Gresham did not need to ask who the letter was from. There were only a small number of men in England who had couriers willing to ride through the night. The seal on the letter was far more ornate than the content.
Come to London. Immediately.
No formal greeting, no 'To that most beloved servant, Sir Henry Gresham…' Merely a blunt message. Come. Come now.
Gresham sighed. He sighed again as he turned to his purse, took out a small coin, remembered the courier, and chose a larger one. It was accepted. Without thanks, but with the merest nod of the head.
'Tell him yes. Soon.'
The courier nodded again. It was all that was necessary.
Cambridge was a haven. Its conflicts were explicable, its double-and triple-dealing following a strange local logic. True, its townspeople were low and squat, hating the University that gave them their living. A riot was never far away, which was why the Colleges were built like domestic castles, facing inwards into their courts and quadrangles and with a towered Lodge as their entrance. Yet the sense of power those buildings gave was illusory. The power in London was the power of life and, more frequently, death. The power in England was very simple, for all the puffed-out vainglory of the Cambridge Fellows. England's power was the power of the Court, nowadays the Court of King James I of England, erstwhile King James VI of Scotland.
So now Henry Gresham would have to drag himself out of the parochial world of Cambridge, back to the dark, brutal and blasphemous underworld of London, a world only recently rid of yet another outbreak of the plague.
He was rather looking forward to it.
Jack Wright sat in the darkest corner of the room, pushing the remnants of his meal idly around the edge of the wooden platter. The air in the room was greasy, stale. There were eight of them in all, in a room that would have more easily coped with four or five. The Catherine Wheel in Oxford had been chosen for recruiting the newest conspirators. It was safer than London, and Oxford was less full of Government spies than Cambridge. It was as safe as anywhere for a group of men for whom life would never be safe again. Jack could not stop himself looking nervously at the door every minute or so. He saw in his mind the soldiers bursting through it, the yelled commands, the kiss of iron round his wrists as he was led away. He shook his head, as if to clear it of the image. His nervous glance returned to the door. Part of him was trying to listen to his friend, but he had learnt at times to let the impassioned words of Robert Catesby flow over him, as unmarked as a stone in the river with the clear water washing over it.
John Wright, or Jack as he had been known since his early childhood, had taken his usual seat at the back of the room. He was a stocky figure, his apparent heaviness deceptive. His sword arm was lightning fast, his agility with a blade in his hand legendary. It was a skill he had tried to use much less since God had called to him and he had answered. Would that his mouth had the same skill as his arm. It was not that he lacked thoughts or ideas, but somehow the link between brain and mouth had eluded him all his life. For years he had felt the frustration of hearing the nonsense others talked, seen the strike of wit that won the applause and the adulation, felt the ideas seething in his head but stumbled at the final hurdle of their expression. As a child he had been laughed at and mocked when the few words he could muster had tumbled out and dried up, like an empty barrel with a hole knocked in it. That was where he had learnt his agility, turning to his fists in those days to make sure that his school fellows paid his body the respect they would not give his words.
He had known Catesby casually for years, in the way that all the sons of the oppressed Catholic families banded together and knew each other. They had attended a Mass together, in the small hours of the night when the fewest servants would see and hear and the risk was reduced. The priest had been impassioned, the liturgy powerful beyond faith. Afterwards, Jack Wright had been moved to tears, and Catesby had turned to meet him.
'It's a thing to die for, isn't it, as Our Saviour was willing to die?' he had said, a fierce light in his eyes.
'It is…' Jack Wright had started to say, wanted to say that it was more than life, that it was the source of life, a faith and a beauty so poignant yet so tragic… but the words had dried up, as they always did, and the red flush of embarrassment crept up on nis face as his eyes dropped.
He felt Catesby's hand on his shoulder.
'We don't need words, do we? The words have been written for us. But we know the beauty. We of all people know the terrible beauty. To feel is enough, isn't it?'
Jack Wright looked up. Was it his imagination that a light pulsed from Robert Catesby's eyes? As if a tide of lovingly warm water had been released to sluice through his mind, the tears came to Jack's own eyes. Here was a man who knew, who understood. Here was a man who needed no words. From that moment in a cold chapel was the bond struck between Robert Catesby and Jack Wright.
