First George had come into his life when five boys had cornered Gresham in the school yard. He had knocked two of them out, but a third had got a stone and thrown it, hitting Gresham on the head and near knocking out his left eye. Blinded by blood, dizzy, he had fought on until he had dimly seen the stone-thrower fly through the air. George had decided to intervene, not liking the odds and attracted by the sheer courage and guts of the young boy he had never noticed before. Then Mannion, a mere servant, entered Henry Gresham’s life and, by caring for Him, became the only other person Henry Gresham cared about.
Gresham had battled to win his degree from Cambridge, serving at table to eke out his meagre allowance, suffering the jibes of the spoiled, wealthy undergraduates. George had offered money. Gresham had proudly rejected it. George was at Oxford, his family so rooted to its university that Gresham doubted they even knew there was a similar institution in Cambridge. The lawyer's visit had come as a complete surprise.
‘You are a rich young man, sir,' the dry-as-dust old man had said, looking down his nose at him as if he was something slightly distasteful found in the road, 'a very rich young man indeed.'
It was the vast fortune his father had accumulated in a lifetime of serving the financial needs of Kings and Queens. The fortune he had decided to leave to his bastard son, if and when that son obtained his degree.
Gresham had stood there, in the meagre room he shared with five other impoverished students, the remnants of the boiled mutton on the table. The grate was empty, smelling faintly of soot. He had long ago forgotten to feel the cold. He gazed and gazed at the copy of the will, in his threadbare jerkin and thrice-mended hose. The will that meant he would never have to go cold or hungry again. The will that made him not just the wealthiest student in Cambridge, but made him one of the wealthiest men in the country.
Life had been simple as a child. Survival. The enemy had been everyone. Now life seemed impossibly complex, and his problems were not just in London.
His troubles in College were not simply down to jealousy of his wealth. Though never directly accused, he was seen as having dangerous leanings towards Rome and Roman Catholicism, and his fondness for music in Chapel was widely derided. It did not help that he had been one of the most brilliant undergraduates of his time, as precocious as he had then been poor. He had also been one of the most unruly. His absences 'on the Queen's business' at Walsingham's bequest had bred extra resentment against him. Fellows of the College had banded together to deny him his degree, despite the superior quality of his work. A peremptory message from the Privy Council, one of the few favours Walsingham had ever returned him, had put the University in its place and given Gresham his degree. Even those on his side had reacted badly to being told what to do by the Government. And then his election as a Fellow had added fuel to the fire.
'It's a joke, isn't it?' said Gresham, pacing the small room, floorboards creaking under his feet, energy held back like the stretched gut of a crossbow. 'The first thing we do when we're born is cry. We spend a few years dodging disease, if we're lucky, and then we invent things to care about. Then we're disposed of, we rot and stink to high heaven and it's over. What a lot of noise and tumult. And all about nothing.'
‘So much for those bloody church services you drag me to!' said Mannion, whose support of religion was theoretical rather than practical. 'Anyway, you knows my view. We're 'ere to eat, drink and 'ave a bit o' fun.' Mannion was not generally troubled by depression. 'Stands to reason. God wouldn't have given us pleasures if he didn't want us to take them. What I'm not here for is to be ordered around by bloody Spaniards,' he added morosely. Now that he could get depressed about. Mannion had a thing about Spaniards. The hatred was at a peak with the wild rumours that a Spanish invasion was imminent.
'Spain, at least, has an identity, a belief in itself,' said Gresham. 'I sometimes wonder if England even knows what it is.'
'You wonder a bloody sight too much,' said Mannion. 'What you need is a lot less wondering and a bit more living.'
'So I'm meant to stop thinking, am I?' said Gresham caustically.
'Well, you can stop thinking Spain's so bloody marvellous, for starters, because it ain't. Load of heathens who want our women and burn people for pleasure. And if you don't watch out the next time a man comes at you, you'll start to think, instead of just stickin' 'im in the gut.' Mannion sucked at the last remnant of small ale in the pewter tankard by his side. 'Fact is, you're alive. He's dead, that bloody Spaniard in the meadows. You've got the luxury of bein' miserable. He ain't.'
