The Desperate remedy

Chapter 1

Will Shadwell froze in terror. There was the noise again.

Behind him, somewhere in the enveloping and impenetrable dark. He had heard it once before, a tiny crack like a twig breaking and the briefest rustling. Imagination? A cow, a sheep? Some idiot peasant's hog stirring in the field? Or men with knives destined for Will Shadwell's back, creeping up on him through the black silence?

He had trudged on, as the sun had hung like a raw orange ball over the horizon's razor edge, taking an age to set. The sense of danger, the fear, were ever present, tingling his bones. Something was wrong. He knew it.

Hot tears of self-pity welled up in him, burnt his eyes against the cold of the night. He was crouched low in a dry ditch, the dust in his nose and mouth, the debris of a country track already working its way inside his doublet and scratching against his skin. He had never felt more alone or more in terror of the nameless things hidden in the vast sweep of the flat countryside. He was holding back his breath, despite the red-hot iron bars in his chest, the impossible urge to scream and run. He had never meant to be on the road in the middle of the night. It was the horse's fault, that damned animal. He knew nothing of horses, could hardly ride. It had looked as good as any other in the dim light of the early morning, rolled its mad eyes at him like any other horse. He had thrashed it into action, hurling it towards Cambridge and the only man to whom he could turn, the panic driving him on and communicating itself to the animal beneath him. He had to see Henry Gresham. Gresham. The only man he could turn to, the only man who would know what to do with the terrible secret Will Shadwell had stumbled on, the secret he carried only in his head. The only man who might stop this terrible pursuit, take the wolves off his back.

The night spread round him, silent, still. There had been nothing now, no noise, for five minutes or more. Hope flared up in him. He knew every noise in London's mean streets, could interpret every sound. Here in the country the night spoke a different language, every sound of it in his heightened state of terror a possible death threat. Had it been some animal, treading lightly over the ground? Surely no men could be so silent. His breath was starting to come to him normally now, his heart thudding less against his eyes.

The horse had foundered outside Royston. He knew they would come after him, expected someone to notice his sudden run from London. With the horse under him he could at least match pursuit. With its useless carcass dead on the road he had had to branch off to avoid pursuit, on to the side roads and tracks. It had been a mistake, dull-faced peasants eyeing him as the only thing of interest to have passed that way in years, noting his progress and all too willing to tell it to whoever came behind. If only he could have hidden the horse, instead of leaving its lathered hide as a sign to any pursuer.

Dare he move? If there were pursuers still out there they might walk past him in his ditch. They were showing no lantern, lighting no flares, if even they existed. He knew he stank, but if they were there they had no dogs, that much he was certain of. He was lost, of course. The tracks he had taken weaved their way through the

Flatlands, but the stars stayed where they had always been. He reckoned he was upstream of Cambridge, knew if he kept on he would meet the slow, flat river. Gresham would be in bed now in his College rooms, simple and book-furnished for all the man's impossible wealth, a world apart from the magnificence of the house on the Strand and the whore who kept it for him. He would know what to do. Gresham always knew.

He was feeling drowsy, despite the cold that was starting to penetrate the thin, ragged cloak that was all he had time to grab when he fled London. Perhaps he would sleep here in the ditch, wait until morning…

He did not hear or even sense the man. He felt his hot breath against his cheek, heard the words cut through the night in his ear, had time to note the almost caressing husky tone.

'Will Shadwell… a fine dance you've led us.'

He screamed then, a spasm tearing through his body and hurling him up out of the ditch. He dimly saw three, perhaps four vague shapes where the night was blacker. He twisted away, felt a thorn tear at his boot and into the soft flesh above his ankle. He felt a thud in his back, was knocked forward, and looked down startled at the blade that had appeared through his flesh, just beneath his ribcage. He opened his mouth, and the warm, salty taste of his blood hit him at the same time as the tearing agony of the pain. He felt himself falling, heard rather than felt himself thud into the soft ground. Gagging, gasping, drowning in his own blood, he felt a boot kick him over. The last thing Will Shadwell saw on God's earth was the thin blade driving down towards his eye socket.

'You'll pay me the usual?' sniffed the miller, who seemed to have a permanent cold.

Henry Gresham prodded the dead face with his boot.

'I've told no-one else…' the miller added morosely, wiping his nose.

