The Desperate remedy

Chapter 6

Robert Catesby was riding through the gently rolling, lush-green pastures of Worcestershire. He had made good time on his journey to meet Ambrose Rookwood and enlist him into the conspiracy. He had cultivated the friendship of Rookwood for years, waiting for just such a moment. He needed Rookwood's wealth, and the horses that wealth would buy. No-one understood his genius, he mused. There was no-one else who could have had the vision he had, conceived of the plot and welded so many different individuals to it. Well, history would know.

They had abandoned the tunnel. It had come near to killing them, not their victims. It had to be God's will that just as the tunnel had proved impossible the lease on a house with cellars directly under the House of Lords had become available. It was stacked now with powder, hidden under piles of faggots and firewood. With one blasting roar of flame that would light up London and burn for years he would destroy all semblance of government in Britain. Into that vacuum of power he would ride with three hundred men. Horsed, armed and ready, they would first of all sweep up the Princess Elizabeth from her thinly guarded home at Coombe Abbey and offer her as the heir apparent. The same three hundred men, swelled by then with other Catholic supporters, would race through the Midlands and along the Welsh borders where Catholic support was at its strongest, gathering strength all the time. Meanwhile the 1,500 Spanish troops idling at Dover would throw off their pretended stupor and race in turn to Rochester. With no army to oppose them, they would sit astride the Thames and starve London into submission if it failed to support the uprising. Fawkes had promised it would be so, returning from Europe with secret assurances. Catesby and every Catholic who could ride a horse would by that time be streaming in their thousands to the gates of London, whilst Sir William Stanley would be bringing his English Regiment over from Europe, land them at Southampton to underpin the new regime, regardless of Spain's support. Again, Fawkes had confirmed that all they were waiting for was the excuse to move. With Percy acting as intermediary to the Earl of Northumberland, and the threat of all his power sweeping down from the north seemingly assured, God had to be on their side.

Robert Catesby would change the world. He smiled to himself as he urged his horse onwards.

The countryside he rode through was dressed in shades of green, with the increasingly darker and richer colours showing the first heaviness of autumn. The thick woodlands on the tops of the gentle hills contrasted in their untamed wildness with the neat rows of the tilled land in the valleys and the strips of pasture. Seen from the inside of a healthy young body, astride a fine horse and with a thick cloak to hand to keep out the chill of evening when it came, it was truly God's green and pleasant land. One could almost forget the rising tide of persecution that was first of all choking and then surely killing off the great families of England, who for years had asked nothing but peace to worship God in the one and true way of the Faith.

Catesby reined in, and gazed out over the pastoral landscape, with a few wisps of smoke showing the whereabouts of peasant cottages, and a fine stone manor on the hillside exuding calm and authority over the scattered holdings. He imagined his own men pounding through and over the harvest-bare fields, the glinting helmets of the Spanish troops catching the sun as they struck fear and trembling into the hearts of the ignorant peasants in the fields.

If the grand vision was simple, and the grand players in place, it was the detail, as ever, that caused the problems. The men had kept their mouths shut, Catesby knew, but there was talk among the women, and of course among the servants. It could hardly be otherwise. The stockpiling they had already done, under the guidance of John Grant and Robert Wintour, could hardly have gone unnoticed by the womenfolk. The stables were fuller by the minute. There would have to be more horses, more weapons. Most of all, he was desperately short of money, and in particular money for horses.

Well, Catesby had an answer to all those problems, he thought as he rode on his way to Huddington Court, the home of Robert Wintour. You could not defeat gossip, but you could block it by spreading other stories and simply overloading the capacity of the tongues to wag. As for money and horses, there were three names he was prepared to risk as new conspirators now there was so little time left to go for them to get it wrong — Ambrose Rookwood, Sir Everard Digby and Francis Tresham. Three young and moneyed men were about to be persuaded to give God, and Robert Catesby, some of their wealth.

His horse shied as some loose stones dislodged by its passage rattled down the steep embankment upon which he rode. It was a nervous creature, but strong and powerful, and he instinctively leant forward to soothe its nervousness.

Horses were the key. Catesby had timed his visit carefully. Ambrose Rookwood had one of the finest stables of any man in England, and his love of horses was legendary, as was his love of fine clothes. That same love of fine horses meant he would never stay with the women and the others on the recent pilgrimage some forty of them had taken to Winifred's Well at Holt. He would ride on ahead, stopping over at Huddington on the way to his own ancestral home at Coldham Hall. It was a woman's thing, this pilgrimage, thought Catesby, but Rookwood's love of his wife had sent him on it and his desire to drive a good horse hard meant that he would ride ahead on its return. That in turn meant that Catesby would see him without the presence of Elizabeth, his wife. Rookwood was a dandy and a showman, but he listened to his wife, who had a great deal more sense than he did. The last thing Catesby wanted was pillow talk the night after he had enlisted Rookwood.

He rode into the courtyard and handed his horse over to the groom who came rushing up to him. Other men might take their mount to the stables themselves, and see it in its stall, fed and rubbed down. Catesby saw no reason why he should do what a servant could do just as well. He had more important fish to fry, as the small, dark and elegant figure of Rookwood did him the honour of coming down the steps almost dancing with joy, and caught him in a warm embrace, as if it were his house and not Robert Wintour's.

Yes, thought Catesby, as they went arm in arm into the house. You have two things I stand most in need of. You have horses and you have wealth.

