August 7th — August 9th, 1588 The Battle of Gravelines
Was Anna in Calais? Gresham hoped so. The Duke had made it quite clear that neither he nor Mannion could leave the San Martin, though the Duke had consented to him sending a messenger to enquire after her safety and whereabouts. 'Was she always part of your plans to cover up your allegiance?' the Duke had asked. 'No, my Lord,' Gresham had answered. 'She was… an accident.' Which was one way to describe her, he thought.
'Well,' said Gresham, holding a by now habitual dawn council of war with Mannion, the both of them gazing from the bow towards the distant port of Calais, 'what're the odds now?'
'Difficult,' said Mannion, "cos it all depends on Parma, don't it? As far as your Duke's concerned this is shit creek and we're moored in it.' Mannion had taken to referring to Medina Sidonia as "your Duke" as Gresham's comments on the man had become increasingly full of admiration for the Spanish Commander's quiet courage and dignity. 'Currents here are terrible, and if you wants my opinion this bloody place 'as got "fireship" written all over it. But if I've got it right,' said Mannion, 'Parma could get loads of boats with his troops down through those canals, with the Dutch able to do sod all about it. Or he could get 'em to Dunkirk and give us pilots to take enough of the smaller ships up into the harbour to protect the transports. Or, best of all, you say Parma's got Antwerp?'
'He's got enough of it to shelter a fleet in the approaches to Antwerp, on the Scheldt,' said Gresham.
'So all it needs is for 'im to send a few pilots over here, and get enough of this lot moored off Antwerp. Nothing I've seen of that lot,' Mannion motioned dismissively out to the English ships, 'is telling me they can stop 'em.'
A cold wind came at dawn, from the south, dragging sharp showers in its trail. If the Armada was flushed out of Calais, it would have to drive north and leave England behind.
Gresham's body shuddered involuntarily, and once again he cursed it for its refusal to obey orders. Something terrible was going to happen here, he knew. A deep instinct in him sensed that somehow in this place and in this time the fate of nations would be decided, the prophecy of Regiomontanus come to pass. Or was it simply the cold, the hunger of a young stomach and the insatiable desire, like a terrible itch always just out of reach, to drink gallons of cold, clear water and let it rinse the salt off his red-raw skin?
The translator had to descend into the gloom to find Gresham. For want of anything to do, he had gone to watch the carpenters plugging the holes in the side of the San Martin. To their amusement he had got himself holding a block of wood against a wooden plug, with a huge Spaniard ramming the plug home with savage blows of a mallet.
'Don Rodrigo Tello de Guzman's pinnace will be alongside in minutes,' was the whispered message. It was he who had been sent with messages to Parma a fortnight ago. 'You have met the Duke of Parma more recently than any except Don Rodrigo. The Duke wishes you to hear his report.'
From the moment Don Rodrigo stepped on board they knew something was wrong. He was both excited and flustered, a sweat on his brow, a nervousness in his manner, almost an irritation. Then it happened, only briefly, for a moment. As it had happened once before to Gresham. The world and time froze, yet there was still movement and sound in it. Don Rodrigo was poised, fixed in a clumsy half-bow as he leaned forward, his startled eyes fixed on the fractured and smashed upperworks of the flagship. The Duke stood on the deck where he had seemed to take root since they had sighted England, frozen also in a stiff, formal greeting. The rigging flapped and slapped against the tall masts, the suck and plop of the waves still soothed. The rhythmic blow of the mallet suddenly took on the timbre of a funereal bell, and all the while the soggy clanking and tired hiss of the pumps reached the upper decks. Then the people and their surroundings became synchronised again, and moved in harmony. Don Rodrigo was troubled, his eyes shifting to Gresham, Sidonia's advisers, those on the deck. The news he brought could not be communicated on the open deck. It took an age for the Duke to realise the problem.
'We shall move into my cabin,' he said finally, nodding to Gresham and several of the Spanish commanders to follow him.
There were perhaps ten of them in the great cabin, and Gresham was reminded of the meeting in Drake's cabin off Cadiz. Three times as many could have fitted into the Duke's centre of operations. The stern windows were intact, remarkably, or had been mended, and they let in the brisk but almost wintery light of Calais. Down one side there was a neat hole where an English ball had pierced the hull, two or three feet on a jagged wrench of splintered timber where a heavier ball, at the end of its trajectory, had smashed into the timbers. One or other of the hits had reduced the top of a fine, carved chest to splinters.
