leather shoes. In total contrast, Drake's Secretary was a thin, lugubrious figure with a balding pate, white face and an expression of very long suffering. His clothing looked as if someone had taken a used sail, dyed it black and turned it into an ill-fitting cloak for human nakedness. His scarecrow figure held a strange dignity. He had a slate in his hand, with a piece of chalk, like a rather tired schoolmaster.
'The sailors have run off,' the Secretary intoned in a voice one might otherwise have expected to find coming from the pulpit at evensong in a tiny, freezing village church, 'because they thought they were going off to rob Spanish treasure ships. Now they hear they're going off to attack the Spaniards in their home ports. This is much more dangerous and far less remunerative. It is-'
'Fuck what it is!' roared Drake, his colour now the highest red and his face looking set to explode. 'Fuck what they are! Fuck what you are! Fuck all cowards and traitors!'
The Secretary showed no sign of wishing to fuck anyone as he stood by his master's side impassively. His eyes were perhaps looking rather more towards Heaven than might be deemed customary, but whatever he was saying was being kept private between him and his God.
It had not been a good day for Henry Gresham. Nor a good week. The doubts about this mission had grown and buzzed in his head like flies. Why should he risk his life to tell Walsingham how many barrel staves were being landed in Cadiz? The weather had been foul when they set out from London, and now he was soaked to the skin. His great riding cloak was wet, weighing five times its normal weight, and had the dank stink of damp wool. Uncontrollable shivers passed through him without warning. Yet it was more than his shivering cold that bothered him. A deep dread had settled over Gresham at the prospect of taking to sea. Seafaring was something about which he knew nothing. He hated being an innocent abroad, hated his own ignorance, sensed that his carefully cultivated front of superiority and control would be smashed. He had been made to look the fool often enough as a child. An aching heart and a nagging headache told him that he was on course for neither Lisbon nor Cadiz, but rather on course for humiliation. Or a lonely, wet death beneath the greasy rolling waves of the Atlantic.
Gresham also hated the filth of seafaring. He was obsessive about cleanliness, and his usual daily routine was to stand in the iron bath, scrubbing his skin with the cold water as if it would cleanse him of all sin as well as of dirt. At sea, the fine velvet and silk-covered bodies stank more with each day that passed. No soap would work up a lather in sea water, which left salt stains on any flesh and cloth it touched, as well as something of the stink of the sea. That strange odour, of sharp salt water tainted by an unidentifiable corruption just beneath the surface.
Therank smell and clutter of the quayside did nothing to reassure him. Even Mannion's usual banter had deserted him and he had descended into an unprecedented black mood of his own from the moment they left London. For years Gresham had often prayed for Mannion to shut up. Now he found himself praying that he would speak. And to cap it all, if this ranting maniac before him was indeed Sir Francis Drake, it would not be a good time for Henry Gresham to introduce himself. Drake saved him the bother. Drake caught sight of the young man and his servant on the quayside.
'You need not mention your miserable name. I know it,' said Drake with extreme rudeness. Gresham's hand itched to clutch his sword. 'It was a condition of the voyage that I take you on board. It is not a condition that I otherwise acknowledge your existence.'
Gresham bowed his head respectfully. It seemed the only thing to do. Clearly Drake did not like spies.
‘Are we loaded? Are we prepared for our voyage? Is there any meaning in this chaos?' Drake was roaring again.
'If you keep distracting me every other minute with requests for information that I cannot supply, my admittedly feeble attempts to keep track of what is being loaded aboard the Elizabeth Bonaventure will die in tatters.' The Secretary placed his slate on a nearby barrel. Clearly, he alone on the waterfront had no fear of Drake. The barrel was almost immediately grabbed by two burly seamen, and the Secretary grabbed his slate back just in time. 'To be frank, Sir Francis,' said the Secretary, ‘I do not know if twenty tons of gunpowder has just been taken ort board, or twenty tons of dried peas.'
Drake looked at his Secretary, with that same speculative glance. Then he rounded, without warning, on the sailors and workmen filling the slippery quayside. 'To Spain! To death and to glory!'
