The Coming of the King: Henry Gresham and James I (The Henry Gresham Series Book 3)

by Martin Stephen

  At 24 minutes he emptied his bowels and bladder, the stench making those nearest gag and choke back their own sick. The Master was past all sense of shame, unaware, entombed in his own living Hell. A brown stream ran from beneath his robe, staining it, the thick fluid falling down to mingle with the dust in the gaps between the floorboards. The medical men among the Fellows, three of them in all, did not fall back. They were well used to the stench and wetness of illness ignored it. For once, they were in agreement. The Master must be bled, immediately. Some noxious humour had somehow invaded him, and unless he was to die within minutes that humour had to be released immediately. Proper medical tools were not to hand, the scalpel, blade and bowl, but what matter if the waste blood went on the floor? Three, four table knives were tried for sharpness, the best one chosen, the incisions made on the wrists. It took two men to hold each arm down, and even then the dying man threatened to lift all four off the floor with the agony of his writhing. The pain of the cuts was insignificant by the side of the pain that was killing him. His blood pulsed out of him.

  It did not end. It did not end. A man in such agony should have exhausted himself with his pain, been bludgeoned by it into unconsciousness, subsided into a coma. But ten, fifteen minutes after he had first fallen from his place he was still threshing on the floor, whimpering and contracting every muscle as whiplash after whiplash of pain hit his dying body. The horrified observers heard the crack as the pressure with which his poor body drove his teeth together broke a front tooth in two. The broken-off tooth seemed to go down his throat, prompting a savage coughing that threw out the fragment of tooth and strange, yellow bile.

  They could, perhaps should, have moved him. But what use would it have been, to add more agony to what was an agony beyond any man’s experience?

  There was an odd stillness in the final moments. The Master was giving out high-pitched squeals now, trembling and spasming on the floor, stained with his own stinking body fluids. No-one had left the Hall, which was bathed in rich sunlight streaming through the windows in shards of soft yellow. Tiny motes of dust floated in the heavenly light, vanishing in and out of sight as strange eddies floated them this way, that way. Even those who claimed medical knowledge had fallen silent, stepping back as the final minutes of the tragedy unfolded. The Fellows were largely on either side of him, rows three or four deep each with three or four gowned figures, looking in their black robed seriousness like strange angels of death, supervising the Master’s passage to Heaven, or to Hell. Then on the other side of the trestle table were the rest of the throng, mainly students, from pensioners to sizars. Strangely and for once rank had not asserted itself. Some of the poorer students had the table edge biting into their groins as they leaned forward to get a better view, whilst numbers of the spoilt rich were at the back, standing on tip-toe to see. No-one spoke, hushed into silence at the sight of a pain so terrible as to exceed their worst nightmares.

  Even with his most respectful audience ever, The Master could not die with dignity. His body underwent one, last heaving surge of agony. And he farted. A stentorian, trump of a wet fart, wholly incongruous, wholly ridiculous. Then, at last, 27 minutes after the whole of the dreadful business started, his body was still.

  The servants carried the Master out, the crowd of Fellows and students breaking into a buzz of conversation. One by one, or in small groups, they emptied the Hall, until only two figures were left there, with the stale smell of unwashed bodies, the remnants of food and the sharper, more sickly tang of the late Master’s effusions to keep them company.

  One figure was seated on the second high table, and on the table itself rather than its bench. An athletic, taut and commanding figure, a face and a body that made men and women stop in the street to look at him as he rode by. He had been next to the Master when his fit started, and had quietly withdrawn when he had sensed the inevitable, walking the length of high table, going round it and taking up a watchful position behind all the others. Henry Gresham. Sir Henry Gresham. The only Fellow permitted, by special order of Queen Elizabeth I, to hold a Fellowship without being an ordained member of the clergy. And the most loathed Fellow of all time, hated because he moved easily at Court, hated because his wealth was paying for the refoundation of Granville College, hated because of the reported beauty of the girl who shared his bed. Hated by some also because he had been a very, very poor student at Granville College before his impossible wealth descended on him, a mere bastard by-blow who should by all rights have no hope of inheritance.