Catesby felt a growing excitement as he agreed to a warming cup of wine, even before taking his boots and riding cloak off. The dour Robert Wintour had appeared, radiating as much warmth as if Catesby were Anti-Christ come to visit. Rookwood was chattering on about a new Hungarian riding coat he had just acquired, with its velvet lining. You have a fine fortune and a fine wife, Catesby thought, and enough brats scampering about your home to fill a farmyard. Your days are filled with your fine horses, your fine wife, your fine sons, your hawks and your hounds.

Rookwood brushed aside the servant hovering to take Catesby to his room, as if it was he and not Robert Wintour who was master of Huddington, and strode up the stairs himself in his eagerness to show his friend where he would be resting his head.

Catesby followed his friend up the stairs to his chamber. Once

Catesby had held a loving wife, had the fine son and the fine house warmed with love and happiness, before they were cruelly dragged away from him. Rookwood's family faced destruction and execution from the involvement Catesby brought, the friend with the viper in his pack.

That, thought Catesby, is their problem, not mine. Life dealt cruel blows. Why should Rookwood, Digby or any other body on earth have the happiness that Catesby had been denied? If there was a hint of pleasure in Catesby's damnation of his friend and all that his friend loved and cared for it was a very private emotion, one he chose not to let see the light of day.

Gresham had gone to the cellar where Cecil's spy, Sam Fogarty, was being held until he had strength enough to be carted out of London. The man had cried out in fear as Gresham had entered.

They had been ordered to kill Shadwell, he had said. He did not have to say whose orders these were. He was Cecil's man. They had cornered him finally on the outskirts of Cambridge, stalked him through the night, hurled the body into the river. No, he did not know why the death had been ordered. Why should he and the others be told? Their business was to kill, not to ask why.

By the time he had finished, the man was speaking almost confidently, believing he was useful to Gresham. Gresham looked calmly down at him.

'This is for Will Shadwell,' he said. In one swift movement he lunged with the dagger in his hand, penetrating the eye exactly in the centre of the pupil and driving upwards until the splintering sound of bone told him he had carved through the soft brain to the skull. It was the blow that had killed Will Shadwell. As the man fell he flung his arms out, hands facing up to the ceiling as if in supplication. They were still trembling. Gresham pulled the dagger away, and stood up.

Jane had woken in the night, as he had known she would. He had held her as the truth had returned, bringing on wracking sobs, imagining it to be like holding a woman through the pangs of birth. Yet it was not a child that had been born from her, but knowledge. Later, at night, they had made love, gently, in the way that she had taught him for the times when the edge was gone from their violent, urgent need for each other's bodies. It had seemed as if his whole body had poured its passion and its intensity into that one focal moment of release, met by her soft cry. For a few seconds after that moment, even sometimes for a few minutes, Gresham felt at peace, the demons inside him stilled. So it was with Jane, he suspected. A new demon was in her, a shared demon. How it would fit with the others inside her head, the restless spirits whose nature he could only guess at, only Jane would know. There would be no more tears for others to see, Gresham knew. She had killed a man. She would learn, like him, to cry inside her head.

He needed to hide, to take cover, to go to ground. Yet at the same time he needed London and the access it gave to his network of spies.

He woke with his mind clear. Breakfast over, he spoke with Jane and Mannion, his tone clipped and definite.

'Raleigh was right. We have to lie low, to hide ourselves until we can find out what all this is about. We're moving, to Alsatia,' he announced. 'Or rather, I am moving. Jane, you can stay here. If you do, you'll be well protected, as protected as money and men can make you. Even then, we can't guarantee there won't be an assault on the House, or more likely a fire to drive you out and into the arms of whoever wants purchase against me. In Alsatia we'll be on our own. Safer, for a while, until our identity leaks out. Yet more in danger, from those we'll be surrounded by. Not to mention plague and pestilence.'

He looked at her, noting her chin jut out just that little bit further as he spoke, sensing as much as seeing the head tilt upwards. 'I come with you, my Lord, if you'll have me.' 'So be it.'

Alsatia lay between Whitefriars and Carmelite Street. No constable or night watchman ever troubled the narrow streets of Alsatia, no law enforcement agency ever lightened its paths. It was a haven for any criminal escaping the hue and cry. Authority in Alsatia lay in a man's brute force and cunning. A force of order, but never law, was more or less enforced by whatever criminal warlord had dominance at any given time, but mastery could change hands three or four times in a year as rival groups and gangs fought their silent and bitter wars out of sight of any judge or jury. Unlike other areas such as Southwark, where the brothels and gambling dens could flourish until the law took notice of them, Alsatia offered little or no entertainment, merely a kennel where wild dogs could hide and lick their wounds, if they were not first killed by their own kind also in hiding. It ranked with the brick kilns of Islington and the Savoy, its distinction being that of all the human cesspits in London. Alsatia was the most foul and the most extreme, talked about with bated breath by the good citizens of London, and with the reddest flush of embarrassment if ever mentioned by a woman.

'But first I have another shorter journey. To my Lord Cecil.'

There was a gasp of breath from Jane. Mannion looked glum, and sucked at his tooth with the hole in it. Whenever Gresham took a decision Mannion thought was ill-advised, a piece of flesh or bread always seemed magically to reappear in that tooth.

'Surely not!' said Jane, emboldened by shock and fear. 'He must be behind all this! What madness is it to walk into his parlour!'

'It is madness, which is why he won't consider it, because it's something he would never do himself. That's why he's not his father's son. Oh, he'll plot and scheme and poison and murder, but he's cautious, always cautious. He thinks all men are lesser versions of himself. He's at his weakest when dealing with someone totally unlike him, someone who's never thought like him in all his life.'

