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

by Martin Stephen

  Night fell gently, and the last bird called. There was no wind, and half a moon appearing behind thin, scuttling clouds. Gresham and Mannion waited silently behind the main gate. Years of campaigning had taught them the way. There was no need for talk, the words men used to bring comfort and express their fear. You made your preparations. You did all you could, used all you had. Then you waited. Silently. To do otherwise was simply to impose your fears on your companion, who most likely had enough of his own to cope with.

  They came at midnight. Gresham and Mannion exchanged glances in the cold, thin moonlight. More than they had expected, from the sound. Ten, twelve men, some drunk judging by the muttered curses and the breaking twigs. The two Irish wolfhounds Gresham had brought back from the Earl of Essex’s disastrous campaign in Ireland two years past started to bark. The noise from the field ceased. Nine, ten times the dogs barked. Silence. More rustling from the fields. Gresham and Mannion stood motionless.

  The planks at the far end of the bridge squeaked and settled. It would be two, maybe four men, clutching piles of dry branches to pile up by the gate and set fire to. At the same time there would be men ringing the moat, pitch-soaked torches ready to hurl up on to the roof. At least the moat was not frozen over, not enough for men to walk on at any rate. Thankfully, heavy rain had filled the stream the river that fed the moat, and Gresham had opened the sluice, threatening to flood the field and yard but at least putting some movement in the water. If the attackers were good, there would be two, four archers, hoping to send fiery arrows crashing through the expensive glass into the rooms behind. That and the torches would be insurance. Once the gate caught fire, it would set off the joists above, which ran through all four sides of the house. Either the inhabitants burned, or ran and were cut down in the open.

  There was a muffled crash, a yell and a splash. howling, as if one of the wolf hounds was in pain. Two men clutching their pile of brushwood had stepped on the planks weakened by Mannion, who had removed the supports under them half way along the bridge, leaving the planks resting on no more than a tenth of an inch on the two thick side members. One had crashed into the moat, where bubbles suggested he could not swim, even if the cold had not stopped his heart. The other had part fallen through the gap, but his jerkin had been impaled by one of the thicker bits of wood, leaving him hanging over the abyss. They had soaked the brushwood with oil, which was now soaking the man. His lantern had cracked open and spilled on the wood, and a flickering showed where the fire had caught. The man’s mouth was wide open, a strangled shriek coming from it as he watched the flames advance to him. A gaggle of men stood behind, on the whole section of the bridge, milling in confusion. Mannion and Gresham flung their weight behind the two sections of the gate, heaving it open with a crash.

  The men looked up, gaped. One or two, not realising what was happening, simply saw the gate open, assumed some of their own men had got across the gap and made as if to jump it.

  Then Hell happened.

  The two brass swivel cannon had come off a wrecked Armada galleon that had survived all the English fleet could throw at it, but failed to survive the combination of a storm, bad maps and the Irish coast. God only knew how the pair of cannon had made it to London, but the dealer who bought them remembered the stories about Gresham, and was insolent enough to bang on his door and ask him if he wanted a ‘souvenir’, or even a ‘memento’. Strapped to two huge baulks of timber that Gresham had installed either side of the gate, they were fearsome short range-weapons. Double charged and stuffed with nails and scrap metal, there were two almost instantaneous claps of noise, blasts of yellow and red and a choking curtain of smoke. Silence, perhaps one or two seconds. A slight gust of night air. Through the smoke, the flickering flame of the brushwood, blood. Blood on faces, blood staining brown on shattered timbers, blood pumping in high fountain from the stump of an arm, blood in an eyeless head with a third hole where a nose ought to be. A man screaming as the brushwood fire caught his jerkin and started to bubble his flesh. There had been nine men standing on the bridge. Now there were none, just twitching bodies. It had been point blank range.

  Gresham sensed rather than saw burning arrows crash through the one window without a shutter in front of it. When Gresham had installed glass in the windows, at vast expense, he had taken the old shutters, stained near black by years of candle and fire, and rehung them. All except one window, where there had been too much rot to keep the shutter and he had never got round to having a new one made. He hoped Jane, her maid and the boy were even now dousing the fire. Thank God the attackers had not discovered Greek fire.

