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

by Martin Stephen

  The cold, analytical part of Gresham’s brain that seemed to work in parallel with his emotional side realised his mistake. Only two men on Hawk could claim to be sailors. One had been trusted with the first grapnel, the other with the helm. By taking both out, the attackers had ensured confusion on the deck of the Hawk. Gresham had unthinkingly repeated the mistake of the Armada, packing his ship with soldiers, not sailors, assuming the boarding of the other vessel would be the challenge, not the drawing alongside. The other men on Hawk were not fools, and at least two could sail a boat at a pinch, but it would take them time.

  Gresham had no time.

  He was watching death bear down on him, death with a splintered side and fine bow wave. Part of Gresham’s brain noticed a piece of straw fly up in the bow wave, to be flung by the water down one side. A body would not move so lightly on the water, float aside. It would meet the wood of the bow with a solid thud, lie there broken, bobbing in the wake with a brown stain spreading around it.

  The old man was screaming soundlessly, his mouth wide open. Mannion was sitting down, hoping to survive the impact without being hurled in the water, hand on dagger, tight-lipped. Gresham looked to the attacking boat, frantically judging distance.

  It froze in his memory for years. The sun glancing off the water, the white beard of frothing water at the bow of the boat, the stark fear in the eyes of the old boatman, the man at the helm of the attacker, clutching his tiller and leaning out over the side of his boat with a steady, serious expression, determined to hit the old boat square. He had a trimmed beard, had lost his hat, and had a rather sensitive face.

  Gresham took a breath and launched himself at the old man, hitting him shoulder to shoulder with the force of a boulder crashing down a steep hill. Gresham sensed the old man had a drowning man’s grip on the tiller. If he was to hurl it round, it was the man he had to move, not the lump of wood. It was a close call, far too close. The old man fell, the boat swung drunkenly round, threatening to unseat Mannion, who grimly hung on to a thwart. This had not been rehearsed. The wind was coming over their right shoulder. The tattered sail, lanteen-rigged, stretched out to the left. As they swung round, the attacking boat’s bow actually clipped their tiller where it stuck out over the stern. The blow shattered the stained wood and broke off half the tiller, but simply gave an extra smashing push to Gresham’s boat, already careering round to the right in the savage turn Gresham had provoked. As a bonus, their boom, now gull-winging and ballooning out to the left, hung there as the attacking boat swept past them, catching one of the enemy men a savage blow on his forehead which flung him back and overboard.

  Gresham had no eyes for him, only for the helmsman still leaning out to see what was happening. Gresham did not have to throw his dagger. So close did the boats pass that all Gresham had to do was lunge out over the side. The dagger in his outstretched hand sank into the right eye of the helmsman. Gresham snatched his hand away just in time to stop himself being carried over the side as the dagger and the head it was embedded in speeded past.

  Gresham had seen men pierced with sword, dagger or arrow, or with bloody bits of themselves blasted off by shot, hang there for seconds. He could swear he had seen life and expression in the eyes of the Scottish Queen Mary as her battered and severed head had rolled across the wooden scaffold at Fotheringay. But a dagger through the eye pierced the brain, and dropped a man in his tracks. Even as he snatched his hand away Gresham could feel the weight of the body dragging down.

  Now it was the turn of the attackers’ boat to swing round head to wind, its helm dead. Attackers? One lay dead in a thickening pool of blood, another was bobbing face down in the Thames. If the blow from the boom had not killed him the water had. The Hawk had got its act together quicker than he might have hoped, and was speeding towards the enemy. It would board the enemy within seconds. Gresham sat down heavily as a wave rocked the boat. He jumped up rapidly as something soft moved beneath him, and a gnarled and feeble fist erupted between his legs, missing his crutch by no more than an inch. He had sat on the old boatman.

  ‘You bastard! You fuckin’ rich bastard! I’ll kill you! I’ll fuckin’ kill you!’ The old man’s was high-pitched, castratos squeak.