Gresham took Mannion and four men with him to see Cecil. Unusually, he rode the cumbersome great coach that his father had ordered. It was a monstrous machine, and made every rut and canyon in the roadway seem three times deeper than it was. It was fit only for old men tottering their way from one visit to another, or fine ladies too fat or too well-bred to walk or mount a horse, and Gresham hated it. Yet it had solid walls and was defensible, with its very cumbersome nature turning it into a fortress on wheels when under attack.

It was fitting that a man with Imperial ambitions lived in a palace. Gresham barged his way through to the ante-chamber. With the King returned from Oxford, and happily killing as many wild animals as he could find in Royston, Gresham knew Cecil would be sitting at the centre of his web. A crowd of hopefuls were waiting kicking their heels, desperate for an audience.

Gresham approached the Clerk sitting like a little God at his desk.

'The King's Chief Secretary is far too busy to see those who come without prior arrangement,' announced the Clerk, sniffing through an elongated nose whilst looking down it at Gresham. 'If you insist I will take details of your petition,' he added in a tone that made it clear the petition was doomed never to meet his Lordship's eyes. A host of other eyes focused on Gresham, from the threadbare old man with a tattered bundle of papers clutched in his hand to the gallant in fine silk and satin but with a haunted look in his restless eyes. The place stank of fear, of despair and of lost hopes.

Gresham leant over and whispered something in the Clerk's ear. His eyebrows rose until they were entangled in his hair. The Chief Clerk to the King's Chief Secretary scuttled off to knock hesitantly on the guarded door. He emerged a short while later, looking even more flustered, and bowed to Gresham, ushering him in. Mannion remained outside, impassive.

Cecil was alone. It was possible that he might have had a hurriedly dismissed floozy with him, more likely one of the wild Irish harpers whose music he had so taken to. The expensive hangings could have concealed any numbers of doors. How could a man with so much ugliness in his soul have so much love of fine art and music? thought Gresham. Yet somehow Gresham doubted Cecil had been with anyone. Cecil simply liked to keep people waiting, and he fed on the anxiety and desperation of those parked outside his door, almost as if the power to deny them his presence confirmed the very power that he held.

The setting was different from the room where Cecil met his spies. It was opulent, with the hangings alone worth a small fortune. It was vast, the mullioned windows letting in bars of strong sunlight that glowed on the richly polished table in the centre of the room. Cecil sat in a huge, ornately carved chair at the head of the table. The usual mass of papers was spread before him. Why so many papers, thought Gresham, for a man with the most ruthless memory he had ever known? Ten perfectly carved matching oak chairs were ranged each side of the table, with a single, simpler chair at the end of the table. Ordered around the room were twenty or so other chairs, each worth a yeoman's ransom. The message was clear. This was a room that dwarfed the individual. It spoke of meetings of powerful men, of decisions taken by rulers.

It was also a room where clearly the petitioner was meant to sit at the end of the table with a vast lump of gleaming wood between him and the Chief Secretary. Gresham, who was never good at obeying orders spoken or unspoken, simply stepped round and marched up the side of the table.

Was there a flicker of fear in Cecil's gimlet eyes? It was difficult to say, the damned table was so long and Cecil so far away from the door.

Gresham walked the length of the table, remembering to drag his feet a little. He stopped by the side of Cecil, pulled out an adjacent chair and casually seated himself, as if drawing up a chair to his oldest friend. As he did so he pulled his sword scabbard aside with just a touch more force than was strictly necessary.

'Do sit down,' Cecil said softly, making a vague motion with his hand, long after Gresham had done so. There was no sign of anger that the man he had tried to kill was here, alive, seated in front of him.

'Thank you, my Lord,' said Gresham, gracefully.

There was a silence. It stretched into an uncomfortably long time. Gresham sat calmly, a quizzical smile on his face, his eyes never leaving Cecil's impenetrable black gaze.

Cecil broke first. 'You did ask to see me, I believe?'

'Did I?' said Gresham, in a surprised tone. 'My apologies, my Lord. A number of your servants have attempted to make contact with me, and so I assumed the invitation was yours. I wondered perhaps if you wished news of Sir Walter Raleigh, your Lordship's old friend?'

'My servants?' said Cecil, apparently equally surprised, and ignoring the gibe about Raleigh. He knew Gresham's relationship with the most distinguished prisoner in the Tower. 'You surprise me, Sir Henry. I was not aware of sending any servants to speak with you.'

No, thought Gresham, you just sent a group of ruffians to murder me. I suppose you could call them your servants.

'That is certainly true, my Lord,' replied Gresham, 'as the servants in question did not have the holding of speech with me as their first priority.'

'I am surprised, therefore, that these speechless creatures were able to identify themselves as my servants. Are you sure in your surmise? I would be angered indeed if there were those seeking to impersonate servants of His Majesty the King's Chief Secretary.'

Mistake, Gresham thought. Your first mistake. You should not need to use your rank to boost your credibility.

'I would not worry overmuch, my Lord.'

'And why should that be, sir?' enquired Cecil, raising one thin eyebrow and feigning boredom despite the patronising impertinence of Gresham's tone.

'The scoundrels in question were an unhealthy lot. Indeed, I believe all but two of them died of a sudden, one is near to death and another broke a limb.'

Let Cecil think one of the murderers lived on. All the bodies could not have been washed up yet, and even Cecil could not keep a count of every body in the Thames…

'How very unfortunate,' mused Cecil.

