Martin Stephen - The Desperate remedy

He held her as she vomited over the side, her meal floating away silently downstream. The vomiting noises continued long after she had emptied her stomach.

'Why?' She turned to him, finally. 'Why?'

He did not answer, merely held her closer as Mannion and the others set about finding where they were and towing the other boat home.

Why, indeed.

Why was he being hunted on the river? Why was life a string of so many squalid little agonies, always ending in death, the smell of fresh blood?

He had the answer to neither question. As for the last question, it had been asked of humankind for all eternity, with no answer that he could believe.

He held Jane in his arms, mourning the death of innocence.

Gresham had lain awake during the night, his whole body tensed with anger. There were few tears left in him, and he shed none that anyone could have seen.

He knew what life was. Two thirds of a woman's children could be swept off from life before they were months old, whilst ague, palsy and the plague could bite into the wealthiest and poorest households alike with no warning. There was only one answer. Live, whilst there was life. Fight the powers that condemned men and women to know the truth of their prison yet have no means of escape. Laugh in the face of the fragility of existence.

Yet the tide of despair had swung down on him, as he had known it would, and engulfed him. The dark of the night flowed into his mind and extinguished all light. The mood came on him rarely, but when it did it threatened all that he was. He felt the pulse beating through his body, felt how frail was a human's hold on life, knew how easily the pressure of that pulse could be let out from its prison by the deftest and gentlest wielding of the knife or dagger. As the blood pounded through his head, causing an agonising pain to throb behind his eyes, the temptation to release the pressure with the sharp cleansing point of metal became almost unbearable. It was as if his blood was prisoner inside his body, screaming and pummelling to get out, as the sailors trapped between decks on the Maria had screamed and punched at the unyielding timbers in their frenzy to escape. No more pressure, no more pounding, no more pain. Release. Yet he was a coward, he told himself as he stared sightless into the dark. 'Conscience doth make cowards of us all..That man Shakespeare had it right, damn him.

His own innocence had died long since, and his survival was a matter of pride rather than of necessity. He had known in his heart that a new dawning and a first sight of the night would come to Jane, as it came to all thinking people, and that the black edge of despair would tear at her soul. The knowledge that it would come did not lessen the pain of its arrival. She had killed a man, and such a thing killed a part of the person who did the act. There was no other way. It was the way of life to demand death. So at least he would meet Jane in Hell. Yet he had reluctantly decided before the events of the previous night that any Heaven without Jane might as well be Hell for him.

He had put Jane to bed, and then gone to an old, battered chest that nowadays he rarely had cause to open. Among its contents was a bottle of a reddish fluid. The smell of it hit him as he opened it, and in a second he was back in his cot in the Lowlands, crying for the blessed liquid that would ease his pain and send him back into the numbed, drowsy state that was his only escape from suffering. The physik had been supplied by an ancient orderly. Gresham knew neither its origins nor its contents, but years later he had gone to one of the most secret and successful apothecaries in all London and described the colour, smell and taste of the physik, as well as its effect on a ravaged body and mind. The apothecary had nodded, gone to a back room and emerged with a small vial.

'What you were given was in all probability a much diminished potion than this you see here now,' he had lectured. 'Be warned. What is here is five, ten times the strength of what you had before. Taken in small measure, and only in time of strictest need, it will offer release from pain both of the body and of the mind. Yet- be warned. Taken too often, it will imprison the taker whilst appearing to release him.'

So the mixture, whatever it was, was dangerous to know, should only be taken sparingly and if the dangers were ignored would destroy you. Not a bad emblem for his dealings with Cecil, thought Gresham. He forced a minimal dose down Jane's barely resisting throat, and left her. He knew that her drug-induced sleep would fade into a more natural slumber, and that the twin healers of time and sleep would allow her not to forget what had happened, but to accept it and still live on. In time. For the pain in that time he. could do little, except help her over the first hurdle.

That done and Jane settled, he posted Martha by her bedside and took himself off to think.

Someone had tried to kill them on the river, that much was clear. Simple robbery? Gresham doubted it. There were easier pickings on the river that night, far easier than a boat manned by six sturdy men. The attacking boat had gone straight for them. It had been well-manned, heavy-built, expensive. This was not an attempted robbery. It was an attempted assassination.

There were too many men, and some women, who might want Henry Gresham dead. There had been a rosary bead on Shadwell's corpse, and Shadwell’s final meeting had been with the Catholic Percy. There was a rosary round the neck of the ruffian who had tried to kill Jane. Had Gresham come too close to a new Catholic plot, first through Will Shadwell and then by means of Moll, and made himself their target? Or had he offended Bacon? Did Cecil want him dead, despite the papers that Gresham's death would release? Had someone found out his role in the Essex rebellion, and sought to take revenge in the name of the dead leader? Or had one of the Spaniards flooding the Court after the peace treaty found out about his involvement in the Armada, and decided that to exact vengeance on water would be sweet revenge for the loss of so many Spaniards and so much prestige? The Spaniards were the most

Catholic nation in Europe, with rosary beads enough to fill the Thames. Had King James discovered the role Gresham had played in the execution of his mother, Mary Queen of Scots, so many years ago, an execution which had acted to blood the young Henry Gresham into the world of espionage and intrigue? Mary had been a Catholic…

There were simply too many options. Once, hiding in a ditch in Norfolk in pouring rain, a young rabbit had emerged from its burrow on the side of a dried-up stream and gambolled on the bed of the old watercourse, below Gresham. He had welcomed the animal, feeling in it an unspoken companion and noting that his cover must be good if the rabbit had not realised his presence. Then, swollen with the torrential rain, a dyke had burst and a small, rumbling wall of water torn down the old path of the stream. There were four, five, perhaps even six ways up from the bed, and Gresham willed the rabbit to run up one of them to safety. Yet the number of choices seemed to confuse the animal, which was still looking, stopping and starting when the water hit it and tumbled it along in its path, sucking it against one too many boulders. Its broken, twisted body lay there until the crows had plucked half its flesh off through the wet fur. Too many choices confused a man, as they had confused the rabbit. It was not movement that killed, but staying still. Someone was forcing an issue with Gresham. Someone wanted him dead. He must decide who it was.

Concentrate! Will Shadwell's murder had started it all and a supper with a drunken Thomas Percy. Whatever he had heard there sent him running pell-mell off to Cambridge, and triggered his killing. Percy had command over men, was ruthless and would murder in an instant if he thought it would serve his own ends or ensure his survival. Had Percy ordered Shadwell's murder, regretting what he had told him, and Gresham's murder, fearing what he might find out? Percy was newly and surprisingly appointed to the King's bedchamber. He could have wished to kill Gresham as a Catholic fearful of the exposure of some plot, or perhaps even on the orders of the King.