'My Lord,' said Don Rodrigo. 'The Duke of Parma sends his warmest greetings. He is delighted that the power and might of Spain has reached thus far, feels that England is already trembling beneath the feet of the true Faith.' Then Rodrigo stumbled, fell silent.
'And?' said the Duke, prompting him gently, 'And our rendezvous?'
The translator seemed to think he had a duty, and was whispering the translation into Gresham's ear.
'The Duke… the Duke…' Rodrigo was gulping, finding difficulty with his words. 'The Duke states that his troops will be ready for their sortie within six days.'
Spanish noblemen and senior commanders did not hiss or gasp in amazement and horror. Centuries of breeding, centuries that Henry Gresham envied with all his heart, forbade the outward display of such emotion. Instead there was a sudden silence of bodies as well as voices, as the men gathered there became immobile.
Six days? Six days for one hundred and twenty-eight ships to remain moored in a treacherous anchorage, nearly out of powder and shot, an ever-growing hostile fleet snapping at them?
'My Lord…' Rodrigo was speaking like a woman in childbirth. The pain was extraordinary, the burden unavoidable. He looked round the room, eyes stopping briefly at Gresham and Mannion, moving on. Apart from their strange presence, the men gathered around their commander were true Spaniards. Most had birth and breeding, and even those who had less of either commodity had experience with which to compensate. 'My Lord,' there was a new strength in his voice, 'when I left Dunkirk a day ago I saw no sign of his troops. The Duke has not been seen at Dunkirk, nor at Nieuport, this many a day. He moves between Antwerp, Ghent and Bruges, with no seeming pattern in his movements.'
Well, thought Gresham, it's good to know other people had the same problem as we did on our visit.
'The vessels I saw in both places were paltry things, few in number, rotten in construction. They had no stores loaded, not even sails or oars.' He paused, not for effect, but because the enormity of what he had seen he had only now allowed to hit him. 'My Lord, the troops are not ready! The boats, if they exist, are not ready. It is as if my Lord the Duke of Parma had only today received notice that your vessels were leaving Lisbon.'
'How long?' asked the Duke quietly, gently.
Rodrigo looked around the cabin walls, almost in despair, hating what he knew he had to say. 'For the troops to embark… My Lord, it can only be my opinion. I may be wrong. A fortnight. Two weeks. At least Possibly more. Even if the transports exist, will bear the weight of men. A fortnight to gather the men and load the stores. I say nothing about crossing the shallows, reaching us in the face of the damned Dutch and their fly-boats.'
'Thank you,' said the Duke. 'You have done well.' He smiled at Don Rodrigo, reaching forward for the package that he now knew would contain the fulsome welcome of the Duke of Parma and a meaningless promise to assemble an army. An army that should already have been assembled and waiting. The smile was addressed to all those in the cabin now, understanding, forgiving. 'Leave me now. And you, Rodrigo, report to my steward and claim from him some of my very best wine. And then offer it to my friends and fellow officers here. We shall reassemble in the turning of a glass. Please leave me to consider the Duke of Parma's letter.'
The Duke's eyes paused on Gresham's, commanding him to remain. The Spanish officers and nobles bowed formally, unconcerned about who remained, not realising the figure and his manservant who remained behind. There was a strange glint in their eyes, Gresham realised. These were not fools, these men. They knew. The Duke broke the ornate seal on the letter, as if Gresham was not there. He read quietly, occasionally holding the paper up to the light coming through the stern windows where he found a particular line hard to decipher. Then he turned to Gresham.
'I have waited so long for these words, and now I have them, that is all they are. Words.'
'The words are not… helpful?' asked Gresham.
‘I need an army, an army of trained men to take over England. I need powder, and shot. And I have… words.'
The Duke placed the letter from Parma on the ornate table, and stood up, stiff, clearly in pain. He turned to gaze out of the stern windows, onto the ornately decorated stern walk.
'A fortnight? Perhaps. If I could sail up the Scheldt, sail up even to Dunkirk, present my fleet before that army and shame them into embarkation. Yet with no pilots, and no promise of pilots, my ocean-going fleet can make no such inland journey. I must await the Duke's army here, in a treacherous anchorage off a neutral country. And I know that the army will not come, as I know my fleet's survival in this place will be lucky to last one night.' The Duke's face seemed to have sunk in on itself, his eyes hollows in his face, the tightness of his skin almost a death mask. 'Well, my dreaming young Englishman? Am I right?'
All the horror, all the pathos, all the stupid idiocy of the world seemed to come together in that cabin.
