How could you live and not be excited by London? It was eternal damnation, a smoke-filled Hell and a cauldron for the plague. And it was deliriously, amazingly and ecstatically exciting. The stench of the shite on the streets and the heavenly smell of a fresh-baked loaf. The waft of the wind bringing the sweet-fresh smell of meadows from outside the city boundaries, and the stink of the open sewer they called the Thames. Everywhere people screaming their wares, a city turned into a multitude of salesmen. A heaving, sweating multi-coloured multitude with their feet in mud and their eyes raised towards the stars. It was a raw, violent and often brutal melting pot, but with all the filth and the putrid vapours of too many people and animals crowded on top of one another came an unequalled excitement. The city had grown in recent years out of all control, the higgle-piggle of streets growing more dense and narrow by the week, spilling out beyond the old walls. Yelling builders and ramshackle scaffolding seemed to clog the routes, fighting with the men, the women and the horses, the sheep and cattle on their way to slaughter, and the open-eyed yokels so busy looking up that they could not see the midden at their feet.
For all the excitement, a nagging question bit at the mind of Henry Gresham. Why was he here? It was not his time to be in London. Yet he had answered the summons, knowing he had no choice.
He had ridden hard. He was a very rich man whose wealth was spent very carefully. One of its objects was horseflesh. Another was Mannion. Mannion, good soldier that he had been, oversaw the stables between Cambridge and London that kept a good horse on permanent standby for Henry Gresham. Mannion also kept an eye on the men who would take Gresham's windblown mount from him, wash it down and give it the love that Gresham, already on his next mount, could not.
He need not have hurried so. Robert Cecil, Viscount Cranborne, soon to be Earl of Salisbury and the youngest man ever to be sworn in as a Privy Councillor, would have waited. As the inheritor of Europe's largest and most efficient network of spies and informers, Cecil spent his life waiting, like a spider at the centre of his web, and watching.
Yet riding as if life depended on it, feeling the rush of wind through his hair, knocking the startled farm traffic aside, the pounding of the horse beneath him on the rough tracks… this was life itself, this was oblivion and fulfilment all in the one moment. Cecil could control elements of Gresham's life. No-one could control that wild, rough ride to London.
Previous meetings between Gresham and Robert Cecil's kind had resulted directly or indirectly in Henry Gresham being shot at or lunged at with sharp metal on innumerable occasions, seriously wounded on two occasions and shipwrecked, mercifully only once, on the wild Irish coast. Cecil's instructions had also resulted in Gresham being sentenced to be hung (twice), sentenced to be hung, drawn and quartered (once) and, on another memorable occasion, actually being roped to the rack in the Tower of London.
Yet Gresham kept coming back.
How on earth had he got himself involved in this lunatic world where power was the only morality, and where nothing was as it seemed? It was as if it had been that way for ever, from the moment when as little more than an overgrown boy he had been dragged in to play such a deciding role in the tragedy of Mary Queen of Scots. He had made no conscious choice to become involved. In Gresham's experience, Fate did not consult with humans before deciding the course of their lives, or if they were to have life at all. Falling initially in the way of the Queen's spymaster, old Sir Francis Walsingham, Gresham had increasingly found himself taking his orders from Robert Cecil, the self-appointed heir apparent to Walsingham's vast complex of spies, agents and informers. Gresham and Cecil had loathed each other from the first moment of their meeting. Yet the danger, the excitement and the risk were a heady mixture, and Gresham had carried on, playing the great game until it had seemed that he had pushed his life to the edge and that by then he owed God a death. Then Cecil had summoned him, years ago, wanting him to go on some pitiful and dreary expedition to see informers in Spain. Gresham had refused. Cecil had looked at him, and drawn out of a wallet a piece of writing, carefully copied in a clerk's hand.
'You might care to read this, Master Gresham, before you make any final decision regarding your acceptance of my request.'
Cecil was cool, calm, measured as he always was.
Gresham read it. In a lesser man the colour would have drained from his face and the hand reading the paper shaken. Instead Gresham made himself read it once, twice and a third time, his hand rock steady.
'Yes?' he had said, gazing calmly, matter-of-factly into Cecil's eyes, revealing none of his inner sickness.
Cecil had stolen Walsingham's papers, the complete record of his spy network. Somewhere in those papers had been details of the affair that had blighted Gresham's life, the only thing he had done of which he was ashamed. Cecil had found it out. It was there, written in a neat hand on the paper.
'It would be a pity if this paper were to become known, would it not?' asked Cecil, in a silky voice. 'Known to a wider public, I mean.'
'Why, sir,' Gresham replied, no sign of his fear in his voice, 'the truth will always out. The Bible tells us so, does it not? And what is one man's vanity and reputation against the call of truth?'
'Will it suit you to go to Spain, Master Gresham, as I have asked?' Was there the tiniest hesitation in Cecil's voice, along with the aggression?
It was a deciding moment, Gresham knew. If he conceded the power of Cecil's paper against him now and obeyed, he would never be his own master again. Yet if he resisted, Cecil could provoke his ruin. It was folly to resist, madness. And so because he was who he was, he chose to fight.
'No, my Lord, I cannot go.' Cannot, he was careful to say. 'Cannot', not 'will not'. 'I have the strongest personal reasons for requiring to be here in England at the moment. Of course, were the matter more urgent, or were your Lordship's life to depend on it, then I would go at your Lordship's command, without hesitation. I ask to be relieved of this duty, by your gracious mercy.'
By your gracious mercy. That made it Cecil's decision to absolve him from the mission, a favour granted from on high. Yet it also meant that he, Gresham, had not bowed to pressure, had not given in to blackmail
Gresham carefully took the paper and placed it on the table, among the mass of papers that always surrounded Cecil, midway between them. He had given a form of words that allowed Cecil to save face. Would he take it?
There was a long silence.
