Ken Follett - A Column of Fire

She giggled. ‘I’m an old lady.’

‘You’re the prettiest old lady in London.’ It was true.

Ned looked around the room restlessly. He recognized most of those present. He had been intimate with the Cecils for almost half a century, and he knew the groom’s family almost as well. Some of the younger people at the back were only vaguely familiar, and he guessed they were friends of the happy couple. Ned found it increasingly difficult, as the years went by, to tell one youngster from another.

He and Margery were near the front, but Ned was not comfortable there, and he kept looking over his shoulder; so in the end he left Margery and went to the back of the room. From there he could watch everyone, like a mother pigeon studying the other birds, looking for the magpie that would eat her chicks.

All the men wore swords, as a matter of course, so any one of them could have been an assassin, in theory. This generalized suspicion was next to useless, and Ned racked his brains as to how he might learn more.

The king and queen came in at last, safe and sound, and Ned was relieved to see that they were escorted by a dozen men-at-arms. An assassin would have trouble getting past such a bodyguard. Ned sat down and relaxed a little.

The royal couple took their time walking up the aisle, greeting friends and favourites, and acknowledging the bows of others graciously. When they got to the front, James nodded to the clergyman to begin.

While the service was going on, a new arrival slipped into the chapel, and Ned’s instincts sounded an alarm.

The newcomer stood at the back. Ned studied him, not caring whether the man knew he was being stared at. He was in his thirties, tall and broad, with something of the air of a soldier about him. However, he did not look stressed or even tense. He leaned against the wall, stroking his long moustache and watching the rite. He radiated arrogant confidence.

Ned decided to speak to him. He got up and walked to the back. As he approached, the newcomer nodded casually and said: ‘Good day to you, Sir Ned.’

‘You know me—’

‘Everyone knows you, Sir Ned.’ The remark was a compliment with an undertone of mockery.

‘—I don’t know you,’ Ned finished.

‘Fawkes,’ said the man. ‘Guy Fawkes, at your service.’

‘And who invited you here?’

‘I’m a friend of the groom, if it matters to you.’

A man who was about to kill a king would not be able to converse in this bantering manner. Nevertheless, Ned had a bad feeling about Fawkes. There was something about his coolness, his half-hidden disrespect, and his satirical tone that suggested subversive inclinations. Ned probed further. ‘I haven’t met you before.’

‘I come from York. My father was a proctor in the consistory court there.’

‘Ah.’ A proctor was a lawyer, and a consistory court was a Church tribunal. To hold such a post, Fawkes’s father would have to be an irreproachable Protestant, and must have taken the oath of allegiance that Catholics abhorred. Fawkes was almost certainly harmless.

All the same, as Ned returned to his seat he decided to keep an eye on Guy Fawkes.

Rollo Fitzgerald reconnoitred Westminster, looking for a weak spot.

A collection of large and small buildings clustered around a court called Westminster Yard. Rollo was nervous about prowling around, but no one seemed to pay him much attention. The courtyard was a gloomy square where prostitutes loitered. No doubt other nefarious doings took place there after dark. The complex was walled and gated, but the gates were rarely closed, even at night. Within the precincts were all the Parliament buildings plus several taverns, a bakery, and a wine merchant’s with extensive cellars.

The House of Lords, where the king would come to open Parliament, was a building on the plan of a squat letter H. The grand hall of the Lords, the biggest room, was the crossbar. One upright of the H was the Prince’s Chamber, used as a robing room; the other was the Painted Chamber, for committee meetings. But those three rooms were on the upstairs floor. Rollo was more interested in the ground-floor rooms underneath.

Beneath the Prince’s Chamber was a porter’s lodge and an apartment for the Keeper of the King’s Wardrobe. Alongside ran a narrow passage, Parliament Place, leading to a wharf called Parliament Stairs on the left bank of the Thames.

Rollo went to a nearby tavern called The Boatman and pretended to be a firewood dealer looking for storage space and willing to buy drinks for anyone who could give him information. There he gleaned two exciting nuggets: one, that the Wardrobe Keeper did not need his apartment and was willing to rent it out; and two, that it had a cellar. However, he was told, the place was reserved for courtiers, and was not available to common tradesmen. Rollo looked crestfallen and said he would have to search elsewhere. The regulars at the bar thanked him for the drinks and wished him luck.

Rollo had already recruited a co-conspirator, the courtier Thomas Percy. As a Catholic, Percy would never be an advisor to the king, but James had made him one of the Gentlemen Pensioners, a group of ceremonial royal bodyguards. Percy’s support was a mixed blessing, for he was a mercurial character, alternately full of manic energy or paralysed by gloom, not unlike his ancestor Hotspur in a popular play about the youth of Henry V; but now he proved useful. At Rollo’s suggestion, Percy claimed he needed the Wardrobe Keeper’s rooms for his wife to live in while he was at court and — after a prolonged negotiation — he rented the apartment.

That was a big step forward.

Officially, Rollo was in London for a long-drawn-out lawsuit between the earl of Tyne and a neighbour about the ownership of a watermill. This was a cover story. His real purpose was to kill the king. For that, he needed more men.

Guy Fawkes was just the type he was looking for. Fawkes’s staunchly Protestant father had died when little Guy was eight, and he had been raised by a Catholic mother and stepfather. As a wealthy young man Fawkes had rejected a life of idleness, sold the estate he had inherited from his father, and set out to look for adventure. He had left England and fought for Spain against the Protestant rebels in the Netherlands, where he had learned about engineering during sieges. Now he was back in London, at a loose end, ready for excitement.

Unfortunately, Fawkes was under surveillance.

This afternoon he was at the Globe Theatre, on the south side of the river Thames, watching a new play called Measure for Measure . Two places along the bench from him was Nick Bellows, an unobtrusive man in drab clothes, whom Rollo knew to be one of Ned Willard’s street stalkers.

Rollo was in the crowd of groundlings without seats. He followed the play with disapproval. Its story of a strong ruler who hypocritically breaks his own laws was blatantly designed to encourage disrespect for authority. Rollo was looking for an opportunity to speak to Fawkes without attracting the notice of Bellows, but it was proving difficult. Bellows discreetly followed when Fawkes left his seat, once to buy a cup of wine and once to piss in the river.

Rollo still had not spoken to him when the play came to an end and the audience began to leave. The crowd choked the exit and the people shuffled along slowly. Rollo manoeuvred himself behind Fawkes and spoke in a low voice directly into his ear. ‘Don’t look around, whatever you do, just listen,’ he said.

Perhaps Fawkes had been involved in clandestine activity before, for he did as Rollo said, only giving an almost imperceptible nod to show that he had understood.

‘His Holiness the Pope has work for you to do,’ Rollo said in the same low tone. ‘But you’re being followed by one of King James’s spies, so first you have to shake him off. Go to a tavern and drink a cup of wine, to give me a chance to get ahead of you. Then walk west along the river, away from the bridge. Wait until there is only one boat at the beach, then hire it to take you across, leaving your tail behind. On the other side, walk quickly to Fleet Street and meet me at the York tavern.’