The Desperate remedy hg-1 Read online

  Looking at William, Gresham wondered how the bastard girl had ever survived. The midwife must have spirited the poor wean away and presented it back to William when the lump it might have made in the pond would have been too obvious even to the other villagers. Come to think of it, there was a fretful old woman hovering at the back of the gesticulating villagers.

  It took precious little money to calm them down. Yet what took all of them aback, including Gresham, was his final question.

  'How much for the girl?'

  Mannion looked up, startled, at his master, and wondered for a brief moment if he liked fucking children. God knows, enough did. And, Mannion decided almost instantaneously, his master didn't. Yet he too had seen the child sliced out of its mother's belly, and knew that taking on this child might somehow claw back some of the despair from that dreadful day.

  And the child could always be handed over to someone else to bring up, when Gresham returned to emotions more proper for a man.

  In the final count, the amount paid for the girl was paltry. The expression in William's eyes suggested that his arm was well broken if this was the reward. Gresham had visions of him erupting into the path of every gentleman who rode by, demanding that they break his arm.

  She had shown no emotion until the time of their leaving. A mere piece of property, she had been bartered and sold, with no-one thinking to ask her opinion. She vented it, forcibly, when she was seated behind Mannion the servant on his horse, as was only proper.

  She screamed and shrieked and pummelled and yelled, causing even Mannion's horse to buck and to rear in protest.

  'What is wrong with you, girl!' Gresham exploded.

  'You bought me,' the thin, shivering Eve proclaimed through gritted and tear-stained teeth. 'I shall ride on no horse except your own.'

  Gresham had killed more men than he cared to count. He had witnessed the person he most loved in Creation die in agony before him, and because of him. He had suffered in a few months more pain than most men underwent in a lifetime. He had a fortune to his name, he cared for no man and he cared for nothing… Why, then, thought Gresham, am I riding at a sedate pace and freezing to death, whilst a seven-year-old bastard girl sits behind me in state, wearing my fine cloak?

  If he had been able to answer that question, then perhaps he would really have been God.

  There was a vestige in him of his own childhood. He too had known what it was to be the bastard.

  'Find me a woman to care for this… minx,' he had said to Mannion as they arrived in London. The girl had been restored to rude good health by a substantial meal. If her eyes had opened any wider on their entry to London they would have consumed her face.

  'Find me someone who won't just care for her. Find me some servants who'll love her, as if she were their own.'

  And Mannion, as he always did, found what his master wanted.

  Jane had fallen in love with the House only slightly less than she had fallen in love with the strange and darkly dressed man who had rescued her from abuse. It had been a dark, dreary and a sad place she had come to, still in mourning for the death of Gresham's father and an heir who seemed determined to neglect it. As a child she had haunted its every nook and cranny, and as she grew older and into womanhood she seemed to light up the building with her love for it. Nominally under the care of the elderly Housekeeper, Jane had grown into that role herself so gently that no-one could point to the exact time when she became the acknowledged mistress of the House.

  The House was the best-run house in London. No wine was drunk, no food eaten and no clothing for footmen paid for without Jane being convinced that the expenditure was proper. There was a part of Jane that was the feral cat, a part Gresham knew would never leave her. It accounted in part for her raw sexuality, her enjoyment of the physical act. The servants saw the untamed Jane if they cheated their master, the House or her, and felt it. Gresham had seen her turn on a thieving servant with a cold fury, and a ferocious concentration of anger that was almost tangible. Yet months later she had waited most of the night by that same serving girl's bed when she seemed as if she would die of a fever, and fed her beef tea. That same woman he had seen when a sudden downpour had flooded the hall, her skirts tucked up to her knees, laughing and joking with the servant girls as they all joined to swoosh the filthy water back out into the street. The men servants may have leered at her behind her back, for all Gresham knew. To her face they were strangely protective, their visible respect tinged almost with a certain fearfulness. All the servants spoke in awe of her, grumbling as servants did. Yet it was her food that was the freshest, her room the most clean and her bed linen the most virgin-white. In a way Gresham did not understand, they took an immense pride in her. He knew and accepted almost with complacency that many of them would die for him. It surprised him how many he thought might die for her. Then again, he lived in a world where if the master or the mistress sinned, the servants received an equal or worse punishment. Dying for your master or your mistress was not a choice for the servants of the well-born. It was a condition of service.

  Gresham still did not know how the irritating, obnoxious foundling, the by-blow of a hasty assault on a peasant common, had become his mistress.

  He had come to the House late one night, obsessed with business. The thin-boned foundling had turned into a strikingly beautiful seventeen-year-old with an imperious will. She had strode about his chamber, showing real anger as she explained the various frauds upon his money that his servants had perpetuated.

  'And furthermore, my Lord, there's one even greater crime to which you must answer!'

  'And what's that?' said Gresham, wearied beyond belief by decisions that affected all Christendom, not to mention his supposedly immortal soul. How was it to him if a cook was ordering extra chickens?

  She stood there, tall and straight as the bolt from an arrow, flashing radiance in the room. 'You, who have every right to claim me as your own, have never looked at me as a woman!'