'You are right,' said Gresham, as an extraordinary, unprecedented and burning hot tear welled up in both his eyes. He dare not blink, in case it scalded his cheek. 'You have lost.'
Around him, hundreds of men went about their business: mending, making, living, filling the hours with the tasks that stop us thinking; talking to God, pleading with God or hoping with all their hearts that God heard what their poor brains could never put into words. Trusting in God, and the Duke of Medina Sidonia and perhaps even in the memory of the kiss their wife or sweetheart had given them as they set out, trusting in all of these or maybe even just in luck to see them through. Using the one thing God had given them, the belief in each man we are immortal, that death will not really come to us and the hope that we alone will be saved. Unaware that men and events hugely beyond their power to control or influence had condemned so many of them to a lottery of death.
'You'll be blown out of this harbour by storm, or by the English,' said Gresham inexorably. This time the tears would accept no boundary, betraying him by cascading from his eyes down his face. 'And you will fight, won't you, my Lord?'
The exhausted face of the Duke of Medina Sidonia was incredulous. 'Fight? But of course I will fight!' There was emphasis in his voice, but the tone was kind. Almost paternal. 'For hundreds of years my country has stood between the rule of Christ and the Ottomans. When Rome and then Constantinople fell to the infidel, did we measure the odds? Did we count the numbers against us? No! We fought. And we won. And saved Europe for Christianity.'
'But now you'll lose,' said Gresham.
'Sometimes, young man,' said the Duke, 'men must believe in miracles. And sometimes, those older and wiser men who doubt miracles recognise a truth of human history. Men may have to lose now in order for their children to win later. Men who are willing to die become stronger because they lose all fear. It is the fear of death, not death itself, that weakens us.'
'And your… reputation?' Gresham hated himself for asking the question but some Devil within him could not refuse to do so.
'They will blame me for this, of course. My family, my children will suffer. So I come to the ultimate problem for a true man. The problem I have faced many times now in my life. And the problem I am amused to see you are struggling to face for the first time.'
How could this man adopt this lightness of tone when at any moment the most important military mission his country had ever mounted could be smashed apart and he be held responsible? 'What problem is that?' Gresham found himself saying.
'Of course the reputation the world affords me matters greatly. But I learned long ago that for all its importance such a reputation is fickle, perhaps even false. When all else fails, and all seems dark and bleak, it is not the judgement of the world I believe will matter to me when I pass into the vale of death. It is my judgement of myself. Do I believe I did everything in my power to make things right? Did I dirty my actions by cowardice, by self-interest, by vanity, greed, lust or avarice? I would love the world to judge my actions as worthy. Yet when all else is done, the judgement that must matter most to me, the crucial, the most scrupulous, the testing judgement must stand as my own judgement on myself.'
'And what will that judgement be?' asked Gresham, fascinated.
'Ask me when I know if I met my death fighting. We cannot control how we are born. We have some control over how we die.'
Gresham spoke softly,
'" Go you gently unto death? Is what you are so little worth? We enter screaming into life, And death hurts more than birth.'"
'What is that?' asked the Duke.
'Childish verse,' said Gresham. He made a massive effort to pull himself together. ‘My Lord,' he said, 'I hope you don't die. I hope justice prevails.'
'I am not such a fool as to hope to die,' responded the Duke, an ironic smile on the edge of his lips. 'It is merely that I fear I have little control over it, and even less control over justice. You may leave. It would not be good to have an Englishman here for the conference 1 must hold now.'
'That's it, then,' said Mannion once back outside. 'Fine mess you've got us into. Tonight there's a spring tide right near its top, and the wind's been freshening all day. If our lads can get enough fireships together, they'll come down on this anchorage like shit off a shovel.'
'The Spanish fireships did nothing at Cadiz,' said Gresham. 'That's 'cos there was no wind to speak of, and hardly any tide. And there was three times as much space as there is 'ere.' 'So what should the Duke do?' asked Gresham. 'Piss off and go 'ome,' said Mannion. 'Like us.' 'But he'll fight,'said Gresham
'Then 'e's a stupid bastard,' said Mannion, 'who ought to know better. If he wants to do it for his honour, let him. I've given serious thought as to whether I want to do it for mine, and I don't. But I bet you he won't let us piss off and go home. So it's the same old place, isn't it? The one people like me 'ave been in for centuries. I have to pop me clogs so fie can keep his honour.'
