that had saved England from the Spanish threat so far, and if England was to be saved now it would be by the same measure.
As he rose from his table, the pain stung at his belly. He doubled up, no one there to see his humiliation. You are already dead, his doctor had said. Only a quack will promise you hope. How soon before his actual death was reported as a certainty?
The Fellowship of Granville College were uncertain as to how they should respond to Henry Gresham on his return for the Michaelmas Term 1587. Guilty? He had taken a prolonged absence, and brought back a beautiful Spanish girl who he had met under impossible circumstances and who had to be his mistress, of course. Fellows were not permitted to marry, and were meant to control the sensual excesses of the students rather than set them an example of it. Innocent? He had fought most heroically for his country at Cadiz. It was now an open secret that the money for the extension to the Old Court had come from him, though God knew who had leaked that bit, of information. He had at least had the decency to return for the most important part of the year. The arguments for a positive response seemed, on balance, to outweigh those for a negative response, so acting true to form two thirds of the Fellowship decided to take a wholly negative approach.
'We could all of us,' said Will Smith, who ran a mile if someone mentioned the word sword, never mind threatened to use one against him, 'go gallivanting off to sea if we chose, enjoying ourselves at the expense of our students. If, of course, we needed such spurious glamour to bolster our reputation.' It was generally agreed that it was far braver and heroic to remain at home, manning the domestic fort, so to speak, than to rush off to obscure places like a common soldier or sailor. Fat Tom was having none of this.
'Do tell me, dear boy,' he mouthed excitedly, all of his chins wobbling in unison, 'all about it, preferably in the most gory detail. I imagine these sailors are very rough people indeed, and you must tell me all about them as well. And please, do dwell at unseemly length on the episodes with lashings of blood in them!' The most worrying thing was that he was entirely genuine in his interest, both in the details of the fighting and in the men.
Gresham had sent messengers to the Netherlands, seeking the whereabouts of the untraceable Jacques Henri. So far they had drawn a complete blank. He had at least found a chaperone for Anna. The daughter of his father's housekeeper, a rather stern, puritanical girl with thin lips and a thin face, she had a permanent air of censorious disapproval about her. She held her once-expensive but now rather shabby skirt close about her nervously, as if everyone and everything including the ground upon which she stood might rise up and criticise her at any minute. Or, even worse, try to make love to her. She had presented herself at The House with the story of the death of her employers, and in a stroke of genius the housekeeper, an elderly and flustered woman, had recommended her to Gresham. It was an interesting relationship. The chaperone had no actual authority over her charge, merely the requirement to be there and ensure her virtue was preserved. The authority came from the certainty that the chaperone would try to put off any amorous young man, deny them opportunity and, in the final count, report their misdeeds to her master. 'Bit like when you pour cold water over a dog that's after your favourite bitch?' asked Mannion, who was intrigued by the idea of a chaperone. 'Not… quite,' Gresham had replied, giving up on an explanation.
The wild set in London with whom Gresham tended to mix when he was there, the poets, the musicians and those trying their hands at the new fashion of writing for the Playhouse, had taken Anna to their hearts. With a chaperone in place, Gresham was less concerned about whether they took her to their beds, not his. Why should he care? Yet he had felt obliged to find a better base in Cambridge than his two rooms in Granville College. The Merchant's House lay in Trumpington, just outside Cambridge, and had lain vacant for a year or more, the dust thick over its old floors and walls. It was ancient, built round the medieval core of its Great Hall, probably a nobleman's house before passing to the Merchant who had given it its name. And now Henry Gresham flickered briefly in its history, setting up a base where he could summon his ward once every six weeks, the state of the roads allowing, from the fleshpots of London to savour the rural delights of Cambridge and the questions of her master. Her nominal master, at least.