‘Not at all, my Lord,' replied Gresham. 'Rather I view it now as God's justice on any soul impertinent enough to pretend to be in your Lordship's employ. Thanks be to God.'

'Well, well,' said Cecil, flatly. 'This has been most interesting. Most interesting.' His tone suggested it had been as interesting as an examination of his master's scrotum. 'But do tell me, as you are here, how things go with the investigation of… Sir Francis Bacon.'

Gresham leant forward, suddenly, conspiratorially. Even the icy control of Cecil could not stop him from a sudden, sharp movement back in his seat.

'I have it on the firmest evidence,' said Gresham with total sincerity, 'that he is the Fiend incarnate.'

'How so?' said Cecil, revealing more interest than he intended.

'It is said that he possesses the Philosopher's Stone, the alchemist's secret, the magic stone that turns all it touches to gold. There is one problem, and one problem alone.'

Cecil's avarice overcame his intelligence. 'Problem?' he said, his eyebrows knitted together in concentration. 'What problem?'

'In its present refinement Sir Francis's stone will turn to gold only the turds of members of the true aristocracy. He has tried it on all manner of substances, and on all manner of turds, but it will only work with those produced from men of the highest breeding.'

Gresham stared hard at Cecil. Cecil's family was of low birth, brought to ascendancy by the mind and not the breeding of Cecil's father, old Lord Burghley.

'This is a problem indeed, my Lord, because as my Lord knows better than I, there are many cheap and imitation Lords about the place nowadays, my Lord, Lords who claim, my Lord, high birth and breeding but who are only lately come into their Lordships, my Lord, and have no more breeding than a turd. My Lord.'

If ever hate could bum a hole in a man's eye sockets there is smoke in your eyes now, thought Gresham.

'Clearly,' Gresham continued, relaxing against the hard back of the chair, 'this matter is of equal importance to the enquiry into Sir Francis Bacon's sodomite tendencies, a matter which I know carries the highest importance to the welfare of the nation. Indeed, one part of the anatomy seems to turn up wherever one looks in the case of Sir Francis. I shall enlarge the scope of my enquiries to cover both areas, so to speak.'

Cecil was stockstill, as if frozen. Gresham could see the tick, tick of the pulse in his neck. It was double Gresham's pulse.

I think you do not have a very great sense of humour, Chief Secretary to the King, particularly where the butt of die humour is yourself.

'On less serious matters, I must report, my Lord, that I have been experiencing minor difficulties in the conduct of my investigation.'

Cecil's eyes had gone on a brief journey to Hell, noted the suffering that could be inflicted on a human body, and returned to the land of the living with renewed enthusiasm, particularly as they looked at Gresham.

'Do tell me,' he said, in a voice of coach wheels on gravel.

'I suspect the wicked Sir Francis has detected my enquiries.'

Let's play you at your own game, thought Gresham, bluff and double bluff. Let Sir Francis be my code for Robert Cecil. Let's see your mind race to break that code.

'Sir Francis has set men to spy upon me and scoundrels to murder me. I believe he has also forged letters in my hand, purporting to show me as a Papist.'

'Good heavens!' said Cecil softly. 'Such wickedness!'

'I know, my Lord,' said Gresham, shaking his head in sadness, 'such wickedness is almost beyond the imagining of men of good conscience such as you and me. However, I am reassured in my heart. You see, I have weapons against such villainy.'

'You do?' enquired Cecil, his voice caressing Gresham.

'I do, my Lord. You see,' he leant forward to whisper the information near to Cecil's ear, 'I have letters from Sir Francis to the Infanta of Spain offering his support to her claim to succeed Her Majesty the Queen upon Her Majesty's most untimely death — whilst at the same time he was expressing his total loyal service to His Majesty King James when His Majesty was King of Scotland! Can you imagine such infamous double-dealing from a servant of the Crown! And what is more, these letters have Sir Francis's very own personal seal on them, the seal he never lets off his hand. They are potent proof, beyond the wit of even the best forger.'

'And how,' said Cecil in a voice that was almost also a whisper, 'did you acquire these letters?'

'I murdered the messenger that was taking them to Spain, as he sought to board a ship in Dover,' said Gresham flatly. 'You will understand, I am sure, my Lord. We servants of the King have sometimes to take drastic action to preserve the peace. They are good letters, remember. The hand and the style are unmistakable, and, as I said, they are sealed with… Sir Francis's seal. His special signet. I believe he uses it still.'

Gresham did not glance at the signet ring on Cecil's finger, the ring containing his personal seal. Nor did Cecil.

'Yet Sir Francis could still do you great harm, Sir Henry. The Papist threat is ever with us. You would do well not to be implicated.'

It had taken very little time for Cecil to pick up the code.

'That is true, my Lord. But were you ever familiar with the work of that great rogue, Kit Marlowe? The lines are from his Doctor Faustus. I believe it is Mephistopheles who speaks them.

"It is great consolation to the damned to have companions in distress."

If Sir Francis succeeds in implicating me, I know of course I would have your Lordship's support in any charges brought against me. Your Lordship has always supported his friends.'

Take that in Raleigh's name, and for his sake!

‘Not to mention the support of several Bishops in the House of Lords who know my fervent Anglicanism. Even were that mighty support to fail, I would at least have the comfort of knowing that I would drag my accuser down to Hell alongside of me.'

'So many secrets, Sir Henry. So many secrets,' mused Cecil. His eyes swivelled back from the window where they had rested their gaze, and fixed on Gresham. There was no change in the tone of his voice, or the posture of his body.

