Martin Stephen - The Desperate remedy

'View it as my gesture of protest against the dominance of night in this world of ours,' Gresham said loftily, and swept out of the room.

'View it as a damn silly waste of money, more like!' muttered Mannion, closing the door behind him.

Mannion also had a sense of humour. By comparison with many other men's sense of humour it was odd in the extreme. What Mannion found funny, and what could not produce even the tiniest stretching of his craggy features, never ceased to fascinate Gresham. Boots, for example, were endlessly funny to Mannion. It was as if he deemed mankind to have been born with feet the aim of which was to trudge through whatever muck God chose to put at ground level. He would accept clogs or the most basic leather footwear as a reasonable recourse against the elements on the part of the dominant species, but in the face of the finery the gentry put on their feet he was reduced to hopeless laughter.

A gentleman would don boots as a matter of necessity. A courtier would like people to believe that his fine shoes would never need to meet muck or mud, unless one was riding, of course. Henry Gresham was a gentleman, fabulously rich and a courtier when he chose. He was also an agent for King James I of England and King James VI of Scotland. So it was that he was planning to walk home, from The Mermaid Inn after his rather fruitless conversation. Gentlemen and courtiers rode horses or had carriages. Gentleman courtiers who were spies tended to avoid both, as drawing attention to themselves.

Mannion eyed his own stout leggings, and the supple leather of his master's fine boots.

'Shame about the boots,' he muttered with a grin. Mannion had no fear for the armed gangs who roamed the streets after nightfall. He was highly amused by the prospect of what the walk would do to his master's fine boots.

There was something about London muck that did for fine leather. Too much of Gresham's time was taken up in walking back from shady rendezvous. The worst times were early morning, and late at night. During the day it was not too bad. A veritable army of men scurried to shovel up every human, horse, cattle and dog turd that lay steaming on the streets. There was money to be made from shit, but to make it you had to see it. At night it was invisible, and ever present.

'Remember that dream you told me about once?' said Mannion, as they walked through a street with a particularly narrow over-hang.

Gresham had once had a nightmare where he was leaving one of Bankside's most unsavoury taverns and his way home was lit by endless torches. The dim and flickering light illuminated thousand upon thousand of straining arses, perched over the narrow and overhanging streets and each delivering their message to the street with a hollow thud.

He shook his head, and the image vanished. A grinning Mannion led him down the rickety stairs and through The Mermaid, full as was usual with its theatrical crowd and some of the more daring socialites, tasting a bit of rough and arty for the night. The air was thick and unpleasant, the dancing light revealing the sweat on the fevered brows. Men dealing, men stealing, men intriguing and whores selling. It was a foetid mix, and Gresham could not wait to be out of it.

Gresham's eyes flickered round the room, seeming to see nothing, noting everything. He noted a dour, stooping figure, clearly the worse for drink, sitting alone at a back table. Gresham scrabbled in his memory for the man's name. It would come. They emerged into the black streets. The muscularity of their walk, and the ease with which their hands rested on the swords in their belts, caused the ways to part in front of them. They were the source of menace, not its victims.

'That man, seated in the corner,' Gresham said, 'the one on his own and worse for drink; do you recognise him?'

'Should I?' replied Mannion. 'Shall I go back in and ask?'

'No, not yet at least. I remember him from somewhere. It'll come back.'

As they passed an 'ordinary', light spilled out from the door, and two men fell brawling into the street. There were shrieks and yells, good-natured laughter. Out of the dark a crowd gathered, egging the two on. Gresham and Mannion looked away, preserving their night vision. Inside that same tavern Gresham knew a man could be reading exquisite sonnets to his friends. Shortly after, they were plunged into darkness, the huge overhang of the half-timbered buildings closing over them like a black cloud. It was a residential area. The doors were closed and bolted this late in the night, and only the feeble light of an occasional candle or guttering lamp behind closed shutters showed that some merchant was still up, counting his credit or bemoaning his losses. Or, as a shriek from behind followed by the thuds of two or three blows suggested, a wife was being taught what a man thought was good manners.

It was, then that a moment for Heaven came, a moment that summed up for Gresham the magic of London. Shortly behind him two men were fighting, cheered on by a drunken crowd, and a wife was being beaten for doing no more probably than trying to be herself. And then, from a high window, came the breath of

Heaven.

Music had always inspired Gresham. It was his greatest regret that he could not find in himself the means to produce what so inspired him from others. O Jove, From Stately Throne. That was it. Gresham had met the composer. Farrant? Yes, Richard Farrant, no less. Perhaps it was Farrant, his face ravaged by smallpox, leading the small ensemble in the upstairs room, playing and singing beyond all reasonable time, desperately trying to compensate for the ugliness of his own face by the beauty of his music.

The voice of Heaven filtered out through the shutters and on to the dark street, dropping like gentle rain on the heads of Gresham and Mannidn. As a man they stopped, raised their faces, and let the beauty fall on their upturned visages like a summer shower.

It was high summer. Even here, in the great city, the sense was in the air. With the warmer evenings fires were lit later and left burning shorter. The smoke that hung over London on a still day like a funeral pall was visibly less. The cattle driven through the streets were fat and full of milk.

The most dangerous thing they met on the journey was a dog, half wild with hunger and trailing a leg damaged in a fight, or in a collision with a cart. It slunk away down an alley.

He had worked himself back into a good humour by the time he and Mannion reached home, his mood generated by what awaited him there. Known simply as the House, the London home built by Gresham's father was situated in the highly fashionable area of the Strand, and with its own landing on to the River it was a prime site. His father had bought it when the monasteries had been dissolved.

The House was well-run. That much was clear. The two well-built men who acknowledged their master as he trudged through the mud to his own doorstep recognised him, but would have recognised an enemy just as clearly, and sounded the alarum. Their pleasure in seeing their master was in no small measure related to the fact that Henry Gresham showed pleasure in seeing them.

'Good evening, Matt, good evening, Will,' he muttered as he passed them by. Mannion grunted at them.

The entrance hall was of marble, brought over at fabulous expense from Italy. The statues and hangings were also Italian. The woman was English.

Jane Carpenter was nearing twenty-three years of age, and was the most beautiful woman in London. She had a face of stunning beauty, cheekbones pushing up round the roundest and darkest pair of eyes in Christendom. Her body lacked the plumpness of many Court ladies, but she had the grace and strength of a young colt, and legs beneath her dress that seemed to cross counties. Yet it was her eyes that commanded attention, extraordinary eyes, with dark lights seeming to flash beneath their surface. Gresham grinned at her as Mannion struggled to pull off his boots, replacing them with soft shoes. She grinned in return. With him she dropped the rather aloof distance she maintained with all people of social standing, the faint tone of terrible boredom.