The rebel heart

Chapter 4

Late June, 1598 Scotland

'I hate bloody Scotland!' said Mannion glumly.

'How can you hate it? You've never been there.'

'Don't have to 'ave bin somewhere to know you hate it.'

They were riding side by side, nearly at the moorings where the Anna lay ready to slip her anchor. The slaughterhouses at Deptford were pouring blood and offal into the river, turning the near shore-side sections of it a stinking brown. The ships jostled against each other in the moorings, the squeak and rattle of rigging vying with the thousand and one noises of a busy mooring. The slop of the waves on the stone steps was reassuring, but even they seemed tired. The day had turned heavy, hot and humid, with thick grey cloud lowering over London. There was nowhere for the air to go, and the stench of the slaughterhouses hung everywhere, sticking to clothes like an invisible devilish glue.

Gresham suspected that one reason for Mannion's reluctance to travel was that a relationship with one of the cooks in The House was starting to get interesting. The woman, recently widowed when her drunken husband fell into the Thames, was both good-looking and a good cook. The combination of sex and food was about as close to a vision of heaven as Mannion could go.

'Madge'll still be there when you get back, old man,' said Gresham with a singular lack of sympathy. 'Anyway, she's still in mourning for her husband, isn't she? Though why anyone would mourn for that drunken lout I'll never know. And how did he kill himself falling in? He came here looking for a job as a boatman and swore he could swim.'

'Tide was out when he fell in,' said Mannion. 'Twelve foot drop. Pity really.' Mannion's voice contained no shred of pity whatsoever. 'It's all silt down there, 'cept there's one rock within about a mile. He fell 'ead first onto it. The sharp bit of it. Stupid bugger.'

'Madge must have been heartbroken,' said Gresham drily.

Mannion did not see the joke, or chose not to see it. 'Bloody ecstatic, more like. She'd been tryin' to kill him for years. Anyway, that's not why I hate bloody Scotland.'

'Well,' sighed Gresham 'you're clearly going to tell me, so why not get it off your chest now and then we can all have some peace?'

'I hate it,' said Mannion, 'because it's cold, it's wet and it's a bloody long way away. And they eat oats boiled in water, cold with salt on top. And there's midges, and the beer's lousy. And,' he continued, warming to his point — it was clear he had been asking around in' the taverns, 'they say as 'ow the people in the lowlands are all miserable bastards who don't like drink or dancing and wear black all the time, and those in the mountains are mad as hatters and so pissed by nine in the morning that they can't give you the time o' day.'

'Well, that last bit sounds attractive for someone like you.'

'I enjoy a drink,' said Mannion. 'When 'ave you ever seen me out for the count as a result of it? I likes to experience my pleasures.'

Never, now Gresham came to think of it. Which was quite extraordinary, as he had never seen anyone capable of drinking as much as Mannion. A surprising number of conversations with Mannion ended with him in charge. Gresham decided to give up. They were nearing the Anna, and it was time for business.

Gresham had not been joking when he said he kept a vessel in permanent wait for him. Or had done so, in recent months. His only sadness was that having confessed to it, he would now have to find a new boat and a new berth. Cecil would get his own men to identify the ship and where it lay, and a vessel that was known to his enemy was no use to Gresham, however beautiful it was. The Anna was small, a barque, yet with three masts, the first two square-rigged and the third lanteen-rigged, but for all her small size she was a thing of great intricacy and perfect in her form, well able to stand the storms of the Channel if the need arose. Her previous owner had died at sea; his widow wanted a quick sale.

Mannion may have hated Scotland, but he hated sea journeys even more. Yet even he had to admit that if one had to go to Scotland it was better to go by sail than to face endless weeks on a horse or, even worse, a bone-shattering carriage. They rounded a corner with a timber-framed house leaning crazily forward as if it wanted to kiss the earth, the horses slipping on the mire and filth that lay on the road, and before them was the Anna.

Gresham had been summoned to Cecil two days earlier, a measure of Cecil's concern being that he would only hand the letter to Gresham in person. An extra measure was the fact that the meeting was not in any Palace, but in Cecil's surprisingly modest London home. It was the place where he kept the servants most loyal to him. Gresham knew that much from having tried to bribe them all without success. The transaction had been brief and businesslike. The house and the servants were draped in black. Lord Burghley's death had just been announced. Had Cecil loved his father? If he had, he was not showing it.

If it became known that Gresham was going to Scotland with a message for its King, he might as well slit his own throat and save someone else the trouble of doing it. So how could he disguise his mission?

The answer had been Mannion's idea. It was highly audacious, so much so that Gresham did not bother to clear it with Cecil in advance. It was more fun that way.

'You've said it yerself often enough. Hide the truth by telling it. Tell 'em you're going to Scotland.'

'Brilliant!' said Gresham. 'And tell them I've a letter from Robert Cecil to the King of Scotland?'

'No,' said Mannion, 'tell 'em you've reason to believe that girl you took on board, and who's the biggest pain in your life, actually had a Scottish father. Tell 'em you're going to try and unite her with her blood relations — which is the best way you can see of getting 'er off your back, an' the sooner the better. You'll be very convincing on that score, I reckon.'

'Hang on,' said Gresham. 'Apart from the prospect of spending quite a long period of time with the bloody girl, and the fact that she'll almost certainly throw a fit and lock herself in her room for a year if I even mention it, I'm implicated in every plot that's going at present. So does it really make sense for me to announce I'm going to Scotland, when everyone knows James is one of the main contenders for the throne?'

'Makes sense if you gets a permit from the bloody Queen,' said Mannion. 'You know her well enough. Ain't many people going up to Scotland on a regular basis, things being what they are. Mebbe she wants a letter delivered as well.' Mannion obviously thought he'd made a joke.

The problem was that the old drunkard might be right. Going to Scotland with a passport from the Queen was the best cover of all. But the first problem was the girl, who was most likely to reject any suggestion that she might come simply because it came from him. The second problem was the Queen. Her body might be ageing rapidly, but there was no sign of the decay entering her brain. Could he fool her into granting him a passport? When she had knighted him ten years earlier in that terrible dungeon in the Tower of London, the sword she had used could just have easily gone through his neck as tapped him on the shoulder. The work he had done since had both harmed and helped his standing with her — if anyone ever knew what their standing was with the Queen.

He gained an audience surprisingly quickly considering everyone in England wanted a private audience with the Queen. Yet perhaps it was not so surprising. Increasingly the old lady seemed to act on a whim, living for the moment as if she realised that her own moments were more and more limited by time, the one thing over which she and no other human had control.

Delay. That was the problem. Elizabeth had always had an uncanny knack of letting time sort her problems out for her. Outsiders saw it as vacillation, but Gresham was not so sure. In this instance he needed a firm answer from a woman to whom firm answers were increasingly becoming an anathema.

The only thing shocking about her today was the extraordinary red wig she was wearing. The gimlet eyes were as hard as ever, her breath capable of knocking a fly out of the sky at fifty yards, and the jewels on her lavish dress enough to buy an army. It was early evening, when the majority of England whose lamp and candle was the sun were heading to their beds. Whitehall Palace proved its usual warren, but Gresham realised how serious things were when he was ushered through a string of rooms and suddenly found his male escort replaced by giggling ladies-in-waiting. His audience was being held in the chamber directly outside the Queen's bedroom. What was even more frightening was that, with a quick nod, she dismissed the female attendants. Gresham hoped for Mannion's sake they had been banished to whatever antechamber he had been forced to leave him in. Some of the ladies-in-waiting were known to be keen on a bit of rough.

