The Desperate remedy hg-1 Page 19

'Well,' said Jane, pragmatically, 'this particular Meg Milkmaid remembers something a little different from her upbringing in this wonderful countryside you talk so lovingly of.'

  'At least you were there for me to find you. You hadn't been trampled under a warhorse's hooves, stuck as a bleeding trophy on the end of a pike and ridden through the lanes with soldiers whooping for joy.'

  He turned on Jane, not seeing her, but seeing instead the horrors that haunted him still at night.

  'I've seen such things… such things as make me despair of God or Heaven. You remember Marlowe? "Why this is hell, nor am I out of it…" Well, I've seen no God, not here on earth, but I've heard God in music and in words, seen something of a God in the sunset or in a light-filled stone chapel in Cambridge as a song rises to Heaven. Yet I too think we live in Hell, and like Marlowe I despair of God, and from that despair comes my anger. And what have we, when all is left? John and Meg, living a life of hard toil, lit only by their need, their lust to survive, to see things through, to feed and clothe themselves and pass on that bare sustenance to their children. There's dignity enough in their mere survival, in their struggle to have and to hold a little human happiness to themselves in their short time here. They have enough to cope with, without we inflict rebellion and war on them. They need our help to survive. What difference to Meg and John and their growing horde if it's a James, an Elizabeth, a Henry or a Richard on the throne? What means it to them if it's a Plantagenet, a Tudor or a Stuart? What matter, as long as the soldiers stay in their barracks and their whorehouses, the enemy dare not invade and their Lord stands in some fear of London if he takes too many liberties with his tenants?

  'We gentry, we nobles, we fight for the glitter, Jane. We fight for our power, our jewels and our wealth. Most of all we fight to gain power, because in wielding that power we give some meaning to our pathetic, flimsy little lives, before they are snuffed out by illness, by bad luck or simply by time.

  'We fight for the wrong things. We shouldn't fight for our own power, our own lusts. We should fight to preserve a life for those who have no power except their power to survive. We should fight for those who have no power to fight for themselves.' There was a silence.

  'My knight in shining armour,' said Jane, part teasing and part heart-torn, 'mounted on his pure white charger. Hasn't your charger gained a little dirt during the fight? How many men have you killed, Henry Gresham? How many of them do you remember, when you lie awake at night, thinking that no-one knows, or when you dream, and mumble restless names in your sleep? Do you really know what you fight? And is it so John and Meg can have peace in their mud hut of a home?'

  There was a strangely flat tone in Gresham's response. 'So John and Meg can be left with some vestige of choice for their own lives. So they can survive too, with a shred of their dignity left to them as well.'

  'He's right, mistress.'

  They both jumped. Neither had heard Mannion enter the room. For one so large he could move like a cat when he chose.

  'You take your pleasures where you can. You fight when you must. It's not about winning. It's about survival.' He handed them both a chalice of wine. 'See that there? Drink it. Enjoy it. It won't taste at all when you're dead meat. Nothing tastes when you're dead. So the whole game is to stay alive. Just that. There's no living at all for the dead.'

  Jane levelled a dark look at Mannion, and then at Gresham. 'So by the men's philosophy, if you've to kill a whole nation to stay alive yourself then it's justified? What about Meg and John and their brats then?'

  'It don't come to that, hardly ever,' said Mannion easily, sitting down and slurping from the tankard of ale he had brought for himself. 'Only Kings think that the whole country dies if they die, and so kill all their folk in the name of their reigning! No, and that's why they need men like Sir Henry here, to work for them and do their dirty work. It's what he does. He puts them right. His job is to see that only enough men die. Bastards like that Essex, bastards like this Catesby, they reckon their glory is in how many people they take with them. Forget how many Sir Henry's killed. Ask how many he's saved.'

  'Women think differently,' mused Jane. The fire was crackling in the grate, and throwing shards of red and yellow light over their faces as they sat in an unconscious circle, framed by darkness. 'We carry a future in our wombs. We don't see life as stopping with ourselves. Rather we see ourselves as the means of carrying it on.'

