'Just in case, Gresham, just in case,' said Essex, as a servant brought garment after garment out of chests. Another servant laid a fire and lit it. The cold was starting to get to Gresham now, and he was fighting his body's desire to shiver. He found himself welcoming the heat of the fire.
Just in case of what, thought Gresham? In case he found himself with an unexpected overnight stay at the Palace in the old Queen's bed? Essex's arrogance, his assumption of superiority, was supreme, yet at the same time Gresham felt himself strangely unaffected by it. He was… amused, that was it. Amused, rather than offended. Why? Perhaps it was because the arrogance was so much on the surface, so understood by its owner as to make it no threat. With Essex, what you saw was what you got. Except by all accounts what you saw and what you got could change several times in the space of one hour. However, he was all conciliation and concern now, though never mentioning once that the reason for Gresham's sodden state was the arrogance of his boat master in seeking to claim a berth that clearly was not his.
If life as a campaigning soldier had taught Gresham anything it was to disavow his culture's horror of nakedness. He stripped down to his shirt, and then pulled that long, dripping garment over his head, allowing Mannion for once to towel him rather more vigorously than was strictly necessary, still cross at his master for taking what he deemed unnecessary risk. Essex had not quibbled when Mannion had made to enter the room. He glanced at Gresham's naked body, not lasciviously, but rather in the manner of a Welsh farmer looking over a bull he was about to buy. Did he notice the slight discoloration down one side of Gresham's whole body, the slightly paler tinge of the skin where a stupid soldier's carelessness had ignited the powder store? Only Mannion knew why there were so few oil lamps in any room Henry Gresham had power over. Candles were likely to snuff out if they were knocked over; a knocked oil lamp spread its flame. If he did notice, Essex said nothing, and nor did he comment on the various scars that adorned almost every part of Gresham's body. Instead, he looked almost dreamily out over the Thames.
'You'll join me at the play? Sit with me? It's the least I can do
… particularly if you tell me how you trained those men of yours. Superb! Quite superb! Put my lot totally in the shade.'
Something in Essex's voice told Gresham that the men on the Essex barge would be made to pay for what had happened out there on the river.
Gresham was dried off now, attending to the intricacies of unfamiliar buttons and fastenings. The doublet he had chosen was one of the most reserved in the Earl's spare wardrobe, but still had double-slashed sleeves and an immensely ornate neckline. The Earl wore his doublets cut high, probably to amplify the cut of his legs, and while Gresham thought it made Essex look faintly ridiculous, like a stork, it suited Gresham remarkably well. On the Earl there was the merest hint that the upper thighs were perhaps just a little too… fat? Perhaps he should ask Essex if he could keep the outfit…
I’d take them out on the river and tell them that we would stay there until they got whatever manoeuvre it was we were practising right. We went out at high tide to some mud flats. If they kept on getting it wrong, we'd get stranded on the mud flats as the tide went out, and they'd have to wait till the next high tide to get home.'
'And did you ever have to wait?'
'Oh, yes. Twice, as it happened. The first time they didn't believe me. The second time they were so desperate to get it right they were all fingers and thumbs. Not a bad training for a real fight.'
Gresham had seen outwardly well trained men panic under the pressure of battle, and load two powder charges into a musket, or ram two balls down the barrel. The effect in each case was lethal, the barrel peeling back and the marksmen blinded by splinters and burning powder. Once he had seen a man fire his musket with the ramrod still in the barrel. For some reason the gun had held firm, and in crazy slow motion the wooden pole described a lazy arc through the air and caught an enemy horseman a smashing blow neatly on the chin, where it peeked out from under his helmet, and threw him to the ground. It was a shot the man could never have made if he had planned it. It had turned the skirmish their way, as it happened. They had been outnumbered and losing their will to fight, and the ludicrous sight of the flying ramrod had persuaded them that someone up there must be on their side.
'Did you arrange for yourself to be picked up? Surely you didn't stay marooned?' asked Essex, leaning forward now, his interest really engaged.
'I couldn't leave, even if I'd wanted to. There was no way off those mud flats — you'd sink seven, eight feet if you tried to step on them. No one could leave the boat, and no one could join it. Tides take a long time to turn, I can tell you.'
'Food and water?' *No. None was allowed.' *Not even for you? The commander?'
'Especially not for me. I was making a simple point. If a vessel gets boarded on the river, it's not because those boarding it want to say hello. They're not going to leave any witnesses alive, particularly the commander. If the men fail, the captain dies as well. It's a simple lesson.'
'Didn't discipline suffer? You can have no secrets crammed onto a small boat with eight men.'
'Sometimes four, sometimes eight, sometimes sixteen,' said Gresham. 'Did it suffer? I don't know. I certainly wasn't going to shout at them for seven or eight hours. The punishment was having to be stuck there. So I played dice half the time, and then kept sane writing sonnets for the rest of it. Bloody difficult, sonnets.'
Mannion, who had been helping him in silence, stepped back, and nodded approvingly. Mannion had little pride in his own appearance, but great pride in Gresham's. Gresham winked at him and gave a slight sideways nod. It was time for Mannion to leave, or rather for him to wait outside the door. Essex would talk more freely if the two men were alone. He was clearly in it up to his neck with James of Scotland, and God knew who else. For once it might be in Gresham's interests to sound out Essex's political thoughts.
Essex hardly seemed to notice Mannion's departure. As he often did, he spoke, but in the manner of someone talking to himself.
'You played dice with them…' Essex mused, his brow furrowed in thought for a moment. His eyes swung back to Gresham, a signal perhaps that his mind had returned to here and now. 'Didn't they lose respect for you?'
'They lost money,' said Gresham, with a grin. 'I learnt to play dice with Drake, and on the Spanish Armada. In fact one of those men on the boat this afternoon, Dick, he owes me five hundred crowns still. I keep reminding him, but I don't think I'll get my money.'
This new vision of a relationship between commander and men was worrying Essex. He kept coming back to it, like a terrier after a rabbit that he was not convinced was quite dead.
'I couldn't do that,' he said with disarming honesty. 'I don't understand common men, not in the way I suspect you do. I've seen commanders in the field like you — on the very rare times I've been allowed to be a real solder!'
It was no secret that the Queen kept Essex on a leash, and that he wanted military glory more than anything else. The fury he descended into when the Queen refused him permission to go on one jaunt or another was legendary.
'Commanders like me? I'm hardly a great commander,' said Gresham. *No?' said Essex. 'I can see the way your men look at you, the way they trust you, the ease of the relationship they have with you. I can lead such men, I think, but I can never feel part of them.'
'Perhaps, my Lord,' said Gresham, suddenly bored with the conversation. You did not talk about leadership or how to work a body of men. You just did it. Theorising killed the whole thing dead. It was all common sense, after all. 'But I've an advantage over you.'