However hard one tried, water always seemed to get into the lungs in escapades like this. 'It wouldn't do to be seen hatless in company.'
'Quite,' said the Earl, as if the conversation they were having was the most normal thing on earth. 'Now you must tell me, how did you train those men of yours to be so superb? Outstanding. Quite outstanding. If Philip Sidney had had men like that around him he'd be alive now. You must tell me how you did it.'
As the realisation of the stupidity of it all hit him, Gresham could no longer restrain his laughter. It burst out of him.
And to his surprise, Gresham heard Essex join him in the laughter. After all, life was a farce, wasn't it? A bad joke played on humanity, their punishment for feeling pain? Was Essex the only other man in the world who saw how ludicrous it all was?
Gresham allowed himself to be helped to his feet. The laughter subsiding, he looked at Essex. 'Forgive me, my Lord,' he said, with a formal slight bow. 'You are most gracious, and I am very silly.'
Essex looked at him, something glancing behind his eyes, lighting them up. 'Fuck off, mister,' he said.
And both men collapsed into yet more uncontrollable laughter.
Gresham was leaving visible puddles behind him as he walked with Essex into the courtyard of the Palace. Mannion followed a dutiful few paces behind, clucking like an ancient hen over a lost chick. He made it clear, without saying a word, what he thought about people who dived in to rescue a child no one would miss. From behind came various gurgling and sloshing sounds, and a torrent of swearing. Gresham glanced over his shoulder. An incandescent Gelli Meyrick was being hauled out of the river, his extravagant dress reduced to a sodden sponge, ruined.
'Shouldn't we wait for your… secretary, my Lord?' asked Gresham.
'He will look after himself,' said Essex carelessly. 'Gelli is very good at that. It's actually what he does best. If he needs me for anything, you can be sure he'll ask.'
They walked on in silence for a few moments, past the guards at the water gate, who drew their pikes up to attention in a salute to Essex. He pretended not to notice. Gresham suspected that had they not shown him this sign of respect they would have had the roasting of their lives. That was the trouble with real aristocracy, thought Mannion: treat you like a brother one minute then have you up for being too familiar.
'I've a room here in the Palace, and some old rags,' said Essex airily. 'I'm taller than you, but they'll fit you passably, I imagine, and I'm sure we can rustle up a towel.'
They walked on for a few more yards. Only Gresham would have noticed the slightest of changes in Essex's step.
'An urchin,' said Essex casually. 'A vagabond of no worth, destined to grow up a thief or a villain, or worse. Why did you risk yourself for him?'
Gresham's tone was the only dry thing about him.
'He is of no worth to us. I suspect to himself he is worth quite a lot.'
Very few people other than the Queen's servants kept a room in the Palace, particularly a large, beamed room with a generous fireplace and splendid views out over the river. Even fewer kept a stock of clothing that would have doubled the wardrobe of many a gentleman.
'Just in case, Gresham, just in case,' said Essex, as a servant brought garment after garment out of chests. Another servant laid a fire and lit it. The cold was starting to get to Gresham now, and he was fighting his body's desire to shiver. He found himself welcoming the heat of the fire.
Just in case of what, thought Gresham? In case he found himself with an unexpected overnight stay at the Palace in the old Queen's bed? Essex's arrogance, his assumption of superiority, was supreme, yet at the same time Gresham felt himself strangely unaffected by it. He was… amused, that was it. Amused, rather than offended. Why? Perhaps it was because the arrogance was so much on the surface, so understood by its owner as to make it no threat. With Essex, what you saw was what you got. Except by all accounts what you saw and what you got could change several times in the space of one hour. However, he was all conciliation and concern now, though never mentioning once that the reason for Gresham's sodden state was the arrogance of his boat master in seeking to claim a berth that clearly was not his.
