This could not be happening, not in a street with nearly a hundred people watching, pushed out of earshot by the mounted guard. Not happening to a man barely out of nappies, given from nowhere the chance to influence events that he had thought only Cecil would be able to take advantage of. Perhaps he should go to Court more often. At least it would be more comfortable.
'Your Majesty,' he said, his thoughts a bare second ahead of his words. 'I have no concept of defending a kingdom such as Your Majesty must have. In all honesty, most of my life has been concerned with defending myself. Yet your wooden walls are not one line of masonry, but ten, twenty or thirty separate walls, each capable of going its own way.'
'What are you telling me?' The tone had no humour in it now. It was flat, merciless, the voice of her father who had ordered the murder of her mother.'
Well, Gresham thought, it had not been an altogether bad life, and, after all, the only certainty about life was that it would end some time or other.
'I wish to continue serving Your Majesty. My loyalty to you goes without question, as it does with every subject.' One had to put these things in with royalty, Gresham remembered. They tended to remember what had been said with appalling selectivity. And accuracy. 'And my loyalty to Your Majesty is even further secured by the fact that your reign has brought peace to this country. Peace, and an end to bonfires.'
Which was true. Queen Bitch was mercurial, infuriating and unpredictable, not knowing at times whether she was King Henry VIII or Anne Boleyn, and at times trying to be both. Yet ploughman Jack and milkmaid Jill cared little for the goings-on in London. Their life was hard enough, a bad winter killing a third of their village, rain at harvest guaranteeing unfilled bellies for their children and themselves, not to mention the relentless, random tide of plague and illness that haunted every man alive in Elizabeth's England. Yet they were human beings, as human as the Earl of Essex and Robert Cecil. As human as Henry Gresham. Did the peasant in the field not feel pain and loss like other men, were the hot tears absent when wife or child died? With what they had to bear already, what need had they of armies tramping over their fields, driving down their crops, taking their women and burning their pathetic, stinking little huts? What need did their men have of being hauled off to war, a weapon thrust into their ill-trained hands, simple cannon-fodder? She had brought peace to England, and stopped for the most part humans being burned alive because their God differed in meaningless respects from that which their monarch claimed to worship. All of this flickered through his brain in an instant.
'Your Majesty, this young, inexperienced and badly born man would be happy to have Sir Francis Drake fighting for him, and believe himself lucky to have such a man on our side. Yet to fight and to lead are not the same thing.'
The Queen looked at him, waiting for him to say more.
'You would have made a good politician, Henry Gresham,' she said. 'Too many say too much, and too many say nothing at all with many words.' She looked at him, waiting for him to speak, to say too much. It was she who broke the silence. 'Lord Howard of Effingham will command my fleet. Drake will be second in command.' Then, in his silence, she nodded, a neutral gesture, climbed into her carriage, gave one cursory wave at the crowd, and drove off amid rolling cheers and roars.
A little girl was squatting by the roadside, rough shift drawn up over her scraggy knees, peeing into the dust with her thumb firmly stuck in her mouth. Her eyes were wide, transfixed by the sight of the two beautiful ladies and the handsome man.
'Have I just met the Queen of England?' asked Anna, who appeared to be standing upright but was actually leaning against the bulk of Triumph, exhausted. It was a dangerous thing to do with a horse, but Triumph seemed resigned to being used as a leaning post.
'It's amazing how quickly it changes from being a matter of excitement to something to be avoided at almost all costs,' said Gresham. He turned to Mannion. 'Did she try to kill me?'
'You wouldn't know if she had,' said Mannion.
They rode back to The House.
The others, the outsiders, thought that the plottings and the machinations of Sir Francis Walsingham were concerned with the overthrow of monarchs, the sowing of discord and the undermining of states. How wrong they were. He had only ever sought to bolster and confirm one state, the England of Queen Elizabeth. He had chosen her from the outset. The Protestant Queen. How could any thinking man make any different choice? He was aware of his innate homosexuality, aware how men of his kind were prone to worship powerful women as icons. Yet it was not his sexual urges, as much under control as the rest of him, that had driven him, but something altogether more logical. He had seen the vanities, the arrogance, the corruption and the decadence that was Rome and its religion. He had fled to Padua when Queen Mary, in a bungled succession, had tried to impose on Englishmen the Catholicism they had learned to do without. He had shuddered as the news of the burnings reached him, known that the true heir of Henry VIII, and the best man in the country, was Elizabeth. He had thrown his weight behind her from the outset, given his fortune to the support of her monarchy, given her information to counter the troops that the wealth of the Spanish and the French enabled them to have. Well, Elizabeth had reigned for twenty-nine years now, and Walsingham thanked his Protestant God that he had been spared this long, to enter into his final battle for the continued reign of Queen Elizabeth.
Pinpricks, Walsingham thought as he gazed unseeing through the mullioned window, the servant clearing the remnants of his solitary meal at noon. That was all that he had managed so far, pinpricks, important, but in the final count little more than that. He would have to strike harder and deeper, not just at the Armada, but at the whole concept of the Enterprise of England, as his spies told him it had now been christened. But how to do it?
Then there was that damn fool Burghley, as if he did not have enough to worry about. The Queen's long-term ally was increasingly deaf, suffering from gout and losing his edge. What had Burghley said when they had met the Queen? That her vessels should, must be cut down as soon as possible, skeleton crews only, to save money. 'Two thousand, four hundred and thirty-three pounds, eighteen shillings and fourpence!' the old fool had intoned, as if it were "some magic catechism instead of the sum the Queen would save by reducing the Navy to half-manning over the winter. 'Two thousand, four hundred and thirty-three pounds, eighteen shillings andfourpence’ he had repeated, saying the figure with all the pride of a midwife holding up the first-born male child. The King of Spain could launch his ships at any time, was fanatic enough to take even the mad risk of sailing in winter. And if he did? If his vessels got through? With even five thousand soldiers he could hold a decent town, even somewhere such as the Isle of Wight, and either advance from there in the Spring or hold it until Parma's troops could be ferried over. There was nothing to stop them, except those ships. If Burghley had his way, would it be the first time that, a country had been sold for two thousand four hundred and thirty-three pounds, eighteen shillings and fourpence?
I will die with my mind as sharp as the pains that afflict me, vowed Walsingham. The irony of the situation hit him then, perhaps for the first time. We are all of us ill and dying, he thought, the men playing this great game for the survival of a country, what the religion and the philosophy of the world will be for the next hundred, two hundred or even five hundred years. King Philip of Spain is sixty-six years old, his circulation failing, Walsingham thought, an age which would make him a mythical, almost God-like figure in any English village. The Marquis of Santa Cruz, commander of the fleet, was spitting blood if Walsingham's informants were to be relied upon, though not fast enough. Recalde of Spain was sixty-two, the same age as Santa Cruz. Burghley was a failing sixty-seven, Elizabeth herself fifty-four. Parma, he thought. The Duke of Parma. The youngest of all the players, on the Spanish or the English side. Was it his youth that made Parma the greatest threat to England?