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

by Martin Stephen

  The man actually winced. Choosing the lesser of two evils, he decided to run through the door.

  Without willing it, and in a gesture that was to haunt her dreams for years, she brought the book up as the man rushed by her. Brought it up savagely, under his chin. His tongue was between his teeth, and he must have bitten it at least half through, if not more. His mouth filled instantly with blood. His hands rose to his lips and the most awful gurgling noise came from his mouth. He collided with the door jamb, and fell to the floor, gagging and trying to draw breath through pints of blood.

  A childhood of insults, of beatings, of abuse. At the hands of a weather-beaten old man who took delight in dominating her. A man who looked surprisingly like the man who had murdered the maid. Though she never admitted it to herself, in chopping off this man’s tongue, at a time when he had ceased fighting and simply wanted escape, she was paying back some of what she had endured as a child. She had dreams about what she had done to the murderer. Strangely, from that time forth, she ceased to dream about her step-father.

  Some part of her that lay deeper than she knew now dismissed the man bubbling blood on the floor. Jane slumped back on the table, and threw up over the floor. A job for the maid. A sudden flush of guilt over whelmed her. She stood up, and cradled the maid in her arms. She was dead. The knife had found her heart.

  She had been called Mary. Her husband had been a farm labourer who had died in his mid-30’s on one of the rural Gresham estates. Mary had been moved to The House by virtue of the rule which said the Gresham family looked after its own. Mary had been trained in the delicate art of cleaning a library of priceless books. She had two children, working in the kitchens. Jane knew all this about her, as she knew all about every servant in The House. Her tears fell and mixed with the blood on Mary’s chest.

  And that was how Mannion found them. Jane cradling Mary’s dead body, the attacker threshing helpless on the floor. As he burst in, Jane looked helplessly at him, the dead woman in her arms. With gentleness surprising in so strong a man, he took Mary from her, laid the body on the table. He offered his arm to Jane, who grasped it to help herself up. Still clinging to his arm, she allowed herself to be led outside, and placed in the care of her maid and the comforting, matronly figure of the woman who had been Gresham’s nurse. Mannion went back into the Library.

  ‘I’ll … bleed ... to death!’ spluttered the attacker. Mannion, veteran of many wars, knew a killing wound better than most.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘you will.’ And, quite calmly, he watched him do it.

  Mannion called the household together. He did not mince his words.

  ‘You were told to be on guard. Either you didn’t listen, or you didn’t believe, or, God forbid, you didn’t care. Result? You let a man sneak in here who told you a parcel of lies about being from the bookseller, and because he carried a parcel of books you bloody well believed him, and let him wander through this house. Now one of you’s dead and two children ain’t got a mother no more, and the mistress would be dead alongside o’ her if she didn’t have more spirit in her than five of you lot.’

  There was silence, a predominance of red faces.

  ‘As for the mistress, any o’ you got a bad word to say about ’er? Girl like that, she could lord and lady it over you all. Has she? Has she ever? Now many of you’ll remember what it was like before she climbed into the Master’s bed. Cook was feeding her entire family from Lincolnshire at the Master’s expense, yet there was hardly meat on the table for us lot. And now? God help you if you cheat the Master, but if you’re loyal, and clean, and hard-working – you, Tom, you who let this bastard in who did this …’

  ‘’E said ’e was from the bookseller. I warn’t to know …’ said a massively embarrassed Tom, who had been on the gate when the murderer talked his way in.

  ‘You were to know, you daft idiot,’ said Mannion. ‘You were to know you didn’t know ’im, and that meant he stayed out while you called me. And ain’t I right in thinking that when your old dad got his leg broke it was the Mistress who got a surgeon to set it, and let ’im stay here for nigh on three month?’

  There was a murmur of assent. They all remembered. Servants remembered things like that.

  ‘And you, Rose, you who said this murdering bastard asked you the way to the library, what did you bloody well do? You showed him, for God’s sake! You showed him to the place where he tried to murder the woman who turned a blind eye when you got pregnant, went off to have the bastard in Norfolk with your family and then let you ’ave your old job back?’

  Rose was in tears. A maid who got pregnant would receive no reference, be faced with prostitution as her only way of making a living.

  They liked Jane, the servants, though they feared her as well. It was accepted that many nobles or landowners in effect bought the bodies of their young female servants by the fact of their employment, and there was a strange and unwritten set of laws that governed the bedding of maids by their master. If the servant body in general half-accepted this as a fact of life, as they accepted occasional hunger, pain and the plague, they were usually scathing about the bits of skirt a master dragged home, where clearly the inducement was not the beauty of the girl’s mind. The live-in mistress was frequently given a hard time by servant’s hall. The fact that such girls held their master by the balls did not give her authority over the servants, in their eyes, and by the strange honour code they followed, and which had many dimensions. For example, the servants at The House would never steal wine or beer from the cask. That was theft. They would be outraged if they were denied the right to what was left after a cask of wine had been broached for a special dinner or function, even if only a glass or two had been drawn. That was not theft. That was a right. From the outset Jane had seemed to understand intuitively these unwritten rules, which at times reached Herculean levels of sophistication. For example, as Mannion mentioned, Cook – with no-one to check up on her – had been in the habit of ordering an army of chickens to feed her own family at Gresham’s expense. When Jane came, spotted this and sent Cook on her way, there was general assent. Cook now would over-order far less, but still ensure that after the Master and Mistress had been served there was a leg and some breast meat for the senior members of servants’ hall, and meat enough for the rest, even though technically they could have been fed on far less expensive meat. Jane, whose words to the original cook had gone down in folk-lore, had arrived in the kitchens to inspect the work of the new Cook, to find rather more chickens than were needed to feed Gresham, herself and their guests. A stilled hush had fallen over that most noisy of places.

