'And Will Shadwell?' Gresham's voice had also dropped almost to a whisper.
'Scum. The scum who for countless ages have greased and oiled the wheels of power with their rank sweat, and their blood. And let us imagine that one of these scum, a perverted, evil creature, a creature who lies with women and yet who lies with boys and men, believes he has found a boy… hurt by this ruler. Found him, lain with him, and now wants money to silence him.'
Cecil moved back to the table, and sat down, heavily. His hooded eyes looked at Gresham, with the nearest thing to passion in them Gresham had seen in him.
'A Minister to a King may be threatened, and he may fence, parry and lunge, may battle with his wits against his enemies. But a King, a King is different. No man, be he scum or be he noble, can challenge a King. No man who threatens a King can live. The King's health is the nation's health. Whatever threatens that health must itself die.'
Gresham spoke softly. 'There is no threat to a King from me. Nor ever has been.' He paused. 'There would have been no threat even had Will spoken with me. Will never spoke. He had no time. And you were worried about a note, or some secret letter from Will to me? Was that why my rooms were ransacked in the House?'
Cecil was silent. Both men took the silence as meaning yes.
'Well now, there's an irony would have appealed to Will. You see, I know my men. I know those who work for me. And I know that Will Shadwell could neither read nor write to save his life.'
He stood up, remembering to make it look painful, and left without ceremony given or received. Cecil was standing by the window, motionless, as the great door closed.
He had told the truth about Will Shadwell to Cecil, at any rate. If Cecil had bothered to check, instead of simply ordering Shadwell and Gresham murdered, he would have found Shadwell could neither read nor write. As for Cecil's tale, it could be true, or it could be another lie. Thomas Percy was a newly appointed Gentleman of the Bedchamber, better able than most to supply details of who entered the King's inner chamber. Cecil probably did think he was protecting the realm from its enemies by all he did, that he was the saviour of the nation.
Mannion was waiting for him. The crowd of hopefuls had not diminished.
'Now for Alsatia?' enquired Mannion, expressionless. 'Now for Alsatia,' confirmed Gresham, remembering to limp slightly as if in pain from the load strapped to his belly until they were well away from Cecil's lair, and sure they were not being followed.
There was no Watch to call out the hour in Alsatia. No constable or serjeant-at-arms entered Alsatia to serve his warrant. There were no walls around Alsatia, yet its boundaries excluded friends of the state just as the iron walls of the Tower excluded its enemies. If London was a fine ship, Alsatia was its bilges, the lowest sump where all that was foul-smelling gathered and stank. Gresham's spies, his scum, came to the various meeting places in ones and twos, draped and cloaked not against the cold but against discovery and recognition. No-one walked straight in Alsatia. All skulked along in the shade of the leaning, stinking buildings, all sought to walk in shadow.
The House lay shuttered, many of the servants sent home to the country to help with the harvest. The dust gathered in Gresham's rooms at Granville College, his place on High Table empty.
Gresham had set up camp on the first floor of a foul-looking three-storey house with mildew rotting the outer timbers. Inside it was a different story. Stout new doors blocked the way into the first-floor rooms, which were newly floored. The shutters of seasoned timber had had paint loosely splashed on them to make them look old, but underneath the mess were also clearly new.
'You've had these rooms prepared?' asked Jane. She looked thinner, and there was still a slightly haunted look to her eyes, but her spirit was returning.
'Of course,' said Gresham, genuinely startled. 'This isn't the first time I've had to vanish.'
The pile of books in the corner was one antidote to boredom. Disguise was the other. Mannion adorned himself in the rough jerkin and cowl of the stonemason, tools strapped to his belt. Gresham wrapped himself in a poorer version of Mannion's costume, setting himself up as apprentice to the older man. Jane they put in a filthy smock. She could be a common-law wife, a whore or even a sister to Gresham. In Alsatia no-one cared, and in the wider streets of London no-one had time to notice.