'Tell me, does Sir Francis know that you once sodomised a young man in the Low Countries, and that the young man in question was executed in a most gruesome manner when you refused to acknowledge your crime? I am sure that your… niece knows what happened. I understand you are very close to her. And that servant of yours… and the students in the fine College you have endowed in Cambridge, and its Fellows. It is in the nature of academics to be forgiving, of course, and they and students never gossip or laugh at a man… how could they, when their studies bring them so close to God? No, I am sure those who have cause to love you will find forgiveness in their hearts, should this thing become known…'

The sinking feeling, as if given a sudden blow to the stomach. He had known it would come. This was what had been in the papers Cecil had stolen from Walsingham, in the paper that Cecil had produced in order to blackmail him into going on that stupid mission overseas so long ago. He had steeled himself for it, knew that Cecil would not be able to resist playing his final card. It was a victory over Cecil, after all. It was Cecil declaring his hand, when he, Gresham, had cards in hiding still. Victory; yet it hurt still like the pains of Hell.

No-one looking at Gresham's neck would have seen the tick of his pulse increase. There was no film of sweat on his brow. Knowing that the human eye could sense the tiniest tightening of muscle — it was the sense that had kept him alive on several occasions — he forced his muscles to relax, kept himself draped nonchalantly over his chair.

'You are kind in your concern for my past, my Lord, and for my future. As it is, I told Sir Francis Bacon of the incident to which you refer.'

The tiniest, tiniest flicker of a muscle in Cecil's eye… Always start a lie with a truth…

'And my niece and servant know everything I know and everything I have been…'

Which if I have knocked you off your guard you will not realise does not include everything I have done… Now. Now was the time. Now he signed his death warrant, or arranged a little longer life for himself, for Jane and for Mannion…

'Yet you are correct, my Lord. I know my secrets are safe with such as your Lordship, yet it would cause me grief if some were to know of what you speak. There is a further matter.'

It was vital that Gresham injected the right blend of bitterness, near-shame and worry into his voice if he was to be believed.

'I am… ill, my Lord.'

'You are?' said Cecil, coming to life, and with a gleam of hope in his voice. 'I am saddened to hear it.'

For only the briefest moment Gresham was tempted to confess to the plague, if only to see how fast Cecil could run.

'It is… a growth, my Lord, here in my side.' It was actually a penny loaf, strapped to his side whilst still warm from the kitchens, but producing a suitable lump just under his ribcage, bulging under his satin doublet. Thank God Cecil did not keep hounds in his hall. They would have sniffed at the doublet and in all probability tried to drag the bread from under his shirt.

'I am told it is serious. It would have been most interesting to pursue Sir Francis, to enact revenge for his assaults on my person, but unless I obtain total rest I am assured that I will do to myself what Sir Francis's men tried to do to me. I am leaving London, my Lord, with those closest to me. It will be difficult for Sir Francis to find me out. I am practised in hiding. Should I be pursued or harried any more I have made arrangements for the letters I mentioned to be delivered to someone who hates him, and who will guarantee sight of them to the King.'

That would set Cecil dunking. The list of men with good cause to hate him would stretch three times round Whitehall and still reach all the way to the Tower. And they did say the King liked younger men, men with straight bodies and golden hair…

'I wish you a full and speedy recovery, Sir Henry. You are master of your own affairs. But if indeed you propose to "vanish", as you put it, I am sure Sir Francis would not over-exert himself in finding you. He will feel, I am sure, that his point has been made. Men such as he hate meddlers, do they not?'

'It would appear that men such as Sir Francis Bacon do not just hate meddlers, my Lord. It would appear they try to murder them.' Gresham drew a deep breath. 'Which leads on to my final question, my Lord.

'Why was Will Shadwell killed?'

Gresham put the ragged edge on his voice, forced the sweat to coat his forehead. A man required to control too much, a man for whom serious illness and the ordeal of a growth being hacked from his side was pushing him over the edge, a man desperate to clear his affairs in the knowledge that he might not be of this earth for too much longer — all these Gresham tried to cram into his question.

‘Shadwell?' said Cecil. 'Shadwell? I do not think I…'

'My Lord!' Gresham interrupted him, made his breathing heavy, short, let his hand creep to his side as to contain pain. 'Enough of this play-acting! It was a game I played once. I am not the person I hope to be at this time. I lack patience. Time is not my friend. Will Shadwell was murdered, on your orders. The murderer has sworn this is so. Will Shadwell was my man. Foul thing he may have been, but he was bound to me as my servant. He who kills my servant stains my honour. I have redeemed that honour by killing the man who killed Shadwell. Can we for this once speak plain? Why did my man have to die?'

There was a long, long silence. Would the fencing cease? Would he ever get a straight statement from Cecil? Cecil moved his gaze away from Gresham, the eyes seeming almost sightless, resting somewhere beyond even this room. What is passing through his mind? thought Gresham. What certainties, what agonies of decision? What happens inside the mind of such a man as Robert Cecil?

'Imagine a land,' said Cecil, getting to his feet, 'a troubled land. A very troubled land.' His voice was soft, whispering almost, a tone Gresham had never heard. Cecil walked slowly, almost limping, to a portrait hanging on the wall opposite the window. He is in pain, thought Gresham. He finds it hard to walk. He hides this pain, but now for a moment he has forgotten to hide. The portrait was of a young woman. The old Queen, Queen Elizabeth, Gresham saw.

