Complete works of a e w.., p.685
Complete Works of a E W Mason, page 685
When Giacomo, having done his work, carried the baggage up to Robin’s room, he found, not Carlo Manucci, but Giuseppe Marino awaiting him.
“The suit of clothes you bought, Giacomo, you will wear. Is that the money?”
He opened the canvas bag and held it out. “Put in your hand, Giacomo, and fill it.”
Giacomo, however, stepped back.
“I am going with you, signore.”
“No, Giacomo.”
“Signore, I know very well that there have been miseries this night. The more reason, then, that I should go with you.”
Robin was moved by the man’s insistence, but he shook his head.
“I am used to you, Giacomo. We have been much together. We are good friends. Such loyalty as you have shown me I shall remember all my life, did I live till the Escorial is in ruins. Were it only danger ahead of me, I would not have let you go. But alas, Giacomo, in what I have to do now there is no room for you. Take my hand in memory of our comradeship. So! Now into the bag with it and fill it till it will hold no more.”
The tears were in Giacomo’s eyes as he drew his handful of gold pieces from the bag.
“Now,” continued Robin, “tell Andrea to ask His Excellency whether he will receive Giuseppe Marino for a minute. And you take the mule on to the Toledo road and wait for me.”
In a little while Andrea Ferranti knocked upon his door. Robin filled the leather pouch at his belt with gold, tied up the bag and, following Andrea, was ushered into a bedroom where Giovanni Figliazzi sat in his dressing gown over a mulled drink.
Figliazzi looked up into Robin’s face, and his own softened and grew kindly as he looked.
“Leave us, Andrea, and stand outside the door. Let no one enter!”
When they were alone Robin put the bag onto a table.
“I may have brought some anxieties and troubles upon your shoulders, sir, in return for your great kindness to me.”
“My shoulders are very broad, Robin. And it would be odd if I had no kindness for a nameless friend in London, and a much tormented boy who has found his way into the core of an old heart.”
He rose and laid his hand upon Robin’s shoulder, and the boy’s face worked, and he uttered a sob.
“Come, sit you down and share my drink with me.”
He set Robin in a chair and poured out for him into a crystal cup a full glass of his mulled port. Then he resumed his seat and asked no questions.
“There is a hue and cry out for Carlo Manucci, sir,” said Robin, and he added sombrely, “It will be louder tomorrow.”
“Carlo Manucci? Carlo Manucci? Carlo Manucci?”
Giovanni repeated the strange name in three different tones of bewilderment.
“An Italian, presumably.”
“Enquiries might be made,” said Robin.
“Of me?”
Count Giovanni was in a fog.
“Really?” he continued. “Were such enquiries made, I should have to ask my good friend King Philip whether in the midst of the extremely difficult work of persuading the Genoese bankers to lend him some money of which he stands desperately in need, I have to be distracted by enquiries about an insignificant Carlo Manucci. Do you know, Robin, I have my doubts whether the fellow exists. Let us dismiss him altogether from our minds.”
“I have one care the less,” said Robin gratefully. He had exaggerated the importance of Carlo Manucci in the troubled affairs of Spain. He added: “And since I bring you this money back, sir, you can let King Philip have a peep at it.”
Figliazzi slapped his knee in delight; he loved a high spirit. Here was this youth, who had plainly been passed through the fire that night, rising at the end of it with a jest. Then his face clouded.
“You don’t want it?”
“I have taken as much as Giuseppe Marino can afford to possess.”
Figliazzi nodded and took a sip of his drink and then another. He looked into the fireplace, where a great log of wood was burning.
“Robin,” he said softly. “Do you want a father? Here is one to your hand,” and now he looked at Robin with so warm an invitation in his aspect that the tears burst from the boy’s eyes. Under the stress of that unhappy night he told at last the story of George Aubrey, and himself. Since he would not wound this friend of his by too curt a refusal he must needs speak a little of himself: a thing which he always found it difficult to do. At the end he said:
“I shall remember your words, sir, with a great pride and a heartfelt gratitude. But, as you see, I am of my own country and must go back to it.”
“I understand that,” said Figliazzi gently.