Gresham cut a fine figure by the riverside. Tall, strongly built, there was an inner fire in his eyes and a slight smile that suggested he found the world both ludicrous and amusing.

The body bobbed gently up and down in the tiny ripples that lapped the edge of the millpond.

'I turned 'im over for you,' the miller said, half bowing and putting his head between Gresham and the corpse, demanding attention yet being sycophantic at the same time. The drowned always lay face down, as if turning their heads from the sun for the last time. The body was swollen, white with corruption, but still recognisable.

It was Will Shadwell. A murdered Will Shadwell.

Spy, informer, double-dealer, whoremonger, pimp, thief, gambler, sodomite, drunkard, occasional follower of Satan when the money was good — and one of Gresham's best men. He had possessed no morals, and so could not be suborned by a good cause. He was utterly selfish and ruthless, and therefore a thoroughly known commodity. He was greedy beyond belief, and hence utterly reliable, provided Gresham paid him more than anyone else.

Once, in a Southwark stew, Shadwell had falsely claimed that someone else was paying him more. Gresham had nailed his hand to the table, sinking his dagger through the soft flesh of the palm he was holding out for more money.

'I've given you a good dagger as well as your gold, Master Shadwell,' Gresham had commented mildly, leaving the room with the screaming and impaled man gaping at the blood seeping into the timber. 'Come back to me when it's spent up.'

And because Shadwell was all these things and yet a coward, he had come crawling back to Gresham three weeks later. He did not lie again about how much others were paying him. He appeared to bear no grudge. Violence was nothing in his world. Mastery and power had to be proven. If proven, they were acknowledged, as much a fact of life as lechery or drunkenness. The mark of the dagger was still visible now on the puffy flesh of his right hand. It waved liked a dead weed in the water.

Now he was dead, hunted down, a town creature flushed out of its habitat and hounded to death in the broad sweep of the countryside. Even the water damage could not disguise the tears the brambles and thorn had made in what looked like a pell-mell chase. Something or someone had torn off a boot. He had been skewered from behind, enough to kill him in time. The actual killing blow, the knife thrust, had gone in through the eye socket and upwards, with so much power that it had broken through the top of the skull. It was a classic thrust, requiring pinpoint accuracy.

Gresham nodded distantly to the miller, and again to Mannion, his servant, who was behind them both. He heard the clink of money as Mannion drew a purse from his belt and started carefully to count out coins. The miller slavered over the sight, his eyes fixed on the money and his greed only thinly cloaked by a ragged air of servility.

'Thanks, master,' said the miller, who would have tugged his forelock had there been any hair left on his greasy pate. He gave a curt order to his lad, who started to drag the body out of the water. The miller was turning away to go back to the screaming wife and screaming brood who were warming up for the day in the stone-built mill when suddenly he paused. A thought must have struck him’ Gresham realised, an event so rare as to stop him in his tracks. 'Why is it you're the only genl'man who pays to see corpses?' the miller asked, daringly. He sneezed, and a globule of something white shot from his nose and lay on an uncomplaining reed. Gresham turned to look at him.

'Why, a man must keep his finger on the pulse,' he replied, straight-faced, gazing down at an entirely pulse-free corpse. The miller, not surprisingly, failed to get the joke. As a trade millers were universally corrupt and oafish. All within a ten-mile radius of the city were bribed by Gresham to report any bodies in the water to him. Except babies. Gresham did not require to be shown the babies, unless, that was, they were finely dressed. The bodies always ended up in the millstream. At least Shadwell's had not been pounded to a pulp by the great paddle of the millwheel. It was no consolation to Shadwell, who was past caring.

As he went to mount the fine grey mare for the short ride back to Cambridge, Gresham halted, and went back to the corpse. Something had caught the light, glinting fitfully inside a tear in Shadwell's tattered doublet. He motioned to the miller's lad to halt his labours, and bent down to feel inside the sodden, stinking material.

A bead. A single rosary bead, from a string of such beads that sold in their thousands in Europe. A dangerous item for a man or woman to wear openly in Protestant England, where to be a Catholic was all too easily seen as being an enemy of the state. The tear in the doublet looked new enough. Had Shadwell’s flailing hand caught at the rosary as he fell to the ground? Well, one thing was sure. Gresham would never find out the truth from Will Shadwell.

