Ken Follett - A Column of Fire

The party entered the House of Lords by the main door and searched the great hall and the two adjoining rooms, the Prince’s Chamber and the Painted Chamber.

Unfortunately, Ned did not know what he was looking for. A concealed assassin? A hidden cannon? Nothing was found.

How will I feel, Ned wondered, if this really is a false alarm? I will look foolish, but the king will live, and that’s all that matters.

At ground level were various apartments. They searched the porter’s lodge and the Wardrobe Keeper’s apartment, rented by Thomas Percy; then they entered the storeroom, going in through the door Suffolk had broken down earlier. Ned was surprised at how large the place was, but otherwise it was as Suffolk had described it, even to the servant in cloak and hat guarding the place.

‘You must be Johnson,’ Ned said to the man.

‘At your service, sir.’

Ned frowned. There was something familiar about Johnson. ‘Have I met you before?’

‘No, sir.’

Ned was not so sure, but it was hard to tell in the flickering torchlight.

He turned to the firewood stack.

There was a lot of it. Did Thomas Percy intend to start a conflagration? It would quickly blaze up to the wooden ceiling of the storeroom, which must be the floor of the chamber of the House of Lords. But this was an unreliable method of assassination. In all likelihood someone would smell smoke, and the royal family would be hustled out of the building in safety long before the place burned down. In order to be a serious danger, a fire would have to develop fast, with tar and turpentine, like a fireship, turning the building into an inferno before anyone could get out. Was there tar or turpentine here? Ned could not see any.

He moved closer to the stack. As he did so, he heard Johnson stifle a protest. He turned and looked at the man. ‘Something wrong?’

‘Pardon me, sir, but your torch is giving off sparks. Please take care not to set light to the wood.’

Johnson was unnecessarily jittery. ‘If the wood catches fire you can stamp it out,’ Ned said dismissively, and he went closer.

The wood was stacked with meticulous neatness. Something deep in Ned’s memory was struggling to get out. This scene reminded him of another, long in his past, but he could not bring it to mind. He felt that he had stood like this, in a dark storeroom, looking at a pile of something, once before in his life, but he could not think when or where.

He turned away from the stack to see that everyone else was watching him in silence. They thought he was crazy. He did not care.

He looked again at Percy’s caretaker and noticed that the man was wearing spurs. ‘Going somewhere, Johnson?’ he said.

‘No, sir.’

‘Then why are you wearing spurs?’

‘I was on horseback earlier.’

‘Hmm. Your boots seem remarkably clean, for a man who has been riding in November weather.’ Without waiting for an answer, Ned turned back to the firewood.

An old table with a hole in its top stood near the stack, and Ned guessed that someone had stood on the table to place the topmost bundles carefully.

Suddenly he remembered.

It had been the terrible night of the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in Paris. He and Sylvie had taken refuge in the warehouse in the rue du Mur where she kept her secret store of banned books. They had listened to the muffled sounds of riot in the city, the hoarse shouts of men fighting and the screams of those wounded, the pop of gunfire and the demented ringing of hundreds of church bells. In the warehouse, by the light of a lamp, Ned had looked at a stack of barrels that appeared to fill the space floor to ceiling and side to side.

But some of the barrels could be removed to reveal boxes of contraband literature.

‘By the Mass,’ Ned said softly.

He handed his torch to another of the search party and clambered onto the table, careful not to put his foot through the hole.

Once standing fairly securely on the table, he reached up and removed the top bundle of faggots. He threw it to the ground, then reached for another.

He heard a scuffle and turned.

John Johnson was making a run for it, dashing across the storeroom to the far end.

Ned shouted a warning, but one of his companions was already acting. It was Edmund Doubleday, he saw, and he was running after Johnson.

Johnson reached a door in the end wall, not previously visible in the dim light, and threw it open.

At that moment Doubleday launched himself through the air. He cannoned into Johnson with an audible thud. Both men fell to the floor.

Johnson tried to struggle up, and Doubleday grabbed his leg. Johnson kicked Doubleday in the face. Then the others surrounded them. As Johnson tried to get to his feet they shoved him down again. Someone sat on him. Another man grabbed his arms and a third sat on his legs.

Johnson stopped struggling.

Ned crossed the room and looked down at Johnson. His face was now clearly visible in the light of several lamps. ‘I recognize you,’ Ned said. ‘You’re Guy Fawkes.’

‘Go to hell,’ said Fawkes.

Ned said: ‘Tie his hands behind his back and hobble his ankles so that he can walk but not run.’

Someone said: ‘There’s no rope.’

‘Take off his breeches and tear them into strips.’ A man with no breeches would not get far.

Something had triggered Johnson’s sudden flight. ‘What are you scared of?’ Ned asked thoughtfully.

There was no reply.

It was when I threw down the second bundle of firewood, Ned thought. What was the significance of that?

‘Go through his pockets,’ he said.

Doubleday knelt beside Johnson and searched him. Doubleday had a large red mark on his face from the kick, and it was already beginning to swell, but he appeared not to have noticed it yet.

From inside Johnson’s cloak Doubleday produced a tinder box and a touchwood match.

So, Ned thought, he was going to set fire to something. The match was notched, as if for the purpose of timing its burning — perhaps so that the person who lit it would be able to get away before...

Before what?

Ned looked over at the firewood stack, then at the man who was holding his flaming torch, and a terrifying possibility occurred to him.

‘Take my torch outside immediately, please, and put out the flames,’ he said, just managing to keep his voice calm. ‘Right now.’

The man to whom he had given the torch stepped smartly outside. Ned heard the hissing sound of flames being extinguished in water, probably a nearby horse trough, and he breathed a little easier.

The interior was still dimly lit by the lanterns held by the others in the search party. ‘Now,’ said Ned, ‘let’s see if this wall of firewood conceals what I think it does.’

The younger men started moving the bundles. Almost immediately Ned saw a dark-grey powder on the floor. It was almost the same colour as the stones of which the floor was made. It looked like gunpowder.

He shuddered to think how near to it he had stood with his flaming, sparking torch in his hand. No wonder Johnson had been nervous.

Behind the bundles was a space, just as in Sylvie’s warehouse; but here it was not Bibles that were hidden, but barrels — dozens of them. One had been tilted off its base to spill a heap of powder on the floor. Ned held up a lamp to see more, and was awestruck. There were at least thirty barrels of various sizes — more than enough gunpowder to flatten the House of Lords and kill everyone inside.

Including Ned Willard.

He was surprised at how angry he felt at the thought that Rollo had planned to kill him, as well as the royal family and the rest of the Privy Council and most members of Parliament.

He was not the only one to feel that way. Doubleday said: ‘They were going to murder us all!’ Several others voiced their agreement.