Martin Stephen - The Desperate remedy

'For the first time in my life, I fear death,' he said to Jane as she finished the last patting on of paste to his beard.

He saw her face fall, and immediately regretted his teasing of her.

'Why so? If you feel that way, you must…'

He raised his hand to stop her. 'Can you imagine what my tailor will say if I go to my coffin dressed like this?' he asked, aghast. The swinging blow to his head was arrested only just in time as she realised it might disturb the newly applied colour.

Dressed like a country bumpkin, and a Scots one at that, Gresham was near besieged by every criminal on duty in London, who saw him coming and could not believe their luck. After he had been pestered with offers of women, card games, bowling alleys and dice halls where only yesterday a fortune had been made to rival Lord Salisbury's, couplings of such power achieved to rival Samson's, and various places where both had been achieved simultaneously, it was a relief to arrive at William Patrick's ordinary. Jonson always arrived at dinner as early as possible, to maximise the amount of time spent troughing at someone else's expense. He met Gresham, held back a brief explosion of apoplexy with commendable restraint, and brought him in to the company.

It was a lively affair. The Irish Boy served excellent food, with wine that was certainly drinkable. Gresham, who had a nose for these things, noticed that Catesby did not stint himself either with the room he had taken or the food and wine served. The room was fresh-painted and had clean rushes strewn on the floor, with hangings of some expense on the walls. A large window let some of the noise of the Strand through, as the cracks in the floorboards and door let some of the noise of the thriving, bustling ordinary up to assail their ears, but not enough to impede conversation.

'It's guid tae meet yae al, guid, guid…' Gresham, who had decided to be called Alexander Selkirk, slurred his words and let them tail off incoherently, a man middlingly drunk but also bemused with new sights and sounds.

He need hardly have bothered. Catesby barely glanced at him before he was dismissed. Jonson was the man, the star brought in to show how well-connected Catesby was, and all eyes were on him. A major playwright, a talking point at Court who was also a Catholic: Ben Jonson was a superb social catch.

'Well met, sir, well met.' It was Tom Wintour, shaking hands with the company, clapping those he knew well on the back. So this was the man for whose sake a whore's bottom would be sore for weeks to come, thought Gresham.

'Here, this is Selkirk, Alex Selkirk, a cousin of mine from Scotland… Cousin Alex, meet Tom Wintour…' Jonson was barely remembering to introduce Gresham. There was a crowd of people, there was good food, there was wine, and Jonson was expanding with almost every minute that passed by. Tom Wintour had come with Catesby. He was a short, stocky figure, with a round face and a cannon-fire way of speech. He was quick, agile, keeping his wit under control but showing a pushy argumentativeness that Gresham imagined could be explosive in more confined or tense situations.

'Have you brought a lot of your friends with you down from the north?' asked Tom Wintour with outward innocence. The reference to King James's horde of hangers-on drawing a guffaw from another member of the company.

'No, no,' replied Gresham, 'but I may hope tae do so if the pickin's are reet guid enough!'

A man to be watched, thought Gresham, someone with the power of the hothead but also the determination and intelligence to be a dangerous enemy. He had the body of a fighter too, Gresham noted, for all that he lacked height.

'My, and you must tell me who your tailor is, Mr Selkirk!' It was Tresham. He had given no flicker of recognition. 'Clothes like that will make a stir anywhere you go!' Another guffaw from the company, except Lord Mordaunt, who thought himself too refined to laugh. Tresham seemed to delight in wearing clothes that had clearly cost good money, but which were crumpled as if tossed carelessly aside at the end of the day. He played his part well, making several scurrilous jokes about the Scots that would have perplexed the real person Gresham was pretending to be, yet got home to other town guests.

Jonson talked endlessly, largely about himself, but he did so with such power, force and good humour that there was a dance in the eyes of all those who listened. The appalling rule of the Lord Chancellor and his power over the plays, the sheer vagabond criminality of all printers and the complete lack of any resemblance to a civilised race of theatre managers and actors, the wonder of Latin, the plan for the next masque, the plan for the next play, the belief that a grateful city should afford its greatest living playwright a theatre of his own, the dreadful affair between Sir Robert Dudley and the mistress he wished to marry… fuelled by greater and greater quantities of alcohol, Jonson's genius and his buffoonery climbed towards the stars in harness.

And what of Catesby? Was this a man full of piss and wind, or a man capable of kidnapping a King? As Gresham observed him it seemed as if the room became darker and darker, the sense of an evil presence almost unbearable. As even Jonson grew tired, and the stories thinner and more unbelievable, so quietly, with hardly a ripple, Robert Catesby began to dominate the conversation, the room and all the people within it.

'We're all victims to the printers!' Jonson was almost shouting now. 'They buy the work, they print the work, they bind the Work and they sell the work — and, if they so please, they put another man's name on the cover! And they get the profit, whilst the poor man who produces the work, whose brain sweats it out over weeks and months — he gets the leavings after the cursed printer has done! Why, these men are nothing more than vultures!'

Catesby broke in. The very quietness of his voice commanded attention.

'Why,' he said to a perspiring Jonson, 'you revile the printers, yet they're as the lice upon your body. They lie still and wait for you to come to them. They backbite and they infect, yet you've no remedy. They feed off you, yet you stop them not. If they grow fat on your blood, isn't it your fault? Throw off your old clothes, man. Scrub your skin. Take the louse between your thumb arid finger…' he picked up a nut from the table, 'and crack it… thus!' The nut shattered over the table. 'Blood for blood; take back your blood, man, or cease your complaining.' It was said gently, conversationally, yet it had the menace of steel slithering out of a smooth scabbard.

There was a pause, and conversation resumed along with the bringing of two fine, freshly baked pies. Later, another of the guests, Lord Mordaunt, raised an obscure theological point, on whether to equivocate or withhold the truth was the same as to tell a lie. Catesby fixed Mordaunt with his eyes and led him down a theological line that had the man tangled in his own arguments as badly as a young ostler caught in the reins of a train of horses.

Catesby knew his Bible, Gresham had to give him that. Textual evidence dropped from him like other men oozed sweat. Gresham had mimed becoming progressively more drunk as the evening wore. He decided to speak.

'I dinnae like the Bible.' That brought a hush, as Gresham knew it would. He had spoken in his thick Scots accent, as a drunk would when suddenly brought back to awareness for an instant. 'There's tae much blood, tae much killin'. Tae many of ma friends have deed..Gresham started to sob, in the maudlin way that drunks did when they had uttered a profound alcoholic truth.

Catesby did not even look at him as he replied. Too much killing, Mr Selkirk? No, surely not. There can be no life without death. Christ wasn't our Saviour until he died in agony.'