  There was an awkward pause, as the childless Gresham looked into the burning heart of the fire.

  'Well,' he said finally, 'one of us here is redeemed. With the number of bastards you've fathered, old man, we must have a future. Though God help us in it if the bastards take after their misbegotten father.'

  It was an old joke, and as with many such it was not the sense of it that drew them together, but simply that it had been spoken at all.

  Jane spoke at last, after a long pause. 'You realise the danger if you infiltrate this group of Papists? Cecil will kill you if he finds you're active. The Papists will kill you if they find you're in on whatever their stupid secret is. The Government will kill you first and ask questions later if there's even a hint you're implicated in the plot. You're already tainted with being one of Raleigh's few remaining allies.'

  'I always liked being popular,' replied Gresham calmly.

  'I'm serious,' said Jane. 'If you walk into this plot, if you somehow get hold of this man Phelippes put you on to, it'll be a gate that slams shut behind you. There'll be no going back, and no knowing what lies in front of you.'

  'Humans were designed to go forward, not look back,' Gresham said. 'That's why our eyes are in the front of our head.'

  'So is this man going to be your gateway in? This Tresham’

  'Francis Tresham is the man. I feel it. He's our way in, our only way in.'

  Gresham curbed the impatience that was threatening to tear him apart. His informants told him that Catesby was still off on his travels. Whatever it was that Catesby planned, he would need to be at the centre of things in London to organise the final planning and co-ordinate his uprising, even if the main action was subsequently to take place in a Hertfordshire forest where His Highness hunted the stag. They had some time, he told himself, though how much only God and Catesby knew.

  Then the news came in. Francis Tresham had been seen in London.

  All that remained now was to kidnap Tresham.

  Syon House, London home of the Earl of Percy, was on alert. The Earl, often a quiet and studious man, was in one of his tempers. Henry Percy, ninth Earl of Northumberland, noted the hesitancy in the step of the servant who came in answer to his furious ringing of the bell. Increasingly deaf, and slow in his ways, Henry Percy had shown from his earliest days an ability to conjure up a temper out of nothing. They used to call him the Wizard Earl, though not because of his ability to conjure up a rage. Rather it was their ignorance, their seeing black magic in his simple experiments and refusing to accept that knowledge could be advanced by such means without recourse to God or the Devil. Raleigh had been an ally, and his reward had been a farcical trial for treason and a judgement that left him rotting in the Tower. Others of the so-called 'School of Night' had died scandalous deaths, like Kit Marlowe, or simply faded away. Now only he was left. His power in the north — that dreadful land of rain, mist and pickpockets — was unchallenged, even reinforced by the accession to the English throne of a Scottish King. True, neither King James VI of Scotland nor King James I of England could stop the reivers and the incessant border raids, and no-one ever would. Yet at least the Earl of Northumberland knew that he would not have to be the vanguard against an invading Scottish army in the lifetime of the present

  King. No, the threat to him no longer came from the north. It came from London. Yet precisely from where in London it came was more difficult to answer. From the carcass of James I, leader of the nation the Percys had been in bitter conflict with for centuries? Or from the twisted body of Robert Cecil?

  Percy shuffled a
cross the room. There were no rushes nor fine carpet on the stone flags of the floor, and the fire in the vast hearth was unlit despite the chill the stonework inflicted. He had inherited Syon House from his wife Dorothy, who held the leasehold on it. He was well rid of her, and in keeping the house and losing the woman he had kept the better part of the bargain. Autumn would have come early to the north, as if the harsh countryside resented the warmth of summer and could not wait to return to the cold. The noise of the grey sea crashing against rock the colour of the castle walls was one of his most vivid memories of the north.

