enough keeping Cecil out of trouble and myself free to do what I need. And you would be at real, serious risk.'
She chanced a very rare smile, to herself more than to him. 'More risk than being stranded at sea on a sinking ship with fifteen pirates?'
Sometimes the best way to deal with a woman was to remain silent.
'You are happy for me to remain here?' she asked. 'Living as I do?' She was asking if he consented to her continuing to spend his money.
'Of course. You're my ward, aren't you?' Gresham liked saying that. It gave him a feeling of power. 'Yet for a short time, in a month or two, I may ask you to stay in a new place. Not for long, I hope.'
A puzzled expression crossed her face. It was time. He had no option. He had to tell this girl his real business. The truth. The truth that only Mannion had known hitherto. The truth that would most likely lead to Henry Gresham being killed in disgrace. As she was a Spaniard, perhaps he should have told her much earlier. Who knows? Secrecy becomes like a second skin, and humans are not like snakes who slough off their skin effortlessly. 'Let me explain,' he said. And then he told her the truth that had been haunting him for so long. The truth that he knew would decide his fate, his life. As he did so, he realised how stupid it must sound to an outsider.
When he had finished, he looked at her face. She was white, aghast. There were tears starting in her wide eyes — of shock? Of horror? Suddenly, surprisingly, he realised what a terrible moment this was. For the first time since he had known her she looked into his eyes, and broke down, the emotion shaking her whole body.
'I'm sure you'll be safer where I'm asking you to go than in the Netherlands,' he added lamely, at a loss as to what he could do. He was to remember his words later on.
All Mannion said when he heard of the conversation was, 'You don't make life easy for them as follow you, do you?'
Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth's Embassy to the Netherlands was one of the most bizarre, mad and, in some strange way, ridiculous events of Gresham's life. Perhaps all diplomacy was this ridiculous. If so, it was a wonder that the world was not permanently at war. Then again, perhaps it was.
Why should the Duke of Parma want peace, wondered Gresham, when he had every chance now of winning a war that had cost him and Spain so dearly? All the cards were in Parma's hands. He had the best army in the world at his disposal. He was winning the war to keep the Netherlands in Spanish hands. He had the biggest fleet in history coming to help him get that army over to England, and he must know how little there was to oppose him if he landed. So England was sending a peace delegation. And was this the team to conclude a peace? Henry Stanley, Earl of Derby, was urbane, intelligent and widely-travelled. But the other two nobles, Cobham and Sir James Croft, were bewildered, the two civil lawyers accompanying them pedantic, and Cecil and Tom Spencer, a relative of Derby's, intelligent enough but wholly inexperienced. This was what England was sending, to oppose an army.
Dover in late February was death by ice. The winter weather was appalling, ships huddling in the harbour as if in fear. For days the wind howled, blowing so hard down the chimney of the inn reluctantly occupied by the peace party that it drove smoke and cinders into the main room, setting furniture ablaze. It was just before the end of the month that they managed passage to Ostend. Gresham thought he was accustomed to rough seas, counted himself a seaman now, but this bucking, crazed animal beneath his feet surprised and frightened him. The bitter cold cut like a blade, flecking their beards with sharp particles of ice just minutes after being on deck. God knows how the sailor's fingers kept enough feeling to work the sails for more than seconds.
Ostend was a city surrounded by war, in a country taken over by war in the way that plague takes over a human body. A whole family lay dead a quarter of a mile outside the walls. The father was on the ground, in a shirt, arm outstretched. It had been gnawed to the bone above the hand, which showed white against the brown mud, half his head eaten away, and great chunks of flesh taken out of his body. His wife and children were similarly mangled, holes where their eyes had once been. 'Wolves,' said their guide, 'and birds, of course. The wolves come right up to the city walls at night now. You'll hear them, well enough.'
Ostend was a town where people walked hunched, where even the deputation from England with all its gold found that there was no food in the hostel. Cecil rose to his feet, issued peremptory orders to his servants. Ludicrously, he returned two hours later with two mangy hunting dogs and two thin fishing nets. 'If there is no food, then we shall find it!' he pronounced proudly. The dogs ran off when the servants took them out, the fishing nets proved to have two vast holes in them, and something in the manner of the servants persuaded Cecil not to ask them to set out on the choppy sea in the small boat that was all they could hire. It was Mannion who went out and returned with three eggs, half a cheese and some mouldy ham. They ate it like village children at a feast.
