The Desperate remedy hg-1

by Martin Stephen

  'My, and you must tell me who your tailor is, Mr Selkirk!' It was Tresham. He had given no flicker of recognition. 'Clothes like that will make a stir anywhere you go!' Another guffaw from the company, except Lord Mordaunt, who thought himself too refined to laugh. Tresham seemed to delight in wearing clothes that had clearly cost good money, but which were crumpled as if tossed carelessly aside at the end of the day. He played his part well, making several scurrilous jokes about the Scots that would have perplexed the real person Gresham was pretending to be, yet got home to other town guests.

  Jonson talked endlessly, largely about himself, but he did so with such power, force and good humour that there was a dance in the eyes of all those who listened. The appalling rule of the Lord Chancellor and his power over the plays, the sheer vagabond criminality of all printers and the complete lack of any resemblance to a civilised race of theatre managers and actors, the wonder of Latin, the plan for the next masque, the plan for the next play, the belief that a grateful city should afford its greatest living playwright a theatre of his own, the dreadful affair between Sir Robert Dudley and the mistress he wished to marry… fuelled by greater and greater quantities of alcohol, Jonson's genius and his buffoonery climbed towards the stars in harness.

  And what of Catesby? Was this a man full of piss and wind, or a man capable of kidnapping a King? As Gresham observed him it seemed as if the room became darker and darker, the sense of an evil presence almost unbearable. As even Jonson grew tired, and the stories thinner and more unbelievable, so quietly, with hardly a ripple, Robert Catesby began to dominate the conversation, the room and all the people within it.

  'We're all victims to the printers!' Jonson was almost shouting now. 'They buy the work, they print the work, they bind the Work and they sell the work — and, if they so please, they put another man's name on the cover! And they get the profit, whilst the poor man who produces the work, whose brain sweats it out over weeks and months — he gets the leavings after the cursed printer has done! Why, these men are nothing more than vultures!'

  Catesby broke in. The very quietness of his voice commanded attention.

  'Why,' he said to a perspiring Jonson, 'you revile the printers, yet they're as the lice upon your body. They lie still and wait for you to come to them. They backbite and they infect, yet you've no remedy. They feed off you, yet you stop them not. If they grow fat on your blood, isn't it your fault? Throw off your old clothes, man. Scrub your skin. Take the louse between your thumb arid finger…' he picked up a nut from the table, 'and crack it… thus!' The nut shattered over the table. 'Blood for blood; take back your blood, man, or cease your complaining.' It was said gently, conversationally, yet it had the menace of steel slithering out of a smooth scabbard.

  There was a pause, and conversation resumed along with the bringing of two fine, freshly baked pies. Later, another of the guests, Lord Mordaunt, raised an obscure theological point, on whether to equivocate or withhold the truth was the same as to tell a lie. Catesby fixed Mordaunt with his eyes and led him down a theological line that had the man tangled in his own arguments as badly as a young ostler caught in the reins of a train of horses.

  Catesby knew his Bible, Gresham had to give him that. Textual evidence dropped from him like other men oozed sweat. Gresham had mimed becoming progressively more drunk as the evening wore. He decided to speak.

  'I dinnae like the Bible.' That brought a hush, as Gresham knew it would. He had spoken in his thick Scots accent, as a drunk would when suddenly brought back to awareness for an instant. 'There's tae much blood, tae much killin'. Tae many of ma friends have deed..Gresham started to sob, in the maudlin way that drunks did when they had uttered a profound alcoholic truth.

  Catesby did not even look at him as he replied. Too much killing, Mr Selkirk? No, surely not. There can be no life without death. Christ wasn't our Saviour until he died in agony.'

  'But ma poor wifie! Ma lovely Agnes! An innocent wee lass, taken awa' before she had time to say her prayers…' Was Gresham pushing it too far, would the reference to the dead and innocent wife draw forth a response? It did, but not of the type Gresham expected. Catesby smashed his tankard down on the table with such force that three wooden platters jumped off and rolled along the floor. No-one moved to stop them.

