Martin Stephen - The Desperate remedy

' Do not condemn this warning. It can do you no harm, and it may do you some good. The… danger is passed once you burn this letter, and I hope God will give you the grace to make good use of it. I… commend you to His holy protection.'

There was total silence.

'Is this some joke?' Monteagle demanded of the company. 'Some idiotic pasquil to stop me from my duty?' There was no-one who felt able to answer. The silence lengthened.

'Saddle my horse,' said Monteagle, quietly. 'I ride to Whitehall. Now.'

Without a further word, he swept out of the room. Behind him his company for supper looked and waited for who would say the first word.. It was a long time in coming.

Gresham watched from the alleyway a short distance up from Monteagle's house. He heard the yelling and the stirring in the stables, saw the lights move back and forth in the darkened yard, heard the rasping sound of rough bolts being drawn back on stable doors. With a spurt of mud Lord Monteagle and two other horsemen sped out of the house, and down the street in the direction of Whitehall.

The cold had taken all feeling out of Gresham's feet, and his hands were little better. The old serjeant who had coached him in the Netherlands would be chiding him now, were he alive. ‘Yer have to keep the blood flowing inside yer limbs if yer want to stay alive’ he would have said, 'and stop someone shedding it outside yerbody!'

Well, the business was under way. It had a power and a force of its own. Gresham saw history like a great river, with estuaries beyond number flowing in intricate patterns away from the main course and then, after interminable rambling, back in again. He did not have the arrogance to think that he could stem that river, unlike many men. He knew that at times he had placed a dam across one of the estuaries, blocked the course it would otherwise have run. So the water would not take the course it would otherwise have done. Perhaps it would go where he willed it to go. Yet water, and rivers, had minds of their own. No man could determine Fortune. All one could do was try.

Gresham did not see Tom Ward retire to his own small chamber, produce a pen and paper and write a hasty note, which he then sealed with a copy of his master's seal. The various marriages between the Ward and the Wright families had cemented a relationship which had gone back decades. God only knew what the letter Ward had given to his master meant for Kit and Jack Wright, but if there was devilment afoot Tom Ward guessed they would be in it to the hilt. The man who had given him the letter had mentioned Catesby. Well, Tom Ward knew Catesby was at White Webbs, most likely with one or both of the Wright brothers, from what he had heard. Ward scribbled down the barest details of the letter and its disclosure, and sealed what he had written. Within minutes of his master's riding forth, one of the strongest riders in Monteagle's employment was similarly pounding through the mud, this time on Ward's orders to head for Enfield. Within hours Catesby would know of the letter.

It was a shaken and dishevelled Monteagle who loudly demanded entry to the Chief Secretary's private apartments at Whitehall. Yet he was not as dishevelled as on a previous appearance, not far from this very spot. To his shame and chagrin he had fallen into the Thames and nearly drowned during the Essex rebellion, being dragged out looking little better than a corpse. Even now as he was rowed up the Thames the cry would come across the river from an anonymous wherry, 'I thought that's one as preferred to swim the river!', followed by a guffaw of laughter.

These were not the rooms to which he had been taken, several years before, in fear of his life. His reception there had been as icy-cold in tone as he had expected, but very different in content. Cecil had recruited him as an informer with the clinical certainty of a surgeon sawing off a leg. What choice did he have? The deal allowed him to retain his religion and its observance, and acquire the state he thought had been lost for ever. In return he only had to keep Cecil informed — and as Cecil had said, that information was more likely to preserve both the peace of the nation and peace for Catholics than it was to disrupt. Well, if ever he was to prove that true it was now.

The door swung open into the brightly lit room. A supper such as he had just left was about to be served on a sumptuously carved table. At its head sat Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury, Chief Secretary to King James I. It was not the sight of Cecil that took Monteagle aback. It was his guests. Edward Somerset, Earl of Worcester. Henry Howard, Earl of Northampton. Thomas Howard, Earl of Suffolk. Four of the most powerful men in all England, and three of them known as either Catholic or Catholic sympathisers.

The irony of it would have struck Monteagle less forcibly had he noticed the letter on the table between the four noble Lords, a letter written on paper from the Spanish Netherlands, in a broad, large and almost child-like hand. Cecil had turned it over, face down, smoothly as Monteagle had burst into the room. It read:

'My Lord, were you and my Lords of Northampton, Suffolk and Worcester to meet for supper on Saturday evening at your palace in Whitehall you will find a message come to you there that will preserve your souls as good food preserves the flesh, and do much to preserve the nation and your self.'

'Will it work?' Jane had asked.

'Who knows?' said Gresham. Jane's hand was stained with ink, crooked with the time she had spent crouched over the paper. He leant over and placed his hand over her own. His hand was cold, hers warm. 'The presence of the three great Catholic Lords when the letter's delivered will serve two purposes, if it can be engineered. It'll force Cecil into action even if he's biding his time to implicate Raleigh in some way. It'll clear the Catholic Lords of any involvement.'

'If I was Cecil,' said Jane, 'I'd think some madman wanted all four of us together to assassinate us.'

'You'd need an uprising to do that, and an army to go with it. The request's for them to gather in the heart of Cecil's stronghold, not for him to come unarmed to a field in Islington at midnight. No, there are two key words in it for Cecil — "souls" will tell him it's to do with Catholics. I'm sure he doesn't know details of the plot, but if all London is buzzing with rumours that there's a plot of some sort he must have heard something, and he'd be madder than he is to ignore anything linked to those rumours. And we've mentioned his "preservation". There's nothing closer to his heart than that. It might work. We're not lost if it doesn't. The presence of the Catholic Lords is a bonus, not the main prize. The main prize is to get that powder removed and the plotters dispersed.'

Monteagle knew nothing of this. He had steeled himself to present before the Chief Secretary, and now found himself facing a court consisting not just of one but four of the people in the strongest position to influence his life, career and prospects.

The slippery element in Monteagle that had let him survive as long as he had came to his rescue. He bowed low to all four men. Collecting himself, he asked if-it were possible for him to have a private word with his Lordship, with no disrespect, of course, intended to the other three noble Lords.

Cecil glanced at the other three, nodded briefly to them, and motioned Monteagle over to a side room. The servants had laid the wine there, before bringing it in to the supper, and one of them scuttled out as if branded as Cecil swept into the room.

Give me your damned message, Cecil was tempted to say, so that I can at least know where I stand in a business that is becoming too complicated for its own good. But, of course, he said nothing, merely enquiring politely about Lord Monteagle's health.