A thick mist still clung to the river and its banks, reaching head height in the lower meadows. The dew clung to the ground and the heady smell of wet grass was everywhere. The towers of the great King's Chapel towered above Cambridge in the distance, and the pall of smoke was already beginning to cling to the town from the early-morning fires.

Henry Gresham saw none of it. He was preoccupied with his thoughts.

Why kill Will Shadwell? He and his kind lived in a raw, violent and a brutal world, yet even there the game was usually played by certain rules. Who among the vagabonds and thieves, the beggars and the rogues, the cutpurses and the pimps he called his friends would kill him? An argument over an unpaid bill? Some story of treachery? A whore who had caught the French welcome from him, paying him back as he sweated inside her spread legs? Or some noble Lord who had attended one too many Masses or plotted once too often to restore the true faith to England? Yet for someone as base as Shadwell there was no need for high treachery to explain his death, no need even for low drama. His death could be about nothing more than a debt that had gone on too long, or simply an opportunist robbery in a dark country lane.

It was possible, simple robbery, yet it stuck in Gresham's gullet. Shadwell's killing was a professional's work. Someone had wanted Will Shadwell dead, and had been willing to follow him to Cambridge to see it done. Will had never worked in Cambridge, and had never been there long enough to make an enemy want him dead. That argued for a bigger secret than a debt or the wrong woman bedded. Had he sluiced a rich man's wife or daughter? Or had he latched on to something that the new government in London had decided should remain secret? Or was it the Catholics he had offended, the same Catholics who still carried huge power and influence for all that their faith was unfashionable?

The time was when a self-respecting assassin would never have travelled beyond Deptford. Yet these were troubled times, so early in the reign of King James I. How could they be otherwise? It was Scotland's King who now ruled England, and Scotland was England's oldest enemy. To add spice to the novel situation, the mother of the new King, Mary Queen of Scots, had been put to death on the order of the previous holder of the English crown, Queen Elizabeth, only a few years earlier. Men still alive had signed the death warrant of King James's mother. Henry Gresham had been in that business up to his neck and, in the final count, her neck as well. It was best to hope that King James had not been told of that side of his mother's death, for all that there had been no love lost between them.

A bird flew up from under the horse's hooves, with a sudden clatter of wings. Well trained, the mare took stock for a second of the irritating thing, decided it posed no threat and went calmly on its way. Gresham's hand, which had instinctively moved to his sword, relaxed halfway along its travel and returned to his side, his left hand continuing to take loose hold of the reins.

There had been a strange optimism two years ago when the new King had ascended the throne. It was already fraying at the edges, with mutterings in the streets and at Court. His Royal Highness s retinue of Scots Lords were as willing to take any money on offer as they were unwilling to wash, and their rapaciousness was becoming as legendary as their stench. James had offended the Puritans by having a Popish wife, and offended the Papists by declaring them excommunicate and appearing to go against his early promises of tolerance. The majority of the country, who wished nothing more than to be left in peace to procreate and earn a decent living, increasingly went in fear of a Catholic uprising, or a rebellion from the English establishment against the Scottish upstart.

Gresham almost found himself yearning for a return to the days of Good Queen Bess, the arch-bitch. Gresham had learnt the art of survival in part from her. She was an actress of unequalled power, and a ruthless whore who would have murdered her own mother without even a momentary qualm if need dictated it. She was also a Queen who would have wept bitter tears in public afterwards, whipped herself with barbs that, strange to say, seemed to leave no mark and provoked numerous plays as a result, as well as more sonnets than there was paper on which to print them. Queen Elizabeth I may have been so corrupt as to make Beelzebub turn in his grave, but somehow that corruption had never broken through the facade of the Virgin Queen, the pure preserver of the State. It had been true of her chief minister as well. Old Lord Burghley had made enough money to buy the Armada whilst producing an English fleet so decrepit that it might as well have farted as fired at the Spanish. With the Devil's own luck, the wind had farted instead, bringing Burghley the victory his ships could never have done. As one of Gresham's old informers had cheerfully stated, old Burghley may have knifed you in the back, but somehow you always felt it was being done by a gentleman. Burghley's son and successor, the wizened Robert Cecil, had a corrupted body that told all too well the tale of his corrupted soul. The double-dealing, the murders and the struggle for power might still be the same. The sense of style had gone, and there was a rawness to the brutal world of 1605 that had not been seen since Good Queen Bess had herself ascended the throne half a century ago.