'Imagine a land,' said Cecil, looking up at the portrait, 'that deludes itself into a sense of its greatness. A poor land with powerful neighbours, threatened always from without and from within. A land with no obvious ruler to take over. Let us imagine that a ruler is found, at last. An experienced ruler, a ruler who has survived in a colder and even bleaker land, a ruler who offers some hope of peace and stability. Such a ruler is a treasure, to be guarded and preserved. Yet all things come at a price. In this imaginary land this imaginary ruler is… troubled by women. His upbringing has not left him at peace with women. He prefers the company of men. And it is rumoured, in the vile way that such rumours will grow, the company of boys.'

'And Will Shadwell?' Gresham's voice had also dropped almost to a whisper.

'Scum. The scum who for countless ages have greased and oiled the wheels of power with their rank sweat, and their blood. And let us imagine that one of these scum, a perverted, evil creature, a creature who lies with women and yet who lies with boys and men, believes he has found a boy… hurt by this ruler. Found him, lain with him, and now wants money to silence him.'

Cecil moved back to the table, and sat down, heavily. His hooded eyes looked at Gresham, with the nearest thing to passion in them Gresham had seen in him.

'A Minister to a King may be threatened, and he may fence, parry and lunge, may battle with his wits against his enemies. But a King, a King is different. No man, be he scum or be he noble, can challenge a King. No man who threatens a King can live. The King's health is the nation's health. Whatever threatens that health must itself die.'

Gresham spoke softly. 'There is no threat to a King from me. Nor ever has been.' He paused. 'There would have been no threat even had Will spoken with me. Will never spoke. He had no time. And you were worried about a note, or some secret letter from Will to me? Was that why my rooms were ransacked in the House?'

Cecil was silent. Both men took the silence as meaning yes.

'Well now, there's an irony would have appealed to Will. You see, I know my men. I know those who work for me. And I know that Will Shadwell could neither read nor write to save his life.'

He stood up, remembering to make it look painful, and left without ceremony given or received. Cecil was standing by the window, motionless, as the great door closed.

He had told the truth about Will Shadwell to Cecil, at any rate. If Cecil had bothered to check, instead of simply ordering Shadwell and Gresham murdered, he would have found Shadwell could neither read nor write. As for Cecil's tale, it could be true, or it could be another lie. Thomas Percy was a newly appointed Gentleman of the Bedchamber, better able than most to supply details of who entered the King's inner chamber. Cecil probably did think he was protecting the realm from its enemies by all he did, that he was the saviour of the nation.

Mannion was waiting for him. The crowd of hopefuls had not diminished.

'Now for Alsatia?' enquired Mannion, expressionless. 'Now for Alsatia,' confirmed Gresham, remembering to limp slightly as if in pain from the load strapped to his belly until they were well away from Cecil's lair, and sure they were not being followed.

There was no Watch to call out the hour in Alsatia. No constable or serjeant-at-arms entered Alsatia to serve his warrant. There were no walls around Alsatia, yet its boundaries excluded friends of the state just as the iron walls of the Tower excluded its enemies. If London was a fine ship, Alsatia was its bilges, the lowest sump where all that was foul-smelling gathered and stank. Gresham's spies, his scum, came to the various meeting places in ones and twos, draped and cloaked not against the cold but against discovery and recognition. No-one walked straight in Alsatia. All skulked along in the shade of the leaning, stinking buildings, all sought to walk in shadow.

The House lay shuttered, many of the servants sent home to the country to help with the harvest. The dust gathered in Gresham's rooms at Granville College, his place on High Table empty.

Gresham had set up camp on the first floor of a foul-looking three-storey house with mildew rotting the outer timbers. Inside it was a different story. Stout new doors blocked the way into the first-floor rooms, which were newly floored. The shutters of seasoned timber had had paint loosely splashed on them to make them look old, but underneath the mess were also clearly new.

'You've had these rooms prepared?' asked Jane. She looked thinner, and there was still a slightly haunted look to her eyes, but her spirit was returning.

'Of course,' said Gresham, genuinely startled. 'This isn't the first time I've had to vanish.'

The pile of books in the corner was one antidote to boredom. Disguise was the other. Mannion adorned himself in the rough jerkin and cowl of the stonemason, tools strapped to his belt. Gresham wrapped himself in a poorer version of Mannion's costume, setting himself up as apprentice to the older man. Jane they put in a filthy smock. She could be a common-law wife, a whore or even a sister to Gresham. In Alsatia no-one cared, and in the wider streets of London no-one had time to notice.

Slowly, excruciatingly slowly, the information dribbled in, often as tattered and piecemeal as those who brought it. It was three weeks of boredom, of trudging through the filthy streets, of keeping two eyes in the back of their heads, of disturbed nights when a scream or a howl sent Gresham and Mannion grasping for their swords. Three weeks before a real picture began to emerge. Most of it came from servants, of course. There was no house where the servants did not know more than their Lord and mistress about what was going on.

Sharpy Sam was one of Gresham's most valuable sources. An elderly, grandfatherly figure, he was a wandering tinker who would sell you an occasional pot or pan and sharpen your knives, or sing you the latest ballad over supper, and was tolerated by the authorities in his illegal wandering life simply because he was useful. Many an unsuspecting scullery maid had taken pity on Sharpy Sam and invited him for a morsel of food and a warm by the fire, to find herself left a short while later with a memory of pleasure and a bastard in her belly.