  ‘How many for supper tonight?’ Jane had asked innocently.

  Heart all a flutter, the newly appointed Cook – a reassuringly rounded lady who had actually been poached from Raleigh, who occupied the house next door – replied,

  ‘As I understands it, ma’am, yourself, the Master, Reverend Donne and his wife and Mr Ben Johnson and his … lady.’

  ‘Six in all?’ asked Jane, silkily.

  ‘So I believe,’ answered a suddenly very frightened Cook looking at rather more than six chickens, gently roasting on spits.

  ‘Next time,’ said Jane, ‘feed the guests and the servants. And only the guests and the servants.’

  ‘You could do a bloody sight worse as a mistress, and we all need to bloody well keep her alive. And there’s more. Which one of you would like to face the master if we’d let ’er be killed?’

  A shudder ran through the audience. They liked working for Gresham. It was a rich household and their livery was thick enough to keep them warm, and they enjoyed the raciness of being servant to a man renowned throughout London as a brilliant swordsman, a spy and a confidante of Kings and Queens. They respected him. Many of his men were trained to fight as well as serve, and the boat crews in particular had seen him share the freezing cold and th
e wet with his men. Yet also they feared him. An angry Gresham was not a sight they wished to see.

  Mannion had played his audience like a fish. Now he came to his climax.

  ‘I’ll tell you once, and once more only. We’re at war, and people get killed in war. Until I says different, anyone you meet who you don’t know to be a friend of this house is its enemy. No-one comes in, no-one goes out without my knowin’. For as long as it takes, we’re not a house. We’re a castle. And if any of you lets me down, never mind the master’s enemies …’ Mannion delivered the last sentence in a low hiss, that somehow was heard by all ‘… I’ll bleedin’ well kill you meself.’

  It should have been a figure of speech. Yet for every man and woman there, it was real. Job done. There would be no more intruders in The House.

  Mannion walked to Jane’s room, stony faced. He was cursing himself. Gresham had left him in charge, and he had let him and the girl down, and a perfectly decent woman was dead as a result. The House had not been tight enough. His fault. His responsibility.

  Mannion had been a gardener in the country residence of Sir Thomas Gresham when he had first come across the young Henry Gresham. It was widely known among the servants that this same Henry was a love-child, fathered from a tempestuous ward of royal blood inflicted on Sir Thomas by the Queen. That did not alter the fact that young Henry had been scrumping apples. From the orchard Mannion was responsible for. Mannion had known that apples were going missing, but not who was taking them. He had ambushed Henry, managed to lay hold of what was an extraordinarily slippery child.

  ‘This is my bloody orchard, and if you takes my bloody apples again I’ll bloody well kill you!’ said Mannion, only recently out of childhood himself and holding this child by the ear. Even that early in their relationship, Mannion was struck by the composure of the child. Swinging by his ear from the hand of a burly gardener, and facing a certain thrashing if that same gardener reported him, Gresham said calmly,

  ‘They’re not your apples, they’re my father’s. And that means they’re sort of mine. And you won’t kill me, because if you did you’d hang.’

  If the unacknowledged bastard son of Sir Thomas Gresham had been brought up in the school of hard knocks, he at least had never faced starving to death. Mannion had done so several times in his childhood. He had in effect been sold as child labour to a sea captain who became his father in all but name, and who he had been forced to witness being burnt alive by the Spanish Inquisition. As a result, the child Henry Gresham held few fears for Mannion.

  ‘They’re only your sort of apples if your sort of father acknowledges you as his sort of son. Which I understand he don’t. And as for hangin’, if the reason for it was I’d sorted a little sod like you out, at least I’d die happy!’

  Gresham, swinging from Mannion’s hand, reflected on this for a moment.

  ‘Truce?’ he said. ‘I promise not to steal your apples if you promise not to tell on me.’

  From that moment a bond had been struck between two extraordinarily disparate people: the bastard son of the wealthiest man in England, and the entirely peasant and hence worthless junior gardener. In a bizarre way, Mannion had taken the place of the father Henry Gresham never had. Did Mannion see it like that? Probably not. But the sense that he had let down the person who mattered most to him in life loomed large as he approached Jane’s room.

  ‘It wasn’t your fault,’ said Jane, heavy rings under her eyes, before he could open his mouth.

