One evening at supper Thomas Harlot said to him: “I wish you had let me see the manuscript in some early form, Walter. It’s ill to me that these statements should have been allowed to pass into the printed book, that you, the apostle of scepticism, should seem to ask your countrymen to believe such wonders.”
“My countrymen, Tom, are as obtuse as you. Read the book again. I am saying these are the stories I have heard from the Indians. Whether they are true is another matter, but often such legends have a solid substance of fact behind them. Further visits will provide opportunity to prove or disprove them.”
“Then I think it would have been a strategy to have made this crystal clear … But these oysters growing on trees. You saw them?”
“If Laurence were here he would confirm it. Ask him when he returns.”
Laurence Keymis had been away three weeks in Portsmouth. Sir Walter had been able to fit out one good and seaworthy vessel. Keymis at least was to go. If Sir Walter went with him then he turned his back on the great Essex and Howard enterprise. Now was the last moment of choice.
“For my part,” said Lady Ralegh the evening Keymis returned, “I as little welcome one adventure as th’ other. Each is fraught with separation and loneliness for me. Each is fraught with danger and hardship for you. Here we’re happy. Let younger men bear the edge of these enterprises.”
“Oh, younger men,” said Sir Walter restlessly. “ Yes, that’s true. Yet, by the living God, at 44 a man still has something to give. And, maybe, less to lose—though I doubt that. Each year I find I’ve more to part from. You weave your silken ties, Bess.”
“I wish they were stronger.” Her discerning eyes followed him as he got up and stood scowling into the fire.
“Well, the choice tonight is not neither but either. And, Laurence, the choice is made. You must go alone.”
Keyrnis’s spectacles flashed in the firelight. “ So be it.”
“If my expedition with Essex is a success, I shall stand a chance of sending a fine fleet to Guiana next year. You must go as my envoy, Laurence. Tell them I shall be with them soon!”
Chapter Two
A day after Sir Walter’s decision he said brusquely to me: “Well, Killigrew, you see how the wind blows for me. For you there are three choices. One, you go home, two, you stay here, three, you go with Keymis. Tell me within the week which it is to be.”
“If I stay with you, sir,” I said, “what of this seafaring adventure? Is there a place for me on that?”
He smiled thinly. “ It’s early days to promise but I should have thought it likely. If the worst befell I could take you as a personal attendant.”
“I should be happy to be that.”
“There may be bitter fighting. I can’t tell you more.”
“That I’ll be glad to see.”
He inclined his head. “Yes, well, then, is that your choice? You’d be advised to sleep on it.”
“No, sir, that’s my choice.”
It must have been some time that week that a first letter came from Belemus.
“Dear Witless (it ran),
All goes badly here as usual. In a world of constant rain and wind we keep warm and fed and allow our vassals to venture out into the half light and the mud of winter, but I wonder often how long the roof will be above our heads.
Your father departed at the break of the year for Westminster, but I learn at his first arrival in London he was pounced upon by some of his creditors and thrown into the Fleet. He was there two weeks, but from his last letter it seems that a friendly hand at Court has got him released and if nothing more has befallen he is now on his way home. Your grandmother, dear Lady K., has taken on a new chapter of life and directly she heard of your father’s plight left for London with her personal maid in tow. She looked frail enough to sink in the first gale, but I seriously believe it would take a tidal wave. Anyway they are likely to have passed each other en route or collided ere this.
John’s marriage with little chimney-smoking Jane comes no nearer, and, ever as a mirage, retreats as we advance towards it. Your Meg bites excessively at everyone, including poor Dick. I believe that in everyone on whom she sharpens her teeth she sees the image of you.
Another old friend of yours. Captain Elliot, put in to the Haven last month and came ashore. For a pirate he is well informed, bringing us news that King Philip is ill with gout and ulcers and a double tertian fever. I hope the news is in no way exaggerated. His usual mate Love was with him and I learned from him the way they have been making money of late: they have been buying guns and powder in Hampshire stolen by the profiteers who are arming and supplying our ships; then they have taken them to Spain and sold them to the Spanish at a fine profit. So if another Armada sails it is like to be partly provisioned with English cannon and shot. Neat, is it not?