Catesby's personality shone like a second sun, filling every corner of the tavern's room.
'Men have a right, a right given by God and by nature to defend their own lives and freedom, a right that no earthly power can take away,' he was arguing passionately, the light of martyrdom in his eyes, thumping the table for effect. 'We Catholics in England are mere slaves. 1 He dwelt on the word, drawing it out in all its shame. 'Lower even than slaves. We're free men, yet we allow our lives and our freedoms to be removed without law, without reason and without authority. Our very life, our vigour, is being sapped by this passive resistance, this feebleness, this palsy of fear and cowardice that's all we seem able to muster in the face of persecution. We're the laughing stock of Europe: despaired of by our friends, and despised by our enemies as God's lunatics!'
Despite the familiarity, the power of Catesby's personality tugged at Jack Wright's soul. When Catesby talked to you, you felt that you were, for him, the most important person in the world. Catesby could reach into men's souls. His audience stared in rapt silence, almost adoration, as he reviled the King, whipping them up into a frenzy of self-justifying anger against the monarch and Robert Cecil, his Chief Minister. It was a brilliant performance. Jack had seen it many times, yet still it held a measure of magic even for his cynical eyes and ears. For a moment, for all of them, the fear retreated, the gnawing, bitter fear that governed their every step, their every breath.
'And is there hope? No.'' Catesby spat out the negative, as if it were a red-hot pip from a sour cherry he had just eaten. 'With Robert Cecil pouring poison into the ear of the monarch, turning his eagerness into hate? There is no hope unless we ourselves create that hope!'
King James had seemed well-intentioned to the Catholic cause before his accession, and his wife was known to be Catholic. Cecil, the King's Chief Secretary, was widely credited with turning the mind of the King against English papists whilst at the same time toadying up to the Spaniards.
They needed some of Catesby's magic. At the mere thought of the tunnel Wright's flesh began to crawl and a spasm ran through his muscles. It had seemed easy enough. Hire the house, dig through until they were under the House of Lords, plant the powder. Yet before they were six feet into the tunnel they were gagging for air, their sweat turning the loose earth beneath them into greasy, salty mud. There was hardly room to move, the candle guttered and died in the rancid air and terror closed in with the darkness. The arm with the pick or shovel could only move back so far, the picking at the tunnel face tearing the same muscles time after time, reducing them to red-hot strings of pain. Their beards, hair and mouths became encrusted, unwashable, the dirt pitted into the skin. They felt the dust coat the inside of their lungs, their breath foul for hours afterwards, their racking coughs depositing a scummy yellow layer like vomit. They had reached the foundations after a lifetime of effort, half mad with the pain of their bodies, half mad with the thought of the soft, suffocating fall of earth and a hidden, slow and secret death. The ancient stone had seemed to bounce their feeble blows off its surface. They were tired, all of them. In time they would need
money, horses, weapons, armour. Now their greatest need was for more brute strength and muscle. The two new conspirators would give them that at least.
Catesby finished his oration with a final flourish, and sat down, draining the tankard to its dregs in one huge gulp. Catesby did everything, from talking to drinking, as if he had half an hour of life left to him, and had to cram a lifetime's experience into a few minutes. He was a meteor in a dark sky. Jack could not help wonder how long that meteor would sustain its light, before it crashed to earth.
'Well spoken, Robin,' Jack said, going up to Catesby and taking his hand. Catesby had slumped down on a stool, as he sometimes did after one of his orations, as if his job was now done and the effort of speaking had drained him of his life force.
Catesby glanced up at his old friend, and smiled. It was a smile of total warmth that lit up Jack Wright's soul.
'I hope it was well spoken. But it's more than words we need now, Jack, much more than words.'
'We have a plan, don't we?'
'We do indeed,' replied Catesby. 'And there'll be those who'll seek to stop that plan before its rightful conclusion. They must be stopped, Jack. Stamped out like vermin…'
It was easy in talk to make a death seem nothing more than stamping on an insect. It was different when you forced the steel into the soft flesh, heard the shriek of pain, felt a man's dying breath on your face, saw the light fade from his eyes.
