Martin Stephen - The Desperate remedy

For once, Mannion did not respond with a grin. Too serious for that, master. I've been in fights enough, you know as well as I. But it was a close-run thing last night, too close. Someone wants us dead, and they don't mind who else they kill in doing it. It was different, seeing her involved.'

'Who wants us dead? Who is it this time?'

Mannion did let a grin light his face, then. 'Why, there's no shortage, is there? It's a fine job you've done of offending just about everybody, in this country and half of Europe, and you not halfway through your natural life as yet.'

'Be serious, old man. You must have your thoughts, as I've mine.'

'I don't think,' said Mannion firmly. 'I just do. That's what I'm best at. I leave the thinking to you.'

'But you have a nose on you, don't you? Who do you smell in all this? Percy and his Catholic brood? The King? Cecil? Spaniards?' Gresham issued the names as if he was punching the air with them.

'My nose tell me this one stinks to high heaven. And there's only one person I know who stinks that much. Cecil. He's in it somewhere, I'll warrant.'

'If Cecil's the one who wants me dead, he must think he can bear exposure from the papers I have lodged in Rome. Does that bring any of our recent visitors to mind?'

'Tom Barnes?' responded Mannion.

Tom Barnes was a devious, sideways-looking rat of a man, servant to one of the greatest villains in London, Tom Phelippes. Phelippes was a forger, code-breaker and general villain to the Government, who had tried one intrigue too far against his masters, and was now residing in less than comfort in the Tower of London. He had been betrayed by his servant Barnes, who had a disturbing habit of turning up on his master's business at midnight and banging on the downstairs shutters of the house he was visiting, instead of the door. Gresham had received just such a visit shortly before his departure to Cambridge, and shortly before Barnes had betrayed his master. Barnes had brought with him, and demanded a pretty price for, one letter in particular which he had stolen from his master's desk. That same letter was still under the boards in Gresham's Cambridge rooms. Gresham had been about to take the matter up with Phelippes himself when the man had suddenly been removed to the Tower.

'Well now,' mused Gresham, 'I think Mr Barnes and his papers are suddenly explained to me, in a way that was not clear before.'

'Are we going to the Tower?' asked Mannion.

'Yes,' said Gresham simply. 'We must.'

'Can we have breakfast first?' asked Mannion.

The Tower of London stood guard grimly over the eastern section of the City walls, where they joined with the Thames. They went by boat, the only sensible way to travel such a distance. Gresham had four armed men come with him. He had not won a pitched battle on the river to be wiped out in some street skirmish. Rather than using one of the House's own vessels, with no Harry fit to take command, Mannion stood by the House's jetty and cried, 'Eastward Ho!' Knowing Gresham's mind, he dismissed several boats, vying for the rich trade of the great houses on the Strand, until one with a young head came in sight.

'Do you land, or do you shoot the arches?' enquired the young man, grinning at his passengers. The hundreds, thousands of men who plied their trade on the river were as filthy with their mouths as they were with their clothes and bodies. This one looked almost healthy. Most people landed before the bridge, picking the boat up again if needs be after it had leapt through the narrow stone arches of London Bridge.

'We go the fast way,' said Gresham firmly. Young as he was, the boatman was both strong and skilled. There were feet on either side of them as they shot through one of the narrow arches of London Bridge, the speed and the danger as exhilarating to Gresham as it always was.

They smelt the Tower before they saw it. A permanent dispute existed between the Lord Mayor and the Lieutenant of the Tower over the City's draining of the town ditch into the Tower ditch. The dispute had been raised to a new level when the City had opened the sluices that let all the sewage from the Minories into the town ditch and so into the Tower ditch. The stink was vile, and even the hardened inhabitants of the Tower were gagging for sweet water. He left the four men to await his return by the postern gate, and took Mannion in with him.

He remembered the first time he had gone to see Raleigh after his farcical, trumped-up trial. Here was the man who had taken on the might of Spain and defeated it, a man with the mind of a scholar, the tongue of a poet and the heart of a lion. A lesser person would have been in tears, and Gresham knew that Raleigh had already tried to take his life. Yet there was no sign of that in the man sitting quietly at his writing desk in the Bloody Tower where he was lodged, still dressed in Court finery. He had raised an eyebrow as Gresham had entered the room.

'Well, my friend, how goes the world with you?'

'I'd thought rather to ask the question of you,' Gresham had replied.

'With me? Why, as you can see, all is well. The thickest walls in England protect me from my enemies…' he motioned to the environs of the Tower around them, 'and I have my wife and son at my side.'

He called out and Bess, the early cause of his troubles with Queen Elizabeth, came into the low-ceilinged room, wiping her hands. She was pale and hollow-eyed, but her face lit up as she saw and greeted Gresham. Bess Raleigh had mothered many more men than her own son, and saw Gresham as a favoured, albeit wayward, stepson.

'My Lord,' said Gresham, 'how can this be?' Raleigh gave a dry, gentle laugh.

'How can it be that I'm accused of being a traitor in league with Spain after having spent all my life fighting that country? How can it be that I'm convicted in a trial where the only evidence is retracted and I'm never allowed to confront my accuser? How can it be that one of my oldest allies and friends seems to be my chief accuser, the man whose sickly child my own dear wife helped to nurture and feed?'

Bess smiled at the mention of the boy she had treated as her own. Cecil's sickly son had been welcomed into the warmth of Bess Raleigh's household and brought up alongside her own bawling bundle of extreme good health.

'Why, my friend, the answer is simple. I'm a mortal being, and I live in the world God has created. And I have pride.'

He was not standing, Gresham realised, because he could not stand. The strain upon him, recent illness and his attempt on his own life had left him too weak to stand. The body had come near to being broken. The spirit, Gresham realised with an upsurge in his heart, was very much alive.

Raleigh's pride and arrogance had made him many enemies, but the wits at Court were saying that he was now the only man whose guilty verdict at trial had proved him innocent in the eyes of the great mass of people. The numbers queuing up in the hope of seeing him, on the narrow walk by the Bloody Tower that fronted the river, had swelled, until it seemed that every person of note in London was lining up hoping to see the great man, the last of the Elizabethans. The Bloody Tower itself still smelt of the new building work and fresh timber brought in to accommodate such a distinguished prisoner. A prison, thought Gresham, needs no bars.

Two years now into his imprisonment, Raleigh welcomed Gresham warmly. Mannion he clapt on the shoulder, thrusting a bottle and a fine silver drinking goblet into his hand.

'Here, you great Goliath, take this out on to the river walk and shout out that you're the great Sir Walter Raleigh!'

Mannion grinned and left, closing the door behind him.

'And as for you,' he continued, turning to Gresham, 'drink this.' Raleigh offered a beaker to Gresham.

'Water?' asked Gresham. 'Drink it and see.'