  He stood by an open window, letting the taste of London wash against his face and skin. His so-called relative, the young Thomas Percy, would be busy telling the City how he had the confidence and the assurances of the ninth Earl of Northumberland, his relative and patron. So much to the good. Young Thomas would learn as many had before him why the senior branch of the Percys had survived the savagery of the north and all the politics of London could bring to bear, and why there had always been a third person present at their meetings. A flicker of something that might have been the start of a savage smile lifted the corner of the Earl's mouth. He would learn, would Thomas Percy, as would all enemies of the Percy clan and the Catholic faith. They thought him easily led, as if he could not see through their pathetic flattery. They joked about his inability to keep a secret, not realising how carefully he had cultivated that image. Well, Robert Cecil, jumped-up Earl of Salisbury, would find soon enough whether Henry Percy, ninth Earl of Northumberland, could keep a secret, a secret that when revealed would destroy Robert Cecil for ever.

  Chapter 7

  ‘I still don't think I like the sound of this man Francis Tresham,' said Jane, working through the pile of papers on which Gresham had scribbled notes and records of interviews.

  Mannion's proposal for securing the undivided attention of Francis Tresham was simple. Waylay him in a street, knock him on the head and drag him off to Alsatia. Even in London's anarchic streets it struck Gresham that this direct action might draw unnecessary attention to those involved. Jane had the simplest and best idea. Send Tresham a note in his lodgings, a note promising that he would hear something to his advantage if he came to their address in Alsatia, with a time scrawled on it.

  'Spiders don't go chasing flies,' said Jane. 'Flies come to spiders.'

  Jane had read her man correctly. A sensible young man, newly come into his inheritance, would not have risked the trip into Alsatia on what might have been a wild-goose chase. But Francis Tresham was not sensible, not once during his whole life.

  'So he comes here, knocks on the door — and then we knock him over?' suggested Mannion hopefully.

  'He'll be on his own, if we tell him to,' said Gresham. 'If he's come this far, we're hardly going to need to drag him in through the door unconscious, are we? Do you only have four ways of responding to anything?'

  'As many as that?' enquired Jane innocently.

  'Eat it, drink it, bed it or hit it. Has it ever entered your mind to think about something?'

  ‘No,' said Mannion, 'takes too much time.' He gathered up the breakfast dishes. 'And whatever it is I do, it's kept me alive all these years.' He clumped down the stairs, clearly feeling himself fully justified.

  Tresham's servant gloried in the name William Vavasour. He looked down his nose at the hefty bribe Mannion put with the note to his master, but did not refuse it. Tresham's greed triumphed over any discretion he might have had, and he turned up on cue at the door of the ill-favoured house as night was falling. A huge rat was feeding off something that might once have been flesh. It looked haughtily up at Tresham, and scuttled off only when it had delayed long enough to show who held the real command. The grumpy and ill-looking couple Gresham had installed on the ground floor of the house let Tresham in, and the man motioned with his head for him to go upstairs. As he did so, the door clanged shut behind him, and Tresham turned to see the doorway blocked out by the figure of Mannion.

  'Upstairs…' Mannion breathed at him, and he fled up the thin wooden treads like a bolting rabbit.

  Gresham sat at the table. The shutters had been closed, and the room was full of lamps. He was dressed in black, with a small, neat white ruff the only contrast on his dress. Several of the Gresham jewels sparkled on his fingers and his clothes. There was a chilling stillness to him. He flicked a hand, inviting Tresham to be seated.

  Tresham was a wiry, unkempt figure in his late thirties, Gresham knew. He would have guessed him some years short of that, his boyish face showing few wrinkles. At first glance he was quite handsome, but the effect was reduced by a set of thin lips and eyes that flickered all the time like a snake's tongue. His shirt was filthy, the doublet over it richly slashed and pointed but crumpled and dirty. He wore muddy riding boots over a fine hose that would not have shamed an audience at court.

  'Who are you? What do you want?' Tresham barked out the words, his hand fingering the fine sword hanging by his waist.

  'I'm your avenging angel,' said Gresham mildly, 'and I can send you to Heaven or to Hell. What I want is to decide which one it will be.'

  'You have no hold over me, you…'

  Gresham cut Tresham short with one simple motion, holding up the palm of his hand.

  'Francis Tresham, born 1567, first child and only son of Sir Thomas Tresham of Rushton and Muriel Throckmorton of Coughton. Educated at St John's College and Gloucester Hall.

