Every man holds his breath. For a long moment nothing happens.
“Is it him? Is it Hamilton?”
Beale is at the window, peering out around its edge.
“A ship,” he says.
“Stay back, Your Majesty!” the captain of the guard instructs.
“No,” Beale says. “Look.”
He gestures and Walsingham joins him.
On the river: a ship, a smudge of smoke over her bows, her sail dipping to join the gunshot in salute.
“What ship is that?” Smith asks.
He squints for his eyes are becoming bad.
“She’s a fluyt,” Beale tells them. “A Sea Beggar, but my God! Look at her. She’s knocked about.”
“Seen better days,” Walsingham agrees.
The ship is very low in the water. Her mast is jury-rigged and her mainsail ragged and smoke smutted.
“What is she doing here?” Smith asks.
Dutch ships such as this are recently forbidden in English waters.
Walsingham turns to Beale.
“Let us see what her captain has to say before we send to have her impounded,” Walsingham tells him.
The Queen steps from behind her human shield, thanking those who would save her life, and she demands the captain of the vessel is brought to her presence. Her color is up. An attempt on your life will do that for you, Walsingham supposes.
After that it is impossible to settle down.
Burghley sends for more wine, and there is the suspicion that Stanley has lost control of his bladder, so the Queen wants air, and they follow her out to the shade of a cedar tree in the palace’s formal garden, where ice is brought, along with the first of this year’s apples from Kent, and the captain of the Dutch ship.
“Is this really necessary, Walsingham?” Smith demands. “Really? A Sea Beggar before our Queen?”
But the Queen is intrigued. Smith reluctantly sends his secretary, amiable Nicholas Gethyn, to fetch the man.
Gethyn! In among the comings and goings, Walsingham remembers that when last they met Gethyn had something to tell him but was too diffident to spit it out. He was going to ask Beale to look into it. He makes a note of it.
He wonders if his wife has given birth to that eleventh child yet? Or is it about Ireland? Walsingham has already heard that Smith’s venture to colonize the north with Englishmen is not going according to plan. It has cost many lives and much money and will continue to do so for how long? Years, at least.
When Gethyn returns, coughing with a kerchief to his lips, he is escorting the Dutch sea captain, Meneer Willem van Treslong. Unlike his ship, Van Treslong looks very fine, as if he has had time to visit a tailor, or planned for such an entrance. He wears a light almost silvery doublet and airy rose-colored breeches quite as large as any of them have ever seen.
“He might have used them to patch his sails,” Beale jokes.
Up close his collar and cuffs are bright and starchy white, but his eyes are rimmed red and made Walsingham want to rub his own.
Van Treslong bows very low when he makes his obeisance to the Queen.
She greets him with some familiarity, and ambiguity, for it was she who had evicted him and his kind from English ports to placate King Philip of Spain, whose life they made a misery. It was a lesson in being careful of what you wish for, though, because the Dutchmen sailed across the North Sea to seize from the Spanish their ports of Den Brill and of Flushing, from where they still sail to harass their erstwhile masters.
“I dare say King Philip wishes you were still our guests?” The Queen laughs, removing her hand from Van Treslong’s grip.
“What is the meaning of this, Master van Treslong?” Smith demands. He is very discontented, for Van Treslong is everything he is not: small, dapper, and Dutch, while Smith is baggy, saggy, and English. He further remains furious that the Dutchman’s arrival has allowed Walsingham to wriggle from the Queen’s hook.
“Ach, Your Majesty, gents, lords, sirs, I bring news,” Van Treslong says. He speaks wonderfully mangled English, slicing across his words as if he held in his mouth a cupful of wet pebbles. “I have just sailed the Western Approaches, from La Rochelle, and I tell you we sighted your Spanish fleet. Quesada’s fleet. That sailed out of Bilbao this last month.”
“You saw her?” Burghley asks.
“Sure. Fifteen ships, sir, galleons and carracks, all well-armed. As you see.”
He indicates his battered ship.
“She caught us off Ushant three days ago. Wind died, then veered. Long story. Anyway. We get away by skin of teeth. Two dead, including Piet the pilot. We think, my God, us next, but then, before we reach Guernsey, they veer southeast, and leave us to beat northeast. Prayers answered I’m saying. I think, sure, they putting into Saint-Malo. Maybe not enough fodder for horses, eh?
“So we wait off Alderney. Repairs, you know. Cut the mast away, put in a spar, and got the rudder answering. But always, with eyes out, you know?”
He points at his eyes.
“Two days. No sign of fleet, day or night. We start to think maybe she slipped by in the dark? But then, third day, we see her. Sailing…”
He holds up a finger and smiles.
“… west!”
The others—Smith, Leicester, Burghley—are confused, but Walsingham almost laughs. West! West! He feels a great weight lifted. Suddenly he can hear birds sing.
“West,” he repeats.
It means Quesada is heading out into the Atlantic.
The Privy councillors look at one another in confusion.
“Then we are—saved?” Burghley wonders with a dawning smile.
“For the moment,” Leicester cautions.
Derby, Walsingham notes, very nearly crosses himself before remembering where he is.
“Why?” Smith wants to know. “Why has he sailed west?”
“Why?” Van Treslong repeats. “How should I know?”
“Ireland?” Burghley wonders.
That is
