Martin Stephen - The Desperate remedy

'Cease this jesting!' said Cecil. 'Have you not had your satisfaction?'

'This isn't jesting,' said Gresham, 'and if there's any satisfaction in the air, it will be your own. You hold Guy Fawkes, don't you, in the Tower at this very moment?'

Cecil did not answer. He knew Gresham knew the truth.

'Wondering what to do with him, no doubt. What jolly talk there must have been between you both, when he was brought in by Knyvett's men. Has Guy Fawkes ever mentioned to you his relationship with the ninth Earl of Northumberland?'

'His relationship?’

'Yes. You thought Fawkes was your man, didn't you? It never crossed your mind that he was someone else's. Before he started to receive money from you he'd been employed by Northumberland. From the outset, in fact. It was Northumberland who spotted him as a young man, sent him over to Europe and paid to settle his wife — Maria, I think she's called — and their son Thomas, in his absence. You see, Fawkes never was a soldier of fortune. He always was a soldier of conscience. When you came along with your offer for him to turn spy, Northumberland encouraged him to say yes. Northumberland always despised you, never trusted you. It amused him to have one of your spies in his pay.

'And then Catesby came along. Northumberland knew the plot was a disaster, knew it would turn the country against Catholics.

And he knew exactly why you were urging Fawkes to go along with it. So he planned a little surprise all his own.'

'Are you seeking to tell me that this Guy Fawkes was in the pay of Northumberland?' said Cecil.

He was a clever man, thought Gresham, you had to admit. He had never actually admitted to any involvement in the plot, or that he had employed Guy Fawkes. Even the oath he had sworn had not been an admission of guilt.

'Is in the pay of Northumberland.'

'And what was my Lord of Northumberland's aim in all this?' To his credit, Cecil recovered quickly. Gresham could almost see the machinery of his brain grappling with this latest problem.

'Very simple, really,' said Gresham. 'He was going to let you expose the plot, take all the glory and revel in it. He was going to wait until you put on trial whatever few pathetic plotters you had managed to keep alive.

'And then he was going to blow up the House of Lords.'

Cecil's face went as white as a full moon.

'Oh, don't worry,' said Gresham cheerfully, 'he wouldn't have killed anyone. Or at least no-one important, just a few servants. He'd have blown the mine when the House was empty. And because of where it was, it wouldn't have been the whole House of Lords. Probably just one wall or so of it.'

'The mine?' Cecil could hardly force the words out.

'Remember? They tried to dig a tunnel under the House of Lords, before they found and hired the cellar. It came to grief against the foundations; they simply couldn't drive through them. You thought they'd abandoned it, didn't you? Well, the plotters did, but Fawkes didn't. Northumberland brought some miners down from the north-west. They were kept in isolation for a week, never told what they were doing, and sent home with a fat purse. Probably dead by now, if Northumberland has any sense. They widened the tunnel, secured it. Didn't have to dig all the way through the foundations, just part way in. Enough to bring a wall down.

'They packed it with barrels of powder. Fawkes used some of the good powder from your cellar. You'll find the stuff in the cellar is all decayed, more or less. The rest they bought in. If the powder held out, they were going to blow up the mine on the day you had your first show trial. Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury, and the hero of the Gunpowder Plot! Except the Catholics fooled him, kept another mine hidden from him and blew a wall out of an empty House of Lords just to prove how little Robert Cecil was actually in command on the very day he was bragging just how wonderful he was.

'You'd have been a laughing stock, forced into immediate resignation. The King would survive, the laughter rebounding on him and blowing a hole out of his authority. If I was them I'd have had pamphlets printed, pointing out that the Catholics could have blown up the whole farce with the people inside it if they'd wished, making it clear they had the power to provoke a rebellion, but had chosen not to use it. James would almost certainly have had to call in Northumberland as his Secretary after that, to make peace with the Catholics. Beautiful, isn't it? Let you make all the running, let you blow yourself up to maximum height and then prick your balloon with a gentle little explosion where the only physical casualties are a few bits of stone, and the only other casualty is one of the Papists' most bitter enemies: you.

