Yet to be found with such a letter is as good as killing me, thought Gresham. Did you know that I was to be killed? Or were your orders simply to keep me on board? And who gave you the instructions not to land me ashore?
Drake reached his decision with surprising speed. It was clear that he did not like Gresham. Gresham's only hope was that he disliked those who were seeking to pull the strings on board his flagship just as much.
'How good is your knowledge of history?' Drake asked. Gresham was learning, eventually, to cope with the wild swings and tangents of a dialogue with Drake. But was he going to let him live, or die?
'As bad as any College Fellow's,' answered Gresham, struggling to stay outwardly calm.
'You will know that in Anglo-Saxon times justice was rough and ready. Yet effective, for all its crudeness. You are aware of trial by ordeal?'
Good God! Gresham was aware. It was the system whereby a man had to grasp a red hot bar and walk with it a number of paces. If the wound healed clean, he was deemed innocent. If it festered, guilty. Was Drake going to brand him?
'The theory is that man decides the action,' Drake continued, 'God decides the outcome. So I will place you in God's hands. One of my pinnaces has sprung some of her seams. She has been patched up on the island, but one of the many decisions of command facing me was to decide whether to destroy her, or risk trying to take her home. I had decided to destroy her.' Drake looked to his second in command. 'Captain Fenner. You will ready the Daisy for the voyage back to England. Starting tomorrow. Provision her as best you can. And choose me a crew for her. Start with that mutinous dog from Dreadnought the one we had decided to hang. I think her present Captain will do very well.' He stood up. 'You will go to the Daisy, now. I will send men to pick up whatever belongings you have on board the Bonaventure. If you make it home, God will have declared you innocent. As He will have declared you guilty if you do not.'
'The girl?' Gresham asked.
'I said I would honour the mother's wishes. They were that her daughter be protected. She will be. And that you were her guardian. I am happy for that to be the case. It is merely that for a few weeks you will be aboard the Daisy, while I act in your place here on the San Felipe. You will be reunited in England, God willing.'
If I return, thought Gresham. He felt a wild stirring in his heart. A leaking ship, a mutinous crew — Drake was clearly taking the opportunity to scour his decks of all human filth — and a perilous journey home. Well, it was a chance. A real chance. Better than choking to death, swinging from a yard arm.
Yet Drake had not finished. He turned to Robert Leng.
'Have you finished your account?' asked Drake.
'I have just this moment finished my account of your glorious capture of the San Felipe,' said Leng. 'The full copy is with your Secretary.' He looked sideways at Gresham, nervous, half expecting Gresham to leap at him.
Then your job is done, is it not.?' said Drake. 'You may leave your manuscript with me. You will be keen to get back home. I have decided to provide you with a fast passage. On board the Daisy. You can act as guard to this young man.'
'Sir! This is unjust! I have merely carried out my duty…'
The knife moved so fast through the air that it seemed just a shimmering flicker of silver metal. It bit deep into the bulkhead, quivering, half an inch from Leng's ear.
'I smell treachery!' said Drake bitterly. 'My own vanity. It was my own vanity, the need to have this voyage recorded that overlaid my sense of smell. But now I smell it in my nostrils. So shall it be between you and my young friend here. Guilty? Innocent? Let God decide. And the Daisy.’
With that Drake let out a roar of laughter, continuing it as he left the cabin and mounted the quarterdeck. Leng had time to grab the letter before half running to catch Drake up.
They could have spent all day comforting a stricken George, to no avail. He pleaded to be allowed to come with them. After one look at the Daisy, Gresham flatly refused. Their last sight of the Elizabeth Bonaventure was the mournful half-moon of George's face, watching them as they bobbed away and out of sight. Would Gresham ever see that cheerful face again? They had managed only a few snatched moments of conversation.
Tm sure someone asked or ordered Drake to keep me on board, not to land me ashore. No skin off Drake's nose, if the price was right. He could always give some tissue of lies to Walsingham to explain why. I think what surprised him was when someone quite clearly tried to get him to kill me as well — he hadn't bargained for that.'
'You're lucky Drake felt sorry for you,' said George.
'Sorry? Don't be stupid!' said Gresham. 'Drake isn't giving me this chance because he feels sorry for me. He's giving a reprimand to whoever he takes his orders from, sending a signal that you don't deal with Drake unless you tell him the whole story. If whoever's working with Drake had told him to kill me, and paid the right price, Drake'd have me executed quicker than a blink.'
The Daisy was a depressing prospect. Her Captain was a notorious drunkard, and had this last voyage not beckoned he would certainly have been relieved of any command. There were only fifteen crew members now, all minor criminals and one of them suspected of murder, and too small-a crew to properly handle and set even the paltry sail area the Daisy carried. The pinnaces were often much smaller versions of the great galleons that bobbed over the waves instead of ploughing through them, but with three tiny masts and some popguns on the side. The Daisy's third mast had snapped in the recent storm, and all that remained of it was the stump embedded in the deck. Even though it only carried a small lanteen sail, its absence threw the whole delicate balance of the ship out of true, forcing her bow lower in the water than seemed safe. Gresham knew that the masts on their own could not support the weight of the sail they were required to bear, and that the rigging tensioned them crucially. Was the rigging interdependent, Gresham asked himself? Were the three masts linked together in any significant way? If so, the balance of the other two masts must be out of kilter, subject to unusual strains and stresses… He decided there were some aspects of knowledge that were best not pursued.
They found the Captain snoring, drunk in his tiny cabin aft, florid face flat on the table, outflung hand still grasping a pewter mug. A thin dribble of saliva hung from his mouth, staining the crude chart on the table.
'Falmouth,' said Mannion, looking down at it. 'Chart o' the entrance to Falmouth. Bloody load of good in the Azores.'
There were four really quite decent, high-backed chairs in the cabin — loot from some earlier escapade? — and Gresham sat down on one of them, motioning Mannion to sit as well. It was close in the small room, but it was private. The four sailors Drake had set to guard them were happy enough to wait outside. There was only one door into the cabin, and no window big enough to take Gresham, never mind Mannion. Gresham did not think the drunken Captain counted as a listener.
'Well?' he asked Mannion.
'I've 'ad better odds,' said Mannion. 'I've been 'aving a chat with the carpenter. The hull's shot some seams, but they've recaulked 'em. In decent weather they'll hold up long enough, probably. Losing the mast's a bugger; it'll make her sail like a crab. But they're fast these pinnaces. The real problem's rot. Carpenter reckons some of the timbers below the bilge 'ave got rot in 'em. Difficult to say 'ow many.'
Some sailors feared it more than drowning. Rot was inevitable in a wooden ship, giving a natural limit to any vessel's life. The English used gravel as ballast, whilst the Spanish and Portuguese tended to go more for large rocks or even scrap metal. The gravel tended to shift less in bad weather, but it made it impossible to pump water out and increased the incidence of rot, as well as making it more difficult to spot. It tended to affect the central members, well below the water line, and particularly the crucial keel timbers under the bilges. Taking out the ballast to get at these timbers was a filthy, stinking job, and took time as well as energy. On the smaller vessels there came a time when repair was simply not cost-effective, particularly as even a tiny piece of rotten timber could infect any new, sound timber placed by it. The fear of rot came from the stealth with which it tore out the heart of a vessel. Every sailor knew stories of ships that had simply come apart in a storm without warning, crucial and hidden load-bearing timbers with the texture of crumbling clay suddenly giving up the ghost.