They stood watching the small boats scuttle between the ships of the Armada, the deliveries of food from shore to ship which the essentially friendly, one-legged Governor of Calais had allowed.
He had lost the leg in retaking Calais from the English fifty years earlier and felt no love for Queen Elizabeth. The tension was tangible. Every sailor on board could sense the tide and wind, and even now, well before sunset, they were looking out to sea and towards the English. That tension had spread to the soldiers, dispirited now, convinced that they had no role in this campaign except to die. For the first time that morning Gresham had seen spots of rust on three or four breastplates, spots that the soldiers concerned had not ferociously rubbed away at the first sign. Somehow everyone on board San Martin was moving more slowly, as if there was a deep ache in their bones and a heavy pack on their back. Gresham had caught one of the gentleman adventurers, a young, fresh-faced lad no more than seventeen years old, standing by the bow, crying. He had turned, horrified, determined to hide his face. Gresham had put out a hand, then dropped it helplessly to his side.
'It's a cruel thing, facing your death, when you're that age,' said Mannion drily. Over these past few weeks his master had taken on an extraordinary strength and inner resilience. Only a few years in age separated the young Englishman and the young Spaniard before them, yet there was a decade between them in experience.
Devil ships. That was the fear of every sailor on board the Armada. Three years earlier the Dutch had sent specially-constructed fireships down the Scheldt to try and lift the Spanish siege of Antwerp. Three tons of explosive had been crammed into brick chambers on board. One had fetched up against a fortified bridge, killed eight hundred men in the explosion and inflicted horrific injuries on thousands of others. Of the bridge nothing remained. Federigo Gambelli was the name of the designer. He was known to be in London, working for the English.
'Your job's done, now, you know that, don't you?' Mannion prompted. 'This 'as gone beyond advice. If our lads… sorry, if the English do their jobs, this lot's going to be burned to buggery, whether you want it to 'appen or not. You ain't going to influence anything any more. That girl's waiting for you in Calais, more as like, and half the girls in England are waiting for me in London…'
'So why not swim ashore?' Gresham finished Mannion's words. 'You go,' he said suddenly. He reached out, grasped Mannion's arm, looked into his eyes. 'This has never been your fight, only mine. You've done enough, lost enough. Go on. Leave me. It's only right.'
'Why ain't you coming?'
'Because… because I can't.' Gresham knew how feeble it sounded. 'I respect this man, respect him more than any other I've ever met. They'll damn him for what happened here, yet I've seen him, talked to him. I think he knew where it would all end, knew he would die all along, yet he still did what he was asked to do, still carried on fighting for his cause against all the odds, knowing it was hopeless. It's not just courage, it's true dignity.'
'So?' said Mannion. 'Write him a letter, get all that off your chest. And then jump overboard.'
'I just can't do it,' said Greshanv 'I have to be here at the end. I want to stay with him.'
'Sleep now,' said Mannion. 'I'll get us up when it's dark. Then we'll slip back and get as close to the stem as we can.'
'What?' said Gresham, startled.
'Not going to get much bloody sleep tonight, are we? And odds on a fireship hits the bow first. Though if it's one of those bloody Devil ships it won't make a blind bit of difference.'
'Then you're staying,' said Gresham. This tears-in-his-eyes business had just got to stop, he said to himself, not realising just how deep down into his reserves of mental energy the past months had forced him to dig and how exhausted he was.
"Course I'm bloody staying, aren't 1?' said Mannion. 'There's got to be somebody with brains looking after you.'
For all that the lead-up to Calais was largely a confused blur in his memory, Gresham remembered that night and day for the rest of his life, could recreate its every moment with total vividness. As he remembered another day. A bald, decapitated head rolling across a hastily erected scaffold, the comic expression of startlement on the executioner's face as he held not a head but a red wig in his hand. And now, thousands of men gripped by a superb discipline fighting a lost cause to the bitter end, fighting a cause that no man should have asked them to sail on, a cause so profligate of human life as to make a mockery of a kind creation. Fighting with simple courage. Why in the depths of his and this life's idiocy did mankind reveal itself as so brave and wonderful?
The flickering of distant fire came at midnight. The sudden, violent ringing of bells, first from one ship then another, until the whole of Calais roads seemed like a vast Cathedral tower. The pinnaces and longboats the Duke had stationed to guard his fleet leaped forward, grapnels ready. Two of the outermost fireships, yards already outlined in a dull red flame, were caught and hauled aside, but the combination of wind and tide was too much, sending the ships at ferocious speed down on to the Spanish ships. One pinnace was engulfed in flames itself, a longboat smashed to pieces as the flaming monster bore down and through it. Then from the lead ship a roar of cannons shattered the anchorage, a series of massive explosions. Devil ships!