'Come on, old man!' Gresham said, jumping up, 'lift your great stomach! Eager young minds are waiting to be filled at The Golden Lion!'
The mask was back, Mannion noted. He was used to his master's sudden swings of mood. But what damage was being wreaked under that mask?
Fellows made their reputation and their livelihood by the students they attracted to hear them teach. Gresham attracted more than anyone. There were a growing number of 'schools' in Cambridge where these groups could meet, but the local inns still provided a traditional venue for teacher and taught to assemble. They had been forced to find a new inn this year to cope with the growing number wanting to hear Henry Gresham. Perhaps his depression fired him up. He taught brilliantly, emerging outwardly carefree on to the street.
Mannion saw himself as an honorary academic. After all, Gresham's seminars took place in a building dedicated to the consumption of drink and food, and a building which not infrequently placed sex on the menu. For Mannion, it was not like attending a place of learning. It was more like attending a place of worship.
'Isn't Cambridge wonderful?' said Gresham, taking a deep breath 'of air.
'Bloody Brilliant,' said Mannion, adopting his annoying habit of speaking in capitals. The beer had been good, but now the street was full of the throng of students, of dons, carters, tradesmen and local people. Cambridge was more of a village than a town, Gresham thought, for all the splendour of the Colleges. The recent rain had soaked the thoroughfare and everyone had mud spattered up to their waists. A herd of sheep were being driven through to the market, with an ancient farmer in a smock being helped by a boy too young for the job. The sheep, instead of being tired by their long march, were restive and fickle. They swept this way and that across the road, driving into all classes of people and rub-bing the grease of their coats onto fine velvet. Last week a student had run into the middle of just such a herd, bodily picked up a fully-grown animal, and run off with it. Gresham shuddered to think why.
'Bloody Brilliant,' Mannion repeated, as Gresham prepared to set forth, having plotted the least mud-strewn path. 'It's set too low down so its air smells like the bilges of a ship. It gets the plague as regular as other places get dawn and sunset. Oh, and the University hate the town and the town hate the University, with neither of the stupid buggers able to see they both need each other.' He stood, glumly. The wind blew the smell of the river towards him. It was still Cambridge's main road, and its main sewer.
'You're getting old!' Gresham jibed. 'This is where you dare to be wise! This is where the white-hot heat of debate burns up the foul vapours of the air! This is life! Young life!'
'Right,' said Mannion. 'Glad you told me.'
Gresham ignored Mannion and set off, looking not so much like a Fellow of a College as the fine young heir to a noble house, a young colt luxuriating in the use of his long limbs.
They navigated the crowded streets, still tame compared to London's frenetic bustle. Ramshackle, leaning wooden houses threatened to topple over, a stark contrast to the pure stone, brick and soaring lines of the Colleges. No wonder there was so often trouble between the University and the townspeople, thought Gresham. There was an arrogance in these buildings, and in the people who taught and learned within their walls.
'Why do you stick with this lot?' asked Mannion as they pushed their way through the crowds to within sight of Granville. 'Any other College would take you with open arms.'
Why
indeed, thought Gresham? It was a thought that bothered him, with half the Fellowship seething with hatred and envy against him. 'Bloody mindedness,' he said, with startling self-honesty. 'I'm damned if I'll let them force me out of My College.' Did he realise he too was speaking in capital letters? He had been truly educated at Granville College. Few men forget their debt to the place that gives them their real education.
Noon was the main meal of the day. In theory the Fellows sat on the High Table, the students beneath them. In practice the wealthier students had created their own High Table, buying in food often more exotic than that served to the Fellows. These same students paid the poorer ones to wait on them and, if they were feeling very gracious, would even allow these intelligent servingmen the leavings of the meal.
