The Desperate remedy hg-1 Read online

  'Sir!' Jane shrieked in anguish, before the lights dancing behind his eyes told her the truth.

  Gresham had obtained details of all Bacon's engagements by bribing his clerk. A word to one of the Gentlemen of the Bedchamber and an invitation to Gresham had been immediately forthcoming. It gave Gresham a grim satisfaction that he had no need to beg an invitation from Cecil. As a major landowner and the patron of what many considered to be Cambridge's leading College, and as a known servant of the Crown for many years past, Gresham had no need of such help.

  'Do I do gracious, or do I do alluring?' asked Jane.

  'You "do" whatever will preserve and protect my honour,' said Gresham, 'which is a far more important thing than your female vanity. However, I'll gracefully accept as my due any information you might come across in the course of the evening.'

  He had taken Jane with him as his niece to a levйe some years earlier and been incensed by her flirting with a young nobleman. He had been about to box her ears when she had poured out to him a torrent of secrets so damaging to the young nobleman's father that twenty full purses would not have bought the information.

  'Weren't you ashamed?' he asked, part in horror, part in amazement at the skill with which the little vixen had stripped the fool of his secrets.

  'Why?' she had asked, with total sincerity. 'I'm more worried about conceiving a baby than I am about being bedded by one, and anyway I do it for you.' She did, Gresham had realised. This was a woman who far preferred pitting herself against a man in the search for secrets to preparing a fine capon for supper, or supervising the making of the season's preserves. Her bкte noire was sewing.

  Since then he had used her whenever it could be safely done.

  Gresham stood up and paced the room. Tell me, who goes out with you on your errands to St Paul's?'

  'It's usually young Will. He secretly hopes to marry me and he defends my honour…'

  'No jesting.' The swooping, instant change of mood — like a hawk coming out from behind the sun, Mannion had commented — was upon him, and it froze the air. 'From now onwards you'll take three men with you, two in company, one a way behind. Make one of them Harry.'

  Harry had seen service abroad, and been a gunner on one of the ships that had fired so many shots with so very few hits against the vast galleons of the Spanish. He was tough, very strong and totally ruthless.

  'As you wish.' Jane curtseyed to Gresham, a troubled look on her face. 'Am I permitted to know why these extra precautions are necessary?'

  Because, thought Gresham, I have let happen what I vowed would never take place. I have fallen in love with you. You are wanton, and then you are saintly, you are strong and hard and then the softest voice I know, you are fierce in one moment and vulnerable in the next, you fight to the bitter end yet you are defenceless. 1 do not understand you, though I know you in bed, and 1 know that when I am with you my heart beats faster and my life has an extra colour in its palette. You have become precious to me, and that gives power over me to any person who decides to take you and hold you and hurt you. You could be held and used against me, young miss.

  'Whatever trail it is that Cecil's setting me on it'll carry danger. I can't believe other than that Will Shadwell was on his way to see me in Cambridge, and someone cared enough to kill him. Does that damned bead mean anything? Maybe Will had come across something the Catholics want hidden, or perhaps even Bacon is considering a public return to Rome. I must assume there's a link, even if I don't know what it is.'

  'Well,' said Jane, 'Will Shadwell certainly wasn't the type to be coming to Cambridge to sign up for a degree.'

  'Cease your nonsense,' said Gresham, caught unawares by her flippancy and the image of Will Shadwell in undergraduate gown and cap. He felt himself starting to sound pompous, and so switched tone, knowing it would annoy her. 'You, mistress, are an additional lure of great value to an enemy. My honour wouldn't permit your being taken and held by an enemy. Were I to be sidetracked by having to extract you from some den of thieves I would lose what little scent I might have followed. It would be most inconvenient.'

  Jane stood up. 'Thank you, my Lord. It is good to know.' Her tone would have frozen the River Thames in midsummer. 'A poor thing such as me must never be an inconvenience..' She left most of the hinges still on the door.

  Gresham grinned at Mannion. 'Call her back, will you, if the stairway's still standing.'

  It took her longer than was necessary to reappear.

