I believed none of it, for he was an upright man, even if obsessed and prepared to drive a carriage and four through other people’s lives in pursuit of his dreams. The dispute, if taken to the law courts, could drag on for years. He had never been other than courteous to my father and myself, so I thanked him for his gift, wondering the while whether he had any idea of the extent of danger and fighting which lay ahead of me. Privately, I felt that Sidney’s poetry might bring me more consolation than these dense, almost indecipherable pages, but it was kindly meant of him.
In addition to my knapsack, I carried my satchel of medicines. This was crammed as full as it would hold, until the seams strained and I could barely buckle it shut. I retained the special compartment at the bottom, which the leatherworker Jake Winterly had made for me, and into this I placed my most precious items – ground pearls and unicorn horn, calabar beans against poisoning, and the rarest of our herbs. The rest of the satchel was filled with every sort of wound salve, febrifuge herbs, extract of poppy, vomitives, senna, and binding tinctures against the flux. I took few instruments, just a scalpel, a probe, tweezers large and small, needles and thread for stitching wounds. Dr Nuñez and I had consulted over the medical supplies which should be carried by the fleet. Our own ship would be better provided than the rest, with the two of us and Dr Ruy Lopez on board. We advised the captains of the other ships, but they had their own naval surgeons and whether they would listen to us was doubtful. We were regarded as civilians, with no experience in warfare, at sea or on land. The fact that I had cared for the wounded soldiers who had survived the siege of Sluys counted for little, as did my brief encounter with a naval battle the previous summer.
It was a beautiful morning when I left home, soft with the pearly light of early spring, and the whole of London was aflutter with courting and nesting birds. In muddy corners primroses raised faces as shiny as butter and in a patch of waste ground, where a house had collapsed and not been rebuilt, there was a patch of bluebells as gloriously bright amongst the rubble as the southern skies we would soon be seeing. There was a tightness in my chest, part fear, part – I suppose – excitement, for although I was apprehensive, there was something gallant and defiant in this whole undertaking. We might have won the great sea battle in the previous year, but we all knew in our hearts that we had come near to defeat, confronted by that fleet, the largest the world had ever seen. Had the great wind not come to our aid, scattering the Spanish ships and preventing the rendezvous with their army in the Low Countries, we must surely have been defeated and would now be living under the iron heel of the Spanish conqueror.
I shivered, despite the bright morning. It had come very close, that defeat. And now we were to sail south to Spain, into the mouth of the lion, and attempt to turn the tables on them, by destroying their fleet, landing on soil they held, defeating their army. Could we possibly achieve such a victory, unless God were once again on our side? We would have a fleet of nearly a hundred and fifty ships and an army of thirty thousand soldiers, but the Spaniards had but to hold fast where they had fortified towns and harbours. Moreover, of these ships of ours, eighty were pinnaces or Dutch vlieboten, small and manoeuvrable, but carrying limited fire-power. There were only six war galleons. The rest were armed merchantmen, built for trade rather than warfare. And our soldiers would mostly be untrained recruits, with just a small leavening of experienced troops drawn from our forces who had been supporting the Dutch rebels in the Low Countries. If the two armies should ever meet in pitched battle on land, there was little doubt what the outcome would be, in the face of Spain’s professional army. Ours was the greater task and could not be accomplished unless the people of Portugal – my own people, I reminded myself – rose up in support of the invasion and fought side by side with us.
When I reached the Legal Quays near the Tower, there was a great bustle and shouting. Only the smallest part of the fleet was here, for most was in harbour at Plymouth, or on the way there. Nevertheless the cranes on the dockside were hard at work loading provisions and weapons on to the ships moored here, or on to the supply boats ferrying goods out to the largest ships anchored off shore. The cranesmen were stripped to the waist and sweating profusely. Sailors crowded the decks of the ships, catching hold of the awkward bundles which spun dizzily at the ends of the cranes’ hawsers and guiding them down through the hatches into the holds below deck.
I scanned the ships, searching for the Victory, the ship which had been allocated to the Portuguese party. Amongst this busy throng I could not see her, but then caught sight of Dr Hector Nuñez, standing on the quayside, a little behind Ruy Lopez, who was attending obsequiously on Dom Antonio. All three were splendidly dressed, as were the men in the Dom’s livery, marshalling what appeared to be an immense amount of personal baggage. I might be one of this Portuguese party, but I could hardly compare with all this sartorial splendour, despite the fact that I was wearing my best doublet, a shirt topped with a small but elegant ruff, and a pair of woollen stocking finer than any I had ever possessed before, a parting gift from Sara Lopez. I would keep my distance.
Skulking half hidden behind a massive barrel which, from the smell, contained stock fish, I thought I would watch where they went and follow at a distance. However, Dr Nuñez, glancing round, spotted me and motioned me to join them. Reluctantly, I did so.
Dr Nuñez clasped both my hands in his. He was glowing with excitement. ‘Well, Kit, so we are on our way at last! I never believed this day would come. Soon we will walk again on the soil of our motherland.’
I tried to smile. At the same time, I wondered. For had not Dr Nuñez and his wife left Portugal to come to London long before Spain had invaded? They had chosen to leave, to make their home in England. They were not enforced exiles like my father and me, driven out by the terror of the Inquisition. I could not quite understand his enthusiasm. Instead, I turned to practical matters.
‘Which is our ship?’ I asked. ‘I can see none called the Victory.’
‘There.’ He pointed to one of the galleons anchored off shore, too large to tie up beside the quay. ‘We are just waiting for a boat to take us on board.’
She was certainly a fine ship, I had to admit. Of course I should I have realised that the ship which would convey the new king to his kingdom would be one of the finest in the fleet. He could not be expected to travel in one of the merchantmen, however comfortable. One consolation, I supposed, was that she carried a full complement of forty-two guns.
The first boat took off Dom Antonio, Ruy Lopez and some of what I imagined must be their most precious possessions. I went in the second with Hector Nuñez and more of the luggage, carrying my own knapsack and satchel myself. It needed a third and fourth boat to convey the remaining servants and bundles. The Thames was at the slack of the tide, so that it was easy enough to climb the sturdy ladder lowered for us, not like a frightening experience I had had when joining Dr Nuñez’s ship the Santa Maria off the coast of Portugal when I was twelve. That was past, I told myself firmly, jumping down on to the deck. I would not let myself think of the past, but only of the future, of the three missions I must accomplish, two for Walsingham and one for myself.
It was some time before we sailed. While the older members of our Portuguese party were being received graciously by the captain and his senior officers, I kept out of the way and found a place by the railings of the poop deck where I could watch all the activity of the loading. Most of the Victory must have been loaded already, but there were still goods coming aboard, besides the Dom’s possessions. The ship had its own crane for lifting goods from the supply boats inboard. When I grew tired of watching that, I strolled about the decks, making myself familiar with the layout of the ship which would be my home for all the weeks ahead. Apart from that first journey from Portugal I had never been on such a large ship, for those which had taken me twice to the Low Countries were pinnaces, as small by comparison as a terrier beside the mythical oliphants that are said to inhabit the inner lands of Africa, or like a herring beside a whale.