The tension was tangible. Every sailor on board could sense the tide and wind, and even now, well before sunset, they were looking out to sea and towards the English. That tension had spread to the soldiers, dispirited now, convinced that they had no role in this campaign except to die. For the first time that morning Gresham had seen spots of rust on three or four breastplates, spots that the soldiers concerned had not ferociously rubbed away at the first sign. Somehow everyone on board San Martin was moving more slowly, as if there was a deep ache in their bones and a heavy pack on their back. Gresham had caught one of the gentleman adventurers, a young, fresh-faced lad no more than seventeen years old, standing by the bow, crying. He had turned, horrified, determined to hide his face. Gresham had put out a hand, then dropped it helplessly to his side.
'It's a cruel thing, facing your death, when you're that age,' said Mannion drily. Over these past few weeks his master had taken on an extraordinary strength and inner resilience. Only a few years in age separated the young Englishman and the young Spaniard before them, yet there was a decade between them in experience.
Devil ships. That was the fear of every sailor on board the Armada. Three years earlier the Dutch had sent specially-constructed fireships down the Scheldt to try and lift the Spanish siege of Antwerp. Three tons of explosive had been crammed into brick chambers on board. One had fetched up against a fortified bridge, killed eight hundred men in the explosion and inflicted horrific injuries on thousands of others. Of the bridge nothing remained. Federigo Gambelli was the name of the designer. He was known to be in London, working for the English.
'Your job's done, now, you know that, don't you?' Mannion prompted. 'This 'as gone beyond advice. If our lads… sorry, if the English do their jobs, this lot's going to be burned to buggery, whether you want it to 'appen or not. You ain't going to influence anything any more. That girl's waiting for you in Calais, more as like, and half the girls in England are waiting for me in London…'
'So why not swim ashore?' Gresham finished Mannion's words. 'You go,' he said suddenly. He reached out, grasped Mannion's arm, looked into his eyes. 'This has never been your fight, only mine. You've done enough, lost enough. Go on. Leave me. It's only right.'
'Why ain't you coming?'
'Because… because I can't.' Gresham knew how feeble it sounded. 'I respect this man, respect him more than any other I've ever met. They'll damn him for what happened here, yet I've seen him, talked to him. I think he knew where it would all end, knew he would die all along, yet he still did what he was asked to do, still carried on fighting for his cause against all the odds, knowing it was hopeless. It's not just courage, it's true dignity.'
'So?' said Mannion. 'Write him a letter, get all that off your chest. And then jump overboard.'
'I just can't do it,' said Greshanv 'I have to be here at the end. I want to stay with him.'
'Sleep now,' said Mannion. 'I'll get us up when it's dark. Then we'll slip back and get as close to the stem as we can.'
'What?' said Gresham, startled.
'Not going to get much bloody sleep tonight, are we? And odds on a fireship hits the bow first. Though if it's one of those bloody Devil ships it won't make a blind bit of difference.'
'Then you're staying,' said Gresham. This tears-in-his-eyes business had just got to stop, he said to himself, not realising just how deep down into his reserves of mental energy the past months had forced him to dig and how exhausted he was.
'Course I'm bloody staying, aren't 1?' said Mannion. 'There's got to be somebody with brains looking after you.'
For all that the lead-up to Calais was largely a confused blur in his memory, Gresham remembered that night and day for the rest of his life, could recreate its every moment with total vividness. As he remembered another day. A bald, decapitated head rolling across a hastily erected scaffold, the comic expression of startlement on the executioner's face as he held not a head but a red wig in his hand. And now, thousands of men gripped by a superb discipline fighting a lost cause to the bitter end, fighting a cause that no man should have asked them to sail on, a cause so profligate of human life as to make a mockery of a kind creation. Fighting with simple courage. Why in the depths of his and this life's idiocy did mankind reveal itself as so brave and wonderful?