If life as a campaigning soldier had taught Gresham anything it was to disavow his culture's horror of nakedness. He stripped down to his shirt, and then pulled that long, dripping garment over his head, allowing Mannion for once to towel him rather more vigorously than was strictly necessary, still cross at his master for taking what he deemed unnecessary risk. Essex had not quibbled when Mannion had made to enter the room. He glanced at Gresham's naked body, not lasciviously, but rather in the manner of a Welsh farmer looking over a bull he was about to buy. Did he notice the slight discoloration down one side of Gresham's whole body, the slightly paler tinge of the skin where a stupid soldier's carelessness had ignited the powder store? Only Mannion knew why there were so few oil lamps in any room Henry Gresham had power over. Candles were likely to snuff out if they were knocked over; a knocked oil lamp spread its flame. If he did notice, Essex said nothing, and nor did he comment on the various scars that adorned almost every part of Gresham's body. Instead, he looked almost dreamily out over the Thames.
'You'll join me at the play? Sit with me? It's the least I can do
… particularly if you tell me how you trained those men of yours. Superb! Quite superb! Put my lot totally in the shade.'
Something in Essex's voice told Gresham that the men on the Essex barge would be made to pay for what had happened out there on the river.
Gresham was dried off now, attending to the intricacies of unfamiliar buttons and fastenings. The doublet he had chosen was one of the most reserved in the Earl's spare wardrobe, but still had double-slashed sleeves and an immensely ornate neckline. The Earl wore his doublets cut high, probably to amplify the cut of his legs, and while Gresham thought it made Essex look faintly ridiculous, like a stork, it suited Gresham remarkably well. On the Earl there was the merest hint that the upper thighs were perhaps just a little too… fat? Perhaps he should ask Essex if he could keep the outfit…
I’d take them out on the river and tell them that we would stay there until they got whatever manoeuvre it was we were practising right. We went out at high tide to some mud flats. If they kept on getting it wrong, we'd get stranded on the mud flats as the tide went out, and they'd have to wait till the next high tide to get home.'
'And did you ever have to wait?'
'Oh, yes. Twice, as it happened. The first time they didn't believe me. The second time they were so desperate to get it right they were all fingers and thumbs. Not a bad training for a real fight.'
Gresham had seen outwardly well trained men panic under the pressure of battle, and load two powder charges into a musket, or ram two balls down the barrel. The effect in each case was lethal, the barrel peeling back and the marksmen blinded by splinters and burning powder. Once he had seen a man fire his musket with the ramrod still in the barrel. For some reason the gun had held firm, and in crazy slow motion the wooden pole described a lazy arc through the air and caught an enemy horseman a smashing blow neatly on the chin, where it peeked out from under his helmet, and threw him to the ground. It was a shot the man could never have made if he had planned it. It had turned the skirmish their way, as it happened. They had been outnumbered and losing their will to fight, and the ludicrous sight of the flying ramrod had persuaded them that someone up there must be on their side.
'Did you arrange for yourself to be picked up? Surely you didn't stay marooned?' asked Essex, leaning forward now, his interest really engaged.
'I couldn't leave, even if I'd wanted to. There was no way off those mud flats — you'd sink seven, eight feet if you tried to step on them. No one could leave the boat, and no one could join it. Tides take a long time to turn, I can tell you.'
'Food and water?' *No. None was allowed.' *Not even for you? The commander?'
'Especially not for me. I was making a simple point. If a vessel gets boarded on the river, it's not because those boarding it want to say hello. They're not going to leave any witnesses alive, particularly the commander. If the men fail, the captain dies as well. It's a simple lesson.'
'Didn't discipline suffer? You can have no secrets crammed onto a small boat with eight men.'
'Sometimes four, sometimes eight, sometimes sixteen,' said Gresham. 'Did it suffer? I don't know. I certainly wasn't going to shout at them for seven or eight hours. The punishment was having to be stuck there. So I played dice half the time, and then kept sane writing sonnets for the rest of it. Bloody difficult, sonnets.'