The delays felt endless, the frustration almost like a physical force pressing down on them. They were in Ostend, but Parma was reportedly in Bruges. Messengers were sent between the two camps, frequently crossing to arrange a meeting. Parma was no longer in Bruges. Where was he? No one knows. 'Inspecting his troops.' How much inspection can an army stand? There was no entertainment in Ostend, not even coal. Her Majesty's Ambassadors sat huddled round a smoking peat fire, praying for real warmth. Cecil's education was expanded even more. The smoke from a peat fire does not sting the eyes. Any more than it warms the body.
Dale, Cecil and Gresham rode to Ghent in the second week of March, their only food an orange apiece. There were brigands riding, lurking in what was left of the woodlands on either side of the road, just out of musket range, lean men on horses, watching, gauging the strength and the commitment of their escort. The eggs they got when they arrived were like a King's feast. They did not compensate for the fact that Parma's emissary had gone, with no one seeming to know where. Finally the ambassadors met with Gamier, Parma's secretary, a small man in his mid- thirties, wearing a heavily furred cloak down to his knees, wearing what could only be called a cassock of blue velvet with gold buttons and a gold chain around his neck. There was more talk, more delay. Then, at long last, they agreed for proper negotiations to start at Bourbourg, near Dunkirk.
'I fear this delay is intentional, that we are simply being stalled while Spain prepares her Armada,' said the Earl of Derby to Gresham. He had fallen into the habit of exchanging words with the young man, to Cecil's evident discomfort.
'It's possible, of course, my Lord,' said Gresham, toying with a rock-hard crust of bread that even his starving stomach was unwilling to take. 'Yet it's one of the Duke of Parma's techniques as a leader to be everywhere and yet nowhere, to move around his command to no obvious plan.'
'What advantage is there in it?' asked Derby, intrigued. He was an intelligent man with a quick brain, and a major supporter of the players.
'They say it's one reason why there's been no assassination attempt against him. That and the loyalty of his troops,' answered Gresham. 'Yet it also means that no commander can be secure against a sudden, ruthless inspection. The first thing he demands is a parade of the men, with the muster roll.' The plague of all European armies were the officers who took money for recruits who had either died, or never existed at all except as a fictional entry on just such a muster roll. It was a foolish officer who played this trick in Parma's army, and one who finished his career at the end of a rope. 'And, my Lord,' said Gresham, 'have we considered if this is the Duke's way of testing our sincerity, our strength of purpose?' *Well, it may be so,' said Derby, 'but I will tell you now that he has tested this man's strength of purpose near to breaking point!' He stood up, ordering one of the very few remaining bottles of wine he had brought with him from England to be opened. A whole dozen bottles had been smashed to pieces in their passage over the Channel.
There had always been an old head on Henry Gresham's young soldier's body, but that night the youthful blood must have been running even more strongly than usual in his veins. Despairing of the conversation in the crude inn where they were staying, with the wind shrieking through the ill-mended windows and rattling the doors, he flung a cloak over his shoulders, threw open the door and took himself off through the night air. The houses were close, crowded in on each other, not dissimilar to London except with no roar of traffic and the ceaseless yelling of trades-people. Mannion tucked in behind his master, silent. They walked briskly for quarter of an hour, reaching the outskirts of the town. The rain was holding off, though the air was thick with wet and cold, and there was a pleasant tingling in Gresham's body after the exercise. The moon emerged briefly from behind the scudding clouds, revealing the dark shape of the town wall before them. It was as if they had the whole town to themselves, apart from a lame, skulking dog that had shadowed them all the way from the inn.
They were halfway back when the attack came. The men must have been waiting down a tiny, stinking jennel that led off the main route. It was the mud that saved Gresham, that and the fact that for a few seconds the wind had ceased its howling. There was a slight squelch as the lead attacker drew his foot from out of the slime that coated the streets. It was a tiny noise, but it was enough for Gresham and Mannion to swing round and face the men. The jennel was so narrow that only one man could leap out from it at a time. It was the one weakness in the