Gresham's scalp itched, under his hat. He had a full head of hair, as yet not ravaged by the pox, and it was well washed. It always itched when there was trouble around. He had endured a lifetime of trouble. He neither feared nor welcomed it. It was simply a part of life, like the footpad on the road, the poison in the wine or the first spot that signified the plague. The particularly virulent itching suggested significant trouble. Well, trouble was a normal part of Gresham's life, and had been so for as long as he could remember. What was unusual was his inability to explain his chronic sense of foreboding, his inability to trace the sense of danger to its source.

It was all most irksome, and most inconvenient. Gresham flicked at his reins. The horse picked up a little speed, then deciding its rider's heart was not in it slowed down again to an easy amble. Gresham had lost a good worker in Will Shadwell. Will Shadwell had been Henry Gresham's creature. An attack on Will Shadwell was an attack on Henry Gresham, yet the reason was a mystery. Gresham did not like mysteries. They disturbed him. They cried out in the night to be explained. They threatened his survival. Survival, Henry Gresham had decided long ago, was all one had. Ruthlessness was required to survive. That, and a sense of humour, a dash of loyalty and a measure of courage.

The mystery was still crying out in his brain as he rode into the inner courtyard of Granville College. He had time still to go to his room, change from his riding clothes into suitably sombre doublet and hose and don the long gown of the MA or Master of Arts.

They gathered in the Combination Room, Gresham and the fifteen other Fellows, before going in to High Table. It was panelled, as was the Hall they were about to enter, very much in the new fashion. Gresham loved the depth of the wood, the changing pattern of its rich colour, but a part of him yearned for the ancient stone that lay behind it. The contrast of rough stone with rich hangings draped over it, hard against soft, wild colour against sombre grey, warmth against cold seemed an emblem for life. Contrast, change, the clash of ideas, these were what made Cambridge breathe and live.

'Well met, Sir Henry,' said Alan Sidesmith, the President Gresham had placed in nominal charge of the unruly crowd that went to make up Granville College. 'Was your ride restorative?' Gresham had never seen Alan Sidesmith drunk, nor ever seen him without glass or even tankard in his hand. Alan knew more of Gresham's other business than Gresham had ever told him, but Sidesmith was one of the few men in whom Gresham had complete trust.

'I've a good horse, good health and will soon have a full stomach. And it's summer in Cambridge… how could I not be restored?' Gresham replied lightly.

'That would depend, I suppose,' said Sidesmith equally lightly, 'whether a certain miller who sent you a message this morning was wishing to display to you his corn, or whether he had something else in mind.'

Gresham knew better than to be drawn.

'Yes,' he said, as if debating a matter of great significance, 'that would depend, wouldn't it?' He grinned at Sidesmith, who grinned back.

'Now, Sir Henry,' announced Sidesmith in a businesslike tone. 'Those newly knighted such as yourself are best placed to advise me on a tricky question of etiquette. Over there…' he pointed to a large and prosperous man whose desire to show off expensive clothes had overcome his reluctance to boil alive in the summer heat, '… we have a rich London merchant, a Trinity man, who wishes to transfer allegiance for his son to Granville. However, over there, we have a new Scottish Lord from Court who claims to have a degree from Europe. Who shall have the seat of honour on my right-hand side — Mr Money In The Bank and a good degree, or My Lord Influence At Court and probably not much else?'

'There is no choice, old friend,' announced Gresham. 'The Scottish Lord already smells to high heaven, whilst the merchant will take a good hour or so to do so despite all he sweats now.'

'Thank you, Sir Henry,' said Sidesmith. 'So helpful, as ever. Perhaps you would care to tell the noble Lord that he has been relegated because he stinks?' He moved off with a smile. The merchant gained the seat of honour on the President's right-hand side, the given reason being that he had his degree from Cambridge.

The great gong struck, and they processed into the Hall. Gresham's money had refounded Granville College, one of the most ancient and derelict in the University, yet he took his place on the High Table in strict order of seniority and the timing of his Fellowship, making him one of the most junior. The students in their gowns shuffled to their feet, benches scraping on the cold floor, as the President and Fellows entered. A student, a thin-faced boy with a face pockmarked from smallpox, came nervously forward, bowed to the President, and recited the long Latin grace. There was a subtle chorus of shuffling and, from somewhere among the depths of the student body, a hurriedly suppressed squeal as an arm was pinched. More bowing, and the business of the meal was allowed to continue.

