danger was coming from. From where were these signals emanating? The servants were smiling in her presence, Gresham's friends assiduous in their escort duties without being more presumptuous than all young men had to be.
The chaperone.
It had to be her.
The sour-faced creature accompanied Anna saying nothing, sitting like a stiff pudding in her presence, never smiling, never talking. Yet once, as the great carriage had rolled out of The House, Anna had seen what seemed like the faintest of nods and thinnest of smiles cross her face as she seemed to see someone out of the window. Craning to see beyond her, Anna had spotted two finely-dressed men in a livery she did not recognise, lounging by the main gate of The House. And they had been there on her return, two different men in the same livery there again on her next outing.
The servants were fond of her, and through them it did not take long to find out the identity of the livery. Burghley. Lord Burghley. The father of Robert Cecil. Her instincts had been honed by Gresham's double-dealing. If she was being spied on by any men associated with Robert Cecil, the news was not good. And was her suspicion about the chaperone correct? The woman had asked leave to be absent for a day, visiting a sick relative in Islington. Feeling both guilty and rather soiled, Anna charmed one of the younger ostlers into following the chaperone, swearing him to secrecy and leaving him heart-stricken with love. When both had left, with a week to go before her intended departure to Dover, she waited until the corridor was silent and slipped into the chaperone's room. It seemed innocent, and she started to ask what on earth she was doing in another woman's room. Then she saw the small writing desk placed by the window, a gap between its lid and the wood it rested on. A quill pen had been stuffed in the desk, but the nib end left sticking out, holding up the lid. The letter, nearly finished, had been interrupted for some reason — perhaps someone else had come into the room and the chaperone had thrust the paper and pen hurriedly in the desk? The contents were clear. In a few lines of spidery handwriting it gave Anna's date of departure from London, the name of the ship she was to pick up in Dover, even its Captain's name. The ostler reported later that evening that he had trailed the woman to Whitehall Palace. Cecil was spying on her, through this dreadful woman, had paid a spy to be as close as any person could be short of sharing her bed.
She shivered, fear temporarily replacing blood in her veins. Giving the details of her departure to Cecil could surely only mean that Cecil intended in some way to stop her. Well, she had learned some things in these tumultuous recent months. She called the chaperone into her room, speaking to her in a tone of supremacy that she knew would annoy her.
'I have decided to bring forward the time of my departure,' she announced. 'I have received notification that the ship must leave earlier.' All lies, of course, but if she managed to annoy the chaperone enough she might not seek to see the evidence.*My belongings are few. I intend to leave tomorrow, must do so if I am to make the ship in time. Your presence will not be required. I will have an escort of servants, and my two maids.'
The woman's colour rose and her lips became thinner than usual, if that were at all possible. She swept out of the room, treading on the edge of impertinence with the shallowness of her bow. Anna made no arrangements to leave, of course. She merely made sure that, half an hour before the time she had given the chaperone, she stationed herself by a window looking out onto the Strand. There were a dozen men in the Cecil livery, six of them on horseback, joking and chatting with each other opposite the main gate. She called the chaperone, and the steward after telling him to bring three of the porters along.
'You have been spying on me for Robert Cecil,' said Anna flatly. The chaperone started to bridle, expostulate, it is a fact,' said Anna. She turned to the steward, a loyal, elderly man who doted on Gresham. 'Master Robert, you do not know me. I will happily tell you why I believe beyond doubt that this woman has been spying on me and on The House for one of your master's greatest enemies.'
‘I need no such explanation, ma'am,' said the steward sombrely, ‘I need only your word. Your instructions?
'Her judgement must await your master's return.' If he is ever allowed to return, thought Anna. 'My request is that until that time she is kept secured in a room from which she cannot escape, and allowed no contact either by voice or by paper with the outside world in general and the Cecil family in particular.'
The steward nodded, and the last Anna ever saw of the chaperone was her hunched, furious figure being led through the door surrounded by porters.