  *

  The kick should have killed Carey. Gresham went up to him with little hope, but to his surprise saw the man was still breathing. There was a massive gash in his head, and enough spilt blood to fill a barrel.

  ‘Supper,’ Carey mumbled.

  You’re hungry?’ asked an incredulous Gresham.

  ‘Got to get to ... King ... by supper ... give ring ...’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ said Gresham, feeling very tired. ‘Let’s give the man a ring, to tell him he’s King ... what a fine thing, to bring a ring to a King ...’

  He bathed the gash as best he could with water from his leather bottle, hoisted a moaning Carey onto his horse.

  Edinburgh was ... Edinburgh. The City Walls were built of surprisingly small stones, where they were not ruinous. Once inside, there were stinking hovels. Thankfully, at ten or eleven of night, they seemed deserted, the lupine natives unavailable or simply too tired to leap out at the two, tired gentleman. Typical of Edinburgh, the scene changed almost instantly to homes that clearly belonged to gentry, seemingly built of stone a mile thick. Finally, they came to the Royal Mile, with huge stone houses seven stories high, many with wooden galleries to allow their owners to gaze down on the less fortunate. They rode at a snail’s space, reaching Holyrood Palace long after dark, long even after midnight.

  Gresham bullied his way through a string of guards until they arrived at the door that lead to James’s bedchamber. He barked at the surly guards, ‘This man carries a token from the late departed Queen Elizabeth of England, announcing that your King is now King of England as well as King of Scotland. So if you want to be the first eunuchs to serve a King of Scotland, deny this man entrance!’

  His instinct told him he was pushing at an open door. Something in the manner of the guards. Someone must have warned James of the seriousness of Elizabeth’s illness; he, and his guards, were expecting a messenger.

  Gresham saw Carey taken into the inner sanctum. He then had time to realise that he ached in every part of his body, was utterly exhausted down to his soul and would have killed a baby in exchange for a crust of bread and a cup of water. Holyrood Palace, long after midnight, seemed to offer little hope of redemption for either Gresham’s physical or mental ills. He set off, with no hope in his heart, to find sustenance.

  He was appalled. The Scots had a regular habit of losing their monarchs, yet security at Holyrood was derisory. Half the torches in sconces on the walls were out, the remainder flickering in a manner that suggested their oil-soaked binding had not been renewed during the day.

  The dancing, irregular light of the sconces reflected off stone wall glittering with damp. Painful memories hit him like a blow in the stomach. Dunbar Castle. 1587. That Godforsaken stronghold, storm and sea-washed, the noise of the beating waves an incessant companion to any thought process. Gresham, little more than a child, called to duty far in excess of his years. Mary, Queen of Scots, supposedly abducted by the extraordinary and barking-mad Bothwell and raped by him at Dunbar. If the female cries of ecstasy Gresham had heard outside the chamber door that night were to be believed, an entirely new definition of rape needed to be established.

  Why was Scotland so damp?

  He heard no noise, felt only the explosive pain in his head. He has a brief sense of falling to the filthy floor before his world went dark.

  Chapter Six

  April 1603

  Vague patterns of grey were moving in his head when the sharp pain of a fierce slap across his face brought him to a semblance of consciousness. He raised his head, unable temporarily to distinguish between the pain inflicted on him by his attackers and those from his journey.

  An extraordinary man stood before him. He was wobblingly fat, and his dress was not even designed to hide it or flatter. A vast belly hung over his sword belt, rippling as he talked. He had long, straggly red hair and a ragged crimson beard, with a bulbous veined red nose with two gross pimples on it. Gresham suspected the hair hid enough animal life to fill the Forest of Arden. He felt bile rise in his throat, choked it back, stinging.

  Gresham was tied roughly to a high-backed, armless chair. They had not even bothered to remove his heavy riding cloak. It was a basic mistake. The extra bulk of cloth cushioned the rope, meant there was play between the flesh and the fibre. Could he escape?

  He looked up. No point. Two heavies stood on either side o
f his chair, and at least four or five others were dotted round the small, stone chamber they were in. His head wrenched round in response to another sharp slap.

  ‘Did I tell you to look away?’ the fat monstrosity said in an accent as thick as the fog over London. ‘Did I? My name is Mackintosh. Lord Mackintosh to you, English shite.’

  Gresham, his head burning and his mind struggling to understand what had happened, decided on silence. It earned him another slap. Gresham’s head was ringing like a gong. At least the Fat Lord was not slapping him with rings on his fingers that would leave Gresham marked for life.

  ‘So why were you planning to kill our good King James? You English bastard!’ the Fat Lord added for good measure.

  ‘I wasn’t planning to kill …’ Gresham started. He earned another slap; harder this time.

  ‘You were. That’s not an issue. The issue …’ the Fat Lord relished his speaking, ‘is why. And whether you die here, in Holyrood, or in London.’

  ‘I think,’ said Gresham, who was finally starting to think, after a nightmare journey and a savage blow to his head, ‘I think you can’t afford to kill me, or mark me. Otherwise, you’d have done so. A slap across the face? A slap? If you’d wanted information you’d have had my fingernails off before you spoke your first word.’