  'Innocent? Innocent! We're alive now because we feed on the dead flesh of animals, innocent animals! Like the lamb in the Old Testament, the innocent must be sacrificed so the higher order may triumph. Their squealing over their death does them no credit. Rather they should praise those who sacrifice them, praise those who make something meaningful come from their paltry death. Did Joshua ask for the innocent to leave the walls of Jericho? When the walls fell, do you imagine the soldiers asked who was innocent and who was guilty before they raped and pillaged in the name of God? Innocence is not a virtue. It is a handicap.'

  On that note the party ended. Gresham had met many men in his life, some good, some bad, most merely human with all the frailty and weakness humanity brought along as their natural baggage. Pure goodness he had met, surprisingly, far more often than pure evil. Indeed the number in that latter group he could count on the fingers of one hand.

  Tonight, Gresham knew he was in the presence of evil. It was in the eyes. It was always in the eyes. Catesby's had a fierce, fixed gleam, an inner light that did not come and go with the moment, with the rising fumes of wine to the head, the excitement of sex or even the lust of battle. The intensity of that madman's gleam did not waver or flicker. Yet it was so gentle, a flash of yellow deep in the pupils, deep and intense burning, that it was almost buried in the proud and handsome tilt of the chin. Gresham had seen that light in the eyes of a judge, in the eyes of a hangman. It was the evil of a man who could not conceive he could be wrong, but whose self-belief could only be satisfied, like a dread hunger, by feeding it with the belief of others. All men, and all beliefs, were simply fuel for Robert Catesby's vanity. In the handsome, dashing figure of Robert Catesby, for a brief and terrible moment, Henry Gresham saw the pride of Lucifer, walking on earth.

  "Normal men suspend their feelings,' said Jane, trying to wash as much as possible of the dye off his body, and trying to understand what Gresham, still shaken, had told her. 'When they kill, or when they rape and mutilate, they lock away their feelings behind a great iron door, only opening it when the business is done. Because they didn't feel it when it happened, they tell themselves it never happened. This man, it seems, has no door to shut. Perhaps it was ripped off its hinges when his wife died?'

  'Or perhaps it was never truly there.' Gresham shivered and not only with the cold. 'Here, your hands are cold. Let me take over.'

  'When I've finished the bits you can't reach. Be still.'

  'Why do I doubt so much? Do you doubt? Everything?'

  She had hardly ever seen him like this, reverting almost to a child-like questioning and simplicity, the veneer of cynical amusement and wit broken through and shattered. It was not that his body was naked before her. For a brief moment, it was his mind. She was careful not to interrupt the measured sweep of her hand, or reveal her feelings in her voice.

  'Sometimes I doubt. Who isn't prey to doubt?'

  'Catesby. Catesby isn't prey to doubt. He takes the fear, the worry, the doubt we humans have and he forces it out, drives it from him somehow in a way he doesn't and I don't understand. And then he turns it into something evil, a fire that draws other people to it like a moth to a candle, and burns them up before they've realised what's happening. Or perhaps makes them so they don't care, makes them so they want to be destroyed.'

  They made love in the tiny bed, little more than a mattress cast on the floor, and Gresham felt the warmth creep back into his soul.

  Well, his question was answered. Not so much piss and wind, Master Robert Catesby. More an avenging, fallen angel, willing to unleash the winds of Hell on earth.

  Chapter 8

  It was dark outside, the first wind of winter dashing against the houses
, and bringing with it a fine rain that first put a layer of watery, tiny jewels on a woollen cloak, and then soaked it through.

  'I saw him as if for the first time last night,' said Francis Tresham. He was sitting at the table with which he had tried to knock the brains out of Henry Gresham only a few days previously, sipping morosely at the fine wine Gresham had placed in his hand. 'He's a vulture, isn't he? I suppose I've been under his spell most of my life. I think it was your being there that let me take a step back almost, to see him as he really is. He doesn't care about God, does he? Or perhaps he thinks he is God? Either way, I realised last night, for all his talk, who Robin Catesby does care about. Himself.'

