The sailors looked on glumly as the last of the guns were swung overboard, and laid in their padded nest on the vast carts, then to rumble off to be stored in the great armoury at the Tower of London. The disgruntled manner of the seamen was not because they were being laid off with the ships. That had been part of a sailor's lot in the winter for as long as mankind had been daring to set sail. It was fear. A number of the men looked nervously down the reach of the Thames to the sea, as if they half-expected to see a Spanish galleon bearing down on them, its cannon ready to belch destruction into London. Now that the fleet was being stepped down for winter, what was there to stop the Spanish if they chose to come?
Holding one possible answer was Walsingham, sat in front of the remnants of a frugal meal, gazing out over the River Thames. He had taken a tenancy at Barn Elms ten years earlier, falling in love with the combination of its quiet solitude and the easy access to London from the tiny village of Barnes. He had complained fiercely at the decision to step down the fleet, to no avail. Money! Money! How dare they preach saving to him, the man who had spent out his own fortune to keep England's borders its own! Thank God in his wisdom that Santa Cruz was ill again. Had it been otherwise, he knew what he would have done in Santa Cruz's position when he heard, as he would surely hear, that the English fleet had been put to bed for winter. He would have ignored his King, taken a squadron of fifteen ships up the Channel risking wind and weather, sailed them into Plymouth or even up the Thames and landed five thousand troops. Let England stop Parma then with a hornet's sting already working its poison in its belly! Oh what tactics, daring, or fifty of the best ships could dash out from Lisbon, and do to the English fleet exactly what Drake had done to the Spaniards in Cadiz.
It could still happen. King Philip was sending ever more urgent messages to Santa Cruz, demanding that he sail now, even in the depth of winter. The moment the first agent in Lisbon reported back that yards were being stepped, supplies being loaded for just such a venture, then this half-manning nonsense would cease. Walsingham guessed Her Majesty would move with unseemly haste, her dignity in disarray at the prospect of her old knees bending to King Philip of Spain! Then let us see the sycophantic Burghley rush to support the immediate re-manning of the fleet, the noble Lords of Leicester and Essex suddenly feel the foundations of their vast castles tremble beneath their feet!
Yet it was history repeating itself. For most of Elizabeth's reign her soldiers and the idiot nobles sent to lead them had proved a false saviour, just as even a fully-manned English fleet might do now. It had been espionage that had saved England from the Spanish threat so far, and if England was to be saved now it would be by the same measure.
As he rose from his table, the pain stung at his belly. He doubled up, no one there to see his humiliation. You are already dead, his doctor had said. Only a quack will promise you hope. How soon before his actual death was reported as a certainty?
The Fellowship of Granville College were uncertain as to how they should respond to Henry Gresham on his return for the Michaelmas Term 1587. Guilty? He had taken a prolonged absence, and brought back a beautiful Spanish girl who he had met under impossible circumstances and who had to be his mistress, of course. Fellows were not permitted to marry, and were meant to control the sensual excesses of the students rather than set them an example of it. Innocent? He had fought most heroically for his country at Cadiz. It was now an open secret that the money for the extension to the Old Court had come from him, though God knew who had leaked that bit, of information. He had at least had the decency to return for the most important part of the year. The arguments for a positive response seemed, on balance, to outweigh those for a negative response, so acting true to form two thirds of the Fellowship decided to take a wholly negative approach.
'We could all of us,' said Will Smith, who ran a mile if someone mentioned the word sword, never mind threatened to use one against him, 'go gallivanting off to sea if we chose, enjoying ourselves at the expense of our students. If, of course, we needed such spurious glamour to bolster our reputation.' It was generally agreed that it was far braver and heroic to remain at home, manning the domestic fort, so to speak, than to rush off to obscure places like a common soldier or sailor. Fat Tom was having none of this.
'Do tell me, dear boy,' he mouthed excitedly, all of his chins wobbling in unison, 'all about it, preferably in the most gory detail. I imagine these sailors are very rough people indeed, and you must tell me all about them as well. And please, do dwell at unseemly length on the episodes with lashings of blood in them!' The most worrying thing was that he was entirely genuine in his interest, both in the details of the fighting and in the men.
Gresham had sent messengers to the Netherlands, seeking the whereabouts of the untraceable Jacques Henri. So far they had drawn a complete blank. He had at least found a chaperone for Anna. The daughter of his father's housekeeper, a rather stern, puritanical girl with thin lips and a thin face, she had a permanent air of censorious disapproval about her. She held her once-expensive but now rather shabby skirt close about her nervously, as if everyone and everything including the ground upon which she stood might rise up and criticise her at any minute. Or, even worse, try to make love to her. She had presented herself at The House with the story of the death of her employers, and in a stroke of genius the housekeeper, an elderly and flustered woman, had recommended her to Gresham. It was an interesting relationship. The chaperone had no actual authority over her charge, merely the requirement to be there and ensure her virtue was preserved. The authority came from the certainty that the chaperone would try to put off any amorous young man, deny them opportunity and, in the final count, report their misdeeds to her master. 'Bit like when you pour cold water over a dog that's after your favourite bitch?' asked Mannion, who was intrigued by the idea of a chaperone. 'Not… quite,' Gresham had replied, giving up on an explanation.
The wild set in London with whom Gresham tended to mix when he was there, the poets, the musicians and those trying their hands at the new fashion of writing for the Playhouse, had taken Anna to their hearts. With a chaperone in place, Gresham was less concerned about whether they took her to their beds, not his. Why should he care? Yet he had felt obliged to find a better base in Cambridge than his two rooms in Granville College. The Merchant's House lay in Trumpington, just outside Cambridge, and had lain vacant for a year or more, the dust thick over its old floors and walls. It was ancient, built round the medieval core of its Great Hall, probably a nobleman's house before passing to the Merchant who had given it its name. And now Henry Gresham flickered briefly in its history, setting up a base where he could summon his ward once every six weeks, the state of the roads allowing, from the fleshpots of London to savour the rural delights of Cambridge and the questions of her master. Her nominal master, at least.
The bonus for Gresham was Excalibur's Pool. He couldn't help but call it that, for if anywhere in England there was a place where a magic sword might rise up out of the mist, it was in the bend of the river where the water had scooped out a deep, dark pool, somehow separated from the moving water, a place where time and motion stood still. You could look into the translucent depths of Excalibur's Pool and see the history of England. He found himself drawn to it more and more, spending the night in the simply furnished great bedroom so that early in the morning he could walk out over the meadow and plunge into its darkness. Buying The Merchant's House created more trouble in the College, of course. It showed unseemly wealth. Residence in College was mandatory for Fellows, the core of communal living on which the whole concept of the College was based.