If he had not known better he would have sworn the Queen had been crying. Her eyes were bloodshot and swollen, the make-up beneath them showing signs of rapid and rather ineffective repair. It was said that she had hand-fed Burghley the old man's last meals on earth, like a mother feeding her young child.

'So, Sir Henry!' the monarch exclaimed, 'the rare moment comes when you ask to see me! I seem to recollect that for much of my reign it has been my job to command you to attend my Court.' The tone was harsh, combative. It was as if she wished to banish any concept of softness.

He was alone with the Queen. She was in a black gown, with a high neck, its folds sparkling. It was what passed as casual wear for the Queen but still had enough whalebone in it to strip a decent-sized whale of its skeleton.

'Your Highness, I-' Gresham started to say.

'Your Highness,' carried on the Queen, in a fair copy of Gresham's tone, 'I recognise the threat you pose to my existence, and your absolute power over my fortunes. I am rich enough not to need your patronage, arrogant enough not to seek your approval in normal times and intelligent enough to be able to flatter you more amusingly than most.'

The Queen paused. Gresham doubted that the Italian who had just set up in London teaching people the manners of the Court would have an answer as to what one did when the Queen started to mimic you. She was seated in a high-backed chair that was not quite a small throne. A fine Venetian glass had been left by her ladies, and she leant over daintily to sip from it. It was as likely to be boiled water as wine, if Gresham's experience was anything to go by.

'Do tell me. Have I summed you up?' Her tone was deadly serious. And when the daughter of Henry VIII used anything deadly, wise men listened.

Ah well. Men — and women — only had one life. What was life without risk? And who wanted to die in their bed of old age?

'Your Majesty, the greatest flattery I can afford you is to acknowledge that my wealth can be confiscated by a wave of your hand, the seat of my arrogance severed from its neck by a wave of altogether different material, and intelligent enough to realise that I am at this moment desperately trying to think out stratagems that will avoid either eventuality. Or, to put it more simply, yes. You have summed me up. Rather too well, as it happens.'

The Queen looked at Gresham for a moment, her expression unfathomable. Then she spoke, 'I have tolerated you because even with your arrogance and shameless good looks you have done me good service, but also because of all the people I have known in my time your superb flattery has never been offered other than with a supreme awareness that it was simply flattery and not the truth.' She leant forward. There was real anger in her eyes. 'I know more than you think I know about your role in the fate of my sister, Mary Queen of Scots.'

Gresham had decided in his youth that to reveal one's fears and one's emotions was the ultimate weakness, and had imposed a rigid self-control on his body. It was only that which enabled him to stop going white.

'I know what you know about the first Armada. I think I could be said to have drawn it from you on the rack.'

The hint of a smile played across that small part of her lips liberated from make-up. Brave men had been known to burst into tears and confess their all when simply shown the rack. Gresham had been strapped into it and the torture about to start when he had held that particular conversation with the Queen. The strangest thing had not been her presence in the torture chamber, but that she had come to the Tower of London at all. She hated that place above all others, ever since she had entered in through Traitor's Gate, accused of treason by her sister Queen Mary.

'And then there are the other affairs, those I have known about, those I know about that were intended to be kept from me and those I do not know about.'

Damn her! Why could not the old body be matched in the mind? Was there anybody stupid in this mad, deranged Court, or did they all have the brains of the Queen, Cecil and Essex?

'So here you are,' said the Queen, taking a sip from her glass. 'Undoubtedly you want something from me. No one asks to see the Queen for love, only ever because they want something in her power.' She held up her hand, as Gresham opened his mouth. 'Enough! Cease before you start. I have had enough of piled words. Tell me what it is you want. Spit it out, man.'

There was no pause in Gresham's answer.

'I wish your passport for me to visit Scotland with my ward and a servant.'

The words hung in the air.

'You always were clever, Henry Gresham. Cleverer than anyone, except perhaps for my little pygmy, and certainly clever in a different way from him. Others would have spun me a cock and bull story about why they wished to visit the country of the impudent young man so hungry for my throne.' There was real venom in her voice. Gresham had a strong impression that Queen Elizabeth of England did not much like King James of Scotland. Perhaps the fact that she had ordered the execution of his mother did not help. 'You choose to say nothing.'

Gresham continued to choose to say nothing. The strain was actually harder than filling the air with noise would have been. Babbling is easy.

In earlier years the Queen would have got up at a moment like this, and started to pace the room restlessly. It used to annoy Gresham because it was exactly what he did. Instead, she stayed seated. Gresham noted the cushions piled high beneath and around her. They were new. The Queen had been renowned for sitting on hard wooden seats for hours on end. How times were changing.

'Well, now,' said the Queen, actually settling back into her cushions, but with a wicked gleam in her eye. 'As Sir Henry is apparently struck dumb for a moment, let us see if an old woman…' She paused momentarily and cocked what remained of an eyebrow at him, as if daring Gresham to challenge as any courtier would do the assertion that she was old. Gresham continued to say nothing, his face impassive. '… can come to some conclusions. It is a long, painful journey to Scotland, and an inhospitable country with few charms for a man of wealth and taste. Therefore Sir Henry has strong reason to go there. His ward, who they tell me he has not bedded yet, is unlikely to be the real reason. Given the importance of Scotland to those who are already playing dice for my throne and who believe me dead already, the real reason is therefore likely to be a plot. But whose plot? And is Sir Henry for or against the plotters?'

Gresham was challenging his own body not to sweat, his own face not to redden. This was getting dangerously close.

'My little pygmy hates Henry Gresham, but uses him.' She was looking intently at Gresham now, daring him to show by a flicker of his face that she had hit the mark. 'As he, for some reason, seems willing to be used. But there are others, of course. Sir Henry is a lifelong friend of the greatest rogue in my Court, Sir Walter Raleigh, who as so many of my Court would like nothing more than to have a line of communication open with the… King of Scotland. And my Great Lord the Earl of Essex has been heard expressing admiration for Henry Gresham the soldier, just as so many others have been whispering that this same Henry Gresham is in this plot, or that plot or the other plot. And my Great Lord of Essex is not above suspicion in seeming willing to bend the knee in obeisance to the north.'

There was a long silence.

'Which one is it, I wonder? Which of those professing undying love and loyalty towards me as their Queen wishes to send a covert message to my rival in Scotland? Or perhaps it is all of them? Or is it the King himself who has asked to see you? Is the whole pattern in reverse, with His Royal Highness of the frozen north making the running, seeking to use this same Sir Henry Gresham as his intermediary with one of those named earlier? Or, God forbid, with all of them?'

There was another, even longer silence.

'I command you to make answer,' said the Queen simply, and Gresham knew that his time of silence had ended. 'Why do you wish to go to Scotland?'

'Majesty,' he said,*I have a lust for porridge and it will not be denied.'

For a moment he thought he had gone too far, as a flicker of yellow flashed across the Queen's eyes, and then she burst into a peal of laughter, so intense it rocked her fragile body. When she had stopped laughing, and had wiped the traces of spittle off her lips with a delicate handkerchief, she looked at him again.