  Gresham looked and saw Mannion try to rise clumsily to his feet. His foot skidded off the deck, and Mannion’s body was suddenly replaced by the sight of the soles of his feet as he fell backwards in the boat. Somehow his head had become entangled in Gresham’s cloak, which Gresham could not remember having thrown off. As Mannion’s fiery red face, blaspheming, rose up he looked for the entire world like a cross between a monk and an old hag under a shawl. Gresham felt something move inside him. Uncontrollable laughter swept over him, racking, painful laughter. Was there laughter in Hell?

  *

  Gresham was shocked by Jane’s response to this latest escapade. What shocked him to the core was the stillness of her response, a stillness he had never met in her before.

  ‘They’re going to kill you,’ she said, not a trace of expression in her voice. It was not a question. It was a statement of fact. She was paler than he had ever seen her, all lustre gone from her eyes.

  ‘Well, they haven’t succeeded yet,’ he said, trying to be jocular. By luck more than judgement, he might have added, but did not. He had been overconfident, made too many mistakes. He had been out of things too long, needed to sharpen up. Essex’s death had stifled something in his soul, made him go mouldy. He had to liven up. As for Jane’s mood, he might as well have sought to put out a great fire by pissing on it.

  Both his men had clean wounds, and would recover. Two men were held in the cellars of The House, out of earshot. Gresham did not believe in torture. In his experience it was used for vengeance, not for obtaining the truth. Tortured men eventually said what their torturers wanted them to say, not the truth. Anything to stop the pain. Was it any less cruel to do what he had done, send Mannion out to buy any loose agricultural implements he could find? A bit of work had emphasised their sharp bits, and particularly anything with a hook on it. He had hung them on the wall opposite the barred area the two prisoners were in, and added to the effect by bringing over an old brazier from the stables, keeping it well lit and having Mannion once heat up several of the agricultural implements until they had glowed white hot, whilst looking meaningfully at the prisoners. One, the expert with the dagger, had shown masterful disdain – a pity, as he looked a professional and therefore more likely to have a shrewd idea as to the identity of his employer – but the other had clearly wobbled. Another couple of days should do it. If the men failed to respond to the pressure, Gresham might just offer to pay them. It was a bizarre world where simple money had a surprising capacity to buy simple truth.

  Jane was a tense as the drawn string of a crossbow.

  ‘Someone has made four successive attempts to kill you, in as many days. They’re not going to give up. If it matters that much to whoever it is, they’ll simply keep on trying until they succeed. You’re dead, Henry. You’re dead.’ Her control broke at last, the pressure too much.

  She had never used his first name outside of the bedroom before. She said she hated the fawning, cooing nonsense lovers exchanged or failed marriages used to compensate for all passion spent. A cool detachment in public amused her and confounded those who sensed but did not understand the depths of their relationship or their passion. Gresham thought it hilarious and co-operated willingly. He had never heard her speak like this before.

  Her anger exploded.

  ‘How can someone so intelligent be so stupid? You’re the man, the one the world allows to do things. Yet you’re behaving like a simpering woman, passive, a victim. Someone is trying to kill you, and four times you’ve ducked and jinked out of the way, gone left as the arrow’s gone right. But soon the person firing the arrow will out-guess you, fire to the right when you jink, and send that arrow through your heart.
’

  ‘So what do you suggest?’ He was angered by this show of rebelliousness, not least because he thought he had started to put himself in charge. As if he ever had been, with this … girl. He was also shocked, and intrigued.

  ‘Take charge! For God’s sake, take charge! That’s what men do, isn’t it? Whoever’s doing this has you on the back foot…’

  Where had she learnt fencing terms?

  ‘… so you’re simply responding to each attempt, not going for the source. Who is it trying to kill you? Until you find out, you’re simply going to keep on being punched until a blow lands home. I chose to live with a leader, not a victim. Take charge, Henry. Take charge, like you always have in the past. Take charge. Before whoever it is takes away what you’ll never get back.’

