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

by Martin Stephen

  It would not leave his body. One of its fastenings had jammed. He tore at it, to no avail. The two boats were bucking and skidding towards London Bridge, where surely they and any cargo they carried would be smashed to pieces. Gresham could only look on as his death jumped at him from the foaming water. At the last second the two entangled boats slewed sickeningly round, so that with a splintering crash it was the other boat that first hit the bridge. Gresham was hurled forward by the shock. There was a wrenching tearing at his neck, and he was gagging for breath as the cloak choked him. Gresham found himself spread-eagled over the boat’s shattered bow, resting on the broken hull of the other boat. His cloak was half in the water, soaking it up like a sponge.

  Perhaps two thirds of the other boat’s hull was left, tilting forward as water poured into its hull. Some strange balance of forces meant that the wreckage of both boats stayed stuck to the pillar of the bridge, pushed on to it by the tide. Gresham was splayed out on the wreckage, the appalling noise of the water pounding his ears, doublet and hose now soaked through already, as well as the damned cloak.

  If you felt the cold, you were all right. It was when the cold sting was replaced by a numbness that you knew your body was closing down, and soon the numbness would close down the brain. Gresham was increasingly out of touch with his limbs. His brain was still working. The flimsy wood on which his body lay would vanish beneath the waters in ten, fifteen seconds, as the hull of the other boat filled with water. The force of the tide would then bounce Gresham off the masonry, his cloak dragging him down and his limbs refusing to obey his commands. The water must be below freezing temperature, kept liquid only by its motion. The simple shock of hitting such cold water caused many men’s hearts to stop. Henry Gresham’s heart was clearly built of sterner stuff, but that made little difference. It merely postponed the inevitable. If the collision with London Bridge did not kill him, the cold and the weight of his clothing certainly would. Or he could fling himself off the debris before it sank – and in all probability suffer the identical fate.

  He did not give up. It was not in Henry Gresham’s nature to give up. But he did think he would die, and was surprised at how easy it would have been to give up. For the first time in his life, he could see no scenario nor course of action that would have let him live. In a second, his mind flicked through the options. His hands were still fluttering feebly at his cloak, to no effect. When the wreckage sank, so would he, dragged down by not only his sodden clothing, but the heavy boots he could not kick off and the sword that somehow still clung to his belt. And if by some strange chance he did not sink, the force of the water would dash him against the bridge. Fling himself off the wreckage and hope his body would shoot the arch and stay afloat long enough to be picked up? Hardly. To be picked up he would both have to stay afloat and avoid hitting the bridge, both of which seemed impossible. Even if he managed both, the arches concentrated the waters like a rapid, and shot boats out at great speed and he knew of no oarsman who could hold the force of the tide long enough to stay alongside and take him on board. Nor did he know if anyone had seen him, least of all someone with the courage and skill to rescue a dead man. More importantly, a grey tide was lapping at his conscious mind. He screamed at it to retreat, but increasingly giving up and giving into the sweet languor that beckoned from the other side of consciousness seemed more and more attractive, a seductress luring him into her bed.

  And the thoughts that resulted, in the ten or fifteen seconds that he thought remained of his life, were fascinating. He had been told that men facing imminent death had seen the whole of their life scroll before them. Well, that was certainly not happening to him. Other men he had met in his life as a spy and a soldier had told him that when Death seemed to have won they had heard for a brief moment the indescribably beautiful music of Heaven. There was no such music in Gresham’s ears, and he formed the inevitable conclusion: it was not Heaven he was destined for. Well, that was no surprise. At least the Other Place would offer warmth instead of the teeth-chattering, life-sapping cold of where he was now.

  And in that moment when he had genuinely resigned himself to his death, one thing became clear. His wealth, his reputation, his battle with Cecil, were nothing. They really did not matter. What mattered was that Jane and Mannion would weep bitter tears for him. What mattered was that he had impressed two humans at least to believe that they, and the world, were a poorer place for the fact that Henry Gresham was no longer in it. Sensing the agonies they would go through imagining his death, he wanted to reassure them, tell them that dying was the easiest thing he had been asked to do. Humans are designed to die. It is easier to die than it is to fight death. Our bodies know when the end has come. Our body is programmed to recognise the inevitable, slip the mind into a coma of acceptance.

