The Desperate remedy hg-1 Read online

  So there was to be no talking, Mannion reflected. So be it.

  'Shame about the candles,' Mannion muttered as they left the room. Gresham had left them burning, most of them not yet half done. The landlord would gratefully snuff them out and use the remaining half, charging Gresham for the whole candle. Gresham did not respond. It was an old joke.

  It had been years ago. They had just started campaigning after a dreadful winter. The canvas of the tent had seemed as if it was just drying out, in the rare sun of a Flanders spring. The soldiers had come in silent, angry. Usually an action cleared the blood, exhilarated them. This time the pathetic Spaniard in charge of the troop had not only been concealing the gold they had been sent to rob, but concealing his wife. She was a pretty girl, not yet nineteen years of age. Hidden in a baggage cart, they would probably have left her, heavily pregnant as she was, if they had found her. Even a scream would have caused a laugh and no more. It was early in the campaigning year, they were fat with an idle winter and there were no grudges to pay back as yet. Instead she had climbed out of her hiding place silently, seeking to rush out of the wagon and into the shrubbery surrounding the ambush. The youngest recruit had heard the rustle of clothing behind him and swung round with sword outstretched. His mother had obtained the sword for him. God knew — or so Gresham hoped — how the Toledo steel of a Spanish grandee had found its way into the hands of a woman who had proudly borne six fiercely Protestant sons in an East Anglian farmhouse. The sword was sharp as a razor, despite the youngest son's crude attempts at sharpening it. Its curving arc, powered by all the untrained force of a healthy and terrified eighteen-year-old, had sliced neatly through the stomach of the pregnant woman.

  It had also sliced into the unborn boy, so that it was bleeding to death even as it flopped to the ground. It had an audience fitting for such an end in Flanders mud. Its mother saw it bleed to death in front of her, as her frighteningly red hands clawed at her own gut. So did its father and its murderer, and an assorted troop of Protestant and Catholic mercenaries and volunteers.

  The young man skewered himself on the sword his mother had given him. He did it badly, of course. He would take days to die as the horrific wound in his belly and bowel suppurated and led to its inevitable conclusion. The problem was, he would scream.

  So they came into the tent in varying moods and set about getting as drunk as possible in as short a time as was possible. Henry Gresham was a veteran of two years' standing. Haying seen so much, he was later to the bottle than many of the younger ones. He saw the outstretched hand knock the lamp and its oil off the empty barrel and fling its contents against the canvas of the tent. He saw the oil sink into the canvas, inert. He saw the wick, still flaming, sail through the air as if the world had slowed down and God declared a war against time, towards the canvas. He saw the wick hit the canvas, flicker as if ready to die, and then burst out anew on the oil-soaked cloth.

  They should not have stored powder in the tent. There was a store for it, only a few hundred yards away. Yet they were veterans, survivors of a war that seemed endless. They knew the perils of powder that had separated through old age, of powder that was damp or badly mixed. They preferred to keep and tend their own, and despite their every precaution the fire reached it.

  Henry Gresham never knew what object, flung out by the blast, gouged his leg and thigh to near pulp. He did know the sight of his erstwhile commander, screaming for light with a boiled face and eye sockets permanently burned out. The last thing he remembered was Mannion, reaching out as if to stop him connecting with the ground.

  So it was that Henry Gresham commanded candles, not lamps, in his house and in the rooms he hired. A candle, if knocked over, tended to go out. If not, its flame was a slow, friendly kind of fire. Oil simply wished to ignite. He could bear lamps, of course. Indeed, in strange rooms and strange houses where he had no control he hardly even noticed them. Henry Gresham had long ago lost any belief that a human being could control their life. All one could do was to control it where one had power, that being a very small portion of the whole.

  ‘I’ll have what's left of those candles snuffed out and in my bag in seconds,' Mannion grumbled. 'You've paid for them, haven't you?' Mannion never ceased to mention the waste of candles. By reminding Gresham, he made the fear normal.

  'View it as my gesture of protest against the dominance of night in this world of ours,' Gresham said loftily, and swept out of the room.

  'View it as a damn silly waste of money, more like!' muttered Mannion, closing the door behind him.