Your father was no sooner out of the house than who should pop up but your witch friend from Truro trailing prophecies and little spiders wherever she strode. She appears to have put a spell on Mrs Killigrew who sweats more night fevers over her two youngest than over all earlier hatchings. Though I wish no hurt to Footmarker I like not so much this affection that has grown between her and Mrs Killigrew, for it smacks of the evil eye. Footmarker sees a doom on the house, and your stepmother, poor wight, cosseted by debts as high as her pink ears, is hardly to be blamed if she believes there’s a truth to it. It is not a healthy friendship …”
On the last day of January Laurence Keymis sailed. The night before he left for Portsmouth there was a party at Sherborne, but Sir Walter was in no mood for it and went early to bed. He commanded me to bring him up some books, and as I was collecting them Laurence Keymis came to me and gave me a note that I was to deliver with the books. The note was open and was a short poem of farewell.
“Put it on the top book, Killigrew. He’ll see it there.”
“Yes, Mr Keymis.”
The other took off his spectacles and polished them. When he did this he always frowned as if angry, but tonight I could see he was full of emotion, and his eyes had tears in them.
“I hope you realise,” he said suddenly, “ your privilege in serving such a man.”
I muttered something and he put on his spectacles, looping them energetically round his ears.
“Such men as he are born once in a century. The warriors who are thinkers. The scholars with the courage to fight. In times of peace they rot, presumed upon by lesser men who fear their brilliance and their superiority. They are banished into obscurity by their fellows or their monarchs, pursued by envy and spite or ignored and derided. Only in need and in time of great peril do other men turn to them. L-Look at your master! A man chock full of faults—I who know him so well would not deny one of them—but also a man so full of talents and inspiration that he is like one with a quiverful of arrows, each sharp and true. A born leader, the greatest living strategist, a poet, a philosopher, an essayist, an orator, a skilled musician, a s-soldier, an explorer, a founder of new England’s overseas. The crowds hate him, the leaders of the country ignore him, the Queen banishes him. But we who know him—we who know him, Killigrew, live to serve him!”
I thought as I climbed the spiral staircase that Laurence Keymis would never have spoken to me so freely if he had not been full of wine.
After Keymis had left Sir Walter remained in very low spirits. He felt, he said, that he had turned away from his true mission in search of a more immediate prize and a less enduring glory. Then, as often, he fell sick. He was certain he had a stone in the kidney, and sent for works on anatomy and surgery to see how it might be removed. Bess Ralegh waited on him personally, and on the fifth day he was suddenly well again and writing a long urgent personal message to Essex on the recruitment of sailors for the fleet.
This done he turned to another interest. While ill he had had two young dogs for company in his room and he had been observing their behaviour.
“Animals,” he desired me to write down, “of a certainty can communicate one
with another and have reasoning powers of a lower but similar order to man. Their senses, however, are more highly refined. Therefore I cannot see that my perception or any man’s perception is better than theirs. In so far as perceiving is a matter of sense—and what else can it be—then I can advance no reason why my apprehension of reality is preferable to theirs. If our perceptions differ, they may be in truth and I in error just as well as I in truth and they err. If I must be believed before them, then my perception must be proven truer than theirs. Without proof none should be asked to believe it. Even if by demonstration it seem to be true, then will it be a question whether it be indeed as it seems to be. To allege as a certain proof what of its nature must be uncertain is absurd!”
That night none of his favourite companions was in the house and he had only Lady Ralegh and me and Victor Hardwicke on whom to sharpen this argument. He paced up and down in his black satin suit, discoursing at us and expecting us to challenge his reasoning while we sat for the most part helplessly by.
