'How can you talk about 'after this'? 'After this' is us swinging on the end of a rope. And choking slowly if Drake has his way.'
'Well, as my old captain used to say, where there's life there's hope.'
'Your old captain? The one who got burned alive by the Spanish?'
'Well, no one's perfect.'
There were fumbling noises in the dark, the sound of something rasping, a gasp of relief.
'Stupid buggers,' said Mannion. ‘Never did search us properly. I allus keeps this little knife strapped on me leg, high up near me crutch. It's a brave man who puts his 'ands there, I can tell you.'
Gresham did not dare to think of the prospect Soon Mannion's hands were feeling for him, finding his hands, untying the rope.
'At least this way we can piss in the corner and not wet ourselves. Or worse. Helps you keep your dignity, that does. Keep the rope in your hand. Wrap it round when they come. They'll not notice the difference. Half of 'em's knackered after the fight, and the other half looks half dead.'
Gresham found his interest stirring, against all the odds, against any objective valuation of their situation. 'I saw that. Yet the ship's hardly damaged, unlike what they did to the Spaniards.'
'I reckon as that poxed bugger in Lisbon did his bit, then. You know what happens as well as I do when a ball's not been cooled properly, or the mix ain't right. It blows to fragments when it leaves the barrel. But if the hull's in one piece, lot of the men ain't. Ship's fever,' said Mannion firmly. 'That, and I bet they're on short rations. Remember how long this lot'll have been at sea? Queen
Elizabeth, she'd rather have her tits cut off than give a ship more than a month's food and drink. And even if they get that much, you can bet half of it's rotten.'
'As much as the Spanish stores?' Gresham could sense Mannion's grimace as they remembered cask after cask being opened on the San Martin to have the men reeling away, gagging and swearing at the stench of its contents. 'Will they starve us? Will we get ship's fever?' asked Gresham, angry at his own fear.
'Precious little food comin' our way, that'd be my guess. Even less water, and sour beer if we're lucky. As for ship's fever, you tell me. 'Cept I reckon as 'ow if we was goin' to get it, we'd 'ave got it by now. A series of slight snaps came from the direction of Mannion's voice. Here, grab this.'
Gresham found two strips of what could only be dried meat thrust into his hands. 'Where did these come from?' he asked, incredulous.
'Always keep three or four strips sewed on the inside of my jacket. Easy, if you drill a hole through each end of the meat first. Eat it now. If they keep us short of water, you won't be able to manage it. Get the goodness in you now, while you can.'
And so the two condemned men sat in the bowels of the Revenge, in total darkness, munching companionably the cast iron of the meat, slowly, in order to guard their teeth.
It was Berwick that saved them. Desperately short of supplies, half his men sick and numbers dying by the day, Drake paused in his pursuit and sent boats into the town that had changed more hands than any other in the troubled history of England and Scotland. Their jailers flung back the door, and stood reeling gently before them, clearly half drunk. A loaf that had been fresh two days ago was thrown into the compartment, and a scuffed and wrinkled wineskin, lying on the planking. One of the sailors laughed, then reached into the room, wrinkling his nose, and placed two apples carefully in the gap between two planks.
'There!' he roared. 'On yer knees, if yer wants it! Go on with you! Let's see you grovel!'
Both sailors were reduced to paroxysms of laughter as Gresham and Mannion, hands apparently bound before them, tried to catch the apples in their teeth, scrambling for them on their knees. The sailors were still laughing as they slammed the door shut.
Gresham thought he had lost his sight when finally they were hauled on the deck of the Revenge. Blinking frantically, filthy, his beard as ragged as a wild man's from the hills, he could only think of Mannion's words. Dignity. It was all a man had, after all, when God, life and other men had taken everything else away. They were bundled, half carried into a boat, and thrown across a horse.
Gresham arched his back, newly-bound hands and legs meaning he could not stand as he landed badly on the ground. Swearing, cursing, the sailors picked him up, prepared to throw him back on to the horse.