'And was I stupid enough to expect a straight answer from you? Tell me one thing. Just one thing.' 'Your Majesty?'

‘I have lost my father.' The mood change was sudden. God knows how anyone could keep track when she and Essex were in the same room together. Lose her father? Henry VIII had been dead these many, many years. Gresham could see the tears rising up in her eyes. Real tears. Good God! 'My Lord Burghley is the nearest thing I had to a father, and now he is gone. I have already lost my executioner, Walsingham, who bankrupted himself for me. I have lost… so many of those who were my friends. And you, with your good looks, your money and your wit, you who were trained by Walsingham, you could have stepped into his shoes had you so wished. But you never showed any interest, fled to the Low Countries to fight in stupid wars and no doubt prove your manhood in the lunatic way men seem to have to do… you are the only person I know, Henry Gresham, who gave up a position of power in my Court when it beckoned him, when to acquire it would have been so easy. Why did you spurn advancement?'

'Your Majesty,' said Gresham, who felt it was time he strung more than two consecutive words together, 'I am one who believes that most of life is a pretence, and who struggles more and more to see or to find meaning in it. Life at Court, even in your service, would for me simply have been another pretence. I am sorry.'

'Yet you miss out the most important thing of all,' said the Queen, 'if you wish to keep your life and your liberty.'

'I do?'said Gresham, nonplussed for once.

'If you were simply seeking to flatter me, you would have pointed out the mere truth. You have done several things for which you should have been hung, if not drawn and quartered. Yet never to my knowledge have you once undertaken an action that would threaten my life or my throne.'

Well, that was true, thought Gresham, though all too often that had not been the motive in his actions. He nodded, acknowledging the truth.

'So tell me this. If I give you my passport to Scotland, will anything that takes place there threaten my life or my throne?'

For a brief moment he saw the real fear that haunted this woman in the small hours when she was alone. Her powers were waning as she lost the battle with time. The men who had put her on the throne and kept her there — Burghley, Walsingham and the rest of the pack — were dead or dying. How easy now to speed up nature: a subtle poison in her food; the assassin's knife; even a carefully mounted rebellion. Ring out the dead wood, ring in the new. The Queen is dead. Long live… a new Queen? A new King?

Gresham did actually take time to think this one through. Slightly to his surprise he found he was not willing to lie to Elizabeth. She was foul-breathed, not infrequently foul-mouthed, infuriating in her procrastination, had probably denied the country an heir simply to preserve her own power for as long as she lived and was the most devious person he had ever known, as well as the most selfish apart from himself. Yet she had brought peace to a ravaged England for forty years, and given her people in exchange for all that it gave her the one thing a monarch could give their country: stability. The Spanish had not invaded, for all that they had tried. Ireland may have been falling apart for most of her reign, Tyrone threatening to wrest the whole country back into Irish hands, but it was of more use to royal vanity and land-starved nobles than to any normal Englishman. The harvest might be bad, the bottom fall out of the wool trade, and a thousand natural calamities befall Jack and Jill. But at least in the reign of Elizabeth their problems were from natural calamities. No wild horsemen trampled their crops at harvest time or ran with their babies on the end of a pike, and no marauding armies took their wives and daughters even as they burnt their house down. Unlike Essex, military glory had never ranked as an ambition in Elizabeth's mind. Like Burghley and Cecil, she saw war primarily as a waste of money. So Gresham ran through at break-neck speed all that might result from his rescuing the reputation of Cecil with James. Try as he might, he could find no scenario that would threaten the Queen. It would probably be better in the name of stability if Cecil was cleared in the eyes of James. It might stop the both of them plotting even more.

It was the time he took thinking that saved his life, he realised afterwards. A dishonest man would simply have denied any threat to the Queen. The sight of him almost visibly testing each scenario against her question, his reserve forgotten for once and his brow furrowed in concentration, was the greatest testimony to the honesty of his answer.

'No, Your Majesty, there is nothing associated with my journey that could threaten your throne or your life. Or rather,' and he allowed himself a dry little smile, 'I give you my word that there is nothing I know of or can predict that would be counter to your interests. No man can ever predict with exactitude what a journey will produce.'

He thought again. Clearing Cecil's name might even allow for a smoother transition of power when the moment came for the Queen to die. And Cecil would never hasten that death. James of Scotland had spent most of his life fighting for survival amid the rabid politics of his homeland. He knew better than most that those who killed or deposed a monarch acquired a taste for it. If Cecil did anything to hasten Elizabeth's death he would not only never gain James's trust; he would hasten his own death at James's hand.

'My journey will help preserve the life and fortune of those few I call friends. And, if anything, it will help rather than hinder your own assured long reign and good health.'

The Queen sat back, suddenly looking very tired.

'Take this ring.' She scrabbled in a box by her side, and produced a fabulous but crude emerald set ostentatiously in gold. 'Show it to the men outside this room, and they will let you pass. Had you not had this, my token, you would have left here under their escort for the Tower. And this time you would not have emerged.'

Something approaching despair filled Gresham's heart. He prided himself on being one jump ahead of his pursuers and those who threatened his life. Yet he had been trapped by Cecil, didn't know whether Essex was his ally or his rival and now had damn nearly been executed by the Queen, all in a state of blissful ignorance as to what was happening. To be in control was central to Henry Gresham's life. What was he playing at, letting these people out-manoeuvre him? Had the depression that had beset him these past six months finally corroded its way into his very soul, draining his will to live and dulling his judgement?

'You may present the ring to King James in secret. It is an agreed token between us.'

An agreed token? Why was there an agreed token between the Queen and the man to whom she had just written a foul and abusive letter, warning him off her kingdom and accusing him of gross presumption? 'And you will give him this as well.' It was a thin, sealed package. A letter, obviously. How interesting. It appeared that everyone in England wanted secret packages delivered to King James of Scotland. There was a tidy little business here for the right person.

'Yet you will cling to your initial stratagem, and take the girl along with you. She will be your given reason for making the journey. Your meeting with the Scottish King will be in secret, as will the exchange of the ring and the package. As no doubt will be the exchange of whatever other information you wish to give. Show the ring to the right people and it will gain you a secret audience with the obnoxious little sodomite.'

It was strange how sodomy and black magic kept cropping up together in Gresham's life.

'You will not under any circumstances let others know you are carrying my message. Those who have commissioned you must continue to think they are the sole reason for your visit, and that you cajoled me in my dotage by your charm and good looks into granting you a passport. And you had better bring the girl to me tomorrow, so I can be seen to question her in private. Yet from now on, you are not undertaking this journey on behalf of those who first asked you to make it, whoever they are. A higher authority now commands you. You are doing it as my messenger. A messenger of your Queen.'

Wheels within wheels. Deviousness within deviousness. What better way to cloak a mission from her enemies than by letting them think it was their mission? And now Gresham knew that beneath the public bickering and exchange of letters there was a different relationship between Elizabeth and James. Whatever it was, it was clearly both separate from the public domain and not based on a true meeting of minds. 'Obnoxious little sodomite' she had called him, with no lack of sincerity.