It must have been about the fifth or sixth of February, and a gale was howling outside. A log fire burned in the hearth and half up the chimney. The two dogs, the object of his argument, lay well fed and dog-sleeping before the fire, their ears twitching once and again as their master passed, but giving no other sign of superior perception. The firelight flickered on Lady Ralegh’s composed face, on her dark velvet robe with its tufted sleeves and long hanging cuffs, and the close gown of white satin under it, on the chains of pearls at neck and waist.
I wondered if this gale would be blowing round the Cornish coast and whether my father was safe home after his experience. His creditors were becoming more desperate. So therefore would he. I wondered what it was like in Paul and where the Reverend and Mrs Reskymer were sleeping. Perhaps it would be cold and the Reverend Reskymer would say “Come into my bed—this way we shall keep each other warm.” And Sue would slip out shivering in the dark, her hair like seaweed, her face like a water lily drifting in the dark, her night shift a reflection of the moon. So she would lie beside him, soft and slim and straight and he would put out his hand and stroke her thighs …
“Well, Maugan,” said Sir Walter, stopping in front of me. “ What have you to say to that?”
“Sir,” I said, “ I believe my apprehension of reality to be preferable to any, for I have not heard a word of what you’ve said.”
Lady Ralegh drew in a sharp breath at this insolence, which was greater than at first appeared, but Sir Walter after looking surprised suddenly laughed. He seldom laughed.
“You assert that my philosophical speculations have no validity outside the brain that breeds them? A stinging rebuke! Well, it’s true that intellectual speculation may run ahead of reason. But the reason of man in itself ends and dissolves like a river running into a sea. What do you advocate—an end of curiosity? You at your age? Between birth and death, Maugan, there’s little time. What there is is not entirely wasted if it strikes a balance between questioning and faith.”
That week he rode again to London and supped in the company of Lord Admiral Howard, Lord Thomas Howard, the Earl of Essex, Sir Francis Vere, Sir Conyers Clifford and our cousin Sir George Carew. It must have been a strange meal for I knew that Sir Walter was on bitter terms with Lord Thomas Howard and he seldom saw eye to eye with Sir Francis Vere. However, he came back a Rear Admiral for the purposes of the expedition. The Queen still would not see him, but her consent to this appointment showed that his disgrace was less deep than it had been.
In the succeeding weeks the whole house was caught up in feverish preparations. Sir Walter was more often in London than at Sherborne, but without warning he would suddenly arrive, mud spattered, out of temper and on edge, sometimes alone, sometimes accompanied, but always turning the house upside down.
With his second-in-command, a grizzled sailor of forty called Robert Crosse, who was Francis Drake’s favourite captain, Sir Walter had been given the responsibility of enlisting or otherwise obtaining crews for such of the ships as were to commission in the Thames. Most of these ships were transports and victuallers; they were scattered from Gravesend to Greenwich, and some were in poor shape and needed serious repair.
In March Cecil received secret confirmation of Drake’s capture of Havana, and he withdrew his opposition to the expedition, though he warned the Privy Council that a serious obstacle was appearing from another quarter. King Henry of France was bankrupt and weary of war. In order to keep him in the field at all he needed support. He needed, he said, an English army.
What was worse he now knew it existed. Massing some 10,000 strong under its finest commander, it was preparing to embark in English warships on one of the biggest enterprises ever to leave England—not, however, to succour the French but to aid some secret adventure farther afield, perhaps to defend Ireland or to attack Blavet. This was not good enough. Though Henry distrusted English intentions to the extent that he would not grant them the port of Calais, which he held with a strong garrison, he wanted their troops inland at this crucial time. Meantime he edged nearer and nearer to that ominous peace treaty with Spain. The only way of preventing such a treaty might be to accede to his demands.
