Clutching the railing at the side of the short companionway that led down into the cabin, I turned slowly to look behind. The change in position made my head swim for a moment, as the ship pitched forward and at the same time rolled over to starboard then back again. A bout of queasiness stirred in my stomach, and I thought I was going to succumb to the pervasive sea sickness, but I closed my eyes and it passed.
When I opened them again, I tried to make out where the Sands were, but I could see nothing. Astern, however, on the far horizon, there was a lightening in the blackness of sky and sea. A band of paler darkness was forming, dividing the two. Dawn was coming.
I turned back to look along the deck, where I could now make out the figures of sailors, some trimming the sails, some passing buckets up from below decks in a chain of men, baling out the seas as they washed over the gunwales and poured down below decks.
‘Well, Dr Alvarez, not long now.’
The captain came to stand beside me. He looked exhausted, but calm. ‘See that glow over there?’ He raised his arm and pointed over the starboard bow. ‘That’s the old Roman lighthouse at Dover. They keep a brazier burning there as a signal. We’ll be there in an hour. Two at most. And the wind is slackening. It often does at dawn.’
To me the wind seemed to blow as fiercely as ever, and the rain was falling more heavily, but I fixed my eyes on that distant watch-fire. We had come through battle, storm, and sea. We were nearly home.
Chapter Fifteen
I stayed at Dover only long enough to change into dry clothes, eat a hearty soldier’s breakfast and bespeak a post horse. Andrew and his men had already received their orders. As soon as they were equipped and mounted, they were to ride to the Essex coast and stand guard in case the Spaniards, moving north, attempted a landing at one of the ports there. I could have waited to have their company on the way to London, but using post horses I would travel faster and I was anxious both to report to Sir Francis and to go home to my father.
Andrew and I parted in the castle stables.
‘Next time you plan one of your dangerous ventures,’ he said, ‘give me fair warning, so that I can ride in the opposite direction.’
I laughed. ‘I do not choose them.’
He gave me a wry smile. ‘They seem to seek you out.’
‘I am going back to the quiet, calm work I am trained for. Mending the bodies of the sick and injured.’
‘Aye, I have reason enough to be grateful for that. How is our injured sailor?’
‘Well enough. I have left him in the hands of the army physicians. They think no harm has come to the limb, for all the tossing we took on the way home.’
‘I hope I never have to make a sea journey like that again.’
He groaned and shook his head. ‘I thought the ship would break in half.’
Secretly I’d had much the same thought myself, but I mocked his fears and we parted with laughter.
I stopped about ten miles south of London for the night and reached Seething Lane early the next morning, where I was called immediately into Sir Francis’s office together with Phelippes, to give an account of all that had happened in Amsterdam and of my small part in the sea battle off Gravelines. They had already received the report I had sent ahead from Amsterdam, and Sir Francis had spoken to Sir John Norreys about the treason of Parker and van Leyden, but I was able to answer their questions about such details as were unknown to Sir John.
When at last I was free to go, I decided to take a wherry upriver, to save time. There was the usual cluster of boats at the Custom quays, and I picked a wherryman I knew to be a speedy oarsman, who kept his boat upstream of the Bridge. As he rowed, we spoke of the Armada. He was one of those wherrymen who had volunteered to serve in our scratch navy and had been at Gravelines, but his ship had lost its mainmast and returned to Gravesend for repairs.
‘I’m not sorry to be back in London,’ he said. ‘Those sailors live like pigs. If our ship hadn’t been damaged, I’d still be sleeping on some gundeck out in the German Ocean, eating pig swill. And never a farthing of pay yet.’
The London wherrymen are known for their gloom and grumbles, but I had some sympathy with this.
‘Surely they will pay you soon,’ I said, ‘once the Spanish ships are finally seen off and the ships stood down.’
He gave a sarcastic snort and made a few pithy comments about fine gentlemen who used their ships to plunder and make their fortunes, while others endured enemy fire – a remark aimed at Drake’s latest exploits.
After landing at Blackfriars Stairs, I made my way quickly to Duck Lane. The sun beat down on the nearby shambles in Smithfield, sending the stench of blood and ordure wafting over this whole part of London, even smothering the more delectable odours from Pie Corner of fresh-baked pastry and good beef gravy.
The door of our house stood open to admit a little air, for it could become very close at the height of summer, and I was still some yards away when a tawny shape of fur and solid muscle flew down the steps and hurled itself at me so hard I fell backwards onto the packed dirt of the street. Before I could stop him, Rikki had bathed my face with a loving and very wet tongue.
‘Get down, you mad creature!’ I said, struggling with some difficulty to my feet.
My father was standing in the doorway, his face alight with laughter.
‘He has missed you.’
‘As I have missed all of you. Over a month it has been.’
‘Aye.’ He put his arm around my shoulders and drew me inside, Rikki weaving about our legs and nearly tripping me up again.
I took up once again my divided life between the hospital and Phelippes’s office. It was as though I was two completely different people – the quiet physician, going about a worthy calling, and the ambiguous agent in Walsingham’s service. Even in the office I could hardly reconcile either persona with a reckless house-breaker and adventurer. The events in the Low Countries began to take on the atmosphere of a dream. At Seething Lane we were the first to receive all the intelligence relating to the Spanish fleet, as the scattered ships hobbled northwards. The Spaniards made no attempt to land in Essex or elsewhere along the east coast.
The reports of their retreat moved even that cool and imperturbable man Walsingham to tears.
‘Almighty God sent a great wind from the southwest which broke and scattered that arrogant Armada to the four winds,’ he said. ‘Victory at last is ours.’
Soon it was on everyone’s lips: ‘He blew with His winds, and they were scattered.’
God, it seemed, was on our side. The Enterprise of England had become England’s victorious enterprise.
I could not quite trust the victory, although Sir Francis seemed convinced of it. For weeks afterwards word came in – and was discussed eagerly in the hospital and on the streets – that limping and broken Spanish ships had been sighted in the German Sea off the Wash, then far to the north rounding the top of Scotland, and finally wrecked in the wild Atlantic waters off Ireland. I do not know how many survived to return home, but the bodies of the Spanish dead and the wreckage of their ships washed up on our shores for months. Stories from Ireland were wildly different. Some said that the Irish had cut down the Spanish sailors as they struggled ashore from their wrecked ships, so that the very breakers of the Atlantic turned crimson with their life blood. Other stories, more worrying to Sir Francis, held that the Irish had welcomed their Catholic brothers with open arms and were mustering an army with them to attack England across the Irish sea. Whatever the truth of it, no invasion seemed imminent, as far as the agents in Ireland reported.