  Gresham and Mannion swung round and ran across the yard. The two servants swung into their place, each shouldering a blunderbuss, a smaller version of the cannon again loaded with metal pieces, with the end of its barrel like a trumpet so that when fired the discharge fanned out for maximum effect. The servants could be relied on to cope with any others who tried to cross the bridge, could handle a sword: both had served with Gresham in the Low Countries, were trusted men. Gresham and Mannion ran to a low door on the opposite side of the yard and yanked it open.

  The moat was fed and topped up from the River Cam, and a short channel had been dug from it to the river, closed by clumsy sluice gates at each end that could be swung open to let a boat through. Once through, there was a wooden jetty by a low door that led into the house. Most things delivered in Cambridge came by the river. That included attackers.

  The four attackers had stolen a boat. No waiting for fire to take hold for them at the front door. They used two massive crowbars to smash the planking apart on the back door, and leapt from the boat in between the broken shards of timber to stand on the damp, mildew-stained floor of the corridor that led into the main courtyard. The four men, carrying two shaded lanterns, arrived at almost the same time as Gresham and Mannion. They had turned away and rammed their hands over their eyes the instant before firing the cannons, preserving some night vision. Both men took aim at the vague shapes outlined against the broken doorway and fired. There was a cry and two shapes fell to the ground, but before Gresham or Mannion could pull their second pistol from their belt there was a spit of fire and a sharp crack from the doorway. Mannion grunted, and fell, hard against Gresham. Gresham’s hand felt Mannion’s hair, and the warm, sticky mass of new blood. It was stooping to put his hands under Mannion’s arms that saved him. As he bent down, a second pistol fired and a ball smacked into the wall behind him where his head had been moments ago. Letting Mannion drop, Gresham brought the second pistol from his belt, praying the priming was intact, and fired in the vague direction of his enemy. The three pistol shots meant all was universally black to him now, his night vision gone. His random shot was rewarded by a scream. He dragged Mannion back out through the doorway into the yard. As he did, a shadow leapt at him, and light exploded inside his head. Idiot! He had let his guard down, should have dealt with Mannion later. A pistol barrel. Gresham’s brain was working, even though power seemed to be draining from his limbs. Was this what it was like to die? His assailant had hit him with a pistol barrel. He smelt the oil, the unmistakable whiff of powder. From some deep recess, as blackness over whelmed him, he heard a click. Misfire. Someone had held a pistol at his head, and had pulled the trigger. It had misfired.

  Someone was shouting at him, shaking him. He was in the yard. The far side of the bridge was burning, sending wild and flickering shadows through the gatehouse into the yard. The near side of the bridge would not burn. Mannion had soaked it through before darkness fell. Mannion! Mannion had been propped up against the wall. His face was a mass of blood, the man motionless. The servant was shouting into Gresham’s face, still shaking him, but Gresham could not hear him. Then a scream cut into his consciousness. Jane. Jane was screaming. In a nightmare he saw her, the man with an arm cruelly round her neck, a pistol rammed at her head. The man was shouting, screaming.

  �
�Let me go! Let me go or the whore dies!’

  He was backing towards the doorway that led through to the moat gate. Once inside that narrow corridor, with the boat still moored at its end, no-one could rush him. He was ten, maybe twelve feet from it.

  An instinct moved into play and Gresham’s every nerve fibre bristled as he reached up his arms to his back and drew out the sword strapped there. Only a fool went into combat with a scabbard hanging from his belt and banging into his legs. The stretch of leg above or below the knee were ideal for a dagger but too short for a sword. A man’s back was long enough to house snugly a short but decent blade, a thrusting, jabbing blade not a cutting or sweeping blade, with the hilt carefully positioned just behind the head, high enough to give purchase but not so high as to do damage if the head was bent back. Gresham’s body moved like a ghost to block the door. A clinical, detached part of his brain noted the man. Dress simple enough, but not cheap; the jerkin was good leather. The pistol was inlaid, expensive. Medium build, wiry, fit, no spare flesh hanging from him. Sharp features, but laugh lines around the eyes. In a different world and at a different time it would have been a good face. In this world, and in the next few seconds, it was simply a face belonging to someone who Gresham must kill.