  And then Mannion appeared. Gresham was too far gone to know if he really was there or simply there in his mind. He perched on the shattered end of the boat, brow furrowed as it did when he was in deep thought.

  ‘Stupid bugger!’ he said. ‘God knows how ’e intends you to finish your days, but it sure as ’Ell or ’Eaven ain’t ’anging off London Bridge!’

  And then Jane appeared, and he knew he was dreaming. She looked stern.

  ‘The man I gave my body and my soul to would never give up!’ she said sternly.

  He remembered feeling deeply hurt. He was dying. Dying men received sympathy, warm words, not reprimands. He shook his head, confused words dribbling from his mouth.

  ‘Fight!’ said Jane.

  From somewhere, deeply hurt at her lack of sympathy and understanding, he found some energy, enough to clear the sweet grey cloud that almost completely immersed him. Jump off the wreckage. Hope to miss the bridge, shoot the bridge, stay afloat long enough to be plucked up or swept to shore. He tensed what was left of his muscles.

  There was an explosion of water beside him, and a vision rose up from the deep. It was the boatman, the frail man Gresham had thought drowned long since. He had a knife between his teeth. He climbed on to the wreckage, causing it to shake and shiver and threaten to sink even earlier. Half-kneeling on the broken timbers, the boatman suddenly took the knife out from his teeth, grasped it in a hairy paw and lunged at Gresham. In horror. Gresham saw the knife arrow to his throat. A vague rictus stirred his limbs. At the moment he thought the knife would enter his throat, there was a sudden easing at his neck, and Gresham realised that part of his lethargy was the fact that his cloak, dragging at his throat, had half-choked him. The boatman had cut away the cloak. Gresham drew in a deep, racking breath, and felt an energy surge in his frozen limbs. The boatman looked at him, and shouted something. Gresham lip-read rather than heard,

  ‘Hang on!’

  The boatman was shivering, convulsive tremors passing through his body. Yet his concentration was ferocious. He looked to his left, where the arch of the bridge beckoned, and stared with stark concentration at the wreckage of the other boat. Just at the moment it sank, he gave it a mighty kick. The boats separated. The remnants of the other boat, its stern nothing but splinters, rushed towards the bleak masonry that formed the arch of London Bridge. The boatman turned to Gresham shrieking soundlessly.

  Of course! Wood floated! With the barge gone, the boat would be shoved on by the pressure of water to the masonry pillar of the bridge. But if at the moment of impact they could somehow fend off, the wreckage would slew sideways, follow the force of water under the arch, the wreckage to which they clung a primitive life raft. Someone – it could not have been Henry Gresham because he was far too tired – drew Gresham’s legs from under him, flung them forward and in the split second they touched the bridge took the force of the impact, bent his knees and then when it seemed knees could bend no further, pushed back out. One pair of legs could not have done it. Two did, the boatman straining likewise to push the wreckage away from the pier. The centre seat of the boat sheered off, as did seve
ral planks. The boatman was seated more centrally than Gresham, who was in what once had been the bow. An iron hand, Gresham’s, clasped the boatman’s collar, his sodden canvas jacket, dragged him back from the abyss. What was left of the boat was swept out to mid-channel. The boatman was yelling at him again. Flat! Lie flat on the wreckage! Some hundred, two hundred yards past London Bridge, the waters suddenly calmed. Two comically ill-assorted figures – a boatman in a canvas jacket and a fine courtier in a wrecked doublet and hose, paddled with their hands for the shore.

  They ended up on shingle, rather than a mud bank, and the scraping noise as they hit it was the best sound Gresham had ever heard. Both men slumped for a moment over the wreckage of the boat, their improvised life raft, their feet still in water.

  ‘Thank you.’ said Gresham, his teeth chattering. ‘You saved my life. And I don’t even know your name.’