'And understand one thing, Henry Gresham.' He had never known King Henry VIII, but something in his daughter's tone made him understand the fear that man could provoke in others. 'If it becomes known that you have exchanged my ring and that package with the King of Scotland, if word ever leaks out, you will return to England not as one of its richest men, but as a pauper. Every piece of land, every house, every hovel and every asset you own will be stripped from you and fall to my Crown. You will become the penniless bastard you were before your father decided to rescue you.'

There was a third, long silence.

'I have no Bible here,' said the Queen of England. 'No witness, even. Yet I ask you to swear a simple oath, and to stand by that oath as if every Bible in the world was here for you to lay your hand on, and every witness including God. Will you swear to do everything — everything — in your power to preserve my reign for as long as I live? And will you swear to do everything in your power to ensure that when the moment of my death comes, it is through nature and God's will and not the actions of men?'

Gresham thought about this for a few moments.

'I wish you had not, Your Majesty, preceded your request by your threat. As for the threat, I take it as one of the most powerful I've received in my undoubtedly misspent life. I shall deal with it as I've dealt with all such other threats.'

A spark of imminent death flickered in Elizabeth's eyes. Not her death, which her soul could not contemplate. His death. He hurried on.

'As for the swearing… yes. I swear to what you ask. You've brought internal peace to England for forty years. You've fought off our enemies and kept them from invading our shores. I swear to preserve your reign and your life, for so long as you do naturally live.'

He dropped to one knee, and bowed his head. It seemed the right thing to do. The silence which followed was one of the longest in Henry Gresham's memory.

'You may leave my presence,' the Queen said finally, in a tone of impenetrable neutrality.

It seemed somehow inappropriate to thank her. He left her presence.

He was silent as they rode home, having given Mannion the briefest summary of what had taken place. Mannion had sucked on the hollow tooth he claimed had been there all his life but which he had never had seen to, and said nothing.

Scotland was renowned for killing its monarchs, and about as welcoming to its own kind as a steel-quilled porcupine, never mind a spy from the English Court. Things could get very unpleasant in Scotland, thought Gresham. As if the trip did not present problems enough, there was the added complication of the girl. Or two added complications, as it happened — coping with her on the trip, and not least getting her to go in the first place. She was his agreed cover, even more essential now the Queen had validated her as the reason for his going, but short of tying her up and stuffing a gag in her mouth he was damned if he knew how to get her up north, and the last thing he wanted was to have to try to do so with her kicking and screaming. Still, it was not in his nature to postpone a problem. As soon as they rode into the yard of The House and handed the reins of the grey over to a groom, he asked to see her. Asked. It was not as if he had rescued her, paid for the clothes on her back and the food in her belly, was it? No, he had to ask to see her, not command it.

She came in to the Library demurely enough, her eyes downcast, her hands folded neatly in front of her. He could see why she drove men mad. Yet his deliberately casual questioning of others had suggested she still had her virginity. Why had he chosen to meet her in the Library? Of all the rooms in The House, it was the one he most identified her with, except for the uncharted territory of the kitchens and servants' quarters. Yet it was, ironically, the room in which he felt most at home. So be it.

She was late, of course. She always was. She did it to show him who was in charge and to infuriate him. He stood by one of the huge windows overlooking the Thames, determined to remain ice-cold and not let her lateness affect him.

A more astute man would have realised that his summons had put her in a panic. Desperate to appear her best before him, she had thrown out every one of the pathetically few dresses she owned onto her bed, the clucking maid who was with her if anything more nervous and thrown than she was. At least her hair was washed, and the last of the infuriating spots had vanished from her face. What dress? What dress? The dark-green offering was her newest and, verging on the formal, hardly suitable for a young woman whose day would be spent helping to run one of the largest households in London outside of the Palace or Essex House. It would have to do. And she would only anger him more if she was later than she had already made herself!

He prided himself that none of his true feelings showed as she arrived a full ten minutes after what was reasonable. He turned, and nodded formally to her.

She prided herself that none of her true feelings showed as she arrived, desperately wishing she had had time to put at least the tiniest smidgeon of powder to her face and neck.

Well, the stick insect he had picked up as a child from the side of a muddy pond was no stick insect now, thought Gresham. No wonder she turned heads wherever she went. She was a fine crop to be harvested by some suitable young man, and the sooner he arranged it the better: for her and for him. Though God knew how you organised such things. Bess Raleigh would know, must know. In the meantime, he needed her. Please, God, if you are there, just this once, make her do what I want…

He had written a fine speech in his head, but he looked at her and gave up. His conversations with Cecil and with the Queen had contained very real threats of death and ruin, and he sensed danger in his relationship with Essex. And these were threats he had failed to see coming! A sudden wave of tiredness swept over him, like the water closing over the head of a drowning man. He looked at her.

'I need your help.'

It was as simple as that. For a fleeting moment he appeared vulnerable, rather like a brave little boy who had lost his parents and was standing in the market place determined not to show his fright.

'I need you to do something for me which will undoubtedly be uncomfortable and… and which might even be dangerous, perhaps.'

If he failed in his mission for Cecil or for the Queen he would be ruined and Jane cast back onto the streets at best, and at worst hacked to pieces for the edification of the mob. And he had a growing sense of dissolution, of impending terror. Was England about to be plunged into civil war? Would the four horsemen be unleashed on England? Whatever the answer, it lay in the Queen, in King James, in Cecil and in Essex, all of them interwoven into the fabric of this bizarre journey he was required to make.

And then one of the most surprising moments of Henry Gresham's life happened.

'I will do as you ask,' she said, looking him in the eye. Not sulky. Not reluctant. Matter of fact, no argument.

What had gone wrong?

He started to gabble, 'We must travel to Scotland by sea. In my barque, the Anna. Though it's summer, such a voyage always has risks. And… I need you to pretend.'

He was struck by her extraordinary eyes, wholly dark but with tiny flecks of light in them.

'What is it you wish me to pretend, my Lord?' Again, matter of fact. As if this conversation was the most normal thing in her life.

Gresham sighed. 'The real reason for my journey is difficult to explain. No. I'll be more honest with you: it's better that you don't know. If things go wrong, which of course I'm almost sure they won't, it's vital that people think you know nothing. If they think that, they'll leave you alone. If you know nothing about the real reason, it's far easier to give that impression.' He looked at her, and saw her intelligence. 'I'm not trying to patronise you,' he said simply. 'It really is that ignorance is your best defence. But I need an excuse, and the one I have arrived at is to invent some Scottish ancestry for you, make the reason for the trip a search for your real parents. The Queen's agreed to grant us a passport on that basis.' Unconsciously, he let his humour show. 'It's usually a good thing to agree with the Queen.'

He realised as he said it how insulting his suggestion was. Jane must have cared about who her parents were. And now he was proposing to use what was central to her concept of self as a mere cover for other, more important things which at the same time she was not allowed to know. He waited for the explosion.

'I'll find it difficult to summon a Scottish accent.'

He started to formulate an answer, and then realised just in time that she was making a joke. And in making it, saying yes to the whole thing. He allowed himself to grin.

'You and me both,' he said. 'There are certain sacrifices I wouldn't ask anyone to make.' He paused for a moment. 'Oh… there is one other thing. Before granting the passport, the Queen wants to meet you, tomorrow. If she's seen-' At his words Jane's control vanished. She squeaked, and put a hand to her mouth in shock. Well, it was almost like a squeak. It was a noise that clearly she wished she had not started to make, and which she tried to stifle from somewhere around stomach level, where it appeared to begin. It lost a little momentum as it progressed from stomach to breast, from breast to neck, from neck to throat and from throat to mouth, but there was still enough left of it to burst out in what could only be described as… a squeak.