Genuine thought, Gresham wondered, or enjoyment of the pain he knew he must be inflicting, for all the calm of the young man before him?
Cecil finally moved, taking the piece of paper carefully with forefinger and thumb, as if it was something faintly distasteful.
'A pity, sir. You would have been an excellent choice. Yet there will be other opportunities, that I do not doubt. Ones you will be more advised to accept, as I choose to exercise my "gracious mercy". As you so gallantly describe it.'
'Your Lordship is indeed most merciful,' replied Gresham, and seeing the expression in Cecil's eyes of the hawk looking down on the mouse, 'most merciful.'
Gresham had not won a victory, that much he knew. The sword was poised, hung over his head, not back in its scabbard. He had merely negotiated an armed truce, and risked being played with by Cecil, as a boy tortures a fly. So Gresham had accepted with enthusiasm several other requests from Cecil, all of them dangerous. As he had done so he had made notes not only of those missions with Cecil, but of his involvement going back years to the days of Walsingham.
The climax had come with the Essex rebellion. Cecil had a habit of triumphing over those apparently better suited than he for survival. For years he had been locked in mortal combat with the dashing and handsome Robert Devereux, second Earl of Essex. Essex had the ancient lineage, the charm and the body that had bowled over every woman at Court, including the Queen. It had done him no good. Cecil's wits, the animal and immoral way in which he fought, had overcome his rival, as they overcame all rivals. The idiotic, ill-fated Essex rebellion had sent Essex to the block, leaving Cecil in total power at Court. Essex's head was still there, picked bare, on London Bridge. There was only one Robert now. Robert Cecil.
The walls of London were ahead of him, and Gresham eased his pace as more and more people appeared on the roadway. He grinned inwardly as he remembered his own decisive part in the Essex rebellion — or, rather, the decisive role he had played in making sure that the so-called rebellion never even spluttered into danger, but fizzled out with hardly more noise than a musket shot. It had made interesting reading, when he had written it down and had it copied, and if Gresham's version had become known he felt it likely that Cecil's thin head might be joining Essex's on a pike. It had been one of his better moments when he had presented a copy, the true account of the Essex rebellion with proof of Cecil's treachery, to Cecil himself. He had trumped it, if it needed doing, by the casual mention of the fact that copies of that and numerous other papers, as well as being lodged in a variety of secret places dotted around England, could also be found in the Papal archive. They were to be held in secret until removed by Gresham himself, their early release authorised only, if Gresham were to die. Cecil blanched at that, showing emotion for almost the first time since Gresham had known him. The cellars below the Vatican were one of the very few areas Robert Cecil knew he would never penetrate, and there was a delicious touch of spice in the business by virtue of the fact both men knew that Gresham's access to this unique repository of documents had come through his having done some of Cecil's dirty work in Italy. It was poetic justice.
There was another reason for Gresham's hatred of Cecil, if another was needed. Two years ago Cecil had testified against and betrayed the friendship of the one man Henry Gresham had ever called master. Sir Walter Raleigh was the greatest man Gresham had ever known, a scholar poet, soldier, sailor, courtier and wit. He had saved Gresham's life. When the great wheel of fortune had seemed destined to plunge Raleigh down to the depths, and he had looked to his friends to rescue him from the sucking bog of Court politics, Cecil had betrayed him. Raleigh had been convicted on a trumped-up charge in a court hearing so biased it had shocked Europe. Now Raleigh, larger than life and leader of leaders, was languishing and ague-ridden in the Tower. Raleigh's wife had helped bring up Cecil's ailing child, taking him in alongside her own lusty, bawling brat and seeming to breathe life into his thin frame. This was how Cecil rewarded those who preserved his life blood, by imprisoning them in the Bloody Tower. Gresham could understand a man who betrayed his principles. He could never forgive a man who betrayed his friends.
The towers and roofs of Whitehall Palace were ahead of him now. Whitehall was Cecil's home, its labyrinthine passages an emblem for the devious and complex mind that dominated the Court more than any other. This was the moment of calm before the storm, the moment before a great venture when time froze and the last chance to turn away beckoned. Gresham's horse had come to a halt. Gently, he urged it forward. In an uncertain world, Gresham knew only two things. He despised Cecil, and whatever task Cecil had for him would bring grief and hardship in its trail. He also knew that he could not refuse the excitement of what Cecil might offer, or run too freely the risk of what he might reveal.
A surly groom took his horse, and Gresham stretched his muscles as he stood on the cobbled courtyard. Gresham was sure it was going to be Catholics this time round. He dreaded Catholics. They were what he did least well. The woman who had brought him up, raised the bastard son of Sir Thomas Gresham, was a Catholic. With her breast milk had come the rosary bouncing off his infant nose. He hated the Catholic business more than any other. The Marlowe business, the Essex rebellion, that tragic creature Mary and most of all his dealings with the Armada had seemed real. His dealings with the Catholics had seemed sad by comparison. Early on in his accidental career he had met a Catholic priest who had seemed to him the nearest thing to a saint on this earth that he would ever know. Months later he had watched that saint hung until near gasping dead, seen his heart cut out of his body and that long-suffering and frail body chopped into four pieces. To Gresham, who was no longer sure that there was a God, the shrieks a man uttered in his death throes were a single language, spoken alike among Roman or Protestant. The mutilation of human flesh in one cause or another seemed just another form of human sacrifice, the practice so widely condemned by Christianity.
Cecil was courteous, as ever. Grey-haired, the rich clothing he wore could only partially hide the deformity in his spine. His desk was littered with papers, and the paintings on the wall showed both his passion for art and his ability to pay for the best.
'Good morning to you, sir,' he had intoned, motioning Gresham to a stool.