  Which is perhaps why you would recognise it more easily than others, thought Gresham, as it describes the pair of you equally well. Gresham's hair and beard had returned to their normal black intensity, apart from an occasional flash of orange when the light caught it from a certain angle.

  ‘I could ask Jonson who you are,' said Tresham. He frequently changed the tack of a conversation, without warning. It followed the restless, ever-changing direction of his eyes, as if anything he gazed at for more than a few seconds became too hot for them to rest on. Perhaps it was a trick to catch the listener unawares; perhaps it was just his nature.

  'You could ask,' said Gresham calmly. He knew Jonson was safe. If Tresham did not know that fact, he would find out easily enough without need of words from Henry Gresham.

  'Tell me again what it is you offer me.'

  'When we've amassed enough information to deal with this plotting, you'll receive travel documents to France, a thousand pounds in your purse and secret passage to a ship, out of the way of your friends or Cecil, whichever one is most hot to kill you.'

  'How can you do that?'

  Because, young man, I have had a plan waiting these years past to release Sir Walter Raleigh and get him to sanctuary in Europe, a plan he has refused to use, believing it would be taken as confession of his guilt were he so to escape.

  'I can do it. That's all you need to know. You'll be taken to the south coast and there put on a boat, and delivered to France. The thousand pounds is in addition to any money you can raise yourself. You'll want to tidy your affairs, won't you, and leave as much as possible to your wife and family? You'll be given another name, and papers in that name that will pass any muster.'

  'What about my family?'

  'That's up to you. They can come later, when the hue and cry's died down, or you can leave them. You can tell me later.'

  If Tresham had decided whether he would desert his family or not, he was not going to let Gresham see it.

  'I think I'm to be inducted on Monday. I'm bid to another dinner, at Lord Stourton's, in Clerkenwell. The invitation came from Robin. Stourton's my kinsman.'

  'I know,' said Gresham, whose mind by now carried an encyclopaedic list of the inter-relations between England's Catholic families. 'So is Lord Monteagle. It's no secret.'

  'It's strange the invitation comes from Catesby, not from my relative. It makes me think there's a reason other than the pleasure of my company for my being invited.'

  'Then you must go.'

  'What freedom do I have?'

  'Freedom to do what?'

  'Can I speak as myself, or do I have to speak from a script that you've written?'

  'There are only two conditions. Firstly, you must speak as keeps you on the inside of whatever is happening. If by staying there you can bring it to an end, then so much the better — but you must under no circumstances be so dismissive that you're excluded. You're no use to me in ignorance. The second is that you must report back to me immediately, and tell me everything that took place.'

  'Here?'

  'Usually, yes. On Monday, no. There's an inn, the sign of The Mermaid, at Clerkenwell. Ask to be shown to the room taken by Mr Cecil.' Tresham's eyes widened. 'Mr Robin Cecil. I'll meet you there.'

  'Can he be trusted?' The question was Jane's. She had read Jonson's manuscript, liked it, and was now descending into restless boredom again. It was going to be called Volpone, or The Fox, his play. It had made her yearn to go to the playhouse again.

  'We'll find out soon enough. While we're under this threat I don't want you out of my sight.'

  'I know,' she said simply. 'But if we're found out then I'll be the least of your troubles. I can be secret, too, you know. When it really matters.'

  A number of those Tresham had been at school with, and some of his adult friends, were now dead. Several had died of the plague, one thrown from a horse, others of illnesses that seemed to have no name and no cure. Another had been knifed in a brawl, and spoken gaily to Tresham as the life blood had ebbed from him. The death of his father had shattered him more than his so-called friends knew. Enemy that he had been, his father had offered a strange security and comfort. Sir Thomas Tresham had been an anchor point in his life. And now even that great certainty was gone.

  He had felt so brave, when he was young. Now all he felt was fear.

  Clerkenwell lay outside the City walls. Until recently a village to the north of the City, bounded by the Fleet on one side and Charterhouse on the other, the relentless march of London had swallowed it up, its residents claiming that the country winds blowing over it from Islington kept the plague at bay.