“And I must go back by the quickest road,” said Robin, and the ambassador stared at him in bewilderment.
“By the quickest road?” he repeated.
“Yes sir.”
“As Giuseppe Marino?”
“Yes sir.”
“Without more than a few gold coins in your pocket?”
“Yes sir.”
Giovanni Figliazzi thumped the table in exasperation.
“Then how in God’s name are you going to do it?”
“I shall sail with Oquendo on the Lady of the Rose,” said Robin quietly. “Spain owes me a passage, but I hope to pay for it in our own currency.”
CHAPTER XXX. Anthony Scarr
ROBIN AMBLED THROUGH the night on his mule and put up in the early morning at an inn in the small village of Castillejo. He was careful to leave the priest-ridden city of Toledo upon his left hand, and travelling at the rate of forty miles a day he came down over the Sierra de Guadalupe into Trujillo. There he had the good fortune to fall in with a strolling company of players who were making their way to Lisbon. Robin rode with them and found in their companionship an alleviation of his bitter memories and distress.
They were joyous and quarrelsome, good-natured and jealous, fierce in their disputes and emotional in their reconciliations, and always with the noblest of phrases culled from the utterances of this or that heroic character fitted to the littlest adventures of their wandering life. Robin lent a hand in setting up their scanty scenery and, since he was travelling light, carried some of their properties on his mule.
They sang their way down the roads, the tenants of a moving fairyland. Philip of Spain, the Invincible Armada, the wickedness of Elizabeth, the machinations of the Turk, the intrigues and convulsions of Europe, never concerned them half as much as the intonation with which Alonzo cried “Mother, thou art avenged,” or the miserable exhibition which the star of a rival troupe was in the habit of giving when the presumptuous fool undertook the part of the bloodthirsty Gomez of the Sierras. Robin was diverted from the gloom of his own thoughts by the swift reactions of their emotions. Their conversation never flagged, they had a jest with which to whip misfortune, and they were never so real as when they were false, never so alive as when for an hour or two they struck their attitudes in a village barn. Robin could not but feel himself rising out of a hideous oppression of his mind and senses, and when he bade them good-bye at Estremoz and pushed on to Lisbon, it was with a warm gratitude for their easy good-fellowship.
He reached Lisbon on the second day of May. The Armada was at last ready for sea, and Robin, waiting on the quay for just this opportunity, thrust his way through Oquendo’s staff and dropped on his knees before him.
“And who is this rascal,” cried Oquendo, and certainly Robin, with the mud and dust upon his face and his clothes, wanted some explaining. Already a stick or two was raised.
“I am Giuseppe Marino, with Your Excellency’s permission,” said Robin humbly.
“And are you now?” cried Oquendo. He had just taken his dinner and was in an excellent humour. “Yes, I certainly permit it. Just as I shall certainly permit you to be thrown off the quay into the harbour unless you give me a better reason for your insolence than a name.”
There was a small crowd now closing in upon Robin and not a very friendly one. Oquendo was the young protagonist of Spanish chivalry. Women might pester him, but ragamuffins were not to burst into his lordship’s presence. It was the Tagus for Robin unless he spoke up sharply and quickly. Indeed it was only Oquendo’s easy mood which availed him up till now.
“Let the lad alone!” he said. “What have you to say to me, Giuseppe Marino?”
“Your Excellency, I was the bodyservant of the great admiral,” cried Robin, setting all upon the throw.
If the Inquisition in Madrid had traced back Carlo Manucci and discovered him in Giuseppe Marino, as by now it might well have done, his case was beyond all hope. The rack and the stake were as handy in Lisbon as in Madrid, and indeed for a moment he thought that he was lost. For there was a swift movement in the crowd at his side. A young man — Robin, as he kneeled, saw the fellow out of the tail of his eye — swiftly drew back. A ripple in the throng showed that he was forcing his way out. He had gone to inform, to claim his reward, to light another bonfire for another heretic.
Oquendo, however, came to his rescue.
“Eh, eh. What’s that?” he cried. “Stand you up straight, my lad!” And as Robin got to his feet, “Giuseppe Marino! Of Leghorn, eh?”