  Mannion also had a sense of humour. By comparison with many other men's sense of humour it was odd in the extreme. What Mannion found funny, and what could not produce even the tiniest stretching of his craggy features, never ceased to fascinate Gresham. Boots, for example, were endlessly funny to Mannion. It was as if he deemed mankind to have been born with feet the aim of which was to trudge through whatever muck God chose to put at ground level. He would accept clogs or the most basic leather footwear as a reasonable recourse against the elements on the part of the dominant species, but in the face of the finery the gentry put on their feet he was reduced to hopeless laughter.

  A gentleman would don boots as a matter of necessity. A courtier would like people to believe that his fine shoes would never need to meet muck or mud, unless one was riding, of course. Henry Gresham was a gentleman, fabulously rich and a courtier when he chose. He was also an agent for King James I of England and King James VI of Scotland. So it was that he was planning to walk home, from The Mermaid Inn after his rather fruitless conversation. Gentlemen and courtiers rode horses or had carriages. Gentleman courtiers who were spies tended to avoid both, as drawing attention to themselves.

  Mannion eyed his own stout leggings, and the supple leather of his master's fine boots.

  'Shame about the boots,' he muttered with a grin. Mannion had no fear for the armed gangs who roamed the streets after nightfall. He was highly amused by the prospect of what the walk would do to his master's fine boots.

  There was something about London muck that did for fine leather. Too much of Gresham's time was taken up in walking back from shady rendezvous. The worst times were early morning, and late at night. During the day it was not too bad. A veritable army of men scurried to shovel up every human, horse, cattle and dog turd that lay steaming on the streets. There was money to be made from shit, but to make it you had to see it. At night it was invisible, and ever present.

  'Remember that dream you told me about once?' said Mannion, as they walked through a street with a particularly narrow over-hang.

  Gresham had once had a nightmare where he was leaving one of Bankside's most unsavoury taverns and his way home was lit by endless torches. The dim and flickering light illuminated thousand upon thousand of straining arses, perched over the narrow and overhanging streets and each delivering their message to the street with a hollow thud.

  He shook his head, and the image vanished. A grinning Mannion led him down the rickety stairs and through The Mermaid, full as was usual with its theatrical crowd and some of the more daring socialites, tasting a bit of rough and arty for the night. The air was thick and unpleasant, the dancing light revealing the sweat on the fevered brows. Men dealing, men stealing, men intriguing and whores selling. It was a foetid mix, and Gresham could not wait to be out of it.

  Gresham's eyes flickered round the room, seeming to see nothing, noting everything. He noted a dour, stooping figure, clearly the worse for drink, sitting alone at a back table. Gresham scrabbled in his memory for the man's name. It would come. They emerged into the black streets. The muscularity of their walk, and the ease with which their hands rested on the swords in their belts, caused the ways to part in front of them. They were the source of menace, not its victims.

  'That man, seated in the corner,' Gresham said, 'the one on his own and worse for drink; do you recognise him?'

  'Should I?' replied Mannion. 'Shall I go back in and ask?'

>   'No, not yet at least. I remember him from somewhere. It'll come back.'

  As they passed an 'ordinary', light spilled out from the door, and two men fell brawling into the street. There were shrieks and yells, good-natured laughter. Out of the dark a crowd gathered, egging the two on. Gresham and Mannion looked away, preserving their night vision. Inside that same tavern Gresham knew a man could be reading exquisite sonnets to his friends. Shortly after, they were plunged into darkness, the huge overhang of the half-timbered buildings closing over them like a black cloud. It was a residential area. The doors were closed and bolted this late in the night, and only the feeble light of an occasional candle or guttering lamp behind closed shutters showed that some merchant was still up, counting his credit or bemoaning his losses. Or, as a shriek from behind followed by the thuds of two or three blows suggested, a wife was being taught what a man thought was good manners.

  It was, then that a moment for Heaven came, a moment that summed up for Gresham the magic of London. Shortly behind him two men were fighting, cheered on by a drunken crowd, and a wife was being beaten for doing no more probably than trying to be herself. And then, from a high window, came the breath of

  Heaven.