  'I hadn't realised that it was convenient for me to appear before you, my Lord. Is it convenient that I stand, or would it be more convenient for me to kneel at your feet?' No arrow about to be released from the bow quivered with more hidden tension, or stood up straighter and more tall.

  God, thought Gresham, you would fight God and Lucifer together if they made, friends again and joined forces against you!

  Gresham, enjoying his rudeness, pointed a finger at her. 'Will you sit down, you stupid wench, and be silent?'

  Jane planted her arms akimbo, looked him full in the face with a fire that beat the burning of Gwent. 'Yes, sir, I will sit down, if that be your will. No, sir, I am not stupid, nor am I a wench, and no, sir, I will not be silent!’

  'God's blood!' barked Gresham. 'Am I to be served by an old man who thinks of nothing but beer and young whores, and a young wanton with a voice like a fishwife and a temper to match, who throws a fit every time she is challenged by her master?'

  Mannion lacked the education to recognise a rhetorical question, so answered it, thoughtfully. 'Aye, sir. I reckon you are.'

  There was a moment of frozen silence, then Gresham, Mannion and Jane burst out into peals of laughter.

  Thomas Percy was sulking. It was nothing new.

  'I swear the man was using loaded dice. Three sixes in a row, would you believe? I challenged him, but the fool of a landlord came between us and made us go outside.'

  Percy was a brilliant swordsman, not perhaps the match of Jack Wright, but nearly so. The difference was that Jack Wright fought to win, with a dark intensity that was as terrifying as his swift movements. Percy enjoyed winging his man, cutting him here and there, taunting him, before moving in for the kill.

  'When we got through the crowd, the bastard made a run for it! Coward! Who would believe it?'

  'He must have heard of your prowess, cousin. Few men would stand against Thomas Percy with a blade in his hand!' It was Catesby, silky-smooth in voice, sitting at the head of the table where the plotters had dined.

  Percy glanced suspiciously at Catesby, looking for mockery. He found none in the bland assurance of Catesby's eyes, and brought out a stained cloth with which he wiped the dripping sweat off his brow. Percy sweated like a pig, or like the inside of glass on a drenching rainy day.

  Jack Wright, seated as always at the rear of the room, made one of his rare contributions. He spoke slowly, as if measuring every word: 'What of your peasants and their lawsuit?'

  'Animals! Animals!' Percy spluttered into renewed anger, grabbing his tankard and spilling half its contents as he rammed the ale down his throat. Wright glanced at Catesby, the merest hint of a grin on his dour features. Catesby raised an eyebrow. Stirring Percy into anger was so easy that it had almost ceased to be amusing. Men's hair had turned white with fear. Had a lifetime of anger turned Percy's hair so white?

  'Am I to let them lie in their hovels all hours of the day and night and pay no rent? How much trust would my Earl of Northumberland have in such a member of his family were I to leave them to stink and rot and pay no rent?'

  'Dead men pay no rent…' It was Tom Wintour who spoke, Tom who had been in on the conspiracy from the start. A small, dark, wiry man, his restless wit was at odds with the glum pessimism of his elder brother. Robert Wintour had been recruited only recently, following again his younger brother but doing so with markedly little enthusiasm. Well, thought Tom, that was nothing new. He had long ago accepted that of the Wintour brothers he would have to generate the energy for both
of them.

  'Dead be damned!' Percy was warming to his theme, and never failed to rise to Tom Wintour's wit. 'There was no chance of that! We tickled them a little, that was all. There was a time when men would have taken it as their due, stout men who could take their punishment and not go whining to the law!'

  And Percy's men had tickled their wives and daughters, by all accounts, with thirty of the tenants complaining direct to the Earl of Northumberland that his Constable and land agent had attacked them for rent they had already paid.

  'And what of it, Robin?' Percy dropped into the familiar name, the one Catesby's friends used. 'Why must I go at my tenants like a dog after a hare? You know why! I need their miserable money! Must I be banker to this conspiracy, as well as its only link to the Court and all else?' Percy flung the question out like a spear, and already the thick sheen of sweat had formed over his whole face. Dark stains were visible under the arms of his shirt, his doublet cast carelessly over a nearby chair, and the same dark stains were on his hose over the cleft of his buttocks, and up his shirt along the line of his back.