  The peacock male in him was angered at being told off by this chit of a girl, this foundling, this woman whose only status in life was bestowed on her by courtesy of her relationship with him. The other part of him was churning. He thought he knew who his enemy was. And in a display of spoilt pique, he determined not to tell her. He would unveil the truth, the truth he had found out, to her in a dramatic moment, when it was all over. Then she would see him for the master he was.

  There was a knock on the door. Mannion never knocked, but had a sixth sense as to when Gresham and Jane were having a conversation in which he had no part to play.

  ‘Bad news,’ he said. ‘The two prisoners … the strong one managed to grab a blade when he was unloosed to eat, killed the weak one. Tried to do the same to Wat …’ Wat was the servant placed in charge of the prisoners, ‘… and Wat fetched ’im a blow to the head. Killed him. Must have had a thin skull.’

  Mannion and Gresham had both experienced outwardly healthy men who succumbed to a blow to the head that would have simply given others a headache.

  ‘There’s more. Package for you,’ Mannion grunted, handing the letter to Gresham. His expression suggested Mannion doubted it was good news. He would have questioned the messenger, Gresham knew, but it was easier to read the letter.

  He did so. Silently, and at length. His face gave no hint as to the contents of what he was reading.

  ‘Well?’ said Jane, her patience exhausted.

  ‘It’s the College,’ said Gresham. ‘More trouble.’

  ‘Illness? More deaths?’ asked Jane.

  ‘Death is normal,’ said Gresham. ‘This is worse. Apparently Granville College – my College – is the centre of devil-worship in Cambridge. The university is threatening to close it.’

  ‘What?’ exclaimed Jane. ‘That’s nonsense! I know many of the Fellows are devils, but it’s devil with a small ‘D’.

  ‘No joke, said Gresham. ‘I wish it were. Apparently they were clearing out the Master’s Lodge, and found that they call a black chapel in a cellar. Black candles, inverted Cross, blood-stained altar, all the trappings. And several human body parts, for good measure. God – or the Devil – knows how they know, but they’re saying the body parts were taken from a grave newly dug a fortnight ago, and ransacked the day before the Master died.’

  ‘Don’t tell me’, said Mannion. In the servant quarters, the Devil was often more real than God. The old beliefs died hard. ‘They’re saying the Master’s death was a visitation, Old Nick punishing his servant for not killin’ enough virgins or something.’ Virgins were writ large in how the taverns viewed witchcraft, either being deflowered vigorously, or sacrificed, in equally large numbers.

  Mannion’s cynicism about God was great, but his cynicism about Satan was even greater. In his opinion mankind needed no help from a Devil to be bad. Gresham had asked him about this, round a camp-fire in the Low Countries.

  ‘Just an excuse, isn’t it?’ he had said. ‘Truth is, we’re all out for number one. People are bastards. Makes it easier to blame someone else, say you was put up to it by the Devil. Don’t alter the truth, though. People don’t need the Devil to make ’em bad.’

  Church and State got very excited about witchcraft. Witchcraft was a challenge to the power of the state and the Church, an alternative, and thus far more serious than a mere corruption of people’s moral fibre. Additional interest was due to James VI of Scotland, a published author on witchcraft and a personal interrogator of Scottish witches, as favourite to gain the Crown.

  ‘What does it mean?’ asked Jane, immediately regretting such a fatuous question.

  ‘It means I have to get to Cambridge now.’

  ‘And leave the Queen.’ Jane said it as a statement, not a question.

  ‘And leave Mannion to investigate. And leave you also. I can’t guard you in Cambridge as I can here.’

  ‘And who’ll guard you?’ asked Jane. She had far more faith in Gresham’s survival if he was shadowed by the man she referred to as his bulldog.

  ‘I’ll take six men.’ It was a measure of how seriously he was taking the threat that he was taking any. Yet Jane knew he was a true free spirit, more than likely to dash off alone on some trail or other at midnight if the spirit took him, leaving his six men snoring in their beds.

  ‘It’s essential the Queen doesn’t hear I’ve left London,’ he added.