  Music had always inspired Gresham. It was his greatest regret that he could not find in himself the means to produce what so inspired him from others. O Jove, From Stately Throne. That was it. Gresham had met the composer. Farrant? Yes, Richard Farrant, no less. Perhaps it was Farrant, his face ravaged by smallpox, leading the small ensemble in the upstairs room, playing and singing beyond all reasonable time, desperately trying to compensate for the ugliness of his own face by the beauty of his music.

  The voice of Heaven filtered out through the shutters and on to the dark street, dropping like gentle rain on the heads of Gresham and Mannidn. As a man they stopped, raised their faces, and let the beauty fall on their upturned visages like a summer shower.

  It was high summer. Even here, in the great city, the sense was in the air. With the warmer evenings fires were lit later and left burning shorter. The smoke that hung over London on a still day like a funeral pall was visibly less. The cattle driven through the streets were fat and full of milk.

  The most dangerous thing they met on the journey was a dog, half wild with hunger and trailing a leg damaged in a fight, or in a collision with a cart. It slunk away down an alley.

  He had worked himself back into a good humour by the time he and Mannion reached home, his mood generated by what awaited him there. Known simply as the House, the London home built by Gresham's father was situated in the highly fashionable area of the Strand, and with its own landing on to the River it was a prime site. His father had bought it when the monasteries had been dissolved.

  The House was well-run. That much was clear. The two well-built men who acknowledged their master as he trudged through the mud to his own doorstep recognised him, but would have recognised an enemy just as clearly, and sounded the alarum. Their pleasure in seeing their master was in no small measure related to the fact that Henry Gresham showed pleasure in seeing them.

  'Good evening, Matt, good evening, Will,' he muttered as he passed them by. Mannion grunted at them.

  The entrance hall was of marble, brought over at fabulous expense from Italy. The statues and hangings were also Italian. The woman was English.

  Jane Carpenter was nearing twenty-three years of age, and was the most beautiful woman in London. She had a face of stunning beauty, cheekbones pushing up round the roundest and darkest pair of eyes in Christendom. Her body lacked the plumpness of many Court ladies, but she had the grace and strength of a young colt, and legs beneath her dress that seemed to cross counties. Yet it was her eyes that commanded attention, extraordinary eyes, with dark lights seeming to flash beneath their surface. Gresham grinned at her as Mannion struggled to pull off his boots, replacing them with soft shoes. She grinned in return. With him she dropped the rather aloof distance she maintained with all people of social standing, the faint tone of terrible boredom.

  'Are London's problems solved, my Lord, and can innocent maidens go safely now to our beds?'

  'Firstly, I don't solve problems but rather create them, I think. Secondly, I am not nor ever will be "Lord" to anyone. Thirdly, you are not innocent, and fourthly, in your bed no-one is safe.' Feeling rather proud of his grasp of numbers, he reinforced the words, as soon as Mannion had left the room with his boots and cloak, by flinging out an arm, gathering her up and delivering a kiss that shook the fine plaster on the walls.

  'Ouch!' she exclaimed truthfully, the hilt of his sword banging into her just under her ribcage. 'Why do men always have to bang at everything?'

  'It's in the nature of men to give, and women to receive,' muttered Gresham, nuzzling her hair.

  'As gifts go, what men give tends to be rather single-minded and very repetitive,' Jane replied, pushing him away and laughing up at him. 'Must I expect to endure receiving you tonight?'

  'If I choose to honour you with my gifts, then yes. Yet as you've always been such an obedient servant, I don't doubt your instant bending…' She raised both her eyebrows. '… or whatever,' he added lamely, 'to my will.'

  She dropped her hands to her sides and looked at him with that rare mixture of exasperation and love.

  'Do be quiet, Henry Gresham. And come to your bed.' Your bed? For a brief flicker of a moment, Gresham was taken back to the time when he had first set eyes on this woman. Was it the timbre of her voice that sent him back, or that strange mixture of something brazen with something vulnerable and defenceless?