They proceeded into the Hall, dark-panelled and with a roaring fire in the great hearth at the end even at noon, and the air rustled as the students stood, scraping back their crude benches. For once, no one upset a bench and sent it crashing to the ground; the students must either have forgotten to greet the Master in the traditional way, or were too drunk to remember to do so. Gresham took his seat, ignoring the frosty looks directed his way by several of the Fellows. He looked to his neighbour opposite, to be met with a glare of hatred.
Will Smith. Fellow of Granville College. Living witness to Cambridge's increasing dedication to hard-core Puritanism. Thin almost to extinction, smaller than average, a shock of fair curls crowning an extraordinarily high forehead and an intensity that would freeze river water. It was no Godliness that Gresham could recognise that drove Will Smith. It was hatred. Hatred, essentially, of anyone having fun.
The interminable Latin Grace was read out by a student who was as nervous as the rest of his fellows were bored. Someone timed a raucously loud fart precisely in-between the end of Grace and the solemn 'Amen'. The students giggled and shifted, the Fellowship looked stolidly ahead. To more scraping of benches Granville College sat down to eat.
Smith almost drove his thin, sweating face into Gresham's across the table. 'The smell of beer is on your breath!' he accused scornfully.
'Weil, it would be, wouldn't it?' Gresham replied mildly, hiding the fact that his good humour was vanishing as quickly as it had returned to him that morning. 'It's what they sell at The Golden Lion. You really don't want to touch the wine. It's-'
'Have you no shame? You desecrate our place of worship with idle music. You drink, you swear, you copulate… and you deny the word of God!' The man was using his words like daggers.
'Good heavens!' said Gresham, his voice calm, 'All those at the same time?'
There was a splutter of laughter from up the table. Tom Pleasance was a man whose vast bulk showed a serious commitment to the sins of eating and drinking. Fat Tom was one of Gresham's few allies.
What do you do when half the Fellows of your College hate you? Mannion's answer was simple. There were relatively few things in life, and you did four things with them. You drank them. You ate them. You slept with them. Or you thumped them. On the basis that Will Smith and his kind could not be eaten nor drunk, and that it would be unhealthy to sleep with them, there was only one alternative.
'Keep thumping 'em when they're contrary,' Mannion had announced with finality. ‘Eventually, they'll give up. If you hurt 'em enough.'
'What happens if they "thump" me first?' a morose Gresham had asked.
'Then you're a stupid bastard.' Well, that was that, then.
It was not unusual for rising young stars from the Court to visit Cambridge, nor for falling ones for that matter. Gresham noted the arrival of Robert Cecil in the Hall with little enthusiasm, not least of all because in his heart Gresham did not wish to go to sea. Cecil's arrival could only mean that he carried Walsingham's orders for him. Cecil was a Trinity man, here to look at a donation to some new building. Or at least, that was the public story. His presence had excited considerable interest in the small world of College. His father was the most powerful man in England. It was common knowledge that Lord Burghley was grooming his second son to take over from him as the Queen's Chief Minister, common knowledge that there was serious aristocratic opposition to any such succession. What excitement! It was the intrigue of which College life was made up.
Cecil initially nodded to Gresham politely enough, and then leaned over to him quickly when his neighbour's attention had been diverted by the arrival of new dishes.
'We must meet,' Cecil said. 'Privately, after this. In your rooms. I come on Walsingham's business.' He turned away suddenly to engage in conversation with the Master.
'It's the talk of the town, I tell you, sir!' The speaker was Alan Sidesmith, a senior Fellow and one of Gresham's other friends in College. He had recently returned from London. A man of urbane polish, he hid an acid wit under an unflappable exterior. Whatever this talk was, Cecil's body language was showing he did not wish to hear it.
'They're talking of nothing else except the prophecy. I'm. given to understand that the Queen is to issue a proclamation condemning its heresy, so concerned are the powers that be.'