The flickering of distant fire came at midnight. The sudden, violent ringing of bells, first from one ship then another, until the whole of Calais roads seemed like a vast Cathedral tower. The pinnaces and longboats the Duke had stationed to guard his fleet leaped forward, grapnels ready. Two of the outermost fireships, yards already outlined in a dull red flame, were caught and hauled aside, but the combination of wind and tide was too much, sending the ships at ferocious speed down on to the Spanish ships. One pinnace was engulfed in flames itself, a longboat smashed to pieces as the flaming monster bore down and through it. Then from the lead ship a roar of cannons shattered the anchorage, a series of massive explosions. Devil ships!
The English would say that the Armada panicked. Yet Gresham saw no panic. A hundred and thirty ships cut their cable, left their anchors rotting in the Calais roadstead, and all evaded the fireships, made it out of harbour. The discipline was superb. Hardly a man spoke on the San Martin as the men clambering oh the yards dropped the great sails, saw them fill with wind. The soldiers were lining the sides in five minutes of the alarm bell sounding. There was no collision, no crashing of great timbers hurled into each other.
'God help us!' said Mannion at dawn the next morning, in the last period of sanity either men would have for twenty-four hours. It was not an expletive, but rather a genuine plea for help. The San Martin had cut her cable, dodged two fireships with relative ease and come round, dropping her spare anchor less than a mile from where she had started. And she was virtually alone in the anchorage.
The San Juan, San Marcos, San Felipe and San Mateo were within hailing range. The San Lorenzo, flagship of the galleasses, was crawling inshore, her rudder destroyed by fouling on a discarded cable, her mainmast broken. And that was all. The remainder of the Armada was scattered out at sea, heading north before the driving wind.
'Anchors,' said Mannion. 'I'll bet most of 'em ain't carrying spare anchors. Most used-two, even three to keep themselves steady here.' There was shifting sand on the bottom, and fierce currents. 'Only one spare anchor left, you 'as to stand out to sea. No point comin' back in here and trying to hold fast in a strong wind with only one anchor.'
A squadron of English ships broke off from the main body, heading inshore after the wounded galleass.
'Ain't nothing 'e can do for 'er,' said Mannion, 'don't care how brave he is.'
Orders were shouted, and the San Martin started to pull out of the roadstead.
'He's going to put himself and these few ships between the rest of the Armada and the English,' said Gresham. 'Hope the other ships can get back and reform in the time he buys them. It's madness. We're outnumbered ten, twenty to one. We'll be blown to pieces.'
'Yep,' said Mannion. 'Want to watch it from the deck, or get below and try to hide?'
The leading English ships, twenty of them led by a fine galleon, were on a converging course with the San Martin and her four companions. The leading English ship made a minor alteration of course, heading straight towards the San Martin.
The artillery captains, one for each side of the gun deck, yelled their orders. The San Martin was perilously short of shot and powder. No shot could be wasted. 'Fire only at point blank range! Hold your fire.' The musketeers on the deck and the arquebusiers aloft braced themselves against deck and yard, many surreptitiously crossing themselves as the enemy ship boiled towards them, crashing the waves aside from her bow in her headlong rush to destroy.
'This is new,' said Mannion, sucking on the inevitable tooth.
The lead English ship was holding her fire, coming within cannon then musket range, coming on even further, until within pistol range, fifty or a hundred yards. Then her bow guns flared out, and she luffed up to present her broadside to the San Martin. The two ships were so close that Gresham felt he could reach out and touch the men on the opposite deck, smell the ship and the fear and tension of its men. And there, on the quarterdeck, strutted the familiar figure, Gresham's nemesis, Sir Francis Drake. Yelling, red-faced at his gunners, forcing them to hold fire until the very last minute by sheer force of will alone. Drake looked round, and for a single brief second their eyes came together.
At this range the explosion of the cannon was felt as a pressure and a hot breath, as well as a gout of black smoke, red and yellow flame. Drake's broadside shattered into the side of the San Martin, its impact at such close range unlike any other assault the brave vessel had received. The ship actually shuddered in her tracks. There were howls and screams from below. The shot had cut through the thick timbers of the main hull, sending a savage spray of splinters through the gun decks, upending a great gun before it could be fired, half its men crushed and