  Stourton had married Frances, Tresham's sister, and though there was a twenty-year age gap between them he had become close friends with Catesby. Lady Frances Stourton had a permanently world-weary look to her, and conducted all her business distractedly, as if something terribly important was happening elsewhere.

  'Francis, you're very welcome here, as ever.' She used the same tone of tired affection, as ever. She was in mourning, of course, and Lord Stourton all commiseration at the loss of his father-in-law. At the same time, he seemed distracted, removed from his usual self. Catesby was no different, seeking first to charm Frances and then turning his attention on to Stourton. Yet dinner was ended early, and Catesby asked leave to hold a few words with Tresham. Tresham felt his heart tighten.

  Winter was drawing in, and a steady fire in the new hearth lapped at the edges of the cold. The room was square, with latticed glass looking out over the garden. The panelling was light, almost irritatingly so, being so new as to not have darkened or weathered properly. Family portraits glowered at Tresham. They were a proud crew, the Stourtons.

  Catesby looked at Tresham, and felt, not for the first time, the stirrings of unease. For long simply a plaything, a stringed instrument on whose neck Catesby could play whatever tune he pleased, Francis Tresham would always be a risk. A risk of a different kind, Thomas Percy, had failed to deliver the rent money due on the

  Westminster house whose cellar hid such a terrible secret. Fawkes had had to be sent to pay Henry Ferrers and Whynniard what they were owed, masquerading as 'John Johnson', Percy's servant. Just as pressingly, Fawkes was insisting on the money needed to hire the ship from Greenwich that would take him abroad after the explo-sipn. Fawkes had been hired for his skill with powder. It was not expected that he would remain on after the explosion, but nor had Catesby expected him to be quite so pressing with the money for his escape route. That great baby Everard Digby had provided some coin, but Tresham was now heir to a rent roll of Ј3,000 a year. Tresham was rich, was from one of the great Catholic families, wasn't he? Then it was time for him to be called on.

  Francis Tresham could feel the blood leaving his face and hands as Catesby told him the bare bones of his plan. Rarely had he heard anything so mad. Could a man's heart stop and he still live on? How could he report this to the man in dark clothes? He drew a deep breath. He recognised the tactic from lesser conversations. Catesby had first of all delivered the shock, and now was winding up into full justification, a passionate torrent of words starting to flow from him, in contrast to the almost jerky rhythms with which he had described his plan to take most of England's nobility to Hell. Tresham stood up, held up his hand.

  'Stop this, cousin, sto
p this. Will you be silent?' No-one told Robert Catesby to be silent. A flicker of yellow covered Catesby's eyes, and vanished as quickly. 'Are you mad? Would you damn us all?' Tresham started to pace the room, unconsciously wringing his hands together as if to squeeze the correct words out of them.

  'This isn't damnation — it's salvation,' Catesby answered, urgent to make a speech.

  'Forgive me. I hadn't realised God had taken a simple little word out of "Thou shalt not murder". How can it not be damnation to kill so many guilty and innocent alike? Why, to kill some of our greatest friends? Of a sudden you have a monopoly on Divine judgement, do you, cousin?'

  'I don't, but, those who do have sanctified and approved the plan. You've heard Father Garnet speak of how a smaller evil is permissible in the pursuit of a greater good. Of how if the innocent in an evil city are besieged then they must take their chance with the rest? I can show you the texts that…'

  'Faith! Damn your stupid texts! And damn the stupid priests who read them! Hold off that, will you? I'm no scholar of theology. Yet if you really do believe that the Bible sanctifies such an act, let Francis Tresham for the first time take on the robes of a saint. The Bible be damned. I tell you this act is an act of madness, as well as an act of murder! It'll kill us all!'

  'Are you then willing to be the only Catholic in England too much of a coward to take up the cause? Are you willing…"

  'Hold off again!' Tresham had never before interrupted Catesby, never mind doing it twice in quick succession. Few had, when he was in full force, or seeking to get there. A force of nature, his father had once described him, not entirely approvingly as he had seen every servant girl go weak at the knees in his presence. 'You can forget the old cowardice trick.. It's been used once before, and it doesn't work. Remember poor Tom in the orchard?'