The Desperate remedy hg-1 Read online

  Henry Gresham was a man's man as well, thought Raleigh, a born leader and someone men would die for. Yes, and women too. He too had caught Raleigh's habit of not only having principles, but occasionally letting them command his actions. Was that why Gresham now seemed to be Cecil's target? Perhaps in part, but it could not be the whole answer. It was Raleigh's potential to sit in Cecil's chair by the side of the King that made Cecil want him dead, and Gresham would never aspire to sit next to any throne, though he might condescend to underpin it. Was the long battle between Gresham and Cecil finally coming to an end, in Cecil's favour as it would have to be? Anger at the power the man Cecil was able to wield fought with black despair at his powerlessness to make things change.

  He turned towards the Tower which lodged Phelippes, expecting to find the door locked for a less privileged prisoner. It was ajar, he saw, to his surprise. He quickened his pace. As he reached the ancient, heavy wood and iron door he heard a crash as of an object being hurled across a room.

  He had no sword or weapon, but the old warhorse needed no second notice. He pushed through the door, ran to the cell, crashed through that half-open door. A tableau met his eyes, as if cast in wax.

  A tall, powerfully built man in a rough jerkin with a hood pulled over his head was standing in the middle of the small room, a dagger in his hand. Tom Phelippes, his eyes wide-staring in terror, was hunched behind the trestle he had grabbed and was using as a shield, on his knees, his face pleading. Such scant furniture as the room offered was thrown around the room. Raleigh guessed the attacker had come in silently, perhaps behind Phelippes, whose animal instinct had alerted him in some way. He must have hurled the stool at his attacker, and then grabbed the trestle as his only defence.

  'Halt!' Raleigh's roar of command had cut across the decks of Spanish galleons, brought drunken crews to order and quelled mutiny. In that small room it had the force of a cannon blast. Yet Raleigh was unarmed.

  The attacker swung round, face half-hidden by the hood. There was silence, a triangle of people — Raleigh by the door, Phelippes crouched on his knees in the far corner, the attacker in the middle. Slowly, carefully, never taking his eyes off those of the attacker, Raleigh raised both his hands in front of him, and moved, one gentle pace at a time, to clear the way to the door. He could take the man on, but the dagger put the odds firmly in the attacker's favour. Yet if he tried to kill Phelippes and beat off Raleigh then he might be overcome, the dagger won from him and used against him. Raleigh moved aside two more paces. The path to the door for the attacker was clear. Raleigh nodded towards it, raising an eyebrow quizzically. Leave, it said, with your job undone but your body intact. Or stay, and fight two men, and run the risk of killing the Tower's most famous prisoner. The attacker returned Raleigh's gaze, glanced briefly towards Phelippes. Was there a hint of a smile on the half-hidden, unshaven face? The attacker drew himself up to his full height, gave a short, almost formal bow to Raleigh, and backed out towards the door. He was out through in an instant, the soft pad of his feet vanishing up the passageway. There was no shout of alarm, Raleigh noted, even though the warder trailing Raleigh could not help but be outside the tower.

  'Well, well,' said Raleigh, stooping to help Phelippes to his feet.

  The man was gibbering with fear. 'I had thought it was my misfortune to be tried and killed in public, but it appears we guests of His Majesty have more to fear from a private reckoning…'

  'Can I get you out of here?' Gresham asked. He had obeyed Raleigh's summons to come to the Tower. 'You know it can be done, has been done…'

  'No, I think not,' said Raleigh, I'm not at risk from a vagabond murderer. Even Cecil wouldn't dare have me murdered here, though I don't doubt even now he's thinking how to achieve the same end within what passes for the law. No, this was all about our friend Tom. He had one chance at Phelippes, and if it had been done silently and quickly it would have been a three-day wonder. He daren't try it again, and I'm safe enough.'

  'But that's not why you refuse to escape?' queried Gresham.

  'No, I suppose not. You know me too well. If I escape, where do I go? To Spain, and prove that I was a traitor all along? All I do by running is prove my accusers were right. My battle is here. As you have reason to know, I'm not a man who runs away from battles.'

  'Yet you're suggesting that I should do just that?'