Wright shook the new recruits, Wintour and Grant, by the hand, and made his apologies. Both men were well-dressed, obviously prosperous, but both looked dour, old before their time. Jack hoped their muscles were more vigorous than their manner. The presence of the priest, with all the makings of a Mass, made him nervous. They were hunted men, these priests, hiding from one house to another, facing the rack and their innards ripped out if they were discovered, and bringing the same threat to those who hid them.
He slunk out into the late afternoon, feeling the bite of the wind on his flesh through the loose cloak, hand comforted by resting on the hilt of his sword. It would be more than the bite, of wind he would feel if they all played the wrong hand in this particular game of cards.
Chapter 2
How could you live and not be excited by London? It was eternal damnation, a smoke-filled Hell and a cauldron for the plague. And it was deliriously, amazingly and ecstatically exciting. The stench of the shite on the streets and the heavenly smell of a fresh-baked loaf. The waft of the wind bringing the sweet-fresh smell of meadows from outside the city boundaries, and the stink of the open sewer they called the Thames. Everywhere people screaming their wares, a city turned into a multitude of salesmen. A heaving, sweating multi-coloured multitude with their feet in mud and their eyes raised towards the stars. It was a raw, violent and often brutal melting pot, but with all the filth and the putrid vapours of too many people and animals crowded on top of one another came an unequalled excitement. The city had grown in recent years out of all control, the higgle-piggle of streets growing more dense and narrow by the week, spilling out beyond the old walls. Yelling builders and ramshackle scaffolding seemed to clog the routes, fighting with the men, the women and the horses, the sheep and cattle on their way to slaughter, and the open-eyed yokels so busy looking up that they could not see the midden at their feet.
For all the excitement, a nagging question bit at the mind of Henry Gresham. Why was he here? It was not his time to be in London. Yet he had answered the summons, knowing he had no choice.
He had ridden hard. He was a very rich man whose wealth was spent very carefully. One of its objects was horseflesh. Another was Mannion. Mannion, good soldier that he had been, oversaw the stables between Cambridge and London that kept a good horse on permanent standby for Henry Gresham. Mannion also kept an eye on the men who would take Gresham's windblown mount from him, wash it down and give it the love that Gresham, already on his next mount, could not.
He need not have hurried so. Robert Cecil, Viscount Cranborne, soon to be Earl of Salisbury and the youngest man ever to be sworn in as a Privy Councillor, would have waited. As the inheritor of Europe's largest and most efficient network of spies and informers, Cecil spent his life waiting, like a spider at the centre of his web, and watching.
Yet riding as if life depended on it, feeling the rush of wind through his hair, knocking the startled farm traffic aside, the pounding of the horse beneath him on the rough tracks… this was life itself, this was oblivion and fulfilment all in the one moment. Cecil could control elements of Gresham's life. No-one could control that wild, rough ride to London.
Previous meetings between Gresham and Robert Cecil's kind had resulted directly or indirectly in Henry Gresham being shot at or lunged at with sharp metal on innumerable occasions, seriously wounded on two occasions and shipwrecked, mercifully only once, on the wild Irish coast. Cecil's instructions had also resulted in Gresham being sentenced to be hung (twice), sentenced to be hung, drawn and quartered (once) and, on another memorable occasion, actually being roped to the rack in the Tower of London.
Yet Gresham kept coming back.
How on earth had he got himself involved in this lunatic world where power was the only morality, and where nothing was as it seemed? It was as if it had been that way for ever, from the moment when as little more than an overgrown boy he had been dragged in to play such a deciding role in the tragedy of Mary Queen of Scots. He had made no conscious choice to become involved. In Gresham's experience, Fate did not consult with humans before deciding the course of their lives, or if they were to have life at all. Falling initially in the way of the Queen's spymaster, old Sir Francis Walsingham, Gresham had increasingly found himself taking his orders from Robert Cecil, the self-appointed heir apparent to Walsingham's vast complex of spies, agents and informers. Gresham and Cecil had loathed each other from the first moment of their meeting. Yet the danger, the excitement and the risk were a heady mixture, and Gresham had carried on, playing the great game until it had seemed that he had pushed his life to the edge and that by then he owed God a death. Then Cecil had summoned him, years ago, wanting him to go on some pitiful and dreary expedition to see informers in Spain. Gresham had refused. Cecil had looked at him, and drawn out of a wallet a piece of writing, carefully copied in a clerk's hand.
