It feels like a long hour of agony, but perhaps it is only minutes. It feels timeless. The side of the ship seems to rest on the water like a sleepy bird, moving with the sea as a handful of men, no more, fling themselves from the rigging and disappear into the smoke-drenched waves. The roar of the cannon goes on, the battle itself goes on. Nobody but us has frozen in horror to watch as the keel rolls a little more to the sky, as the sails fill with water, not wind, and billow and swell in their strange submerged beauty, and then drag the ship down to the green depths.

I can hear someone weeping: “No, no, no.”

COWDRAY HOUSE, MIDHURST, SUSSEX,

SUMMER 1545

The battle is inconclusive, they tell me, when the smoke finally clears and the fleets limp their different ways: the French back to France, the English ships into port. They report to the king that England was triumphant. We sent out a few tiny ships against a great French armada, and the French soldiers that landed on the coast of Sussex and the Isle of Wight burned a few barns but were driven off by the farmhands.

“Englishmen,” Sir Anthony Denny whispers encouragingly to the king. “For God and for Harry!”

But the king is not stirred by the battle cry of an earlier, greater king. He is shocked, his great carcass beached in his bed like his great ship is beached on the seabed, underwater in the Solent. They come almost hourly to tell him that it is not as bad as it seems. They say that they will raise the Mary Rose, that it will be no more than a matter of days before they have hauled her to the surface and pumped out the water. But after a while they stop boasting that she can be reclaimed from the sea, and the beautiful ship and her sailors, and the fighting men—four hundred of them, five hundred, nobody knows how many were enlisted—will be left to the chantry of the tides and the singing of the sea.

* * *