The English would say that the Armada panicked. Yet Gresham saw no panic. A hundred and thirty ships cut their cable, left their anchors rotting in the Calais roadstead, and all evaded the fireships, made it out of harbour. The discipline was superb. Hardly a man spoke on the San Martin as the men clambering oh the yards dropped the great sails, saw them fill with wind. The soldiers were lining the sides in five minutes of the alarm bell sounding. There was no collision, no crashing of great timbers hurled into each other.
'God help us!' said Mannion at dawn the next morning, in the last period of sanity either men would have for twenty-four hours. It was not an expletive, but rather a genuine plea for help. The San Martin had cut her cable, dodged two fireships with relative ease and come round, dropping her spare anchor less than a mile from where she had started. And she was virtually alone in the anchorage.
The San Juan, San Marcos, San Felipe and San Mateo were within hailing range. The San Lorenzo, flagship of the galleasses, was crawling inshore, her rudder destroyed by fouling on a discarded cable, her mainmast broken. And that was all. The remainder of the Armada was scattered out at sea, heading north before the driving wind.
'Anchors,' said Mannion. 'I'll bet most of 'em ain't carrying spare anchors. Most used-two, even three to keep themselves steady here.' There was shifting sand on the bottom, and fierce currents. 'Only one spare anchor left, you 'as to stand out to sea. No point comin' back in here and trying to hold fast in a strong wind with only one anchor.'
A squadron of English ships broke off from the main body, heading inshore after the wounded galleass.
'Ain't nothing 'e can do for 'er,' said Mannion, 'don't care how brave he is.'
Orders were shouted, and the San Martin started to pull out of the roadstead.
'He's going to put himself and these few ships between the rest of the Armada and the English,' said Gresham. 'Hope the other ships can get back and reform in the time he buys them. It's madness. We're outnumbered ten, twenty to one. We'll be blown to pieces.'
'Yep,' said Mannion. 'Want to watch it from the deck, or get below and try to hide?'
The leading English ships, twenty of them led by a fine galleon, were on a converging course with the San Martin and her four companions. The leading English ship made a minor alteration of course, heading straight towards the San Martin.
The artillery captains, one for each side of the gun deck, yelled their orders. The San Martin was perilously short of shot and powder. No shot could be wasted. 'Fire only at point blank range! Hold your fire.' The musketeers on the deck and the arquebusiers aloft braced themselves against deck and yard, many surreptitiously crossing themselves as the enemy ship boiled towards them, crashing the waves aside from her bow in her headlong rush to destroy.
'This is new,' said Mannion, sucking on the inevitable tooth.
The lead English ship was holding her fire, coming within cannon then musket range, coming on even further, until within pistol range, fifty or a hundred yards. Then her bow guns flared out, and she luffed up to present her broadside to the San Martin. The two ships were so close that Gresham felt he could reach out and touch the men on the opposite deck, smell the ship and the fear and tension of its men. And there, on the quarterdeck, strutted the familiar figure, Gresham's nemesis, Sir Francis Drake. Yelling, red-faced at his gunners, forcing them to hold fire until the very last minute by sheer force of will alone. Drake looked round, and for a single brief second their eyes came together.
At this range the explosion of the cannon was felt as a pressure and a hot breath, as well as a gout of black smoke, red and yellow flame. Drake's broadside shattered into the side of the San Martin, its impact at such close range unlike any other assault the brave vessel had received. The ship actually shuddered in her tracks. There were howls and screams from below. The shot had cut through the thick timbers of the main hull, sending a savage spray of splinters through the gun decks, upending a great gun before it could be fired, half its men crushed and screaming under the great wooden carriage. A ship's boy was crawling along the deck, leaving a trail of blood behind him on the grimy deck, hand clutched disbelieving to his stomach where the grey sausages of his intestine had been exposed. It would be minutes before the shock wore off and the pain came in its place. As quickly as she had come, Drake swung out of line, revealing another English ship behind her, already swinging at monstrously close range to punch the San Martin with all her power.
The San Martin's return fire was sporadic, almost measured. At fifteen minutes to reload a gun, and twenty English ships taking it in turns to draw up and empty their broadsides into her hull, the Duke had ordered several guns to hold their fire, so that there was at least something awaiting the next English vessel as it hauled round and poured iron into the long-suffering hull of the San Martin.