Slowly, excruciatingly slowly, the information dribbled in, often as tattered and piecemeal as those who brought it. It was three weeks of boredom, of trudging through the filthy streets, of keeping two eyes in the back of their heads, of disturbed nights when a scream or a howl sent Gresham and Mannion grasping for their swords. Three weeks before a real picture began to emerge. Most of it came from servants, of course. There was no house where the servants did not know more than their Lord and mistress about what was going on.
Sharpy Sam was one of Gresham's most valuable sources. An elderly, grandfatherly figure, he was a wandering tinker who would sell you an occasional pot or pan and sharpen your knives, or sing you the latest ballad over supper, and was tolerated by the authorities in his illegal wandering life simply because he was useful. Many an unsuspecting scullery maid had taken pity on Sharpy Sam and invited him for a morsel of food and a warm by the fire, to find herself left a short while later with a memory of pleasure and a bastard in her belly.
Gresham knew Sam's annual progress. The Midlands and the west in high summer, London in late autumn and the south coast for the winter months. He had sent one of his own men, a young, lusty recruit with a love of horseflesh and women, to ride hard after Sam and brief him with the same names Moll had given him. Catesby. Kit Wright. Jack Wright. Tom Wintour. Thomas Percy. And Francis Tresham, of course. Even before Sam presented himself to talk to Gresham there was news enough, so much news indeed that Gresham marvelled at even Cecil's not finding it out. The men had been meeting regularly. They were all Catholics, all linked by blood or by marriage, and frequently by both. Then, out of the blue, a greasy John at one of the taverns in the Strand reported another name. Guido or Guy Fawkes, an armourer and mercenary.
The name and his profession clinched it for Gresham.
Why did a group of Catholics, many of whom had a history of rebellion only a few years earlier with the ill-fated Essex, want to meet with a soldier and armourer? Such men knew about weapons, armour and powder. The presence of one of Northumberland's relatives and henchmen had to be crucial. So did the servant gossip of great stocks of weaponry and horses over and above any conceivable need being laid in.
A group of dissident men in regular conclave. A professional soldier. A potential leader drawn from one of the oldest aristocratic families in the kingdom. Weapons and war supplies being bought in.
It had to be an uprising.
With the Spanish troops quartered in Dover? Possibly. Was Northumberland involved? He was the only Catholic with the breeding and the standing to act as Protector if King James was done away with. If Gresham were in Northumberland's rich shoes, he would not bother with the Spanish troops in Dover, except as perhaps a distant threat to divert Cecil's attention. Rather he would turn not only to all the young English Catholic men blooding themselves and defining their manhood in the European wars, but to all the disaffected soldiers in Europe who might smell easy meat in knocking a new Scottish King off an English throne. After all, had not a Catholic ambassador described James in the hearing of his court as 'a scabbard without a sword'? Europe was more scared of Queen Bess than they were of James. Scottish Kings were brought up to defend themselves by a knife in the back, not a cavalry charge to the front. There was nothing approaching an army in England, and the only man left to build and lead a fleet was Sir Walter Raleigh, languishing in the Tower on a trumped-up charge of treason.
Gresham paced up and down the small room, spilling his thoughts to Jane and Mannion.
'It must be an uprising!' he exclaimed. 'These men aren't courtiers, men who wish to rule! They're gentry, foolish idealists, men who think because they've held a sword and fou
ght off a drunken ploughboy in a market-town brawl that they're soldiers. I don't believe the Earl of Northumberland could stir himself to be King if he was asked by Jesus himself! No, their plot must be to kidnap the King. He makes it easy. The man's besotted with hunting. Where easier to grab a monarch than in a forest where his men are bound to be split up? Take him, hold him in some stronghold with two or three hundred well-armed men. Move your mercenaries and your missionaries over from the Lowlands before a navy or an army can be mustered. The King's a coward. Show him some cold steel, prick him a little, make him sign what you will. Make him call a Parliament, make him promise God on earth to the people. Ride him in state back to London… they will have to kill Cecil, of course…'
Gresham's mind was racing ahead, as it always did, plotting the moves he himself would have undertaken in order to turn the uprising into a new government.