  By him was a hulk of a man, a few years older than Gresham’s thirty and a few years, dressed as a servant, and seated on the bench drinking small beer from a wooden cup some student had thankfully failed to knock over in his rush to see the Master die. Mannion had come into Hall ten or twelve minutes after the start of the Master’s fit. Mannion had a knack of turning up at crucial moments. Yet clearly he was worried.

  ‘We knows what that was, don’t we?’ asked Mannion grimly. Some colour had left his ruddy face. Even the most hardened veteran could not fail to be moved by the sight of a man dying from what both Mannion and Gresham knew could only be a good dose of the Italian poison known to a very few practitioners as the Yellow Devil.

  Mannion and Gresham knew it. They had administered it to a man themselves, and watched him die, seven years earlier.

  Gresham’s face gave nothing away. He remained silent, looking into a distance that could have been on another world.

  Mannion sighed.

  ‘Why should some bugger with a special knowledge of poison choose the bleedin’ Master of Granville bleedin’ College as its first known English victim?’

  ‘It’s more commonly known as ‘Granville College’,’ said Gresham in a far away tone, ‘rather than ‘Granville Bleeding College’.’

  Mannion’s expression suggested he preferred his version. Mannion hated Cambridge.

  ‘The poison takes effect almost instantly.’ said Gresham suddenly. ‘And it only works with alcohol. But there are only two, three minutes before the poison loses its potency.’

  ‘I remember,’ said Mannion, looking round to make sure they were alone in the Hall.

  ‘So the main point is that the only cup of wine that the Master drank that could have poisoned him was poured for me.’

  There was a long silence.

  ‘Two of us gave him our cups. Mine was full, just poured. The other had just been drunk from, two swallows. Then the drinker decided it might be more fun to give his dregs to the Master. Can you see Henry Worthington as a murderer? His was the only other wine the Master drank.’

  The other Henry was one of the mildest of the Fellows.

  ‘So someone was trying to kill you? For the second time today?’ asked Mannion. There was concern in his voice, but no surprise. For most of both of their lives someone had been trying to kill Henry Gresham.

  ‘Not someone. Someone waiting on the table. Someone paid to put a yellow powder into someone else’s wine.’

  ‘Clever,’ said Mannion. ‘They’ll have been told the powder was to make you shit or vomit, a lark played by the Fellows, and they’ll ’ave taken some money because it’s easy and because they want to believe that’s all it is. Then someone dies, and the servant knows if he opens his mouth he’s dead too.’

  ‘Is someone trying to kill the College?’ Gresham mused. Mannion was confused. It was as if he was hearing a conversation going on inside Gresham’s head, a conversation he was not included in, like one heard through an open window.

  ‘There’s enough people might want to kill you. But kill a College?’ said Mannion, unafraid to show his startlement. ‘I could kill it, with pleasure. As long as it took Cambridge along with it. But why anyone else? Why would you want to? And you can kill people. You can’t kill a College.’

  Gresham turned to look at Mannion.

  ‘You cou
ldn’t be more wrong.’

  They both looked to the shit stain on the floor where the Master had vented both his bowels and his dignity. The flies were gathering round, sucking it up.

  Two attempts to kill him in a few hours.

  Then realisation dawned, as if borne in on the slanting winter sunlight flooding through the windows.

  Would someone so determined to rid the world of Henry Gresham be content to leave his home and one of the only two people he cared for alive and well? His home outside Cambridge was open, defenceless, his ward turned mistress unsuspecting.

  Was his home already a burning wreck? He only wished he did not feel so tired.

  Chapter Two

  January 1603

  Gresham flung himself on to his horse, and set off as if the Devil was in pursuit, Mannion behind him. Were they already too late? Had his nameless enemy already burnt his house down?