  Well, he had been taken by a fit and had done more than look upon her as a woman that night, to their apparent mutual satisfaction. Yet when he woke, he was more than a man with the edge taken off his carnal hunger by a fine night of lovemaking. More scared than he had been in the face of a Spanish cannon, he realised with an almost sickening fear that he was in love. He knew that he had signed his will away. He had not sought it. He had even tried positively to avoid it, or any other entanglement. It had done him no good.

  Yet Jane had steadfastly refused to marry him. He had pleaded with her.

  'You seem to have claimed ownership of my body, and doubtless wanted my soul since I first saw you by that cursed pond! I've said I love you, haven't I? Why won't you make a proper woman of yourself, and a proper man of me, by being my wife? Am I fat and stinking of grease? Am I not rich enough for you?'

  She had turned away that night, after their lovemaking, peaceful and contented. She let his ranting pass over her, with the inner calm that drove him to even greater fury. She turned round to face him, letting cold air into the bed.

  'I've said my thanks with my body. It's all I was gifted with from God. Everything else I have was somebody else's. You've had the only thing I have to give, as I now am. Anything else must wait.'

  'Yet you've shown me your secret places. You've let me use those secret places, to my heart's content.'

  He remembered the first showing to him of her wounds.

  She smiled at him, a radiance that lit up the bed. 'I've shown you the secret places of my body, and willingly so.'

  She turned over in the bed, her back towards him. As if from a far continent, her last words came. 'As for the secret places of my soul, for that you will have to wait.'

  Gresham knew of no more final goodnight.

  Arid now he was lying in his vast bed in 1605, years on from that first meeting and years on from the night when he had taken her virginity. He was satiated, yet as mystified by this woman he loved as he had been by the side of the pond
in that filthy village all those years ago. Perched on the very edge of sleep, the knowable world of Cambridge, the dangerous world of Robert Cecil and the imponderable world of Jane raced round in his head until they blended into a wild half-dream. Cecil was screaming at him, blaming him that his mistress was soon to be elected as Master of King's College. He recoiled in the face of Cecil's spitting anger, yet thinking it would not be the first time a bastard had been involved in the governance of that College.

  In his dreams, the bloated face of Will Shadwell rose up from the deep.

  'Beware! Beware!' it moaned at him. 'You are in waters too deep for your soul!'

  'My soul, poor tattered thing, was lost a long while ago,' whispered Gresham. 'And I have been in waters too deep all my life!'

  At that the ghost of Will Shadwell vanished, and Henry Gresham slept in peace. Just before he did so, the name of the man stooped over his tankard in the tavern came to him.

  'Wintour. Robert Wintour..;' What did he know about Robert Wintour? It would come to him. It always did.

  Chapter 3

  Father Garnet was in prison. As prisons went it was pleasant enough. The half-timbered house had been sheltering Jesuits safely for years, its walls peppered with hiding places. The fire burnt cheerfully in the grate, the oak panels mellowed in the evening sun and there was wine at hand. Yet it was still prison.

  A curlew sounded in the meadows outside the house, its forlorn, mewing cry echoing the priest's mood. Father Garnet was tired, more tired than he had ever been in his whole life. It was no crisis of faith. When he summoned the image of Our Saviour into his mind the rushing well of tenderness, the biting pain of love were the same as ever, undiminished and unrelenting. Rather, it was simple exhaustion.

  How long had he been in England, fighting for the faith that was his life? Fighting for it with his life?

  He had forgotten how many years, years of being continually shunted from one secret house to another, years of disguise, of whispered Masses in shuttered rooms. The Jesuit priest was a hunted animal in England, yet at least the real animal was given a quick death by the hounds. If the priest was found he would be stripped and trussed to a wooden hurdle, dragged through the streets behind a horse, to be reviled and spat at by the worst sort of scum. Hauled on to a scaffold, he would be dropped and hung until the choking edge of suffocation had plunged him near into unconsciousness, and hurriedly cut down whilst still aware. Rough-handled over to the nearby block, the executioner would then hack off his testicles, to show that he should never have been born, and thrust them before the priest's agonised face. Then the crude blade would strike into the chest, and the heart be torn out, the bleeding, pathetic flesh held up for the baying crowd to see, to the cry, 'Here lies the heart of a traitor!'

  Father Garnet's dreams were haunted by the first, coarse feel of that rope around his neck, the gasping panic of strangulation, the sharp, shrieking cut of the metal. Was it weakness to be so scared? Could he pray to be spared this pain, or should he pray to have it inflicted on him, thus becoming a glorious martyr for the Faith? A good man, he prayed for neither. The first was unfair and a coward's way, the second was untrue. He prayed instead simply for the wisdom to understand.

  O my God. Why hast Thou forsaken me?

  Garnet tensed. Horse's hooves sounded outside his window. He looked expectantly at the bell over the fireplace in his room. Were it to ring, tugged frantically by a loyal servant, Garnet would hastily grab his bottle and glass so as to hide his presence, run outside into the passageway and back into the adjoining room. The fireplace there was kept deliberately blackened, ash in the basket, as if used every day. Behind it lay a priest-hole, activated by a hidden lever. Within lay a rosary and a crucifix, scraps of dried-out food and a single, thin and emaciated turd. This was evidence enough that a priest had once lain, eaten and shat therein. The stench of urine, added to every three days by loyal Catholic servants ordered to piss, there, gave force to the message.

