He noticed a bare leg sticking up over the side of a mound, some ten or twenty yards beyond the ditch. Leaping lightly from his horse, he handed the reins to a soldier, and picked his way to where the Irish body lay. The ground was littered with huge tussocks, soft marsh between each one; he felt the earth sucking at his boots.
"Ere,' said Mannion, catching him up. 'You sure about this? It only needs one man in those woods…'
Gresham said nothing. He needed to see the enemy. He reached the figure, pathetic now in death. He was a young man, perhaps not even sixteen. He wore a ragged shirt and some sort of pantaloons that looked as if they could have been made of canvas, with something that looked like a woollen plaid over one shoulder. Knitted and spun by a mother? By a lover? Even by a wife? The musket ball had caught him full over the heart, smashed into his chest. Death must have been instant. He had long, straight legs, at his age more like a woman's than a man's. They were muddy, scarred with scratches from brambles or thorns. He had no shoes, but the sole of the foot that was sticking up had hard, brown skin on it that Gresham suspected was tougher than any leather. The boy's face had a strange innocence, and though his lips were drawn back in a grimace of pain — or was it hate? — one could see how good-looking he had once been. The body was filthy, the boy's hair sticking out in spikes and also covered in mud — a smear of mud across his face. Foul living? Or disguise? A disguise that broke up the whiteness and the symmetry of his face, a disguise that covered him not just with the earth but the smells of the earth, so that the human smell a horse or dog might sense was battened over and covered?
Something glittered. Gresham knelt down, and saw that round the boy's neck, mostly covered by the plaid that had been thrown up round it by his fall, was a silver decoration. He moved the material gently to one side. It was thin, fragile, a thing of rare beauty, with tiny, intricate interwoven designs. Was he a chieftain's son, this young man? Sent out on his first foray to test his manhood. He had no musket by his side, merely a quiver of the darts the Irish favoured and a sword, workmanlike but with no decoration to it. Youth. He had moved forward too close to the enemy, and paid the price for his courage. Perhaps he had wanted to show the other men that he was not afraid, not knowing that all men knew fear.
'Don't move! Stay down!' Mannion hissed at him urgently. Gresham looked up.
A man was standing at the very edge of the woods. Tall, middle-aged, he had the wild beard and hair of the Irish, the same mud-stained appearance. He held a musket, pointing it straight at Gresham. It rested on nothing, no stick or mound, and the barrel was rock steady. Whoever this man was he had muscles of steel.
A wave of tiredness came over Gresham. It was his own folly that had taken him off the road within musket range of this wild man; his own folly that had made him stay by the body. He looked up at the man. Who cared? Would the world cease because this boy had been torn uselessly out of life? Would the world change when the musket ball tore into his own heart? Would death be like the longest sleep possible, pure oblivion and an end to terror and trial? But then there were the dreams. Who could know what the dreams might be?
Very carefully, aware all the time of the musket pointed at him, Gresham straightened the boy's legs before they froze in death at their grotesque angle. It was always a kindness; it saved someone the unpleasant task of breaking the corpse's legs to straighten them out. He laid the plaid carefully over the broad shoulders and exposed the silver ornament to the thin sunlight only now starting to creep out from behind the clouds. He cleared the clotted hair from the boy's face, folded his arms across his chest, closed his staring eyes. And stood up.
He looked across the void into the eyes of the man pointing the gun at him. For once, he did not feel fear. It was always going to happen like this, wasn't it? On some God-forsaken field in the Low Countries, in a back alley in London or in a palace in France. It could have happened so many times before, when the galleys had chased him at Cadiz, when Drake had shot at him, when the Armada had so nearly ground itself, at Tantallon Castle, in the Tower of London. So many times, so many escapes, each one chipping a tiny part off his soul, each one shrieking the question why. Why bother? Why go through this dance to the nonsense of time? To what end? To what purpose? So it happened by a pass that no one had heard of, after the most feeble of little victories. So be it.
He smiled a thin smile at the man, and turned to face him full on, dropping his hands to his side.
'Jesus!' he heard Mannion mutter beside him.
There was a rustle from behind him. His men had seen what was happening, were scrambling to join him. Though he could not see them, he could imagine numbers of them gauging the distance, deciding whether a shot at extreme range might be worth it. Slowly he held out his hand, never taking his gaze from the man with the musket, palm up, in the unmistakable gesture that says no. Do nothing.
The man waited an eternity, the barrel rock steady. Then, quite clearly, Gresham saw him nod. He let the musket drop, butt first, turned on his heels. And vanished into the woods.
'Fuckin' 'ell!' said Mannion. 'He came out o' nowhere, just as you started to finger that necklace thing. 'Ad 'is musket up before I could move.'
'He thought I was going to steal the necklace,' said Gresham. 'Thought I was a grave robber, a battlefield scavenger.'
'Why didn't he fuckin' shoot you anyway?'
'He was sending me a message.' Two of his men had reached him now, puffing and perspiring; four or five others were just behind him.
'If you're going to climb through these tussocks and this bog with your musket at full cock we'll lose more men from friendly fire than we ever do from Irish,' said Gresham with total calm.
The first man looked open-mouthed at Gresham, then almost comically down at his musket. With a shame-faced grin, he hooked his thumb over the hammer, let it click forward so that it was on safe. The story would go down in the books of course, though that was not why Gresham had said what he said.
There was Gresham, doin' the funeral rights over some Irish bastard, and up pops this savage, few feet away he was, and points 'is musket at him. Old Gresham e' don't even flicker. He carries on laying out the Irish bastard's limbs, like 'e were 'is mother, and then stands up. Stands up, I tell you! Not only stands, but turns and faces the bastard. Then 'e 'olds his 'and up, clear as daylight, tellin' us who're rushin' in to 'elp not to fire. An' they stand an' look at each other for Gawd knows 'ow long. And they nod at each other. I'm not kidding you — 'ere, pass the jug — they nods at each other. And the Irish bastard, 'e shoulders arms and fuckin' vanishes into nowhere, like these Irish bastards do, and Gresham, he turns round cool as a cucumber and tells me orf for 'avin' me musket at full cock! Would you believe it?
They would believe it, and embellish it, and men would look at him and think of it every time they saw him.
'It really doesn't matter, you know,' said Gresham to Mannion, when they were back on the road and out of earshot. 'None of it matters at all.' Yet by recognising it, he suddenly felt more free than he had for years. The pain in his head was lifting, and he had enough strength left to grin to himself. Something had changed within him when the wild man with the musket had nodded briefly at him.
A number of Essex's officers, mostly the younger ones and some of those who by now had returned from their vain chase, came up to clap him on the shoulder and shake his hand. Cameron Johnstone, increasingly seen alongside Essex's cronies, was hanging round at the back of the crowd. He was wearing what he called his campaigning garb, a coat even longer than Gresham's and fiercely clean white linen. When asked, he said simply that one had to keep up civilised standards.