Martin Stephen - The Desperate remedy

Jonson rolled over on the bed. 'You bastard!' he grunted at Gresham.

'True. But at least my poetry's good,' responded Gresham with a grin.

'"Calumnies are answered best with silence",' responded Jonson. When he quoted from his own works he always stuck his chest out.

'Please don't quote from your own work, Ben,' asked Gresham. 'Only someone of exceptional arrogance would even remember what they had written, never mind spout it to an unsuspecting public at every opportunity.'

'I am exceptional in everything I do,' grunted Jonson, rubbing his head and heaving himself upright.

'Exceptional as a sycophant, I believe. What were those lines you wrote to celebrate Robert Cecil's sudden uplifting to be Earl of Salisbury? Do I remember…

"What need hast thou of me, or of my Muse Whose actions do themselves so celebrate?"'

'Aye, well,' Jonson responded, pulling on a pair of boots, 'a man has to live.'

'"I do honour the very flea of his dog"?' asked Gresham, quoting from Every Man In His Humour.

'Please don't quote from my works, Sir Henry,' said Jonson solemnly. 'I find it degrades the beauty of my lines.'

Jane was an avid playgoer, and Gresham had become converted during his time with Kit Marlowe. They had known Jonson for years. He traced his roots back to Scotland, and had done so when it was not fashionable to be so linked, and was a Catholic, when it had never been fashionable. He was also an entirely self-taught classical scholar of awesome knowledge, a brawler who had killed a man, a poet of huge genius and a boor, a man of great intuition who at times showed the sensitivity of a stone privy in the Tower. Ben Jonson's body could be and had been caged. His spirit was uncontainable. That at least he shared with Walter Raleigh.

Without expression, Jane picked up the overflowing yellow chamber pot from beside the bed, opened the shuttered window and hurled out the contents into the street below. A fierce yell and a squeal suggested it had found a target. Jonson stopped rubbing his head and feasted his eyes on Jane's trim figure, a beatific smile on his lips. He recovered quickly from shocks. His life had produced enough of them for him to have had to learn quickly.

'Avert your gaze, old lecher, and listen to me. You dine with Lord Mordaunt and Robert Catesby soon enough, I hear?'

Jonson struck a dramatic pose on the bed, the effect somewhat ruined by a button popping off as he raised both his arms. He launched into verse:

'" Come, my Celia, let us prove, While we can, the sport of love!"'

'My name's Jane,' replied the object of his attention, poking with her foot at the remnants of what could have been last week's meal on the floor. 'As for your kind proposition, " all the adulteries of art. They strike mine eyes, but not my heart".'

'Spoken beautifully!' exclaimed Jonson, gallantly. 'Almost as well as I could do it myself.'

'Lord Mordaunt? Catesby?' interjected Gresham.

'You're well informed, as ever. What of them?'

He got up clumsily from the bed and walked over to a low, rough-carved table with some bottles on it. Jane stood before it and glowered at him. He veered in mid-course, changing direction to the jug and ewer with something like fresh water in them. He bent over it, motioning to Gresham, who came and poured the contents slowly over his head. He stood up and shook his wet mane like a dog coming out of the river.

'I'm growing thin. I stand in need of a good dinner,' Gresham said, replacing the empty ewer. 'I will be your Scottish cousin who's arrived from the north, in the hope of rich pickings in this city which has newly learned to love a Scotsman so much. Under the circumstances, young Catesby will be delighted to add an extra place to the table, so your kinsman can taste the delights of life with the nobility.'

'Hmmph!' grunted Jonson. 'I trust you've a good Scots accent?'

He looked enquiringly at Jane, and when she stepped aside went to the table and poured two beakers of cheap sack. He offered one to Gresham, who declined it, sipped appreciatively at his own lifer saver and offered Gresham's to Mannion. 'You're invisible, I see…' It was the phrase he used when Gresham did not wish to be recognised. ‘Why this sudden interest in my friends?'

'Is Robert — Robin — Catesby a friend of yours?'

Jonson sat down heavily on a stool. He tossed some written sheets to Jane with an inquisitorial raised eyebrow. She caught them, nodded and settled in a corner to read the scribblings that were Jonson's next play.

'It's most unfair and unusual that someone so beautiful should have intelligence as well,' grumbled Jonson, changing the subject. ' " Blind Fortune still Bestows her gifts on such as cannot use them."'

'Is Catesby that beautiful?' asked Gresham, pretending not to notice.

‘Not him, you fool. Her. That angel who has mistakenly taken to living with an old satyr such as yourself. Perhaps she's hoping to reform you. Beautiful women like to reform lost men,' he added hopefully, watching her as she became instantly lost and totally absorbed in the manuscript.

'I thought it was her honesty you most liked?' There had been a massive row between Jonson and Jane when she had last criticised a piece of his writing. He had called her a lying slut and broken a perfectly good stool by hurling it against a wall, following which Gresham had broken his head. He had rewritten the piece though, Gresham had noticed. 'But you haven't answered my question. Is Catesby a friend of yours?'

'I know him. Everyone of my faith knows him. A friend? Hardly. I refuse to acknowledge the sun shines out of his arse, which is a prerequisite of anyone wanting friendship with him. Young Catesby sometimes has difficulty distinguishing between worshipping our Saviour, and his being our Saviour. He's not a good… influence, I think, on our younger people. But he has a good table. And I'm a good guest.' He gazed sadly down at the remnants of liquid in the now-empty beaker. 'They'll all be Catholics there. Are you after Catholics? Will your presence at our table bring harm to our faith?'

Gresham thought for a moment. If he was to expose a plot to kidnap the King, harm would come to the plotters. But to Catholicism? More harm would come if the plot were allowed to go ahead than if it were destroyed.

'To your faith, no. To some people of your faith, in all probability, yes. To you, too, Ben, if you plan to be in rebellion against the State, as well as against every person of culture and taste…'

The bantering tone did not hide the seriousness of Gresham's answer.

There was a bellow of laughter. 'Me? A rebel! God help me! Don't you think trouble enough comes looking for me, without me sending out invitations for more of it to come visiting?'

Ben Jonson had a mouth as big as his capacity for drink, and a wild reputation, but Gresham had never known him betray a secret. Or, at least, never betray one of Gresham's secrets. Gresham had rescued Jonson from the bailiffs and debtors' prison. The old secrets between them stood custodian over the new ones. Jane gave instructions for the bulging bag of washing to be sent off by servant to the laundress at the House. His manuscript she took away with her. The boredom of Alsatia was due to be lessened at least a little.

'There's risk in this dinner,' said Mannion flatly on their return. He was right. For all its huge size, London was a small town where those at the top of its society were concerned. The other guests seemed unlikely enough on the surface to recognise Gresham for who he was, but disguise would be prudent, and Gresham worked on two principles. Either one altered the original hardly at all, or one went for something outrageously different. He opted for the latter.

'Hold still, will you!' said a cross Jane as she applied the last of the dye to his hair and beard. It had been turned from the darkest black to something reddish, if not verging on positive ginger. A salve applied to his face, neck and hands (and, on Jane's insistence and in the face of his firm opposition, to the whole of the rest of his body) turned his skin dark, almost like that of a Moor. He had not trimmed his beard since they moved out of the House, with the result that it now straggled and looked, as Mannion said, 'Like a badly blown cornfield.' From his extensive wardrobe Gresham had chosen a suit of clothes that a country bumpkin might have been offered by the worst country tailor as being the height of fashion in London. The whole dreadful mess was topped off by a vast bonnet that clashed with his hair and beard and his suit of clothes, and a large eyepatch.