The rebel heart hg-4

by Martin Stephen

  He recognised that at the back of his mind, even as he had fallen on the bed with her, there had been exactly that fear.

  'My Lord,' she said, and was prim and courteous now, 'what's happened is between us. And only us. With your permission, I propose to make it both secret and private.'

  He sat on the edge of the bed.

  'Keep anything from the servants?' he said. He was not at his most articulate.

  'My Lord,' she said almost pityingly. 'The servants have had us sharing a bed these two years past, whatever the truth might have been. And been loyal enough to keep the news to themselves. It would be better if you left first,' she said, matter-of-factly. 'And if the right buttons were in the right loops on your doublet.'

  He started and, rather guiltily, buttoned up his doublet correctly.

  'Look,' he said, 'I know where we've been, but I don't quite know where I am yet. One thing only: no more "My Lord". If you have to use something, make it… oh, I don't know… sir?'

  'Why, yes, sir,' she said, bobbing a curtsy like a simpering little parlour maid, with a wicked smile lurking at the corner of her mouth.

  What did it mean when you left a girl you had just slept with, and found her even more beautiful after the event than you had beforehand? He had not wanted this to happen, or at least had persuaded himself so, but like her something in him had recognised a strange inevitability about the whole thing.

  He spent the rest of the day in a daze. Mannion kept an impassive face and said nothing. That night, when he had gone to bed and the embers of the fire were flickering, there was the merest whisper of a door opening, and she stood by the bed. Hesitant, confused as he had never been before in his life since the night he had lost his own virginity, he drew back the cover. Jane slipped in.

  Next morning when he woke she was gone, leaving no trace of her presence except for the slightest indent in the pillow and a lingering perfume. When Mannion came, they started the ritual of dressing as first light was coming up over the rooftops. If Mannion smelt a slight fragrance in the air, he said nothing.

  He remembered these days as a strange interlude in his life. Outwardly, nothing changed with Jane, except they rarely argued. Once, when she had complained that the cook was paying too much for fish and she suspected the relationship between her and the fishmonger was not entirely restricted to fish he had responded by saying that as far as he was concerned the fishmonger could be going to bed with a school of whales. She had said that he ought to care more where his money went, and he had said it was his money… all like the old times. Just when they were about to start going at each other she giggled, and he stopped in his tracks. ‘What is it?' he said.

  'It's your image,' she had said. 'Cook does look very like a whale! And she puts her lips together and blows out with a sort of — "Harumph!" noise. Just like the books say a whale does. And,' she said, getting carried away, 'the books also say that the breath the whale expels smells awful, and cook can smell awful at times.' Looking at her for the first time with the scales pulled from his eyes, he saw her life force, her exuberant energy. Ruby was the right jewel for her.

  At night she came to his bed, and it was strange and new and unlike anything he had ever experienced. Sometimes it was gentle, sometimes almost violent and at other times they did nothing except talk to each other, in stage whispers as if Mannion who slept outside the door did not know what was going on inside. And for the first time in his life he talked to someone other than Mannion about his childhood.

  London was convinced that rebellion was imminent the day after Grey assaulted Southampton. As it so often was, London was wrong. The apprentice boys, so frequently the source of riot in the crowded streets, slowly stopped working with half an ear cocked for disturbances, ready to down tools at a moment's notice and start to break some heads. The guards at Whitehall went back to normal manning levels, and it was rumoured that late one night cartloads of muskets and small arms rumbled and rattled their way back into the armoury in the Tower of London, whence they had been summoned to reinforce the guards at Whitehall.

  And then the storm broke, one Saturday after what George would undoubtedly have described as Gresham's revelation in an attic.

  Gresham was in deep thought when Jane came to see him. There was a purse on the table in front of him, open where he had just taken money out to give to an informer who had skulked in through the back door of The House. It was early morning, and the man had given Gresham much food for thought.

  'Sir!' she said, breathless and flushed, 'there's something very strange happening at the Globe. One of the delivery boys was full of it this morning, and I've checked and it's true. Something I think you ought to know.'

