His breakfast was milk warm from the cow, brought from the fields near Islington. The bread was fresh-baked in the House's own ovens, and smelt divine. There was cheese, and strips of bacon burnt to the black as if on a campaign fire, a taste he had never lost. There was a concoction of eggs beaten up with milk and then heated over the fire until it bubbled a gentle yellow, a half-eaten beef pie. Dr Perse in Cambridge had advised him to eat a hearty breakfast above all other meals, and it suited Gresham's constitution. There were many who ate no breakfast at all.
Gresham finished his breakfast. Mannion left the room briefly and returned with one of the kitchen maids, who cleared the wooden table. There was a rustle, and the briefest sense of a fine perfume. Without turning round he sensed that Jane had entered the room. He waved a hand, motioning both to be seated.
Gresham nodded to the small beer and Mannion poured himself a tankard. He drank like a sewer, with a vast, slurping contentment that only just stopped short of the belch he clearly needed to deliver after devouring the whole tankard.
'For God's sake, man, let it go before you explode.' Mannion let loose a torrent of wind that started at his feet and came out finally from his mouth like the blast of the trumpet on Judgement Day. Jane looked at him as he rocked with the force of the expulsion, the tiniest flicker visible at the corner of her mouth. Gresham looked on with distaste, his lip curling.
'You are disgusting!' he said.
'Aye, sir. Disgusting.' Mannion poured himself another tankard and placed it cheerfully in front of him. 'Truly disgusting. But no longer thirsty, for which I thank you.'
It did not occur to Gresham to ask how many other gentlemen of his wealth and standing discussed the most important matters of the day after breakfast with their body-servant and their mistress. As for how many gentlemen were blessed with a body-servant who won both the morning's opening conversational gambits, he preferred not to think. The girl had made it clear from early on that she had a brain to match her body, one source of her capacity to irritate him more than any other person on earth. It was so much simpler to have the body as one container, and the brain in another, and far more convenient for the latter to be contained in a man. He had said so to Jane once. She had considered the proposition thoughtfully, and then hit him with the bedpan.
The upper room in which they sat was one of Gresham's favourites. Dressed with dark oak panelling that had been young in the Wars of the Roses, it had a large window and balcony overlooking the street. Already the hubbub of London was audible despite the lavish expenditure on glass in the window. As with most houses, the introduction of glass had not caused Gresham to remove the old, unwieldy shutters, which were an excellent defence. They had been thrown back as he had entered the room, revealing a watery, smoke-stained dawn.
Gresham gave a brief resumй of where he thought things stood, speaking as if to himself but knowing his silent, attentive audience. He listed the death of Will Shadwell, the meeting with Cecil, the strange task of Bacon. For Jane's sake he went over the story of the informer, the lack of any incriminating evidence on Bacon. They knew his ways, knew that in some way this careful repetition of the facts, this thinking aloud, enabled him to order things in his mind, to speed up thought. The fingers of his left hand began to drum gently on the rough wood of the table. It was a rare gesture for a man who held himself always in fierce physical control.
‘I’m uneasy. There's something in the air. Unrest, trouble. I don't know. Yet the feeling is there. As it was before Essex, the same feeling. What gossip is there in the markets and the fine shops, Jane? What are they talking of in St Paul's?'
The old cathedral of St Paul's was the crumbling centre of London. Even though it had lost its steeple to lightning some years before, it still dominated London in its centre. Occupying over twelve acres at the western end of Cheapside, it would have taken Jesus two lifetimes to clear it of its moneylenders. It was here that those caught by the new plant tobacco came to buy, here where every servant in London looked for vacancies on the siquis door. It was here that the gallant casually threw back his fine cloak to reveal the satin lining, and the younger son skulked in the doorway to hide his ragged doublet. It was here that the scaffold would be erected, the men twitching their last moments in earshot of the sermon being preached from St Paul's Cross. Puritan and Papist, gentleman and cutthroat, fine lady and bawd met, mingled and, not infrequently, came to blows or copulated. The country bumpkins who increasingly flocked to London were drawn to St Paul's and drew with them the lowlife who preyed on their naivety. It was the best centre for gossip in London, exceeded only by the Court itself.