  ‘Not run away, no. Hide, yes. Go to Cambridge and lie low there, perhaps? It's such a small place you'd be bound to hear of any outsiders coming to the town who might pose a threat. Go abroad? You've enough hiding places there, haven't you? Cecil is all-powerful. He wants you dead, for what you might know, just as he wants me dead for what I might become. You can swear until Doomsday that you know nothing and he won't believe you. My advice is to take a leaf out of that girl Moll's book. Lie low, go away.'

  'I accept half the advice,' said Gresham. 'Hide and lie low, yes. But not in Cambridge, nor in Europe. Here, in London, in Cecil's back yard, where I can still do my work, turn the tables on him. I have my battles, like you. Like you, I don't run away. I stay and fight.'

  Chapter 6

  Robert Catesby was riding through the gently rolling, lush-green pastures of Worcestershire. He had made good time on his journey to meet Ambrose Rookwood and enlist him into the conspiracy. He had cultivated the friendship of Rookwood for years, waiting for just such a moment. He needed Rookwood's wealth, and the horses that wealth would buy. No-one understood his genius, he mused. There was no-one else who could have had the vision he had, conceived of the plot and welded so many different individuals to it. Well, history would know.

  They had abandoned the tunnel. It had come near to killing them, not their victims. It had to be God's will that just as the tunnel had proved impossible the lease on a house with cellars directly under the House of Lords had become available. It was stacked now with powder, hidden under piles of faggots and firewood. With one blasting roar of flame that would light up London and burn for years he would destroy all semblance of government in Britain. Into that vacuum of power he would ride with three hundred men. Horsed, armed and ready, they would first of all sweep up the Princess Elizabeth from her thinly guarded home at Coombe Abbey and offer her as the heir apparent. The same three hundred men, swelled by then with other Catholic supporters, would race through the Midlands and along the Welsh borders where Catholic support was at its strongest, gathering strength all the time. Meanwhile the 1,500 Spanish troops idling at Dover would throw off their pretended stupor and race in turn to Rochester. With no army to oppose them, they would sit astride the Thames and starve London into submission if it failed to support the uprising. Fawkes had promised it would be so, returning from Europe with secret assurances. Catesby and every Catholic who could ride a horse would by that time be streaming in their thousands to the gates of London, whilst Sir William Stanley would be bringing his English Regiment over from Europe, land them at Southampton to underpin the new regime, regardless of Spain's support. Again, Fawkes had confirmed that all they were waiting for was the excuse to move. With Percy acting as intermediary to the Earl of Northumberland, and the threat of all his power sweeping down from the north seemingly assured, God had to be on their side.

  Robert Catesby would change the world. He smiled to himself as he urged his horse onwards.

  The countryside he rode through was dressed in shades of green, with the increasingly darker and richer colours showing the first heaviness of autumn. The thick woodlands on the tops of the gentle hills contrasted in their untamed wildness with the neat rows of the tilled land in the valleys and the strips of pasture. Seen from the inside of a healthy young body, astride a fine horse and with a thick cloak to hand to keep out the chill of evening when it came, it was truly God's green and pleasant land. One could almost forget the rising tide of persecution that was first of all choking and then surely killing off the great families of England, who for years had asked nothing but peace to worship God in the one and true way of the Faith. />
  Catesby reined in, and gazed out over the pastoral landscape, with a few wisps of smoke showing the whereabouts of peasant cottages, and a fine stone manor on the hillside exuding calm and authority over the scattered holdings. He imagined his own men pounding through and over the harvest-bare fields, the glinting helmets of the Spanish troops catching the sun as they struck fear and trembling into the hearts of the ignorant peasants in the fields.

  If the grand vision was simple, and the grand players in place, it was the detail, as ever, that caused the problems. The men had kept their mouths shut, Catesby knew, but there was talk among the women, and of course among the servants. It could hardly be otherwise. The stockpiling they had already done, under the guidance of John Grant and Robert Wintour, could hardly have gone unnoticed by the womenfolk. The stables were fuller by the minute. There would have to be more horses, more weapons. Most of all, he was desperately short of money, and in particular money for horses.