  ‘She’ll hear you’ve been to Cambridge, even if she doesn’t hear you’ve gone,’ said Jane, showing her command of tenses.

  ‘We’ll face that when it happens.’

  ‘We?’ Her heart beat faster. It was the first time he had ever used the word that way, referring to them as joint entities.

  ‘I’ll organise a standing chain of horses every ten miles between here and Cambridge, post a man for each horse. That’s the quickest way to get any news of the Queen to you, or if she summons you, to let you know.’

  In her excitement at being involved, she had forgotten that this was the sort of thing Mannion should do. She had never tried to use her beauty on Mannion, despite the full knowledge any beautiful woman had of the effect on men of fluttering eyebrows. So she just looked at Mannion.

  He winked. He seemed very amused at something, though what it was she could not see.

  Gresham had a remarkable capacity to read the truth in the minutest gesture, and totally ignore trumpet-like blasts of information shot forth from the few people he loved and trusted. He remained oblivious to the unspoken communication between the two most important people in his world. He hurried out, to change and cram some food into his mouth while doing so. Normally, Mannion would have gone with him, fussing like a strange form of mother hen, disturbed at being parted from his chick. Unusually, he stayed.

  ‘We might just keep ’im alive,’ he said, ‘between us.’

  Another partnership. Suddenly, Jane felt less alone than she had done for years.

  Chapter Four

  February to March 1603

  Gresham ached in every joint. It had taken three horses to get him to Cambridge in record time, and he would have the pain in his muscles to remind him of the journey for several days. The contrast between the soaring, brick-built Colleges and the hovels most citizens lived in grew more pronounced by the year. This time his troubled mind did not note it, though his lungs reacted strongly to the cloud of coal smoke that hung over the town in winter, a smaller version of London’s equivalent.

  There was one man he trusted above all at Granville College. Alan Sidesmith, possibly the best scholar of Greek in the University.

  Alan had written him the letter breaking the news. Now he told Gresham, over a pewter mug steaming with mulled wine, the full story.

  ‘The first we knew was ten men banging on the door at midnight. On the orders of the Bishop, they said, but at least one was wearing part of the livery of Lord Clapton. They simply forced their way to the Master’s lodgings. I let them in, I’m afraid. It was either that or pay for a broken door. And I thought it better we showed we had nothing to hide. That was before I rea
lised, of course, that actually we appeared to have quite a lot to hide.’

  ‘You were right, Alan,’ said Gresham reassuringly. ‘You had no choice.’

  Lord John Clapton was a Court parasite, available for hire. He had obtained an estate in Cambridge in return for favours Gresham preferred not to know about back in the days when Walsingham had been running the biggest network of spies in Europe, bigger even than King Philip’s of Spain.

  ‘Acting on evidence, they said,’ Alan carried on. ‘The evidence appears to be an old hag with more offspring than a ripe sow who lives in a hovel outside Harston and has a reputation for getting rid of unwanted babies. Unfortunately for her reputation, not all of the babies concerned were unborn. Sacrifices, the authorities allege, in Devil-worship – though why in God’s name it has taken the thirty year’s this old lady has been in practice presumably only God knows.’

  Alan paused for a sip of his own drink. He had a thin, ascetic face reminiscent of monks who used to believe that Christ for some reason wanted them to starve themselves to death. As far as denial was concerned, Gresham lent to the Mannion school of philosophy, which stated that God would not bleeding well have given man fleshly desires unless man was bleeding well meant to satisfy such desires. Gresham was surprised how much he missed the bleeding old man.

  ‘A further question is why apparently so many people would turn to her to stop children being born when she was so self-evidently incapable of stopping her own great fecundity. In any event, she apparently met a man she thought was Jesus on the Harston road – a most unlikely place for the Saviour to make the venue for a Second Coming, in the opinion of this humble scholar, but there you are. Jesus, who was in a white robe of course, admonished her and told her to repent. Which she immediately did to the nearest magistrate, detailing among many sacrificed babies and so forth the fact that the centre of her coven had been a cellar under the Master’s Lodge at Granville College.’