Jane went there nearly every day to visit the booksellers. She had more or less taught herself to read and had devoured the library built up by Gresham's father. The only time she had badgered him for money was to add to the library, to which he had willingly agreed. The House now had one of the finest collections of books in London. As a child she had become almost a talisman among the booksellers, the men vying with each other to attract her to their stalls. They knew her as the foundling of the fabulously wealthy and strangely reclusive Henry Gresham, and latterly his 'niece'. Yet when she made her purchase solemnly every Friday, always from a different stall, she got the best price in London, as well as the best gossip.
'Those who talk of books are full of Jonson's Sejanus, of course it was played some two years ago at the Globe. It's not very good, actually, very loud and long. Martha and I went. Thorp first took it on and entered it in November last, but refused to print it, and Blount's now taken it over. Jonson's friends say it's good to his face but damn it behind his back, and he's very vexed indeed with the world!'
Jane's face lit up as she relayed the tittle-tattle of the booksellers.
'When has Ben Jonson not been vexed with the world?' asked Gresham with a laugh, trying to imagine a world where his friend Jonson would be at peace with anything. 'Who wouldn't be vexed, with the ghost of Kit Marlowe grinning up at you from Hell and that clever brat Shakespeare taking the crowds at the Globe? But there must be other gossip?'
'There's always gossip in the places I visit, though none concerning Bacon. Except the normal, that is,' she replied, her brow furrowed in thought.
'So what is the normal?' asked Gresham gently.
'The normal is that he's a man of great ambition, a man of law and a man of Parliament, who'll sell his soul to the King for preferment. His fiancйe's a shrew, and he prefers the company of young men.' She giggled. 'As, so it's said, does his intended. There's no noise abroad that any of the young men are unwilling.' She looked him straight in the eye. 'It's become fashionable these days to try what's new. A courtier who wishes to be in the light of fashion will say that he needs his women, but that he loves only his young man or his boy.'
'Will they now? How very daring,' mused Gresham. 'Does this gossip talk of sedition, of treason, of plotting?'
'It talks of the King,' said Jane. 'They say the new King screams if he sights cold steel.'
It was rumoured that James's mother, Mary Queen of Scots, had witnessed her Italian lover Rizzio murdered in front of her, in some Godforsaken frozen Scottish palace, while the child that was to become James I was live in her belly. A drawn sword or dagger had ever since sent him into a fit either of madness or of swooning.
'They still talk of Raleigh, of course. Aren't people strange and fickle? The mob used to hate him when Essex was alive, but now they say Raleigh was the first Englishman to be tried and sentenced before the charge was heard.' Raleigh's trial, conducted by the irascible and lickspittle Attorney-General, Sir Edward Coke, had been a farce.
Gresham growled his response. 'Do they talk of how Raleigh was betrayed by the man who protested to be his deepest friend? By the man whose son Raleigh helped to bring up? Do they talk of Cecil so?'
'They talk more of the numbers in the King's service at Whitehall,' said Jane truthfully, 'and how they grow by the day. It's the talk of town that soon every gentleman in the co
untry will be paid a pension to be in His Majesty's Chamber, and every working man in the whole country employed in the King's palaces. The
Scots Lords offend everyone. It's said that they stink, that to sit next to them is to get their fleas, that they've no breeding and that they rut like stags when they're not too drunk to know what they're doing.'
Gresham knew that over a thousand men worked to serve the King in his palace at Whitehall. It was a far cry from the days of Old Bess, for whom each coin she parted with was like a drop of blood.
'The merchants see what the King spends, and worry about their profits and yet more taxes.'
'There's more, though — talk of a Popish plot, now the treaty with Spain is signed. The Catholics are angry. They had high words of promise from the King, and had great hopes of his Catholic wife. It all seems to have turned sour, and the fines are bleeding some of the great families to death, they say.'
