'Are we going to the Tower?' asked Mannion.
'Yes,' said Gresham simply. 'We must.'
'Can we have breakfast first?' asked Mannion.
The Tower of London stood guard grimly over the eastern section of the City walls, where they joined with the Thames. They went by boat, the only sensible way to travel such a distance. Gresham had four armed men come with him. He had not won a pitched battle on the river to be wiped out in some street skirmish. Rather than using one of the House's own vessels, with no Harry fit to take command, Mannion stood by the House's jetty and cried, 'Eastward Ho!' Knowing Gresham's mind, he dismissed several boats, vying for the rich trade of the great houses on the Strand, until one with a young head came in sight.
'Do you land, or do you shoot the arches?' enquired the young man, grinning at his passengers. The hundreds, thousands of men who plied their trade on the river were as filthy with their mouths as they were with their clothes and bodies. This one looked almost healthy. Most people landed before the bridge, picking the boat up again if needs be after it had leapt through the narrow stone arches of London Bridge.
'We go the fast way,' said Gresham firmly. Young as he was, the boatman was both strong and skilled. There were feet on either side of them as they shot through one of the narrow arches of London Bridge, the speed and the danger as exhilarating to Gresham as it always was.
They smelt the Tower before they saw it. A permanent dispute existed between the Lord Mayor and the Lieutenant of the Tower over the City's draining of the town ditch into the Tower ditch. The dispute had been raised to a new level when the City had opened the sluices that let all the sewage from the Minories into the town ditch and so into the Tower ditch. The stink was vile, and even the hardened inhabitants of the Tower were gagging for sweet water. He left the four men to await his return by the postern gate, and took Mannion in with him.
He remembered the first time he had gone to see Raleigh after his farcical, trumped-up trial. Here was the man who had taken on the might of Spain and defeated it, a man with the mind of a scholar, the tongue of a poet and the heart of a lion. A lesser person would have been in tears, and Gresham knew that Raleigh had already tried to take his life. Yet there was no sign of that in the man sitting quietly at his writing desk in the Bloody Tower where he was lodged, still dressed in Court finery. He had raised an eyebrow as Gresham had entered the room.
'Well, my friend, how goes the world with you?'
'I'd thought rather to ask the question of you,' Gresham had replied.
'With me? Why, as you can see, all is well. The thickest walls in England protect me from my enemies…' he motioned to the environs of the Tower around them, 'and I have my wife and son at my side.'
He called out and Bess, the early cause of his troubles with Queen Elizabeth, came into the low-ceilinged room, wiping her hands. She was pale and hollow-eyed, but her face lit up as she saw and greeted Gresham. Bess Raleigh had mothered many more men than her own son, and saw Gresham as a favoured, albeit wayward, stepson.
'My Lord,' said Gresham, 'how can this be?' Raleigh gave a dry, gentle laugh.
'How can it be that I'm accused of being a traitor in league with Spain after having spent all my life fighting that country? How can it be that I'm convicted in a trial where the only evidence is retracted and I'm never allowed to confront my accuser? How can it be that one of my oldest allies and friends seems to be my chief accuser, the man whose sickly child my own dear wife helped to nurture and feed?'
Bess smiled at the mention of the boy she had treated as her own. Cecil's sickly son had been welcomed into the warmth of Bess Raleigh's household and brought up alongside her own bawling bundle of extreme good health.
'Why, my friend, the answer is simple. I'm a mortal being, and I live in the world God has created. And I have pride.'
He was not standing, Gresham realised, because he could not stand. The strain upon him, recent illness and his attempt on his own life had left him too weak to stand. The body had come near to being broken. The spirit, Gresham realised with an upsurge in his heart, was very much alive.
Raleigh's pride and arrogance had made him many enemies, but the wits at Court were saying that he was now the only man whose guilty verdict at trial had proved him innocent in the eyes of the great mass of people. The numbers queuing up in the hope of seeing him, on the narrow walk by the Bloody Tower that fronted the river, had swelled, until it seemed that every person of note in London was lining up hoping to see the great man, the last of the Elizabethans. The Bloody Tower itself still smelt of the new building work and fresh timber brought in to accommodate such a distinguished prisoner. A prison, thought Gresham, needs no bars.
Two years now into his imprisonment, Raleigh welcomed Gresham warmly. Mannion he clapt on the shoulder, thrusting a bottle and a fine silver drinking goblet into his hand.
'Here, you great Goliath, take this out on to the river walk and shout out that you're the great Sir Walter Raleigh!'
Mannion grinned and left, closing the door behind him.
'And as for you,' he continued, turning to Gresham, 'drink this.' Raleigh offered a beaker to Gresham.
'Water?' asked Gresham. 'Drink it and see.'
Gresham took a reluctant sip, tasting the fluid on his lips and mouth. There was a slightly brackish, unpleasant tang to it, but it seemed wholesome enough.
'Don't worry!' roared Raleigh in laughter, seeing the expression of distaste on Gresham's face. 'It won't kill you, or at least it hasn't killed me this week past. It's nectar, young fellow Do you know what it is?'
'Is that a question in rhetoric, or one I'm expected to answer?' said Gresham dryly.
'That fine fluid you're guzzling was once sea water. Sea water, mind! The water that taunts mariners on their longest voyages, those mariners who're dying of thirst but yet can't partake of the water that surrounds them. Imagine what it could mean for exploration not to have to take casks of water aboard, to take your very drinking water from the sea itself…'
'Is your concern the health of the mariners, or the extra looted Spanish treasure you could cram on board in place of the water casks?' asked Gresham innocently.
'Both!' roared Raleigh, rocking back on his heels with an explosion of mirth. 'It's my ability to combine the practical and the spiritual that marks me out as a great seaman!'
'It's my ability to agree with my master that makes me such a good servant,' replied Gresham. 'Even if it means lying like the Devil.'
Raleigh was in the best of moods, his huge energy refusing to be constrained. As well as writing a History of the World he had a chemistry laboratory in a room a short way off from the Bloody Tower, where he had concocted the brackish water from a sample of sea water.
'Time,' he told Gresham, 'time is what I need. The process for the distillation is not right yet — it works only one in five, six times — and the machinery is too cumbersome and yet too fragile ever to set to sea. No point in having fresh water only until the first blow lays the ship on its side. And time, time is what my Lord Cecil and His Majesty the King have given me in plenty!'
'Time is what someone is trying to take away from me…'
Gresham revealed to Raleigh what he knew, and what his fears were.
A sombre expression fell over Raleigh's face.
'You're right, there are too many names,' he said. 'And Sir Walter Raleigh is hardly the person to ask for advice in evading an enemy's clutches,' he said ruefully. 'One thing's clear, you need to get inside this Papist crew. But that'll take time. The man Fogarty — Sam, was it? — will be of no use to you. He's either Cecil's man, in which case he'll be more frightened of Cecil than you, or a Catholic, in which case he'll be more frightened of Northumberland or God. Tom Phelippes, now, he might be an answer. You say this man Barnes, this servant of his, brought you letters? Incriminating letters? Then Phelippes is your man. Try not to kill him, will you? It does seem to be getting something of a habit with you.'