  'Tell me,' he said, only half interested, his mind churning over what he had just heard. News from a delivery boy did not seem likely to change the world.

  'A group of Lord Essex's men were at the Globe yesterday. They saw the play, and then apparently one of them, Lord Mounteagle I think, offered the players forty shillings — forty shillings'. — to put on a performance of Richard the Second. You know — the old play by Shakespeare!'

  'I should think the players'll have forgotten the lines by now,' said Gresham. 'It hasn't been performed for years now, has it? It's hardly the height of fashion.'

  'That's what the players said, apparently. But the money was too good, and they've agreed to stage it. Tonight. You know what it means, don't you? The play, I mean.'

  'It's the story of the rebellion by the Welshman Bolingbroke, who's shown as a loyal and good servant to a fickle monarch. He's banished, returns to England and, with the help of Welsh support, overthrows and imprisons Richard, eventually becoming King himself,'said Gresham.

  An incitement to rebellion? A signal to London of what was going to happen? He jumped up to his feet.

  'Are we going to the play?' Jane wanted to be in the action.

  'Yes. Perhaps. Why not? But first I have to see someone.'

  Plays were performed in the early afternoon, after the main meal of the day which, for most people, was at noon. There was time for Gresham to do what he had to do and see the play. 'Who?' asked Jane.

  'I have to see a man called Smith,' answered Gresham grimly. He took Mannion and four men with him and returned in time for their dinner. There was a sense of suppressed tension in him. 'Are we going to the play?' asked Jane.

  'Yes,' said Gresham. 'But I warn you it could be dangerous. I'm gambling that Essex will be there, so that I can talk to him. I must talk to him! If he is there, you'll be safe. He won't attack me if there's a woman in the party, I know it. If he's not, it could get nasty. Very much so. So if you come it's as our insurance, but at great risk.'

  He could see the fear in her eyes, but also the excitement. 'Will I need a pistol?' she asked. 'Can you stuff one in your dress?' 'I'd rather you carried it for me.'

  They ordered the boat. Unusually, Gresham chose the crew.

  The playhouses were on the south side of the river, outside the strict boundaries of the City of London and thereby granted a little more freedom to do what the City Fathers so hated them for doing. Plays were seditious, evil things in the opinion of many, inflaming the popular imagination and corrupting it, hotbeds of riot, breeding centres for plagues of the body and plagues of the mind. It was a damp, cold day, though not wet enough to cancel the performance. The actors had an awning over the stage, and those who could pay sat in the tiered ranks and boxes of the wooden 'O' that was the Globe theatre. Only the groundling stood and caroused in the open area of the pit, and they were used to being soused.

  It was a smaller crowd than usual flitting across the river, and the Globe was only half full, some put off by the damp, some by the unfashionable play and others fearful of what this revival might mean. Some people came onto the streets when rebellion was in the air but more locked and bolted their doors. Yet it seemed as if every rabble-rouser, Welsh peasant and unemployed soldier who had ever walked London's streets was packed in the theatre.
Half an hour before the play was due to begin the noise level was rattling the timbers and shaking dust out of the thatch.

  'Is this safe?' asked Mannion, not usually prone to feeling nervous.

  'For us? For London? Or for the Queen? I don't know,' answered Gresham. Southampton was there, he saw, Mounteagle and the vulture-like Gelli Meyrick, plus a host of the others Essex had gathered round him like a graveyard gathers corpses. And Davies, of course. Would Essex come? Surely he would. For months now he had refused to leave Essex House, citing the danger he believed he was in from his enemies. The attack on Southampton by Grey, when for once the odious little toad was apparently doing nothing more than riding about his own business, had confirmed Essex in his opinion, and produced a host more pamphlets. Even without their master, the mood of the assembly was dark, violent, poisonous.