'It's not just talk, the first bit,' said Mannion. 'It's true.' He spoke with an air of total finality. 'The girls in the stews hear the pillow talk. The young merchants are full of the Government costing too much and doing too little. And they say the Papists are restless.'
'Well,' said Gresham with heavy irony, 'that has to be it, then. If the girls in the stews say it's true who can deny it?'
Jane carried on, ignoring Gresham. 'Any Papists who heard my Lord Archbishop preach his sermon at St Paul's Cross on Tuesday last will be more than restless. They'll be scared. He damned all. Papists to Hell. He said the King would pour out the last drop of blood in his body to defend the Protestant faith.'
So, thought Gresham, there is anger in the country. Three angers, in fact. The anger of the Catholics, the anger of a disappointed people in their profligate King and the increasing anger of the King against the Pope's followers. Yet when had there not been anger in the country? And none of what he had heard explained Will Shadwell’s death, or his intuitive sense of unease.
Jane and Mannion were waiting expectantly. He looked at Jane, his expression unfathomable. She wondered what thoughts were hidden by those dark eyes. For all that she believed she knew Gresham better than anyone except Mannion, there were times when she was frightened by her inability to read his mind and his soul. Had she known the image in his mind she would have been saddened and horrified in equal measure.
Gresham was thinking of blood. Its smell and its look. There is no smell like fresh human blood, as there is no smell like rotting human flesh. The first is warm, salty yet strangely thin, the latter so vile as to make a man retch into his boots. Gresham had seen so much blood shed, smelt so much dead flesh. It was so bad at times that even as he looked at Jane, flushed with all the fires of youth and excitement at the joy of living, he saw the blood pumping beneath her fair skin, saw her raped and mutilated by a troop of soldiers as he had seen so many young girls, smelt the rank odour of her death. Gresham saw the skull beneath the skin.
Would there be rebellion so soon again? Had people learnt nothing from the waste, the torment and the agony of the Essex rebellion, so short past? Were fine young men to be butchered on the pikes of mercenaries, their reeking guts to be torn out and shown to their wives? Were the Catholics to launch yet another blood bath in the vain hope that the country would join their rising?
'May I speak?' It was Jane, reluctant to interrupt his reverie.
'Madam,' replied Gresham with a short bow, 'the Four Furies have left for their supper after a hard night riding people down and I am temporarily without my wand of power, or a standing army, so I fear I lack the means to stop you talking.'
Jane waved her hand dismissively, as she would to a rather silly child. 'My Lord, I'm worried that you should become involved between Bacon and Cecil. There's danger in going on to any ground where there's no map. How do we know what argument might exist between the two of them? How can we know that you're not simply being used in some way to gain advantage for Cecil, perhaps at great cost to you?'
'She's right,' said Mannion. 'I'm as good a swimmer as anyone, but even I wouldn't swim certain stretches of the river, where I don't know what the current's doing.'
Gresham thought for a moment. He stood suddenly. Something had sealed in his mind as he listened. He felt a fear and an uncertainty, but now he knew where it sprang from and what he intended to do about it.
'I agree, it almost certainly is dangerous. But I won't know how dangerous until I find out more. Cecil rarely tells the whole truth when he briefs one of his men. He likes to keep his spies in the dark, just as much as he likes to keep everyone else in the dark. Men like him distrust the light.'
He walked over to Jane, pulled her up gently by her wrists and stood gazing at her.
'I see my lawyers this morning.' The vast fortune left to Gresham by his father carried title to thousands of acres of land and numerous properties, and with it continual detail of tenancies and rents. When in London Gresham's lawyer was always desperate to see him, the pile of documents that needed signing stretching from St Paul's to the river.
'After that, I visit Moll Cutpurse this evening. If there's knowledge to be had, Moll will have it. And tomorrow, we see the King.'
Jane gave a squeal of excitement, clapping her hands together.
'Have you no shame, girl, to be so carried away from your wits by an evening of over-bred drunkards and whores cavorting at the expense of the nation?'