“Your Excellency promised that I should haul a rope on Your Excellency’s ship,” Robin reminded him.
“So I did! Well, get you on board to the master and tell him I sent you. We have gunners and pikemen and priests, but God knows we are short of sailors in the Grand Fleet. If he says Aye, I’ll not say No.”
Robin did not wait. With a gabbled sentence of gratitude he edged himself into the crowd and was out of it again before a tenth of it knew that he had gone. The trouble was that that plaguy informer was hanging upon the outskirts. Robin knew very well where the Lady of the Rose was moored against the quay. He would not run, but he walked as quickly as his legs could carry him. Nevertheless the plaguy informer was close upon his heels. Robin mounted the gangway and found the master in the midst of such a confusion of sails, ropes, spars, blocks and cleats that it looked as if the ship could not put to sea for a fortnight.
He gave Oquendo’s message and was put to work at once, and since he showed some knowledge of the seaman’s trade was thereupon enrolled for the Enterprise of England. But to his dismay he saw that his pursuer had followed him; Robin heard him talking and reckoned him to be a Catalonian from Marseilles. Was the fellow after all merely one of the crew like himself? Or was he there to watch that Robin didn’t get away, and to tap him on the shoulder, say, an hour before the fleet sailed and point to certain officers of the Inquisition waiting to arrest him?
But nothing of the kind happened. And on May 14 of the memorable year 1588, after the blessing of innumerable banners, unending processions of priests and much chanting of choirs, the Invincible Armada sailed down the Tagus, its canvas billowing in the wind and its decks so crowded with a cheering multitude of soldiers that it was a wonder that the sailors ever got the ships to sea at all. As all the world knows, it was caught two days later in a gale and so violently dispersed that a fresh assembly of it must be made at Corunna. There it was found that, in spite of all the prayers and blessings which had wafted it upon its way, the drinking water stank and the meat was alive with worms. It was therefore not until the morning of July 20 that Robin saw the black rocks of the Lizard like a shadow on the edge of the seas.
Medina-Sidonia’s flagship, with a great new banner of the Virgin embroidered on white silk streaming from his masthead, led the centre of the fleet, and the flanks curved away to points, so that the whole stately formation had at a distance the look of a sickle with its convex edge advanced. Oquendo’s Guipuscoan squadron guarded the left flank, and to Robin’s delight the admiral was posted on the extremity of the flank. As the Armada swept into the Channel, more and more clearly the Lizard slid forward into the sea, and in a little while he could distinguish, with a swelling of the heart which brought the tears into his eyes, on the uplands above the cliffs, the chequerboard of dark hedgerow and green field which is the true quartering of England. And here and there startlingly white little pyramids showed where the pits of china clay were dug.
All the while the wind was rising in the southwest and the sky darkening.
“There will be a gale tonight,” Robin predicted, his spirits rising with the wind. These clumsy galleons with their towering castles at bow and stern and their crowded soldiery would be sport for the gale and sport too for Lord Howard of Effingham and his great coadjutor, Drake. Robin strained his eyes in his gaze towards the coast. Would he see a certain great ship, the Expedition of Poole — he was sure that he would recognize her amongst a thousand — or the Sea Flower and the Grace of God, the twins of Weymouth, or the Lyon of Fowey, or the Golden Real, which was built over there in Falmouth yard? For Falmouth Bay was sliding past now. Pendennis Castle stood out upon its hill, the great teeth of the Manacle Rocks were abeam, and soon behind Dennis Head the lovely reach of the Helford River opened out between its woods. On a bluff at the mouth of the river a big house half buried in trees shone in a gleam of sunshine like a jewel, and a glimpse was given of an ordered garden descending in terraces to the water’s edge.
Robin heard at his elbow a little gasp of breath and then a laugh of infinite pleasure and then three words spoken in English.
“Saint Mawnan’s Chair.”
Robin turned very slowly and saw at his side a young man with a dirty stubble of beard and a face so begrimed that he had some difficulty in recognizing the plaguy informer of the Lisbon quay. Robin, so near home, was not going to walk into any parlour but his own.
“Que dice usted?” he asked, as one mildly puzzled.