Gresham's companion sniffed as he sat down.

'Out of sorts, Hugo?' asked Gresham, taking his own linen napkin from his sleeve.

The Fellow in question was a huge man, slobbering rolls of fat hanging over his neck and bulging out his thick arms into rotund sausages of flesh.

'I approve of tradition,' the man replied, grabbing at the warm bread that had already been placed on the platters in front of the Fellows. 'If three tables was good enough for this College in all its history, it's good enough for me.' He was already looking hungrily for the servant to bring in the first trenchers of food, and a glass of wine had already gone into the cavern he called his stomach.

'Ah,' said Gresham, 'but you didn't have the task of telling the eminent citizen of this town that he was good enough only for the second table, or telling that same to a man with an excellent degree who sees some jumped-up favourite of Court dining here on high.' It was an old argument, and Gresham did not offer it to convert, but merely to annoy. It worked. Hugo spluttered and sent dangerously large lumps of bread firing from his mouth across the table.

'It is a nonsense! A nonsense. I firmly believe…' Dinner at High Table was started, and would proceed along its normal path. Gresham had insisted that Granville College have a High Table for Fellows, guests and those with BAs and above, and the remaining tables for those studying for their first degree or those with no degree. He had proposed the abolition of the second, intermediate table to the President.

Alan Sidesmith had smiled.

'It'll cause a rumpus, you know,' he had said, with no sign that it concerned him at all. 'The young men of pleasure we seem to be receiving at this University in such large numbers will dislike a College where they can't buy their way into higher fare, and out of the company of the poor students.' Under the old system, the third table had been reserved for 'people of low condition'.

'What a great pity,' Gresham had replied. 'We'll just have to make do with taking students who wish to learn, instead of those who simply wish to play tennis, get drunk and swagger that they've done their study in Cambridge.'

'Now that would be something new,' Alan had responded, a mischievous twinkle in his eye. 'But I do hope it won't restrain you personally in pursuing those noble aims.'

In fact the young and the rich had flocked to Granville in its new foundation. Its High Table was frequently extended to several tables as it was besieged by the rich and the famous, its simple rule that no man without his Bachelor of Arts could sit there giving it an unexpected prestige. The fact that the rule had been waived only once, for Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth I, had added to rather than taken away from the distinction.

The heady smell of fresh-baked bread and roast meat mingled with the sharper tang of the wine on High Table and the ale and beer cheerily being consumed by the students. Granville College ate a good dinner, the platters loaded with meat and fish and the game pies being offered first to High Table, and then taken down to vanish into the gaping mouths of the students. A senior student was reading aloud from the Bible, one of many monastic traditions the Colleges had absorbed. The difference was that whilst total silence would have greeted the reading in the monastery, here a burble of conversation was allowed to accompany it.

Hugo was denouncing the decline of logic in favour of rhetoric to his other neighbour at table. Gresham turned to the man on his left. A man after Gresham's own heart, he had been fighting for a greater musical element in the Cambridge course.

'How goes the new material?'

Edward smiled at Gresham.

'Slowly, but surely. Master Byrd presents challenges to those who try to do justice to his music'

'Musical challenges, or other challenges?' Gresham asked innocently. William Byrd was widely believed to be a committed Papist. He had published a book of sacred songs in 1575 which had circulated among Papists and found their way into Gresham's hands, and from thence to the man who ruled over the choir of Granville College.

'Challenges of all types,' answered Edward, with no sign that he wished to relinquish any of them. 'Firstly, it's a matter of debate whether or not the songs should be performed in a chapel at all. Secondly, singing them seems tantamount to declaring an allegiance to Rome. Thirdly, it's the Devil's own job deciding if they need an organ alongside them.'

'So in summary,' Gresham answered, 'their forthcoming presence in our order of service will result in the musical director being excommunicated for singing secular work in God's chamber, burnt alive for being a Papist and beaten by the Chapel organist for doing him out of a job?'

'Sir Henry,' answered Edward with a mock bow of his head, 'how can I challenge the wit and judgement of one so distinguished?'

'Not at all, if you know what's good for you,' said Gresham cheerfully, draining his glass. He was looking forward to the performance. 'But I wonder you bother with that music. There must be easier pieces.'