  'First arrested in June 1591. You altered a Privy Council warrant, didn't you? Instead of some Godforsaken tailor who owed you money you substituted the name of a troublesome tenant. Then you beat him up and his pregnant daughter.'

  'That's not true! The man was a rogue, he…'

  'Shut up,' said Gresham, quietly, and for some reason Francis Tresham did so.

  'Bailed out by your father this time, and countless times there-after. Married Anne Tufton of Hothfield, and soon one of the wild band who gathers in Essex House giving promises as rashly as they spend money they do not have. Arrested again in 1596 for possible involvement in a Catholic conspiracy, and arrested in 1601 for involvement in the Essex uprising. Bribed out of the Tower, to the near ruin of his father. The father who is now dead, of course. The loving father who spent thousands of pounds on rescuing his son, despite the fact that the son in question, allowed to live in the manor of Hoxton, tried to cheat his father out of lands he owned there…'

  Tresham had sat with head bowed. Suddenly he placed both his hands under the table and heaved it up at Gresham, following it with a mad rush, his sword half out of his scabbard. It had worked for him in countless taverns and brawls.

  He could not remember properly what happened next. The strange, dark man was suddenly not behind the table, but standing to one side. Tresham felt a huge blow to the side of his head, and then a searing, roaring pain. The dark man's toe connected with vicious power between his legs, the flat of his foot sending him flying through the air. He flew into the wall, cracking his head on a timber, and blackness descended.

  'I knew you'd have to hit him,' said Mannion contentedly, dragging up the prostrate figure and propping him upright against the wall. 'Shall I tie him up?'

  'No,' said Gresham. 'Let him try again, if he needs to. He must know who his new master is. He won't learn tied up.'

  When Tresham came round he was aflame with pain. The most beautiful girl he had ever seen was sponging the blood off what felt like a large hole in his head. He felt sick with the agony in his groin.

  The girl spoke calmly, as she took the sponge away. 'I think I'll not try to ease the pain down there,' she said. 'Look at me.'

  He did so. Her eyes were the most startling dark pools he had ever seen, burning with an intensity he had only seen before on the coldest and clearest star-lit night.

  'Take my advice. Don't fight him. Here or elsewhere. He'll win, and you'll die. Listen, do what he says, and you might live.'

  She placed the bloodied cloth in a rough wooden bucket, and moved out o
f the light. Was he in Heaven, or in Hell? And was this stunning creature an angel or a devil?

  'What do you want?' asked Tresham, muzzily.

  'Shall we start again?' It was the same figure, dressed in black, seated behind the same table that had been returned to exactly the same place. Yet this time there was a silver jug and two goblets on the table, and a delicious smell of fruity wine. The wild thought crossed Tresham's mind that the man had known he would hurl the table back, had not placed the wine on it until the first, annoying little trial of strength was over and they could get down to business. A different type of fear began to flood through his veins, a fear so sharp that it started to soften the physical pain and make it less important.

  'Guido or Guy Fawkes. Robert, or Robin as he is sometimes called, Catesby. Thomas Percy. Thomas Wintour. Robert Wintour. John Grant. Kit Wright. John Wright. Robert Keyes.'

  Suddenly the pain returned.

  'Do you want to come and sit at the table? To take some wine with me? You're not bound.'

  The confidence, the sheer arrogance of the man. As far as Tresham could see there was only the woman in the room, seated in a corner. They had not even taken his sword or dagger away. An overwhelming sense of defeat came to Tresham. He crawled to his feet, sucking in his breath as the blood flowed through his broken head and sent needles into his brain and groin.

  'What do you want? Who are you?'

  Tresham knew the questions were sounding like an increasingly pathetic litany.

  'I want you.' Gresham spoke as if it were the simplest thing in the world. ‘I know that something evil is being planned by a group of men who number you among their friends. I believe you either know of it, or are in a position to find out. And I know that you face ruin and prosecution already, because you've been in trouble too many times, and you'll be associated with whatever these your friends are up to regardless of whether or not you're involved. You're a very lonely man, Francis Tresham.'

  He paused for a moment..