Martin Stephen - The Desperate remedy

From Bread Street, mused Francis Tresham, you could see both the Tower of London, its White Tower with its four new pepper-pot cupolas, and St Paul's, still without its steeple after a lightning blast in Elizabeth's reign. Prime executions spots, the Tower and St Paul's. He felt a clawing in his stomach, and wondered if the crowds would be gathering in one of those spots to see his disembowelment before November 5th.

It had to be stopped, this madness. It had to cease.

The miners were thin, wiry creatures with an aversion to washing their backs and muscles made of corded steel. If they were to avoid discovery, it was essential that their work was done at break-neck speed, and in silence. The men could be housed easily enough, shutters kept tight and a single candle the only light. Food and drink were brought in after midnight, with those bringing it carting the waste away at the same time, usually choosing to dump it in the river where it was sluiced away. The men had been well briefed. Any curiosity they might have had was torn out of them by the sheer physical pressure of the work. The armed guards placed there to ensure that none of the bumpkins went sightseeing had an easy job.

'Silence!' Their overseer barked a whispered command and the men froze, those still in the tunnel slinking back. A rattle of hooves and wheels outside had stopped. There was a shouted command, the cart started up again. The men relaxed, the remainder climbing their way out through the hole in the floor, dripping sweat on to the newly sanded boards.

The men worked naked in the tunnel, though a few made a rough pouch for their testicles, to protect them from cuts, or placed a sweatband round their head. By their standards it was not difficult work, the main opening having been cut, but the scenes underground still looked like a vision of Hell. The feeble yellow light flickered over the naked bodies, glinting off the sweat that caked them, and seeming to emphasise the dark patches where muck and earth had become embedded in the miners' flesh. The air was foetid, stinking of sweat, piss and decay, and the light cast huge shadows on the rough wall as the miners hewed away at the subsoil and rock. The shadow dancers seemed like huge mythical creatures, beating punishment into an unyielding earth to the tune of the picks' out-of-tempo clink and thud. The job would soon be done, the miners sent back home richer but none the wiser.

Above the ground, London went about its normal business. The bankers and moneylenders bowed low and opened the doors of their fine timbered houses in Goldsmiths' Row, whilst yards away, hidden from sight and mind, the rat-infested rookeries held families of eight or ten souls, crammed into the one room. The prosperous shop owners took their over-dressed wives to sit on the benches by St Paul's and to hear the sermon, watching all the time to see which Privy Council member and which wife of which famous Lord was sitting in the privileged north gallery of the Cathedral wall. Meantime hungry-eyed men waited for the gawping sailors and country bumpkins come to see the great Cathedral, knowing that a false dash at a purse would mean the gallows only a few yards away from where the word of God was being preached. God was a strange master in this greatest of all cities. A wretch was being whipped through the street at the tail of a cart, for having denied God, whilst the moneylenders thronged the aisles of London's Cathedral. The bright-painted two and four-oar wherries cried out for trade on the riverbank, peaking as the time came for the afternoon performances in the playhouses across the river in Southwark. Sitting on one of their plush-covered cushions was a young girl, dressed as if for Court. She ran her hands through the water, the same water on which swans were floating a short way away. She had been told not to, but the pattern of the water and the sensuality of its cold across her hand were too great to resist. Later, she sucked her hand without thinking, watching as they neared their landing jetty and gazing in wonder at so many fine ships on the river. In seven days she would be dead, the incessant bleeding to which her surgeons submitted her sapping her body's resistance to the flux which raged through her thin, under-developed body. It is London, and in the playhouse Hotspur is about to proclaim:

'O gentlemen! The time of life is short; To spend that time basely were too long.'

When the play is finished, many of the same audience who listened to Shakespeare's poetry will stay on and pay to watch wild dogs tear a bear to pieces, the bear being tied to a stake.

'The one who worries me most,' said Gresham, 'is Monteagle.'

'Why more so than the others?' asked Jane. They had filled pages of paper with their scrawlings, gathering together all they could reach on the Catholic Lords.

'He hunts with the hounds and runs with the hare, I think,' said Gresham. 'If you were to pick someone more likely to be in this foul business, it must be him. His family are Catholic through and through. He's connected to the Howards and the Stanleys, through his mother. He fought with Essex in Ireland, even mounted d madcap rescue of him. He was at the siege in Essex House, and managed a pardon somehow. Tom Wintour acts as his secretary. He's married to Tresham's sister Elizabeth. He must have dined with every Catholic sympathiser in the country this past year or so…' Gresham's hand swept over the papers where they had tried to record the whisperings and reports of the spies they had sent out. 'And, to cap it all, he's a bosom friend of Catesby, so much so that he declares in public that when Catesby goes from him a light goes out in his life. Good God. If someone said that of me, I'd vomit.'

'Sir Henry,' said Jane, fluttering her eyelashes, 'when you leave my presence the sun goes out of my day, the moon goes out of my night and the liquid goes out from my…'

'Shut up!' said Gresham. 'You're a disgrace to your sex.'

'Surely Monteagle must be a conspirator, then?' said Jane, unabashed. 'Isn't he a prime contender for your blue blood, waiting behind the scenes and pulling all the strings? Catesby might have his own good reasons for not letting Tresham know Monteagle is involved. If you ask me, it's Tresham's money Catesby needs more than anything else. If Catesby had really wanted Tresham in he'd have recruited him much earlier. If he's suspicious of Tresham, wouldn't he hide Monteagle's involvement from him?'

'It works as a theory, but only to a degree. Why hold back on Monteagle, when he's told Tresham that the Earl of Northumberland is involved through Thomas Percy? Northumberland's a far bigger fish than Monteagle. And then there's the other side… look at all this. Monteagle gets given a massive fine after the Essex business — but there's no sign it was ever paid. Then look what happens. No sooner is he let out of jail and a new King on the throne than he gets his estates in Essex restored, and his right to sit in the House of Lords. Suddenly, everyone wants to know Lord Monteagle. James asks the French King to let his brother out of jail, he's made the Lord Commissioner who prorogues Parliament, wins a nice job in Queen Anne's court, gets his name on the charter when Prince Henry gets made Duke of York. My, my! Our Lord Monteagle is very popular all of a sudden, don't you think?'

'Everyone knows James favours those in the Essex rebellion,' said Jane, 'not just you.'

'I'm one of the few who knows James helped organise it,' said Gresham, 'however much others might suspect it. But there's more in it than that. This man's had good fortune positively poured all over him.'

'Good spy,' said Mannion.

He had seated himself on a stool, gazing out on the narrow, foetid street as night closed in. He had given the appearance of not listening, but it was always a mistake to assume that Mannion was not listening.