'When I meet music in which I hear God's hand,' said Edward sombrely, 'I'll risk the judgement of God's emissaries on earth to hear it played.'

There would be another stir when Edward believed he had the music to his standard, and allowed it to be sung. Accusations would fly back and forth, perhaps even the odd pate would be broken. Gresham ran his eye over the Fellowship of Granville College. One Fellow was a sodomite, making a play at every pretty boy who joined the College. Two others were bedding every serving girl who offered herself. Times being hard, there was no shortage of offers of either kind. Another had the pox, and had been seeing a local quack to little effect. Dipping the genitals in a mess of white vinegar was one of the least painful remedies, and the Fellow in question had been coming to dine for weeks smelling like a barrel of wine that had been allowed to go off in the sun. The newest Fellow was involved in a ruinous lawsuit, chasing an inheritance that an older brother would grab, at dreadful cost to the younger sibling. Two of them were Catholics to the core, two of them fierce Puritans. They sat at opposite ends of the table, and a pair of them had nearly come to blows in a recent public debate.

Opposites attract, thought Henry Gresham, and from the clash of opposites comes new ideas. He gazed contentedly, as much as his restless spirit could ever be content, over his High Table and the college he had refounded. He had no children that he knew of. He seemed destined to be barren. In the meantime, the 135 students and Fellows made a contented burbling noise in the Hall Gresham had built. It could hold two hundred with ease, and would do so before too long. His children? Possibly. His Foundation? Certainly.

The meal over, he had two reasons to retire to his rooms. The first was a letter written in his best handwriting, a letter which had been returned to him a few days previously by a man called Tom Barnes. Its style was faultless, and Gresham could only marvel at the sharp logic and intelligence that shone through the written words. There were only two problems with the letter. Firstly, Gresham had never written it, despite what seemed to be his handwriting and signature, and secondly, its content was sufficient to have him hung, drawn and quartered were it ever to reach any member of the Government. There could be many reasons for the existence of such a forgery, and Gresham needed time at least to eliminate from his mind some of the least likely. When that reading was over, he had his copy of the English translation of Machiavelli's The Prince, obtained from St Paul's for a King's ransom on his last visit to London. He had read it in the original Italian, of course. He was fascinated to compare the original with the translation. It was not to be.

The knock on the door was loud, insistent. Gresham slipped the letter through the gap in the floorboards beneath his feet, and shouted for the visitor to enter.

The courier stank of horse piss and sweat. He had arrived long after supper, his leathers stained with mud up to his armpits. Cambridge was at its most dank and dark, the Fenland mist swirling round the gates of the Colleges like a miasma of plague, waiting to strike. The feeble flicker of candle from the latticed and barred windows in the inner court hardly dented the blackness. The courier had arrived after nightfall. Every tongue would wag in the morning. Gresham called away 'On His Majesty's business', again. Some would snigger, nod knowingly, and gaze down in their tankards as he strode past to his place at table in the morning.

The Porter ushered the courier into Gresham's rooms. They were on the first stairway, built in the fourteenth century. He was Cecil's man, of course, and exuded a sense of menace. Silently he handed a package to Gresham. The Porter hovered over his shoulder, drunk, inquisitive.

'Time you kept your watch, old Walter,' said Gresham to the grizzled old man. 'Who knows how many fresh young virgins are queuing by your gate to test if men are like wine, better when they're old?'

Old Walter grinned, and clumped down the stairs. Gresham could just as easily have kicked him down the stairs, or snarled at him to mind his own damned business. As it was, Gresham saw nothing but an accident of birth in their different station in life. He treated Walter as he treated all people. God persistently refused to treat all people as equal until they proved otherwise, but that was no reason for Gresham to follow suit. As a by-product, old Walter would continue to tell Gresham everything that went on in the College. As far as most of the Fellows and the students were concerned, old Walter, the drunken sot, was invisible. Gresham had been using his sharp eyes and ears for years.

Gresham did not need to ask who the letter was from. There were only a small number of men in England who had couriers willing to ride through the night. The seal on the letter was far more ornate than the content.

Come to London. Immediately.

No formal greeting, no 'To that most beloved servant, Sir Henry Gresham…' Merely a blunt message. Come. Come now.

