coins sewn into each of their jackets — the number was limited by their weight and the amount they could still swim with if they found themselves in the sea. Gresham rubbed his eyes, succeeding in making them sting even more from the salt water dripping down his forehead. From the deck of the San Martin he could see the drifting hulk of the San Salvador, but also another great ship in trouble. Something seemed to have snapped off her bowsprit and her mizzenmast had tumbled over. As they watched, the ship's mainmast shivered and fell forward in the driving wind. Someone was asking to note down their names, while a seaman offered them a rough blanket.
From the central position occupied by the flagship Gresham saw a group of English ships form up and follow them at a safe distance. There was shouting on the deck, and what looked like Sidonia's own personal barge was lowered.
'That's two great Spanish ships stumbling in our wake, crammed with God knows what in the way of treasure and booty,' Gresham whispered to Mannion.
'So?' Was Spain already losing this battle, Gresham thought, as he shivered in the cold wind?
'Do you think Drake will see them in his magic glass?'
Later that night Sir Francis Drake extinguished his stern light, stating that he had seen the shadows of ships pass him by, and headed off to capture the Rosario and make himself fifty thousand pounds. He had been tasked with following the Armada, his stern lantern the marker on which the whole of the rest of the English fleet was relying. The ships following him saw the light ahead of them in the dark flicker and fade, but then picked up another dimmer light. Thinking it to be Drake, they put on sail to catch up. When dawn broke, they found they had been marking the lantern of the rearmost vessel of the Armada all night, and were alone and in range of the greatest fleet on earth. The three English vessels heeled about, and withdrew to search for the remainder of the English fleet, thrown into disarray by Drake's action.
One of the greatest fleets the world had seen was separated from its enemies by only a few miles, and the fate of nations was being decided by the decisions of the warring commanders. And Gresham was almost terminally bored.
The men passed the time gambling, the dice carried in two locking cups, even though the authorities frowned on it. Mannion had carved dice out of a waste piece of wood, begged (or stolen) an earthenware cup from somewhere, and shown himself capable of mindlessly throwing dice for hours. It bored Gresham and he already owed Mannion ten thousand pounds. In the hierarchy of a Spanish galleon a traitorous English gentleman belonged nowhere. There were no cabins or beds on board for even the Spanish gentlemen, fifty or so who had clamoured to be taken aboard the prestigious flagship and who added to its already vas
tly overcrowded decks. Gresham was reduced to sitting on whatever bit of spare deck there was whenever he could resist Mannion's gambling fever, composing sonnets in his head. The rhyme scheme and the fourteen-line format was demanding and so took more time. He had forgotten what it was like to sleep without another man's body pressing against him on one or both sides. Or should he simply switch his mind off and be lulled by the routine of the ship? Night was marked by the saying of a simple prayer:
'The Watch is set, The glass runs yet, Safe on the seas If God decrees.'
The glass, or sand clock, was turned every half hour. A ship's boy, pathetically young and vulnerable, gave what Gresham had learned was the traditional lilt.
'One glass has gone, Another's a-filing, More sand shall run, If God is willing.'
Simple stuff, childish words recited by children, yet far more comforting than the tangled precision of his sonnets. Each watch lasted four hours, the new watch being called again by the boys with their shrill ' Al cuarto, al cuarto, senates marineros!' Yet it was the evening ceremony Gresham found most moving. It silenced even Mannion, as the pair of them, still shivering from their soaking, clutched the thin blankets round their bodies and chewed the last of the rations formally handed out to them a half hour earlier.
First a ship's boy brought the newly-lighted stern lantern on to the darkening deck, breaking out into the evening lilt. The thin, treble voice was feeble against the gusting of the wind, the rattle of intermittent raindrops on the bulging sails, the continual creak of timber and cordage, all the more moving because of its fragility. The words were mundane, given meaning only by the rolling deck and the sense of men drawn together in danger.
'Amen, and God give us goodnight,
May the ship make good passage and have a safe voyage,
Captain, Sir, Master, and all our company.'
The altar was set with candles and glittering images, the candles needing to be continually relit. The ship's Master called in a stentorian voice, 'Are we all present?' A muted roar of male voices greeted the question, 'God be with us!'. It was bad luck not to answer. The Master chanted a salve, strange because by now the light was flickering off his face and making him look more like a demon than Christ's representative, strange because of the deep, rhythmic tone of his voice.
'A salve let us say
To speed us on our way,
A salve let us sing,
A good voyage may it bring.'
The men chanted the salve then the Litany of Our Lady, then the Credo, their voices firm. For a few moments the rolling, sonorous familiarity of the words brought the men together, bonded them to the ocean and their common purpose. Then the Ave, and the usual evening lilt, sung by everyone, the stern lantern hoisted in its proper place.
It was the faces that Gresham could never forget. The smooth, clear complexion of the ship's boys, the hardened, wrinkled faces of the men, stained by sun and sea, gazing into the flickering lights, each one an island in himself. Hundreds of men and boys, each one holding themselves as the most important person in the world.
The next dawn came revealing a sea virtually clear of English ships. The summons came after he and Mannion had collected their morning rations.
Sidonia's cabin was sumptuously furnished, the table behind which he sat bizarrely inlaid with ivory. The Duke did not ask Gresham to sit. Two of the San Martin's officers stood beside him, glowering, and the choleric Diego Flores. The translator was the same man who had been with the Duke in Corunna.
'The San Salvador. What happened? The tone was neutral, the thin, tired eyes expressionless.
'My servant and I were at the bow. We saw a Dutchman manhandle a barrel of powder, place a slow match into it and dive overboard.'
