‘I think, perhaps, you were right, Husband,’ she says. ‘I shall wait, back there – where we turned down into the bay. I can shout if anyone approaches.’
Nicholas smiles at her determination not to let distress make a purposeless bystander of her. ‘That is a wise idea,’ he says, though they haven’t seen another soul for hours, and by the time he and Spenser reach the wreck, they’ll be too distant to hear her call above the wind and the crash of the waves. Taking one hand from the reins, he reaches out and lays his gloved fingers against her cheek. ‘I’m sorry that you had to see this. I shouldn’t have let you come.’
She smiles back at him, brushing aside a tangle of dark hair that the wind has blown across her face. ‘You couldn’t have stopped me, Nicholas. You should know by now that Caporetti women by tradition take unkindly to constraint.’ As she turns her horse away, she calls back, ‘Though you might have expected the daughter of a line of famous poisoners to have developed a stronger stomach.’
Where is the honour in slaughter? What glory does it bring to kneel astride a man already half-drowned, pull back his head by the sodden hair and cut his throat? There is only one word that Nicholas can find for what the bay reveals to him: murder.
He counts at least twenty bodies before he and Spenser reach the wreck. He can imagine how these poor, floundering fellows must have thought God had bestowed His mercy upon them, saving their bones from whitening on the ocean floor. He can picture them now, exhausted, crying out in relief, Thank Jesu! We’re saved – even as the shadows of their killers fell across their outstretched arms.
Some seem to have been hunted down for sport. Their remains are scattered amongst the scrub. None has shoes, or a jerkin. Several are naked. Nicholas assumes that somewhere in a nearby garrison, or in Waterford or Dublin, Wexford or Cork, there are young men from England, or mustered from Irish counties, who are sporting a newly acquired item of clothing. He wonders if they’ve managed to wash the bloodstains out, or whether – when they sit together at a tavern bench – they display them like trophies.
Nicholas remembers the file of unlikely recruits at the Southwark Fair muster. How long, he wonders, does it take boys like those to become monsters? What had they seen, what had they been told, to turn them from laughing plough-hands and farm labourers into implacable killers? He remembers, too, the three heads propped on the back of the cart that he saw in Dublin. A sudden wave of disgust sweeps over him. Is bestiality to be the means by which Robert Cecil and the others in the Privy Council maintain the queen’s laws, the queen’s realm, the queen’s religion, here in Ireland?
I am not some unworldly innocent, he tells himself. I know full well what men can do. I’ve seen the same savagery in the Low Countries, perpetrated by both sides – Catholic and Protestant. I know that neither holds the monopoly on sanctimony or cruelty. But if this is the mercy we show to a score of Spaniards whom even the sea has declined to take, what right do we have claiming God’s authority over our enemy?
Ahead of him, Edmund Spenser is peering down from his saddle. Nicholas rides over to join him.
Spenser is staring down at a corpse. It is that of a man of some substance, judging by the quality of his hose and the barbered ringlets of black hair that lie around his shoulders. He lies with both arms outstretched, as if crucified. The fingers of each hand are missing: hacked off for the rings they wore. Close by lies a travelling chest, resting forlornly on the sand. It looks too expensive to belong to a sailor, even a ship’s master. It is finely carved, with brass guards on the corners, each embossed with a lion’s head. Prised from its hinges, the discarded lid lies tossed into a nearby clump of grass. The chest is empty.
‘Have you found something?’
‘No, nothing,’ Spenser says.
Is that a note of anxious disappointment in the poet’s voice that Nicholas can hear? He recalls his earlier impression that Spenser may have been here before.
Riding on along the beach, they reach the remains of the wreck.
Driven ashore by the wind and the sea, it is a sizeable part of the ship’s stern-castle. Around twenty feet high and a little more in length, it has come to rest tilted against the cliff, the forward, shattered end jammed into a fold in the cliff’s face. The lower, rounded part of the hull has been smashed in as the sea dragged it across the rocks, so that what survives reminds Nicholas of the upper half of an egg dropped onto a floor. Now that the tide is out, barely a foot of water gurgles in and out through jagged fractures draped with kelp. Pounded for weeks by the tide, she makes a sorry sight, a ghost of the fine face she once presented.
‘The forward part of her must lie out beyond the headland,’ Spenser says. He points to the promontory and the jagged rocks that surround its base. ‘I would hazard those are what broke her in twain.’
‘And that’s where the rest of her crew will be,’ Nicholas says solemnly.
‘Aye, they may have been papists, but they were men for all that, and far from home.’
‘The question is: why?’
‘She must have been dismasted in that terrible storm we had.’
‘I meant, why was she so far from home?’ Nicholas says quietly.
Spenser offers no opinion. So Nicholas says softly to the cold, dead timbers of the wreck, ‘What mischief were you up to in these waters, I wonder?’
He contemplates the ruined stern-castle for a while. Then, to Spenser, ‘How did you know it was a Spanish ship?’
‘Because Sir Oliver Henshawe told me so. If you had stayed in Dublin longer, no doubt you would have heard the story.’
Taken aback, Nicholas sees in his mind the grinning, aristocratic features of the man he met in the Brazen Head in Dublin, the man who had once paid court to Bianca.
‘Henshawe? Was it his troops who did that?’ he asks, glancing back at the beach. ‘I can’t say I like the man, but I hadn’t taken him to be a butcher.’
‘You know Sir Oliver then?’ Spenser says warily.
‘Not really, but Bianca does. He once paid suit to her, in London. He said he wanted to marry her,’ Nicholas says with a laugh. ‘I don’t think he had the slightest notion–’
‘You know that Sir Oliver is one of the Lieutenant-General’s officers, here in Ireland?’
‘Yes, we met him in Dublin. As I say, I found him objectionable.’
Spenser looks visibly troubled. ‘Did you mention you were coming to visit me?’
‘Yes. He offered to provide an escort. Why, do you have some manner of quarrel with Henshawe?’
‘No, nothing,’ says Spenser, a little too hurriedly to be convincing.
‘Of course he was just plain Oliver Henshawe when Bianca knew him. He said he’d been knighted at Cádiz by the Earl of Essex. I would have thought that might put him in your favour.’
‘Why would you think that?’
‘Because I worked out from your pamphlet that you consider the earl to be the best man to bring Ireland to order.’
‘His Grace has been a firm friend to me. Admiring him does not mean I have to admire all of his officers.’
Dismounting, Nicholas tethers the reins of his horse to the limb of a stunted gorse bush and walks out across the wet sand and into the water. Spenser watches him from the shore.
First he wades around to look at the wreck end-on. The rudder has been torn away from the stern-post, leaving only one large empty iron ring twisted out of shape by the force of the sea. About two feet above his head is a narrow gallery protruding from the ship’s hull, where the master or an admiral might have found himself a little privacy. Above that, the stern narrows, framing a weathered painting of a haloed saint holding a shepherd’s crook. At the very peak is a lantern on an iron post, the translucent horn smashed in.