The ship to take her to France was marked, known. She was under no illusions that the imprisonment of the chaperone was only a temporary measure. She had to assume there were other spies in The House. The minute she left Dover would be reported, possibly Folkestone as well if they wanted her that much. But why did Cecil want her? What to do? The answer was obvious. She would go now, with a handful of servants, when no one could expect it, and she would not head east to the Channel ports, but south, where there were boats for hire in plenty but no one would expect her to go.
It was a good plan, and she handled it in a manner Gresham would have been proud of. The small party slipped out at dusk, spending the night at an inn a few miles out of London. Two days later, at a tiny port so obscure she could not remember its name, she had enough money to bribe a fisherman to risk the dash to Calais. She wrinkled her nose at the stink of fish, recognising that because no proper lady would choose such a vessel it was her best disguise. Scudding out of the small fishing port, the boat's single cabin her own for the journey, three servants and a maid crammed on the deck, she felt a triumphant lifting of her heart. She had beaten Cecil! She had outsmarted her enemy! And done so with no help from the young man appointed her guardian.
She was not aware of the significance of Monday 1st August, a relative lull in between the Armada's first engagement with the English and the renewed battle. She did not know that the captain she had appointed knew the Spanish fleet was coming up on him but had gambled on slipping ahead of them. She did not see his jaw drop as the leading ships of the Armada came out of the drizzle, and the pataces leaped forward after his ungainly smack, desperate to capture fishermen for the intelligence they could bring.
She did hear the running on the deck, and the first cry from the pursuing vessels in Spanish, a peremptory command for the English ship to halt. In what seemed like seconds, stunned Spanish sailors were grinning at the unexpected Spanish beauty from the cabin door. They took her over to the San Mateo. Let the captain of that great ship decide what to do with her.
Tuesday 2nd August. The stitching on Gresham's clothing was beginning to break now, his salt-encrusted garments starting to fall apart. For those who washed at all there was only sea water, and Gresham began to dream of cool, clear river water, and hot, steaming tubs where a man could rinse the taste of salt from his mouth once and for all. The ship was becoming foul now, the stench of shit wafting up from the bilges as they ate the half-rotten biscuits, the dried strips of what might have been fish, and ate the olives that seemed little more than a thin layer of dry flesh over the stone.
For the rest of his life, when the Armada was discussed, people would turn to Gresham and ask him to describe the battle. After all, he had sailed on the Armada, held a ringside seat on board the Spanish flagship. 'What was it like?' the men or the women would ask, waiting to be shocked. 'Chaos,' Gresham would answer. 'First boredom. Then confusion. Smoke, and noise, and rolling thunder. And chaos.'
Gresham supposed the basic situation was simple enough, though nothing felt clear in the days before the Armada fought through to Calais. The Spaniards kept to their half-moon formation, the growing number of English ships snapping at their heels. Wherever there was any action, when a Spanish ship fell behind or was threatened, or an English ship seemed to present a chance for the Spaniards to grapple and board it, there the Duke sent the San Martin.
'E's a brave bastard, I'll grant him that,' grunted Mannion grudgingly, as the Spanish flagship headed straight for a squadron of English vessels, their firepower dwarfing his.
'He's a leader,' said Gresham simply, 'and though he's not a sailor by nature he knows he has to lead from the front, and lead by example.'
There had been a rising tide of excitement on the deck the first time the San Martin had heeled over and headed towards the English. Gresham and Mannion were pushed and buffeted as the soldiers, left with nothing to do for weeks on end, not used to the frozen world of boredom that a sailing ship could be, now sensed that a job for them might be coming. Weapons were being checked, priming secured and slow-match lit from a linstock begged from the gun captains.
'He's got to grapple with the English,' said Gresham. 'It's his only hope of defeating them. Yet they won't let him get near them. They'll stand off and try to blow him to pieces.'
