Martin Stephen: The Conscience of the King

In private, that is, except for the figure of Mannion. If the one certainty in Gresham's life was that Jane's slim, warm body would be gone from his bed when he awoke, the other was that Mannion, that immense hulk of a man, would drift in silently to the room almost as soon as Gresham's feet touched the floor, towel in hand, ready to guide his master to the adjoining room where the bath had already been filled. This morning he had rejected the ritual, putting on instead a rough country jerkin and trews over his clean linen, stuffing a simple cap on his head and walking out past the startled servants wiping the sleep from their eyes as they came to terms with their own world. He had strode out of the house, lungs taking in great gasps of the still, chill morning air. Mannion, with a wistful eye back at the house and breakfast, had followed him in silence. He knew where Gresham would be going. It had to be Excalibur's pool.

Gresham had called it that when he bought the house. If ever there was a pool from which an enchanted hand might bring Excalibur, this was it; a bend in the river channelled out by the years into almost the size of a small lake, the water deep in history, cool and pure.

Mannion sniffed as Gresham stripped off and prepared to dive into the pool. Gresham heard it, as he was meant to. He turned to his body-servant, grinning, stark naked in the still-cold morning air.

'This is a magical place! An enchanted place! Can't you feel it, old man?'

'Funny how you can miss these things,' Mannion replied in a tone that did not imply any great respect for magic or enchantment. 'I thought it was just cold and damp.'

'Have you no imagination?' Gresham half shouted as he prepared to dive in to the darkness of the pool, thin strands of early morning mist still clinging to its luminous surface. *No,' said Mannion, at least able to close that one up without further discussion. 'And if I did have, you can be sure neither of us'd be standing here catching our deaths this morning!'

Gresham pulled back, aborting his dive, interested.

'And how do you reckon that?'

'Because it's your so-called imagination that's got you into most of the scrapes that my lack of it has helped pull you out of. Now are you going to dive in, or are we both going to die of your imagination?'

Not for the first time, Gresham reflected that it was usually a bad thing to engage the servants in conversation before breakfast. He gasped as the cold river water bit benignly into his flesh. Mannion was waiting with the towel as he climbed out, dripping, on to the grassy bank. Mannion noted with approval, as he always did, the firmness of Gresham's body, the muscle under just the right layer of flesh. In the cold, patches of Gresham's skin, all down his right side, had turned just the slightest shade paler than the rest of his flesh. If Mannion remembered holding Gresham in his arms for weeks on end, or Gresham his screaming for release from his agony when the powder had burned all that side of his body, then neither said anything. They did not need words in order to communicate.

They walked back in companionable silence to The Merchant's House. Medieval in its origins, it had once been little more than a Great Hall with a kitchen attached. Extended and added to over two hundred years, Gresham could feel the heat of the house extend towards him like outstretched arms. He found it difficult to explain its magic, but he knew it was centred in the Great Hall. Once, in a different age, whole families and their retainers had lived, squabbled and loved in this Hall, with only the kitchens, store houses and rooms for the master and mistress separated off. Now, with its tapestries and fantastic gilded and beamed roof, the Great Hall was simply the largest room at the centre of a complex of corridors, levels and parlours, a positive industry of a house, the noises of which Gresham could perpetually hear faintly in the background. Summer was truly in the air, and there was a sense of reawakening in all the subdued sounds around him, a stirring of limbs aching from the winter. Yet the Great Hall seemed almost impervious to this tumult. In its time it had seen and hosted all that human life could offer. It was called The Merchant's House, but Gresham guessed some rich merchant had bought it from the nobility who had first built it and then fallen on hard times, or perhaps even fallen on the executioner's block. No merchant would have built that Hall. Its confidence was the confidence of a blood-line, not of earned money.

His children had come in through the door at the other end of the Hall, talking quietly to each other. The room gleamed, rich with the shine and smell of polish. Gresham felt an irritation, and half rose to banish them from the formal room of the great house, the room that was his to be alone in whenever and howsoever he required it. This was an adult room, not a nursery. Then he fell back, unseen, as he caught the words of their conversation.

'Sssh!' It was Walter, six this year and the older of the two, who happened to be making the most noise. 'If they hear us they'll make us leave!'

'Why will they make us leave?' That was the small, piping voice of Anna, rising five. Learning to speak extraordinarily early, she had always done so with perfect clarity.

'Because adults do that sort of thing.'

'Then are adults not very clever?'

'I… I… I don't know!' safd an exasperated Walter. 'Let's get on with the game.'

Gresham relaxed back into his chair, grinning, still hidden from his two children. Now there was the subject of his next academic work, he thought. Man, the dominant species, brought to a grinding halt by the seventh rib asking a sensible question. And what was Man's answer? 'I don't know! Let's get on with the game!' How many men had Gresham known who treated the deadly serious business of life as simply a game? The only difference between Gresham and other men was that he had learned long ago that there was no answer, that life was indeed a game and survival its only victory.

The game in this instance, or so it appeared, consisted of skipping the length of the vast table centred in the Hall and placing something a few feet past its end, itself only a few feet from the back of Gresham's chair. Feeling increasingly like a naughty child himself, Gresham looked round to catch sight of what his daughter had laid on the floor.

Good God. It was a bum roll. Or two bum rolls, to be precise. These were the padded half-hoops that a woman wore resting on her bottom to exaggerate the size of her hips and the narrowness of her waist, and to put a barrier between the flesh and the steel wires that extended her skirt out to the ludicrous lengths required by Court fashion. There would be hell to pay when their loss was discovered.

The game quickly became clear. Walter and Anna each had a packed leather ball. Underneath the table was a narrow tunnel formed by the extravagantly backed oak chairs tucked under it. Bowling the ball under the entire length of the table so that it emerged to rest in the centre of one of the bum rolls acquired top points. Bowling the ball so that it hit the end of the bum roll meant no points. A few points were scored for clearing the table but not reaching the embrace of the bum roll.

The temptation was too much.

'Can I play?' asked Gresham, standing up.

Children were meant to doff their caps to their father after his breakfast, ask him to pray for them and invite his formal blessing. Formal. Restrained. Fathers did not romp with their children on the floor.

But it was a good game, and he did want to play.

His two children, ludicrously small now that he was upright, jumped back as he spoke but calmed immediately as they recognised their father.

'Do you… do you… do you mind us being here, Father?'

It was Walter, the brave little soldier standing in front of his officer, always unsure of what erratic authority would decree yet wanting so much to get it right.