The voice was flat, expressionless. The eyes were gimlet-hard, like a rat's. Cecil had a thin, mean figure, and a thin, mean face. His long cloak hid the ludicrously short legs that were such a joke in the marketplaces. There were many who saw a warped body as testimony to a warped mind. How right they were, thought Gresham, who had met many with both afflictions but never anyone who combined them to such effect as Robert Cecil. He moved in a manner that gave least cause to show the wrench in his neck, hidden by an exceptionally large collar on the cloak and an extravagant ruff. He seemed permanently cold, yet he met his network of spies in the largest and coldest room in his Palace. A huge, carved stone fireplace held the most meagre of fires, spluttering to cope with the cheapest of sea coal in the early morning and producing far more smoke than heat.
'How go your affairs in Cambridge?' enquired Cecil solicitously.
'Well, my Lord,' replied Gresham, outwardly deferential and inwardly impatient for the fencing to end. 'The College grows by the month.' Cecil was Chancellor of the University; another power base.
'So good to hear!' mused Cecil with total insincerity, pouring wine into a goblet and pushing it across the table to Gresham. The goblet was gold. It shone forth in this dreary room like sunshine after rain. The wine was cat's piss. Cecil only spent money on things that lasted, like the goblet or fine paintings. On something like the wine, that would be urine in a matter of hours, he spent as little as possible.
Gresham smiled, took the goblet and raised it in a toast. In doing so, he sniffed the wine, and without his smile shifting at all put the goblet down in front of him, its contents untasted. They would remain so throughout the meeting. Even a badly brought-up dose of the pox would have revolted had the liquid in the glass been poured over it.
Cecil's expression did not change, though he certainly noted the rejected goblet. He sat back in his splendid chair, gazing out through the narrow window with its view of the river. His guest sat on a bare, three-legged stool, with one leg shorter than the others. It was all there was to sit on, except the near-throne in which Cecil sat upright.
'We live in wicked times, Sir Henry. Wicked times.' Cecil sighed. There was no goblet or wine for him. In all their meetings Henry Gresham had never seen food or drink pass Cecil's lips.
Well, mused Gresham, you should know, as having created no small measure of that wickedness yourself.
'There are those in our midst who seek to deny the most basic, the most central commandments of Our Lord. Those who seek to do so whilst holding positions of very real power. Wicked men, Sir Henry. Truly evil men. Do you not agree?'
Catholics. It had to be Catholics. Damn, Gresham thought, anything but Catholics.
'You know of Sir Francis Bacon, I believe?' Cecil enquired, responding to Gresham's silence, leaning forward. It was his most beguiling gesture. In leaning forward the collar of his cloak drooped and the ruff dropped slightly, revealing his warped neck. 'Indeed, I think you have dined with him?'
Bacon? Bacon? Gresham's mind, behind its public mask and the half-smile, was in a turmoil. Bacon had been accused of most things, except being a Papist. Bacon's intelligence was matched only by his ambition. He had spent a lifetime trying to get inside the Queen's linen and was now trying to get inside the King's. Gresham hoped it was cleaner than the outside of the monarch. Bacon was just another man of talent trying to compensate for a lack of birth, driven by the same ambition that drove all those who came to Court. What had Bacon to do with the state of the nation?
'He has been to College, my Lord,' Gresham replied light-heartedly. 'He talks well,' he added dismissively. Let Cecil make the running.
'It is not his talk that concerns me, Sir Henry,' replied Cecil. He was sitting back now, ready to launch the blow. 'It is his sodomy.'
Gresham's face did not flicker. His expression did not falter. His pulse missed not a beat. He held down a massive urge to burst out laughing.
'Is it proven, my Lord?' enquired Gresham, his expression serious.
'No,' replied Cecil, looking coldly at Gresham. 'It is not. Yet if it is true, I must have it proven. I believe you to be the man to find such proof.'
Sodomy was a capital offence, certainly. The growing band of Puritans shouted the evils of fornication at an increasing number of street corners, to the hilarity and amusement of the populace. When they denounced the double sin of sodomy, the crowds ceased their laughter and joined in the shouting. Yet more and more the fashionable end of society was turning to experiment, be it with the new weed tobacco, strange concoctions of wine and herbs or the practice of sex. Sodomy was ill-advised. It was hardly the stuff of which the survival of nations was composed.
'I hope, my Lord,' responded Gresham carefully, 'that I have some experience of finding proof. Yet are you not better advised to set one of similar inclination on to this project? Why not set a thief to catch a thief? Am I to believe this is an urgent matter?'
'You might consider my example, Sir Henry. I believe very little.' Cecil's eyes bored into Gresham. Gresham did not flinch, the infuriating half-smile still on his lips. 'I observe a great deal. I merely use that which I have.'
Touchй", thought Gresham. Or if not that, stalemate.
All in all, it left them in their usual state of even balance. Both despised each other, yet had need of what each other had to offer. Each one could destroy the other, but knew the destruction was likely to be mutual. In that room Gresham was in the presence of raw power, pure and simple, and Henry Gresham could not resist the taste and smell of it.
Yet to be set on to determine the destination of Bacon's prick? After a frantic summons to travel without delay and post-haste to London? Bacon was fiercely ambitious. That much was widely known. He was in debt. That was also widely-known. And most known of all was the fact that he had one of the best brains in Christendom. He was related to Cecil, but the relationship, complicated by too many embattled women, had not been easy. It was also rumoured that, in common with Kit Marlowe — an earlier tragedy — he thought those 'who liked not boys were fools'. It was all good stuff for gossip in the ordinary and the tavern, but even if Bacon was proven to have buggered every boy in Europe it would hardly set England tottering on its constitutional heels. Essex had been Bacon's patron, of course, before Bacon had turned against him and even helped in his prosecution. Was this Cecil paying back an old debt, slowly destroying the last vestiges of those who had supported his old enemy Essex?
His scalp started to itch unbearably, even though he would swear no flea had made its entry to his head. He refused the overwhelming urge to scratch his itch.
