Martin Stephen - The Desperate remedy

And that, thought Gresham, showed why one should not engage in conversation with the servants.

He allowed Mannion to dress him. He could not remember when Jane had first started to sleep the night with him, regardless of his carnal needs. He knew it was shortly after their first, frantic lovemaking. He had resented the presence in his bed, the last citadel of his private person, when instead of leaving after their coupling she had turned over and lain gently on the far side of the bed, back towards him. Her young and muscled body lay there, its curves as relaxed and bored as a seasoned choirboy's arm swinging the censor. He had willed it to move, and gone to sleep so doing, waking up to find it gone and about its business.

He did not understand how in entering her body he had let her enter his mind.

Jane had never interfered with his silent routine of early morning washing, and Mannion's attendance on it as his body-servant. The relationship between Mannion and Jane was one of life's great secrets as far as Gresham was concerned. After that first day, when she had screamed to be taken off Mannion's horse, he had not discerned so much as a-flicker of disagreement between them. In his presence they were formal, even brisk, in their conversations. At times Gresham thought they used a shorthand between each other, a language he could not understand. It never crossed Gresham's mind that what united them was their love of him.

His breakfast was milk warm from the cow, brought from the fields near Islington. The bread was fresh-baked in the House's own ovens, and smelt divine. There was cheese, and strips of bacon burnt to the black as if on a campaign fire, a taste he had never lost. There was a concoction of eggs beaten up with milk and then heated over the fire until it bubbled a gentle yellow, a half-eaten beef pie. Dr Perse in Cambridge had advised him to eat a hearty breakfast above all other meals, and it suited Gresham's constitution. There were many who ate no breakfast at all.

Gresham finished his breakfast. Mannion left the room briefly and returned with one of the kitchen maids, who cleared the wooden table. There was a rustle, and the briefest sense of a fine perfume. Without turning round he sensed that Jane had entered the room. He waved a hand, motioning both to be seated.

Gresham nodded to the small beer and Mannion poured himself a tankard. He drank like a sewer, with a vast, slurping contentment that only just stopped short of the belch he clearly needed to deliver after devouring the whole tankard.

'For God's sake, man, let it go before you explode.' Mannion let loose a torrent of wind that started at his feet and came out finally from his mouth like the blast of the trumpet on Judgement Day. Jane looked at him as he rocked with the force of the expulsion, the tiniest flicker visible at the corner of her mouth. Gresham looked on with distaste, his lip curling.

'You are disgusting!' he said.

'Aye, sir. Disgusting.' Mannion poured himself another tankard and placed it cheerfully in front of him. 'Truly disgusting. But no longer thirsty, for which I thank you.'

It did not occur to Gresham to ask how many other gentlemen of his wealth and standing discussed the most important matters of the day after breakfast with their body-servant and their mistress. As for how many gentlemen were blessed with a body-servant who won both the morning's opening conversational gambits, he preferred not to think. The girl had made it clear from early on that she had a brain to match her body, one source of her capacity to irritate him more than any other person on earth. It was so much simpler to have the body as one container, and the brain in another, and far more convenient for the latter to be contained in a man. He had said so to Jane once. She had considered the proposition thoughtfully, and then hit him with the bedpan.

The upper room in which they sat was one of Gresham's favourites. Dressed with dark oak panelling that had been young in the Wars of the Roses, it had a large window and balcony overlooking the street. Already the hubbub of London was audible despite the lavish expenditure on glass in the window. As with most houses, the introduction of glass had not caused Gresham to remove the old, unwieldy shutters, which were an excellent defence. They had been thrown back as he had entered the room, revealing a watery, smoke-stained dawn.

Gresham gave a brief resumй of where he thought things stood, speaking as if to himself but knowing his silent, attentive audience. He listed the death of Will Shadwell, the meeting with Cecil, the strange task of Bacon. For Jane's sake he went over the story of the informer, the lack of any incriminating evidence on Bacon. They knew his ways, knew that in some way this careful repetition of the facts, this thinking aloud, enabled him to order things in his mind, to speed up thought. The fingers of his left hand began to drum gently on the rough wood of the table. It was a rare gesture for a man who held himself always in fierce physical control.

‘I’m uneasy. There's something in the air. Unrest, trouble. I don't know. Yet the feeling is there. As it was before Essex, the same feeling. What gossip is there in the markets and the fine shops, Jane? What are they talking of in St Paul's?'

The old cathedral of St Paul's was the crumbling centre of London. Even though it had lost its steeple to lightning some years before, it still dominated London in its centre. Occupying over twelve acres at the western end of Cheapside, it would have taken Jesus two lifetimes to clear it of its moneylenders. It was here that those caught by the new plant tobacco came to buy, here where every servant in London looked for vacancies on the siquis door. It was here that the gallant casually threw back his fine cloak to reveal the satin lining, and the younger son skulked in the doorway to hide his ragged doublet. It was here that the scaffold would be erected, the men twitching their last moments in earshot of the sermon being preached from St Paul's Cross. Puritan and Papist, gentleman and cutthroat, fine lady and bawd met, mingled and, not infrequently, came to blows or copulated. The country bumpkins who increasingly flocked to London were drawn to St Paul's and drew with them the lowlife who preyed on their naivety. It was the best centre for gossip in London, exceeded only by the Court itself.

Jane went there nearly every day to visit the booksellers. She had more or less taught herself to read and had devoured the library built up by Gresham's father. The only time she had badgered him for money was to add to the library, to which he had willingly agreed. The House now had one of the finest collections of books in London. As a child she had become almost a talisman among the booksellers, the men vying with each other to attract her to their stalls. They knew her as the foundling of the fabulously wealthy and strangely reclusive Henry Gresham, and latterly his 'niece'. Yet when she made her purchase solemnly every Friday, always from a different stall, she got the best price in London, as well as the best gossip.

'Those who talk of books are full of Jonson's Sejanus, of course it was played some two years ago at the Globe. It's not very good, actually, very loud and long. Martha and I went. Thorp first took it on and entered it in November last, but refused to print it, and Blount's now taken it over. Jonson's friends say it's good to his face but damn it behind his back, and he's very vexed indeed with the world!'

Jane's face lit up as she relayed the tittle-tattle of the booksellers.

'When has Ben Jonson not been vexed with the world?' asked Gresham with a laugh, trying to imagine a world where his friend Jonson would be at peace with anything. 'Who wouldn't be vexed, with the ghost of Kit Marlowe grinning up at you from Hell and that clever brat Shakespeare taking the crowds at the Globe? But there must be other gossip?'