  The manic ride back to his Cambridge home, The Merchant’s House, was through Grantchester meadows. The mist was rising off the ambling river, coating the ground with mystery. Tomorrow the ground and trees would be covered in frost, the world turned white in stunning beauty. They went at break-neck speed, the mist parting in front of the horses and mysteriously reforming behind.

  They crested the rise. Smoke was rising gently from the chimneys, the drawbridge of the old-fashioned moated, fortified manor house intact and spanning the calm, weed-strewn water with just a hint of ice at the edge. It was a picture of rural bliss and perfect calm. The horses, lathered, broke the silence with their snorting.

  Mannion gave a sigh, and swung himself down off his horse, stretching himself. Mannion did not much ride a horse as drive it.

  Gresham looked out over the rural idyll, as still as a statue. His horse pawed the hard ground, but even it seemed to catch its master’s mood.

  ‘See anyone?’ he said.

  ‘No,’ said Mannion. ‘If someone’s going to try anything, it’ll be tonight, I guess. Leastways, that’s when I’d have a go.’

  ‘There’s a man on the rise, just in the trees. No. Don’t turn and look. The more unprepared they think we are, the better. And anyway, he’s gone. He’ll have a mount hidden at the back of the wood. He’s gone off to tell his mob we’re here.’

  ‘Bloody hell!’ said Mannion in wonder. ‘How’d you see him?’ The cold had made Mannion’s eyes water.

  Gresham made no answer. Then, out of the blue and with utter calmness, he said, ‘I really do need to teach someone a lesson. Someone who thinks they can keep on taking shots at me until I roll over and die.’

  There had been no shortage of those taking a shot at Gresham two years earlier, when the Earl of Essex had mounted his failed rebellion. A string of people and countries were apparently determined to kill Henry Gresham.

  Gresham gently eased his mount forward, ambling down the grassy slope to the house.

  Mannion made as if to speak, then thought better of it, biting back his words. Their problem was that the easiest place of all to kill Gresham, the place where they were most vulnerable, was here in the country. Mannion had made the point, forcibly. Gresham had ignored him. They lived simply in Cambridge, with a handful of retainers, unlike the army that served Gresham in the vast ancestral Gresham home known simply as The House, on London’s Strand. Only two able-bodied servants travelled with Gresham between his two homes. Actually living in the Merchant’s House were Mary, the housekeeper, who looked to have been built around the same time as the house itself and rather came with it, a cook, almost as elderly, two boys who acted at pot washers, and an ostler who used the pot washers as grooms when they were not being beaten over their heads with a wooden spoon by cook. Living in the nearby village were the gardener, who was in his 60’s, and four young servant girls. Two old women, two old men, two children and four young girls were not an army. Any real defence had four men to call on: Gresham, Mannion, and the two servants from London.

  Gresham slowed his horse, and let Mannion catch up with him.

  ‘There’s a reason why I didn’t take your advice.’

  Christ! Did the bloody man read minds as well?

  ‘I wanted the girl to have somewhere that was normal. Somewhere she could breathe without a guard following her everywhere. Somewhere she could call a home, and not just be seen as a rich man’s tart. Somewhere normal.’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Mannion, ‘but you’re losing it bad if you think we could ever be ‘normal’, whatever that is. We’ve come too far, done too much, had too much done to us. An’ it could be the last bad decision you make.’

  ‘No, it won’t,’ said Gresham, with total certainty. ‘Will they have enough time to find a load of brigands ready by tonight?’

  ‘Well, if you did actually see the invisible man in the woods just now, looks like they already done it.’ said Mannion. ‘This ain’t no academic behind this, no amateur. They’re goin’ to be pretty pissed off not to ’ave pulled it off, killed you by now. They’ve ’ad two shots at it. They’ll want to make the third one count... Next trick? Burn the bloody house down, that’s my bet. Kill anyone who runs. Looks like robbery. Tut tut. What is this country comin’ to, and three weeks later it’s forgotten. Easy enough to get men, with all this rumour about treasure at the house.’ He tried not to sound as if he was saying ’I told you so’, but failed

  ‘Any time for us to hire in extra men?’ asked Gresham. They were nearly at the House now, and the horses tried to pick up speed as they smelt home.

