Martin Stephen: The Desperate remedy

'Why, a man must keep his finger on the pulse,' he replied, straight-faced, gazing down at an entirely pulse-free corpse. The miller, not surprisingly, failed to get the joke. As a trade millers were universally corrupt and oafish. All within a ten-mile radius of the city were bribed by Gresham to report any bodies in the water to him. Except babies. Gresham did not require to be shown the babies, unless, that was, they were finely dressed. The bodies always ended up in the millstream. At least Shadwell's had not been pounded to a pulp by the great paddle of the millwheel. It was no consolation to Shadwell, who was past caring.

As he went to mount the fine grey mare for the short ride back to Cambridge, Gresham halted, and went back to the corpse. Something had caught the light, glinting fitfully inside a tear in Shadwell's tattered doublet. He motioned to the miller's lad to halt his labours, and bent down to feel inside the sodden, stinking material.

A bead. A single rosary bead, from a string of such beads that sold in their thousands in Europe. A dangerous item for a man or woman to wear openly in Protestant England, where to be a Catholic was all too easily seen as being an enemy of the state. The tear in the doublet looked new enough. Had Shadwell’s flailing hand caught at the rosary as he fell to the ground? Well, one thing was sure. Gresham would never find out the truth from Will Shadwell.

A thick mist still clung to the river and its banks, reaching head height in the lower meadows. The dew clung to the ground and the heady smell of wet grass was everywhere. The towers of the great King's Chapel towered above Cambridge in the distance, and the pall of smoke was already beginning to cling to the town from the early-morning fires.

Henry Gresham saw none of it. He was preoccupied with his thoughts.

Why kill Will Shadwell? He and his kind lived in a raw, violent and a brutal world, yet even there the game was usually played by certain rules. Who among the vagabonds and thieves, the beggars and the rogues, the cutpurses and the pimps he called his friends would kill him? An argument over an unpaid bill? Some story of treachery? A whore who had caught the French welcome from him, paying him back as he sweated inside her spread legs? Or some noble Lord who had attended one too many Masses or plotted once too often to restore the true faith to England? Yet for someone as base as Shadwell there was no need for high treachery to explain his death, no need even for low drama. His death could be about nothing more than a debt that had gone on too long, or simply an opportunist robbery in a dark country lane.

It was possible, simple robbery, yet it stuck in Gresham's gullet. Shadwell's killing was a professional's work. Someone had wanted Will Shadwell dead, and had been willing to follow him to Cambridge to see it done. Will had never worked in Cambridge, and had never been there long enough to make an enemy want him dead. That argued for a bigger secret than a debt or the wrong woman bedded. Had he sluiced a rich man's wife or daughter? Or had he latched on to something that the new government in London had decided should remain secret? Or was it the Catholics he had offended, the same Catholics who still carried huge power and influence for all that their faith was unfashionable?

The time was when a self-respecting assassin would never have travelled beyond Deptford. Yet these were troubled times, so early in the reign of King James I. How could they be otherwise? It was Scotland's King who now ruled England, and Scotland was England's oldest enemy. To add spice to the novel situation, the mother of the new King, Mary Queen of Scots, had been put to death on the order of the previous holder of the English crown, Queen Elizabeth, only a few years earlier. Men still alive had signed the death warrant of King James's mother. Henry Gresham had been in that business up to his neck and, in the final count, her neck as well. It was best to hope that King James had not been told of that side of his mother's death, for all that there had been no love lost between them.

A bird flew up from under the horse's hooves, with a sudden clatter of wings. Well trained, the mare took stock for a second of the irritating thing, decided it posed no threat and went calmly on its way. Gresham's hand, which had instinctively moved to his sword, relaxed halfway along its travel and returned to his side, his left hand continuing to take loose hold of the reins.

There had been a strange optimism two years ago when the new King had ascended the throne. It was already fraying at the edges, with mutterings in the streets and at Court. His Royal Highness s retinue of Scots Lords were as willing to take any money on offer as they were unwilling to wash, and their rapaciousness was becoming as legendary as their stench. James had offended the Puritans by having a Popish wife, and offended the Papists by declaring them excommunicate and appearing to go against his early promises of tolerance. The majority of the country, who wished nothing more than to be left in peace to procreate and earn a decent living, increasingly went in fear of a Catholic uprising, or a rebellion from the English establishment against the Scottish upstart.

Gresham almost found himself yearning for a return to the days of Good Queen Bess, the arch-bitch. Gresham had learnt the art of survival in part from her. She was an actress of unequalled power, and a ruthless whore who would have murdered her own mother without even a momentary qualm if need dictated it. She was also a Queen who would have wept bitter tears in public afterwards, whipped herself with barbs that, strange to say, seemed to leave no mark and provoked numerous plays as a result, as well as more sonnets than there was paper on which to print them. Queen Elizabeth I may have been so corrupt as to make Beelzebub turn in his grave, but somehow that corruption had never broken through the facade of the Virgin Queen, the pure preserver of the State. It had been true of her chief minister as well. Old Lord Burghley had made enough money to buy the Armada whilst producing an English fleet so decrepit that it might as well have farted as fired at the Spanish. With the Devil's own luck, the wind had farted instead, bringing Burghley the victory his ships could never have done. As one of Gresham's old informers had cheerfully stated, old Burghley may have knifed you in the back, but somehow you always felt it was being done by a gentleman. Burghley's son and successor, the wizened Robert Cecil, had a corrupted body that told all too well the tale of his corrupted soul. The double-dealing, the murders and the struggle for power might still be the same. The sense of style had gone, and there was a rawness to the brutal world of 1605 that had not been seen since Good Queen Bess had herself ascended the throne half a century ago.

Gresham's scalp itched, under his hat. He had a full head of hair, as yet not ravaged by the pox, and it was well washed. It always itched when there was trouble around. He had endured a lifetime of trouble. He neither feared nor welcomed it. It was simply a part of life, like the footpad on the road, the poison in the wine or the first spot that signified the plague. The particularly virulent itching suggested significant trouble. Well, trouble was a normal part of Gresham's life, and had been so for as long as he could remember. What was unusual was his inability to explain his chronic sense of foreboding, his inability to trace the sense of danger to its source.

It was all most irksome, and most inconvenient. Gresham flicked at his reins. The horse picked up a little speed, then deciding its rider's heart was not in it slowed down again to an easy amble. Gresham had lost a good worker in Will Shadwell. Will Shadwell had been Henry Gresham's creature. An attack on Will Shadwell was an attack on Henry Gresham, yet the reason was a mystery. Gresham did not like mysteries. They disturbed him. They cried out in the night to be explained. They threatened his survival. Survival, Henry Gresham had decided long ago, was all one had. Ruthlessness was required to survive. That, and a sense of humour, a dash of loyalty and a measure of courage.