Martin Stephen - The Desperate remedy

'Are London's problems solved, my Lord, and can innocent maidens go safely now to our beds?'

'Firstly, I don't solve problems but rather create them, I think. Secondly, I am not nor ever will be "Lord" to anyone. Thirdly, you are not innocent, and fourthly, in your bed no-one is safe.' Feeling rather proud of his grasp of numbers, he reinforced the words, as soon as Mannion had left the room with his boots and cloak, by flinging out an arm, gathering her up and delivering a kiss that shook the fine plaster on the walls.

'Ouch!' she exclaimed truthfully, the hilt of his sword banging into her just under her ribcage. 'Why do men always have to bang at everything?'

'It's in the nature of men to give, and women to receive,' muttered Gresham, nuzzling her hair.

'As gifts go, what men give tends to be rather single-minded and very repetitive,' Jane replied, pushing him away and laughing up at him. 'Must I expect to endure receiving you tonight?'

'If I choose to honour you with my gifts, then yes. Yet as you've always been such an obedient servant, I don't doubt your instant bending…' She raised both her eyebrows. '… or whatever,' he added lamely, 'to my will.'

She dropped her hands to her sides and looked at him with that rare mixture of exasperation and love.

'Do be quiet, Henry Gresham. And come to your bed.' Your bed? For a brief flicker of a moment, Gresham was taken back to the time when he had first set eyes on this woman. Was it the timbre of her voice that sent him back, or that strange mixture of something brazen with something vulnerable and defenceless?

It had been on one of his first journeys from the calm of his Cambridge College to London, in 1590. He was still hobbling from his wound, and was without the relay of spare horses that Mannion was establishing for him. His horse had thrown a shoe just outside Bishop's Stortford. He had been left to his own devices in a village that did not even boast a poor inn', whilst Mannion saw to the horse and a replacement.

As he sat, picking at the rough grass and throwing it into the dank pond, he became aware that a pair of eyes were gazing solemnly at him from in between some bushes.

He gazed back. The two gazes locked, and held.

A thin, piping voice came from the bushes. 'First one who blinks loses.'

Gresham was so surprised that he blinked.

'There, you've lost. You must pay me a forfeit.'

The accent was thick but the diction clear.

'Well, young madam,' said Gresham as the painfully thin figure of a six or seven-year-old girl climbed out of the bushes and into full view, 'I've no recollection that I ever agreed to your terms.'

'But you didn't refuse them either, sir, and therefore as a gentleman you're bound to agree with me.'

The logic was somehow faulty, in a way that Gresham could not quite fathom.

'And what if I don't agree?' The girl's eyes seemed to occupy her whole head. They were the darkest blue Gresham had ever seen, with flickering sparkles hidden deep inside them.

The girl shrugged. 'Then I suppose you'll beat me.'

'Do many beat you?'

'All the time. You see, I'm a bastard, and bastards deserve to be beaten.' The little girl said it as if it was a litany she knew off by heart.

'How often are you beaten?'

'All the time. Here, you may see.' The girl dropped her loose tunic over her bony shoulders, down to her waist. Seven or eight red stripes marked her back, with the older blows turning to dull and dark bruises. She turned to look at him, over her shoulder. There was no coyness in her posture or voice, merely a statement of fact.

'They go on further down, but you're a man, so I can't show you my secret places.'

She carefully drew up her stained tunic, and sat on her haunches, looking at him. 'May I have my forfeit now?'

Gresham had often wondered what would have happened then, were it not for the interruption. He suspected he would have given this little vixen a few coins, and shooed her on her way. It was still his time of darkness, not a time when he had a care for any other living creature, being too full of mourning for those he had loved and betrayed.

Yet at the word 'forfeit' there was an outraged yell from one of the hovels overlooking the pond, and an elderly man erupted from the ill-shuttered door.

'You bitch! You brazen whore's whelp! Where've you been, you little whore, when your duty called? I'll teach you your duty…'

The girl might have been quick enough to evade the blow, had she not been rapt in her attentions to Gresham. As it was, she was a split second late and caught the blow square on her back.

It was not much of a back, as these things went. It was only seven years old, it had never been properly fed or properly clean. Yet it could bleed like any other back, if a witch-hazel stick whipped across it.

Gresham broke the man's arm. It was easy enough, for a soldier. As he raised it for the second blow on the prostrate little figure beneath him, Gresham sprang up, finding his sword in his hand without consciously willing it there or even knowing it had happened. He brought up the sword arm, with its extra weight of metal, just behind the man's wrist, a split second before he brought down his other arm with terrible force on the outstretched arm 'twixt wrist and elbow. The crack of bone would have shattered ice.

The peasant was bellowing on the ground, his arm smashed. The girl had vanished back into the bushes, nursing a new welt but not, Gresham noted, making a sound. Neighbours were rushing out on to the green to see the cause of the entertainment. In very short order they surrounded the gentleman and demanded reparation not only for the damage done to the man, but for disturbing the peace of the whole village. After all, a sword could only kill one man, and there were ten or more of them there in the space of three or four breaths. There was money in this business, and they knew it, peasants that they were.

Then Mannion loomed over the rise that surrounded the pond, and things became calmer. Things usually did become calmer when Mannion arrived on the scene. The villagers who had been feeling their cudgels with enthusiasm suddenly thought it better to put them behind their backs. A rather more civilised process of negotiation assumed pride of place. The man on the ground howling in his agony — 'William', it would appear by all counts — was a labourer. Well, William would not be labouring for a month or two, that was clear. William was also the nearest thing this village had to a saint, that much was also clear. Taken on his daughter's bastard, he had, that same daughter who had caught God's justice when she died in childbirth with no man to call her proper husband.

Looking at William, Gresham wondered how the bastard girl had ever survived. The midwife must have spirited the poor wean away and presented it back to William when the lump it might have made in the pond would have been too obvious even to the other villagers. Come to think of it, there was a fretful old woman hovering at the back of the gesticulating villagers.

It took precious little money to calm them down. Yet what took all of them aback, including Gresham, was his final question.

'How much for the girl?'

Mannion looked up, startled, at his master, and wondered for a brief moment if he liked fucking children. God knows, enough did. And, Mannion decided almost instantaneously, his master didn't. Yet he too had seen the child sliced out of its mother's belly, and knew that taking on this child might somehow claw back some of the despair from that dreadful day.

And the child could always be handed over to someone else to bring up, when Gresham returned to emotions more proper for a man.

In the final count, the amount paid for the girl was paltry. The expression in William's eyes suggested that his arm was well broken if this was the reward. Gresham had visions of him erupting into the path of every gentleman who rode by, demanding that they break his arm.