demanded a tour of the vessel. Before leaving with the Captain and four armed sailors, he turned to the other men on the deck.
'There's money here to buy you any woman in Devon!'
Sir Francis Walsingham gagged as the pain hit him, the stones in his kidney cutting into his flesh at its most basic level, making him cry out and clutch the table edge. He knew what the pain was, knew where it would end. The Spanish, his spies told him, now put it about that he was suffering from a 'terrible corruption of the testicles'. Well, there had been pain and trouble enough for the products of his loins, but nothing like this from his testicles.
It passed, as all pain passed, as life itself passed, and Walsingham settled back into the hard wood of his chair. He looked again at the stained sheet of paper in his hand. His agent had rammed it into the hand of one of the sick sailors Drake had sent home, though the only sickness this particular man had was the illness of wanting to take Walsingham's money. The report made interesting reading. So Drake had done damage in Cadiz and hit the coastal shipping. So much the better! Yet he had steadfastly refused to land young
Gresham. Why disobey such a request? Walsingham was still powerful, and for Drake to refuse to send Gresham ashore meant that the order to keep him on board, if indeed it had ever been issued and was not simply some madness of Drake's, had to come from someone with higher authority. Who was higher than Walsingham? Who was important enough to risk offending Walsingham? The Queen, of course. Perhaps Leicester, or even Essex. Burghley, certainly. And if Burghley, then his son Robert Cecil.
Just as worrying as not knowing who the order came from, he did not know why. Knowledge to Walsingham was as blood to other men, the stuff of life. Someone was thwarting his orders to one of his agents. As of now, finding out who it was and why they were doing it was his top priority.
Chapter 5
June, 1587 Flanders; the Azores; the Escorial
They were hardened soldiers, the usual mixture of nationalities, the usual blaspheming, hard-drinking whoring sons of the Devil. Yet they fought like the Devil too, as they had proved in campaign after campaign. They hardly paid attention to the man in their midst, caked with mud, swearing too as he stumbled waist-high through the water. All were holding their firearms high above their heads, though in the pouring rain God knew what was happening to the powder. Then the man's foot sank into even deeper, invisible mud, and he seemed set to fall forward.
'Careful, my Lord.' A soldier leaped forward and caught the man's arm, halting his fall.
'Thank you,' said the Duke of Parma. 'Whose bloody idea was this?'
A ripple of laughter went round the soaked and exhausted men.
'I think you'll find it was yours, my Lord,' the soldier grinned.
They struggled up out of the channel, a boiling inferno of water at high tide, only just fordable at low tide. Cadzand. What a Godforsaken spit of land. Sand with not a building nor even a tree in sight, yet crucial for guarding the channel that gave access to Sluys, crucial for capturing the port of Sluys itself.
He had rather it had been Ostend, Parma thought, if he was to find a deep-water port for the fleet his King was insisting on sending. But Ostend was too well defended, the English troops he had brushed against the best he or his men had ever fought. Good! If they were in Ostend they could not fight him in England, where he knew there were no soldiers of any standing. Sluys it had to be. No deep-water port, for sure, but at the heart of the system of canals and waterways that would allow him the only battle plan that he believed might work.
He had the army here in Flanders, a mere forty miles off' the English coast. Once in England his men would cut through the English like a hot knife through butter. Yokels, militia armed with pitchforks were all the English could muster against him. Spain could and would send the ships, now that her conquest of Portugal had given her a proper, ocean-going Navy. But what about the damned Dutch fleet under the thrice cursed Justin of Nassau? It was that fleet that haunted the dreams of the Duke of Parma. Using their shallow-bottomed yet heavily armed fly-boats, they could bottle up his men, pounding them in their fragile barges as they came out from the canals and before they reached the open sea. The great Armada of his master's dreams could only wait off shore in deep water, and witness the tragedy, unable to sail into the shoals where the Dutch had mastery. If only he could capture a deep- water port. Allow Philip's Armada to sail in, embark his troops and blast the English navy out of their way in the Channel. Yet he had no time!
No. It was cunning that would bring him victory, the same cunning that had won him all his victories, made men talk about the Duke of Parma's army in the same breath as the all-conquering Roman legions. If he held Sluys, he held power over a spider's web of canals and waterways. It was clear in his mind. He would send out barges to the north, allow them to be seen, draw the damned Dutch off. Then he would flood the southern canals at night with his men, when the darkness would confuse the Dutch sailors, if they were there and if they were mad enough to sail at night. Shielded lanterns would guide his invasion barges, invisible from the seaward side, and guide them out and over the shoals before the Dutch would see or know what was happening. If the Dutch followed the barges out to sea the guns of the huge galleons would blast them to pieces before they could blink. And if enough ships were sent by Spain, then they could stand as an impenetrable barrier between the frail barges and the English fleet. But first he had to capture Sluys.
He climbed over the sand to what amounted to Cadzand's highest point. Where were the barges bringing his supplies and the heavy guns he needed to set up over the channel? The Duke of Parma sighed. War was never certain. They had known the barges could be, were likely to be, delayed by enemy interference. They faced a cold few hours while they waited, praying their enemy would not mount an assault from the seaward side, knowing if they did with wet powder and priming all they had to resist with was cold steel, praying the barges would get through. Meanwhile, trenches had to be dug, the emplacements formed for the big guns.
The soldier proffered something to his commander. It was a lump of biscuit, soaked through and with the pattern of the man's fingers embedded in its surface where he had clutched the sodden mass. Damn! Why did he always forget to order his servants to pack food when he went out to battle? You would think they'd have learned by now. Yet he was hungry, surprisingly hungry. He looked up at the man, nodded, and grasped the biscuit, cramming it into his mouth. It tasted good.
True to his word, Drake mounted an armed guard outside the door to Anna's cabin. 'Is it to keep us out? Or to keep 'er in?' joked the sailor to his mates as he took up position.
George had been sent off to reconnoitre the cabins at the stern. Since no one had told Gresham not to join him he followed. Their instructions were clear, given to them by Captain Fenner while Drake entertained the captain of the San Felipe in what had once been the man's own cabin.
'Anything of value in those cabins, I want it detailed, written down here, immediately.' He tossed a scrap of paper to Gresham, turned to give him the pen and ink, looked at him and thought better of it. He handed them instead to George. 'I don't want things going walking the minute the prize crew get on board, you understand. And I don't want anything walking in either of your pockets, either!'
They had opened the door to find the woman in bed, and drawn back instinctively, embarrassed. So much for conquering heroes, thought Gresham, ruefully. In the heat of battle, the red-blood excitement, such a woman might have been raped or simply had her skull smashed in. Now it was all over, decorum had returned, and manners too.
'Come in! Please come in!' The voice was faint, but the accent perfectly English. Exchanging a glance, Gresham and then Mannion pushed through the cabin door.
They knew she was the girl's mother immediately. The lustrous fair hair, now rather lank and thin in the older woman but clearly once a matter of great glory; the high cheekbones, the full lips, the beautiful blue of the eyes. God had starved the rest of the world when he handed out the good looks — to this pair. Yet the older woman was clearly ill. The face was pale beyond the demands of beauty, drawn and with fine lines of pain etched on to it. The voice was faint, the spirit of the woman obviously ebbing and flowing as alternate tides of weakness and of pain flushed through her body.
'Tell me… tell me what has happened, please. My servant ran away when the first gun was fired…' The woman was too weak to raise her head from the pillow. She was bathed in sweat now, not the healthy glistening