The other laughed again, but with such a throb of elation in the note that no man could have doubted its sincerity. He touched Robin on the arm, he looked around to make sure that they were apart, and then he pointed towards St Mawnan’s Chair.
“My house,” he said.
Robin remembered now some words which Sir Francis had spoken to him at Barn Elms. “You may meet a friend, you may not.” He had been instructed, moreover, to pay no heed to Medina-Sidonia’s squadron at Cadiz. Figliazzi the ambassador had passed the instruction on to him. Here was the reason for the instruction at his elbow.
“You were with Medina-Sidonia?” he asked.
“I had a nodding acquaintance with his secretary, who happily was a very poor man,” returned the other. “My name is Anthony Scarr.”
“If I had known that,” Robin returned, “I should have been spared some hours of anxiety. I saw you slip away out of the crowd at Lisbon. I was afraid that you had gone to lay an information. When you followed me on the ship I was certain that you were making sure I shouldn’t give you the slip. Even when I lost sight of you I was uneasy.”
“I kept out of your way,” said Anthony Scarr. “We should have talked in our own tongue.”
It had been easy enough on that big ship, since they were not in the same watch. Sailors were of little account in King Philip’s ships, of hardly more, indeed, than the convicts pulling the oars in the galleasses. They slept where they could find a space, on the open decks, in the passages, on the companion stairs. No castles protected them; they were not paraded in divisions, or appointed places in the battle disposition.
“I knew there was a lad with Santa Cruz,” said Anthony. “I guessed it was you when I heard you plead with Oquendo. I was in the same case as you. There was I at Lisbon, my work done, and no way of getting home. And you showed me the way, the perfect, satisfying, obvious way. Let the Don carry us! I hurried along at your heels for an excellent reason. I wanted the ship’s master to believe that Oquendo had sent us both to him, and that he very kindly did.”
Whilst young Scarr had been talking, young Robin had been thinking.
“I am on the tiller tonight,” he said. “I shall be relieved at midnight. I’ll find you here afterwards.”
There were six in all of Walsingham’s men who sailed on the Invincible Armada, but for the men who do their dangerous work secretly in the enemy’s encampments no bugles are blown, no banners unrolled. Of these two alone is the story known.
In the battle of the Mewstone off Plymouth Sound, when the English fleet, sailing into the wind, got to windward of the Armada, one great galleon was dismantled and carried into Dartmouth. Medina-Sidonia pressed on in spite of signals of distress. He was not a sailor. To join with Parma’s troops from the Lowlands at Calais, to escort them across the Straits in their flat-bottomed barges to the English shores, to land an army of trained soldiers and fight land battles, this was his strategy. The Armada for him was a transport, not a navy, and, though Oquendo and De Leyva and Recalde might rave at him for his cowardice, he held on before the gale, and the fate of England still trembled in the balance.
Robin, with three other sailors at the huge tiller high above the sea on the top of the stern castle, kept the plugging, rolling, unwieldy ship on her course, and behind them, short of powder and shot though they were, the hornets of the English fleet raced up and fell back, and stung and stung again. Robin lived that night in a curious ecstasy. For as the darkness fell the beacons on the headlands blazed upon the night, and every now and then, through the wrack of hurrying clouds, a burst of moonlight made a white fire of the waves and of the countryside a vision of quiet peace.
There were pilots on the Armada who knew the Channel. Close in under Berry Head, where the ferns were growing thick and close as an animal’s fur, into the steep, short seas and shallows of the West Bay the Armada swept, and towards morning the wind fell. Robin had nursed a dream whilst he stood at the tiller that before his trick was done he would see the flare of his own beacon on the Purbeck down. Dakcombe would be feeding it, his friends would be standing by. Cynthia, sitting on her horse with her eyes gazing out to sea, and the flames of the beacon lighting them up and flinging waves of warm colour across her sweet and anxious face. The Bannets would be there — oh, for sure they would be there, the good loyal couple praying for the success of Her Majesty’s arms and that the gracious tolerance of her reign might still endure. And not one of them would find a place in his wildest fancy for the extravagance that Robin Aubrey was actually one of three holding the tiller of Spain’s nearest galleon!