Without speaking and with no conscious communication
Gresham and Mannion started to haul such wounded as could be moved to the companionways, where other willing hands took them down to the sweated and agonised hell of the surgeon's deck. There seemed no end to the line of English ships, the crash and roar of the guns, the replies from the San Martin, the continual crack and pop of the small arms. There were problems loading the guns. Gresham could see. The soldiers whose job it was to return from their station to reload were unwilling to do so. Feeble, hope-less battle though it was, for the first time they had targets on board the English ships, someone to aim and fire their weapon at. Loading a heavy gun would have done more damage to them, and done more to save their lives, but men in battle are not subject to logic. Soon Gresham and Mannion found themselves serving a gun, obeying the screaming orders amid the stench of blood and warm bronze, the bitter biting tang of powder in the nose and throat.
The tone of the battle changed. The San Martin seemed almost dead in the water now, a shadow blotting out the light from the open gun ports on the starboard side. Blood was running out from the scuppers and gun ports. A great English galleon had drawn up almost alongside the flagship, struck his tops'ls and started to try to pound her to pieces from pistol shot range. Other vessels were ' engaging her port side now, though the whine and crack of shot suggested the English too were reduced to firing lighter broadsides than they might have wished.
Three, four, five hours the monstrous cannonade went on. For a moment, Gresham felt his world go dark, came round to see himself looking up at the grating on the San Martin's deck. He felt his head gingerly. A flying piece of timber had cracked his head open, the wound soaking his hair with blood. Mannion dragged him upright. 'On deck!' he said firmly. 'Get yourself taken to the surgeon and 'e's as likely to amputate your head as put a dressing on it.' They stumbled up the ladder. A bucket miraculously still full of sea water lay on the deck, part of the precautions against fire. Unceremoniously Mannion dumped it over Gresham's head. The sting of the salt water on the open wound cut through the mists in his head.
Strangely, as in a dream, he saw the half-naked figure of a man with a rope round his waist, a waist already rubbed red raw. Men were firing, reloading, dropping all around him, yet the half-naked man seemed oblivious. He and an assistant were tying something round the rope on a loop, what looked like a lead plate and some hemp. The diver tugged at them both, nodded to his assistant, and stood on the rail. Strangely graceful, he poised for a moment, and dived into the cold sea, which was whitening around the San Martin's hull. A diver. One of three on board, seeking to plug the holes in the side and hull of the San Martin even as they were made. How had he survived the marksmen on the English deck? By accident? Or by some strange form of chivalry to one of few men at sea that day who would take no lives, but might save some?
Extraordinarily, with superb seamanship and magnificent heroism, the great ships of the Armada started to appear round their flagship, drawing the English fire and shepherding her back into what was at first a mere mocking copy of the half-moon formation that had served the ships so well, but which as each hour went by became tighter, stronger.
The San Martin's sails were in tatters, her rigging half cut away. Four hundred round shot they counted taken into her hull, yet still she sailed, still she fought, the blood running from the scuppers, men with mangled limbs continuing to serve the guns, to hurl abuse at the enemy. Ten, fifteen English ships gathering like wolves around a single Spanish galleon, as they had gathered round the San Martin. Twice the San Martin herself dragged herself out to relieve besieged vessels. Her crew looked on horrified as they pulled up alongside the San Mateo. How could any man have survived the series of smashing blows she had received? Half her men were dead, her shot lockers empty, her decks a bloody shambles. Standing' proudly in the wreck of his ship was her Captain, Diego de Pimental. They offered to evacuate the San Mateo. Pimental sent the boats back, asking instead for divers to mend his leaks.
It could not last. Perhaps God had some mercy left in Him. At four o' dock a sudden, sharp savage squall blew itself down on the battlefield, and fighting men looked up to see billowing sails thrashing against the masts, hulls rising and failing in the increasing sea. Was their reward to founder in a storm after all?
For fifteen minutes, perhaps half an hour, the opposing fleets fought the sea and not their own kind. The English ships, seemingly undamaged from their encounters, had either turned head to wind or skidded along the edge of the storm under close sail. The Armada vessels, their sails in tatters and losing more wind than they held, simply plunged on off to the north east, the wind full in their tattered and leaking canvas.
When the storm settled, there was clear water between the Armada, huddled now back together, and the English fleet. Gresham lay beyond exhaustion, his back up against the carriage of the gun he had helped to serve, when the tap on his shoulder came.