'Would it work?' The question was Mannion's.
'It could be made to work. I must meet these men, this Catesby and this Tresham above all. Then I will know.'
Then, almost at the end of September, Sharpy Sam had sent a message to the House for Gresham to meet him, in a Deptford tavern a stone's throw away from where Kit Marlowe's murder was meant to have taken place.
Sam was a Devon man with a deep burr in his voice. Like most of his kind he was a pirate at heart, but for some reason had turned from the sea twenty years past to take up his wandering trade.
'They were on a pilgrimage,' he had told Gresham over their third flagon of ale. He spoke slowly, measuring every word as if it had a value. 'Would you believe it? As bold as brass they were, some forty of them, paradin' through the marches as if they owned the land, priests in tow. Not as some of them looked like priests, as I remember,' he said disapprovingly. He took a pull of his ale, rolling the taste around his tongue before swallowing it. 'I made for Huddington, thinkin' I'd let them come to me instead of my chasin' all over the countryside, and got myself taken indoors. There's no doubt the servants and womenfolk are all a-twitter — more horses in the stable than the Duke of Parma, more swords than the Armada. They says it's for the young folk to go an' fight with the Archduke. Archpiss, if you ask me. More like that lot want the Archduke over here, rapin', lootin' and pillagin'.' The phrase obviously rang a bell with Sharpy, who repeated it, rolling it around his mouth like the ale. 'Rapin', lootin' and pillagin'.'
'Disgraceful,' said Gresham, 'all this rapin', lootin' and pillagin'.' There was a sniff that could have been a splutter from Jane, but which turned into a loudly blown nose. She was parked behind Gresham, dirt all over her face, and training herself to look longingly at the beer the men were drinking. 'Noisy girl, isn't she?' enquired Sharpy. 'Nice tits, though,' he added approvingly, and grinned at her. If Sharpy realised that Gresham had suddenly acquired an inability to put a 'g' on the end of his words, he did not show it
'Well, there's two bits of news as might interest you. The first is that man Catesby. Handsome bugger, fancies himself. Pure luck, as it happens. I was down at Huddington — that cook they 'ave, she's special in the kitchen and special up against an apple tree — when this Catesby rides in to see his friend, Rookwood. He'd come ahead, seein' as he likes fine horseflesh, and likes to ride them hard. Lovely boy, Rookwood. Dressed like a paint shop. Talk is among his servants, Catesby gets going with Rookwood, he comes over all miserable, spends the night on his knees in a tiny room there, one candle. He's mumblin' a prayer, and they tries to listen. Can't hear much, except somethin' about "God's vengeance" and a "great enterprise" and "preserve my family". That put the fear of God into the servants' hall, I can tell you. Well, anyhow, next mornin' Rookwood takes a great mass o' money out of his chest and gives it to this Catesby. Catesby's up to somethin', that's sure.
An' it's somethin' that needs a ton of money, that's sure as well. I bin there with Essex and his bunch, I were there with Babington and his bunch, I seen it and I smelt it before. It's rebellion, I tell you, the stupid buggers. Some people don't deserve to be born with heads on their bodies. Should be taken off at birth, to save the hangman the trouble later on!' 'There was other news, Sharpy?'
'Right enough. Another tankard of this would be welcome… thanks. That boy Tresham you asked after? News is, his father's dead. Not before time, by the sound of it. Pompous old bugger, they says as know. Left a ton of debt, but young Francis got a pretty penny still. Not before time. They say as how he's up to his young neck in debt. 'E's a bastard, that one. Tried to do in a pregnant girl, fiddled his father out of land.'
'I don't think I'm going to like this Francis Tresham,' said Jane.
'I think you'd better pray to God you never meet him!' answered Gresham.
The house in Alsatia was starting to feel like home, Gresham thought ruefully as they finally made it back there from Deptford. It was not the house that depressed him, he knew, as he mounted the stairs and slumped down on a chair, the black mood mounting in him.