Gresham knew Sam's annual progress. The Midlands and the west in high summer, London in late autumn and the south coast for the winter months. He had sent one of his own men, a young, lusty recruit with a love of horseflesh and women, to ride hard after Sam and brief him with the same names Moll had given him. Catesby. Kit Wright. Jack Wright. Tom Wintour. Thomas Percy. And Francis Tresham, of course. Even before Sam presented himself to talk to Gresham there was news enough, so much news indeed that Gresham marvelled at even Cecil's not finding it out. The men had been meeting regularly. They were all Catholics, all linked by blood or by marriage, and frequently by both. Then, out of the blue, a greasy John at one of the taverns in the Strand reported another name. Guido or Guy Fawkes, an armourer and mercenary.

The name and his profession clinched it for Gresham.

Why did a group of Catholics, many of whom had a history of rebellion only a few years earlier with the ill-fated Essex, want to meet with a soldier and armourer? Such men knew about weapons, armour and powder. The presence of one of Northumberland's relatives and henchmen had to be crucial. So did the servant gossip of great stocks of weaponry and horses over and above any conceivable need being laid in.

A group of dissident men in regular conclave. A professional soldier. A potential leader drawn from one of the oldest aristocratic families in the kingdom. Weapons and war supplies being bought in.

It had to be an uprising.

With the Spanish troops quartered in Dover? Possibly. Was Northumberland involved? He was the only Catholic with the breeding and the standing to act as Protector if King James was done away with. If Gresham were in Northumberland's rich shoes, he would not bother with the Spanish troops in Dover, except as perhaps a distant threat to divert Cecil's attention. Rather he would turn not only to all the young English Catholic men blooding themselves and defining their manhood in the European wars, but to all the disaffected soldiers in Europe who might smell easy meat in knocking a new Scottish King off an English throne. After all, had not a Catholic ambassador described James in the hearing of his court as 'a scabbard without a sword'? Europe was more scared of Queen Bess than they were of James. Scottish Kings were brought up to defend themselves by a knife in the back, not a cavalry charge to the front. There was nothing approaching an army in England, and the only man left to build and lead a fleet was Sir Walter Raleigh, languishing in the Tower on a trumped-up charge of treason.

Gresham paced up and down the small room, spilling his thoughts to Jane and Mannion.

'It must be an uprising!' he exclaimed. 'These men aren't courtiers, men who wish to rule! They're gentry, foolish idealists, men who think because they've held a sword and fought off a drunken ploughboy in a market-town brawl that they're soldiers. I don't believe the Earl of Northumberland could stir himself to be King if he was asked by Jesus himself! No, their plot must be to kidnap the King. He makes it easy. The man's besotted with hunting. Where easier to grab a monarch than in a forest where his men are bound to be split up? Take him, hold him in some stronghold with two or three hundred well-armed men. Move your mercenaries and your missionaries over from the Lowlands before a navy or an army can be mustered. The King's a coward. Show him some cold steel, prick him a little, make him sign what you will. Make him call a Parliament, make him promise God on earth to the people. Ride him in state back to London… they will have to kill Cecil, of course…'

Gresham's mind was racing ahead, as it always did, plotting the moves he himself would have undertaken in order to turn the uprising into a new government.

'Would it work?' The question was Mannion's.

'It could be made to work. I must meet these men, this Catesby and this Tresham above all. Then I will know.'

Then, almost at the end of September, Sharpy Sam had sent a message to the House for Gresham to meet him, in a Deptford tavern a stone's throw away from where Kit Marlowe's murder was meant to have taken place.

Sam was a Devon man with a deep burr in his voice. Like most of his kind he was a pirate at heart, but for some reason had turned from the sea twenty years past to take up his wandering trade.

'They were on a pilgrimage,' he had told Gresham over their third flagon of ale. He spoke slowly, measuring every word as if it had a value. 'Would you believe it? As bold as brass they were, some forty of them, paradin' through the marches as if they owned the land, priests in tow. Not as some of them looked like priests, as I remember,' he said disapprovingly. He took a pull of his ale, rolling the taste around his tongue before swallowing it. 'I made for Huddington, thinkin' I'd let them come to me instead of my chasin' all over the countryside, and got myself taken indoors. There's no doubt the servants and womenfolk are all a-twitter — more horses in the stable than the Duke of Parma, more swords than the Armada. They says it's for the young folk to go an' fight with the Archduke. Archpiss, if you ask me. More like that lot want the Archduke over here, rapin', lootin' and pillagin'.' The phrase obviously rang a bell with Sharpy, who repeated it, rolling it around his mouth like the ale. 'Rapin', lootin' and pillagin'.'

'Disgraceful,' said Gresham, 'all this rapin', lootin' and pillagin'.' There was a sniff that could have been a splutter from Jane, but which turned into a loudly blown nose. She was parked behind Gresham, dirt all over her face, and training herself to look longingly at the beer the men were drinking. 'Noisy girl, isn't she?' enquired Sharpy. 'Nice tits, though,' he added approvingly, and grinned at her. If Sharpy realised that Gresham had suddenly acquired an inability to put a 'g' on the end of his words, he did not show it

'Well, there's two bits of news as might interest you. The first is that man Catesby. Handsome bugger, fancies himself. Pure luck, as it happens. I was down at Huddington — that cook they 'ave, she's special in the kitchen and special up against an apple tree — when this Catesby rides in to see his friend, Rookwood. He'd come ahead, seein' as he likes fine horseflesh, and likes to ride them hard. Lovely boy, Rookwood. Dressed like a paint shop. Talk is among his servants, Catesby gets going with Rookwood, he comes over all miserable, spends the night on his knees in a tiny room there, one candle. He's mumblin' a prayer, and they tries to listen. Can't hear much, except somethin' about "God's vengeance" and a "great enterprise" and "preserve my family". That put the fear of God into the servants' hall, I can tell you. Well, anyhow, next mornin' Rookwood takes a great mass o' money out of his chest and gives it to this Catesby. Catesby's up to somethin', that's sure.