  ‘Mark,’ said the boatman incongruously. He had a deep, profoundly base voice, wholly at odd with his effeminate appearance. ‘And you saved mine. I’d have been over, if you hadn’t grabbed me.’

  Extraordinary! The man’s accent was refined, as refined as Gresham’s.

  ‘Mark,’ said Gresham. ‘I’ll pay for a new boat, of course. But why did you come back? You can swim, obviously. So why not just head for the shore?’

  ‘You were my passenger, weren’t you? Even a tradesman can have some honour, you know.’ There was a story to tell here, Gresham was sure.

  They took unsteady steps on to the shingle. Mercifully there was an Inn, The Mermaid, just above them on the shore. They struggled up to it, frequently having to support each other. Equally mercifully, Gresham’s purse had survived the ordeal, pinned like his sword to his belt. It bought them a roaring fire in a private room, coarse blankets while their clothes were dried and a mountain of food, ale and wine.

  There was something worrying Gresham.

  ‘Mark,’ he said, ‘I was stuck on that wreckage, and it never occurred to me that I could fend off and shoot the arch. Why not?’

  ‘Simple,’ said Mark. ‘One thinks the water’s will smash you into the stones. But water’s clever. It wants to sweep you through the open space. You look at the people who work the Bridge for a living. The amateurs, they start rowing the moment their boat looks to be heading for one of the pillars. The professionals, they stop rowing. They know the water will sweep them out and through the arch. You have to trust the water.’

  ‘But our boat and the barge hit the arch! We weren’t swept out!’

  ‘But we were going faster than the water! That barge hit us like a cannonball! It shot us out of the current, through the dead zone and up against the pier. Up to about six foot away, the water pins you to the stone, smashed you against it. We call it the dead zone. But all we needed to do was get out of that dead zone, back into the mainstream – you with a bit of wood to hang on to, or your clothes would’ve sunk you. You keep at the same speed as the water, it’ll shoot you to safety. Fight it, go faster or go slower, and it’ll kill you. One other problem. There’s a vicious undertow once you’re through the arches. If your feet or body and hanging down, you’ll be sucked under. That’s why I yelled at you to lie flat.’

  ‘I’ll replace the boat,’ said Gresham. ‘But you can let it put to someone else if you want, and come and work for me as my personal boatman. You keep whatever you earn from the boat, of course.’

  ‘How much?’ asked Mark. He clearly found talking about money distasteful, and went red. Gresham believed money bought loyalty, and the figure he named was ten to fifteen percent above the going ‘And there’s lodging and free keep for you, and your wife if you have one, in my house in the Strand.’

  ‘I have no wife,’ Mark rumbled. No, said Gresham to himself, I thought you might not.

  ‘What house?’ Mark asked.

  ‘It’s called ‘The House’’, said Gresham.

  ‘Christ!’ said Mark, ‘Then you’re that spy!’

  Gresham said nothing.

  ‘Well.’ said Mark, ‘it’s got to be a more interesting life than this. So I accept, thank you.’

  Two days later, Mannion arrived with Jane. Gresham gave them edited highlights of his brush with London Bridge. Jane went pale, but said nothing

  Mannion was horrified. ‘What you bring that faggot ’ome for? Make ’im your boatman? Mary from the kitchen’d do a better job.’

  ‘I need a new man, you know as well as I do, since John went back to Cornwall.’ John the boatman, the one who always took Gresham when it was a one-man job, was also in charge of the other men who manned the boats, including some of the servants who did it alongside other duties. John had inherited a small plot of land from his father, and had gone back to Cornwall. ‘That ‘faggot’ saved my life. He’s not only as strong as you, he survived the cold better than me – and he handled his boat brilliantly. There was nothing he could do about the accident.’

  ‘Strong as me, is ’e?’ said Mannion grimly. ‘Mind if I test ’im?

  He nodded. It would not have crossed Gresham’s mind to appoint someone Mannion did not approve of.

  Mannion walked up and stopped behind Mark. He decided to take the subtle approach.