'Just that? No more? A man blows up his own ship and trusts himself to the mercy of the sea?'
'My Lord,' Gresham moved uneasily, 'there were… rumours.'
'Rumours?
'Rumours that a Spanish captain had… interfered with the German wife of this same gunner.' In the tiny space of a sailing ship there were no secrets. The whole crew and the soldiers had heard the Dutchman vowing revenge. They had thought it likely to be a knife in the back, if the words were anything more than braggadocio.
'Would these two men take a dispute on land to sea? Destroy a ship, and half its crew?' The Duke was grappling with drives and motivations that were alien to his whole upbringing and culture.
'It was not on land, my Lord,' said Gresham reluctantly. 'The offence took place… at sea. The gunner's wife was aboard the San Salvador. 1
'How can this be?' There was a cold fury in the Duke's voice now. He is a prude, thought Gresham. His innate refinement shrinks at the thought of carnality. 'I ordered all women to be removed from ships in Lisbon. Over thirty were found and put ashore. To have women on board this holy mission would be sacrilege!'
Make or break time, thought Gresham. He would not tell the Commander what every sailor knew, that one of the urcas was crammed to the gunnels with women, the wives and camp followers of the sailors and, in the main, the soldiers. That for the thirty or so women disguised as men that his marines had ferreted out on board a variety of ships there were two or three times as many on board by the time the fleet sailed. Sailors were used to months at sea without women. The soldiers were used to taking their women with them. These were not the refined, wilting Court ladies that the Duke knew. Many of them were common-law wives. No priest had ever said words over their union with their man, yet with a stubborn determination that defied both the Duke and his interpretation of God's will they stuck with their man.
'My Lord, for one woman to remain hidden in a hundred and thirty ships is no cause for recrimination. Rather it is a matter of wonder that only she remained.'
The officers of the San Martin shuffled uneasily. They understood why he hid the truth from their Duke. They also knew the story of the explosion before he told it to them, Gresham realised. It had been a test — you are a spy, you find out things. So did you find out what blew you overboard and near lost you your life? He had passed the first test. Sidonia motioned Gresham to sit in front of him, on a plain, three-legged stool.
'So, my young English, can you tell me why the sea is bare of English ships this morning, those same ships that pecked in such numbers at our heels yesterday? Is this some strange English stratagem a true Spaniard is not meant to understand?'
'We left two great ships in our wake. It's my belief that Sir Francis Drake couldn't resist such a prize. I would guess that he's taken off after one or both of your abandoned vessels, and either many ships have gone with him in hope of plunder, or he's just confused the English fleet.'
One of the younger commanders leaned forward, looked into the eyes of his master for permission to speak. 'You are saying that your countrymen are pirates, more interested in plunder than in defending their land?' This man seemed permanently angry.
'I do not think of them as my countrymen anymore, and yes, that is exactly what they are. Brilliant sailors, brave and tenacious. But at heart, pirates,' Gresham replied.
'Tell me about the Isle of Wight,' said the Duke.
'It's a large, fertile area, and a potential death trap for your fleet.'
One of the other men shuffled, drawing in his breath with a sharp hiss. This was not the way one spoke to the Duke of Medina Sidonia. If the Duke took offence he did not show it.
'Why?' the Duke asked. 'Why is it a death trap?'
Clever, thought Gresham, adding the description to the catalogue of features he was building in his mind of this man. Possibly so clever as to be over-sensitive, and to have retreated behind a wall of courtesy and good manners to protect that sensitivity. Yet with steel, plentiful steel. And lonely. Above all Gresham sensed an immense loneliness, here in this gorgeously furnished cabin with all the trappings of vast wealth.
'It has no strategic significance. As close as it is to the good port of Portsmouth, you could be subject to blockade with relatively little ef
fort. Its anchorages cry out for fireships. The English would bring you to no great battle there. Yet they would whittle away at your fleet piece by piece, waiting for winter and the storms to do their job for them.'
'And you who know so much about the English and England, you who have met the Duke of Parma, can you tell me why he does not answer my letters?'
Now Gresham saw how this man was using him. On board the San Martin, the turncoat English spy Gresham had no friends and no allies. And so he could talk to no one, not refine the Duke's words for his own advantage, not play off the confidences for political favour. In talking to Gresham the Duke of Medina Sidonia had a sounding board who could talk to no one else. Carefull
'The Duke must know that you're coming, from your own messengers and from the King. The country he rules over is vast, his centres of governance widely separated, the country war-torn and difficult to travel. Wolves gnaw the bodies of women and children as well as their fathers, within sight of the city walk of Ostend. He'll assume automatically that you expect him to mobilise his troops, prepare his invasion barges. He'll only put final plans into progress when you and your fleet are close enough to meet with him, in person.'
'And how do you find the hospitality of the San Martin, after your experience on board one of Drake's ships?'
The Duke of Medina Sidonia had some way to go before he matched Sir Francis Drake for sudden changes of topic, but was clearly a contender.
'Strange. Disturbing. Comforting. There are no rituals aboard English ships. If they acknowledge God, it is as a fellow sailor, almost an equal. Yet what I have seen aboard your ships concerns me.'
The other Spaniards stiffened. We take offence, their bodies told Gresham.
'You may speak freely,' said the Duke. He raised a hand, and a two beautiful golden goblets appeared on the table, the deep red of the wine taking on a lustrous tinge from the metal. Mannion would be driven to despair at what he was missing, thought Gresham, as he raised the stunning bouquet of the wine to his lips.
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