'I will do as you ask, my Lord,' said Gresham calmly. 'It is my choice to do so.' Their eyes locked for a brief, fiery clash, and then both went dark. 'Yet I think there are greater issues than one man's buggery, in the present times.'
Cecil mouthed an insincere farewell, failing to rise to show Gresham to the door. There had to be a deeper reason for all this, thought Gresham as he left. At a guess, Bacon had offended Cecil, or was coming to be seen as a threat to Cecil's power in some way. This had to be personal. Would Gresham help destroy the man if it were so? He would see. He had felt no compunction working against Essex and bringing him down, not least of all because he saw Essex as both a threat to the nation and a lifelong enemy of Sir Walter Raleigh. If Bacon seemed a fly not worth the squashing, Gresham would leave him in peace and return an infuriatingly bland report to Cecil.
A servant appeared from nowhere and held open the carved and varnished door. As he passed through Gresham felt a distinct increase in temperature. Was it the room? Or was any room occupied by Robert Cecil colder and darker by virtue of its occupant?
'God's blood!' yelled the informer.
The cheap red wine had spilled out of his mouth and across one of the weeping ulcers that ringed his lips.
If Gresham was disturbed by the blasphemy, he did not show it. He leant casually back in his chair and motioned invitingly to the jug and the man's half-empty tankard. He carefully laid his arm in between some of the more poisonous stains on the table and gazed at the half-drunk informer.
'So have you news of Bacon's household?' asked Gresham patiently. Gresham's enquiries after Bacon had coursed out through the underworld of London. This was the latest lead that had emerged from its sewers.
The informer grunted, reached for the jug and poured himself a life-threatening dose of vinegar. He drew back on it, careful this time to make no spillage. He made as if to wipe his lips, remembered in time the damaged flesh thereabouts, and poked out instead a thick red tongue to gather up the residue.
'Yes, I do. Truthfully, I do. The little man has… visitors. Young visitors.'
The conspiratorial tone he sought to adopt was spoilt somewhat by the vast belch of foul breath that ended his sentence. The explosion of air seemed to rock him back, like a loose-shotted cannon.
Little man? Sir Francis Bacon was not particularly short, though certainly no giant. Those who envied the size and scope of his brain tended to vilify his build, as if the latter reflected the former. It was a common mistake of the time. If it had been true, the pathetic stunted and warped figure of Robert Cecil would not contain the most powerful brain in the country.
'The names of these young visitors?'
The informer's eyes were still glazed with the shock of his own eruption. God forbid he might fart next, thought Gresham. If he did it was likely to have lumps in it.
'Names? Names?' The man took another swig. 'These things have no names. They're sweepings, sweepings. Bastards taken at birth from a whore's bed, or saved from the river.'
The brown and swirling waters of the Thames bore a frequent cargo of new- or still-born children. They were meant to be from the loins of the whores who had matched London's stupendous growth. Gresham cared not to think how many well-born casement windows had seen a private cargo despatched into the waters of Lethe. All new-born appeared alike when swelled by their feast of filthy river water.
'If not names, then witnesses. Who witnesses this nightly progress?'
The informer allowed an expression of alarm to cross his eyes and ravaged face. He took another half-swig, his moderation reflecting a new sense of danger.
'Why, the servants, of course. All the servants.'
'And the Gateman will testify to this? The other servants will testify?'
'Why… why… they may, of course. Of course they may.'
Gresham's voice was at its most silky soft. He placed his other arm between a stain that might have been blood and one that was certainly grease, and leant forward.
'Without testimony those visitors are phantoms, just ghosts upon the wind.'
His voice turned from summer sun to the glint of blade in passageway.
'As you, my friend, are so much piss and wind.'
He came to his feet. He was an impressive figure, five foot eight or so and with an easy muscle rippling below the superbly tailored doublet, hose and cloak.
His figure, clothed all in black, loomed over the informer like Death himself. And now the voice became ice, cold beyond belief. It froze the informer, even as it released him. As Gresham spoke, he heard the tinkle of urine falling to the floor from the terrified man, smelt the hot, raw stink of steaming piss.
'You will return here, a fortnight from now. You will bring names, names of young sodomites or names of servants who will testify against their master. Or you will bring nothing. On what you bring you will be judged. Leave. Now.'
Gresham sank back in his chair, a black mood of despair threatening to overwhelm him. The informant, humiliated by his wetting himself and terrified beyond belief, fled, muttering incoherently.
This was going nowhere, Gresham thought. I am facing a man of unbounded intelligence, and all I have to question is fools.
'More work for the laundress.' The gruff voice was Mannion's. Built like a Cathedral, he had stationed himself just outside the door, opening it to let the informer out and himself in.
'More work for the chambermaid,' muttered Gresham, nodding to the steaming yellow pool on the floor beneath the table. He doubted she or the landlord would bother. The floor had seen much worse. There was a virtual history of London drunkenness etched on to the worn boards.
Mannion waited. If his master wished to talk, he would do so. Mannion would listen. Sometimes his master needed to talk and hear no reply. Sometimes he spoke and needed to debate. Mannion would respond, in kind. He would know which it was and, if it seemed proper to do so, would speak.
There was silence, Gresham sipping thoughtfully at his own goblet. As ever he had made sure he had his own wine, not the spew served to the informer. It was the best the inn had to offer, which was not very much. Like much of the City, it was brash, and new and quite raw, and like the City it had a taste of something much older, something sweetly rotten, beneath it.
So there was to be no talking, Mannion reflected. So be it.
'Shame about the candles,' Mannion muttered as they left the room. Gresham had left them burning, most of them not yet half done. The landlord would gratefully snuff them out and use the remaining half, charging Gresham for the whole candle. Gresham did not respond. It was an old joke.
