Martin Stephen - The Desperate remedy

'Women think differently,' mused Jane. The fire was crackling in the grate, and throwing shards of red and yellow light over their faces as they sat in an unconscious circle, framed by darkness. 'We carry a future in our wombs. We don't see life as stopping with ourselves. Rather we see ourselves as the means of carrying it on.'

There was an awkward pause, as the childless Gresham looked into the burning heart of the fire.

'Well,' he said finally, 'one of us here is redeemed. With the number of bastards you've fathered, old man, we must have a future. Though God help us in it if the bastards take after their misbegotten father.'

It was an old joke, and as with many such it was not the sense of it that drew them together, but simply that it had been spoken at all.

Jane spoke at last, after a long pause. 'You realise the danger if you infiltrate this group of Papists? Cecil will kill you if he finds you're active. The Papists will kill you if they find you're in on whatever their stupid secret is. The Government will kill you first and ask questions later if there's even a hint you're implicated in the plot. You're already tainted with being one of Raleigh's few remaining allies.'

'I always liked being popular,' replied Gresham calmly.

'I'm serious,' said Jane. 'If you walk into this plot, if you somehow get hold of this man Phelippes put you on to, it'll be a gate that slams shut behind you. There'll be no going back, and no knowing what lies in front of you.'

'Humans were designed to go forward, not look back,' Gresham said. 'That's why our eyes are in the front of our head.'

'So is this man going to be your gateway in? This Tresham’

'Francis Tresham is the man. I feel it. He's our way in, our only way in.'

Gresham curbed the impatience that was threatening to tear him apart. His informants told him that Catesby was still off on his travels. Whatever it was that Catesby planned, he would need to be at the centre of things in London to organise the final planning and co-ordinate his uprising, even if the main action was subsequently to take place in a Hertfordshire forest where His Highness hunted the stag. They had some time, he told himself, though how much only God and Catesby knew.

Then the news came in. Francis Tresham had been seen in London.

All that remained now was to kidnap Tresham.

Syon House, London home of the Earl of Percy, was on alert. The Earl, often a quiet and studious man, was in one of his tempers. Henry Percy, ninth Earl of Northumberland, noted the hesitancy in the step of the servant who came in answer to his furious ringing of the bell. Increasingly deaf, and slow in his ways, Henry Percy had shown from his earliest days an ability to conjure up a temper out of nothing. They used to call him the Wizard Earl, though not because of his ability to conjure up a rage. Rather it was their ignorance, their seeing black magic in his simple experiments and refusing to accept that knowledge could be advanced by such means without recourse to God or the Devil. Raleigh had been an ally, and his reward had been a farcical trial for treason and a judgement that left him rotting in the Tower. Others of the so-called 'School of Night' had died scandalous deaths, like Kit Marlowe, or simply faded away. Now only he was left. His power in the north — that dreadful land of rain, mist and pickpockets — was unchallenged, even reinforced by the accession to the English throne of a Scottish King. True, neither King James VI of Scotland nor King James I of England could stop the reivers and the incessant border raids, and no-one ever would. Yet at least the Earl of Northumberland knew that he would not have to be the vanguard against an invading Scottish army in the lifetime of the present

King. No, the threat to him no longer came from the north. It came from London. Yet precisely from where in London it came was more difficult to answer. From the carcass of James I, leader of the nation the Percys had been in bitter conflict with for centuries? Or from the twisted body of Robert Cecil?

Percy shuffled across the room. There were no rushes nor fine carpet on the stone flags of the floor, and the fire in the vast hearth was unlit despite the chill the stonework inflicted. He had inherited Syon House from his wife Dorothy, who held the leasehold on it. He was well rid of her, and in keeping the house and losing the woman he had kept the better part of the bargain. Autumn would have come early to the north, as if the harsh countryside resented the warmth of summer and could not wait to return to the cold. The noise of the grey sea crashing against rock the colour of the castle walls was one of his most vivid memories of the north.

He stood by an open window, letting the taste of London wash against his face and skin. His so-called relative, the young Thomas Percy, would be busy telling the City how he had the confidence and the assurances of the ninth Earl of Northumberland, his relative and patron. So much to the good. Young Thomas would learn as many had before him why the senior branch of the Percys had survived the savagery of the north and all the politics of London could bring to bear, and why there had always been a third person present at their meetings. A flicker of something that might have been the start of a savage smile lifted the corner of the Earl's mouth. He would learn, would Thomas Percy, as would all enemies of the Percy clan and the Catholic faith. They thought him easily led, as if he could not see through their pathetic flattery. They joked about his inability to keep a secret, not realising how carefully he had cultivated that image. Well, Robert Cecil, jumped-up Earl of Salisbury, would find soon enough whether Henry Percy, ninth Earl of Northumberland, could keep a secret, a secret that when revealed would destroy Robert Cecil for ever.

‘I still don't think I like the sound of this man Francis Tresham,' said Jane, working through the pile of papers on which Gresham had scribbled notes and records of interviews.

Mannion's proposal for securing the undivided attention of Francis Tresham was simple. Waylay him in a street, knock him on the head and drag him off to Alsatia. Even in London's anarchic streets it struck Gresham that this direct action might draw unnecessary attention to those involved. Jane had the simplest and best idea. Send Tresham a note in his lodgings, a note promising that he would hear something to his advantage if he came to their address in Alsatia, with a time scrawled on it.

'Spiders don't go chasing flies,' said Jane. 'Flies come to spiders.'

Jane had read her man correctly. A sensible young man, newly come into his inheritance, would not have risked the trip into Alsatia on what might have been a wild-goose chase. But Francis Tresham was not sensible, not once during his whole life.

'So he comes here, knocks on the door — and then we knock him over?' suggested Mannion hopefully.

'He'll be on his own, if we tell him to,' said Gresham. 'If he's come this far, we're hardly going to need to drag him in through the door unconscious, are we? Do you only have four ways of responding to anything?'

'As many as that?' enquired Jane innocently.

'Eat it, drink it, bed it or hit it. Has it ever entered your mind to think about something?'

‘No,' said Mannion, 'takes too much time.' He gathered up the breakfast dishes. 'And whatever it is I do, it's kept me alive all these years.' He clumped down the stairs, clearly feeling himself fully justified.

Tresham's servant gloried in the name William Vavasour. He looked down his nose at the hefty bribe Mannion put with the note to his master, but did not refuse it. Tresham's greed triumphed over any discretion he might have had, and he turned up on cue at the door of the ill-favoured house as night was falling. A huge rat was feeding off something that might once have been flesh. It looked haughtily up at Tresham, and scuttled off only when it had delayed long enough to show who held the real command. The grumpy and ill-looking couple Gresham had installed on the ground floor of the house let Tresham in, and the man motioned with his head for him to go upstairs. As he did so, the door clanged shut behind him, and Tresham turned to see the doorway blocked out by the figure of Mannion.