  ‘We ain’t got those sorts of contacts in Cambridge,’ said Mannion, shaking his head. ‘More’s the pity.’ If they survived tonight, Mannion had decided there would be a few changes to their lifestyle in Cambridge. Gresham had had his way. Now it was Mannion’s turn. Unless it was too late.

  They clattered over the simple bridge, designed once to lift like a drawbridge but with the mechanism long since rusted away. A grinning stable boy took the horses. It was the horses he was pleased to see, not their riders. It was starting to get dark, and two spluttering torches were brought out and placed in sconces either side of the gatehouse.

  Gresham flung off his cloak and eased off his supple riding boots, sliding his feet into a pair of shoes made from the finest Spanish leather. He went immediately to the Library, and stood before the fire that crackled there, throwing warm light on the bindings of the books. The smell of leather was comforting, enfolding. Jane spent little money on herself, but had persuaded him to have rotting bindings replaced on books at both The House and The Merchant’s House.

  ‘We shouldn’t really have a fire in here,’ said Jane, ‘even in this cold. Or we should keep one alight at all times.’ She had entered almost silently, bringing two cups and a jug of spiced, warm wine. ‘The temperature change is bad for the books.’ She was about to say more, when she caught sight of Gresham’s face. She fell silent.

  ‘Well,’ he said drily, ‘we can’t have that. Far better the humans freeze to death than the books suffer.’

  She smiled at him then, almost shyly. They had achieved a form of peace between them, after a battling adolescence in which Jane had been his self-appointed ward. Gresham looked at her, this ground-movingly beautiful creature he had accidentally rescued as a stick-thin girl brutalised by a drunken oaf of a step-father. At a different time his look would have lingered. Straight as an arrow, her long hair hung over her shoulders as befitted someone unmarried and not much more than a girl. She radiated sexuality, full mouth, huge eyes, perfect cheekbones and the lithe body of a gazelle. The extraordinary thing was that she seemed genuinely unaware of how attractive she was to men. She shrugged off any reference to it, as a trivial and irrelevant detail. Ironically, this added to both an air of innocence and vulnerability, thus stoking the fires of desire even more. She had refused his offer of marriage, after they had fallen into bed two years ago. He didn’t know why s
he had refused his offer. There was a lot he did not understand about women, and this woman in particular. Her eyes were extraordinary. Pools of darkness, they seemed to have little motes of light dancing and flickering in their unfathomable depths. Like the motes of dust that had danced in the sunlight as the Master had died. Suddenly sickened, Gresham flung himself into one of the tall, hard oak chairs by the fire.

  He told her the truth, simply, starkly. The first attack. Then the poison. The inevitability that whoever it was would come for him tonight, in numbers. How whoever it was would know that the earlier attempts would alert all his defences, how the person would know they had to act now, before Gresham could draw the strength of his household round him, attack while he was still a scantily-servanted academic living in an isolated house in the country and not a fabulously rich courtier in London.

  She did not faint, nor scream. She swallowed. She’s not a bolter, Gresham thought, overtaken by a surge of warmth and pride. He would like to say he had chosen his woman wisely. Except she had chosen him. He was haunted by the vision of some roughneck astride of her, her skirt up round her neck. No. That was weakness. They were playing for high stakes tonight. He needed no vision of Jane being raped to know that. And would Jane allow things to reach that stage? He suspected her knees would be somewhere rather more central, and with force, than either side the balls of a man assaulting her. Why did he know that she would rather die than submit to a man she had not chosen?

  ‘What are my instructions?’ she said. Her thoughts stayed locked inside her. Had she shared his vision?