It had been years ago. They had just started campaigning after a dreadful winter. The canvas of the tent had seemed as if it was just drying out, in the rare sun of a Flanders spring. The soldiers had come in silent, angry. Usually an action cleared the blood, exhilarated them. This time the pathetic Spaniard in charge of the troop had not only been concealing the gold they had been sent to rob, but concealing his wife. She was a pretty girl, not yet nineteen years of age. Hidden in a baggage cart, they would probably have left her, heavily pregnant as she was, if they had found her. Even a scream would have caused a laugh and no more. It was early in the campaigning year, they were fat with an idle winter and there were no grudges to pay back as yet. Instead she had climbed out of her hiding place silently, seeking to rush out of the wagon and into the shrubbery surrounding the ambush. The youngest recruit had heard the rustle of clothing behind him and swung round with sword outstretched. His mother had obtained the sword for him. God knew — or so Gresham hoped — how the Toledo steel of a Spanish grandee had found its way into the hands of a woman who had proudly borne six fiercely Protestant sons in an East Anglian farmhouse. The sword was sharp as a razor, despite the youngest son's crude attempts at sharpening it. Its curving arc, powered by all the untrained force of a healthy and terrified eighteen-year-old, had sliced neatly through the stomach of the pregnant woman.
It had also sliced into the unborn boy, so that it was bleeding to death even as it flopped to the ground. It had an audience fitting for such an end in Flanders mud. Its mother saw it bleed to death in front of her, as her frighteningly red hands clawed at her own gut. So did its father and its murderer, and an assorted troop of Protestant and Catholic mercenaries and volunteers.
The young man skewered himself on the sword his mother had given him. He did it badly, of course. He would take days to die as the horrific wound in his belly and bowel suppurated and led to its inevitable conclusion. The problem was, he would scream.
So they came into the tent in varying moods and set about getting as drunk as possible in as short a time as was possible. Henry Gresham was a veteran of two years' standing. Haying seen so much, he was later to the bottle than many of the younger ones. He saw the outstretched hand knock the lamp and its oil off the empty barrel and fling its contents against the canvas of the tent. He saw the oil sink into the canvas, inert. He saw the wick, still flaming, sail through the air as if the world had slowed down and God declared a war against time, towards the canvas. He saw the wick hit the canvas, flicker as if ready to die, and then burst out anew on the oil-soaked cloth.
They should not have stored powder in the tent. There was a store for it, only a few hundred yards away. Yet they were veterans, survivors of a war that seemed endless. They knew the perils of powder that had separated through old age, of powder that was damp or badly mixed. They preferred to keep and tend their own, and despite their every precaution the fire reached it.
Henry Gresham never knew what object, flung out by the blast, gouged his leg and thigh to near pulp. He did know the sight of his erstwhile commander, screaming for light with a boiled face and eye sockets permanently burned out. The last thing he remembered was Mannion, reaching out as if to stop him connecting with the ground.
So it was that Henry Gresham commanded candles, not lamps, in his house and in the rooms he hired. A candle, if knocked over, tended to go out. If not, its flame was a slow, friendly kind of fire. Oil simply wished to ignite. He could bear lamps, of course. Indeed, in strange rooms and strange houses where he had no control he hardly even noticed them. Henry Gresham had long ago lost any belief that a human being could control their life. All one could do was to control it where one had power, that being a very small portion of the whole.
‘I’ll have what's left of those candles snuffed out and in my bag in seconds,' Mannion grumbled. 'You've paid for them, haven't you?' Mannion never ceased to mention the waste of candles. By reminding Gresham, he made the fear normal.
'View it as my gesture of protest against the dominance of night in this world of ours,' Gresham said loftily, and swept out of the room.
'View it as a damn silly waste of money, more like!' muttered Mannion, closing the door behind him.
Mannion also had a sense of humour. By comparison with many other men's sense of humour it was odd in the extreme. What Mannion found funny, and what could not produce even the tiniest stretching of his craggy features, never ceased to fascinate Gresham. Boots, for example, were endlessly funny to Mannion. It was as if he deemed mankind to have been born with feet the aim of which was to trudge through whatever muck God chose to put at ground level. He would accept clogs or the most basic leather footwear as a reasonable recourse against the elements on the part of the dominant species, but in the face of the finery the gentry put on their feet he was reduced to hopeless laughter.
A gentleman would don boots as a matter of necessity. A courtier would like people to believe that his fine shoes would never need to meet muck or mud, unless one was riding, of course. Henry Gresham was a gentleman, fabulously rich and a courtier when he chose. He was also an agent for King James I of England and King James VI of Scotland. So it was that he was planning to walk home, from The Mermaid Inn after his rather fruitless conversation. Gentlemen and courtiers rode horses or had carriages. Gentleman courtiers who were spies tended to avoid both, as drawing attention to themselves.
Mannion eyed his own stout leggings, and the supple leather of his master's fine boots.
'Shame about the boots,' he muttered with a grin. Mannion had no fear for the armed gangs who roamed the streets after nightfall. He was highly amused by the prospect of what the walk would do to his master's fine boots.
There was something about London muck that did for fine leather. Too much of Gresham's time was taken up in walking back from shady rendezvous. The worst times were early morning, and late at night. During the day it was not too bad. A veritable army of men scurried to shovel up every human, horse, cattle and dog turd that lay steaming on the streets. There was money to be made from shit, but to make it you had to see it. At night it was invisible, and ever present.
'Remember that dream you told me about once?' said Mannion, as they walked through a street with a particularly narrow over-hang.
Gresham had once had a nightmare where he was leaving one of Bankside's most unsavoury taverns and his way home was lit by endless torches. The dim and flickering light illuminated thousand upon thousand of straining arses, perched over the narrow and overhanging streets and each delivering their message to the street with a hollow thud.