'My Lord!' she said in desperation. 'I have nothing to wear!'

Oh God! How could he have forgotten? Even a man such as he could not fail to recognise that honour, reputation and life itself for a woman depended on the dress she wore to meet the Queen. It was entirely reciprocal. How could he have forgotten that to present a young girl to the Queen in the wrong dress was as if to present her naked?

A sudden calm descended on him. This was a life or death crisis. He was good at those. It was only young girls for whom he was responsible who threw him. This was different. He looked Jane up and down, and a separate part of his brain noted the startled and even rather fearful effect this produced on her. He was undressing her in his mind, right enough, but not for that reason. Not yet, anyway. This was business.

Lady Downing. Sarah. Married at around Jane's age to a semi-senile suitor, she had enjoyed her husband's wealth and compensated for what he could not provide by starting an affair with Gresham, one of his very first acquaintances with a lady-in-waiting. Except that Sarah had been very bad at waiting. Their physical relationship had lapsed when she had married her second husband, but they had stayed good friends. Sarah had married a mere stripling of forty-six after her first husband died, and been plunged into mourning when he too had died of a canker some three years later. They were about the same height* Sarah and Jane, and seemed to push out against their dresses in more or less the same places. Sarah would help. Thank God they had remained the best of friends when the business between the sheets had ended. As for seamstress, alterations, ribbons and… and things girls cared about, it was still daylight, and money talked.

'MANNION!' Gresham bellowed. In time of need… Mannion was never far away from Gresham, but this time the old fool must have been hovering outside the door.

Gresham turned to Jane. 'I'm sorry… I should've thought. There's an answer. Lady Sarah Downing. She's an old friend of mine.' To his credit, Mannion kept a straight face. 'She's got a stock of Court dresses a mile high.' Did Jane's face lift a little at this? 'She's about your size. We'll go there now in the coach. You — ' he turned to Mannion — 'find me three seamstresses and two jewellers. Get them here, the first with their kit and the second with their wares. Tell the seamstresses they'll be working through the night and most of the morning. Tell 'em why — it'll make them more committed — and offer them three times the going rate. This is a crisis.'

He turned to Jane. 'I hope…' What he saw with his intuitive instinct for reading faces was the most extraordinary kaleidoscope of emotions he had ever witnessed. In business mode now, he was detached, needing to cut to the quick and to identify what the quick actually was. 'Please tell me what it is you want to say?'

Jane appeared almost in despair. 'My Lord,' she said, 'I have never appeared before a Queen. Never dreamed that I would be presented at Court. I have nothing to prepare me for this. But…'

'But what?' said Gresham, impatient.

'But Lady Sarah Downing? Two jewellers?'

She waited. Gresham said nothing.

‘I am a person of no breeding!' she said at last. 'I can't appear before the Queen in rags. But at the same time I can't appear as mutton dressed as lamb! Overdress me and I'm as humiliated as if I was under-dressed.'

A number of memories of Sarah floated before Gresham's eyes. Some were unprintable. All were happy.

'Sarah's a great Court lady,' he said, 'but she's human, and surprisingly normal. Try to trust her, if you can. Tell her just what you've told me.'

Mannion had left, and the yard was full of the noise of a great house being woken up.

'Thank you,' said Gresham, still in business mode, 'for making something I was dreading surprisingly easy.'

'Thank you,' said Jane, 'for letting a girl of no breeding meet the Queen of England.'

Why had it all gone so easily?

Gresham had not heard the brief conversation that had preceded her meeting with him. By some strange coincidence, Mannion had bumped into the hastily dressed Jane on her way to the Library.

'He needs yer to say yes to goin' with the both of us to Scotland.'

'And?' said Jane, cocking an eye to one of the very few men she had come to trust. If she had learned anything from Henry Gresham it was to mask her feelings, although her heart seemed to have speeded up to three times its normal rate.

'It's bloody dangerous,' Mannion said factually. 'But fer Christ's sake, say yes, and give 'im an easy time of it.'

Jane looked him in the eyes for a brief moment, then nodded carefully, before going to meet Gresham.

Gresham was relieved at the outcome of his request. He was staggered when, the next morning, he saw its product. The dress Jane and Sarah had chosen was of the finest dark-green velvet. It seemed to hug Jane's upper body, and then glance splendidly off her waist, cascading like a waterfall. Yet she had reserved the greatest stroke of genius for herself. Such a dress would be slashed to reveal perhaps an irridescent blue or even a pure black silk. Against the dressmaker's entreaty, Jane had insisted that the rich slashings show underneath not an oasis of blue or black, but simply more of the dark-green velvet. The only concession she had made was to ask for the openings to be lined with a modest number of small pearls. We are here, the pearls seemed to say, and if we thought we were more than we are we could be used to reveal a glow of colour that would rival a mallard's neck. But we are not so. We are simply a young girl in a borrowed dress, and we know who we are. As ever, the lack of pretension made a more powerful point than a week's artifice would have achieved.

Gresham's jaw dropped when Jane was presented to him. He had not seen this girl — this woman — before. She was extraordinarily, stunningly beautiful. It was not the dress with its cunning line, or the make-up so sparingly and skilfully applied, nor the wonders they had done with her lustrous hair. She was not made beautiful by what she wore. She made what she wore look beautiful. He looked at her for a moment, his face expressionless, sensing her yearning for his approval.

'Wait here a moment, please,' he said, and left the room. Five, ten, tense minutes passed before he returned, bearing a box.

'Something so beautiful deserves something equally beautiful,' he said quietly, as he drew forth the necklace. On a simple gold chain, the ruby was like an open heart pulsing with extraordinary colour. He moved behind Jane, slipping the necklace over her neck, feeling the warmth of her skin at his fingers' ends.

'It was my father's,' he said. 'It seems a shame for such a thing to lie in the dark. It'll be your only jewel. They'll know whence it came. And they will not call you mutton dressed as lamb.'

Well, at least he had struck her speechless for once.

He had thanked Sarah from the bottom of his heart. There had been no malice in their meeting, and when their time was done there had been no malice in their parting.

'I enjoyed it,' she had said simply. 'It made me feel young again.' She did not mention that she had no children of her own. 'Tell me, have you slept with her?'

'No I have not!' said Gresham with a vehemence partly fuelled by the thoughts he had had at the sight of Jane in her finery. Because of these thoughts, he could guess other men's reactions. As a result he felt himself aggressively protective towards Jane.

'Do you really know what you've got there in that girl? Sarah asked.

'A target for every man at Court?' asked Gresham glumly, ‘I hadn't realised she would make me act gamekeeper as well as poacher.'

'However beautiful, the body will always decay over the course of life,' answered Sarah. 'The mind,' she added gnomically, 'stays with us all our lives, God willing.'

It was difficult to say whether the radiance that lit Jane came from the superb job Sarah — and Jane — had made of an instant Court dress, or from within her own sense of well-being. Gresham never doubted that the meeting with the Queen would go well. Whatever her failings, Elizabeth had a soft spot for young girls, provided they did not marry against her will or bed one of her favourites.