Mannion went downstairs, to bring them wine.
'Does it matter, this uprising?' Jane had tuned in to his mood, was trying to tease the melancholy out of him without seeming to do so. 'All Kings and Queens are rotten,' she said calmly, in a sweeping generalisation that Gresham noted as disposing of humanity's favoured form of government for several thousand years past. 'Look at our King. His legs can't hold up his body, his tongue's too big for his mouth so he slobbers like a baby and his clothes are as ragged as the jewels he places on them are bright. He stinks and he's lousy. He learnt his statecraft in a small nation that's only learned to survive by alliance with France and by murdering its rulers, and so he negotiates a treaty with Spain instead of realising that we're victors over Spain and a great power now in our own right. His wife has no brains and his favourites no balls… excuse my language… are we worse off if he's knocked off his throne?'
'You know Machiavelli? The books I gave you?'
'I've read them, yes.'
'And?' enquired Gresham.
'He's like most men. He thinks he's talking about everyone but he's actually only talking about himself. He's arrogant, so he spoils a good idea by claiming too much for it.'
Gresham thought for a moment. 'Machiavelli was captured and tortured when his Prince failed to be ruthless and strong. We don't need leaders who are good, or beautiful, or kind, or generous. We need leaders who're effective. Most of all we need peace. Stability.'
'You sound like Cecil, if what you told me about your little chat with him was true. How can you say that, who was brought up to war? You, who've lived your whole life as if it were a war? You, who of all people I know seem to exult in a fight?'
'Because I know for what I fight.'
'And what might that be?'
He sat in silence for a moment, reflective.
T fight to survive. It's all I can do. It's all I know. You, me, Cecil, we think we're in control, but really we're all actors in a play written by a madman, a play with no meaning and no sense. I know we can't win that fight, I know death is more powerful than any of us — but at least if I fight to survive I haven't given in. That way, death at least takes me on my terms. None of us can make the sun stand still. Yet we can make it run.'
'Is that why you fight Cecil?'
'I'm fighting him firstly because if I don't, I die. We've a truce at present, while he thinks I'm ill, but what he tried once he could well try again. The more I can find out about what he doesn't want me to know, the better armed I am against him.'
'Yet you could destroy him.' Jane said it as a simple matter of fact.
'I could destroy Cecil, I think, rather than merely keep him at bay. I choose not to. This isn't just about his life, or my life. For all his evil and his double-dealing, for all that he sums up everything I hold in contempt in a man's lust for power and wealth, his very evil helps hold the country together. It is as Machiavelli says. A man doesn't have to be pure to be a good ruler. He merely has to rule, and if in so doing he consigns his soul to Hell, then that's the price he pays for hi
s worldly power. I fight Cecil only when he fights me, and when he ceases to rule well and with power. If there's an uprising planned and he can't see what's brewing, then I'll fight his ignorance only.'
'Is that all?' asked Jane. 'Would you fight for me?'
'I'd do more than fight for you,' he said simply. 'I'd die for you.' It was a simple statement of fact, uttered with no sense of drama. 'But I fight for someone else as well.'
‘I'd rather hoped I was the only one…' said Jane, who to her obvious irritation had managed to get something in her eye that was making it water.
'I fight for John Plowman, thin-wrapped in the bitter cold, pissing in the field in which he works and coming home with his hands bitten and scarred by the very plough that feeds him and his family and his Lord. For Meg Milkmaid, who's there waiting for John Plowman as he comes home. He may growl at her, or he may kiss her, or he may have her against her will, but that's in the way of things, that's how we were made, that's how we were meant to be. I know there are few freedoms in their lives — no freedom from hunger, from pain, from illness or from a corrupt and vengeful master. Yet they've some choice, and they make some choices. There's a freedom in the air they breathe, in the sight of cold blue light on a frosty morning, in the first leap of a fish in Spring. There's something good in their children, ragged-arsed though they be, some good in the work they do.'
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