He shook his head, and the image vanished. A grinning Mannion led him down the rickety stairs and through The Mermaid, full as was usual with its theatrical crowd and some of the more daring socialites, tasting a bit of rough and arty for the night. The air was thick and unpleasant, the dancing light revealing the sweat on the fevered brows. Men dealing, men stealing, men intriguing and whores selling. It was a foetid mix, and Gresham could not wait to be out of it.
Gresham's eyes flickered round the room, seeming to see nothing, noting everything. He noted a dour, stooping figure, clearly the worse for drink, sitting alone at a back table. Gresham scrabbled in his memory for the man's name. It would come. They emerged into the black streets. The muscularity of their walk, and the ease with which their hands rested on the swords in their belts, caused the ways to part in front of them. They were the source of menace, not its victims.
'That man, seated in the corner,' Gresham said, 'the one on his own and worse for drink; do you recognise him?'
'Should I?' replied Mannion. 'Shall I go back in and ask?'
'No, not yet at least. I remember him from somewhere. It'll come back.'
As they passed an 'ordinary', light spilled out from the door, and two men fell brawling into the street. There were shrieks and yells, good-natured laughter. Out of the dark a crowd gathered, egging the two on. Gresham and Mannion looked away, preserving their night vision. Inside that same tavern Gresham knew a man could be reading exquisite sonnets to his friends. Shortly after, they were plunged into darkness, the huge overhang of the half-timbered buildings closing over them like a black cloud. It was a residential area. The doors were closed and bolted this late in the night, and only the feeble light of an occasional candle or guttering lamp behind closed shutters showed that some merchant was still up, counting his credit or bemoaning his losses. Or, as a shriek from behind followed by the thuds of two or three blows suggested, a wife was being taught what a man thought was good manners.
It was, then that a moment for Heaven came, a moment that summed up for Gresham the magic of London. Shortly behind him two men were fighting, cheered on by a drunken crowd, and a wife was being beaten for doing no more probably than trying to be herself. And then, from a high window, came the breath of
Heaven.
Music had always inspired Gresham. It was his greatest regret that he could not find in himself the means to produce what so inspired him from others. O Jove, From Stately Throne. That was it. Gresham had met the composer. Farrant? Yes, Richard Farrant, no less. Perhaps it was Farrant, his face ravaged by smallpox, leading the small ensemble in the upstairs room, playing and singing beyond all reasonable time, desperately trying to compensate for the ugliness of his own face by the beauty of his music.
The voice of Heaven filtered out through the shutters and on to the dark street, dropping like gentle rain on the heads of Gresham and Mannidn. As a man they stopped, raised their faces, and let the beauty fall on their upturned visages like a summer shower.
It was high summer. Even here, in the great city, the sense was in the air. With the warmer evenings fires were lit later and left burning shorter. The smoke that hung over London on a still day like a funeral pall was visibly less. The cattle driven through the streets were fat and full of milk.
The most dangerous thing they met on the journey was a dog, half wild with hunger and trailing a leg damaged in a fight, or in a collision with a cart. It slunk away down an alley.
He had worked himself back into a good humour by the time he and Mannion reached home, his mood generated by what awaited him there. Known simply as the House, the London home built by Gresham's father was situated in the highly fashionable area of the Strand, and with its own landing on to the River it was a prime site. His father had bought it when the monasteries had been dissolved.
The House was well-run. That much was clear. The two well-built men who acknowledged their master as he trudged through the mud to his own doorstep recognised him, but would have recognised an enemy just as clearly, and sounded the alarum. Their pleasure in seeing their master was in no small measure related to the fact that Henry Gresham showed pleasure in seeing them.
'Good evening, Matt, good evening, Will,' he muttered as he passed them by. Mannion grunted at them.
The entrance hall was of marble, brought over at fabulous expense from Italy. The statues and hangings were also Italian. The woman was English.
Jane Carpenter was nearing twenty-three years of age, and was the most beautiful woman in London. She had a face of stunning beauty, cheekbones pushing up round the roundest and darkest pair of eyes in Christendom. Her body lacked the plumpness of many Court ladies, but she had the grace and strength of a young colt, and legs beneath her dress that seemed to cross counties. Yet it was her eyes that commanded attention, extraordinary eyes, with dark lights seeming to flash beneath their surface. Gresham grinned at her as Mannion struggled to pull off his boots, replacing them with soft shoes. She grinned in return. With him she dropped the rather aloof distance she maintained with all people of social standing, the faint tone of terrible boredom.
'Are London's problems solved, my Lord, and can innocent maidens go safely now to our beds?'
'Firstly, I don't solve problems but rather create them, I think. Secondly, I am not nor ever will be "Lord" to anyone. Thirdly, you are not innocent, and fourthly, in your bed no-one is safe.' Feeling rather proud of his grasp of numbers, he reinforced the words, as soon as Mannion had left the room with his boots and cloak, by flinging out an arm, gathering her up and delivering a kiss that shook the fine plaster on the walls.
'Ouch!' she exclaimed truthfully, the hilt of his sword banging into her just under her ribcage. 'Why do men always have to bang at everything?'
'It's in the nature of men to give, and women to receive,' muttered Gresham, nuzzling her hair.
'As gifts go, what men give tends to be rather single-minded and very repetitive,' Jane replied, pushing him away and laughing up at him. 'Must I expect to endure receiving you tonight?'
'If I choose to honour you with my gifts, then yes. Yet as you've always been such an obedient servant, I don't doubt your instant bending…' She raised both her eyebrows. '… or whatever,' he added lamely, 'to my will.'
She dropped her hands to her sides and looked at him with that rare mixture of exasperation and love.
'Do be quiet, Henry Gresham. And come to your bed.' Your bed? For a brief flicker of a moment, Gresham was taken back to the time when he had first set eyes on this woman. Was it the timbre of her voice that sent him back, or that strange mixture of something brazen with something vulnerable and defenceless?