'What did she ask you about?' asked Gresham, as they went back to The House in the Strand.

'Oh…' said Jane vaguely, 'woman's stuff.'

He decided to leave it at that. The real business was about to start.

Gresham and Mannion dismounted at the quayside, handing the horses over with a pat to the grooms who would ride them home. The cobbled wharf was littered with the debris of the sea, and stank of tar and foul water, thick in the heavy air that barely flapped a sail. The tiny Waves were slapping angrily yet ineffectively at the hulls, as if warning the ships of their bigger brethren waiting out at sea. Jane was due to come in the huge coach that Gresham's father had adopted in his later years. Already the arrival of the fine gentleman and his baggage was causing a stir, with men turning from the mending of sails or the lugging of stores to watch the new entertainment and relieve the boredom of their working lives.

How did you train your men? Essex had asked Gresham. With great difficulty and at great length, was the answer. Only two of those same men were with Gresham now, Jack and Dick, to act as porters for the luggage. Other men would have taken servants to care for their clothes or shave them on such a trip. Gresham chose to take two people who knew how to handle themselves in a fight.

The same was not true of the crew of the Anna. The master was a competent seaman, in part-retirement now. His crew were no better and no worse than many of their type — jobbing mariners who moved from one boat to another as work came up — and who would stay only a few months or even weeks when it became clear that the Anna would only leave her berth for short trips to shake out her sails and stretch her hull. Some three or four, the more permanent ones, were members of the master's own family. Gresham's instinct had been to use the Anna for the trip to Scotland rather than take passage on a boat of which he had no previous knowledge. At least he knew that good money had been spent on her rigging, that her timbers were sound and the vessel in exceptional repair. He would sell her afterwards, he reasoned, and buy another escape route in another mooring.

But he had not trained the Anna's men. Her crew did not know him, had no particular loyalty towards him. The elements were only one of the dangers for a sailing ship.

What if his enemies were watching him, even now? How much would Cecil's letter, or that from the Queen, be worth to someone angling for the Crown? How much was the Queen's ring worth? Anyone bringing it to James would be granted private access. On a secret mission, how would James know whether or not the bearer was the man to whom the Queen had handed her token, or the man who had murdered the initial bearer? Worst of all, was Essex skilled enough to hear of Cecil's rebuttal and try to intercept it?

Nagging at the back of his mind was the way he had been tricked by Cecil. Was he losing his touch? Was using his own boat another sign of the decaying mental powers of someone who had lived on the edge for so long that he was now taking the easy route? And all the time the sense was growing in him of the importance of what he carried. A letter from Cecil to James was bad enough, possible proof of treachery. Yet even that was insignificant by the side of a secret letter from Queen Elizabeth of England to King James of Scotland. How many of those fighting over the flesh of the English crown would give a fortune to know the contents of that letter?

He cast his eyes over the roadstead, from the bits of rough timber, fish scales and assorted unidentifiable lumps of matter washing up against the strand, to the boats with the precious berths by the shore out to the less fortunate moored in the tideway. Would one of these nondescript, assorted vessels, the lifeblood of England's coastal and near-continental trade, drop its sails as the Anna set out, and follow it silently out to sea? How many of the seamen and rabble on the quayside were in the pay of Gresham's and the Queen's enemies? Was the spy being spied upon at this very moment?

Mannion was oblivious to Gresham's fears, casting a professional eye over the Anna and grunting in satisfaction at what he saw. Mannion had been a ship's boy, groomed to be a captain, until the owner of the vessel had fallen into the hands of the Inquisition and been burned alive as a heretic in front of his wife and crew. Just as Gresham hated oil lamps, so Mannion would never stay in a room where pork had been overcooked. The similarity to the smell of human flesh burning was too close.

The master of the Anna was standing on her tiny quarterdeck, and hurried over to greet Gresham. Old now, every storm he had weathered had left a wrinkle on his face, but he had a toughness that Gresham found reassuring. What was less reassuring, and what Gresham had not seen when he had interviewed the man, was his tendency to move sideways all the time like a restless crab, and to rub his gnarled hands together like a moneylender striking a deal. Nor would he look Gresham in the eye. Interesting. Alarm bells began to ring in Gresham's head. The man was sweating, nervous. What had scared him so much?

'You seem to have a full crew,' said Gresham noting more men than he remembered scurrying round the deck. They ranged from another wizened old man who the captain assured Gresham was the best ship's carpenter sailing from London, to a boy for whom a razor seemed an impossible dream.

'I hope I haven't acted out of turn, sir,' the man was now saying. As well as not looking at Gresham his rheumy eyes flickered left and right, as if expecting someone to rescue him. 'The voyage to Scotland is long and sometimes treacherous, even in summer. It would be greatly in our interest for us to have two watches, but that means doubling the crew. Trade's not good at present, and there's plenty of good men around, so I took the liberty of hiring another watch. I know it's more expensive, but it will be safer, and with the lady on board…' He nodded obsequiously towards Jane, who had just arrived and whose trunks were being lugged on board by a cheerful Jack and Dick, and kept his eyes on her for longer than was strictly necessary. 'I've also taken on board a sailing master. He can navigate and con the ship, let me have a little sleep every now and then.'

Damn! Damn! Any one of the original crew might have been paid by one of Gresham's enemies, though as a safeguard Gresham had instructed the master wherever possible to recruit from his extended family. But the new men? Recruited in a hurry from the taverns that served as employment exchanges along the river, they could be anyone's man. Damn! Why had he not thought of this beforehand? For someone who liked above all to be in control, too much of his life was out of his hands at present.

'Master,' said Gresham, 'I do mind.' The man's face fell, and Gresham worked outwardly to reassure him. 'No, the responsibility is mine. I didn't explain to you the reality of what it is we do. The voyage we are embarking on is… sensitive. It's possible my enemies may have tried to place someone on board.' Had he hit a spot? Or was the old man simply angry at the implicit accusation. God! What a way to start off with someone who might at some stage in the voyage have their lives in his hands. In any event, the man showed anger, started to bluster. Genuine? Difficult to tell. Patches of his face were dead, unmoving, the nerves perhaps atrophied by too many stormy days and nights gazing head on into the wind and the spray.

'Sir Henry! I'm an honest man and I ply an honest trade!' Why, when a man felt the need to tell you that he was honest, did it always mean the opposite? 'The idea that I would allow — a spy — on board my ship — your ship,' he hastily corrected himself, 'is a deep insult.' Did he realise what Gresham was? If he did, he was about to allow the deepest insult he had ever met board his ship. For money of course. Which would be why he would have let others on board of the same type, if that was what he had done. Gresham let him rant for a while longer, then cut in.

'What's the minimum number of men you need?'

The man's brow furrowed in concentration. It was clearly with only the greatest reluctance that he spoke. He was caught in a dilemma: when Gresham had hired him it had been plain as a pikestaff that the man was not only rich, but knew about boats. There were some as said that he had sailed not against the Armada but actually on it. 'Well, two more might let me stand down most of the rest, I suppose, so that we run with a full crew in the day and have only two on watch at night, if the wind is steady and the boat's working well. It's not ideal, but it'll do. There must be a good man at the helm, of course, and one as a look-out. It's dangerous out there, and I don't mean just the chance of running into another vessel.' He thought for a moment. 'But I would implore you, sir, to let me keep my new sailing master. The only other man I could have trusted to take charge on a watch left me last week to take up his own command.'

