Martin Stephen - The Conscience of the King

December passed and January crawled on. There was increasing excitement at Court about the impending wedding, and an increasing dread in Gresham's heart as silence greeted his every enquiry as to the whereabouts of Marlowe and Shakespeare. The strain was greater on Jane, he knew, never knowing as she walked in the garden of The Merchant's House whether or not a madman with a crossbow was hiding in the overshadowing woods, for all the extra men they had hired to police them.

'Perhaps he's dead, after all,' said Jane one morning, as the rain poured down and blotted out the view from her window. 'Perhaps he killed Shakespeare, and then died of the pox himself…'

Gresham desperately wanted to reassure her, to agree with her. Yet he knew that to do so might allow her to relax her guard.

‘It's possible, but we daren't assume it's so,' said Gresham, hating himself.

‘I'm only guessin' as to how far gone he is with the pox,' said Mannion. 'But I've seen worse than him live a year or more.'

Jane could not conceal her excitement at the festivities laid on for the royal wedding. Outwardly she scorned Court and its ladies, inwardly becoming as excited as a maid-in-waiting when a great event beckoned. The climax, the evening before the wedding, was to build a replica of the fort and town of Algiers on the south bank of the Thames at Lambeth, and stage a mock sea battle and storming of the town. Well over five hundred watermen and a thousand musketeers from the local militia had been pressed into providing this spectacle, and Rochester and Chatham stripped of every longboat, pinnace and barge that could have mock masts strapped to it and bear at least one cannon.

There was the usual chaos at the Palace the day before the wedding. The old efficiency of Elizabeth's Court was a long-gone memory; James's household was run on excess and confusion. The Chapel Royal at Whitehall was relatively small, which to Gresham's common sense argued for moving the wedding to somewhere larger. Instead, attendance at the ceremony had been limited to barons and above, but in order for others to see the couple they would be sent on a circuitous route to the chapel prior to the wedding. To his intense chagrin, Gresham had been summoned to a rehearsal.

'You can guarantee the bloody King and his wife won't be at any bloody rehearsal!' he muttered, climbing into Court clothes. He had decided that Mannion could act Jane's part, to the immense amusement of the household, and spare her the need to kick her heels for hours in the shambles he knew they would find at the Palace of Whitehall. He would see her that evening, at the great naval battle, with the children. Their excitement had filled The House for days at the news they were allowed to watch.

So it was that Jane was left to her own devices on February thirteenth. Managing a household as vast as that of The House was second nature to her. She had become involved in its running as a young girl, when as a ward of Henry Gresham she had first entered its gloomy, almost derelict walls. It had been sadly neglected then, its servants corrupt, its fabric wasting. Gresham had had no wife, and The House to him had been no more than the extravagance of the father he had hardly known. Jane realised that in gifting to the man who was now her husband the best and most efficiently run household in London, she was in some way trying to pay back the man who had rescued her from rural squalor and given her his heart and mind as well as his body.

It was long after noon. Jane was humming happily to herself, checking the preserves in the vast larder, reassured that they would see The House well through into spring, when the messenger came. Young Tom was the grandson of Old Tom, who had for years been Gresham's Master of Horse. Increasingly, the servants in Gresham's household had a family lineage less illustrious in heraldic terms than those of nobles but nearly as long. Young Tom, as he would probably be known even if he lived to his sixties, had served only a year, and was at the gangling stage between boy and man. He was panting with exertion.

'Please, mistress. Master says as 'ow you're needed at the Palace as they've had to change all the plans, and please would you bring the little master and mistress along as well. Use the coach, he says, as it's safer, and for reason that all the landings at the Palace are clogged with boats for the fight tonight, and please you…' He said all this in one breath, having had little enough left to work with after his run home. Jane laughed, thanked him and felt only a mild twinge of annoyance. It was typical of the Palace to change plans at the last minute, or to have none at all. It was also increasingly the fashion to show off one's children at high-born weddings, using them almost as accessories, dressing them like little puppets in the high fashion of the day. Well, thought Jane, they could have her children if they wanted them, but young Walter would turn out in a very plain doublet and little breeches and Anna in a simple dress with no farthingales, and not a jewel in sight on either of them.

Jane felt a slight stir of unease when she bustled the children into the courtyard to enter the great coach and saw not John, who usually drove them, but his underling Nicholas. Nicholas too came from long-standing stock, men who had served the Greshams for years, but she had never been driven by him before, and the cargo, with her children on board, was precious. It would not have helped her unease had she heard that John had failed to return from the tavern last night, unprecedented in his long service. It would have been reported to Mannion that morning, had he not rode off so early with his master. No one had thought to report it to Jane.

'Can you manage us all in safety now, young Nicholas?' she called up to him, part in jest, as she clambered into the coach. He was white-faced, she saw, but put it down to nerves at his first full outing with his mistress and her children. He made no reply except to wave his whip reassuringly in her direction.

They assembled in the yard, as Gresham had instructed. Two riders in front, two riders each side and two at the rear, and a man with a charged pistol sitting beside Nicholas. The great gates were opened, and the whole magnificent entourage swept out into The Strand. The two lead horsemen, knowing they were heading to Whitehall, turned their mounts to the left.

With a cry, Nicholas cracked his whip and turned the lumbering coach right. Pedestrians turned in horror to see the huge vehicle with its fine horses bearing down upon them, gathering speed with every minute, and leaped to safety.

Jane felt a massive lurch and knew instinctively that they had turned the wrong way. Oh God! she thought. Nicholas has seen an enemy and driven the coach away from him.

The two lead horsemen failed to realise that the coach had not followed them. By the time they reined in, it had vanished from sight. Looking hopelessly at each other, and cursing themselves for their certainty that things would go as they had planned and expected, they yanked on the reins and reversed their path. Mannion's advice was ringing in their ears. Always expect the unexpected! They had been strutting ahead of the coach, clearing the way, full of their glory at serving the First Baron Granville. They knew the depth of their mistake, and in their stomachs hung the awful fear that tomorrow they would be dismissed in ignominy with no reference. Their panic lost them even more of their judgement. They drove their horses not back down The Strand but to the gates of The House.

'There! There!' shouted Nicholas meanwhile to the armed man by his side on the careering coach, his arm outstretched. The man gaped at him, looked in the direction indicated. The next thing he knew a tremendous kick landed in his side, and he was flung from the vehicle. He fell directly under the hooves of one of the escorting horsemen on the left-hand side. Reducing him to a bloody lump, the horse stumbled and fell, one leg at least broken, its rider hurled from his mount into a crunching, bloody collision with the earth. The horse lay there, twitching. Its rider lay still.