'Young Henry Gresham who absents himself from my Court, I see,' said the Queen, dangerously. Correction; every word she spoke was potential danger, thought Gresham, including these.
'Your Majesty, I have until yesterday been at sea for several months, with the forces of Sir Francis Drake. Nothing except the urgency of serving Your Majesty overseas would otherwise take from me the pleasure of attending Your Majesty's court.'
'Hmph!' said the Queen, in a most unladylike grunt, 'so I hear that you picked up a prize of your own on your recent sea voyage. Show yourself, girl. Come forward now!' She motioned to two men to take Gresham's and Anna's horses. Eyes lowered, Anna advanced, curtseyed again.
Oh help, thought Gresham, had she been listening? Does this silly girl know who this is? Does she think it's some dowager aunt of mine who's accosted me in the street?
'Well,' said the Queen, 'I could see they would fight over you. Is it true, girl, that your mother died on board ship? That she cast you on the mercies of this young wolf here?'
'Your Majesty,' said Anna, eyes still decorously lowered, 'it is true that my dear mother departed this life at sea. As your all-knowing Majesty will know, I was placed in the guardianship of your subject here.'
'I am sorry for your mother, and for you in your loss,' said the Queen, not unkindly. Anne Boleyn, her mother, had been executed for adultery before she knew her, thought Gresham, and called a whore ever since. It must give her a limited line in sympathy for dead mothers. Of all people on earth she had been dealt a Devil's pack by her breeding. Yet she had survived. Against all the odds. The Queen looked at the beautiful girl and her horse, the striking young man standing beside her. They were an embodiment of good breeding, for all that Gresham was born on the wrong side of the bed. Like their respective horses, they were the summit of their species. The Queen stared at the young bastard in all his glory, and the young girl, the splendour of her beauty shining out despite the riding habit twenty years out of fashion.
'It will end in tears,' she said, but with the slightest of smiles playing on her make-up smeared face, her eyes dancing with fierce intelligence. She looked directly at Anna. 'I of all people know how hard it is to be a woman in a man's world. They would rather own us than obey us, these men. So you, young lady, can I come to your rescue?' Suddenly Gloriana appeared rather tired, and above all old. 'Is this young man terrorising you? Is he haunting you? Would you wish that I make you a ward of Court — though, God knows, I have enough expenses to my charge already!'
Had the Queen looked at Gresham as she spoke?
Anna risked her own tiny smile. 'No, Your Majesty, not terrorising me. He is trying to be very distant,' and here she chanced the smallest of looks up at the Queen and into her eyes, 'as he tries to be very distant from everyone. But he is perfectly proper.'
The Queen laughed out loud, an unashamed belly laugh that would have done a fifteen stone man in a tavern proud. 'Well,' she roared, 'if you keep them distant you've won your safety! Well, my offer stands.' She was clearly becoming bored, and the wind was starting to blow up the street, the crowds increasing by the minute. 'If you wish me to take you in, find you a good English husband even, you may contact me. And as for you, Henry Gresham…' She turned to him. 'Come and see me in my Court! There are enough who would die for such an invitation. Do not be so arrogant as to refuse one from your Queen that others would give their lives for. And one other thing. Lay a finger on that girl and it won't only be your head stuck on a pike on London Bridge!'
And with another roaring laugh, she ascended into her coach. Gresham's shoulders were beginning to sink back in relief as he let out his breath. Then, as she was almost in through its vast door, she turned and motioned to Gresham to come close. His shoulders pulled upwards again. Her teeth were black and Gresham was surprised her breath could not be seen like a putrid brown stain on the air. She leaned close to him.
'Tell me,' said the Queen, 'is it true that Drake said he intended to swinge the King of Spain's beard, and then changed it when that damn fool Secretary of his put him right?'
You never knew with royalty, that was the problem. They could be your best friend one minute, and then have you up for treason for telling a bad joke or being over familiar. And this one could be chatting away knowing full well she had just ordered him killed. Gresham gambled. He leaned forward even closer to Elizabeth, wondering if at that proximity his trimmed beard would catch fire at her breath.