  Catesby took the angry question with a smile, waving his hand as if to say thank you. Far less of Thomas Percy's money had gone to swell the coffers of the plotters than Percy liked people to think, but he had been asked for, and had given, good coin. If this angry, self-serving torrent of words was the price Catesby had to pay for Percy's money then it was a price he was willing to pay.

  'You've done well,' said Catesby placatingly, 'and all of us know it. We're grateful, truly grateful…'

  The Duck and Drake in the Strand was rapidly becoming one of London's most fashionable taverns, and had long been a favoured ground for the conspirators to meet. It was convenient for Catesby, who had lodgings only a few doors away. Percy subsided into a grumble. It would flare up again soon, Catesby knew. He could write the speech.

  Was Thomas. Percy not kinsman to the mighty Earl of Northumberland, the patron who had appointed him Constable of Alnwick Castle, the Percy stronghold in Northumberland? Had not the great Catholic Earl entrusted Thomas Percy above all others to act as his emissary to the upstart James VI of Scotland, offering the support of English Catholics to the Scottish King in exchange for simple tolerance of their faith? Had not Percy won the support of the King for the Catholic cause, only to have it wrenched away from him by that Anti-Christ Robert Cecil, the poison in the ear of the new monarch? Had not a month past that same Thomas Percy been made Gentleman Pensioner to King James I, allowing that same Thomas Percy access to the King of All England? Was it not Thomas Percy who had negotiated the rent of the house adjacent to the House of Lords from John Whynniard and Henry Ferrers, the house from whence a tunnel could be dug to undermine the very fabric of England's Government? Catesby's own house in Lambeth was almost opposite, for all the use he had been. It was Percy's power, influence and charm that had closed the deal, Percy would point out, causing Whynniard and the Catholic Ferrers to look the other way.

  Thomas Percy was a powerful man, thought Catesby, and a useful one, but flawed to his very centre. The anger that seemed to flare continually at the core of his being, anger against his tenants, against the invidious Cecil, against his lot in life, fuelled him but at the same time clouded his judgement. Was he noble-born? Percy's claim to be a member of Northumberland's family was at best tenuous. Yet the real problem was that of all the five original conspirators, Percy was the only one fighting for himself.

  Catesby knew he was not fighting for himself. He was fighting for God. From as early as he could remember he had fallen in love with the Mass. The flickering candlelight, the language that resounded to the pit of one's brain, the transcendental union with a spirit higher and greater than that of man — even as a child his soul had risen to the Mass as a flower reaches towards the sun. He had recognised the joy of that faith, but seen the savage surgery it had caused on the body and mind of his father and mother. When he was a mere eight years of age he had seen his father tried in the Star Chamber for housing a Jesuit Father. Robert had known that Father, a foul-smelling man who had smiled all over the young Robert until the evening when he had plunged his hand down the boy's front and fondled his private parts. We do this for Jesus, the Father had said, his thumb and fingers working away. And there is more we can do for Jesus. And for this man my father is facing imprisonment and execution, thought the young Robert. He screamed and punched, even then strong for his age, and bloodied the priest's nose.

  The priest had gone soon thereafter, spirited away as they always were. The humiliation, the fierce and burning bitterness, had lasted for years. Catesby had been driven to be the best at everything he had done, driven by the memory of a lost father whose suffering had soured his soul, a father whose suffering was betrayed by those for whom he suffered. Yet the meeting with his Catherine had shown him his true course. He had worshipped her from the first moment they met. When on his wedding night he had joined with her, her giggling turning first to a panting and then to a gasping and then to a scream of pleasure, he had known true salvation. She was the most beautiful, the most lovely, the most heavenly thing that had ever happened to him. Despite his dashing good looks and his charm, it was his virginity that he lost to Catherine on that night. As did so many men, he gave his soul as well to the first woman who opened her legs for him.