The bonus for Gresham was Excalibur's Pool. He couldn't help but call it that, for if anywhere in England there was a place where a magic sword might rise up out of the mist, it was in the bend of the river where the water had scooped out a deep, dark pool, somehow separated from the moving water, a place where time and motion stood still. You could look into the translucent depths of Excalibur's Pool and see the history of England. He found himself drawn to it more and more, spending the night in the simply furnished great bedroom so that early in the morning he could walk out over the meadow and plunge into its darkness. Buying The Merchant's House created more trouble in the College, of course. It showed unseemly wealth. Residence in College was mandatory for Fellows, the core of communal living on which the whole concept of the College was based.
He had spent Christmas in London. No young man with blood flowing through him would refuse his monarch's order to celebrate the twelve days of Christmas with the richest and most spoilt of the land. The memories blurred into each other. The swirling, flickering light from thousands of candies, the stately procession of the dance with the vibrant bodies, hungry for each other under the strict discipline of the music. Anna, with fire in her eyes, being swept round and round by a courtier whose tongue was hanging out, and who later offered her his whole inheritance for one night spent with her. She had sent him home to his mother. The dreaded moment when a really drunken Gresham had looked up to see that the dance had placed him yet again opposite Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth. He had never danced as well, nor sobered up more quickly.
The men, the ships, the very countries involved in this great game of life now stood like dominoes stacked in a line, each one carefully placed over years through the scheming ambition of those with a desperate desire to retain power, or those with a desperate desire to grab it. For years those dominoes stood still, silent, and then came the push. It only needs one of those dominoes to topple, and worlds shiver, history is changed.
The first of the great dominoes to topple and knock the next in line, was the death of Don Alvaro de Bazan, Marquis of Santa Cruz, Captain General for the Ocean Seas, hero of Lepanto, victor of Terceira and endless other conflicts and Commander for the Enterprise of England, on February 9th, 1588. He died, the old man, with no tears from his servants for this abundantly cruel man.
Then the worst day in his life came to the Duke of Medina Sidonia. It had started badly. There was rarely peace for any Spanish grandee, living his life from dawn till dusk in the eyes of his people, the few snatched hours of night with his wife the only time he was not on show. It was his duty, he accepted it both as his responsibility and his birthright, but sometimes he ached for isolation. Having returned from Cadiz he had been sitting in judgement on tenants all day, and one particularly unpleasant case where a man had denied God, his duties as a tenant, and his duties as a husband and father had sickened him. So it was that he had a strange feeling that things were not well, coupled with a great restlessness.
The messengers arrived at his home as he did. King Philip never sent one man where ten would do. The letter hit him like a sword through his heart. Santa Cruz was dead. His King required the Duke of Medina Sidonia to become Commander by Sea for the invasion of England. He clutched the parchment in his hand, frozen, the blood draining from his face. For minutes he said and did nothing. Then, with a slow walk, he called for his Secretary. He had no time to think over his response, merely to feel the awful dread pulling at his heart. It was from his heart finally that he wrote to his King.
My health is not equal to that needed for such a voyage. I know this since the few times that I have been at sea I was sea sick and always caught a fever. My family have debts of over nine hundred thousand ducats. I have no money to spend on the enterprise, nothing to spend even for my King. I have no experience of war, nor of the sea. How is it that I can be suited for such a great command I know nothing of what Santa Cruz has been doing. I have no intelligence of England. I fear therefore that I will let myself and you, Your Majesty, down most terribly, acting as a blind commander, relying on the advice of those I do not know, unable to distinguish truth from lies, the good advice from the bad…
As soon as he had sealed it and sent it he regretted the impetuosity with which he had written. Fretfully his mind told him that his response would make him look like a coward. He feared such an accusation against his honour, far more than he feared death itself. Yet equally potent in his growing sense of despair was the realisation that his letter would fail, of course. Like all limited men, Philip was incapable of changing his mind, not seeing that sometimes to do so was wise, but seeing it rather as him being proven wrong. And the King with God's ear could never be wrong.
He knew why he had been appointed. They were proud men, the sea captains of the Spanish Empire, and men uniquely conscious of their rank. Well, Sidonia was superior to any of them in rank and, more importantly,