An' it's somethin' that needs a ton of money, that's sure as well. I bin there with Essex and his bunch, I were there with Babington and his bunch, I seen it and I smelt it before. It's rebellion, I tell you, the stupid buggers. Some people don't deserve to be born with heads on their bodies. Should be taken off at birth, to save the hangman the trouble later on!' 'There was other news, Sharpy?'

'Right enough. Another tankard of this would be welcome… thanks. That boy Tresham you asked after? News is, his father's dead. Not before time, by the sound of it. Pompous old bugger, they says as know. Left a ton of debt, but young Francis got a pretty penny still. Not before time. They say as how he's up to his young neck in debt. 'E's a bastard, that one. Tried to do in a pregnant girl, fiddled his father out of land.'

'I don't think I'm going to like this Francis Tresham,' said Jane.

'I think you'd better pray to God you never meet him!' answered Gresham.

The house in Alsatia was starting to feel like home, Gresham thought ruefully as they finally made it back there from Deptford. It was not the house that depressed him, he knew, as he mounted the stairs and slumped down on a chair, the black mood mounting in him.

Mannion went downstairs, to bring them wine.

'Does it matter, this uprising?' Jane had tuned in to his mood, was trying to tease the melancholy out of him without seeming to do so. 'All Kings and Queens are rotten,' she said calmly, in a sweeping generalisation that Gresham noted as disposing of humanity's favoured form of government for several thousand years past. 'Look at our King. His legs can't hold up his body, his tongue's too big for his mouth so he slobbers like a baby and his clothes are as ragged as the jewels he places on them are bright. He stinks and he's lousy. He learnt his statecraft in a small nation that's only learned to survive by alliance with France and by murdering its rulers, and so he negotiates a treaty with Spain instead of realising that we're victors over Spain and a great power now in our own right. His wife has no brains and his favourites no balls… excuse my language… are we worse off if he's knocked off his throne?'

'You know Machiavelli? The books I gave you?'

'I've read them, yes.'

'And?' enquired Gresham.

'He's like most men. He thinks he's talking about everyone but he's actually only talking about himself. He's arrogant, so he spoils a good idea by claiming too much for it.'

Gresham thought for a moment. 'Machiavelli was captured and tortured when his Prince failed to be ruthless and strong. We don't need leaders who are good, or beautiful, or kind, or generous. We need leaders who're effective. Most of all we need peace. Stability.'

'You sound like Cecil, if what you told me about your little chat with him was true. How can you say that, who was brought up to war? You, who've lived your whole life as if it were a war? You, who of all people I know seem to exult in a fight?'

'Because I know for what I fight.'

'And what might that be?'

He sat in silence for a moment, reflective.

T fight to survive. It's all I can do. It's all I know. You, me, Cecil, we think we're in control, but really we're all actors in a play written by a madman, a play with no meaning and no sense. I know we can't win that fight, I know death is more powerful than any of us — but at least if I fight to survive I haven't given in. That way, death at least takes me on my terms. None of us can make the sun stand still. Yet we can make it run.'

'Is that why you fight Cecil?'

'I'm fighting him firstly because if I don't, I die. We've a truce at present, while he thinks I'm ill, but what he tried once he could well try again. The more I can find out about what he doesn't want me to know, the better armed I am against him.'

'Yet you could destroy him.' Jane said it as a simple matter of fact.

'I could destroy Cecil, I think, rather than merely keep him at bay. I choose not to. This isn't just about his life, or my life. For all his evil and his double-dealing, for all that he sums up everything I hold in contempt in a man's lust for power and wealth, his very evil helps hold the country together. It is as Machiavelli says. A man doesn't have to be pure to be a good ruler. He merely has to rule, and if in so doing he consigns his soul to Hell, then that's the price he pays for his worldly power. I fight Cecil only when he fights me, and when he ceases to rule well and with power. If there's an uprising planned and he can't see what's brewing, then I'll fight his ignorance only.'

'Is that all?' asked Jane. 'Would you fight for me?'

'I'd do more than fight for you,' he said simply. 'I'd die for you.' It was a simple statement of fact, uttered with no sense of drama. 'But I fight for someone else as well.'

‘I'd rather hoped I was the only one…' said Jane, who to her obvious irritation had managed to get something in her eye that was making it water.

'I fight for John Plowman, thin-wrapped in the bitter cold, pissing in the field in which he works and coming home with his hands bitten and scarred by the very plough that feeds him and his family and his Lord. For Meg Milkmaid, who's there waiting for John Plowman as he comes home. He may growl at her, or he may kiss her, or he may have her against her will, but that's in the way of things, that's how we were made, that's how we were meant to be. I know there are few freedoms in their lives — no freedom from hunger, from pain, from illness or from a corrupt and vengeful master. Yet they've some choice, and they make some choices. There's a freedom in the air they breathe, in the sight of cold blue light on a frosty morning, in the first leap of a fish in Spring. There's something good in their children, ragged-arsed though they be, some good in the work they do.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'He's right, mistress.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All that remained now was to kidnap Tresham.

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

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

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

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