  He had been lulled by the love of the flesh, human flesh, not the flesh of Christ Our Lord. He had gone as far as to flout the true religion, seduced by his new, human love into denying Divine love. True, he had continued to hide and to host a succession of Jesuit priests, part in honour of his parents, part in honour of many of those priests who truly placed the souls of their parishioners above all worldly concerns. He appeared less and less at Mass, and had his first son Robert baptised as an Anglican, to the scandal of the Catholic community and his father's friends.

  'And do I have to settle the score for this as for everything else?'

  Percy was being truculent over the bill, and his tone penetrated Catesby's inward pattern of thought.

  'No fear of that, Thomas,' said Catesby. 'Here — take it from my purse, and my thanks for your company along with it.' He tossed the smaller of the two purses he carried so that it landed with a solid thump on the trestle. Percy could have picked it up, but he sniffed and turned away, returning to talk at Jack Wright, who nodded every few sentences but said nothing. It was left to Tom Wintour, reliable and ever-restless, to take it, unbar the door and go to find the landlord.

  Then his world had collapsed, Catesby remembered, only half deflected by Percy's intrusion. Robert his son, on whom he and his wife doted, died suddenly, to be followed by Catesby's father and then by his lovely, his adorable Catherine herself. He had worn mourning on his body, yet it was his soul that was truly black in shock. It was a punishment from God, retribution for his turning away from the True Faith.

  They did not realise it, any of the others, but in seeking to destroy the Government of England, the dashing and charismatic Robert Catesby was saying sorry to God and the True Faith.

  Percy was droning on still, petulant, like a spoilt child denied a sweetmeat. In a month or two he would probably be dead, as they all would be dead. Yet by their death they would have become martyrs to the Faith, opening the floodgates that would allow Christ to reign again in England. A faint smile played on the face of Robert Catesby as he contemplated the thought. Christ had died so that all of humankind could be saved. What did a few lives matter if by their death England was allowed to live again?

  They were in the library of the House, the room where Gresham knew he was most likely to find Jane once her domestic duties were over.

  'What new people have you taken on in these past three months?' Gresham asked.

  'Two, I think — a kitchen maid and a porter. Why do you ask, sir?'

  'Someone must have been watching Will Shadwell. There must be a chance, therefore, that someone is watching his master. The best place to keep watch on a man is from inside his
own house… Walsingham had a bribed servant in every nobleman's house in London.'

  'Sir!' Jane exploded. 'I'd trust every man and woman of them with my life!'

  'Jane, they worship you, God knows why — but there's never any servant on God's earth who's free from sin! You must learn. I'm truly sorry. It's a hard lesson. Trust no-one. Wasn't Judas Jesus's most favoured disciple, and what's a disciple but a servant? In any event, they probably risk too much by trying for someone already in employment. No, the easiest way would be to plant a rotten flower in this garden of rest. What of the two new people?'

  'One's a distant cousin of Martha's. She's a lovely girl, about whom I’ve had to have strong words with your body-servant.' She gazed darkly at Mannion, who shrugged his shoulders as if to ask what a venerable innocent such as he should have to do with a young girl. 'He may pay his dues to your body, my Lord, but he'll keep away from those bodies over which I've charge and care. In any event, she's no spy. She lacks the brains, poor thing, apart from anything else.

  'The other's a Northumbrian. He says he's seen service at sea. He comes with an excellent testimonial from my Earl of Northumberland's houses. He's a strong worker. I hired him above the others because he plays the lute.'

  Gresham had the extravagant number of five musicians in his permanent employ, who played for him every evening he was in the House. Though Gresham hated public entertaining it was politic for him to drag himself to lay on five or six events a year, the taste and expense of which made them highlights of London's social calendar. For such events his band would be augmented by other musicians. It made for better music if there were such already in the employ of the House, if only through it allowing more of the practice which Gresham knew was essential for any good musician. The Cook played a merry flute, if a little too merry for Gresham's private ear of an evening, but more than good enough for a raucous evening where the finer points of intonation would never be heard by the guests.