Gresham would probably have to compromise on that. Experienced sailor that he was, he was no navigator, nor qualified as a captain. He spoke as if granting a great favour.

'By all means keep your sailing master,' said Gresham. And I will ensure that either Mannion or myself are awake whenever he is on duty. 'And you'll have four extra men. My men. These two here and two more I'll send for. They've all been at sea. The two you see here are quite experienced.'

Was fate playing against him? There were ten, perhaps twelve men in The House he would trust in a fight. Apart from Jack and Dick, he knew of only two remaining whom he could call on as reinforcements. The rest he had allowed to go home to their villages, knowing he would be gone perhaps for months, knowing also what a difference the men would make to their families and their villages for the harvest. Many of the great London houses ran on a skeleton staff in the summer, the owners fleeing the heat and increased plague risk in London for the country, the servants desperate to get back to their homes to help in the crucial time that could decide whether a family starved over the winter.

Yet at least he had two men at The House, men with no family to return to. Gresham's boatmen were all originally sailors. They were tough, adaptable and very happy to swap the sea for the Thames. There was little glamour in life at sea. Take the Anna, Drake had taken ships as small with him around the world. It was standard policy to take twice the men one needed on any long cruise, on the assumption that half would die of disease or injury.

Even though Gresham sweetened the signing off of the new sailors who had been recruited with a week's wages, two of them took it very badly, looking poisonously at Gresham and rubbing their foreheads. Gresham's sense of danger grew, was screaming at him now. He knew that when a man touched his chin in talking he was uncertain, when someone played with their earlobe they were considering a lie. His life had depended at times on knowing these things, reading the language spoken by the body as well as hearing the words spoken by the mouth. And he knew that the man who rubbed his forehead in that manner was not only angry and disturbed, but scared and rebellious as well. Why so? The men had received a week's wages for no work, and sudden appointment and dismissal were as much a part of a sailor's life as fighting the sea or eating badly salted beef. Had these men been paid to act as spies on the spy? To steal the packages he carried from Cecil and from the Queen, and her ring? If so, he was well rid of them. But it meant that the secret of his trip was out, to someone at least.

He motioned to Mannion.

'Sure you're not just getting into a panic?' asked Mannibn gruffly. 'You've been in a right old mood for months past now.' It was the nearest Mannion would ever come to criticism.

'The master talked about our voyage to Scotland,' said Gresham flatly.

'Well, that is where we're bloody well goin', ain't it?' said Mannion.

'But he doesn't know that!' said Gresham. 'When I ordered him to get ready, I mentioned a long trip. Supplies for two months. I didn't say where we were going!'

'But there's others who knows, ain't there?' said a perplexed Mannion.

'Think about it,' said Gresham. 'I know. You know. The girl knows. Cecil has every interest in keeping my going a secret until I've at least embarked and am well on my way. The Queen likewise — which is why I never mentioned the reason for my request to see her to anyone before the audience, and why she agreed to issue the passport in secret and make no announcement. Of course people will find out where I've gone. There are no secrets in England — or, probably, in Scotland. But I bent over backwards to keep the knowledge secret until we were halfway up the coast and out of harm's way, too late for anyone to stop us. We did everything to make sure our destination was a secret. And an old sea captain doesn't exactly hob-nob with a lady-in-waiting who might just conceivably have been listening outside the door, or spend time with one of Cecil's servants. Someone else told the master we were going to Scotland.'

'And?' said Mannion.

'And the only reason, the only reason, must be to suborn him, buy him. The quick blow on the head, the search of us and our baggage? Or the arrangement to meet with another vessel off a certain point at a certain time?'

'So what do we do now?' said Mannion, looking around the quayside. 'Call it off and go 'ome?'

'What for?' said Gresham. 'Cecil'll pull the plug on us if I don't get going. The Queen'll have my balls, likewise. And if we do turn round and get another crew in time, what's to stop it happening all again? We've got the two of us, two good men we've trained ourselves and two more we can get in time. And we can lay on a few surprises. We've faced lots worse odds. And we know what might be coming. Better out than in, I say. If someone's after us, let's bring them on, find out who it is.' He paused for a moment. 'I'm tired of all this shadow-dancing. Let's get this out in the daylight. I'm tired of running away. Let's run into it, head first.'

Gresham felt a cloud lifting from his soul. It was madness to walk into a trap with himself, five men and little more. But it was doing the unexpected, taking a perverse control. If his instinct was right, he would soon have an enemy to fight. A real, physical enemy, tangible and visible.

'Right you are,' said Mannion, simply. He rarely agonised over decisions. 'We got some more work to do, then, ain't we?'

There was time enough to get some extra supplies from The House and the two men — Gresham hoped they were still there and had not already gone off to some tavern — and still catch the tide. He had planned for everything to be ready two hours earlier than was strictly necessary, assuming Jane would be late by at least that much.

Jane appeared on deck.

'Lucky bugger!' an onlooker shouted, as Jane bowed politely to Gresham.

Lucky? The particular bugger who had cried out did not know half of it — the tears, the tantrums, the moral blackmail… well, at least she had agreed to come and not made his life difficult. He owed her something for that. If she kept to it, of course. Storms at sea could take on a new meaning over the next few days.

The age of chivalry could not be allowed to die entirely, and so the master's cabin had been given over to Jane, tiny as it was. She shared it with her maid, Mary, who was thankfully ugly enough to put off even Mannion's roving eye. Gresham had never doubted that Jane's maid had to come with her. It was not only that the girl would need help dressing, particularly if as part of their cover, she was to be paraded before a King as she had just been paraded before a Queen. Sarah had been persuaded to part with two more Court dresses, so there were now three packed carefully in a chest all their own, carefully sealed against damp and salt spray. It was also the more mundane matters. It would be wholly unseemly, for example, for a man to enter the cabin in the morning and ditch the contents of the chamber pot over the side. That was definitely another of the maid's jobs. Gresham took over the one other, even tinier cabin, knowing without asking that Mannion would sleep at the foot of his truckle bed. The master, pushed out by the need to house Jane, would make do with a hammock slung at the rear of the hold, an old sail slung across to mark out his space even though the hold was empty apart from Gresham's baggage.

Jane was excited by the prospect of the voyage. It was quite pathetic really, and if Gresham had had any spare emotional capacity he would have found it rather touching. He knew they could be in for weeks of damp boredom, a tiny deck their only exercise. Yet for Jane, who suddenly at the prospect of the voyage had turned from a sulky young woman into an excited young girl, this was clearly an adventure. She saw little outside the confines of The House, her visits to St Paul's to buy books and her occasional visits to Cambridge. She had invented a role for herself in The House, becoming in effect its steward; the old man who occupied that role had been only too willing to allow her to take over.

