Martin Stephen: The Desperate remedy

The brown and swirling waters of the Thames bore a frequent cargo of new- or still-born children. They were meant to be from the loins of the whores who had matched London's stupendous growth. Gresham cared not to think how many well-born casement windows had seen a private cargo despatched into the waters of Lethe. All new-born appeared alike when swelled by their feast of filthy river water.

'If not names, then witnesses. Who witnesses this nightly progress?'

The informer allowed an expression of alarm to cross his eyes and ravaged face. He took another half-swig, his moderation reflecting a new sense of danger.

'Why, the servants, of course. All the servants.'

'And the Gateman will testify to this? The other servants will testify?'

'Why… why… they may, of course. Of course they may.'

Gresham's voice was at its most silky soft. He placed his other arm between a stain that might have been blood and one that was certainly grease, and leant forward.

'Without testimony those visitors are phantoms, just ghosts upon the wind.'

His voice turned from summer sun to the glint of blade in passageway.

'As you, my friend, are so much piss and wind.'

He came to his feet. He was an impressive figure, five foot eight or so and with an easy muscle rippling below the superbly tailored doublet, hose and cloak.

His figure, clothed all in black, loomed over the informer like Death himself. And now the voice became ice, cold beyond belief. It froze the informer, even as it released him. As Gresham spoke, he heard the tinkle of urine falling to the floor from the terrified man, smelt the hot, raw stink of steaming piss.

'You will return here, a fortnight from now. You will bring names, names of young sodomites or names of servants who will testify against their master. Or you will bring nothing. On what you bring you will be judged. Leave. Now.'

Gresham sank back in his chair, a black mood of despair threatening to overwhelm him. The informant, humiliated by his wetting himself and terrified beyond belief, fled, muttering incoherently.

This was going nowhere, Gresham thought. I am facing a man of unbounded intelligence, and all I have to question is fools.

'More work for the laundress.' The gruff voice was Mannion's. Built like a Cathedral, he had stationed himself just outside the door, opening it to let the informer out and himself in.

'More work for the chambermaid,' muttered Gresham, nodding to the steaming yellow pool on the floor beneath the table. He doubted she or the landlord would bother. The floor had seen much worse. There was a virtual history of London drunkenness etched on to the worn boards.

Mannion waited. If his master wished to talk, he would do so. Mannion would listen. Sometimes his master needed to talk and hear no reply. Sometimes he spoke and needed to debate. Mannion would respond, in kind. He would know which it was and, if it seemed proper to do so, would speak.

There was silence, Gresham sipping thoughtfully at his own goblet. As ever he had made sure he had his own wine, not the spew served to the informer. It was the best the inn had to offer, which was not very much. Like much of the City, it was brash, and new and quite raw, and like the City it had a taste of something much older, something sweetly rotten, beneath it.

So there was to be no talking, Mannion reflected. So be it.

'Shame about the candles,' Mannion muttered as they left the room. Gresham had left them burning, most of them not yet half done. The landlord would gratefully snuff them out and use the remaining half, charging Gresham for the whole candle. Gresham did not respond. It was an old joke.

It had been years ago. They had just started campaigning after a dreadful winter. The canvas of the tent had seemed as if it was just drying out, in the rare sun of a Flanders spring. The soldiers had come in silent, angry. Usually an action cleared the blood, exhilarated them. This time the pathetic Spaniard in charge of the troop had not only been concealing the gold they had been sent to rob, but concealing his wife. She was a pretty girl, not yet nineteen years of age. Hidden in a baggage cart, they would probably have left her, heavily pregnant as she was, if they had found her. Even a scream would have caused a laugh and no more. It was early in the campaigning year, they were fat with an idle winter and there were no grudges to pay back as yet. Instead she had climbed out of her hiding place silently, seeking to rush out of the wagon and into the shrubbery surrounding the ambush. The youngest recruit had heard the rustle of clothing behind him and swung round with sword outstretched. His mother had obtained the sword for him. God knew — or so Gresham hoped — how the Toledo steel of a Spanish grandee had found its way into the hands of a woman who had proudly borne six fiercely Protestant sons in an East Anglian farmhouse. The sword was sharp as a razor, despite the youngest son's crude attempts at sharpening it. Its curving arc, powered by all the untrained force of a healthy and terrified eighteen-year-old, had sliced neatly through the stomach of the pregnant woman.

It had also sliced into the unborn boy, so that it was bleeding to death even as it flopped to the ground. It had an audience fitting for such an end in Flanders mud. Its mother saw it bleed to death in front of her, as her frighteningly red hands clawed at her own gut. So did its father and its murderer, and an assorted troop of Protestant and Catholic mercenaries and volunteers.

The young man skewered himself on the sword his mother had given him. He did it badly, of course. He would take days to die as the horrific wound in his belly and bowel suppurated and led to its inevitable conclusion. The problem was, he would scream.

So they came into the tent in varying moods and set about getting as drunk as possible in as short a time as was possible. Henry Gresham was a veteran of two years' standing. Haying seen so much, he was later to the bottle than many of the younger ones. He saw the outstretched hand knock the lamp and its oil off the empty barrel and fling its contents against the canvas of the tent. He saw the oil sink into the canvas, inert. He saw the wick, still flaming, sail through the air as if the world had slowed down and God declared a war against time, towards the canvas. He saw the wick hit the canvas, flicker as if ready to die, and then burst out anew on the oil-soaked cloth.

They should not have stored powder in the tent. There was a store for it, only a few hundred yards away. Yet they were veterans, survivors of a war that seemed endless. They knew the perils of powder that had separated through old age, of powder that was damp or badly mixed. They preferred to keep and tend their own, and despite their every precaution the fire reached it.

Henry Gresham never knew what object, flung out by the blast, gouged his leg and thigh to near pulp. He did know the sight of his erstwhile commander, screaming for light with a boiled face and eye sockets permanently burned out. The last thing he remembered was Mannion, reaching out as if to stop him connecting with the ground.

So it was that Henry Gresham commanded candles, not lamps, in his house and in the rooms he hired. A candle, if knocked over, tended to go out. If not, its flame was a slow, friendly kind of fire. Oil simply wished to ignite. He could bear lamps, of course. Indeed, in strange rooms and strange houses where he had no control he hardly even noticed them. Henry Gresham had long ago lost any belief that a human being could control their life. All one could do was to control it where one had power, that being a very small portion of the whole.

‘I’ll have what's left of those candles snuffed out and in my bag in seconds,' Mannion grumbled. 'You've paid for them, haven't you?' Mannion never ceased to mention the waste of candles. By reminding Gresham, he made the fear normal.