'It's still there, of course. I mean the mine, and the powder. I set my servant guard over it when we found it, but called him off when I came here, just in case you sent someone and he got arrested as a conspirator. We wouldn't want old Mannion to find himself being nabbed like Guy Fawkes, would we? So I suppose Northumberland could have sent someone down there right now to blow it up, since you appear to want to implicate him in the Gunpowder Plot.'

Gresham stood up easily. He looked out of the high window in the direction of Westminster, as if for a cloud of smoke.

'I'd get someone down there pretty quickly, if I were you. Someone to secure it, take the powder away. Someone you can trust not to talk. We wouldn't want London knowing there was a plot you knew nothing about, would we?' Gresham made as if to leave.

'Oh, by the way,' he said, 'there is just one other thing. I'll make Francis Tresham give himself up, so you can have your full set of conspirators. But I want no torture, and I want a fake death to get him out of the Tower and out of England. He won't trouble you again, I guarantee. Are we agreed — on that oath you swore? Tresham has just become both near and dear to me.'

Cecil nodded, a curt, hard nod. Gresham nodded ironically back, and left the room, almost casual in his manner. As he reached the nearest wall out of sight of Whitehall, he leant back against it, and breathed for what seemed like the first time in an hour.

Why had Gresham remembered Tresham's talk of the tunnel Fawkes and the others had tried to dig from the house they had rented, the tunnel they had given up on when the cellar under the House of Lords became available? Perhaps it was simple curiosity, perhaps it was the realisation that a secret tunnel leading up to the walls of the House of Lords was an open invitation for the future, a hostage to fortune and a loose end that simply needed to be tied up. Perhaps most of all it was Wintour's staying on in London, for far longer than was reasonable, and Wintour's obsessive attempts to reach the street in which the house was situated. Had he been trying to hide in the tunnel? Or had he hoped to reopen it himself, ironically wishing to stage the same embarrassment for Cecil as Northumberland had planned all along?

It had been easier than Gresham had thought to gain access to the house from where the plotters had started. A desultory guard was on duty now the first excitements were over, easily bluffed into allowing Gresham and Mannion entry by the obvious wealth of Gresham's clothing and his casual use of Cecil's name and title. Gresham had half expected to find nothing, or at best the caved-in remnant showing what happened when amateurs tried to play at being miners. They had found the shaft under the floor, despite the care of the miners in re-laying the boards their work had scuffed and splintered.

Mannion had been voluble in his insistence that Gresham should not enter. Gresham had ignored him, stripping down to his shirt and crawling through the surprisingly spacious tunnel. This was no work of amateurs, he realised, noting the simple yet effective pattern of timber framing that held up the roof of the tunnel. At its end a positive chamber had been hollowed out, the powder stacked neatly in the seven- or eight-foot-deep hole that had been made in the old foundations, rumoured to be some eleven or twelve feet thick in total. Nothing had been left to chance. Lanterns, tinder, flint and fuse had been stored there, awaiting whoever came to blow the mine. There were two pointers to the originators. A napkin or towel was stuck behind one of the barrels, pinned between it and its neighbour, as might have happened if it had become trapped as a man manoeuvred the one barrel into place by the side of the other. It was simple stuff, of the sort that would be put at table to wipe a guest's hands. Embroidered into the top corner was the Percy crest. Gresham knew that Northumbrian miners worked naked in the tunnels, sometimes discarding even a loincloth, but wrapped a piece of towelling round their brow to wipe the stinging sweat off before it reached their eyes. They must have given the miners napkins from Syon House to take the place of the towelling. Gresham had worked with the moles in the Netherlands, which was why he looked carefully on the ancient stone of the foundations. Those who cut through stone like to leave a mark on it. Eventually he found it, scratched on to a stone, perhaps with the edge of a pickaxe. ' All for God and HP '. HP. Henry Percy. Perhaps the ninth Earl had deliberately recruited Catholics to work his mine, and perhaps even given whoever had supervised them a hint of what it was all about.