'Why have they left us?' the Duke asked. 'Why are they not attacking?' He had spoken without the translator, who had one arm bound to his side with a rough dressing. Gresham looked at Mannion. He shrugged, spoke to the Duke directly. All were too tired to care about the breach of protocol.
'Out of powder, most likely. And the wind's driving you north, away from Parma. Why risk more lives when the wind's doing their job for them?'
The Duke nodded, and turned back to stare out over the stern at the far distant white blobs of English sail. It was a dismissal. He was in a tunic, his frame seeming thin in the cold light. He had given his two boat cloaks to a wounded officer, and a ship's boy with a smashed leg who he had put in his cabin.
They lost three ships over the night, the San Mateo and the San Felipe hardly able to keep afloat, beached on the Flemish shore, their crews tossed overboard to drown. The final act came with the morning. The wind had strengthened overnight, half the ships nearly unmanageable because of the state of their sails and spars.
They were being driven inexorably north west. Ahead of the Armada lay a patch of clear sea, then a layer of choppy water. Beyond that lay the white foam of waves breaking on a beach. The Flanders sand banks.
The Duke luffed up the flagship, shortened sail, and ordered his remaining anchor to be dropped. It did little good, the soft bottom giving nothing for the anchor to hold on to, the ship still being driven hard by the tide towards the sand banks. They ordered a man into the bows, sounding the depth with the lead-weighted line, tallow stuck in its base so that an experienced pilot might judge where they were by the sand or gravel that stuck to it from the bottom.
The San Martin drew five fathoms. In less than that depth of water, she would ground and cease to be a living, moving and fighting ship, but merely a hulk to be used as target practice by the English.
'Seven and a half, by the lead!' came the yell from the bow.. Gresham and Mannion sat against what was left of a bulwark, gazing impassively ahead, bracing themselves. 'Seven, by the lead!'
A soldier stationed at the mast head took off his belt, wrapped it round the mast and himself, tightened it, hugging the wood as if it were a lover.
'Seven, by the lead!'
Was there the slightest lift in the shoulders of the Duke. 'Six and a haif, by the lead!'
There was a sudden call, and the Duke's priest came up from below, eyes blinking in the light. The Duke knelt before him, quietly asking the man to take his confession. Trembling, the priest reached out his hand. All over the deck of the San Martin men were kneeling, heads bowed, some with their hands together, others with them loosely at their side. None spoke out loud, though many had their lips moving in silent prayer, some lifting their faces to the sky.
'Six, by the lead!'
There was a collective, shiver through the kneeling men.
Would anyone remember him, when he was dead? Gresham was too tired to be over-bothered by his own demise, but it was a fair question, after all. Mannion would remember, but he would be dead as well. George would remember. Anna? Perhaps, if she did not damn him. And was there no one else to shed a tear for the memory of Henry Gresham? Fat Tom, perhaps, Alan Sidesmith in Cambridge. Inigo Jones, Ben Jonson, Spenser, Donne, some of the wild set in London, if they were sober enough to remember.
Gresham looked up at the vast banner, the banner that had been taken all those months ago from the altar of Lisbon Cathedral, flying out bravely from the main mast of the San Martin, the size of a sail. Its tip pointed remorselessly to the sand banks. Then, as if a divine hand had taken it, turned it firmly, it started to blow hard, so hard that the great line of fabric was almost straight. Away from the banks. Out to sea. The ship lurched round, away from the banks, the helmsman instantly sensitive to the sudden, unprecedented change in the wind.
'Six and a half!' The leadsman's voice was almost a shriek, the correct form forgotten.
The Duke's lips were moving now, Gresham saw, his hands clasped together, his eyes screwed tight shut, a line of salt staining his beard and moustache.
'Seven and half, by the lead!' There was an exultant shout from the leadsman now. The whole ship waited.
'Eight and half, by the lead!' Men were climbing to their feet, a cheer starting from the main deck and rolling round and round the ship, men embracing each other, several raising fists to Heaven in triumph.
'Thanks be to God.' The voice was not loud, but it carried to the furthest deck. The Duke was standing now. He looked at his men, the men who had fought and shed so much of their blood, and one by one, they started to kneel again, the men in the mast heads bowing forward as best their precarious positions would allow. Was any prayer ever said as fervently as that led by the Duke's priest that day on board the San Martin.
It seemed only minutes later that the summons came. This time the Duke spoke through the translator.