Gresham sighed. He sighed again as he turned to his purse, took out a small coin, remembered the courier, and chose a larger one. It was accepted. Without thanks, but with the merest nod of the head.

'Tell him yes. Soon.'

The courier nodded again. It was all that was necessary.

Cambridge was a haven. Its conflicts were explicable, its double-and triple-dealing following a strange local logic. True, its townspeople were low and squat, hating the University that gave them their living. A riot was never far away, which was why the Colleges were built like domestic castles, facing inwards into their courts and quadrangles and with a towered Lodge as their entrance. Yet the sense of power those buildings gave was illusory. The power in London was the power of life and, more frequently, death. The power in England was very simple, for all the puffed-out vainglory of the Cambridge Fellows. England's power was the power of the Court, nowadays the Court of King James I of England, erstwhile King James VI of Scotland.

So now Henry Gresham would have to drag himself out of the parochial world of Cambridge, back to the dark, brutal and blasphemous underworld of London, a world only recently rid of yet another outbreak of the plague.

He was rather looking forward to it.

Jack Wright sat in the darkest corner of the room, pushing the remnants of his meal idly around the edge of the wooden platter. The air in the room was greasy, stale. There were eight of them in all, in a room that would have more easily coped with four or five. The Catherine Wheel in Oxford had been chosen for recruiting the newest conspirators. It was safer than London, and Oxford was less full of Government spies than Cambridge. It was as safe as anywhere for a group of men for whom life would never be safe again. Jack could not stop himself looking nervously at the door every minute or so. He saw in his mind the soldiers bursting through it, the yelled commands, the kiss of iron round his wrists as he was led away. He shook his head, as if to clear it of the image. His nervous glance returned to the door. Part of him was trying to listen to his friend, but he had learnt at times to let the impassioned words of Robert Catesby flow over him, as unmarked as a stone in the river with the clear water washing over it.

John Wright, or Jack as he had been known since his early childhood, had taken his usual seat at the back of the room. He was a stocky figure, his apparent heaviness deceptive. His sword arm was lightning fast, his agility with a blade in his hand legendary. It was a skill he had tried to use much less since God had called to him and he had answered. Would that his mouth had the same skill as his arm. It was not that he lacked thoughts or ideas, but somehow the link between brain and mouth had eluded him all his life. For years he had felt the frustration of hearing the nonsense others talked, seen the strike of wit that won the applause and the adulation, felt the ideas seething in his head but stumbled at the final hurdle of their expression. As a child he had been laughed at and mocked when the few words he could muster had tumbled out and dried up, like an empty barrel with a hole knocked in it. That was where he had learnt his agility, turning to his fists in those days to make sure that his school fellows paid his body the respect they would not give his words.

He had known Catesby casually for years, in the way that all the sons of the oppressed Catholic families banded together and knew each other. They had attended a Mass together, in the small hours of the night when the fewest servants would see and hear and the risk was reduced. The priest had been impassioned, the liturgy powerful beyond faith. Afterwards, Jack Wright had been moved to tears, and Catesby had turned to meet him.

'It's a thing to die for, isn't it, as Our Saviour was willing to die?' he had said, a fierce light in his eyes.

'It is…' Jack Wright had started to say, wanted to say that it was more than life, that it was the source of life, a faith and a beauty so poignant yet so tragic… but the words had dried up, as they always did, and the red flush of embarrassment crept up on nis face as his eyes dropped.

He felt Catesby's hand on his shoulder.

'We don't need words, do we? The words have been written for us. But we know the beauty. We of all people know the terrible beauty. To feel is enough, isn't it?'

Jack Wright looked up. Was it his imagination that a light pulsed from Robert Catesby's eyes? As if a tide of lovingly warm water had been released to sluice through his mind, the tears came to Jack's own eyes. Here was a man who knew, who understood. Here was a man who needed no words. From that moment in a cold chapel was the bond struck between Robert Catesby and Jack Wright.

Catesby's personality shone like a second sun, filling every corner of the tavern's room.

'Men have a right, a right given by God and by nature to defend their own lives and freedom, a right that no earthly power can take away,' he was arguing passionately, the light of martyrdom in his eyes, thumping the table for effect. 'We Catholics in England are mere slaves. 1 He dwelt on the word, drawing it out in all its shame. 'Lower even than slaves. We're free men, yet we allow our lives and our freedoms to be removed without law, without reason and without authority. Our very life, our vigour, is being sapped by this passive resistance, this feebleness, this palsy of fear and cowardice that's all we seem able to muster in the face of persecution. We're the laughing stock of Europe: despaired of by our friends, and despised by our enemies as God's lunatics!'