The men on the waterfront heard his words, stopped their work and started to cheer. The sailors caught the mood. Suddenly the whole quay was a feast of cheering. Drake opened his arms, welcoming the cheers. He turned and set off through yelling crowds, mounting the gangplank. Once aboard the Bonaventure he vanished below decks.
‘Now that one,' said Mannion glumly, following Drake up the gangplank, 'he's a real bastard.'
There was a clatter of hoofs behind them, yells and curses and the noise of a pile of barrels being knocked over. Several sailors and half the women waiting to say farewell to their menfolk had run for their lives as the heavy barrels rolled down the quayside.
'Sorry! Sorry!' a booming voice called out. 'Any damage paid for, of course. Truly sorry!' George Willoughby had arrived, plastered with the rain and looking like a drenched mammoth.
'What in God's name are you doing here?' asked an astounded Gresham, his heart lifting already.
'My father's got contacts with Drake. Helped fund one of his voyages five years ago. I asked him to call in some favours. Plus, no doubt the old man'll have landed the bill for half of Drake's powder! Who cares? It's only money, and it worked.'
'But why?' asked Gresham, grinning at his friend. 'Why choose to come?'
'Too much theoretical politics, dear boy!' boomed George. 'The fate of the nation's being decided here.' There was a sense of excitement in his voice, a burning in his eyes. 'Do I want to be one of those who comments on what's happened? Or do I want to be the one who tells the girls of my first-hand acts of derring-do against a horde of Spaniards?'
He had a point, Gresham thought. Every young man with fire in his belly had sought to sail with Drake, the eternal rite of passage where men have to prove their courage. And George Willoughby was no coward.
'Will you shout as loudly at them as you're shouting at me?' asked Gresham, noticing an increasing number of the rabble gathering round for this free show.
'Sorry!' George clamped a hand theatrically over his mouth. Well, thought Gresham, the Elizabeth Bonaventure was going to seem a lot smaller with this man's bulk on it, but somehow he sensed the horizons would seem a lot wider.
The twenty English vessels were strung out over a vast expanse of ocean so blue that its glittering surface bit into the eyes, white sails looking like dainty seagulls dipping in and out of the waves. So peaceful, so calm in the mild wind driving them to Cadiz. So deceptive. Each patch of white on the blue of the sea was a heaving, straining, iron-fastened box of wood entombing the men who crawled like so many maggots on their deck and up their masts. Fragile things, for all the serenity they showed from afar, built from tension. The tension of straight wood forced to curve and hug a hull. The tension of the huge pressure of sail pitted against a thin wooden mast and the taut pull of infinitely complex rigging, checking and balancing all to keep that sail full of the ferocious and fickle power of the wind. And those tensions broke easily. The savage, ripping, tearing noise of a sail suddenly shredding itself as a tiny weakness opened up into shreds. The crack as a rope snapped, whipping viciously across the deck and then through the body of any man unlucky enough to stand in its way. The seam between planking forced open as the ship plunged and drove time and time again into a heavy sea, the caulking being driven out in what the sailors called a boat spewing its oakum, burying its prow in the» water and only after what seemed like minutes rising up and shaking the water from its bow. Those picturesque dots on the ocean were a fragile challenge to the power of the elements.
Gresham and Mannion were munching their midday meal companionably in the waist of the ship, George alongside. All three were now used to the easy rise and fall of the deck. Gresham was surprised at how he felt. Three or four days of dreadful sickness and intense misery had passed, to be replaced by a life confined, simplified. There was hardly room to move on board the Elizabeth Bonaventure, crammed to the hilt as it was with 'gentlemen adventurers' such as George, and the extra crew needed to replace those lost by sickness and combat. Luxury was to find room to stretch out to the full on the deck at night, huddled under one's cloak, the rough timbers cutting in to each toss and turn of the body. Even the longing for his bath in the morning was a dull ache rather than an active stab of pain. He had become accustomed to his own rancid smell and that of those alongside him. Seafaring, he was finding, was largely about fighting the elements. It left him with far less time to fight himself.
On English ships even a commander such as Drake would lend a hand with a rope when the need arose. So