  Well, Catesby had an answer to all those problems, he thought as he rode on his way to Huddington Court, the home of Robert Wintour. You could not defeat gossip, but you could block it by spreading other stories and simply overloading the capacity of the tongues to wag. As for money and horses, there were three names he was prepared to risk as new conspirators now there was so little time left to go for them to get it wrong — Ambrose Rookwood, Sir Everard Digby and Francis Tresham. Three young and moneyed men were about to be persuaded to give God, and Robert Catesby, some of their wealth.

  His horse shied as some loose stones dislodged by its passage rattled down the steep embankment upon which he rode. It was a nervous creature, but strong and powerful, and he instinctively leant forward to soothe its nervousness.

  Horses were the key. Catesby had timed his visit carefully. Ambrose Rookwood had one of the finest stables of any man in England, and his love of horses was legendary, as was his love of fine clothes. That same love of fine horses meant he would never stay with the women and the others on the recent pilgrimage some forty of them had taken to Winifred's Well at Holt. He would ride on ahead, stopping over at Huddington on the way to his own ancestral home at Coldham Hall. It was a woman's thing, this pilgrimage, thought Catesby, but Rookwood's love of his wife had sent him on it and his desire to drive a good horse hard meant that he would ride ahead on its return. That in turn meant that Catesby would see him without the presence of Elizabeth, his wife. Rookwood was a dandy and a showman, but he listened to his wife, who had a great deal more sense than he did. The last thing Catesby wanted was pillow talk the night after he had enlisted Rookwood.

  He rode into the courtyard and handed his horse over to the groom who came rushing up to him. Other men might take their mount to the stables themselves, and see it in its stall, fed and rubbed down. Catesby saw no reason why he should do what a servant could do just as well. He had more important fish to fry, as the small, dark and elegant figure of Rookwood did him the honour of coming down the steps almost dancing with joy, and caught him in a warm embrace, as if it were his house and not Robert Wintour's.

  Yes, thought Catesby, as they went arm in arm into the house. You have two things I stand most in need of. You have horses and you have wealth.

  Catesby felt a growing excitement as he agreed to a warming cup of wine, even before taking his boots and riding cloak off. The dour Robert Wintour had appeared, radiating as much warmth as if Catesby were Anti-Christ come to visit. Rookwood was chattering on about a new Hungarian riding coat he had just acquired, with its velvet lining. You have a fine fortune and a fine wife, Catesby thought, and enough brats scampering about your home to fill a farmyard. Your days are filled with your fine horses, your fine wife, your fine sons, your hawks and your hounds.

  Rookwood brushed aside the servant hovering to take Catesby to his room, as if it was he and not Robert Wintour who was master of Huddington, and strode up the stairs himself in his eagerness to show his friend where he would be resting his head.

  Catesby followed his friend up the stairs to his chamber. Once

  Catesby had held a loving wife, had the fine son and the fine house warmed with love and happiness, before they were cruelly dragged away from him. Rookwood's family faced destruction and execution from the involvement Catesby brought, the friend with the viper in his pack.

  That, thought Catesby, is their problem, not mine. Life dealt cruel blows. Why should Rookwood, Digby or any other body on earth have the happiness that Catesby had been denied? If there was a hint of pleasure in Catesby's damnation of his friend and all that his friend loved and cared for it was a very private emotion, one he chose not to let see the light of day.

  Gresham had gone to the cellar where Cecil's spy, Sam Fogarty, was being held until he had strength enough to be carted out of London. The man had cried out in fear as Gresham had entered.

  They had been ordered to kill Shadwell, he had said. He did not have to say whose orders these were. He was Cecil's man. They had cornered him finally on the outskirts of Cambridge, stalked him through the night, hurled the body into the river. No, he did not know why the death had been ordered. Why should he and the others be told? Their business was to kill, not to ask why.

  By the time he had finished, the man was speaking almost confidently, believing he was useful to Gresham. Gresham looked calmly down at him.