Despite the familiarity, the power of Catesby's personality tugged at Jack Wright's soul. When Catesby talked to you, you felt that you were, for him, the most important person in the world. Catesby could reach into men's souls. His audience stared in rapt silence, almost adoration, as he reviled the King, whipping them up into a frenzy of self-justifying anger against the monarch and Robert Cecil, his Chief Minister. It was a brilliant performance. Jack had seen it many times, yet still it held a measure of magic even for his cynical eyes and ears. For a moment, for all of them, the fear retreated, the gnawing, bitter fear that governed their every step, their every breath.

'And is there hope? No.'' Catesby spat out the negative, as if it were a red-hot pip from a sour cherry he had just eaten. 'With Robert Cecil pouring poison into the ear of the monarch, turning his eagerness into hate? There is no hope unless we ourselves create that hope!'

King James had seemed well-intentioned to the Catholic cause before his accession, and his wife was known to be Catholic. Cecil, the King's Chief Secretary, was widely credited with turning the mind of the King against English papists whilst at the same time toadying up to the Spaniards.

They needed some of Catesby's magic. At the mere thought of the tunnel Wright's flesh began to crawl and a spasm ran through his muscles. It had seemed easy enough. Hire the house, dig through until they were under the House of Lords, plant the powder. Yet before they were six feet into the tunnel they were gagging for air, their sweat turning the loose earth beneath them into greasy, salty mud. There was hardly room to move, the candle guttered and died in the rancid air and terror closed in with the darkness. The arm with the pick or shovel could only move back so far, the picking at the tunnel face tearing the same muscles time after time, reducing them to red-hot strings of pain. Their beards, hair and mouths became encrusted, unwashable, the dirt pitted into the skin. They felt the dust coat the inside of their lungs, their breath foul for hours afterwards, their racking coughs depositing a scummy yellow layer like vomit. They had reached the foundations after a lifetime of effort, half mad with the pain of their bodies, half mad with the thought of the soft, suffocating fall of earth and a hidden, slow and secret death. The ancient stone had seemed to bounce their feeble blows off its surface. They were tired, all of them. In time they would need money, horses, weapons, armour. Now their greatest need was for more brute strength and muscle. The two new conspirators would give them that at least.

Catesby finished his oration with a final flourish, and sat down, draining the tankard to its dregs in one huge gulp. Catesby did everything, from talking to drinking, as if he had half an hour of life left to him, and had to cram a lifetime's experience into a few minutes. He was a meteor in a dark sky. Jack could not help wonder how long that meteor would sustain its light, before it crashed to earth.

'Well spoken, Robin,' Jack said, going up to Catesby and taking his hand. Catesby had slumped down on a stool, as he sometimes did after one of his orations, as if his job was now done and the effort of speaking had drained him of his life force.

Catesby glanced up at his old friend, and smiled. It was a smile of total warmth that lit up Jack Wright's soul.

'I hope it was well spoken. But it's more than words we need now, Jack, much more than words.'

'We have a plan, don't we?'

'We do indeed,' replied Catesby. 'And there'll be those who'll seek to stop that plan before its rightful conclusion. They must be stopped, Jack. Stamped out like vermin…'

It was easy in talk to make a death seem nothing more than stamping on an insect. It was different when you forced the steel into the soft flesh, heard the shriek of pain, felt a man's dying breath on your face, saw the light fade from his eyes.

Wright shook the new recruits, Wintour and Grant, by the hand, and made his apologies. Both men were well-dressed, obviously prosperous, but both looked dour, old before their time. Jack hoped their muscles were more vigorous than their manner. The presence of the priest, with all the makings of a Mass, made him nervous. They were hunted men, these priests, hiding from one house to another, facing the rack and their innards ripped out if they were discovered, and bringing the same threat to those who hid them.

He slunk out into the late afternoon, feeling the bite of the wind on his flesh through the loose cloak, hand comforted by resting on the hilt of his sword. It would be more than the bite, of wind he would feel if they all played the wrong hand in this particular game of cards.