  ‘Oi! Are you a faggot, then? ‘Cos if ...’

  Mark did not disappoint. Before Mannion could finish, Mark had spun round and from nowhere a knife was pushing at Mannion’s stomach.

  ‘Call me that again, you lump of lard, and I’ll stick this in your fat stomach.’

  There was a cheer from the other men in the yard. They had all seen Mannion fight. None were worried about his survival,

  ‘T’ain’t fat,’ said Mannion, unmoved. ‘Its muscle.’ Then in an amazingly swift movement Mannion’s great paw was over Mark’s wrist. For a few seconds both men stood there, apparently motionless. Only close examination reveal the gigantean struggle going on between the two men. Slowly, but only very slowly. Mark’s hand was forced backwards, his dagger being forced to angle upwards. Gresham was impressed. Mannion’s fist was the nearest thing to a pile driver Gresham had ever seen, and Mark must hide huge muscular strength in his slight frame to put up the opposition he did. His teeth gritted, brow furrowed, he made no sound as his knife was slowly forced back.

  Finally Mark’s knife was under his own chin. Then he did something Gresham had only seen the most experienced street fighters do, something so dangerous it need split-second timing. He flung his own head backwards, and released his resistance to Mannion’s hand for just an instant. What should have happened then was that Mannion’s hand and the dagger would suddenly jerk up, and Mark could then reapply pressure to divert the knife into Mannion’s face. But Mannion had caught the first sign on Mark’s head going back, was prepared for the sudden release of pressure, let Mark’s hand fling up as if in some salute to the Gods and when he was at full stretch punched Mark hard in the stomach. It was blow enough to go through many men and come out the other side. Mark let out a whoomph! of breath, blinked, but hung on to the knife.

  ‘It’s fat!’ he hissed, and punched Mannion as hard as he could in the gut, with his other fist. Mannion did not let out his breath, but he did blink. It had been a real punch, Gresham could see that. He had better stop these children before someone did get hurt.

  But Mannion and Mark were making their own number.

  ‘I could break yer wrist,’ said Mannion conversationally, ‘or you could drop the knife. I’d like the last, ’cos it’s more civilised... What’ll it be?’

  ‘No more names?’ said Mark.

  ‘Are you in a bargaining position?’ asked Mannion.

  ‘Not yet,’ said Mark. ‘But I have got time to give you the most massive kick in the balls you’ve ever had before you can do anything about it. That might even the odds. I’m assuming you have balls, of course.’

  Mannion grinned. �
��Oh yes,’ he said. ‘Knife?’

  ‘Names?’

  ‘Deal.’

  Mannion released his grip and the knife clattered to the ground.

  ‘Like ’im,’ said Mannion to Gresham, in Mark’s hearing. ‘E’s good. Not as good as me, but good.’

  *

  Gresham had never had time for Christmas. He was not at all sure about God, and did not see the sense of an immortal being wanting to have a mortal, and killable son, on earth. He paid for a feast and celebrations as an event at The House and The Merchant’s House simply because it was expected, and it would have been short-sighted to offend the servants by ignoring it. Yet even Gresham could see the contrast between a Court making ready for the festivities, and Raleigh, now stuck back in the Tower. They were actually putting another floor into the Bloody Tower for him, and he was allowed Bess, his wife, to stay whenever she wished, and their children, as well as servants and the freedom to wander more or less at will inside the walls. Despite all that, it was still prison, and the building work suggested that someone with access to purse strings was expecting a long sentence.

  Gresham made himself go by boat, one of his own this time, with Mark riding it. Mannion insisted on coming, watching Mark closely until the man’s self-evident skill allowed him to relax. There had been at least one other man who believed he should be Boatman in succession to John. The morning after he appointed Mark that man went about with a nose that had been clearly broken, and there was just a whisper of a bruise on Mark’s cheek. Gresham asked no question. The servant’s hall had its own way of sorting out these things.

  ‘Do you know,’ said Gresham to Raleigh, ‘I think you’re probably as guilty as Hell.’