Martin Stephen: The galleon's grave

'You're getting old!' Gresham jibed. 'This is where you dare to be wise! This is where the white-hot heat of debate burns up the foul vapours of the air! This is life! Young life!'

'Right,' said Mannion. 'Glad you told me.'

Gresham ignored Mannion and set off, looking not so much like a Fellow of a College as the fine young heir to a noble house, a young colt luxuriating in the use of his long limbs.

They navigated the crowded streets, still tame compared to London's frenetic bustle. Ramshackle, leaning wooden houses threatened to topple over, a stark contrast to the pure stone, brick and soaring lines of the Colleges. No wonder there was so often trouble between the University and the townspeople, thought Gresham. There was an arrogance in these buildings, and in the people who taught and learned within their walls.

'Why do you stick with this lot?' asked Mannion as they pushed their way through the crowds to within sight of Granville. 'Any other College would take you with open arms.'

Why indeed, thought Gresham? It was a thought that bothered him, with half the Fellowship seething with hatred and envy against him. 'Bloody mindedness,' he said, with startling self-honesty. 'I'm damned if I'll let them force me out of My College.' Did he realise he too was speaking in capital letters? He had been truly educated at Granville College. Few men forget their debt to the place that gives them their real education.

Noon was the main meal of the day. In theory the Fellows sat on the High Table, the students beneath them. In practice the wealthier students had created their own High Table, buying in food often more exotic than that served to the Fellows. These same students paid the poorer ones to wait on them and, if they were feeling very gracious, would even allow these intelligent servingmen the leavings of the meal.

They proceeded into the Hall, dark-panelled and with a roaring fire in the great hearth at the end even at noon, and the air rustled as the students stood, scraping back their crude benches. For once, no one upset a bench and sent it crashing to the ground; the students must either have forgotten to greet the Master in the traditional way, or were too drunk to remember to do so. Gresham took his seat, ignoring the frosty looks directed his way by several of the Fellows. He looked to his neighbour opposite, to be met with a glare of hatred.

Will Smith. Fellow of Granville College. Living witness to Cambridge's increasing dedication to hard-core Puritanism. Thin almost to extinction, smaller than average, a shock of fair curls crowning an extraordinarily high forehead and an intensity that would freeze river water. It was no Godliness that Gresham could recognise that drove Will Smith. It was hatred. Hatred, essentially, of anyone having fun.

The interminable Latin Grace was read out by a student who was as nervous as the rest of his fellows were bored. Someone timed a raucously loud fart precisely in-between the end of Grace and the solemn 'Amen'. The students giggled and shifted, the Fellowship looked stolidly ahead. To more scraping of benches Granville College sat down to eat.

Smith almost drove his thin, sweating face into Gresham's across the table. 'The smell of beer is on your breath!' he accused scornfully.

'Weil, it would be, wouldn't it?' Gresham replied mildly, hiding the fact that his good humour was vanishing as quickly as it had returned to him that morning. 'It's what they sell at The Golden Lion. You really don't want to touch the wine. It's-'

'Have you no shame? You desecrate our place of worship with idle music. You drink, you swear, you copulate… and you deny the word of God!' The man was using his words like daggers.

'Good heavens!' said Gresham, his voice calm, 'All those at the same time?'

There was a splutter of laughter from up the table. Tom Pleasance was a man whose vast bulk showed a serious commitment to the sins of eating and drinking. Fat Tom was one of Gresham's few allies.

What do you do when half the Fellows of your College hate you? Mannion's answer was simple. There were relatively few things in life, and you did four things with them. You drank them. You ate them. You slept with them. Or you thumped them. On the basis that Will Smith and his kind could not be eaten nor drunk, and that it would be unhealthy to sleep with them, there was only one alternative.

'Keep thumping 'em when they're contrary,' Mannion had announced with finality. ‘Eventually, they'll give up. If you hurt 'em enough.'

'What happens if they "thump" me first?' a morose Gresham had asked.

'Then you're a stupid bastard.' Well, that was that, then.

It was not unusual for rising young stars from the Court to visit Cambridge, nor for falling ones for that matter. Gresham noted the arrival of Robert Cecil in the Hall with little enthusiasm, not least of all because in his heart Gresham did not wish to go to sea. Cecil's arrival could only mean that he carried Walsingham's orders for him. Cecil was a Trinity man, here to look at a donation to some new building. Or at least, that was the public story. His presence had excited considerable interest in the small world of College. His father was the most powerful man in England. It was common knowledge that Lord Burghley was grooming his second son to take over from him as the Queen's Chief Minister, common knowledge that there was serious aristocratic opposition to any such succession. What excitement! It was the intrigue of which College life was made up.

Cecil initially nodded to Gresham politely enough, and then leaned over to him quickly when his neighbour's attention had been diverted by the arrival of new dishes.

'We must meet,' Cecil said. 'Privately, after this. In your rooms. I come on Walsingham's business.' He turned away suddenly to engage in conversation with the Master.

'It's the talk of the town, I tell you, sir!' The speaker was Alan Sidesmith, a senior Fellow and one of Gresham's other friends in College. He had recently returned from London. A man of urbane polish, he hid an acid wit under an unflappable exterior. Whatever this talk was, Cecil's body language was showing he did not wish to hear it.

'They're talking of nothing else except the prophecy. I'm. given to understand that the Queen is to issue a proclamation condemning its heresy, so concerned are the powers that be.'

'It is nothing!' Cecil interjected, drawn from his conversation with the Master. The man clearly had ears that could stretch down a whole table, thought Gresham. 'A mere fad, superstitious fancy…'

Cecil's obvious reluctance to have the topic aired was like a red flag to a bull for the Fellowship.

'What is it, this prophecy?' asked one, a thin man with a streak of venison gravy down his chin.

'The man was popularly known as "Regiomontanus",' said Sidesmith. 'I believe he was actually called Muller. Johan Muller, of Konigsberg. He died over a hundred years ago.'

'Muller? The mathematician? The one who did the calculations for Columbus and his navigating tables?' It was Adam Balderstone, a drunkard who was one of Gresham's bitterest enemies in College.

Now, it was happening, Gresham could see — that strange alchemy of College life, the coming together despite the vicious rivalries and deep enmities. The Fellows had started to gather round Sidesmith, moving the trestle tables aside to get closer, hunching forward in their interest. Students had left their tables, rich and poor, and were gathering on the edges of the group of men. The College was starting to breathe its magic, drawing these disparate men together, declaring a temporary truce even between those who yesterday could have killed each other.

Something started to sing in Gresham's heart. For all its anger and petty hatreds, its turmoil and parochial tumult, these strange, isolated moments of harmony were the reason why he felt at home only here, why he was pouring out money in the face of envy to revitalise this College. We do not own our lives, he thought. At best we are merely tenants. But sometimes we can buy a stake in the future, a stake in something that will outlive our frantic, short share of life. A young man in an all-male community, he was too young to realise that this same justification was what drove men to have children.