It had been on one of his first journeys from the calm of his Cambridge College to London, in 1590. He was still hobbling from his wound, and was without the relay of spare horses that Mannion was establishing for him. His horse had thrown a shoe just outside Bishop's Stortford. He had been left to his own devices in a village that did not even boast a poor inn', whilst Mannion saw to the horse and a replacement.
As he sat, picking at the rough grass and throwing it into the dank pond, he became aware that a pair of eyes were gazing solemnly at him from in between some bushes.
He gazed back. The two gazes locked, and held.
A thin, piping voice came from the bushes. 'First one who blinks loses.'
Gresham was so surprised that he blinked.
'There, you've lost. You must pay me a forfeit.'
The accent was thick but the diction clear.
'Well, young madam,' said Gresham as the painfully thin figure of a six or seven-year-old girl climbed out of the bushes and into full view, 'I've no recollection that I ever agreed to your terms.'
'But you didn't refuse them either, sir, and therefore as a gentleman you're bound to agree with me.'
The logic was somehow faulty, in a way that Gresham could not quite fathom.
'And what if I don't agree?' The girl's eyes seemed to occupy her whole head. They were the darkest blue Gresham had ever seen, with flickering sparkles hidden deep inside them.
The girl shrugged. 'Then I suppose you'll beat me.'
'Do many beat you?'
'All the time. You see, I'm a bastard, and bastards deserve to be beaten.' The little girl said it as if it was a litany she knew off by heart.
'How often are you beaten?'
'All the time. Here, you may see.' The girl dropped her loose tunic over her bony shoulders, down to her waist. Seven or eight red stripes marked her back, with the older blows turning to dull and dark bruises. She turned to look at him, over her shoulder. There was no coyness in her posture or voice, merely a statement of fact.
'They go on further down, but you're a man, so I can't show you my secret places.'
She carefully drew up her stained tunic, and sat on her haunches, looking at him. 'May I have my forfeit now?'
Gresham had often wondered what would have happened then, were it not for the interruption. He suspected he would have given this little vixen a few coins, and shooed her on her way. It was still his time of darkness, not a time when he had a care for any other living creature, being too full of mourning for those he had loved and betrayed.
Yet at the word 'forfeit' there was an outraged yell from one of the hovels overlooking the pond, and an elderly man erupted from the ill-shuttered door.
'You bitch! You brazen whore's whelp! Where've you been, you little whore, when your duty called? I'll teach you your duty…'
The girl might have been quick enough to evade the blow, had she not been rapt in her attentions to Gresham. As it was, she was a split second late and caught the blow square on her back.
It was not much of a back, as these things went. It was only seven years old, it had never been properly fed or properly clean. Yet it could bleed like any other back, if a witch-hazel stick whipped across it.
Gresham broke the man's arm. It was easy enough, for a soldier. As he raised it for the second blow on the prostrate little figure beneath him, Gresham sprang up, finding his sword in his hand without consciously willing it there or even knowing it had happened. He brought up the sword arm, with its extra weight of metal, just behind the man's wrist, a split second before he brought down his other arm with terrible force on the outstretched arm 'twixt wrist and elbow. The crack of bone would have shattered ice.
The peasant was bellowing on the ground, his arm smashed. The girl had vanished back into the bushes, nursing a new welt but not, Gresham noted, making a sound. Neighbours were rushing out on to the green to see the cause of the entertainment. In very short order they surrounded the gentleman and demanded reparation not only for the damage done to the man, but for disturbing the peace of the whole village. After all, a sword could only kill one man, and there were ten or more of them there in the space of three or four breaths. There was money in this business, and they knew it, peasants that they were.
Then Mannion loomed over the rise that surrounded the pond, and things became calmer. Things usually did become calmer when Mannion arrived on the scene. The villagers who had been feeling their cudgels with enthusiasm suddenly thought it better to put them behind their backs. A rather more civilised process of negotiation assumed pride of place. The man on the ground howling in his agony — 'William', it would appear by all counts — was a labourer. Well, William would not be labouring for a month or two, that was clear. William was also the nearest thing this village had to a saint, that much was also clear. Taken on his daughter's bastard, he had, that same daughter who had caught God's justice when she died in childbirth with no man to call her proper husband.
Looking at William, Gresham wondered how the bastard girl had ever survived. The midwife must have spirited the poor wean away and presented it back to William when the lump it might have made in the pond would have been too obvious even to the other villagers. Come to think of it, there was a fretful old woman hovering at the back of the gesticulating villagers.
It took precious little money to calm them down. Yet what took all of them aback, including Gresham, was his final question.
'How much for the girl?'
Mannion looked up, startled, at his master, and wondered for a brief moment if he liked fucking children. God knows, enough did. And, Mannion decided almost instantaneously, his master didn't. Yet he too had seen the child sliced out of its mother's belly, and knew that taking on this child might somehow claw back some of the despair from that dreadful day.
And the child could always be handed over to someone else to bring up, when Gresham returned to emotions more proper for a man.
In the final count, the amount paid for the girl was paltry. The expression in William's eyes suggested that his arm was well broken if this was the reward. Gresham had visions of him erupting into the path of every gentleman who rode by, demanding that they break his arm.
She had shown no emotion until the time of their leaving. A mere piece of property, she had been bartered and sold, with no-one thinking to ask her opinion. She vented it, forcibly, when she was seated behind Mannion the servant on his horse, as was only proper.
She screamed and shrieked and pummelled and yelled, causing even Mannion's horse to buck and to rear in protest.
'What is wrong with you, girl!' Gresham exploded.
'You bought me,' the thin, shivering Eve proclaimed through gritted and tear-stained teeth. 'I shall ride on no horse except your own.'
Gresham had killed more men than he cared to count. He had witnessed the person he most loved in Creation die in agony before him, and because of him. He had suffered in a few months more pain than most men underwent in a lifetime. He had a fortune to his name, he cared for no man and he cared for nothing… Why, then, thought Gresham, am I riding at a sedate pace and freezing to death, whilst a seven-year-old bastard girl sits behind me in state, wearing my fine cloak?