Jane had been little more than a foundling when she had first been entrusted to the care of The House. Unlike Gresham she worshipped it; its architecture and its grandeur staggered her. Its comfort seemed to her as if heaven had indeed arrived on earth. Its Library was proof that paradise did indeed exist. So much to find out! As a little girl rescued from the cruelty of being a bastard in a mud-soaked village, she was simply another whim of Henry Gresham, the man who had scorned one of the biggest fortunes in England to go and fight in the Low Country, risking death by bullet or pestilence with every step he took. To those he paid to work in The House, the man who had rescued her was little more than an absentee adventurer and rather too many of them remembered their master as a ragged-arsed urchin who, like Jane, had wandered the endless corridors and passages of The House, owned and loved by no one. She too had been free to wander The House from its finest rooms to its lowest cellars. And she had listened. Oh, how she had listened, a mere child, wide-eyed and posing no threat to anyone. What she had heard had horrified her. The Gresham fortune was feeding half of London. Even worse, basic repairs were being neglected. She had never had any position of power; she had always been cast as the victim: 'Ah, there she is — the poor little bastard girl rescued by that strange man who does the dirty work for the Cecils!' Jane could remember the moment, the single defining moment, when she had declared war on life as a victim. It was when she saw three sides of beef being delivered to The House, and two of them just as quickly being whisked off to destinations unknown; a nod and a wink the only currency that changed hands. It was then that she had given herself a purpose in life. Henry Gresham — Sir Henry Gresham — was a book she could not even lift off the shelf, never mind open and read the pages. His House was a different matter altogether: that she could read and understand. From that moment it became her aim to run The House as it should be run.

How to do it? Very difficult, as she had no status and was nothing more than a discardable whim of her master. Yet she had one thing, one thing only, on her side. None of those in the employ of The House and her master knew the exact nature of the relationship between them. The fact that there was no such relationship was as true as it was not widely known. She had traded shamelessly on that ignorance. She had waited until she had turned sixteen, the age at which many a girl was married and nominally at least became responsible for running a household. She had positioned herself in the right place when the sides of beef arrived, and at the crucial moment when a grinning labourer was about to cart the majority of the delivery off elsewhere she had asked, in a loud voice, 'Does my master know where his beef goes?'

There had been a stunned silence, and the grin had frozen on the face of the man with one of the sides of beef hung over his back. The cook had fought back, inevitably. Jane had planned for this.

'Stop your nonsense, girl!' she had said. 'What do you know about such matters? Get about your business — and while you're at it, out of my kitchen!'

'I know you're cheating Sir Henry!' Jane had said with an air of absolute finality; inwardly she was quaking. 'And if you carry on doing so, I shall tell him.'

They had reached an agreement, the elderly cook and the young girl. These sides of beef would go their way, as they had done for so long, but would cease to do so after that. As of now. And if the lucrative business ended, her conversation with Henry Gresham — the one he would never in reality have allowed her to have — would never take place.

She had then gone immediately to the steward, and demanded that she scrutinise the meat orders in future. Reduced to panic by the thought of what could be revealed about his mismanagement, he had agreed.

Slowly, Jane had thought. One piece at a time. It had taken her two whole years to gain control, to do the steward's job while he continued to receive the rewards. Yet it gave her a strange satisfaction to know that The House was now well managed, albeit at one remove.

And Mannion had proved her greatest ally. The stables in The House were as corrupt as the rest of it. Certainly Gresham's fine horses — one of the few things he really did seem to care about — were well fed and well looked after, but so were many other horses in London from money siphoned off from The House. The Head Groom was a vicious bully, renowned for the violence he inflicted on prostitutes in the stews of Southwark. Jane had left him until last, partly through fear, partly through realisation that he would be her greatest enemy. He was no cleverer than the others, the sum of money he was taking from his master no greater than others, but he hated women. He, of all the power figures in The House, would not bow down under a threat from a woman, and he also had the strongest position. Gresham cared more about his horses than he ever did about his ward, and the Head Groom was good with horses, one of the best in his profession. Would Gresham care how much money was wasted if his horses were well cared for? In her heart of hearts, Jane thought not. And she had no doubt that if it came to a choice between the welfare of his horses and her welfare, there would be no competition. She actually, went to her show-down with the Head Groom convinced that he would win, for the moment at least, and that she would be lucky to emerge from their conversation with anything less than a black eye or a bloodied lip.

It had certainly been heading that way. He had actually stood up and started to walk towards Jane, his right hand clenching into a furious fist, when suddenly he stopped. The stable door had opened. Someone was standing there, blocking out the light.

'If you lay a finger on 'er,' said Mannion, 'you're dead. Tragic episode. Man killed by 'orse. Except it won't be an 'orse that kicks your pathetic little life out of you. It'll be me.'

The man looked at Mannion, stunned. There was an air of absolute finality in what he had said. When he chose to exercise it, Mannion carried massive authority.

'And while you're at it,' Mannion said, in the same flat tone, 'pack your bags. You just resigned. You got an hour. Otherwise, I'm telling you, one of these 'orses is going to behave out of character tonight.'

The man left the stables, his white face suggesting that The House would have a vacancy for a new Head Groom within the hour.

Jane was stunned. She had not even realised that her master and Mannion had returned to The House. She had not seen Mannion at work before. The sheer, blunt force of the man in part overwhelmed her, made her feel fragile and will o' the wisp. And no one had ever helped her before, not like this, except for the one moment when the fine gentleman had rescued her from poverty and humiliation. Jane was used to being alone, and acting on her own.

'Why did you… how did you know…?' 'Pleased I 'appened to be around.'

She felt she ought to say something, started scrabbling for words. Mannion put his finger to his lips.

'Look, girl,' he said, and somehow the 'girl' was not patronising. Rather, and very strangely, it made her feel an equal. 'People like

'im upstairs' — it was clear he was referring to Henry Gresham — 'they need 'elp from the people who really know how it works. You give it your way. I give it mine. Truth is, we're both on the same side. 'Im upstairs, 'e'd use a sonnet to say it, and then not get it right. Us, we don't need fancy words. We just need to know as 'ow we're on the same side.'

He grinned at her, gave an ironic touch to his forehead, and left, leaving the stable door open. A few of the horses had become restive at the tension and the voices, and before she left, almost without thinking, she walked down the length of the stables, reaching out a hand here and a hand there, talking nonsense softly. The smell of horses was all around, not offensive like the stench of human sewage, but somehow rich and warm, tempered by the delicate scent of straw and fodder.

It was a strangely assorted trio that watched as the Anna's scratch crew dropped her dun sails and eased gently out of Deptford, enough hours of daylight left to get her safely out to sea: the young man of fashion in his prime, the waif-become-spy and the great bulk of the serving man.

For two of them at least, it was not the blustery wind nor the rapid, chopping motions of the boat that held their attention. It was the other vessel that also slipped its moorings at exactly the same time as they did, let them build up a lead and then started to follow a suitable distance behind.

'Coincidence?' asked Gresham.

'You must be jokin',' said Mannion. 'But, you know, you get feelings, don't you? Even before your business with the captain. I got a feeling about this one.'

'I've got a feeling about the whole bloody trip,' said Gresham, under his breath. No point in alarming Jane. The wind streamed her hair behind her as she gazed excitedly at civilisation slipping past them. Her maid was puking over the side. She had told everyone she was going to be seasick, and was determined not to let them down.

'We can still turn round,' said Gresham. 'Yeah,' said Mannion, 'we could.'

They watched as they made more open sea. The sails behind them, even darker than their own, stayed steady, neither coming nearer nor turning for France.