The militia officer was respectful, but forceful. He knew Sidonia's reputation. A hard taskmaster, but fair. As for Sidonia, he had no training as a General, but the necessary actions seemed obvious to him. He took fifty of the best mounted troops, and rode through the town, grabbing the disorganised men as he found them, sending the drunkards off to the dungeons in the Castle and organising the remainder into detachments of mixed horse and foot. Small enough to be mobile, yet powerful enough to hurt seriously a landing party, he placed the detachments all along the shoreline, defined a command structure. He gave the command to men who he either knew, or simply those officers with natural authority. Next he ordered such few light cannon as the city could muster and placed them in hurriedly constructed batteries along the shoreline. Now let the enemy land by boat! He had Cadiz scoured for powder and shot, placing it in the cellars of the stoutest brick and stone houses, within reach of his shoreline detachments but out of range of the English guns. Messengers were sent to the galleys, apparently his only effective fighting force afloat, and a line of communication set up. There was no escape from the harbour for any Spanish vessel, so a rider was sent to the next fishing village along the coast, with enough gold to send the entire fishing fleet out to sea to search for Recalde's squadron to tell it to return to Cadiz.
By now Sidonia was exhausted, and a film of dust covered him from top to toe. It would never do. A commander had to be seen to be the part, as well as to do it. He turned to a meagre house and waited for its screeching inhabitants to be evicted by his men. They would come to no harm, and afterwards would become the talk of their friends because the great Duke had changed in their hovel. He wrinkled his nose at the stench inside, but allowed himself to be changed and put into new clothing, more resplendent than his riding garb, more slashed and jewelled. Let the people see the King's representative glitter a little in front of them. It would do no harm.
Could he do anything about the outrageous arrogance of the English ships in the harbour? Very little, he suspected. Fireships must be tried to drift down in the English vessels, but with so little wind the English could easily divert them, if their discipline and control held. Sidonia never underestimated Spain's enemies, as did so many other of his aristocratic colleagues. Heathen devils though they were, they were professionals. Yet the fireships would boost the morale of the garrison and the inhabitants, even if they failed.
He paused to take food and wine, rationing himself to half an hour before riding off to inspect the result of his day's arrangements. In a matter of hours chaos had been transformed into order. His face was calm, composed, showing sign neither of the fact that he was not displeased with his efforts, nor of the fierce anger he felt at the English impudence. For the first time he felt the desire to launch a great fleet in revenge.
The call went out for men to man a boat. Drake wished to know if any unseen problems had arisen now that the ships had left Cadiz harbour and were at sea, and subject to the full stress of wind and wave. As they scudded round the fleet, aided by the brisk wind and the tiny sails they carried, they became more and more amazed. The first shot fired from the great culverin the Spaniards had mounted in Cadiz had pierced the hull of the Golden Lion and carved off the leg of its master gunner, but after that, and despite the at times frantic cannonades from the shore, hot a single ship reported a single hit nor a casualty. Far from being exhausted by hauling the cables to bring broadsides to bear on the lurking galleys, the crews were becoming increasingly jovial and confident, beginning to think themselves invulnerable.
Mannion was giving Gresham a lesson in gunnery as they bounced over the choppy seas to yet another English galleon. 'How can they miss so often?' Gresham had asked.
'Well, it's like this…' Mannion was breathing easily, despite his rowing.
'It's 'cos all gunners are stupid bastards! Pissed out o' their minds!' One of the sailors guffawed. There were no private conversations on a small boat.
'Apart from that,' said Mannion, 'powder costs a fortune, so you ain't exactly encouraged to practise. They'll have fired off more shots this morning than they've done all year.'
'Silly buggers still haven't learned much, 'ave they?' said the sailor, clearly setting himself up as the boat's chief entertainer.
'Then there's the ball. Hardly any of 'em's perfect. It's called windage. Gap between the ball and the inside o' the barrel. If it's big, the ball gets less of a push. If the fit's snug, the ball goes further.'
'Windage, is it? I thought 'as 'ow with gunners it were all piss and wind!'
'Then there's the powder,' Mannion continued, ignoring the running commentary made on his every word. 'It's all different, burns differently. Even the same batch can change from one day to the next.'
'End result,' said the sailor, 'is no gunner can 'it a piss-pot even if 'is dick's in it at the time!'
There was no real supply of saltpetre in England. Laborious applications of human urine were the only way to remedy nature's deficit. Every gunner in the fleet knew his powder was composed in no small part of piss. It affected their humour.
Anna had never been so bored in her life, nor so terrified. They had brought books on board, of course, even though there was a current debate over whether or not reading was likely to overtax the weaker female brain and bring on the vapours. And most of the books were sermons or edifying texts, though she had ploughed through them once, twice even, rather than face the prospect of nothing at all to engage her brain. She could walk on the quarterdeck at certain times, provided she was well protected from the sun, and feel the eyes of such men as could see her boring into her back. Well, that had been quite exciting initially, and a little thrill of a shiver had gone down her spine when she had realised how much she was the centre of attention. Then she had turned unexpectedly one day, caught sight of raw lust in a man's eyes before he could properly turn away, and she had felt sick. Her father had tried to breed horses in Goa, as much to pass the time as for any profit, but the venture had largely failed. Yet she had been brought to the field once, by accident, when they had also brought the stallion to the mare. She remembered the little foals she had been allowed to caress and give her easy love to. The end product might have been lovable, defenceless, sweet beyond belief. The process that led to it was brutal, sharp and short, a functional exercise in need and power. Would her French merchant take her like that, she thought?
It did not stop her walking the deck. She was too proud for that, and her young body demanded the exercise. Yet it reduced her pleasure in the vista of the great, rolling sea, with its permanent hint of danger, of worlds yet to be discovered and of the total magnificence of nature. She learned the names of the birds that swooped around them even far out at sea, envying their freedom to fly where they wished, their careless abandon as they found a firm footing on a rolling yard arm, looking down their beaks at the dots who manned the decks below them. They had fired a cannon, once. That had been exciting. Truth be told, most of the cannon on board could not be moved, never mind loaded and fired, because cargo was piled in their way. Yet they had kept one or two ports open and hurled a broken barrel into the sea as a target, laboriously putting the ship round so as to allow the cannon to bear. The men had huffed and puffed, put slow match to cannon one, two and then three times. The thing had bellowed its noise, and Anna had seen the tiny splashes either far beyond or far to the side of the bobbing barrel. So much for battle practice.
That left reading and sewing — not practical sewing, but the highly decorative tableaux that ladies were meant to produce — and practising her languages. At least they had a plentiful supply of books with them, in Spanish, English, Italian, Latin and Greek, their bindings only partly ruined by the damp heat of Goa. Her father had believed that girls should be educated and speak different languages.