'You might care to read this, Master Gresham, before you make any final decision regarding your acceptance of my request.'
Cecil was cool, calm, measured as he always was.
Gresham read it. In a lesser man the colour would have drained from his face and the hand reading the paper shaken. Instead Gresham made himself read it once, twice and a third time, his hand rock steady.
'Yes?' he had said, gazing calmly, matter-of-factly into Cecil's eyes, revealing none of his inner sickness.
Cecil had stolen Walsingham's papers, the complete record of his spy network. Somewhere in those papers had been details of the affair that had blighted Gresham's life, the only thing he had done of which he was ashamed. Cecil had found it out. It was there, written in a neat hand on the paper.
'It would be a pity if this paper were to become known, would it not?' asked Cecil, in a silky voice. 'Known to a wider public, I mean.'
'Why, sir,' Gresham replied, no sign of his fear in his voice, 'the truth will always out. The Bible tells us so, does it not? And what is one man's vanity and reputation against the call of truth?'
'Will it suit you to go to Spain, Master Gresham, as I have asked?' Was there the tiniest hesitation in Cecil's voice, along with the aggression?
It was a deciding moment, Gresham knew. If he conceded the power of Cecil's paper against him now and obeyed, he would never be his own master again. Yet if he resisted, Cecil could provoke his ruin. It was folly to resist, madness. And so because he was who he was, he chose to fight.
'No, my Lord, I cannot go.' Cannot, he was careful to say. 'Cannot', not 'will not'. 'I have the strongest personal reasons for requiring to be here in England at the moment. Of course, were the matt
er more urgent, or were your Lordship's life to depend on it, then I would go at your Lordship's command, without hesitation. I ask to be relieved of this duty, by your gracious mercy.'
By your gracious mercy. That made it Cecil's decision to absolve him from the mission, a favour granted from on high. Yet it also meant that he, Gresham, had not bowed to pressure, had not given in to blackmail
Gresham carefully took the paper and placed it on the table, among the mass of papers that always surrounded Cecil, midway between them. He had given a form of words that allowed Cecil to save face. Would he take it?
There was a long silence.
Genuine thought, Gresham wondered, or enjoyment of the pain he knew he must be inflicting, for all the calm of the young man before him?
Cecil finally moved, taking the piece of paper carefully with forefinger and thumb, as if it was something faintly distasteful.
'A pity, sir. You would have been an excellent choice. Yet there will be other opportunities, that I do not doubt. Ones you will be more advised to accept, as I choose to exercise my "gracious mercy". As you so gallantly describe it.'
'Your Lordship is indeed most merciful,' replied Gresham, and seeing the expression in Cecil's eyes of the hawk looking down on the mouse, 'most merciful.'
Gresham had not won a victory, that much he knew. The sword was poised, hung over his head, not back in its scabbard. He had merely negotiated an armed truce, and risked being played with by Cecil, as a boy tortures a fly. So Gresham had accepted with enthusiasm several other requests from Cecil, all of them dangerous. As he had done so he had made notes not only of those missions with Cecil, but of his involvement going back years to the days of Walsingham.
The climax had come with the Essex rebellion. Cecil had a habit of triumphing over those apparently better suited than he for survival. For years he had been locked in mortal combat with the dashing and handsome Robert Devereux, second Earl of Essex. Essex had the ancient lineage, the charm and the body that had bowled over every woman at Court, including the Queen. It had done him no good. Cecil's wits, the animal and immoral way in which he fought, had overcome his rival, as they overcame all rivals. The idiotic, ill-fated Essex rebellion had sent Essex to the block, leaving Cecil in total power at Court. Essex's head was still there, picked bare, on London Bridge. There was only one Robert now. Robert Cecil.
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