  The real priest-hole lay behind. Two men might crouch in it, but not stand or sit. A thousand men might seek how to enter it, but never find the means of entry unless they were told. Even the fiercest fire built in the first fireplace would not singe the occupants of the second priest-hole, for all the damage it could have done to occupants of the first.

  A cheerful call wafted up from the gatehouse, greeting the rider. Father Garnet relaxed again in his chair.

  He felt a dread terror as he contemplated that young fool Catesby and his hellish plot. Catesby had told his servant what was planned, then sought to calm the servant's disquiet by sending him to confess to Father Tesimond. The servant, thought Garnet, had a deal more common sense than the master, but then that was usually the way. As for Tesimond, he had received the confession and run straight to Garnet, in turn confessing all to him.

  It was a nightmare. Garnet could no more break the secrecy of the confessional than he could sell his soul to the Devil. He could not disclose what Father Tesimond had told him to any person upon earth on pain of the loss of his immortal soul.

  It would not just kill the Lords and Government of England, Garnet realised, a single tear forming in his eye and cooling as it found release and trekked down his cheek. It would kill the cause of Catholicism in England for years, perhaps for ever, uniting the country in a frenzy of hatred against the Popish impostors. It was the most awful, the most terrible thing that any young madcap rebel could conceive and carry out. And he, Father Garnet, was bound by the most awful vow of all not to reveal his knowledge. He had to persuade Catesby to give it all up. An emissary to the Pope had to be the answer. Surely if the Pope condemned the plot, even so overweening a vanity as Catesby's would have to recognise its folly?

  A sharp cramp cut across his stomach. Too much food and wine, and not nearly enough exercise, he knew. Or an omen of the executioner's knife cutting into his most sensitive flesh in front of the howling crowd… He stumbled to his feet, and vomited up most of his day's food into the flames of the fire.

  Gresham stood bolt-upright in the rough iron tub, as naked as the day he was born, scrubbing with satisfaction at the few suspicions of dirt left on his reddened flesh. It was before dawn, two guttering candles piercing the gloom, and Mannion stood silent in a corner as the early morning ritual took its course. He held a huge towel over his arm, with the rest of his master's clothing waiting draped over two stools.

  It was still a good body, Mannion thought with quiet satisfaction, though God knows why Gresham insisted on spoiling it with water. He knew every one of the wounds that criss-crossed his master's body, could probably name and date the cause of each one. Yet they were superficial, healed. The hips were narrow and muscled, the shoulders broad and strong and the dusting of hair across the manly chest so much more satisfying than the blanket of dead seaweed so many sported there. There was no self-consciousness in Mannion's frank appraisal, any more than there would have been embarrassment in Gresham's receipt of it, had he even realised it was taking place. Mannion knew every inch of that body, had carried it on his shoulders as a child, whooping through the apple orchards. He had thrashed it once, and only once, when its seven-year-old owner had stood up imperiously and demanded that Mannion do its bidding as he was a mere servant. Years later he had washed it when its owner could only whimper, half-conscious, with the searing pain of wounds that seemed never to heal. He had fed it by hand for months, never speaking, holding the sustenance in front of the mouth for hours, sometimes forcing it down the throat when all else failed.

  With no obvious signal Mannion stepped forward. Gresham held out his arms, back towards Mannion, to receive the towel he knew would be draped across his shoulders. Without turning, he spoke. 'God, man. Your breath stinks. What on God's earth were you up to last night?'

  Gresham stepped out of the tub, turning to grasp the towel round his cold frame.

  'My duty, young master,' replied an impassive Mannion.

  'And what duty might that be?' enquired Gresham short
ly, irritated that his own conversational gambit required him to speak at this time in the morning.

  'Why, sir, I'm a man. And the world must be peopled.'

  And that, thought Gresham, showed why one should not engage in conversation with the servants.

  He allowed Mannion to dress him. He could not remember when Jane had first started to sleep the night with him, regardless of his carnal needs. He knew it was shortly after their first, frantic lovemaking. He had resented the presence in his bed, the last citadel of his private person, when instead of leaving after their coupling she had turned over and lain gently on the far side of the bed, back towards him. Her young and muscled body lay there, its curves as relaxed and bored as a seasoned choirboy's arm swinging the censor. He had willed it to move, and gone to sleep so doing, waking up to find it gone and about its business.

  He did not understand how in entering her body he had let her enter his mind.

  Jane had never interfered with his silent routine of early morning washing, and Mannion's attendance on it as his body-servant. The relationship between Mannion and Jane was one of life's great secrets as far as Gresham was concerned. After that first day, when she had screamed to be taken off Mannion's horse, he had not discerned so much as a-flicker of disagreement between them. In his presence they were formal, even brisk, in their conversations. At times Gresham thought they used a shorthand between each other, a language he could not understand. It never crossed Gresham's mind that what united them was their love of him.