  It had been on one of his first journeys from the calm of his Cambridge College to London, in 1590. He was still hobbling from his wound, and was without the relay of spare horses that Mannion was establishing for him. His horse had thrown a shoe just outside Bishop's Stortford. He had been left to his own devices in a village that did not even boast a poor inn', whilst Mannion saw to the horse and a replacement.

  As he sat, picking at the rough grass and throwing it into the dank pond, he became aware that a pair of eyes were gazing solemnly at him from in between some bushes.

  He gazed back. The two gazes locked, and held.

  A thin, piping voice came from the bushes. 'First one who blinks loses.'

  Gresham was so surprised that he blinked.

  'There, you've lost. You must pay me a forfeit.'

  The accent was thick but the diction clear.

  'Well, young madam,' said Gresham as the painfully thin figure of a six or seven-year-old girl climbed out of the bushes and into full view, 'I've no recollection that I ever agreed to your terms.'

  'But you didn't refuse them either, sir, and therefore as a gentleman you're bound to agree with me.'

  The logic was somehow faulty, in a way that Gresham could not quite fathom.

  'And what if I don't agree?' The girl's eyes seemed to occupy her whole head. They were the darkest blue Gresham had ever seen, with flickering sparkles hidden deep inside them.

  The girl shrugged. 'Then I suppose you'll beat me.'

  'Do many beat you?'

  'All the time. You see, I'm a bastard, and bastards deserve to be beaten.' The little girl said it as if it was a litany she knew off by heart.

  'How often are you beaten?'

  'All the time. Here, you may see.' The girl dropped her loose tunic over her bony shoulders, down to her waist. Seven or eight red stripes marked her back, with the older blows turning to dull and dark bruises. She turned to look at him, over her shoulder. There was no coyness in her posture or voice, merely a statement of fact.

  'They go on further down, but you're a man, so I can't show you my secret places.'

  She carefully drew up her stained tunic, and sat on her haunches, looking at him. 'May I have my forfeit now?'

  Gresham had often wondered what would have happened then, were it not for the interruption. He suspected he would have given this little vixen a few coins, and shooed her on her way. It was still
his time of darkness, not a time when he had a care for any other living creature, being too full of mourning for those he had loved and betrayed.

  Yet at the word 'forfeit' there was an outraged yell from one of the hovels overlooking the pond, and an elderly man erupted from the ill-shuttered door.

  'You bitch! You brazen whore's whelp! Where've you been, you little whore, when your duty called? I'll teach you your duty…'

  The girl might have been quick enough to evade the blow, had she not been rapt in her attentions to Gresham. As it was, she was a split second late and caught the blow square on her back.

  It was not much of a back, as these things went. It was only seven years old, it had never been properly fed or properly clean. Yet it could bleed like any other back, if a witch-hazel stick whipped across it.

  Gresham broke the man's arm. It was easy enough, for a soldier. As he raised it for the second blow on the prostrate little figure beneath him, Gresham sprang up, finding his sword in his hand without consciously willing it there or even knowing it had happened. He brought up the sword arm, with its extra weight of metal, just behind the man's wrist, a split second before he brought down his other arm with terrible force on the outstretched arm 'twixt wrist and elbow. The crack of bone would have shattered ice.

  The peasant was bellowing on the ground, his arm smashed. The girl had vanished back into the bushes, nursing a new welt but not, Gresham noted, making a sound. Neighbours were rushing out on to the green to see the cause of the entertainment. In very short order they surrounded the gentleman and demanded reparation not only for the damage done to the man, but for disturbing the peace of the whole village. After all, a sword could only kill one man, and there were ten or more of them there in the space of three or four breaths. There was money in this business, and they knew it, peasants that they were.

  Then Mannion loomed over the rise that surrounded the pond, and things became calmer. Things usually did become calmer when Mannion arrived on the scene. The villagers who had been feeling their cudgels with enthusiasm suddenly thought it better to put them behind their backs. A rather more civilised process of negotiation assumed pride of place. The man on the ground howling in his agony — 'William', it would appear by all counts — was a labourer. Well, William would not be labouring for a month or two, that was clear. William was also the nearest thing this village had to a saint, that much was also clear. Taken on his daughter's bastard, he had, that same daughter who had caught God's justice when she died in childbirth with no man to call her proper husband.