  ‘Move or I kill her!’ the man hissed.

  ‘Then kill her,’ said Gresham flatly, and moved forward. Realisation dawned in the man’s eyes. Click. He had tried to fire. Gresham’s arm moved like a snake’s tongue. Even as the man was trying simultaneously to fling away the useless pistol, push Jane away from him and reach for a knife there was a flicker. Gresham rammed his sword into the man’s mouth and upwards into his brain. He left his sword there, and turned to catch Jane as she fell in a dead faint. He nuzzled her hair, smelling its sweetness.

  ‘It wasn’t the same pistol,’ a voice said from behind him.

  ‘What?’ said Gresham, startled.

  ‘It wasn’t the same pistol as he tried on you.’ Mannion’s speech was slightly stirred, but both eyes were open and he was gingerly feeling his head with his fingers, wincing every now and again.

  ‘I thought you were dead.’

  ‘Shows how much you know, doesn’t it? Side o’ my head. Always bleeds rotten if you get caught there. And it wasn’t the same pistol.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ asked Gresham aware that Jane was starting to stir in his arms.

  ‘You thought the pistol he had on her head were the one he’s tried to pop you with, didn’t you? Looked the same, that’s for sure. An’ we both know if the priming’s wrong, it ain’t going to go off second, third or fifth time either.’

  ‘So?’ said Gresham.

  ‘So I thought it was the same pistol. I was seein’ all the time before I could move or talk. That bullet didn’t knock me out. More stunned me. And I then saw that, there. That’s the pistol he drew on you. The one that misfired.’

  Mannion nodded towards the door. There, just in the dirt of the yard, was a discarded pistol, the exact match of the one the man had drawn on Jane. The one that for all Gresham knew might have been perfectly primed, and blown the girl’s head off. Gresham had seen pistols misfire before. But never two identical pistols, one after the other. He felt as the hanged man must feel in the split second between the trapdoor opening and the rope biting into his neck.

  Something like a grin passed across Mannion’s bloodied face.

  ‘I won’t tell ’er if you don’t,’ he said.

  *

  It was morning. Mannion had a large bandage round his head, Gresham a much smaller dressing over the dent the pistol barrel had made in his skull. He could do nothing about the hammers inside his head.

  Jane was sticking sharp things savagely into the cloth in her lap. She was the most disastrous seamstress Gresham had ever seen. Her brow was furrowed, her lips pursed, and she attacked the cloth and the threads with an intensity of concentration that Gresham had only seen on the faces of soldiers readying their pikes for an onslaught.

  Jane looked up. Her face was pale, bags under her eyes. There was a faint red mark on her neck.

  ‘I seem to have an effect on pistols. I hope it lasts,’ Jane said. Gresham was reminded of her, wild-eyed on the deck of the barque Anna, determined to kill a man. With a pistol that had misfired. ‘How did you know the pistol held at my head would misfire?’ It was calmly asked, with no hint of criticism.

  ‘He’d tried it on me, and it’d already misfired,’ he said, perhaps rather too quickly. He turned to look at Mannion, who had found something interesting to look at in the fireplace.

  ‘How did you know they would attack round the back?’ she asked.

  ‘Obvious,’ said Gresham, with just the tiniest hint of smugness. He had allowed himself to forget how close he had come to killing Jane, was on safer ground. ‘Make a big show of the attack on the front, draw everyone to fight that, and when our attention was grabbed break in through the back. It’s what I’d have done. It nearly worked. Even with the cannons we need four men at the front. They got to the back door quicker than I’d thought. A minute later and the four of them would’ve had free run of the house.’

  ‘Do we know who they were?’ she asked.

