Ken Follett - A Column of Fire

Margery could bear it no longer. She said: ‘Ned, I did a terrible thing.’

At first he was not sure how to take this. ‘What?’

‘I didn’t lie to you, but I kept a secret from you. I thought I had to. I still think I had to. But you will be terribly angry.’

‘What on earth are you talking about?’

‘I know who Jean Langlais is.’

Ned was uncharacteristically bewildered. ‘What? How could you — who is it?’

‘It’s Rollo.’

Ned looked as if he had been told someone had died. He went pale and his mouth dropped open. He staggered and sat down heavily. At last he said: ‘And you knew?’

Margery could not speak. She felt as if she were being strangled. She realized that tears were streaming down her cheeks. She nodded.

‘How long?’

She gasped, sobbed, and managed to say: ‘Always.’

‘But how could you keep this from me?’

When at last she found words, they came fast. ‘I thought he was just smuggling harmless priests into England to bring the sacraments to Catholics, then you found out he was conspiring to free Mary Stuart and Queen Elizabeth and he left the country, and he came back after the Spanish armada but he said it was all over and he wouldn’t conspire any more, and if I betrayed him, he would reveal that Bartlet and Roger had helped smuggle priests.’

‘You wrote the letter to Monteagle.’

She nodded. ‘I wanted to warn you without condemning Rollo.’

‘How did you find out?’

‘Bartlet told me he’s not coming to the opening of Parliament. He’s never missed it before. Rollo must have warned him.’

‘All this going on, and I didn’t know. Me, the master spy, deceived by his own wife.’

‘Oh, Ned.’

Ned looked at her as if she were the vilest criminal. ‘And Rollo was in Kingsbridge the day Sylvie died.’

His words were like a bullet, and she found she could no longer stand. She sank to her knees on the rug. ‘You want to kill me, I can tell,’ she said. ‘Go ahead, do it, I can’t live now.’

‘I was so angry when people said I could no longer be trusted to work for Queen Elizabeth because I had married a Catholic. What fools they were, I thought. Now it turns out that I was the fool.’

‘No, you weren’t.’

He gave her a look so full of rage that it broke her heart. ‘Oh, yes, I was,’ he said.

And then he went out.

Ned and Cecil saw King James on the first day of November. He received them at White Hall, in the Long Gallery that ran from the private rooms to the orchard. As well as paintings the gallery featured priceless draperies in gold and silver brocade, just the kind of thing James liked.

Ned knew that Cecil doubted the authenticity of the Monteagle letter, suspecting it might be no more than a piece of troublemaking. Cecil continued to believe this even when Ned told him that Earl Bartlet, a Catholic peer, was planning to miss the opening of Parliament for no plausible reason, and had probably been warned off.

Cecil’s plan was to take all possible precautions, but not to reschedule the ceremony. Ned had a different agenda.

Ned wanted to do more than prevent the planned murders. Too often he had been on the trail of traitors only to see them scared off, after which they lived to plot another day. This time he wanted to arrest the conspirators. He wanted, finally, to get Rollo.

Cecil gave the Monteagle letter to James, saying: ‘One would, of course, never keep something such as this from your majesty. On the other hand, it may not merit being taken seriously. It isn’t backed by any facts.’

Ned added: ‘No facts, your majesty, but there are supporting indications. I heard rumours in Paris.’

James shrugged. ‘Rumours,’ he said.

Ned said: ‘You can’t believe them, and you can’t ignore them.’

‘Exactly.’ James read the letter, holding it up to the lamp, for the winter light coming through the windows was weak.

He took his time, and Ned’s thoughts strayed to Margery. He had not seen her since her revelation. He was sleeping at a tavern. He could not bear the thought of seeing her or speaking to her: it was too painful. He could not even identify the emotion that swamped him, whether rage or hatred or grief. All he could do was look away and engage his mind with something else.

The king let the beringed hand holding the letter drop to his side, and he stood still for a minute or so, looking nowhere. Ned saw intelligence in his eyes, and a determined line to his mouth, but a streak of self-indulgence was evidenced by his blemished skin and puffy eyes. It was hard, Ned guessed, to be disciplined and moderate when you possessed absolute power.

The king read the letter again, then said to Cecil: ‘What do you think?’

‘We could reinforce Westminster Yard with guards and cannons immediately. Then we could close the gates and search the precincts thoroughly. After that we could control and monitor everyone entering and leaving until the opening of Parliament is safely past.’

This was Cecil’s preferred plan, but both he and Ned knew they had to give the king options, not instructions.

James was always conscious of his public image, for all his talk of the divine right of kings. ‘We must take care not to alarm the public over what might be nothing at all,’ he said. ‘It makes the king look weak and frightened.’

‘Your majesty’s safety is paramount. But Sir Ned has an alternative suggestion.’

James looked enquiringly at Ned.

Ned was ready. ‘Consider this, your majesty. If there is a plot, then perhaps the preparations are not yet complete. So if we act now we may fail to find what we’re looking for. Worse, we may find incomplete preparations, which would give us only questionable evidence at a trial. Then the Catholic pamphleteers would say the charges were trumped up as a pretext for persecution.’

James did not yet get the point. ‘We have to do something.’

‘Indeed. In order to catch all the plotters and seize the maximum amount of incriminating evidence, we need to pounce at the last minute. That will protect your majesty both immediately and, importantly, in the future as well.’ Ned held his breath: this was the crucial point.

James looked at Cecil. ‘I think he may be right.’

‘It’s for your majesty to judge.’

The king turned back to Ned. ‘Very well. Act on the fourth of November.’

‘Thank you, your majesty,’ Ned said with relief.

Ned and Cecil back away, bowing, then the king was struck by an afterthought and said: ‘Do we have any idea who is behind this wickedness?’

All Ned’s frenzy at Margery came back to him in a tidal wave, and he struggled to suppress the shaking of his body. ‘Yes, your majesty,’ he said in a voice that was barely controlled. ‘It’s a man called Rollo Fitzgerald from Shiring. I’m ashamed to tell you that he’s my brother-in-law.’

‘In that case,’ said James with more than a hint of menace, ‘by God’s blood, you’d better catch the swine.’

When the plotters heard about the Monteagle letter, on Sunday, 3 November, they started to accuse one another of treachery. The atmosphere became poisonous in the Wardrobe Keeper’s apartment. ‘One of us did this!’ Guy Fawkes said belligerently.

Rollo feared that these aggressive young men would start fighting. ‘Never mind who did it,’ he said hastily. ‘The man was certainly a fool rather than a traitor.’

‘How can you be sure?’

‘Because a traitor would have named us all. This idiot just wanted to warn Monteagle off.’

Fawkes calmed down. ‘I suppose that makes sense.’

‘The important question is how much damage has been done.’

‘Exactly,’ said Thomas Percy. ‘Can we now go on with this plan, or should we abandon it?’