If he had been able to answer that question, then perhaps he would really have been God.
There was a vestige in him of his own childhood. He too had known what it was to be the bastard.
'Find me a woman to care for this… minx,' he had said to Mannion as they arrived in London. The girl had been restored to rude good health by a substantial meal. If her eyes had opened any wider on their entry to London they would have consumed her face.
'Find me someone who won't just care for her. Find me some servants who'll love her, as if she were their own.'
And Mannion, as he always did, found what his master wanted.
Jane had fallen in love with the House only slightly less than she had fallen in love with the strange and darkly dressed man who had rescued her from abuse. It had been a dark, dreary and a sad place she had come to, still in mourning for the death of Gresham's father and an heir who seemed determined to neglect it. As a child she had haunted its every nook and cranny, and as she grew older and into womanhood she seemed to light up the building with her love for it. Nominally under the care of the elderly Housekeeper, Jane had grown into that role herself so gently that no-one could point to the exact time when she became the acknowledged mistress of the House.
The House was the best-run house in London. No wine was drunk, no food eaten and no clothing for footmen paid for without Jane being convinced that the expenditure was proper. There was a part of Jane that was the feral cat, a part Gresham knew would never leave her. It accounted in part for her raw sexuality, her enjoyment of the physical act. The servants saw the untamed Jane if they cheated their master, the House or her, and felt it. Gresham had seen her turn on a thieving servant with a cold fury, and a ferocious concentration of anger that was almost tangible. Yet months later she had waited most of the night by that same serving girl's bed when she seemed as if she would die of a fever, and fed her beef tea. That same woman he had seen when a sudden downpour had flooded the hall, her skirts tucked up to her knees, laughing and joking with the servant girls as they all joined to swoosh the filthy water back out into the street. The men servants may have leered at her behind her back, for all Gresham knew. To her face they were strangely protective, their visible respect tinged almost with a certain fearfulness. All the servants spoke in awe of her, grumbling as servants did. Yet it was her food that was the freshest, her room the most clean and her bed linen the most virgin-white. In a way Gresham did not understand, they took an immense pride in her. He knew and accepted almost with complacency that many of them would die for him. It surprised him how many he thought might die for her. Then again, he lived in a world where if the master or the mistress sinned, the servants received an equal or worse punishment. Dying for your master or your mistress was not a choice for the servants of the well-born. It was a condition of service.
Gresham still did not know how the irritating, obnoxious foundling, the by-blow of a hasty assault on a peasant common, had become his mistress.
He had come to the House late one night, obsessed with business. The thin-boned foundling had turned into a strikingly beautiful seventeen-year-old with an imperious will. She had strode about his chamber, showing real anger as she explained the various frauds upon his money that his servants had perpetuated.
'And furthermore, my Lord, there's one even greater crime to which you must answer!'
'And what's that?' said Gresham, wearied beyond belief by decisions that affected all Christendom, not to mention his supposedly immortal soul. How was it to him if a cook was ordering extra chickens?
She stood there, tall and straight as the bolt from an arrow, flashing radiance in the room. 'You, who have every right to claim me as your own, have never looked at me as a woman!'
Well, he had been taken by a fit and had done more than look upon her as a woman that night, to their apparent mutual satisfaction. Yet when he woke, he was more than a man with the edge taken off his carnal hunger by a fine night of lovemaking. More scared than he had been in the face of a Spanish cannon, he realised with an almost sickening fear that he was in love. He knew that he had signed his will away. He had not sought it. He had even tried positively to avoid it, or any other entanglement. It had done him no good.
Yet Jane had steadfastly refused to marry him. He had pleaded with her.
'You seem to have claimed ownership of my body, and doubtless wanted my soul since I first saw you by that cursed pond! I've said I love you, haven't I? Why won't you make a proper woman of yourself, and a proper man of me, by being my wife? Am I fat and stinking of grease? Am I not rich enough for you?'
She had turned away that night, after their lovemaking, peaceful and contented. She let his ranting pass over her, with the inner calm that drove him to even greater fury. She turned round to face him, letting cold air into the bed.
'I've said my thanks with my body. It's all I was gifted with from God. Everything else I have was somebody else's. You've had the only thing I have to give, as I now am. Anything else must wait.'
'Yet you've shown me your secret places. You've let me use those secret places, to my heart's content.'
He remembered the first showing to him of her wounds.
She smiled at him, a radiance that lit up the bed. 'I've shown you the secret places of my body, and willingly so.'
She turned over in the bed, her back towards him. As if from a far continent, her last words came. 'As for the secret places of my soul, for that you will have to wait.'
Gresham knew of no more final goodnight.
Arid now he was lying in his vast bed in 1605, years on from that first meeting and years on from the night when he had taken her virginity. He was satiated, yet as mystified by this woman he loved as he had been by the side of the pond in that filthy village all those years ago. Perched on the very edge of sleep, the knowable world of Cambridge, the dangerous world of Robert Cecil and the imponderable world of Jane raced round in his head until they blended into a wild half-dream. Cecil was screaming at him, blaming him that his mistress was soon to be elected as Master of King's College. He recoiled in the face of Cecil's spitting anger, yet thinking it would not be the first time a bastard had been involved in the governance of that College.
In his dreams, the bloated face of Will Shadwell rose up from the deep.
'Beware! Beware!' it moaned at him. 'You are in waters too deep for your soul!'
'My soul, poor tattered thing, was lost a long while ago,' whispered Gresham. 'And I have been in waters too deep all my life!'
At that the ghost of Will Shadwell vanished, and Henry Gresham slept in peace. Just before he did so, the name of the man stooped over his tankard in the tavern came to him.
'Wintour. Robert Wintour..;' What did he know about Robert Wintour? It would come to him. It always did.