  'This is for Will Shadwell,' he said. In one swift movement he lunged with the dagger in his hand, penetrating the eye exactly in the centre of the pupil and driving upwards until the splintering sound of bone told him he had carved through the soft brain to the skull. It was the blow that had killed Will Shadwell. As the man fell he flung his arms out, hands facing up to the ceiling as if in supplication. They were still trembling. Gresham pulled the dagger away, and stood up.

  Jane had woken in the night, as he had known she would. He had held her as the truth had returned, bringing on wracking sobs, imagining it to be like holding a woman through the pangs of birth. Yet it was not a child that had been born from her, but knowledge. Later, at night, they had made love, gently, in the way that she had taught him for the times when the edge was gone from their violent, urgent need for each other's bodies. It had seemed as if his whole body had poured its passion and its intensity into that one focal moment of release, met by her soft cry. For a few seconds after that moment, even sometimes for a few minutes, Gresham felt at peace, the demons inside him stilled. So it was with Jane, he suspected. A new demon was in her, a shared demon. How it would fit with the others inside her head, the restless spirits whose nature he could only guess at, only Jane would know. There would be no more tears for others to see, Gresham knew. She had killed a man. She would learn, like him, to cry inside her head.

  He needed to hide, to take cover, to go to ground. Yet at the same time he needed London and the access it gave to his network of spies.

  He woke with his mind clear. Breakfast over, he spoke with Jane and Mannion, his tone clipped and definite.

  'Raleigh was right. We have to lie low, to hide ourselves until we can find out what all this is about. We're moving, to Alsatia,' he announced. 'Or rather, I am moving. Jane, you can stay here. If you do, you'll be well protected, as protected as money and men can make you. Even then, we can't guarantee there won't be an assault on the House, or more likely a fire to drive you out and into the arms of whoever wants purchase against me. In Alsatia we'll be on our own. Safer, for a while, until our identity leaks out. Yet more in danger, from those we'll be surrounded by. Not to mention plague and pestilence.'

  He looked at her, noting her chin jut out just that little bit further as he spoke, sensing as much as seeing the head tilt upwards. 'I come with you, my Lord, if you'll have me.' 'So be it.'

  Alsatia lay between Whitefriars and Carmelite Street. No constable or night watchman ever troubled the narrow streets of Alsatia, no law enforcement agency ever lightened its paths. It was a haven for any criminal escaping the hue and cry. Authority in Alsatia lay in a man's brute force and cunni
ng. A force of order, but never law, was more or less enforced by whatever criminal warlord had dominance at any given time, but mastery could change hands three or four times in a year as rival groups and gangs fought their silent and bitter wars out of sight of any judge or jury. Unlike other areas such as Southwark, where the brothels and gambling dens could flourish until the law took notice of them, Alsatia offered little or no entertainment, merely a kennel where wild dogs could hide and lick their wounds, if they were not first killed by their own kind also in hiding. It ranked with the brick kilns of Islington and the Savoy, its distinction being that of all the human cesspits in London. Alsatia was the most foul and the most extreme, talked about with bated breath by the good citizens of London, and with the reddest flush of embarrassment if ever mentioned by a woman.

  'But first I have another shorter journey. To my Lord Cecil.'

  There was a gasp of breath from Jane. Mannion looked glum, and sucked at his tooth with the hole in it. Whenever Gresham took a decision Mannion thought was ill-advised, a piece of flesh or bread always seemed magically to reappear in that tooth.

  'Surely not!' said Jane, emboldened by shock and fear. 'He must be behind all this! What madness is it to walk into his parlour!'

  'It is madness, which is why he won't consider it, because it's something he would never do himself. That's why he's not his father's son. Oh, he'll plot and scheme and poison and murder, but he's cautious, always cautious. He thinks all men are lesser versions of himself. He's at his weakest when dealing with someone totally unlike him, someone who's never thought like him in all his life.'

  Gresham took Mannion and four men with him to see Cecil. Unusually, he rode the cumbersome great coach that his father had ordered. It was a monstrous machine, and made every rut and canyon in the roadway seem three times deeper than it was. It was fit only for old men tottering their way from one visit to another, or fine ladies too fat or too well-bred to walk or mount a horse, and Gresham hated it. Yet it had solid walls and was defensible, with its very cumbersome nature turning it into a fortress on wheels when under attack.