  They had been spotted by the Essex crowd — Gresham, Mannion and Jane, together with the eight men who had rowed them there. There was a strict order among them for who rowed to the play, and such trips were a zealously guarded perk of working for Gresham. Gresham had ordered the rota to be thrown out of the window this time, and had chosen the men himself. Jack, Dick and Edward were there, and five others whose qualifications for the trip seemed to be in the broadness of their backs rather than in their love of poetry. They were on open seats on the first tier, just to the side of the stage. Essex's major cronies were in the same tier, taking the middle seats as befitted the patrons of the performance. Meyrick nudged Davies, and both men looked up to gaze calmly at Gresham. He gazed back. The two men looked impassively at him for a moment, whispered a few more words and turned away.

  'We could 'ave trouble gettin' out of 'ere,' said Mannion.

  'We could,' said Gresham. 'Give the nod to Tom.'

  Jane had not understood why three of the men were carrying bulky leather sacks on their backs, with a flap of leather over the top to protect their contents from the rain.

  'It's to carry your pistol,' said Gresham.

  Nor did she understand why a ninth man, the rather nondescript' looking Tom, very different from the man who had died on the Anna, had been parked as an extra in the boat, between the oarsmen, and confined to the pit, and banned from wearing the black and silver of Gresham's livery. Jane had heard him being told to lose himself, but to keep in touch. He kept turning round and staring up at the gallery with a fixed, white look, his hair plastered down on top of his head by the thin drizzle. Mannion waited until none of the Essex men seemed to be looking in their direction, stood up and snapped his fingers at a boy selling nuts and ale. As he bought them, he looked down at Tom, and gave a slight nod. Tom nodded back, and quietly and without fuss began to edge to the exit door nearest to him. No one paid any attention to him. Mannion's eyes followed him to the door. So far so good.

  The cannon roared its blank shot from the roof, and the trumpet blast sounded for the last time to announce the start of the play.

  They were rusty in the parts, the actors, but they were professionals and they warmed to their material. King Richard was a pathetic figure, a man more destined for a College than for a Court, while the powerful figure of Bolingbroke was shown reluctantly wresting a Crown he did not want. It did not take long to see why Essex's men had chosen the play. Bolingbroke talked of his, 'Eating the bitter bread of banishment.'

  In Gresham's mind Essex kept recurring not in the figure of Bolingbroke, but in the doomed figure of Richard II. All the huge melancholia of the man, his vast capacity for self-pity, was there in Richard's lines:

  'Of comfort no man speak:

  Let's talk of graves, of worms, of epitaphs;

  Make dust our paper, and with rainy eyes

  Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth;

  Let's choose executors, and talk of wills.'

  Gresham felt a chill in his heart as the actor recited the words:

  'A brittle glory shineth in this face:

  As brittle as the glory is the face.'

  It was Essex's face he saw, and Essex's voice as the actor intoned:

  'I wasted time, and now doth time waste me.'

  The stamping and cheering at the end seemed to last for ever, and while it was at its height Gresham gave the signal and he and his men, gathered protectively round Jane, made their way to the door and the thin, narrow wooden passageway that led downstairs. It smelt of piss and worse, where men and women had used it to answer nature's call. Two men brought up the rear, facing backwards, in case of a rush from behind. They emerged into the open, muddy courtyard, the sound and smell of the river just before them.

  A line of men, in the tangerine livery of Essex, stood before them. How ironic. There were twenty of them, about the same number as had attacked them on the boat. They were armed with knives and clubs, were soaked through, had clearly been waiting for an hour or more. Meyrick and Davies must have sent for them before the play had even started. The startling Essex livery had not been seen since the Irish campaign, its appearance on the streets enough to cause a riot and have the fortunate man wearing it feted and taken to every tavern within sight. Well, well, well, thought Gresham. How interesting that on this Saturday night of all nights so many men in the Essex livery were armed and ready.

  His own eight men had drawn into a protective circle. There was a rustle from behind him, and he sensed rather than saw Meyrick and Davies come out from the same exit and into the fading light.

  Gresham's gamble had failed: Essex had not come. Now on the eve of rebellion his cronies had seen the man who had argued against them, the man whose influence on their master they most hated and resented, infiltrating their clarion call to rebellion. Now, with their master absent, was the time for them to wreak their revenge on Gresham.

  'Can you turn to look at me?' shouted Davies. 'Or are you too much of a coward?'