Sir Walter was in a fever lest the whole expedition should now come to nothing. The sixteenth of March was a Saturday and the day, I learned, when Sir Robert Cecil was drafting the Generals’ commissions which would give them authority to take this formidable fleet and army away from English shores. The Queen, said Sir Walter at dinner, though the most gifted and the most brilliant woman he had ever met, was much given to indecision. Now of all times she might be excused for hesitation in the signing. On her choice might hang the future of the world.
When home he would usually find respite from his activity in London by other activities of body or mind, all undertaken with the zest of youth; but now he drooped. One of his sick spells loomed. It rained all Sunday morning, and after divine service he retired to his study and sent word that he would take a light dinner in his room. Arthur Throgmorton and Carew Ralegh played at backgammon all afternoon, a game that was never now brought out in Sir Walter’s presence. Once he had played it largely, but since his friend Christopher Marlowe had been killed in a duel originating at the board he would not have the draughtsmen near him.
The rest of us spent time in the stables admiring a white gelding Sir Walter had bought, and a sorrel mare which had foaled last week. Little Wat, having received no encouragement from his father, toddled with us. Lady Ralegh stayed indoors and helped Mrs Hull, her sempstress, line a stomacher with grey cony’s skin.
Ralegh’s depression bred restlessness in me, and I had a return of the acute malaise of last August. I felt that wherever I went I was an animal in a cage—and the cage was my love and desire for Sue Reskymer. Somewhere in the world there must be escape for me. Before supper I went a walk with Victor Hardwicke but strode along so violently that he ran out of breath and had to call a halt.
“One would think the devil was after you, friend. Remember my age and infirmity!”
I stared at him moodily. “ If you cannot walk a mile across a park you’re not in good state for a campaign at sea, Victor.”
“Oh, pooh to that.” He coughed. “Who ever had to walk a mile on a battleship? That is the beauty of the form; superior to soldiering; one is conveyed into the fight. Much to be preferred.”
“There may be soldiering in this too. De Vere’s men are not coming with us for the pleasures of a sea voyage.”
“Well, then, they can fight on land. I’m to keep a diary of the trip. Tell me I shall need breath to write! That’s what Cousin Bess would argue!”
“Who? Lady Ralegh? She doesn’t want you to go?”
“No, she’s superstitious. She’s a mixture, is Bess. To her Sir Walter can do no wrong; but all the same she considers him unlucky. She says on each voyage he loses some splendid youth. John Grenville last time. Who this? She doesn’t want it to be me.”
“I wouldn’t call y
ou a splendid youth,” I said.
“Agreed! The dangers which threaten don’t threaten me. Tell her so.” He linked his arm in mine. “ Let us walk back at a more endurable pace.”
That evening we supped frugally. Sir Walter came down but his presence cast a blight on the table. At the end of the meal he said, well, tomorrow, unless he heard to the contrary, he would return to the Thames-side to continue his recruitment. It was, he said despondently, a task like gathering sand in the fingers; no man had stomach for the job; as fast as crews were brought together they slipped through his grasp and ran away.
He was about to go upstairs to his study when Bell, one of the servants, brought in a dripping rider with a message from Essex. It contained only four words. “Her Majesty has signed.”
In the melancholic mood that still hung over me—like some miasma I had caught from my master—I watched and listened to the rejoicing and the toasts that followed without ever becoming a part of them. Much wine was drunk and everyone was joyful. Victor Hardwicke brought out his lute and they sang songs. The victory might already have been won. In fact this was only the preliminary victory—over a monarch’s indecision. Whatever the project, I had already seen enough of the Spanish to know that the expedition was not likely to bring an easy or a cheap victory. Sir Walter himself must have known that, for he it was who was constantly warning his countrymen against underestimating the strength and courage and determination of the enemy. Yet tonight he was transformed and as happy at the news, it seemed, as any heedless boy.
All thought of retiring to his study was gone, and instead maps were brought and he watched smiling while the others pored over the charts and speculated as to the destination of the fleet. Their first objective, he said, would be to cover Drake’s and Hawkins’s triumphant return. Afterwards they would sail to seek glory of their own.