'But, sir — I've so little chance to meet either! My life here is quite matronly and respectable. And how can a girl resist drunkenness and envy and pride and greed and gluttony and lechery and sloth and all those other terrible things unless she can learn to recognise them? And this is not ordinary sin. This is royal sin. It's positively my duty as a loyal subject to witness it! Where are we going? What is it His Majesty celebrates?'
Mannion grunted. 'His Majesty celebrates a cow farting in a field, as long as he can drink to it.' He took a swig of beer.
Jane appeared perfectly content without a social life in Gresham's absence. Such a life was hers for the asking. Money and fame mattered more than morality in the London of King James I, and the beautiful 'niece' of the wealthy and mysterious Henry Gresham would be a catch for any hostess, and a fine chase for any man in town. She never appeared tempted, but it did not mean that the young woman in her failed to enjoy hugely the opportunities when they arose.
'His Majesty, for once, is being economical. He kills two birds with one stone. The masque is both to welcome the ambassador from the Emperor, one Prince George Lodovic, and to bid farewell to the Spanish Ambassador,' announced Gresham.
Mannion had grabbed a crust which the maid had missed from the table, and was chewing on it with his few remaining teeth. 'They do say as the noble Prince' — no-one could put more loathing into the word Prince than Mannion — 'comes with his baggage overstuffed.'
'He brings three Earls,' piped up Jane, eagerly, 'one Baron, twenty-four gentlemen, twelve musketeers and one hundred servants. It's the talk of St Paul's,' she said, with great authority.
'Pigs feeding at the trough!' exclaimed Mannion, stuffing a remnant of Gresham's meal into his cavernous mouth, and spitting out a bit of bacon gristle. Something seemed to have got stuck in what was left of his molars. Gresham's eyes were drawn reluctantly and with extreme distaste to the sight, as Mannion dug for the stuck strand of meat with the enthusiasm of a miner sure he was on to a major seam of pure gold ore.
King James would be displeased at having to break off from his hunting. It was necessary for his health that he should hunt, he had told the Privy Council, and his health was, after all, the health of the nation. He had demanded they help take some of the burden of State affairs off his bending back. Cecil would have rubbed his hands with glee, thought Gresham, at being left to rule over the very fabric of government in the absence of the King. However, there was so much money from Spanish bribes sloshing around the Court that the departure of the Ambassador needs must require the King's return from hunting, and probably provoke the whole C
ourt to go into mourning.
'What's the entertainment?' asked Jane.
'The entertainment will be provided by several fat Aldermen whose health will be put to great strain by the weight of jewels they and their even fatter wives will don for the evening, and a race between most members of the Houses of Lords and Commons to see who can place his face closest to the buttocks of His Royal Highness.' Gresham warmed to his theme. He started to mince round the chamber, bowing to various walls and doors with an inane smile on his face. 'The winner gets a pension, a title and the right to take first shot at Cecil, Earl of Salisbury. The loser has to try and extract an intelligent comment from Her Royal Highness the Queen Anne, but may opt to be hung, drawn and quartered instead, on the grounds that this is a sentence that at least leads to a relatively quick death.'
'My Lord!' said Jane, genuinely shocked. 'You shouldn't speak so about the King and His Queen!' She adopted the cool calm of the enigmatic beauty when at Court, but would talk for hours afterwards when she returned home about who had been wearing what and been seen speaking to whom. Gresham had once taxed her with her love of everything royal, pointing out some of the less savoury features of King James I of All England.
'It's perfectly possible, my Lord,' she had replied primly, 'for the institution to be divine whilst its agents on earth are merely human.'
Gresham looked at the eager sparkle in her eyes, and relented. At least she was not being distant, aloof and dignified, which he hated.
'I'm given to understand that His Majesty has commanded a masque from your good friends Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones, in which the virtues of Faith, Hope and Charity will appear to welcome Prince Lodovic, and bid farewell to the Spanish Ambassador. We go because Sir Francis Bacon will be a guest — a guest of honour, in fact, reading a pretty speech of welcome from the House of Commons. It's at Whitehall, of course. I remember you told me you had a most commanding book of sermons to read, and so informed the Lord Chamberlain that I'd be going alone…'
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