'Word reached me two days ago that one of our vessels captured an English fishing smack weeks ago, interrogated their crew, took the vessel in tow. They found a surprising cargo on board. A girl claiming to be Spanish, on passage to Calais. A girl calling herself Maria Anna Lucille Rea de Santando.'
Gresham felt the shock run through his body.
'They say she claimed to have been pursued out of England, by virtue of her association with an infamous spy. They felt they could not send her back to England, so they sent her to another vessel. To the San Mateo. 1
Gresham's heart stopped. The San Mateo, the most heavily engaged of all the ships, battered to a pulp, sent to sink or beach off the Flanders coast, her crew by now either the victim of the sea or the pillage of the hostile Flemish. The image of Anna being raped on a windswept beach, the men queuing up to enjoy, flickered across Gresham's brain.
'Apparently, they felt she was out of place on board such a ship. Apparently there are woman aboard one of the urcas, despite my orders, so they sent her there, to be with the other women.'
Gresham looked at the Duke, voiceless. What was there for him to say?
'I would fight the English again, if I could. Yet the wind will not let me. The most I can do is take what remains of my fleet round the north coast of Scotland, go by Ireland back to Corunna, to fight another day. I can no longer win victory for my King. 1 can save his fleet.' The Duke paused, looking deep into Gresham's eyes. 'I think more of you than you might imagine. I have decided that you will take a longboat, go to the urca and pick up your ward. You may take her back to Calais. I shall not expect to see you return here.'
Gresham started to splutter thanks, but the Duke held up his hand.
'Say nothing. Just go. And perhaps we shall meet again. In Spain. Or, who knows, even in England?'
Gresham bowed low and deep, for such time as those around them wondered if he would ever move.
They plunged towards the lumbering urcas, the single sail enough to bring them quickly away from the San Martin. Gresham looked back at the battered vessel. A new Henry Gresham had been born on the deck of that ship. How much of a new man he did not realise, yet he did know that in a way he was yet to understand fully he had ceased in any way to be a child. The moment with Walsingham had been a false dawn.
He saw Anna as they brought her up on deck, as he had seen her an age ago. The tattered dress, the wild abundance of hair, the spirit so tough as to seem indestructible, and the ravishing beauty all the more obvious because of the lack of paint and powder, the beauty that needed no augmentation. Yet she too had changed, she too had grown into something more than a child. The smile on her lips replaced any tantrum, complaint or edict she might have issued. It spoke worlds, the smile. Spoke of a world so ludicrous as to be unbelievable unless one lived in it, of a chance so fickle that no man or woman could ever be justified in making plans. Spoke even of acceptance. They needed and used few words. The Duke's commission secured her presence aboard his flimsy boat.
'It seems we are bound to meet at sea,' she said.
'Have you been… well treated?' asked Gresham.
'The women here are calmer than the men. And kind. Very kind,' she said, simply. She looked into his eyes. 'I am the only virgin here, of either sex. And the women were determined that there was one prize that would not be lost in this battle.'
A sheet had been placed over the back of the longboat, giving some rudimentary cover. The clouds were scudding low now, over a grey sea. The wind that was pushing the Armada ever northwards, so that it was already almost out of sight, was difficult for Calais even despite the little boat's nimble ability to tack before the wind. It was hard, desperately hard luck. Determined to stick as close inshore as possible, they crawled back down the treacherous coast, too small to be of any use as plunder, too close inshore for the great ships of England to bother with the shoals and treacherous water. Except for one man, of course. One man who had heard of great Spanish ships beached on the shore, seen the great galleass beach itself under the guns of Calais. One man whose anger at missing such chances knew no bounds, and a man, therefore, whose pursuit of the Spaniards came close, close inshore in the hope of seeing yet another great galleon detach itself from the Spanish fleet and fall into his hands and not those of the undeserving Dutch.
Sir Francis Drake.
The Revenge bore up on them out of a squall as they were on the outermost leg of their painful tack. For a moment they thought the ship would cut them in two, but at the last minute it hauled round, shortened sail, sending three grappling hooks to cling them to their side. A rough ladder, rope with wooden steps knotted into it, was hurled overboard, instructions yelled to climb. Whistles and roars greeted the sight of Anna. *Well, well,' said Sir Francis Drake, standing in front of Gresham and Mannion on the quarterdeck of the Revenge. 'The man who fled England. Deserted his country. The man I saw but yesterday standing companionably by the side of the Duke of Medina Sidonia on the quarterdeck of his flagship’ He paused. 'And the man who is going to hang for traitor!'