'It is nothing!' Cecil interjected, drawn from his conversation with the Master. The man clearly had ears that could stretch down a whole table, thought Gresham. 'A mere fad, superstitious fancy…'
Cecil's obvious reluctance to have the topic aired was like a red flag to a bull for the Fellowship.
'What is it, this prophecy?' asked one, a thin man with a streak of venison gravy down his chin.
'The man was popularly known as "Regiomontanus",' said Sidesmith. 'I believe he was actually called Muller. Johan Muller, of Konigsberg. He died over a hundred years ago.'
'Muller? The mathematician? The one who did the calculations for Columbus and his navigating tables?' It was Adam Balderstone, a drunkard who was one of Gresham's bitterest enemies in College.
Now, it was happening, Gresham could see — that strange alchemy of College life, the coming together despite the vicious rivalries and deep enmities. The Fellows had started to gather round Sidesmith, moving the trestle tables aside to get closer, hunching forward in their interest. Students had left their tables, rich and poor, and were gathering on the edges of the group of men. The College was starting to breathe its magic, drawing these disparate men together, declaring a temporary truce even between those who yesterday could have killed each other.
Something started to sing in Gresham's heart. For all its anger and petty hatreds, its turmoil and parochial tumult, these strange, isolated moments of harmony were the reason why he felt at home only here, why he was pouring out money in the face of envy to revitalise this College. We do not own our lives, he thought. At best we are merely tenants. But sometimes we can buy a stake in the future, a stake in something that will outlive our frantic, short share of life. A young man in an all-male community, he was too young to realise that this same justification was what drove men to have children.
'Yes,' said Sidesmith, 'but the prophecy derives from others as well.'
'Its principles are Biblical as well as mathematical.' It was Balderstone again. His eyes were bright, and One could see something of the excitement that had drawn the students to him in droves when he had first taught at Cambridge. Who would have thought that an obscure prophecy could have aroused him so, thought Gresham. Not for the first time he reminded himself: never think you can completely know any human being. 'Muller and others — Melancthon, Stofler, Postel — argued that all human history is contained in a series of cycles.'
'These… cycles, are they Biblical?' It was the Dean of the College.
'Only in part,' Balderstone said. 'They are authenticated by the Holy Bible — passages in Revelations, Daniel XII and Isaiah — but their structure is numerical, based on permutations of the numbers seven and ten.'
A frisson of fear shuddered through the group. Numerology was accepted as a valid path of knowledge, but smacked to some of witchcraft.
'But what is the importance of all this?' It was the Master, part fascinated
, part unsettled by Cecil's obvious displeasure.
Sidesmith glanced at Balderstone, who glanced back and shrugged.
'The prophecy of Regiomontanus is based on the belief that the penultimate cycle of human history closed in 1518 with Luther's defiance of the Pope,' said Sidesmith. There was shuffling in the crowd. Cambridge was fiercely Puritan, a Puritanism that had been made possible by Luther's defiance. Yet Gresham knew there were those in the Hall whose outward observance of Protestant ritual covered weekly attendance at the Mass, conducted in secret by priests whose bowels would be hung out to dry in front of them while their hearts were still beating if they were discovered.
'So are we all to die this year?' *No,' said Sidesmith.*Not this year. Next year. One version states that the final cycle is based on ten times seven years.'
'The time of the Babylonian captivity?' asked an excited young voice from die back, showing off.
'Precisely. It states that in 1588 the Seventh Seal will be broken.'
There was silence. From far away came the call of a servant in the kitchen.
'Some say that the anti-Christ will be overthrown in that year. That it will be the final judgement.'
For a moment the Hall seemed to darken. A cloud passing over the sun? Coincidence.
'What are the words or the prophecy?' It was another young student eagerly questioning.
Sidesmith did not raise his voice, but the sonorous words seemed to echo and reverberate in the Hall:
'"Post mille exactos a partu virginis annos
The galleon's grave hg-3 Page 4