'As a mere subordinate, Majesty,' he said, 'and someone who Sir Francis saw fit to take a shot at…' she would have heard that story for certain, 'you would expect me to be the soul of discretion. Yet I can confirm that a certain rather unconventional assault on the King's beard was proposed, somewhat sotto voce, before a correction was issued and a rather different threat was made fortissimo.' He leaned in even further, almost touching her face. Had he got the mix of deference and the conspiratorial right? 'However, Your Majesty, what is not widely known is that when the first threat was made I was the only person looking away to Cadiz harbour. I swear two additional Spanish vessels sank the minute our commander uttered his unique threat to the King of Spain.'
He had got it right, thank God. An appreciative snort of laughter emerged from the unnaturally red royal lips, wrapped now in a grin of positively malicious enjoyment. Then her face darkened. Gresham's heart sank with it.
'And what does the young man who I hear such things of…' Such things, Gresham's mind raced. Talk of good things, or bad things? 'What does he think about the prospect of Sir Francis Drake commanding the only wooden walls that stand between my kingdom and Spain?'
This could not be happening, not in a street with nearly a hundred people watching, pushed out of earshot by the mounted guard. Not happening to a man barely out of nappies, given from nowhere the chance to influence events that he had thought only Cecil would be able to take advantage of. Perhaps he should go to Court more often. At least it would be more comfortable.
'Your Majesty,' he said, his thoughts a bare second ahead of his words. 'I have no concept of defending a kingdom such as Your Majesty must have. In all honesty, most of my life has been concerned with defending myself. Yet your wooden walls are not one line of masonry, but ten, twenty or thirty separate walls, each capable of going its own way.'
'What are you telling me?' The tone had no humour in it now. It was flat, merciless, the voice of her father who had ordered the murder of her mother.'
Well, Gresham thought, it had not been an altogether bad life, and, after all, the only certainty about life was that it would end some time or other.
'I wish to continue serving Your Majesty. My loyalty to you goes without question, as it does with every subject.' One had to put these things in with royalty, Gresham remembered. They tended to remember what had been said with appalling selectivity. And accuracy. 'And my loyalty to Your Majesty is even further secured by the fact that your reign has brought peace to this country. Peace, and an end to bonfires.'
Which was true. Queen Bitch was mercurial, infuriating and unpredictable, not knowing at times whether she was King Henry VIII or Anne Boleyn, and at times trying to be both. Yet ploughman Jack and milkmaid Jill cared little for the goings-on in London. Their life was hard enough, a bad winter killing a third of their village, rain at harvest guaranteeing unfilled bellies for their children and themselves, not to mention the relentless, random tide of plague and illness that haunted every man alive in Elizabeth's England. Yet they were human beings, as human as the Earl of Essex and Robert Cecil. As human as Henry Gresham. Did the peasant in the field not feel pain and loss like other men, were the hot tears absent when wife or child died? With what they had to bear already, what need had they of armies tramping over their fields, driving down their crops, taking their women and burning their pathetic, stinking little huts? What need did their men have of being hauled off to war, a weapon thrust into their ill-trained hands, simple cannon-fodder? She had brought peace to England, and stopped for the most part humans being burned alive because their God differed in meaningless respects from that which their monarch claimed to worship. All of this flickered through his brain in an instant.
'Your Majesty, this young, inexperienced and badly born man would be happy to have Sir Francis Drake fighting for him, and believe himself lucky to have such a man on our side. Yet to fight and to lead are not the same thing.'
The Queen looked at him, waiting for him to say more.
'You would have made a good politician, Henry Gresham,' she said. 'Too many say too much, and too many say nothing at all with many words.' She looked at him, waiting for him to speak, to say too much. It was she who broke the silence. 'Lord Howard of Effingham will command my fleet. Drake will be second in command.' Then, in his silence, she nodded, a neutral gesture, climbed into her carriage, gave one cursory wave at the crowd, and drove off amid rolling cheers and roars.