  'I'll stay facing the greater threat, thank you,' shouted Gresham over his shoulder. Other playgoers had melted into the gathering gloom, sensing that something terrible and dangerous might happen any moment. 'But I've something I want to show you.' He clicked his finger.

  Effortlessly, and as they had been trained, the men on either side of those with the strange leather bags took a step back, flipped a brass catch, lifted up the leather flap and drew heavy items out. One was tossed to Mannion, the others handed to the eight men.

  Blunderbusses: a short-barrelled musket, its end opening out like a trumpet. Usually a cheap weapon, these had hardwood stocks and glinting muzzles, their firing mechanism a state of the art combination of flint and matchlock, the cover over the mechanism, waiting to be torn off in an instant by the men. Loaded with old nails and bits of scrap metal, it was a lethal short-range weapon. A weapon for when a body of men were rushing at you.

  There was a mutter from the men in front of the Essex mob, and two or three took a step back. Mannion took advantage to reach into one of the bags, and draw out three pistols. He kept one and handed two to Gresham, who took one and stuck one in his belt, and, grinning, handed the other to Jane. She did not grin back but, pointing the gun up into the air, pulled back the hammer to half cock and checked the firing mechanism. Something in the cold, calculated professional way she did this seemed to unsettle the men facing them even more. They muttered among themselves.

  Davies and Meyrick walked round the circle of men. Gresham risked a brief look behind him. Another thirty or forty men, the so-called gentlemen, had tanned out from the door. All were armed with swords and daggers. One or two even had pistols in their hands, though to walk through London armed with such was to risk attack rather than prevent it.

  'There are fifty men here!' barked Davies, 'and for all your farmer's guns, we will overwhelm you.'

  'Fifty-four, to be precise,' shouted Gresham. ‘Not including yourself and jelly brain there with you.'

  There was a rustle from the men, and a roar from Gelli Meyrick, 'You bastard, Gresham!'

  Gresham had achieved his reputation as a swordsman by answering insults such as that
. He smiled. 'True,' he said, managing to sound almost cheerful. 'But that means this ball is for your stomach and not your head.' There was a moment's silence. Gresham knew these moments. Any second a man would leap forward, or one tiny imagined shout or movement would start the action. He spoke again. 'I reckon on two of your men taken out as a minimum by each blunderbuss. My men are trained to aim alternately. One fires at the eyes, the other at the balls. It'll be those in the front rank who get it, of course. Then there's three pistol balls before you can reach us. That's you in the stomach, Hay Rick and Davies there in the head. And whoever my ward chooses. That's nineteen at least on the ground, dead or screaming, and maybe more.'

  'It's worth it to rid the world of one of Cecil's spawn!' said Meyrick, almost out of control.

  Gresham didn't bother to deny it. He had something else to say, 'Your men might not think so. The ones who get killed or have their balls blown off, at any rate. But there is one other thing.'

  'What other thing?' asked Davies. Gresham could sense that at any moment the man would make a rush forward. Davies did not lack courage, merely charm or any sense of humanity.

  'The rather large number of men just emerging from the shadows behind you,' said Gresham. 'My men, actually.'

  Davies turned. The houses round the Globe were mean things, low drinking houses or brothels with mud-filled jennels between them. Like ghosts or Irish soldiers emerging from the woods, thirty or so men had drifted out. Ten of them had been in Gresham's squad in Ireland, men who had come back and asked if they could serve him. Some instinct had told Gresham that in these of all times such men at his disposal in London might be useful. They stood a yard in front of the other men, the porters, grooms and servants, in a straight line, with the muskets Gresham had bought them held across their chests. They were impassive, staring ahead. Gresham had taught them to never see their enemy as human. As a result, they looked like statues, staring through the ranks of Essex's men. It had a chilling effect.

  Essex's men began to shuffle, look to one side. Davies glanced at them scornfully, and moved towards Gresham. There was a click of a pistol being pulled back to full cock. It was Jane's. He stopped, spat on the ground, and whirled around. Grumbling and muttering, his men started to move away to the left, in the gap between the theatre and the ranks of Gresham's men.