Martin Stephen - The Desperate remedy

She had shown no emotion until the time of their leaving. A mere piece of property, she had been bartered and sold, with no-one thinking to ask her opinion. She vented it, forcibly, when she was seated behind Mannion the servant on his horse, as was only proper.

She screamed and shrieked and pummelled and yelled, causing even Mannion's horse to buck and to rear in protest.

'What is wrong with you, girl!' Gresham exploded.

'You bought me,' the thin, shivering Eve proclaimed through gritted and tear-stained teeth. 'I shall ride on no horse except your own.'

Gresham had killed more men than he cared to count. He had witnessed the person he most loved in Creation die in agony before him, and because of him. He had suffered in a few months more pain than most men underwent in a lifetime. He had a fortune to his name, he cared for no man and he cared for nothing… Why, then, thought Gresham, am I riding at a sedate pace and freezing to death, whilst a seven-year-old bastard girl sits behind me in state, wearing my fine cloak?

If he had been able to answer that question, then perhaps he would really have been God.

There was a vestige in him of his own childhood. He too had known what it was to be the bastard.

'Find me a woman to care for this… minx,' he had said to Mannion as they arrived in London. The girl had been restored to rude good health by a substantial meal. If her eyes had opened any wider on their entry to London they would have consumed her face.

'Find me someone who won't just care for her. Find me some servants who'll love her, as if she were their own.'

And Mannion, as he always did, found what his master wanted.

Jane had fallen in love with the House only slightly less than she had fallen in love with the strange and darkly dressed man who had rescued her from abuse. It had been a dark, dreary and a sad place she had come to, still in mourning for the death of Gresham's father and an heir who seemed determined to neglect it. As a child she had haunted its every nook and cranny, and as she grew older and into womanhood she seemed to light up the building with her love for it. Nominally under the care of the elderly Housekeeper, Jane had grown into that role herself so gently that no-one could point to the exact time when she became the acknowledged mistress of the House.

The House was the best-run house in London. No wine was drunk, no food eaten and no clothing for footmen paid for without Jane being convinced that the expenditure was proper. There was a part of Jane that was the feral cat, a part Gresham knew would never leave her. It accounted in part for her raw sexuality, her enjoyment of the physical act. The servants saw the untamed Jane if they cheated their master, the House or her, and felt it. Gresham had seen her turn on a thieving servant with a cold fury, and a ferocious concentration of anger that was almost tangible. Yet months later she had waited most of the night by that same serving girl's bed when she seemed as if she would die of a fever, and fed her beef tea. That same woman he had seen when a sudden downpour had flooded the hall, her skirts tucked up to her knees, laughing and joking with the servant girls as they all joined to swoosh the filthy water back out into the street. The men servants may have leered at her behind her back, for all Gresham knew. To her face they were strangely protective, their visible respect tinged almost with a certain fearfulness. All the servants spoke in awe of her, grumbling as servants did. Yet it was her food that was the freshest, her room the most clean and her bed linen the most virgin-white. In a way Gresham did not understand, they took an immense pride in her. He knew and accepted almost with complacency that many of them would die for him. It surprised him how many he thought might die for her. Then again, he lived in a world where if the master or the mistress sinned, the servants received an equal or worse punishment. Dying for your master or your mistress was not a choice for the servants of the well-born. It was a condition of service.

Gresham still did not know how the irritating, obnoxious foundling, the by-blow of a hasty assault on a peasant common, had become his mistress.

He had come to the House late one night, obsessed with business. The thin-boned foundling had turned into a strikingly beautiful seventeen-year-old with an imperious will. She had strode about his chamber, showing real anger as she explained the various frauds upon his money that his servants had perpetuated.

'And furthermore, my Lord, there's one even greater crime to which you must answer!'

'And what's that?' said Gresham, wearied beyond belief by decisions that affected all Christendom, not to mention his supposedly immortal soul. How was it to him if a cook was ordering extra chickens?

She stood there, tall and straight as the bolt from an arrow, flashing radiance in the room. 'You, who have every right to claim me as your own, have never looked at me as a woman!'

Well, he had been taken by a fit and had done more than look upon her as a woman that night, to their apparent mutual satisfaction. Yet when he woke, he was more than a man with the edge taken off his carnal hunger by a fine night of lovemaking. More scared than he had been in the face of a Spanish cannon, he realised with an almost sickening fear that he was in love. He knew that he had signed his will away. He had not sought it. He had even tried positively to avoid it, or any other entanglement. It had done him no good.

Yet Jane had steadfastly refused to marry him. He had pleaded with her.

'You seem to have claimed ownership of my body, and doubtless wanted my soul since I first saw you by that cursed pond! I've said I love you, haven't I? Why won't you make a proper woman of yourself, and a proper man of me, by being my wife? Am I fat and stinking of grease? Am I not rich enough for you?'

She had turned away that night, after their lovemaking, peaceful and contented. She let his ranting pass over her, with the inner calm that drove him to even greater fury. She turned round to face him, letting cold air into the bed.

'I've said my thanks with my body. It's all I was gifted with from God. Everything else I have was somebody else's. You've had the only thing I have to give, as I now am. Anything else must wait.'

'Yet you've shown me your secret places. You've let me use those secret places, to my heart's content.'

He remembered the first showing to him of her wounds.

She smiled at him, a radiance that lit up the bed. 'I've shown you the secret places of my body, and willingly so.'

She turned over in the bed, her back towards him. As if from a far continent, her last words came. 'As for the secret places of my soul, for that you will have to wait.'

Gresham knew of no more final goodnight.

Arid now he was lying in his vast bed in 1605, years on from that first meeting and years on from the night when he had taken her virginity. He was satiated, yet as mystified by this woman he loved as he had been by the side of the pond in that filthy village all those years ago. Perched on the very edge of sleep, the knowable world of Cambridge, the dangerous world of Robert Cecil and the imponderable world of Jane raced round in his head until they blended into a wild half-dream. Cecil was screaming at him, blaming him that his mistress was soon to be elected as Master of King's College. He recoiled in the face of Cecil's spitting anger, yet thinking it would not be the first time a bastard had been involved in the governance of that College.

In his dreams, the bloated face of Will Shadwell rose up from the deep.

'Beware! Beware!' it moaned at him. 'You are in waters too deep for your soul!'

'My soul, poor tattered thing, was lost a long while ago,' whispered Gresham. 'And I have been in waters too deep all my life!'