'I do not think of them as my countrymen anymore, and yes, that is exactly what they are. Brilliant sailors, brave and tenacious. But at heart, pirates,' Gresham replied.
'Tell me about the Isle of Wight,' said the Duke.
'It's a large, fertile area, and a potential death trap for your fleet.'
One of the other men shuffled, drawing in his breath with a sharp hiss. This was not the way one spoke to the Duke of Medina Sidonia. If the Duke took offence he did not show it.
'Why?' the Duke asked. 'Why is it a death trap?'
Clever, thought Gresham, adding the description to the catalogue of features he was building in his mind of this man. Possibly so clever as to be over-sensitive, and to have retreated behind a wall of courtesy and good manners to protect that sensitivity. Yet with steel, plentiful steel. And lonely. Above all Gresham sensed an immense loneliness, here in this gorgeously furnished cabin with all the trappings of vast wealth.
'It has no strategic significance. As close as it is to the good port of Portsmouth, you could be subject to blockade with relatively little effort. Its anchorages cry out for fireships. The English would bring you to no great battle there. Yet they would whittle away at your fleet piece by piece, waiting for winter and the storms to do their job for them.'
'And you who know so much about the English and England, you who have met the Duke of Parma, can you tell me why he does not answer my letters?'
Now Gresham saw how this man was using him. On board the San Martin, the turncoat English spy Gresham had no friends and no allies. And so he could talk to no one, not refine the Duke's words for his own advantage, not play off the confidences for political favour. In talking to Gresham the Duke of Medina Sidonia had a sounding board who could talk to no one else. Carefull
'The Duke must know that you're coming, from your own messengers and from the King. The country he rules over is vast, his centres of governance widely separated, the country war-torn and difficult to travel. Wolves gnaw the bodies of women and children as well as their fathers, within sight of the city walk of Ostend. He'll assume automatically that you expect him to mobilise his troops, prepare his invasion barges. He'll only put final plans into progress when you and your fleet are close enough to meet with him, in person.'
'And how do you find the hospitality of the San Martin, after your experience on board one of Drake's ships?'
The Duke of Medina Sidonia had some way to go before he matched Sir Francis Drake for sudden changes of topic, but was clearly a contender.
'Strange. Disturbing. Comforting. There are no rituals aboard English ships. If they acknowledge God, it is as a fellow sailor, almost an equal. Yet what I have seen aboard your ships concerns me.'
The other Spaniards stiffened. We take offence, their bodies told Gresham.
'You may speak freely,' said the Duke. He raised a hand, and a two beautiful golden goblets appeared on the table, the deep red of the wine taking on a lustrous tinge from the metal. Mannion would be driven to despair at what he was missing, thought Gresham, as he raised the stunning bouquet of the wine to his lips.
‘Your gun carriages are huge, long, tailing back into the body of the ship, cumbersome to handle. You lash the gun to the side of the ship for firing, and need to untie it every time you reload. Your company are united when they hear the divine service, but are three separate groups in action — officers, sailors and soldiers. The soldiers are tasked to load a gun, under the command of a sailor. When it is done, they must return to their battle station and prepare to board an enemy. So the gunner has to call them back after each round is fired. It must take a full fifteen minutes for one of your great guns to reload and fire again.' Unless it was on a galley, set on a rail and chasing a longboat, thought Gresham.
'And your English ships?' asked the Duke. The commanders and the officers of the San Martin had been motioned to sit. 'How do they differ?'
'Their English ships.' The bitterness in Gresham's voice would etch steel. 'I'm a traitor, if you remember. The cannon are placed on short, four-wheeled carriages. The lashings allow the gun to be run back for reloading, hauled forward for firing. Each gun has a crew of seamen, dedicated to just that gun. They think five minutes to reload and fire a long time.'
The silence must have been seconds, seemed minutes.
'Call for the others,' the Duke ordered. 'Get them aboard.' He turned to Gresham. ‘You may leave,' he said. 'Understand me. You are either a very honourable man, or a self-serving traitor of a type who offends me deeply. Events will develop, the weighty matters of which I have charge, and in time I will decide your future and your status.'
'Well,' said Mannion, on the deck, 'we're back where we usually are. Everyone hates us.'
The shock of hearing the truth from Gresham had changed something inside Anna, something she was hardly aware of herself but which at the same time left her knowing that her life had altered for her in a way that could never be reversed. Suddenly the candle-lit masques and the overheated, fetid evenings at Court and nobleman's house seemed frivolous, cheap, the glittering jewels little more than baubles, the conversation that had once been so amusing thin and shallow.
The scrupulous travel arrangements made by Gresham would get her to Dover and thence by ship to Calais well before it was likely that he would be unmasked as a Spanish spy. Operating on the basis that the best hiding place was in the open, Gresham had spread it widely around that he was returning from the Netherlands to Calais, there to meet her and start again the search for her fiancй. She felt a growing disquiet in the days before her departure, as what pathetic few belongings she had were packed into wooden chests, a disquiet over and above the appalling confusion she had been thrown into by the death of her mother and Gresham's strange revelations. Nor was it sadness at leaving London and England, where she had hardly had the time to feel at home. It was as if a beacon of danger had been set alight inside her head where only she could feel it, yet with no hint as to where the danger was coming from. From where were these signals emanating? The servants were smiling in her presence, Gresham's friends assiduous in their escort duties without being more presumptuous than all young men had to be.
The chaperone.
It had to be her.
The sour-faced creature accompanied Anna saying nothing, sitting like a stiff pudding in her presence, never smiling, never talking. Yet once, as the great carriage had rolled out of The House, Anna had seen what seemed like the faintest of nods and thinnest of smiles cross her face as she seemed to see someone out of the window. Craning to see beyond her, Anna had spotted two finely-dressed men in a livery she did not recognise, lounging by the main gate of The House. And they had been there on her return, two different men in the same livery there again on her next outing.
The servants were fond of her, and through them it did not take long to find out the identity of the livery. Burghley. Lord Burghley. The father of Robert Cecil. Her instincts had been honed by Gresham's double-dealing. If she was being spied on by any men associated with Robert Cecil, the news was not good. And was her suspicion about the chaperone correct? The woman had asked leave to be absent for a day, visiting a sick relative in Islington. Feeling both guilty and rather soiled, Anna charmed one of the younger ostlers into following the chaperone, swearing him to secrecy and leaving him heart-stricken with love. When both had left, with a week to go before her intended departure to Dover, she waited until the corridor was silent and slipped into the chaperone's room. It seemed innocent, and she started to ask what on earth she was doing in another woman's room. Then she saw the small writing desk placed by the window, a gap between its lid and the wood it rested on. A quill pen had been stuffed in the desk, but the nib end left sticking out, holding up the lid. The letter, nearly finished, had been interrupted for some reason — perhaps someone else had come into the room and the chaperone had thrust the paper and pen hurriedly in the desk? The contents were clear. In a few lines of spidery handwriting it gave Anna's date of departure from London, the name of the ship she was to pick up in Dover, even its Captain's name. The ostler reported later that evening that he had trailed the woman to Whitehall Palace. Cecil was spying on her, through this dreadful woman, had paid a spy to be as close as any person could be short of sharing her bed.