‘I fought on the San Martin!' he managed to say, through cracked lips. He could vaguely discern the sailors now, clear shapes moving in a blur of browns, grey and blue. 'I stood up like a man as you threw everything you had at me, as did that man.' He motioned with his head, all he could move, at. where he thought Mannion might be. 'Does that merit riding through London with my arse as my highest point? Or have we earned the right to ride with our heads held high?'
There was a muttering among the men.
'We made no pleading with you at sea, did we? We fought to the end! Yet I plead with you now. Allow me my dignity, and my man here, as fighting men.'
They were decent men, as most are. They cut the bonds round his ankles, let him ride the mangy horse, kept his hands tied but thrust the reins into his hand, a secure tether leading to the man ahead. And so Gresham's ride began. Every bone in his body crying out for release, wanting nothing more than to slump across the horse, to give up. Somehow he stayed upright, seeing through the pain and agony of his body the sight he had most dreaded. He had ridden through London once before in sea-stained clothing, in triumph. Now he rode through as a prisoner.
When the Normans had conquered England five hundred years earlier they had built two symbols of power in London, the four towers and keep of the Tower of London, and St Paul's Cathedral, its mass sending an unequivocal signal that those in power in London held supremacy over men's souls as well as their bodies. But it was not to St Paul's that Gresham was headed. It was the Tower, whose bulk squatted over the Thames. First the drawbridge leading over the moat, coated with scum and full of noisome lumps that did not bear close examination, to the Lion Tower. Then over the wooden planking, shouted words. A sharp left turn, under the Lion Tower, across the moat again and the second drawbridge. The two round, squat forms of the Middle Tower stood in their way. More shouted instructions, a rattling of chains, and they lurched forward again. Yet another drawbridge, and then the taller, round form of the Byward Tower. Under its rusting portcullis. Into prison, with three vast towers and their gates blocking their route to freedom. To prison? No. Worse than that. Bundled off his horse, into the White Tower itself, down damp, stone stairs, down and seemingly ever down. Flickering torches in rusted iron sconces hung on the walls. A huge, heavy door, black iron hinges set deep into the wall, flung back.
The rack.
They used to show it to prisoners, knowing that even the sight of it would send them into paroxysms, make them willing to sign whatever was needed, welcome the clean simplicity of the axe. Anything except the torture of the rack. It was a simple enough structure, crude planks and timbers making up for what might seem little more than a giant's bed. Except this bed had ropes at either end, ropes connected to wicked cogs and wheels and handles that turned. And how those handles turned. With the man strapped to the ropes, those handles, cogs and wheels could coax a man's body to extremities of pain no person was capable of imagining, drag his muscles and sinews into one long agony that burned and fried the soul of a man as if it were turning on a spit above a roaring flame. No man walked from the rack. He might collapse off it, if he was lucky and the final cog had not been turned, his mind seared and horrified by the impact of pain as much as his ravished body had been, never to walk again and to spend what little remained of his life as a discarded, crumpled heap thrown into a corner. All would choose death rather than the rack. Its final cruelty was to deny men even that solace.
Gresham had no power to resist as he was laid on the rough planks, stained with something foul that could once have vented from a human being. He felt the ropes clutch his wrists and ankles, smelt the corrupt breath of the grinning jailer, saw the arched stone ceiling flicker in the dim light of the torches, felt his grip on consciousness loosening, knew that the first sharp stab of appalling pain would bring him back to this world.
And from out of the gloom of the Tower, a vision came to him. Not of Christ, nor even of the Devil. A vision of a man. The Duke of Medina Sidonia.
When all else fails, and all seems dark and bleak, it is not die judgement of the world I believe will matter to me when I pass into the vale of death. The judgement that must matter most to me, the crucial, the most scrupulous, the testing judgement must stand as my own judgement on myself.
Was Henry Gresham to die here on this foul contraption, venting his own piss and shit as he shrieked what his interrogators wished to hear? Die before his time, die without issue, die as a traitor to England, reviled for ever more, if even he was remembered? Could a man die with dignity on the rack?