  ‘No,’ said Gresham. ‘Vagabonds, tramps, some ex-soldiers: the usual sweepings of the forest. Hirelings. It doesn’t matter who they were. It matters who hired them. And such people are so desperate that they just look at the coin, not the hand that holds it.

  And even if they did, it’d be no use. The hirer will have made sure there’s more than an arm’s length between the paymaster and the man really calling the tune.’ There were small villages of ‘vagabonds’ living rough in the vast remnants of the medieval forests that once covered England. ‘The leader was clearly of gentle blood, dressed in the English style. That’s all we know.’

  ‘Do we know why?’ asked Jane.

  ‘I have … this feeling,’ Gresham said finally, as if talking to the fire. One leg was casually parked now over the arm of the chair. His tone was not casual. Jane and Mannion looked up. Both knew him well enough not to speak.

  ‘I sense … something in the air. A sense of hidden threat, of terrible things about to happen …’

  ‘Is it because Elizabeth must die soon? Most of us have only known England with her as Queen,’ asked Jane.

  ‘It’s probably just that,’ said Gresham. ‘But I have this vision … in my dreams I see man fighting man. And both sides are Englishmen.’

  ‘So you think we’ll have civil war when Elizabeth dies?’

  ‘Yes … no. That’s the problem. I don’t know. I don’t know what will happen, or when. I’m just suddenly frightened, sense some monstrous thing birthing in the forest, stirring to march on us. And I’m not used to it, feeling frightened – and that makes me frightened even more.’

  Neither Jane nor Mannion had ever heard Gresham confess a weakness before, least of all that he was frightened. It was unexpected, shocking,

  ‘And it’s not just fear for the country. The College is very vulnerable,’ he said, ‘probably more than ever. And I’m the one person with the wealth and control to make it flourish, and someone has just tried to kill me. I just wonder if it’s me they want dead. Or the College. Is it too fanciful to think that in some way the College is either such a threat to someone that they need it destroyed, or that it has something of immense value to yield up if it does go?’

  Jane spoke. ‘You rescued it, surely?’ she said, glad to move away from nameless fears to a specific threat.

  ‘It might seem like that. It was about to fold, that’s for sure, when I came along. And I paid its important debts, put up a new wing and attracted three or four good men as Fellows. And a cook.’

  ‘Now that I can understand,’ said Mannion. A good meal, a good drink and a good night in bed with a suitable companio
n put Mannion in Heaven, without the need to die first. As all but the richest Colleges survived on their ability to attract students, the appointment of a class-act cook had been an act of genius on Gresham’s part. As Mannion pointed out, most students thought with their pricks first and their bellies second. Gresham could satisfy the second, if not the first.

  ‘But ironically that success has made us almost more vulnerable,’ Gresham continued. ‘Other established Colleges are noticing our good bits, and would love to grab them before we become too powerful to be scorned.’

  ‘I know College politics are vicious, and most Fellows to suit, but I’ve never thought of them as murderers,’ said Jane.

  ‘True,’ said Gresham, ‘but … I’ve just got this sense, again … I can’t put my finger on it. The next five or ten years will make or break Granville College. Maybe a third of the Fellowship are decent now, same for the students. We need it to be a half. As we stand, we’re like a widow whose inherited some good things, but’s standing by the roadside almost begging to be robbed.’

  ‘Why this fear all of a sudden for Granville College?’ asked Jane. ‘Something must have made you worried.’

  ‘Cecil’s asked me about the College. Twice, in as many weeks. He never does anything by accident. And the Crown’s already robbed the College dry once.’

  Mannion took no interest in Granville College at all, but his ears pricked up at the word ‘robbed’.

  ‘How can the Queen rob a College?’ he asked.

  ‘Granville College used to own Aldgate. All of it. In London. It was its original endowment, from Thomas Granville. At the start of Elizabeth’s reign Burghley did a deal with the College. The Crown got the deeds to Aldgate. The Fellows each got an annuity – in perpetuity for whoever the Master was, for the lifetime of the Fellows who signed away the title to the land. Burghley slipped in a footnote to make sure the Crown retained the gift of the Mastership.’